I was checking my Reader Blogs and saw a new post by Eric Kirk. When I got to his blog I found this:

To Sacramento for the Busses!

January 14, 2012 in Uncategorized | by Eric Kirk

The ‘Occupy’ movement is one of several in American history to be based on anarchist principles.

For all of those that are stumbling around trying to understand what the Occupy Movement is all about, I offer the following article. Mr. Graeber has the clearest, most concise understanding I found yet. For those readers that believe they live in a Democracy and enjoy all the guaranteed rights and privileges of voting for their choice of elected leaders, I suggest they take a hard look at the truth.

This is the link to the article: Occupy Wall Street’s anarchist roots – Or continue at the break. The complete article is printed below.

Occupy Wall Street’s anarchist roots

[Picture: Occupy-Movement]

New York, NY – Almost every time I’m interviewed by a mainstream journalist about Occupy Wall Street I get some variation of the same lecture:

“How are you going to get anywhere if you refuse to create a leadership structure or make a practical list of demands? And what’s with all this anarchist nonsense – the consensus, the sparkly fingers? Don’t you realise all this radical language is going to alienate people? You’re never going to be able to reach regular, mainstream Americans with this sort of thing!”

If one were compiling a scrapbook of worst advice ever given, this sort of thing might well merit an honourable place. After all, since the financial crash of 2007, there have been dozens of attempts to kick-off a national movement against the depredations of the United States’ financial elites taking the approach such journalists recommended. All failed. It was only on August 2, when a small group of anarchists and other anti-authoritarians showed up at a meeting called by one such group and effectively wooed everyone away from the planned march and rally to create a genuine democratic assembly, on basically anarchist principles, that the stage was set for a movement that Americans from Portland to Tuscaloosa were willing to embrace.

I should be clear here what I mean by “anarchist principles”. The easiest way to explain anarchism is to say that it is a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society – that is, one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence. History has shown that vast inequalities of wealth, institutions like slavery, debt peonage or wage labour, can only exist if backed up by armies, prisons, and police. Anarchists wish to see human relations that would not have to be backed up by armies, prisons and police. Anarchism envisions a society based on equality and solidarity, which could exist solely on the free consent of participants.

Anarchism versus Marxism

Traditional Marxism, of course, aspired to the same ultimate goal but there was a key difference. Most Marxists insisted that it was necessary first to seize state power, and all the mechanisms of bureaucratic violence that come with it, and use them to transform society – to the point where, they argued such mechanisms would, ultimately, become redundant and fade away. Even back in the 19th century, anarchists argued that this was a pipe dream. One cannot, they argued, create peace by training for war, equality by creating top-down chains of command, or, for that matter, human happiness by becoming grim joyless revolutionaries who sacrifice all personal self-realisation or self-fulfillment to the cause.

It’s not just that the ends do not justify the means (though they don’t), you will never achieve the ends at all unless the means are themselves a model for the world you wish to create. Hence the famous anarchist call to begin “building the new society in the shell of the old” with egalitarian experiments ranging from free schools to radical labour unions to rural communes.

Anarchism was also a revolutionary ideology, and its emphasis on individual conscience and individual initiative meant that during the first heyday of revolutionary anarchism between roughly 1875 and 1914, many took the fight directly to heads of state and capitalists, with bombings and assassinations. Hence the popular image of the anarchist bomb-thrower. It’s worthy of note that anarchists were perhaps the first political movement to realise that terrorism, even if not directed at innocents, doesn’t work. For nearly a century now, in fact, anarchism has been one of the very few political philosophies whose exponents never blow anyone up (indeed, the 20th-century political leader who drew most from the anarchist tradition was Mohandas K Gandhi.)

Yet for the period of roughly 1914 to 1989, a period during which the world was continually either fighting or preparing for world wars, anarchism went into something of an eclipse for precisely that reason: To seem “realistic”, in such violent times, a political movement had to be capable of organising armies, navies and ballistic missile systems, and that was one thing at which Marxists could often excel. But everyone recognised that anarchists – rather to their credit – would never be able to pull it off. It was only after 1989, when the age of great war mobilisations seemed to have ended, that a global revolutionary movement based on anarchist principles – the global justice movement – promptly reappeared.

How, then, did OWS embody anarchist principles? It might be helpful to go over this point by point:

1)    The refusal to recognise the legitimacy of existing political institutions.

One reason for the much-discussed refusal to issue demands is because issuing demands means recognising the legitimacy – or at least, the power – of those of whom the demands are made. Anarchists often note that this is the difference between protest and direct action: Protest, however militant, is an appeal to the authorities to behave differently; direct action, whether it’s a matter of a community building a well or making salt in defiance of the law (Gandhi’s example again), trying to shut down a meeting or occupy a factory, is a matter of acting as if the existing structure of power does not even exist. Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.

2)    The refusal to accept the legitimacy of the existing legal order.

The second principle, obviously, follows from the first. From the very beginning, when we first started holding planning meetings in Tompkins Square Park in New York, organisers knowingly ignored local ordinances that insisted that any gathering of more than 12 people in a public park is illegal without police permission – simply on the grounds that such laws should not exist. On the same grounds, of course, we chose to occupy a park, inspired by examples from the Middle East and southern Europe, on the grounds that, as the public, we should not need permission to occupy public space. This might have been a very minor form of civil disobedience but it was crucial that we began with a commitment to answer only to a moral order, not a legal one.

3)    The refusal to create an internal hierarchy, but instead to create a form of consensus-based direct democracy.

From the very beginning, too, organisers made the audacious decision to operate not only by direct democracy, without leaders, but by consensus. The first decision ensured that there would be no formal leadership structure that could be co-opted or coerced; the second, that no majority could bend a minority to its will, but that all crucial decisions had to be made by general consent. American anarchists have long considered consensus process (a tradition that has emerged from a confluence of feminism, anarchism and spiritual traditions like the Quakers) crucial for the reason that it is the only form of decision-making that could operate without coercive enforcement – since if a majority does not have the means to compel a minority to obey its dictates, all decisions will, of necessity, have to be made by general consent.

4)    The embrace of prefigurative politics.

As a result, Zuccotti Park, and all subsequent encampments, became spaces of experiment with creating the institutions of a new society – not only democratic General Assemblies but kitchens, libraries, clinics, media centres and a host of other institutions, all operating on anarchist principles of mutual aid and self-organisation – a genuine attempt to create the institutions of a new society in the shell of the old.

Why did it work? Why did it catch on? One reason is, clearly, because most Americans are far more willing to embrace radical ideas than anyone in the established media is willing to admit. The basic message - that the American political order is absolutely and irredeemably corrupt, that both parties have been bought and sold by the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population, and that if we are to live in any sort of genuinely democratic society, we’re going to have to start from scratch - clearly struck a profound chord in the American psyche.

Perhaps this is not surprising: We are facing conditions that rival those of the 1930s, the main difference being that the media seems stubbornly willing to acknowledge it. It raises intriguing questions about the role of the media itself in American society. Radical critics usually assume the “corporate media”, as they call it, mainly exists to convince the public that existing institutions are healthy, legitimate and just. It is becoming increasingly apparent that they do not really see this is possible; rather, their role is simply to convince members of an increasingly angry public that no one else has come to the same conclusions they have. The result is an ideology that no one really believes, but most people at least suspect that everybody else does.

Nowhere is this disjunction between what ordinary Americans really think, and what the media and political establishment tells them they think, more clear than when we talk about democracy.

Democracy in America?

According to the official version, of course, “democracy” is a system created by the Founding Fathers, based on checks and balances between president, congress and judiciary. In fact, nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or Constitution does it say anything about the US being a “democracy”. The authors of those documents, almost to a man, defined “democracy” as a matter of collective self-governance by popular assemblies, and as such they were dead-set against it.

Democracy meant the madness of crowds: bloody, tumultuous and untenable. “There was never a democracy that didn’t commit suicide,” wrote Adams; Hamilton justified the system of checks and balances by insisting that it was necessary to create a permanent body of the “rich and well-born” to check the “imprudence” of democracy, or even that limited form that would be allowed in the lower house of representatives.

The result was a republic – modelled not on Athens, but on Rome. It only came to be redefined as a “democracy” in the early 19th century because ordinary Americans had very different views, and persistently tended to vote – those who were allowed to vote – for candidates who called themselves “democrats”. But what did – and what do – ordinary Americans mean by the word? Did they really just mean a system where they get to weigh in on which politicians will run the government? It seems implausible. After all, most Americans loathe politicians, and tend to be skeptical about the very idea of government. If they universally hold out “democracy” as their political ideal, it can only be because they still see it, however vaguely, as self-governance – as what the Founding Fathers tended to denounce as either “democracy” or, as they sometimes also put it, “anarchy”.

If nothing else, this would help explain the enthusiasm with which they have embraced a movement based on directly democratic principles, despite the uniformly contemptuous dismissal of the United States’ media and political class.

In fact, this is not the first time a movement based on fundamentally anarchist principles – direct action, direct democracy, a rejection of existing political institutions and attempt to create alternative ones – has cropped up in the US. The civil rights movement (at least its more radical branches), the anti-nuclear movement, and the global justice movement all took similar directions. Never, however, has one grown so startlingly quickly. But in part, this is because this time around, the organisers went straight for the central contradiction. They directly challenged the pretenses of the ruling elite that they are presiding over a democracy.

When it comes to their most basic political sensibilities, most Americans are deeply conflicted. Most combine a deep reverence for individual freedom with a near-worshipful identification with institutions like the army and police. Most combine an enthusiasm for markets with a hatred of capitalists. Most are simultaneously profoundly egalitarian, and deeply racist. Few are actual anarchists; few even know what “anarchism” means; it’s not clear how many, if they did learn, would ultimately wish to discard the state and capitalism entirely. Anarchism is much more than simply grassroots democracy: It ultimately aims to eliminate all social relations, from wage labour to patriarchy, that can only be maintained by the systematic threat of force.

But one thing overwhelming numbers of Americans do feel is that something is terribly wrong with their country, that its key institutions are controlled by an arrogant elite, that radical change of some kind is long since overdue. They’re right. It’s hard to imagine a political system so systematically corrupt – one where bribery, on every level, has not only been made legal, but soliciting and dispensing bribes has become the full-time occupation of every American politician. The outrage is appropriate. The problem is that up until September 17, the only side of the spectrum willing to propose radical solutions of any sort was the Right.

As the history of the past movements all make clear, nothing terrifies those running the US more than the danger of democracy breaking out. The immediate response to even a modest spark of democratically organised civil disobedience is a panicked combination of concessions and brutality. How else can one explain the recent national mobilisation of thousands of riot cops, the beatings, chemical attacks, and mass arrests, of citizens engaged in precisely the kind of democratic assemblies the Bill of Rights was designed to protect, and whose only crime – if any – was the violation of local camping regulations?

Our media pundits might insist that if average Americans ever realised the anarchist role in Occupy Wall Street, they would turn away in shock and horror; but our rulers seem, rather, to labour under a lingering fear that if any significant number of Americans do find out what anarchism really is, they might well decide that rulers of any sort are unnecessary.

David Graeber is a Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011112872835904508.html

–Joe

In view of the letter published in the Times-Standard newspaper by Tom Nash, a so-called “OWS supporter” and the picture of the police punishing peaceful protesters published in this article by Kevin Gosztola: UC Davis Chancellor Called to Resign After Police Pepper Spray Students, this is a really appropriate demonstration or representation of reality from James MacLeod and Mike Flugennock. Then there is this from the Daily Kos: America’s Tacit Approval of Police Brutality – that draws the connection or parallel issue with the Humboldt County Sheriff’s history of brutalizing and torturing peaceful people.

What I’d like to know is how any REAL MAN or woman for that matter can stand on the sidelines and watch peaceful people, women in particular, be brutalized by ONE lone thug? No man with even an ounce of dignity, manhood, and honor would not defend his women to the death. That’s the secret Occupy People. Once the Masters of this brutality realize those are the terms or rules of engagement, they will stop. There is no greater force on this Earth than a man committed to defending his family no matter who or what the threat.

Nonviolence…?

Mike Flugennock: “After a decade of observing police thuggery against protests in Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York City along with the recent police attacks on unarmed protesters at Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland, and comparing it against similar scenes I witnessed in video from Athens, Bahrain and Cairo, I can’t help but conclude that Nonviolence™ is an ideological luxury affordable only to the cushy-living white middle-class activists of the United States.” [Emphasis added]

YET, the reality of the Occupy Movement is caught here by James MacLeod:

James MacLeod adds:

The physical or defacto reality of the so-called doctrine “Ahisma,” as practiced is actually granting permission for the police to criminally brutalize and punish non-compliant, disobedient, peaceful people. Tom Nash’s letter misrepresents Gandhi’s teachings and practice as somehow being subservient, slavish, abjectly obedient and call that: “Non-Violence.” The very kind of passive stance as defined by Tom Nash, in his misbegotten belief that the “movement” needs “large segments of the 99% to be “sympathetic” clearly demonstrates his lack of cognitive understanding of this worldwide movement. Perhaps he should read this very good explanation by Glenn Greenwald: Here’s what attempted co-option of OWS looks like – Here you can get a hint of what’s really going on with the Occupy Movement. To quote: “[B]ut the U.S. desperately needs a citizen movement devoted to working outside of political and legal institutions and that is designed to be a place of dissent against it.”

Continuing to operate according to “rote learning” based upon contaminated “self-serving distortions and preconceived ideas” IS the sure way to fail. Martin Luther King’s interpretation of Gandhi stems from an abundantly American way of thinking rooted solidly in a feminine belief system. This, of course, is exactly how the dominant female way of thinking wants their masculine counterpart to perform. Since the end of World War II this form of Non-Violence is what’s been practice all over the world by all peoples that bowed down and willingly subjugated themselves and their families to a whole generation of authoritarian, dictatorial, top-down rule. What Gandhi taught and actually practiced was NON-COOPERATION.

If there is one thing that the United States of America has established in stone – it’s total legitimate right to exist as an independent nation rest totally upon this established legal right – is the inherent legitimate, legal rights of people, most particularly American citizens, the individual’s right to SELF-DEFENSE. Which is consistent with Gandhi’s teachings. For reference, Wikipedia makes note: “Avoidance of verbal and physical violence is also a part of this principle, although ahimsa recognizes self-defense when necessary, as a sign of a strong spirit.” The belief that husbands had the right to physically beat their spouses anytime and in anyway for whatever they judged them guilty, ended in America a long time ago.

Everyone should keep in mind the words of Swellsman. What he says is extremely important and probably should be printed out and posted on all would-be Occupy Movement people’s walls so everyone can see. And Tom Nash and all those that support his way of thinking or believing, they should take a lesson:

And, yeah . . . the rest of us might want to think about trying to undo some of the power and public relations imbalance that we have allowed to creep into law enforcement’s favor by our past apathy in the face of public abuses.

Despite what they’ll tell you, and what we’ve been conditioned to believe, the cops are not the law. The law resides in a system, not in a person, not even in a group of people. Cops are merely citizens – just like you and me – who have been given special dispensation to arrest people under certain circumstances and then turn them over to that system . . . and nothing more.

And it seems to me that America would be a lot better off trying to keep that basic fact in mind.

Real Meaning of “Ahimsa” – NON-COOPERATION

[Picture Source] - [Update :: From the Swellsman’s Blog about how the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Deputies were on the cutting edge of torturing peaceful people with impunity. (Always a link to Digby on the Joe Blow Report on Blogspot)

Update: Like me, Digby also was reminded of the Humboldt County pepper-spray incident from the late 90s. She has a post up at her joint that fleshes out what happened there, including the fact that one sheriff deputy apparently was recorded telling the young woman whose eyeballs he had coated with pepper spray: “We’re done torturing you now.” Additional fun fact: it took 12 years and 3 separate trials (the first two, apparently, ended in deadlock) but the protesters did eventually win their suit against the county and its deputies for use of excessive force. Each plaintiff was awarded $1 in nominal damages.

Tom Nash’s letter to the Times-Standard is offered in “Read the rest…

Angry, disruptive actions alienate

Ahimsa is a term meaning to do no harm in Sanskrit. Gandhi promoted the principle of ahimsa by applying it to all spheres of life, particularly to politics. His non-violent resistance movement had an immense impact on the course of history in India.

Martin Luther King Jr. adopted this strategy with great success during the civil rights era. In Gandhi’s thought, ahimsa precludes not only the act of inflicting a physical injury, but also mental states like evil thoughts and hatred, as well as unkind actions such as harsh words and aggressive behav­iors. He saw these as manifestations of violence incompatible with ahimsa.

The antagonistic stance that some Occupy Eureka protesters are adopt­ing might feel satisfying in the moment, but ultimately is destructive to the movement. Angry, disruptive actions will alienate large segments of the 99 percent who might otherwise be sympathetic to the cause. They will serve mainly to marginalize the occu­pation and its ability to effect the real change that this country so desperate­ly needs.

Tom Nash – OWS supporter – Eureka

–Joe

[Source]

–Joe

Anyone really wonder why there is a spreading Occupy Movement willing to brave a modern-day Schutzstaffel? 

Had a story on the HWMA – ACRC fiasco, but it got lost among my more important comments and observation. With this latest news emanating from Humboldt Herald this seems like a good time to post something.

Can any member of the Eureka City Council, with a straight face, explain how their decision to contract with a Willit’s garbage company was a greater benefit to the local economy and need for good jobs? The fact is, they can’t. If they try to justify these consequence, as reported in the Wednesday, November 2, 2011, Times-Standard newspaper: ACRC (Arcata Community Recycling Center) to close its doors in January; about 35 employees will lose their jobs – they’re talking out of both sides of their face.

I didn’t even bother to consider the Humboldt Waste Management Authority when reviewing their history in this matter. While doing some further research on this matter I came across this from: LAST GASP: Arcata Community Recycling Center Sues Humboldt Waste Management Authority – which also offers some history and strong-arm tactics used. You can take Hank Sim’s inferences for what their worth.

–Joe

His article posted on Salon.com today, Sunday, October 30, 2011 is here. He answers the driving question:  but what can we do about all of this? He offers a good start:

(1) Ever since I began writing about politics, the most frequently asked question I’ve encountered has been: but what can we do about all of this? The reason I find the Occupy movement to be one of the most important, exciting and inspiring political developments of the last decade is that it provides the definitive answer to that question. Though still in what I hope is its incipient stage, this protest movement proves that citizens of all different backgrounds and even ideologies (though sharing common interests) possess the ability to unite, pose a threat to seemingly invulnerable power factions, and demand change beyond the mere act of voting once every two years — and that they can endure and even grow in the face of abusive police force. Though it has already accomplished substantial good, the protest movement hasn’t yet achieved all of that, but it has provided the template and made manifest the possibility.

Having spent substantial time over the past week talking about the protests and speaking to many protesters, I will have a lot more to say about all of this when time permits (my speech to Occupy Boston was unfortunately cancelled yesterday due to weather problems, highlighting the need for support from sympathizers in ways like this). For the moment, I want to make this point: as I’ve focused on these protests, there is one passage that I’ve repeatedly thought about from this genuinely important May, 2009 article in The Atlantic by Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the IMF. That article is entitled “The Quiet Coup” — referring to the oligarchy that Johnson argues has replaced American democracy — and, as his primary evidence, Johnson describes how America’s reaction to the 2008 financial crisis was virtually indistinguishable from those he witnessed first-hand in corrupt, “emerging market” oligarchies of the past when they faced severe financial distress:

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. . . .

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large. . . .

In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets) . . . .But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

It’s those two observations in bold that have been at the forefront of my thoughts about the Occupy movement: that oligarchs in a corrupted society will be free from any meaningful checks from the government they own and control, and will continue to pilfer from the rest of the society until resulting social unrest on the part of ordinary citizens becomes too disruptive and threatening to their interests. Put another way, an oligarchical class that operates without any fear in its collective heart of the citizenry will continue to assemble and protect its ill-gotten gains without limits. That is why this protest movement is so vital — so indispensable — because it is precisely that fear in the hearts and minds of the elite classes that has been so destructively lacking.

–Joe

–Joe

By Mike Flugennock – Saturday – October 22nd, 2011
Please note: This cartoon and accompanying commentary are from Mike Flugennock Political Cartoons. For the rest of the story, continue reading at his website, where you can discuss his cartoons and commentary with him or use the link below.

The consensus over here on the Left is that there is a danger to the Occupy Movement far greater than any amount of pepper spray, mace, tear gas or blunt force trauma that could be dished out by various metropolitan police departments, or any amount of buffoonish insults crapped out by Fox News — and that is the danger of being co-opted by the Democratic Party in the form of its various front groups. On the upside, though, this generation of dissidents seems less likely to fall for Democratic Party snake oil, unlike their older comrades who came out of Seattle/WTO, “A16″, and the early ’00s peace movement.

The Democrats’ co-optation attempts are especially galling in the context of the latest news of the Obama re-election campaign fundraising efforts. They’re continuing the pace set during the ‘08 campaign, when the Democrats first surged ahead of the GOP in the amount of campaign cash coming from Wall Street and the banksters.

Not only that, but it’s right out in the open, butt-assed naked, reported on the front page of this past Thursday’s Washington Post. The real “money shot” comes eight paragraphs deep:

Obama’s ties to Wall Street donors could complicate Democratic plans to paint Republicans as puppets of the financial industry, particularly in light of the Occupy Wall Street protests that have gone global over the past week.

“Could complicate Democratic plans”? No shit, Sherlock.

Of course, this inconvenient truth won’t stop the likes of Michael Moore, the AFL-CIO, MoveOn and the Progressive Democrats Of America from trying to weasel their way in and divert the movement’s energy down the Democratic Electoral Black Hole anyway, because that’s just the way they are — exploitive, manipulative, parasitic, amoral.

When it’s broke, it’s broke, folks.  – Source: Mike Flugennock Cartoons.

–Joe

We Are The 1%

Compliments of Mike Flugennock:

As if the celebrities and Liberal politicians barging in on the Occupy Movement aren’t bad enough, now the movement’s having to contend with Mr. Wall Street Water Boy himself, President Barack Sparkle Pony Obama, claiming support for the protests, although in classic Obama fashion, he waters it down by pleading with them to not “demonize” the banksters and brokers. Yes, the man who pushed the Democrats ahead of the GOP in the Wall Street Campaign Donations Department in 2008, whose Treasury Department maintains a revolving door with Goldman Sachs and who, in this year’s Presidential campaign, has already set a record at shuffling for investment bankers and stock brokerages, has sent a shout-out to Occupy Wall Street. What’s worse is that despite Obama’s obvious, shallow election-cycle pandering to the Left and his ongoing brown-nosing of Wall Street and the bankster scum, the Tea Party crowd still insists on claiming that he sincerely supports the Occupiers — and, of course, that he’s a Marxist.

With that in mind, here’s a little bit of ammo for you to use on those Teabagger nutcakes who try to connect President Sparkle Pony to the Occupy Movement, even though anyone who didn’t ride the short bus to school knows he’s been Wall Street’s boy for years, and is simply trying to pander to the movement and exploit it in classic Democratic Party fashion.

Americans for Campaign Reform: Both parties profit from Wall Street
Sourcewatch: 2008 Obama campaign financing: more donations from investment banks, hedge funds, and Wall Street
Obama Taps Wall Street for Dollars, Washington Post 07.16.07

First it was the small business-minded voters worshiping at the feet of Ronald Reagan thinking that they were going to finally get that elitist position in American Society they believed they owned a right to. Well, that didn’t work out, did it? The there was the Prophet in the Wilderness preaching “HOPE” and “CHANGE,” Barack Obama. He was a half  Black half white guy – had to be a man of “the people.” Turns out he was and is a fraudulent liar and betrayed everyone that voted for him thinking they would finally get that recognition coming to ALL Americans. Well, you can all forget that recognition. The One Percent own it all. The System is way too corrupt to salvage. American-style Democracy is finished.

–Joe