I am afraid that any attempt to organize or resist will meet the same fate as the Occupy Wall Street movement which was crushed by a ruthless,coordinated, nation wide (even world wide) crackdown by police and security forces.

It is clear to me that this dragnet data mining is not meant for those few pitiful “terrorists” out there. It is for the ability to snuff out any kind of domestic organization that threatens the financial and corporate oligarchy.

I think that what you are saying is true. The question remains: what is going to happen as the situation for us continues to deteriorate?

I have been reading a lot of history in the last year or so – American Revolution, French Revolution, the “European Spring” of 1848, The American Civil War, the Paris Commune, the Progressive Movement, Civil Rights Movement,etc. etc.. In all of them the spark started a flame that then extinguished itself. I am myself more than half way to being an anarchist such as I can understand what that is.All I can see ahead is a flash, a bang and black smoke clearing to reveal a ruin.

Do you have hope?

The great con job of the tax cut extension was focusing attention on the extension of cuts for the gap between $250k and $400K. Completely unmentioned was the relatively enormous FICA tax increase dumped on the lower income people by the FICA tax holiday being allowed to expire.

This con is focusing on some high income tax deductions while the chained CPI is increasing taxes all the way down by slowing down the upper movement of tax brackets. It would be interesting to see a balance between the savings of the chained CPI on benefits versus the increase tax revenue.

Classic misdirection to cheat the rubes. Who are the people with the above $250K incomes? The Washington and New York news media people and the professional lobbyists and political operatives.

Keep your eye on the pea.

It was clear to me that neither Al Gore or John Kerry really wanted to be president either. Certainly they didn’t put up a fight to keep from losing after the election.

The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (precursor to HSBC) was founded in 1860 to handle money from the opium trade before opium was illegal (but still clearly immoral and socially destructive). Laundering drug money has been their stock in trade from the beginning, so I imaging that they might have a hard time seeing why it is suddenly a problem.

The real issue is not the drugs, but the fact that there is now one law for the rich and another for the poor. All we can hope for now is that there is a god in heaven who loves the poor and who will punish the rich.

Their problem is that their message makes no sense without expressing the fundamental hidden premise: Sex is sin, the physical mechanism by which Original Sin is transmitted from one generation to the next, and the only permissible sexual activity of any kind is for the purpose of procreation, and that is only permissible within the sacrament of marriage.

This is the key that unlocks their positions on abortion, contraception, in-vitro fertilization and same-sex marriage. Even their campaigns against programs that prevent sex education, HIV prevention and the HPV vaccine. Nothing that reduces the threats of unwanted pregnancy and disease is allowable since it reduces the negative consequences of sex.

They can’t convince people of their positions because they make no sense unless they include their medieval theories of original sin and substitutionary atonement. And if they did include them, they would be laughed out of town. No amount of re-organization of the PR department can cure that problem.

Truth,well said. Trouble is that I have no idea what to do about it, nor hope that anyone else does either.

They can read just fine and many of them have educations. What they lack is the ability to be critical of their own beliefs. Once they get something into their heads it becomes true for them and a guiding principle. They lack empathy and the ability to experience the consequences their harsh ideas have on others.

I think we have been tricked by the whole concept of the “middle class”. I think we are better served by the classic definition of the “working class”: those who have no other wealth to live on and must live by selling their labor. Above the working class are the wealthy who own the means of production and those who live of rents, interest and dividends from their property.

Roughly it corresponds to the 99 and the 1 per cent.

The working class has broken its strength by dividing itself into a laboring class and a more prosperous “middle class”. We fight amongst ourselves over our portion of the dregs of wages the owners deign to share with us, some more than others. It suited the owners for a time to give a lot more to the more educated and trained part of the workforce and to let those people think they were special and had a brighter future. But that time is over.

The only way to fight back is to re-discover the power of solidarity and to win back the trust of the laboring class we thought we had risen above.

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you ?
People’d call, say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall”
You thought they were all kiddin’ you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin’ out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone ?

We have spent the last couple of years saying that we might be willing to go to war with Iraq if these sanctions don’t produce results. And now we have a foreign bank more or less admitting that it was involved in crooked deals to evade the sanctions and helping preserve the horrible terrorist regime that we claim is about to build a bomb and wreck the world.

Why isn’t the state department, defense department, white house and everybody else all over this bank and throwing the managers into GITMO as enemies in the global war on terror? They did it to some poor guy who sent a pair of socks to his brother in Afghanistan. I thought we didn’t negotiate with terrorists, and anybody who helped them is liable to get a cruise missile down his chimney.

Wage workers were cheaper than slaves. They bought their own food and clothing, and if one got injured or died you just dragged them off to the potters field and brought in a new one fro an endless supply, no investment required.

The only real problematic aspect of them is that they could own guns.

McConnell and Manchin have had a grudge for a while, since Manchin accused McConnell of apparently trying to interfere with West Virginia University changing football conference. Yes, our country’s fate may be decided by such weighty considerations.

Look out for Joe Manchin to sprain his ankle and not be able to show up for the vote. He won’t be able to face his millionaire buddies if he votes for this.

The people who go to the ER will pay for it. If you go there, they have to treat you, at least enough to keep you alive for a while, but its not free. You get a bill. For the doctor, X-ray, lab test, everything. You can’t walk away from it any more than you can any other bill without having your credit ruined or going bankrupt.

This is why, if you have a heart attack, you should hope nobody finds you to call the EMTs until you are already dead.

It’s not the first time in history that congress has been a worthless pack of thieves and scoudrels. The humorist commentator Artemus Ward write this at the beginning of the civil war:

There air other cheerin signs. We don’t, forinstuns, lack great
Gen’raJs, and we certinly don’t lack brave sojers but there ‘a
one thing I wish we did lack, and that is our present Congress.

I venture to say that if you sarch the earth all over with a
ten-hoss power mikriscope, you won’t be able to find such
another pack of poppycock gabblers as the present Congress
of the United States of America.

Gentlemen of the Senit & of the House, you Ve sot there
and draw’d your pay and made summer- complaint speeches
long enuff. The country at large, incloodin the undersined,
is disgusted with you. Why don’t you show us a statesman
sumbody who can make a speech that will hit the pop’lar hart
right under the Great Public weskit 1 Why don’t you show us
a statesman who can rise up to the Emergency, and cave in
the Emergency’s head ?

Congress, you won’t do. Go home, you mizzerable devils
go home !

This reminds me of a scam they played here in coal country called the “Synfuel Tax Credit”, supposedly to use coal as some kind of synthetic liquid fuel. But the law didn’t say exactly what you had to do to the coal to qualify.

So they figured out that they could take waste coal chips and dust that were lying around in piles, spray some oil on it and then call it “synfuel” to get the credit.

I guess these con artists moved out west.

Herbert Hoover called together a group of the big bankers, but was trying to jawbone them into putting together and investment pool to lend out money to stimulate the economy. I guess it doesn’t occur to any of these people to cough up some of their unused profits to help out building a road or a bridge somewhere.