Citing Homeless Law, Hackers Turn Sights on Orlando

The New York Times
by DON VAN NATTA Jr.

The hacker group Anonymous has declared a cyberwar against the City of Orlando, disabling Web sites for the city’s leading redevelopment organization, the local Fraternal Order of Police and the mayor’s re-election campaign.

Volunteers from Food Not Brombs were arrested at Lake Eola Park in Orlando, Fla., last month after feeding homeless people without a permit. 

Anonymous, a large yet loosely formed group of hackers that claimed responsibility for crashing the Web sites of MasterCard and the Church of Scientology, began attacking the Orlando-based Web sites earlier this week.

The group described its attacks as punishment for the city’s recent practice of arresting members of Orlando Food Not Bombs, an antipoverty group that provides vegan and vegetarian meals twice a week to homeless people in one of the city’s largest parks.

“Anonymous believes that people have the right to organize, that people have the right to give to the less fortunate and that people have the right to commit acts of kindness and compassion,” the group’s members said in a news release and video posted on YouTube on Thursday. “However, it appears the police and your lawmakers of Orlando do not.”

A 2006 city ordinance requires organizations to obtain permits to feed groups of 25 people or more in downtown parks. The law was passed after numerous complaints by residents and businesses owners about the twice-weekly feedings in Lake Eola Park, city officials said. The law limits any group to no more than two permits per year per park.

U.S. Must End Wars Fought To Hike Corporate Profits

Contributed by Sherwood Ross

Humanism has little place in U.S. global affairs these days when government acts as the enforcement arm of capitalism-run-amok.

Especially since WWII, Washington has habitually aligned itself with the goals of U.S. corporations to dominate. In Latin America and elsewhere, it has funded armies of goons that harass, batter, jail, and murder labor leaders and their allies. In Colombia, labor organizers that call a strike put their lives at risk. It's a veritable shooting gallery where trade unionists are targets.

In Iraq, writes Noam Chomsky in “Interventions”(City Lights Books), the occupying forces broke into union offices, arrested leaders, and enforced Saddam Hussein's antilabor laws. Union leaders were killed under mysterious circumstances. Concessions went to bitterly anti-union U.S. firms. New oil contracts went to firms whose executives were personal friends of President George W. Bush.

At home, U.S. corporations---which exhibit zero loyalty to their employees and to the cities that gave them all those tax breaks to locate---put profits first even if it means stripping those cities of their plants; even if it means throwing thousands of loyal staffers out of work; even if it means cheating taxpayers by relocating their headquarters' offshore; even if it means hiring cheap foreign labor.

“We are seeing the Financial Elite of America waging class warfare against the ordinary working men and women of this country who have made it what it is today,” says University of Illinois international legal authority Francis Boyle.

And Noam Chomsky points in Imperial Ambitions(Metropolitan Books): “Corporations barely pay taxes. The corporate tax rate is already very low, but corporations have worked out an array of complicated techniques so they often don't have to pay taxes at all.”

At the same time, he adds, “the general population has gone through 30 years(1975-2005) of either stagnation or decline in real wages, with people working longer hours with fewer benefits. I don't think there's been a period like this in American history.” Meanwhile, corporations harvest record profits.

"A Perfect Product of the Religious Right"

Deconstructing Michele Bachmann’s GOP Presidential Bid
Democracy Now

 

The rising star of the Tea Party movement, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has launched her bid for the Republican 2012 presidential nomination. On the eve of her announcement, Bachmann was tied with Mitt Romney in the Des Moines Register’s Iowa poll, the first survey of voters who plan to attend the Republican caucuses. The former tax lawyer identifies as a conservative Christian and is a fierce opponent of abortion and gay marriage. Bachmann also supports teaching intelligent design in public schools, and she’s claimed that global warming is a hoax. She has largely built her campaign around accusing Obama of favoring government intervention, pushing the U.S. toward socialism, and having “anti-American views,” and is a particularly fierce critic of Obama’s healthcare overhaul.

While Bachmann is known for advocating a limited government, she has recently come under scrutiny for allegedly accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in agricultural subsidies for her family farm in Wisconsin. We are joined by journalist Karl Bremer, who has covered Michele Bachmann’s political career for the last decade from Stillwater, Minnesota, which is where the Bachmanns currently reside. We also speak with journalist Michelle Goldberg, author of the book "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism.”

Climate sceptic Willie Soon received $1m from oil companies, papers show

guardian.co.uk
by John Vidal, environment editor



Photograph: Donna Williams/AP



Documents obtained by Greenpeace show prominent opponent of climate change was funded by ExxonMobil, among others.
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Willie Soon received over $1m from oil companies including ExxonMobil, documents reveal.
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One of the world's most prominent scientific figures to be sceptical about climate change has admitted to being paid more than $1m in the past decade by major US oil and coal companies.

Dr Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, is known for his view that global warming and the melting of the arctic sea ice is caused by solar variation rather than human-caused CO2 emissions, and that polar bears are not primarily threatened by climate change.

But according to a Greenpeace US investigation, he has been heavily funded by coal and oil industry interests since 2001, receiving money from ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Insitute and Koch Industries along with Southern, one of the world's largest coal-burning utility companies. Since 2002, it is alleged, every new grant he has received has been from either oil or coal interests.

In addition, freedom of information documents suggest that Soon corresponded in 2003 with other prominent climate sceptics to try to weaken a major assessment of global warming being conducted by the UN's leading climate science body, the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

We Like War - Carlin

War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning

Failure to Trickle Down and other Taxing Realities

OpedNews.com

by Glen Sherman

As we move toward another presidential election season while trying to recover from an economic downturn, enduring debates on raising the debt ceiling, and hearing proposals aimed at severely slashing government budgets, I feel compelled to write a summary of America's approach to taxes and budgets over the last 30 years.

Since we were introduced to Reaganomics in 1980, the concept of cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations as a method of increasing job growth and stimulating the economy has been by far the dominant political position embraced by most republicans and some democrats. In fact, most Americans under 35 years of age have grown up hearing this single economic approach almost exclusively. It has been known and reinvented using several names such as Trickle Down Economics, Supply Side, Supply Chain, Support for the Job Creators, et cetera. Make no mistake; it is all the same concept. Those who support this economic concept also generally seem to believe that all budget issues must be solved on the spending side, never on the revenue side. Additionally they believe that cutting taxes increases government revenue and that a graduated tax is unfair, compelling high income earners to pay too much. Most also believe that we must preserve the free market with little or no government regulations.

Let's work through the basic premise and these adjacent beliefs. We live in a capitalist society where profit making is encouraged. Even though we have some government regulations, we do enjoy a mostly free market. As most republicans and democrats will agree, along with anyone who has ever taken an economics class, this system is ruled by the law of supply and demand. Prices, market share, and hiring are all ruled by supply and demand. This brings us to the biggest flaw in the concept of Trickle Down Economics and the idea that tax breaks for the wealthy will create jobs. 

Example: If I own a factory with 100 employees who are able to produce enough product to meet demand, why would giving me a tax break make me want to hire more employees? I have the same market share and demand; I am already meeting that demand, and until that demand increases beyond the ability of my current work force, I have no reason to increase that work force no matter how much of a tax break I receive. In fact, each time we cut taxes for the "Job Creators," the gap between the low and high wage earners increases, while the number of people considered middle class decreases. Extra jobs are not created, and the wealthy simply put the extra money in their pockets.

How Greed Destroys America

Consortium News

Exclusive: New studies show that America’s corporate chieftains are living like kings while the middle class stagnates and shrivels. Yet, the Tea Party and other anti-tax forces remain determined to protect the historically low tax rates of the rich and push the burden of reducing the federal debt onto the rest of society, a curious approach explored.
by Robert Parry

Image: Corporate Greed

If the “free-market” theories of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman were correct, the United States of the last three decades should have experienced a golden age in which the lavish rewards flowing to the titans of industry would have transformed the society into a vibrant force for beneficial progress.

Direct Action for Single-PayerAfter all, it has been faith in “free-market economics” as a kind of secular religion that has driven U.S. government policies – from the emergence of Ronald Reagan through the neo-liberalism of Bill Clinton into the brave new world of House Republican budget chairman Paul Ryan.

By slashing income tax rates to historically low levels – and only slightly boosting them under President Clinton before dropping them again under George W. Bush – the U.S. government essentially incentivized greed or what Ayn Rand liked to call “the virtue of selfishness.”

Further, by encouraging global “free trade” and removing regulations like the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banks, the government also got out of the way of “progress,” even if that “progress” has had crushing results for many middle-class Americans.

True, not all the extreme concepts of author/philosopher Ayn Rand and economist Milton Friedman have been implemented – there are still programs like Social Security and Medicare to get rid of – but their “magic of the market” should be glowing by now.

We should be able to assess whether laissez-faire capitalism is superior to the mixed public-private economy that dominated much of the 20^th Century.

The old notion was that a relatively affluent middle class would contribute to the creation of profitable businesses because average people could afford to buy consumer goods, own their own homes and take an annual vacation with the kids. That “middle-class system,” however, required intervention by the government as the representative of the everyman.

Beyond building a strong infrastructure for growth – highways, airports, schools, research programs, a safe banking system, a common defense, etc. – the government imposed a progressive tax structure that helped pay for these priorities and also discouraged the accumulation of massive wealth.

After all, the threat to a healthy democracy from concentrated wealth had been known to American leaders for generations.

Billionaires give big to new 'super PACS'

MSNBC
by Michael Isikoff

When you're raising political cash these days, it helps to have a few billionaires in your corner. 

The outside role a small number of extremely wealthy donors is playing in the run up to the 2012 elections is highlighted by the first early finance reports of the new campaign cycle filed late last week by two so-called "super PACs " — political groups that can raise unlimited amounts from individuals, corporations and labor unions.

American Crossroads, the super PAC spearheaded by Karl Rove, is vowing a massive attack ad campaign aimed at defeating President Barack Obama next year. The group reported it had raised $3.8 million during the first six months of 2011.

The group proclaims on its website that its mission is to empower "America's citizens" to "take back control of their government." But the new report suggests American Crossroads is anything but a grassroots funded organization.

More than 90 percent of its money this year came from just three billionaire donors: Jerry Perenchio, the former Hollywood talent agent and ex-chairman of the Spanish language television network Univision, whose trust contributed $2 million; Dallas area hotel magnate Robert Rowling, who gave $1 million; and Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, who donated $500,000.

All three have given generously to Republican and conservative causes in the past. Perry, who bankrolled tort reform efforts to limit lawsuits, was American Crossroads' biggest single donor last year, giving the group $7 million.

"It’s the Willie Sutton syndrome—they’re going to where the money is," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy One, a group that advocates for campaign finance reform. "These groups are not looking for small donors to participate in the political process."

Nor is this merely a Republican phenomenon. The House Majority PAC, a newly formed group that recently announced an attack ad campaign targeting freshman Republicans backing GOP Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposals, reported it had raised $800,000 during the same time period.

Politics is a Scam – Why I Will Never Vote Again

The Altucher Confidential
by James Altucher

I had five seconds to make the secretive most powerful man in the world like me so I could potentially make millions. “James,” Bill McCluskey said to me, “this is Alan Quasha.” Bill was CEO of Brean Murray, one of the mini-banks I considered selling my fund of hedge funds to in 2006. We had a deal on the table and I was desperate at the time to make it work. The table was circular, there were papers on it with numbers, I was bullshitting every which way I could about “synergies”. Whatever. That was months later. But first I had to meet Alan Quasha, the owner of Brean Murray, at an event they were throwing, and he had to like me. Because…

Alan Quasha squinted his eyes, shook my hand. He had no idea who I was. I certainly wasn’t anything like George W. Bush, the man Quasha had personally saved in 1986. The man Bush owes his sobriety to. In 1986  Bush was CEO of some oil company that was going down in flames. Possibly the worst oil company in Texas history.

Some calls were made and Quasha’s Harken Oil bought Bush’s company for millions of dollars. Then, of course, a few years later, Bush sold his shares in Quasha’s Harkin Oil right before Harkin Oil announced a mega-loss and the stock tanked. Bush used his profits to buy a stake in the Texas Rangers, sold that stake later for 10-15 million dollars and was finally able to follow his father’s sage advice (“don’t go into politics until you get rich” ***).

Let’s spell out what that means: if Alan Quasha called up W on September 12, 2001 in the middle of Bush pouring over maps of the jungles of Afghanistan to see where we would invade (do they have jungles in Afghanistan? Do we really need an “h” in Afghanistan?), Bush would say “hold all calls”, close the doors of the Oval Office and say “Hi Daddy Number 2″, to Quasha. He owed his life, his livelihood, the Texas Rangers, the Presidency, all to Alan Quasha and now I was shaking Quasha’s hand. I had five seconds to make Alan Quasha like me almost as much as he liked Bush so he would buy my company. Why? Alan Quasha was Chairman of Brean Murray.

Fast-forward about ten seconds. Alan Quasha had moved on. Now I was being introduced to Terry Mcauliffe. Terry was the Vice-Chairman of Brean Murray. Terry was known in most circles as “Bill Clinton’s best friend”. Terry raised the bulk of the money for the two Presidential campaigns that Bill was in (the first, of course, where he crushed Bush, the Elder). I’m guessing Terry also raised the money for all of Hillary’s political races. If Chelsea Clinton ever ran for Mayor of New York (now that Weiner is out of the running so you never know) I bet Terry would raise all the money for her race as well.

So there you have it. The biggest mastermind in Republican politics, the behind the scenes mover and shaker across the entire Bush family, was Chairman of the company. And the biggest mover-and-shaker in Democrat politics, was Vice Chairman. The war of values, between Democracy and Republicanism that our founders had fought for, had shed blood for, was over between them, if it ever even existed. Screw “The Federalist Papers”! Let’s make some money!

You see why your vote is useless? Not only is it useless, it’s scary. A female friend of mine told me: “it was like the biggest orgasm I had felt in the past 10 years of my marriage” when Obama became President.

But then what happened? Obama extended Bush’s tax cuts, kept Bush’s Secretary of Defense, extended the wars in Afganistan and Iraq, didn’t close Guantanamo Bay, and fought for a healthcare that’s now being disputed (and overturned) in every court in America. What else has he done? I can’t think of it. Planned Parenthood has less government funding now than under Bush. Africa has less funding from the US than under Bush (in fact, Obama has bombed Africa / Libya)

And yet we all fought so much. “Palin is an idiot!” “Biden can’t speak straight!” “Where’s Obama’s birth certificate!” “Is McCain senile?”!  “!”!”!” Let’s fight in the streets and pass out pamphlets and wear buttons and lose friends (“I can’t believe he’s voting for Nader!”) and stick on bumper stickers that can never be scratched off once we realize they are as embarrassing as that magic dragon tattoo we got lasered across our backs when we were 17.

We fought so hard for beliefs we all thought we had and where do they all end up? Where does it all congeal together right before it flushes down the toilet?

Answer:

One is Chairman and the other is Vice-Chairman of the same company. They’re all laughing together. Slapping backs. Making Money. They are laughing at you and me, my friend. The war is over for them.

We voted them all in there, they served their time, and now they are minting money as if they own the printing press. I watched Quasha and McCaulliffe laugh, sitting next to each other when they used to pretend to be sitting so far apart.

They have no idea who I am, what I want out of life, what ideas I think are good or bad, or would save the world, or whatever. They were laughing as hard as they could just ten feet from me and I knew while I stood there watching them, hoping beyond hope that they would share some of the wealth, I knew that they were laughing at me.

*** Net worth of most recent Presidents and Vice-Presidents (according to celebritynetworth.com)

• Barack Obama: $5 million (will probably end up around a billion)
• George W. Bush: $26 million
• Bill Clinton $85 million (my guess is this is understated by about $50-100 million.)
• George H.W Bush: $15 million (I think this is understated by about a billion)
• And now the big question: Al Gore versus Dick Cheney? Democrats versus Republicans. The winner is….
• Al Gore, coming in at $300 million with Dick Cheney at $90 million (don’t forget Gore was an advisor to Google since 2001 and on the Board of Apple. He also manages a billion dollar “green fund”). Al Gore’s net worth in 2001: $1 million.

Gone With the Papers

TruthDig
by Chris Hedges

I visited the Hartford Courant as a high school student. It was the first time I was in a newsroom. The Connecticut paper’s newsroom, the size of a city block, was packed with rows of metal desks, most piled high with newspapers and notebooks. Reporters banged furiously on heavy typewriters set amid tangled phone cords, overflowing ashtrays, dirty coffee mugs and stacks of paper, many of which were in sloping piles on the floor. The din and clamor, the incessantly ringing phones, the haze of cigarette and cigar smoke that lay over the feverish hive, the hoarse shouts, the bustle and movement of reporters, most in disheveled coats and ties, made it seem an exotic, living organism. I was infatuated. I dreamed of entering this fraternity, which I eventually did, for more than two decades writing for The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor and, finally, The New York Times, where I spent most of my career as a foreign correspondent. 

Newsrooms today are anemic and forlorn wastelands. I was recently in the newsroom at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and patches of the floor, also the size of a city block, were open space or given over to rows of empty desks. These institutions are going the way of the massive rotary presses that lurked like undersea monsters in the bowels of newspaper buildings, roaring to life at night. The heavily oiled behemoths, the ones that spat out sheets of newsprint at lightning speed, once empowered and enriched newspaper publishers who for a few lucrative decades held a monopoly on connecting sellers with buyers. Now that that monopoly is gone, now that the sellers no long need newsprint to reach buyers, the fortunes of newspapers are declining as fast as the page counts of daily news sheets. 

The great newspapers sustained legendary reporters such as I.F. Stone, Murray Kempton and Homer Bigart who wrote stories that brought down embezzlers, cheats, crooks and liars, who covered wars and conflicts, who told us about famines in Africa and the peculiarities of the French or what it was like to be poor and forgotten in our urban slums or AppalachiaThese presses churned out raw lists of data, from sports scores to stock prices. Newspapers took us into parts of the city or the world we would never otherwise have seen or visited. Reporters and critics reviewed movies, books, dance, theater and music and covered sporting events. Newspapers printed the text of presidential addresses, sent reporters to chronicle the inner workings of City Hall and followed the courts and the police. Photographers and reporters raced to cover the lurid and the macabre, from Mafia hits to crimes of passion. 

We are losing a peculiar culture and an ethic. This loss is impoverishing our civil discourse and leaving us less and less connected to the city, the nation and the world around us. The death of newsprint represents the end of an era. And news gathering will not be replaced by the Internet. Journalism, at least on the large scale of old newsrooms, is no longer commercially viable. Reporting is time-consuming and labor-intensive. It requires going out and talking to people. It means doing this every day. It means looking constantly for sources, tips, leads, documents, informants, whistle-blowers, new facts and information, untold stories and news. Reporters often spend days finding little or nothing of significance. The work can be tedious and is expensive. And as the budgets of large metropolitan dailies shrink, the very trade of reporting declines. Most city papers at their zenith employed several hundred reporters and editors and had operating budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The steady decline of the news business means we are plunging larger and larger parts of our society into dark holes and opening up greater opportunities for unchecked corruption, disinformation and the abuse of power.

Why Do People Believe Stupid Stuff, Even When They're Confronted With the Truth?

AlterNet 

by David McRaney

The "backfire effect" helps explain how strange, ancient and kooky beliefs resist science, reason and reportage. 
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Misconception: When your beliefs are challenged with facts, you alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking.
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Truth: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.

Wired, The New York Times, Backyard Poultry Magazine – they all do it. Sometimes, they screw up and get the facts wrong. In ink or in electrons, a reputable news source takes the time to say “my bad.”

If you are in the news business and want to maintain your reputation for accuracy, you publish corrections. For most topics this works just fine, but what most news organizations don’t realize is a correction can further push readers away from the facts if the issue at hand is close to the heart. In fact, those pithy blurbs hidden on a deep page in every newspaper point to one of the most powerful forces shaping the way you think, feel and decide – a behavior keeping you from accepting the truth.

In 2006, Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler at The University of Michigan and Georgia State University created fake newspaper articles about polarizing political issues. The articles were written in a way which would confirm a widespread misconception about certain ideas in American politics. As soon as a person read a fake article, researchers then handed over a true article which corrected the first. For instance, one article suggested the United States found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The next said the U.S. never found them, which was the truth. Those opposed to the war or who had strong liberal leanings tended to disagree with the original article and accept the second. Those who supported the war and leaned more toward the conservative camp tended to agree with the first article and strongly disagree with the second.

These reactions shouldn’t surprise you. What should give you pause though is how conservatives felt about the correction. After reading that there were no WMDs, they reported being even more certain than before there actually were WMDs and their original beliefs were correct.

They repeated the experiment with other wedge issues like stem cell research and tax reform, and once again, they found corrections tended to increase the strength of the participants’ misconceptions if those corrections contradicted their ideologies. People on opposing sides of the political spectrum read the same articles and then the same corrections, and when new evidence was interpreted as threatening to their beliefs, they doubled down. The corrections backfired.

Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do it instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens them instead. Over time, the backfire effect helps make you less skeptical of those things which allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.  In 1976, when Ronald Reagan was running for president of the United States, he often told a story about a Chicago woman who was scamming the welfare system to earn her income.

America, Awaken

The New York Times
by Roger Cohen

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once remarked that the United States was “aesthetically inferior but morally superior” to Europe.

On the aesthetics, there’s not much doubt. Savoir vivre is a French expression that English finds it needs. Style is many things but one reason Italy elevates it is because it is a fine disguise for lost power. When you’re running the world you don’t have much time for Windsor knots.

The aesthetics of European cities offer the consolation of the past’s grandeur but seldom the adrenalin of future possibility. It’s wonderful to be lost in Bruges or Amsterdam, Venice or Vienna. The palaces bear no relation to current obligations. They have become outsized repositories of beauty.

Sleepwalk through them and feel content. The only problem is awakening. One of the things you awaken to is that it’s now almost a century since Europe ripped itself to shreds at Verdun. Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently calculated in The New York Review of Books that British losses on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, given respective populations, were the equivalent of “280,000 GI’s killed between dawn and dusk.”

The Great War had its midcentury European sequel. And so power passed to America. It was of a United States ascendant that Berlin wrote, a confident nation assuming responsibility for the world.

He found it “morally superior” to Europe. I think he meant above all the can-do vigor of a young nation still able to dream big and gather its collective resources to realize great projects. Not for America the moral relativism of tired European powers that, ambition exhausted or crushed, settled for comfort and compromise.

I was talking about puritanism the other day with an American friend who observed: “Don’t knock it — that’s what got us this country in the first place!” There’s something to that: America has been inseparable from a city-on-the-hill idealism but also from a strong work ethic. When I became an American citizen and had to do an English test the second sentence of my dictation was: “I plan to work very hard every day.”

But of course you can’t work if you don’t have a job and today that’s the situation of 9.1 percent of Americans and 24 percent of U.S. youth. These are shocking numbers that aren’t temporary blips. They reflect shifts in the global economy. Every year developing economies are producing tens of millions of middle class people who can do American jobs.

What’s most worrying is that the U.S. response to this crisis seems to be one of a country in middle age, a nation that has lost its can-do moral edge, the ability to come together and overcome. In this critical regard President Obama has failed to deliver.

Harrowing, Heartbreaking Tales of Overworked Americans

Mother Jones

First person stories of doing more with less, from warehouses and classrooms to operating rooms and air-traffic control towers.

by Kiera Butler, Dave Gilson, Josh Harkinson,

Andy Kroll, and Laura McClure

These stories are part of our package on how corporations are shoving more work onto each employee, helping to goose profits by 22 percent. Read the essay and look at 12 charts that will make your blood boil. Do you have your own workplace speedup story to tell? Share it in the comments.


Sylvia: Warehouse loader, California
It's a big old warehouse out in the desert, a distribution center for [a major pharmacy chain]. It's way bigger than a Walmart, but with no air conditioning. Our temperature gets up to 115 degrees. Sometimes it feels so hot in there that you just can't breathe. You have a lot of people go home sick from the heat. To stay cool people put towels around their necks. They go back and forth getting ice to chew on.


In my part of the warehouse, we load products like cigarettes, shampoos, or lotions into totes that get sent down the rollers to where the trucks are. We're given orders by scanning our badges and totes into a computer system, which tells us what to pull and how quickly it has to be done. Back when I started in 1999, the rate wasn't so bad, but for about a year, they've been gradually ratcheting it up. Say the old rate was 100 orders a day. Now they're up to 160, sometimes even higher.


I've talked to some of the coordinators who add up the numbers at night. They've told me that it's impossible to meet the rate that they want with the amount of people that we have. So we have to work longer. We already worked 10 hours a day. Now we work another hour or two hours overtime, sometimes with last-minute notice. If we refuse to stay longer, we get disciplined.


On the job you're bending down constantly, reaching forward using the same movement in your hands to open up boxes or unwrap packages. My group's supposed to just handle lighter stuff but now they make us pull whole cases of water and Gatorade. These are older ladies doing this. One woman hurt her back and she's off on workers comp. It builds up on people's bodies, and that's why people call in sick. So that might be another hour that other people have to work.


On the job I used to get anxiety attacks. One time we were about to go out to lunch and I just couldn't breathe, couldn't get no air. I just started panicking. But I calmed myself. I don't know what other job I could get that would pay the bills. I'm in my fifties and I have six children and then I have my grandchildren. Sometimes I get home and I don't even spend time with them. I'm just so tired I go to sleep. Five hours later, it's gotta get up, gotta walk in there.


"Mom," my kids always ask, "are you going to work today?"


"Yeah."


"What time are you getting home?"


"I don't know." That's the answer I tell them all the time.

The Empire of Illusion

The Project for the New American Century

Information Clearing House
by William Rivers Pitt

The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, is a Washington-based think tank created in 1997. Above all else, PNAC desires and demands one thing: The establishment of a global American empire to bend the will of all nations. They chafe at the idea that the United States, the last remaining superpower, does not do more by way of economic and military force to bring the rest of the world under the umbrella of a new socio-economic Pax Americana.

The fundamental essence of PNAC's ideology can be found in a White Paper produced in September of 2000 entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century." In it, PNAC outlines what is required of America to create the global empire they envision. According to PNAC, America must:
* Reposition permanently based forces to Southern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East;
* Modernize U.S. forces, including enhancing our fighter aircraft, submarine and surface fleet capabilities;
* Develop and deploy a global missile defense system, and develop a strategic dominance of space;
* Control the "International Commons" of cyberspace;
* Increase defense spending to a minimum of 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, up from the 3 percent currently spent.

Most ominously, this PNAC document described four "Core Missions" for the American military. The two central requirements are for American forces to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars," and to "perform the 'constabulary' duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions." Note well that PNAC does not want America to be prepared to fight simultaneous major wars. That is old school. In order to bring this plan to fruition, the military must fight these wars one way or the other to establish American dominance for all to see.

Why is this important? After all, wacky think tanks are a cottage industry in Washington, DC. They are a dime a dozen. In what way does PNAC stand above the other groups that would set American foreign policy if they could? Two events brought PNAC into the mainstream of American government: the disputed election of George W. Bush, and the attacks of September 11th. When Bush assumed the Presidency, the men who created and nurtured the imperial dreams of PNAC became the men who run the Pentagon, the Defense Department and the White House. When the Towers came down, these men saw, at long last, their chance to turn their White Papers into substantive policy.

America's War on Terror is a Farce

War Powers Resolution is not optional

DailyKos
Barack Obama is following an ugly tradition
by Mark Sumner

The president is the Commander in Chief. We get that. It's right there in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. The Army, the Navy, and all the other branches of service are his to command. Nobody disputes it.

Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi is a despot. A violent, egotistical, sociopath who under the guise of creating a democracy instead fashioned a surveillance state where one Libyan in five is charged by the government to keep tabs on his neighbors. Under Gaddafi's control, Libya became a place where all dissent was crushed through imprisonment, torture, and murder. It also became not just a breeding ground for terrorists, but a financier for terrorist activity. Nobody seriously disputes this.

Those Libyans in rebellion against Gaddafi are fighting for some measure of the freedom that has been denied them for over four decades. There's no doubt their cause is worthy, and no doubt that without external intervention Gaddafi would use military forces to destroy all opposition, no matter what the body count. Anyone who disputes that better have one hell of a good argument on their side.

For these reasons, it is completely understandable that the United States, along with many other nations, would feel compelled to reach out to those involved in the Libyan uprising. After a decade of what appears to be worse than fruitless military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan, many Americans are reluctant to see our forces engaged anywhere overseas, but the president was certainly within the powers of his office and acting from a understandable desire to do the right thing when he ordered the use of American aircraft and missiles in the defense of Libyan civilians under threat from Gaddafi. Personally, I applaud this action.

But my applause ends when the president refuses to take the case for action before Congress in accordance with the War Powers Resolution.

Granted, no president likes this act. It was passed over the veto of Richard Nixon. Numerous administrations have failed to answer to the War Powers Resolution at all, and those that have filed reports under the act – as in the letters sent to Congress when the US invaded Haiti and Bosnia during the Clinton administration – have often been carefully circumspect when it comes to admitting the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution. Even in actions as large as the First Gulf War, going before Congress happened long after troops had been deployed and action was certain; well after the deadline for the act had passed. Multiple presidents have either openly scorned the act, or pretended that it did not exist.

The American Dream...You Have to be Asleep to Believe it

Taking Back The American Dream: Us, Not The Politicians

opednews.com

by Robert Borosage

 

It was an accident of scheduling, but call it fate. As President Obama was meeting with 600 major donors from the gay and lesbian community in New York to raise money for his re-election campaign, three blocks away, Van Jones and the driving beat of the The Roots electrified an overflowing Town Hall meeting of citizen activists intent on reviving the movement of hope and change -- the American Dream Movement -- that helped put the president in the White House in the first place.

The place was rocking, and Jones was as hot as the band. "We voted for peace and prosperity," he stated, "not war and austerity.  We've got to challenge both parties in Washington once more."

The American Dream? It's about the dream, Jones argued, not the fantasy. The American fantasy -- that we're all going to get rich, that buying things will make you happy, he preached, isn't the dream; "it's a fantasy that turned into a nightmare."  No the basic American dream is the dream Dr. King invoked in his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial over 50 years ago: "I have a dream," he said, "it is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream."

And that dream is the basic promise -- if you are willing to work hard, you've got the opportunity for a job with dignity, one that can support a family, provide for a home, health care and a measure of retirement security and give your kids an education and a shot at a better life than you had. That very American dream of "liberty and justice for all" is the dream Dr. King fought to make available to all. And it is that dream -- open to more and more Americans as the "great generation" built the first broad middle class in the history of the world -- that is now being crushed.

Ask most Americans what the American dream means in their family and you will hear a tale of heroism -- of grandfathers and grandmothers who came over on the boat to create a new life; of fathers and mothers who survived the Depression and World War II and either made the leap to the new suburbs or found their path blocked and built movements to open the door for African Americans or women or -- more recently -- immigrants.

It is a story of hard work, sacrifice and grit. But it is also the story of citizens demanding equal opportunity after a Great Depression and a Great War in which all had sacrificed. The middle class wasn't inherited; it was built, step by step, with hard work and a government accountable to all.

Remember, the U.S. came out of World War II with a debt burden twice the size of what we have today in relation to the economy. We emerged fearful that we'd plunge back into the Great Depression. Some argued we had to tighten our belts, pay down the debt, and get rid of the New Deal shackles on finance. Instead, returning GIs demanded jobs and opportunity for their sacrifice.

So under citizen pressure, Congress passed a GI Bill that offered a generation a chance to go to college or advanced training. It set up financing to help families buy homes, and that built the suburbs. It adopted a conscious industrial policy, subsidizing the conversion of wartime factories to civilian production, opening markets abroad by rebuilding Europe and setting up global economic rules.

The top tax rate -- a wartime 90% -- was sustained at that level by Eisenhower, the Republican president who put a lid on military spending and built the interstate highways. The debt continued to rise in dollars -- but the economy grew faster, a broad middle class was built, and by 1980, the debt was down to nearly 30% of GDP and not a problem. Most important, we all grew together -- the wealthiest Americans, the growing middle and working class.  Labor unions represented nearly one in three workers and drove wage and benefits increases for union and non-union employees alike.

America: The Silence of a Nation

Documents Reveal Canadian Cops Used Agents Provocateurs to Disrupt 2010 G20

Infowars.com
by Kurt Nimmo

2010 G20 Protests - Photo by Jason Hargrove

Following the police state spectacular at the G20 last June, the cops were accused of infiltrating so-called black-bloc anarchists, who engaged in all sorts of pointless mayhem, including trashing a Starbucks and burning police cars (see video below). The corporate media had a field day covering these circus sideshow distractions while ignoring the larger issue of the globalists meeting behind closed doors and plotting to sell the national sovereignty of millions down the river.

It was necessary for the state to arrange this sort of meaningless property destruction in order to offer a public rationalization for spending nearly a billion dollars on police state “crowd control” equipment (including L-RAD sound cannons) for the globalist summit. The Canadian state also granted the cops special police state powers by expanding the jurisdiction of the existing Public Works Act to apply to high-security areas of the summit site.

It is now an indisputable fact the cops engaged in massive infiltration. According to newly released G8/G20 summit documents, the RCMP dispatched poseurs and agents provocateurs to infiltrate the ranks of anti-war, anti-globalization and anarchist groups.

In 2007, Canadian cops were caught red-handed posing as anarchists during a North American Union summit in Montebello, Quebec. “Protesters are accusing police of using undercover agents to provoke violent confrontations at the North American leaders’ summit,” the Toronto Star reported. “Such accusations have been made before after similar demonstrations but this time the alleged ‘agents provocateurs’ have been caught on camera.”

Photographs released showed the supposed “anarchists” wearing the same boots as the police arresting them.

“Protest organizers on Wednesday played the video for the media at a news conference in Ottawa. One of the organizers, union leader Dave Coles, explained that one reason protesters knew the men’s true identities was because they were wearing the same boots as other police officers,” CBC News reported on August 23, 2007.



Reports filed by the Joint Intelligence Group formed by the RCMP-led ISU (Integrated Security Unit) reveal that various police services contributed at least 12 undercover officers to take part in covert surveillance of potential “criminal extremists” in a bid to “detect… and disrupt” any threats, according to CBC News.

In other words, the RCMP was assigned the task of discrediting the larger anti-war and anti-globalization movement and making the public believe they are bomb-wielding anarchist criminals.


“There’s a lot of stuff that isn’t in there, that’s been redacted, or isn’t spelled out. But it says these undercover operations were going on, that there were 12 officers,” investigative journalist Tim Groves, who requested and obtained the reports through an access to information request, told the CBC. “The problem is that, looking at these documents, police expected criminal extremism everywhere.”

The same mindset and illegal police state activity operates in the United States. Since the FBI’s use of CLOINTELPRO tactics to neutralize political opposition to the state in the 1960s and early 70s, such practices have been uniformly codified and are now widespread and routine in the so-called war on terrorism.

According to the CBC, RCMP records indicate:

- The RCMP set up a Joint Intelligence Group in January 2009, which in turn assigned a dozen officers to a covert PIIT (Primary Intelligence Investigative Team) expressly for monitoring and infiltrating suspected extremist networks.

- The joint-forces PITT had a mandate to use undercover officers and informants from within the ranks of protest networks, not just to monitor potential criminal activity by organizers, but also to “deter, prevent, investigate and/or disrupt” threats to the summit.

- The investigative team created and shared files on a long list of individuals, color coding them according to perceived risk level as red (suspect), orange (person of interest) and yellow (associate).

Following the June summit in Toronto, a number of so-called black-bloc anarchists were outed as police agents provocateurs. Such reports were covered by the alternative media and generally ignored by the corporate media that had characterized the demonstrations as lawless behavior by a handful of crazed extremists.

“It is hopeful that in the days, weeks and months to come government and police will be forced to admit (under similar circumstances as in Montebello, Quebec in 2007) that much of the vandalism and fire-setting was undertaken by those encouraged, directly or indirectly, by agents provocateurs,” Canadian activist Ghada Chehade wrote following the summit.

Unfortunately, it took more than a few weeks for the truth to come out. It took exactly a year.

China..America..The inevitable Confrontation

algathafi.org
by Muammar Al Gathafi

I dealt with the problem of the Ukraine in view of its impact on international peace. It is for the same reason that I deal with the problem of China and America. Mine is a small country that is concerned for international peace, therefore I try to the extent possible to make a contribution to the maintenance of international peace and security.

A direct confrontation between major powers is harmful to all. However, regardless of the efforts of peace-loving leaders, the Sino-American problem cannot be solved. I find it very alarming to have to say to the world that the Sino-American problem does not lend itself to mediation or solution. It is an inevitable and unavoidable problem. All that is happening now is the preparation for direct confrontation or attempts to postpone it. But it is unavoidable. America would like it to be an indirect confrontation. China would like to postpone it as much as possible. However, it is in the nature of things for the two sides to find themselves moving inexorably towards confrontation. The current rapprochements and the occasional skirmishes are simple tactics to postpone confrontation, gain time or move towards indirect confrontation as preferred by America. 

The world and peace-loving leaders must not be hoodwinked by the side shows and maneuvers such as trade and customs disputes, market dumping and the pressures on China to increase consumption or to raise the exchange rate of its currency or attempts to use environmental degradation as a pretext to slow down China’s progress.

The fact is China is a very dangerous world competitor. It is much more dangerous to the US than the USSR used to be in the past. The USSR depended on ideology to defeat America politically. In addition, it depended on its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Ideology is a philosophical matter and a matter of faith. It depends on its adherents. The moment the leadership changed in the erstwhile “leftist” countries, the policies shifted from left to right. Even some of the leftists themselves moved to the right.

China is a different kind of competitor. It is a rising economic power and America is unable to stop it. It has an unprecedented human wealth. In addition, it is a nuclear-weapon state and a permanent member of the Security Council. Everywhere in the world, China is making economic, human and political inroads. Unlike America which unwisely has chosen the harsh military approach, China is making those inroads using soft power. America continues its brazen interference in the internal affairs of states in the name of democracy and human rights. Africom is a case in point. Such interference is no longer acceptable. America itself is condemned in the field of human rights. It makes a habit of taking losers as allies.

Those who do not know the facts believe that the current crisis of the arms deal with Taiwan is a passing crisis. Nothing could be farther from reality. America is aware of the danger China poses. It knows that the next international confrontation will be with China. The new pssolicy adopted by America is one of creating regional deterrents to China in order to make their confrontation an indirect one. The strategic US policy aims at keeping China busy with those regional deterrents so as to avert a direct confrontation with China. Those deterrents are India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and maybe Viet Nam as well!! The most important among them are Taiwan, India and Japan. America’s objective is to keep China busy with those regional deterrents so as to avert a direct confrontation with it. 

It is a well-known fact that the US used China in the past as a regional deterrent against the USSR when Maoism broke away from Soviet Marxism-Leninism. Pitting Russia and China against each other was America’s biggest gain. America wishes to see that kind of gain continue in the future. It is the strategic equivalent of having a Euro-American confrontation. That would be a major gain for Russia and China. Therefore, America will not cease to arm Taiwan against China, nor will it cease to support India against China.

In accordance with the policy of creating regional deterrents against China, it is in America’s interest to see Japan become a major military power. This is happening now. The limitations placed on Japan after World War II no longer serve the interests of America in the face of the real danger or in its unavoidable confrontation with the Yellow Giant. 

The Problem With Anonymous

S.Paul Note:  Anonymous is a movement that represents We the People who have grown tired of the Global, Oppressive Regimes of Corporatism and the Untied States' financial and military support of it.  The author states that all movements must have a solid set of principles and goals but in the battle against a corrupt system which has entrenched itself into the whole of  global economics and politics, the problems are not so simple as to approach with a standard line of defense or revolution guidelines.  

Corporations do not pay attention to laws for they are designed to control the ruled not the rulers. The resistance against the fascist state requires following suit.  Anonymous is willing to take the necessary steps to remind these would-be-fascist that they survive because of us and it will be us who will take them down when they forget this simple fact.  Being "anonymous" in this effort protects against falling victim to the machine against which this movement fights.

Mathaba

No people's (r)evolutionary movement 

operates without a set of 

clear principles or a manifest

Many people have now hear of "Anonymous" but few know who it really is, whether a collection of young computer nerds who are this generations "revolutionaries" but who are even weaker in knowledge than previous generations of "revolutionaries", or, simply yet another Soros-funded ulterior-motive group such as Assange's WikiLeaks.

Of course, since Anonymous is anonymous, it could just as well the Hilary Clinton of the U.S. State Department, Twitter's main sponsor, or even a friend of Facebook's Zuckerberg. It could be grandma and her grandchildren, or it could be Israel's MOSSAD. It could be anything, and anyone could attribute any statement to it, as there is no digital or other signature to authenticate.

So, let us take a little cursory look at the history of Anonymous and what it has claimed to have done in the past. First, it rose in defence of WikiLeaks. That could have been an honourable effort against censorship, and not a Soros-funded operation, but a true anarchist underground, or, it could have been any of the above earlier-mentioned possibilities.

Yet, its next effort, reveals a lot more. It took upon itself the very easy task of threatening American ISP's that were hosting www.algathafi.org the web site that contains the speeches of the African revolutionary leader, Muammar Qaddafi. Here is the full text of the threat which shut down algathafi.org at the end of March.

Anyone can now see the algathafi.org web site as we resurrected it in Russia. The algathafi.org site content has not been updated since about one year. So please try to find any one reason why it should be censored by Anonymous.

On the contrary, as anyone taking a look can see, algathafi.org is precisely one of a handful of web sites in the world that should never be censored nor attacked, as it contains within it, pertinent solutions to the urgent problems and calamities facing the world. In fact, one such is the speech of Muammar Qaddafi to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2009. Anonymous wanted that erased.

Continuing with the sound logic of the real MIB (Mathaba Intelligence Bureau, not Men In Black), we can come to any one of the following conclusions:

* Anonymous did not even bother to read algathafi.org before threatening others to shut it down, and/or
* Anonymous is an anti-people group, despite what it now claims in its diatribe against NATO and/or
* Anonymous is amateurish (it cannot even keep its own website up and running some of the time)

But we can not come to the following conclusion:

* Anonymous is a movement or group that should be supported

And the reasons that we cannot support them, are clear: Muammar Qaddafi, has put forward for all time and eternity a truism "No revolutionary without revolutionary ideology" -- you cannot remain anonymous and at the same time have no ideology or set of principled, ideals or at the very least a clear manifesto.

Contrast this with the e-volutionary committees movement of the Green Charter. Many of those committees are indeed anonymous and exist in various places, a few here and more there, but all have public guidelines and a set of laws which belong not only to them, but to all the people of the world.

Until and unless "Anonymous" drops its child-like and nihilistic slogans such as "we are legion, we do not forget, we do not forgive", which are presumably designed to make its adherents feel self-important and all-powerful instead of the actual cowards they are for both hiding and not having an ideology or guiding set of noble principles.

They can do one or the other but not both: if they hide, but adopt principles, then more power to them and worldwide support. If they come out into the open and have principles, also more power to them and worldwide support. But whether they hide or not, and especially having no ideology, means quite simple that they are not (r)evolutionaries and not worthy of support or attention of any kind.

It is not enough to say "I'm anonymous, I'm with the people, I fight for the people, I defend the people" if it does not also say exactly what it does support, namely if it agrees and adopts the human rights and freedoms of the Green Charter which was the result of the deliberations on human rights and freedoms by around one million people, not a small group drafting a communique, like the UN.

Anyone can say they are against NATO, no one in their right mind wouldn't be. But to say you're against NATO and at the same time to be against the very leader of the world (r)evolution is questionable, but to fail to declare support for true human rights and freedoms nor to provide a clear set of principles or an ideology, is morally bankrupt.

Those thinking of joining or pretending to be Anonymous by hiding behind the cowardly masks that have been adopted without the slightest imagination -- something sadly lacking among today's copy-cat youth -- would be better of hiding behind The International Green Charter and promoting that instead. Wear a mask if you have to but use some imagination, at least paint it green.

Beware the Rising Ire of a Forgotten Generation

S. Paul Forrest

Confusion, frustration and outright anger are the only words I can think of to describe and define the undertones of a generation forgotten in the tides of history.  These words are more than just a collection of letters with meaningless application; they depict the feelings and moods circulating through a group of people that have become disgruntled to the point of anger amidst the fog of deception emanating from our political systems past and present.

Distrust in our government grows by leaps and bounds, sparked by the actions of people who are bent on monetary allocation and blatant self-service.  These “politicians” are the soldiers of a two-party political system that has become a farce, using popular media as a tool to promote their brand of control over the people.  Republicans and Democrats alike call on us to protect the interests of our nation when they are, in reality, only asking that we give them the right to use us as fodder in their personal agendas.  The time has come for real change and the deconstruction of the old ways and practices of a bygone era that has failed us all.

Today, we live in a world that is so clearly confused with these items of self-interest that many have become overwhelmed by the implications for the future of the country.  Corporations are buying Washington piece by piece and it seems there is nothing we can do about it anymore.  Have we just been sleeping, head in the comfortable warmth of the sand, and not realized the slow creep of decay in the foundation of this nation? Or, is it only now, like a slap across the face from a jilted lover, that we are finally awakening to it?

Recently, the lies and deceit which surged forth in this past mid-term election have only served to fill us with additional malevolence.  Corporate contributions, partisan attacks on naysayers, and purposeful lies to propel a dishonest agenda are at an all-time high.  Precipitated by the actions of modern politicians who claim to represent us, a new surge of movements and actions is unfolding to counteract the deception of an old era.  These movements have made clear that WE, as a people, will NOT accept the lies anymore.

The most potent of the platforms for change for these movements rests within the blogosphere.  No longer is modern media, with its corporate backing and purposeful misdirection, trusted.  New information is being delivered through electronic media which does not serve to censure the realistic words of a people.  Bloggers and Internet journalists are now the real informers of our society.  Many people still cling to the old ideals and channels of this deception, though, wondering why so many have taken the road less traveled.

The simple answer is this: For too long we have listened to meaningless rhetoric and promises of a better tomorrow.  For too long we have watched as our “leaders” deceived us to serve their own elite purposes.  For too long we have been lied to and told by our politicians and their media constituents that all they do and stand for is for our collective good.  For too long we have sat still and worked toward a change that served only those who would spit upon the masses without regard for our safety and only served to fill their coffers with the sweat of our labor.

Don’t be fooled into thinking the powers don’t recognize our rise, though.  In reaction to the blogger speaking their mind, the powers-that-be are poised to apply the label ODD.  Oppositional Defiant Disorder is a made-up illness that was introduced to define the behavior of "troublesome" children.  Now, it seems they are set to apply the label to anyone who will stand against them.  They have also introduced new “Patriot Act” bylaws that consider those who would speak out against their ill work as criminals; a direct assault upon the First Amendment of The United States Constitution.

The reality of it all is that corporations rule our politicians and our country.  If you truly want to know what a candidate thinks, research their largest corporate contributors; there, in the charter of said corporation, you will find the platform upon which candidates really stand.  It is best to ignore the campaign trail promises of change, and the hope you may have in it, for it is not the truth of the machine they are a part of.  The truth (the hard depressing truth) is so catastrophically detrimental to the American Dream that I cannot help but gasp at the implications.

In his novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the American Dream as an ideal about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness.  In the 1920s, as depicted in the novel, easy money and relaxed social values had corrupted this dream.  It would seem we have not come very far from this age.  Today, like in Fitzgerald’s novel, monetary disfigurement of the truth has overwhelmed our country and is spreading with the ferocity of the plague.

The term “American Dream” was first used by James Truslow Adams in his book, The Epic of America, which was written in 1931.  He stated:

The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

This may have been the image in the past, but today this dream has become a nightmare filled with ghastly images of a people serving as slaves to the interests of the elite ruling party.  It has become painfully evident that politicians care only about a letter after their names instead of the people they were entrusted to represent. In his piece, A Two-Party Death Grip, Chuck Baldwin stated:

It is clear, therefore, that conservatives are more than willing to support and defend someone they know to be unfaithful to both their oath of office and to bedrock conservative principles. In other words, it does not matter a whit to them whether their candidate tells the truth, obeys the Constitution, or even demonstrates fidelity to the fundamental principles of liberty. If he has an "R" behind his name, conservatives will support him.

The same holds true for Democrats.  It would seem that rhetoric is all we hear from our “leaders” anymore, and they daily employ deception in an effort to quiet the voices of reason from the people.  Everyday, new items and issues bubble to the surface in this swamp of deception.

But change is coming and it will be in the form of an irate mass of bodies which have been whipped into a shape by the master’s leather, deformed and seeping with the putrid scars of seething ire.   We will overrun the standard of elitism that has infected this country and will send a message to those who will do us harm for their own personal gain that “Enough is enough!!”  We have taken all that we will take and now, as the whip rises for one more painful burst upon the backs of this great country, we will collectively stand and say, “NO MORE!”  We say to you who will do us harm, “Beware the Rising Ire of a Forgotten Generation.”