Money and Democracy

There’s something wrong with the poster below. It’s simple. Dark money already took over our democracy. Now the federal government is as rotten to the core with corruption as is its master; the banksters of Wall Street.

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‘Monsanto Protection Act’ Defended By Roy Blunt, Farm State Senator (UPDATE)

Corrupt Senate Republicans defended the Monsanto Protection Act, which had to be secretly and corruptly inserted into another piece of legislation in order to pass through congress. In other words, the Act is another conspicuous example of quintessential corruption running amok through government. The Act “specifically allows the secretary of agriculture to block a judicial injunction and allow planting of particular seeds.”

Tom Vilsack is the current US secretary of agriculture. A former governor of Iowa, Vilsack was appointed by Monsanto President Barack Obama. “Vilsack has a glowing reputation as being a schill for agribusiness biotech giants like Monsanto.” See the story from Organic Consumers. 

According to the Organic Consumers Association, “As Iowa Governor, Tom Vilsack was a leading advocate for Monsanto, genetic engineering, and factory farming. President Obama proudly lauded his new Agriculture Secretary for “promoting biotech.”

Vilsack has, in fact, promoted the most controversial and dangerous forms of agricultural biotechnology, including pharma crops, plants genetically engineered to produce pharmaceuticals. When grown outdoors on farmland, where most pharma crop trials have occurred, pharma crops can easily contaminate conventional and organic varieties.

In one chilling example from 2002, a corn crop engineered by ProdiGene to produce a vaccine for pigs contaminated 500,000 bushels of soybeans that were grown in the Nebraska field the next season. Before this incident, a similar thing had happened in Iowa where the USDA ordered ProdiGene to pay for the burning of 155 acres of conventional corn that may have been contaminated by the firm’s biotech plants.

ProdiGene eventually went out of business, but not before it received a $6 million investment from the Governors Biotechnology Partnership, chaired by Iowa Governor Vilsack. Vilsack didn’t want any restrictions placed on experimental pharma crops. In reaction to suggestions that pharma crops should be kept away from food crops, Vilsack argued that “we should not overreact and hamstring this industry.”

In other words, Vilsack will do Monsanto’s bidding and he will block any judicial injunction that will harm the profits of Monsanto. In other words, he will place the profits of Monstanto ahead of the health and wallets of the rest of the nation.

During debate on the farm bill last Thursday, Oregon’s Senator of the 99 percent, Jeff Merkley, offered an amendment that would have repealed the measure, but it was blocked by corrupt, corporate Senate Republicans, led by the most likely corrupt Senator in congress, Roy Blunt (R-Mo.).

“Earlier on Thursday, in an interview with The Huffington Post, Blunt said that the point of the provision was to protect farmers who had already purchased seeds that were later deemed unsafe. “I was raised — my mom and dad were dairy farmers. Once you’ve made a decision to plant a crop for that year, you can’t go back and undo that decision,” he said.

Blunt, of course, is lying. The Act was signed less than a month ago. And it can be repealed. Sure, maybe you can’t go back on some seeds that have already been planted, but repealing the Act would prohibit any more seeds from being planted. Blunt isn’t as stupid as he appears, he’s simply lying and not making sense so as to justify not repealing this god awful piece of legislation.

 

 

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Is Senator Elizabeth Warren Preparing to Take on the Banksters Where Others Are Too Scared?

Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to the corrupt Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. She “demanded to know why the government keeps accepting financial settlements from criminal bankers when they could instead be taken to trial, convicted and locked up.”

The letter was also sent to corrupt US Attorney General Eric Holder, the person most capable and completely unwilling to deal with the crimes of Wall Street. SEC Chair Mary Jo White also received a copy.

Senator Warren put the matter bluntly, “..…I believe very strongly that if a regulator reveals itself to be unwilling to take large financial institutions all the way to trial — either because it is too timid or because it lacks resources — the regulator has a lot less leverage in settlement negotiations and will be forced to settle on terms that are much more favorable to the wrongdoer.

The consequence can be insufficient compensation to those who are harmed by illegal activity and inadequate deterrence of future violations. If large financial institutions can break the law and accumulate millions in profits and, if they get caught, settle by paying out of those profits, they do not have much incentive to follow the law.”

In other words, Wall Street banks rip off main street citizens, make big profits in the process, and then get assessed tiny penalties that are paid for with the money they stole from us. Doesn’t sound like much of a deal for the 99 percent to me. It’s a scam aided and abetted by the federal government.

We all know the answers to the problems outlined by Warren. The US government has been completely corrupted by big money, through both chambers of congress, both political parties, the white house, and all the way to both liberal and conservative wings of the US Supreme Court. That’s why and how the whole economic game has been legislatively rigged against the 99 percent. Elizabeth Warren is our champion.

The letter is below. It should also have been addressed to Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, as well as Wall Street President Barack Obama.

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wall street fraudsters ripped you off again and Guess what Obama’s Justice department is going to do about it for you

How would you feel if a bunch thugs stole your money in broad daylight, were caught red-handed, and they were immune from the law, could not be convicted, and they got to keep your money?

Guess who recently did that to you? The banksters! People are calling it the LIBOR scandal. Sixteen banks, like Citibank and Bank of America, decided not to compete with each other, which is normal business for them. But this time they got caught setting their interest rates at higher levels than if they’d been competing, which coincidentally, is illegal.

This was a massive income redistribution scam from the 99 to the 1 percent. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that was stolen by collusion from the 99 percent. Did you know that the 1 percent have gained $5.6 Trillion in this supposed economic recovery, while the rest of us have lost $669 billion?
That’s because most of their gains have been stolen from us.

The US Justice Department has decided the banks are too big to go after, even though they were caught months ago. This really means the banks have been handing out a ton of money to politicians to not go after them; they’ve been handing out the money they stole from us so that the political hacks such as Barack Obama and Eric Holder stand up for the right of the banks (which are tools of the 1 percent) to rip off every one else.

It’s time to end the madness of corruption. Let’s begin to form a broad alliance that can take back our government from thieves and liars, like Wall Street’s Senator Ron Wyden and his buddy, Wall Street Congressman Paul Ryan.

That’s what the Democratic and Republican parties stand for. Click on the link below for the full story.

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A massive redistribution of income from the bottom results in a massive redistribution of income and wealth to the top

The rich are getting richer under President Obama, and this is partly true because of his policies, such as the South Korea Free Trade Agreement.

According to a report out of the Pew Research Center, “During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28%, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93% dropped by 4%.”

There’s are several reasons for this trend. One of the worst is that one to two plus million jobs are exported every year from the US, according to the Federal Reserve. The difference between the old wages and the new lower wages over there are redistributed from the job losers to rich shareholders via higher corporate earnings, increased dividends and rising share prices.

And that is precisely what has occurred, a massive redistribution of income, which has fueled a rise in share and bond prices (wealth). BTW, income is money coming in, such as weekly pay checks and corporate dividends, while wealth is composed of assets.

The people in the top 7 percent saw their total wealth increase $5.6 trillion, mostly in the form of stocks and bonds. The 93 percent and lower saw their wealth decrease by $0.6 trillion. Their wealth is mostly in their houses.

What happens when job get shipped overseas? Many people lose their houses. If enough jobs are shipped overseas, then local tax bases begin to shrink. Teachers, fire fighters, government lawyers and accountants; they lose their jobs, they lose their houses. But corporate share prices rise because labor costs are reduced. In other words, a massive redistribution of income results in a massive redistribution of wealth.

The 1 percent have stolen virtually all income growth during the last five years. They now steal over 30 percent of all yearly US income, up from about 8 percent thirty-three years ago. Free trade treaties have played a massive role in this.

According to Pew, “During the period under study, the S&P 500 rose by 34% (and has since risen by an additional 26%), while the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index fell by 5%, continuing a steep slide that began with the crash of the housing market in 2006. (Housing prices have slowly started to rebound in the past year but remain 29% below their 2006 peak.)”

The reason for the results of this study is massive corruption in the US government. Money is the reason why many congress persons and senators vote to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent. All of this was easily predictable, and I did so in The Rigged Game.

Click the link for more on this story.

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The Keystone Pipeline: How much does it cost to buy the US senate, the US House of Representatives, and the man in the White House?

Protestors against the Keystone XL pipeline dressed as referees throw red penalty flags during a rally on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 24, 2012. The utterly corrupt US government, which includes the massively corrupt Koch Brothers wing of the US Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito, were bought off years and years ago.

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How the Monsanto Protection Act became law

How the Monsanto Protection Act became law

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Chris Hedges: The Day That TV News Died

Television and newspaper news died many years ago. What is called news nowadays is a mixture of news, no-news and propaganda. News is the stuff that’s going on. No-news is the stuff that’s news, but the folks who manage the corporate news media won’t report it because it would sabotage their propaganda campaign against the 99 percent. Propaganda is pure bull shit pushed onto the 99 percent as fact.

Take automation. Even though advancing technology has been a partner with economic advancement for 200 or more years, the media has printed and told us stories via television news that the current dearth of US jobs have been caused by automation, which is a function of technology. Isn’t it strange that automation didn’t put us all out of work 100 years ago, or during the 1980s? Like there wasn’t automation back then. The automation story is pure propaganda. It’s fiction that the corporate press wants you to believe. However, the press doesn’t want you to believe that free trade treaties have led to the exporting of nearly thirty million US jobs to lower wage countries since 1994, the year NAFTA was signed into law. Don’t you think maybe that has something to do with the lack of US jobs? By the way, those jobs were part of the US tax base, which supported a lot more jobs that don’t exist because of the results of those free trade treaties.

There is a story below by Chris Hedges. In it he describes the day that television news died. However, the death of the news media began with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Bill Clinton signed his name on the paper and it became law. The law allowed corporations to monopolize more and more media outlets. That’s the day the news media began to switch to the corporate propaganda machine.

Check out the link below for more on this issue.

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US Corruption: The Stink has been Rising to the Clouds

US Corruption: The Stink has been Rising to the Clouds

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Is American Idol Part of the Corporate Plot?

Is American Idol Part of the Corporate Plot?

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