Better Educated People Most Likely Voted For Obama in 2012

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The Battle Against The Trans Pacific Income Redistribution Free Trade Treaty

The Trans Pacific Pact (TPP) is going to redistribute income and democracy from the 99 to the 1 percent. That’s what all free trade treaties are about. These unconstitutional treaties have nothing to do with trade. TPP is the biggest, baddest one of these treaties. The Guardian newspaper of the UK calls the TPP “Nafta on steroids.” There are those who oppose these income redistribution treaties. An announcement of one such action is below.

Cross-Border Organizing Summit & Rally to Defeat the TPP

Saturday, December 1 * Peace Arch Park
in Blaine, WA on the U.S./Canada border

Join hands with Canadian, Mexican and American trade justice advocates from the labor, environmental, family farm, immigrant rights, Internet freedom and other social movements to help launch a historic, new tri-national campaign to defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) corporate power grab.

RSVP FOR A SEAT ON THE FREE BUS FROM PORTLAND
at http://www.OregonFairTrade.org or call (503) 736-9777

What Is the TPP?

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a massive, NAFTA-expanding trade and investment pact under negotiation between the U.S., Canada, Mexico and other countries throughout the Pacific Rim. If implemented, the TPP threatens to:

· offshore jobs, reduce tax bases and increase austerity, while undercutting worker rights globally

· promote fossil fuel exports and hand corporations new tools for attacking environmental rules

· further deregulate Wall Street financial institutions

· prioritize corporate profits over indigenous rights

· destroy family farms, force emigration and concentrate global food supplies into fewer hands

· block access to generic medications and limit freedom and innovation on the Internet

The good news is that, by working together across borders and issue areas, we have derailed similar corporate power grabs before. We can do it again!

What to Expect on December 1st

Meet rock-awesome local activists • Learn about the TPP from organizers throughout North America • Strategize on how to spread the word & mobilize in your community • Participate in a fun border action • Make movement history

For more info, contact the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign at elizabeth@oregonfairtrade.org or (503) 736-9777

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What Would Jesus Say to Fox News Critics of Obama?

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US Poverty Increase as Income is Redistributed from Working People to the Rich

Poverty rates in the United States rose during the 2000s; it started happening during and because of the economic policies of the illegal Bush regime. The trend was exacerbated by the Great Recession and its aftermath, which, to fair degree, were products of the Bush tax cuts.

The US government is continuously working on behalf of the 1 percent to redistribute income from working Americans to the 1 percent. In this way, Wall profits can constantly move upward. Without this redistribution, corporate profits would go down, down, down, and Wall Street would shrivel up and die. See links below.

According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), “By 2010, just over 46 million people fell below the U.S. Census Bureau’s official poverty line (according to data from the Current Population Survey).”

EPI’s “‘The State of Working America, 12th Edition’ puts the U.S. experience with poverty in an international context, comparing the lower end of the wage and income distribution in the United States with that of “peer” countries, largely countries within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with roughly similar GDP per hour worked as the United States.” Check it out at the link below.

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Economic Policy Institute–US Poverty Rates Higher, Safety Nets Weaker

Charts Show Tax Cuts for the Rich Destroy Jobs

Obama and Jobs; Hostage to Fortune; or How Free Trade Treaties Redistribute Income From the 99 to the 1 Percent

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Is Shrinking Our Government Leading Us Into Another Recession?

The conventional wisdom seems to be that our biggest economic challenge is runaway government spending. The reality is that government spending is contracting and pulling economic growth down with it. And worse is yet to come.

Given the federally sponsored redistribution of income and wealth from the 99 percent to the 1 percent since 1981, the demand by the 99 percent for goods and services in sufficient amounts to keep the economy afloat cannot be sustained without heavy and increasing government spending. The economy cannot stand on its own, which is what FDR discovered when the federal government cut back on spending in 1937. This is especially true given that more and more income is being redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent. The process is continuing unabated under President Obama.

Perhaps the best measure of active government intervention in the economy is something called “government consumption expenditure and gross investment.” This includes total spending by all levels of government (federal, state, and local) on all activities with the exception of transfer payments (such as unemployment benefits, social security, and Medicare).

The graph below shows the yearly percentage change in real government consumption expenditure and gross investment over the period 2000 to 2012 (first quarter). As can be seen, the rate of growth in real spending began declining after the end of the recession, then jumped off a cliff beginning in 2011, which means that government spending (adjusted for inflation) is actually contracting.

The following chart shows the ratio of government consumption expenditure and gross investment to GDP; it highlights the fact that government spending is also falling as a share of GDP.

Adding transfer payments, which have grown because of the weak economy, does almost nothing to alter the picture. As the chart below shows, total government spending in current dollars, which means unadjusted for inflation, has stopped growing. If we take inflation into account, there can be no doubt that total real government spending, including spending on transfer payments, is also contracting.

The same is true for the federal government, everyone’s favorite villain. As the next chart shows, total federal spending, unadjusted for inflation, has also stopped growing.
Another chart

Not surprisingly, this decline in government spending is having an effect on GDP. Real GDP in the 4th Quarter of 2011 grew at an estimated 3 percent annual rate. The advanced estimate for 1st Quarter 2012 GDP growth was 2.2 percent. A just released second estimate for this same quarter revised that figure down to 1.9 percent. In other words, our economy is rapidly slowing.

What caused the downward revision? The answer says Ed Dolan is the ever deepening contraction in government spending:

What is driving the apparent slowdown? It would be comforting to be able to blame a faltering world economy and a strengthening dollar, but judging by the GDP numbers that does not seem to be the case. The following table (see below) shows the contributions of each sector to real GDP growth according to the advance and second estimates from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Exports, which we would expect to show the effects of a slowing world economy, held up well in the first quarter. In fact, the second estimate showed them even stronger than did the advance estimate. The contribution of private investment also increased from the advance to the second estimate, although not by as much. Exports and investment, then, turn out to be the relatively good news, not the bad, in the latest GDP report.

Instead, the largest share of the decrease in estimated real GDP growth came from an accelerated shrinkage of the government sector. The negative .78 percentage point decrease of the government sector is the main indicator that we are already on the downward slope toward the fiscal cliff.

If current trends aren’t bad enough, we are rapidly approaching, as Ed Dolan noted, the “fiscal cliff.” That is what I was referring to above when I said that worse is yet to come. As Bloomberg Businessweek explains:

Last summer, as part of its agreement to end the debt-ceiling debate (debacle?), Congress strapped a bomb to the economy and set the timer for January 2013. Into it they packed billions of dollars of mandatory discretionary spending cuts, timed to go off at exactly the same time a number of tax cuts [for example, the Bush tax cuts and the Obama payroll-tax holiday] were set to expire

The congressional deficit supercommittee had a chance to disarm the bomb last fall, but of course it didn’t. And so the timer has kept ticking. The resulting double-whammy explosion of spending cuts and tax increases will likely send the economy careening off a $600 billion “fiscal cliff.”

The fiscal contraction will actually be even worse, since the extended unemployment benefits program is also scheduled to expire at the end of the year.

So, what does all of this mean? According to Bloomberg Businessweek:

If Congress does nothing, the U.S. will almost certainly go into recession early next year, as the combo of spending cuts and tax hikes will wipe out nearly 4 percentage points of economic growth in the first half of 2013, according to research by Goldman’s Alec Phillips, a political analyst and economist. Since most estimates project the economy will grow only about 3 percent next year, that puts the U.S. solidly in the red.

One can only wonder how it has come to past that we think government spending is growing when it is not and that it is the cause of our problems when quite the opposite is true. Painful lessons lie ahead—if only we are able to learn them.

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The Republican Economic Dream; We’re Living In It

The Republican Party leadership continues to argue that the best way to spur the economy to great heights is to “cut spending and cut taxes on the rich.” By now, everybody but a large number of foolish and ignorant Republican party members know this isn’t true. Here’s something most people don’t know.

The Obama administration, largely because they’re Wall Street puppets and due to Republican party obstructionism in the House of Representatives, have been following this course. Click below to read the complete story.

There is something not mentioned in the link below. Both the Democrats and the Republicans have one common goal; make the affluent richer by soaking the rest of us dry. To that end both parties have been extraordinarily successful!

We Are Living the Republican Party Dream

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Is the Obama administration cracking down against political activists?

Carlos Montes faces 22 years in prison for throwing a can of soda at police during a demonstration way back when, in 1969. But that isn’t the real reason the sixty-four year old is facing prison. His political activities have gotten him the attention of President Barack “Wall Street” Obama.

Click the link below for the rest of the story.

A 64-year-old leftist activist turned retired Xerox salesman raided by the FBI over protest-related felony charge from 1969

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Video–Occupy Dallas Spreads the Word on Obama’s War Against the Middle Class Via The Trans Pacific Free Trade Treaty

Let’s get something straight. President Obama is a tool of Wall Street in its war against the middle class. He is their class warrior. The Obama team is negotiating to ship more jobs overseas, gut US laws and do a lot of other nasty stuff to the middle class. Check out the video below from Occupy Dallas.

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Obama under fire for high gasoline prices and then he does something incredible!

It’s an election year and that’s why President “Wall Street” Obama “urged Congress to toughen penalties for improper manipulation of oil markets and called for stricter government oversight of energy markets.” Apparently, the president thinks there is a proper way to manipulate the market. Nobody should take the president seriously.

The price of gasoline in the United States is probably two to three dollars per gallon higher than if there was some kind of real, competitive, market. Gasoline may be even three dollars or more per gallon higher than it should be. The United States has been exporting more oil than it is importing for several months now, for the first time since the late 1940s. That suggests the market has been manipulated for a long time, that US production has been artificially curtailed and manipulated for decades, and that there is an overabundance of oil available, but the president hasn’t done anything as the price of gasoline has risen, fueled by the demands of the financial markets. The big boys are making us pay so they can keep their stock values high. It’s been a scam for a long time and the president hasn’t instructed his Department of Justice to use the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to break up the oil oligarchs and send some of these big and slick oil barons and their Wall Street cronies to prison for their crimes.

Related Story

The Myth of Peak Oil

click here for the complete story

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Is the Trans Pacific Free Trade Scam Just Another NAFTA?

The Trans Pacfic Free Trade Treaty is another jobs destroying, income redistribution treaty, just like Nafta. So why is Herr Obama of the Silver Tongue of Hope negotiating this thing? Well, he does worship and take his orders from Wall Street. In that respect he is significantly different than George Bush. The Bush was Wall Street’s foot stool and boot licker. Okay, so is Obama. Both Bush and Obama received a ton of cash in the form of campaign contributions from Wall Street, so Obama has got to do what his money masters say.

The treaty is being negotiated in secret, but some of those secrets have been leaked, and it doesn’t look good for the 99 percent who are going to pay the cost of Obama’s latest scam. Remember this. When jobs are shipped overseas, the difference between the old higher wages here and the new lower wages there go into the pockets of the affluent via higher profits, dividends and share prices. Also, it looks like we’ll be facing higher medicine prices if this treaty goes through, and the difference between the old lower prices and the new higher prices that we pay go into the pockets of the 1 percent via higher profits, dividends and share prices.

That’s why this treaty is just another income redistributing scam, forcing the 99 percent to pay higher prices to the one percent. Sounds like the market at work, doesn’t it? And I mean that sarcastically.

click here for the details

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