Our economic system is broken.

Wall Street banksters raked in almost $27 billion dollars in bonuses last year, yet Congress can't even get it together to raise the minimum wage. According to the New York State Comptroller's office, the gamblers on Wall Street raked in $26.7 billion dollars in bonuses in 2013 – 15 percent more than they did the previous year. That's enough money to double the paycheck of every single minimum wage worker in our country.
Our economic system is so completely broken that banksters got another pile of cash after wrecking our economy while millions of real working people put in long, hard hours for paychecks that leave them in poverty. And, this keeps happening even though it does not make a lick of economic sense. Every extra dollar paid to a low-wage worker generates about $1.20 for our economy. When that dollar goes to line the pockets of the super-rich instead, it adds less than 40 cents to our GDP. The banksters and the corporate elite can afford to stash their money away in foreign countries and high-return risky investments, while real working Americans have to spend every single dollar just to get by.
If that $26.7 billion in bonuses went to the working poor, instead of the gamblers on Wall Street, our economy would grow by more than $32 billion. That makes a whole lot more sense than gifting billions to the very people who crashed our economy. It's time to fix this broken system, to stop rewarding the people who gamble with our economy, and time to put this money back into the hands of the real working people in America.
Comments


For more info: google -- richarddwolff march 2014 -- for a great lecture on cooperatives, the reason why we should go that direction and where it has already worked big time.

Quote hartmann:If that $26.7 billion in bonuses went to the working poor, instead of the gamblers on Wall Street, our economy would grow by more than $32 billion. That makes a whole lot more sense than gifting billions to the very people who crashed our economy. It's time to fix this broken system, to stop rewarding the people who gamble with our economy, and time to put this money back into the hands of the real working people in America.
Definitely very well said!!!

I agree, PD. Thom's a brilliant media messenger, the kind that is sorely needed in today's neocon-fascist environment. And frankly, I don't give a rat's ass if KW accuses us of thinking he "walks on water". KW can just kiss my... well never mind. - AIW

The bonuses are given with private funds. It is none of anybodies business what they do with it. I would suggest to quit putting your money into wall street. They would have nothing to bonus.
Why is it that Thom thinks all money in America belongs to all Americans. It belongs to the Americans that earn it. They choose how much of it goes to the government by elections and the rest is theirs to choose what they want to do with.

WOW really

What are we to do?

Thanks Thom for all you do. I am reading Mike Lofgren's book, The Party is Over - How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class got Shafted. Seems things haven't changed much...
In 1892, the People's (Populist) Party met in Omaha, Nebraska and their platform called out the U.S. Supreme Court (which in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad laid the foundation for "corporate personhood" and the 2010 Citizen's United decision), along with the rest of the political apparatus as rotten and corrupt. “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized...The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages...The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind, and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of government injustice we breed the two great classes - tramps and millionaires.”

It will have to get worse before it gets better: I guess. We need a massive occupation of Washington DC; the sooner the better or fix voter suppression. The pen can be mightier than the sword.

It will have to get worse before it gets better: I guess. We need a massive occupation of Washington DC; the sooner the better or fix voter suppression. The pen can be mightier than the sword.

It will have to get worse before it gets better: I guess. We need a massive occupation of Washington DC; the sooner the better or fix voter suppression. The pen can be mightier than the sword.

This is why we have to make a movement towards human standards in america and the world, this meaning that the standards being of each individual and being the standards used of humans, humans as a value is evolving that each individual having as a value until they die, but their children carry on and their children for millions more generations so society is always evolving,so that being said the individual of today his or her value is unlimited. now if you look to my blog of people\human standards then you will understand how it works and evolves, so this casino type GDP, labor, and products and services type casino will eventually fail because you can't go on forever manipulating a product or service. people\human standards is the answer.

They should get their bonuses in very high velocity spent uranium.

Quote Aliceinwonderland:WORKER-OWNED COOPERATIVES, Thom!
Aliceinwonderland ~ Very true! However, like so many things 'there is a season, Turn! Turn! Turn!' Thom is right. We need to double the minimum wage first. Worker-Owned Co-ops will not improve poverty income until they can survive in the "free market." You cannot pay yourself a decent wage competing with poverty slave labor that is subsidized by our social safety net. One thing at a time.
Like with gun violence and control we need to address mental health and poverty first. Like with immigration reform, we need to repeal free trade and increase wages and the number of jobs first; or, address poverty first. With all three currently popular issues, poverty is the common denominator that has to be addressed first and foremost. It is the main obstacle to any real progress. Everything else is a Red Herring. 'For everything there is a time under heaven.'
By the way, if you haven't given that autobiography of the Mayor of Oakland, John L. Davies, a look you might want to. Besides defeating the railroad and winning back Oakland's waterfront for the citizens, battling railroad pirates on the SF Bay with his ferry fleet, inspiring and winning riots in both Oakland and San Francisco, surviving numerous assassination attempts, building his own lake by hand, serving 5 terms as the most popular Mayor in the history of Oakland, helping Jack London sell books and make Jack London Square a reality--amongst other legendary feats, he also joined labor and business by founding the first California Consumer Co-op. My personal all-time hero; and a genuine inspiration to us all. One of the most unsung heros of all time if you ask me. His true story makes the legendary Biblical story of David and Goliath look like a school yard fight. (No offense intended against King David)
http://oaklandwiki.org/His_Honor,_the_Buckaroo
http://www.amazon.com/His-Honor-Buckaroo-Autobiography-Davie/dp/0943077125

Off topic:
The Citizens United decision may not prove the right-wing of the Supreme Court is corrupt, however, continued failure to reverse the decision does.

Quote ckrob:The Citizens United decision may not prove the right-wing of the Supreme Court is corrupt, however, continued failure to reverse the decision does.
ckrob ~ Well said!!!

What do you expect.
We have a president who let's them do as they please. I thought Obama was a Democrat but he will be the first president to retire as a billionaire.
Keystone xl? He will let them have that too. That is a done deal. It is all over except for the crying.
BP allowed to drill in the gulf? He let them start bidding on new leases just this week.
Honestly what do you expect. Obama still thinks a plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11.

"The gamblin' man is rich,
the workin' man is poor
and I ain't got no home in this world anymore."
-Woody Guthrie

"They stole it fair and square", eh Kend? Why, Kend, do you think that if something is legal that makes it legit or ethical? If corruption is legalized because corrupt politicians make the laws that doesn't make it less corrupt. This is democracy, Kend, there is no "divine right". If we don't like laws we change them. Property rights and how they are defined, what is letimately yours or someone else's are creations of the state. The legitimate function of government is to protect the weak from the strong, that's why the strong are against government because they want to be the government and put a tyranny over the weak.
The working people, the "working poor", work harder than anybody, they work very hard, very difficult and unpleasant jobs for nickels - so they have to work two or three of them. They should be paid more than anybody some of those jobs are so unpleasant.
Don't talk about "earning" money, Kend. The working people make it possible for the CEO to have what he has. He doesn't deserve the bonus while his producers are so undercompensated.

Well put, Mark! You've just saved me the trouble of countering Kend's asinine comments.
So where do you think all that money comes from, Kend? The CEOs?! Don't make me laugh. The people doing all the work are the ones who earned those millions; otherwise the CEOs wouldn't have a pot to piss in. They are nothing but parasites. - AIW

Mark and Alice. I don't like Wall Street anymore then you do. But I also believe that we should be free to do with what we want with what we have. people who invest in Wall Street Are not the working poor. They are investors and if they are stupid enough to but there hard earned money with those crooks then so be it. Alice I don't think those CEO's deserve a penny but they have a contract and the investors invested knowing that. I don't agree with the lady who deliveries my mail who only works 5 hrs a day and makes $60,000 a year with 6 weeks holidays but that here contract So be it.

Kend: What if the tables were turned? What if those who worked the hardest in the fields, or any other labor intensive job, like scrub women, ditch diggers, or even oil men, etc., were the highest salaried people who got the biggest bonuses...millions of dollars every year.... and the CEOs earned $10 dollars an hour with no bonuses...maybe a Christmas turkey. Would you still think that "it (the money..the bonuses) belongs to the people who earned it"? And how do you define "earning it"?
What about people who rob banks....do they "earn" it? Aren't these banksters and corporate executives and major investors robbing from other people? In effect, yes they are! Aren't they just as bad as people who put on masks and enter banks with guns to rob banks? Yes, they are! They're worse than bank robbers because the legal system is rigged in their favor....rigged by revolving door crook politicians and "law" makers who will, after getting their bribes, enter the private sector later to get the rest of their their filthy lucre. Why should these top execs get awarded all that money when they do very little labor...if you want to call bossing underlings around...labor. I'd say that they are more akin to the Mafia.

Kend: It's one thing if wealthy investors take a chance and risk their money and another thing when the government bails them out and puts the burden on the taxpayer. I believe that the government shouldn't do this.
Yes, a lot of people would lose their jobs...but then, the top executives of those companies would take the blame and lose their shirts... as they should lose their shirts. They would also get the blame for being bad business people...no bailouts!
Workers take risks too...that they have chosen a good company to work for or not...and they may have made a bad decision when they applied for the job. But mostly, workers don't have any say in running the companies and are mostly innocent victims of top management's bad decisions.
But when our government bails these companies out and puts the burden on the tax payers it just isn't fair to the tax payers. The companies should fail and the top execs should be shot in a firing squad. Oops! did I just say they should be shot in a firing squad? I mean they shouldn't get off so lightly. They should die penniless and destitute!
They claimed that it was to save American jobs. Bull$h1t!!!
Then why to they let these corporations send our jobs overseas? What they are more concerned with is bailing out the top execs and the wealthy investors. They deserve to lose...we don't!
This sets up a system of "too big to fail"..."too rich to lose". And they make the little people lose their money. Make them go through austerity...do without essential goods and services so the rich can continue their high life.
It's high time for a revolution in this country...not that I look forward to it...but what else can we do? Voting doesn't work because people keep voting for the same political crooks, both Republican and Democrat, owned by the ruling elite. Re-elect the good Democrats but vote out the bad ones...put Greenies or Socialists in their place. They'll vote the same way as good Democrats. But the Blue Dog Democrats won't!

The wealthy keeps pushing the rest of us in the gutters and it can only result in the same kind of actions that occurred against the Tzars of Russia and the Kings of France and Spain. It's happening all around the world now...people are fighting back against tyranny and oppression...kicking their criminal leaders out. The US is headed down that path.
It is desperately trying to bring back the cold war between the US and Russia. I guess the terrorist bogeyman is losing steam. The right wing ruling elite is salivating over the memories of HUAC that kept people too scared to even think anti-establishment thoughts. They dearly miss the old cold war.
Quote truthdig article:The last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine are a response to years of hostility from the United States, including the eastward expansion of NATO, the bombing of Serbia and the expansion of American military bases in Eastern Europe.
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/former_ambassador_russia_responding...

This commentary on the BANKSTERS, to me is not only just `common sense`, it is pretty similar to the thinking of everybody i know--so how come we are not hearing and seeing Thom EVERYWHERE????
Thom had a radio show here in L.A. on an AM station that actually tried a Progressive format--for a minute--but now they are back to the standard Conservative blather. The Message needs to get out there!

Palin the tables are turning where I live. Supply and demand. People that dropped out of high school can make well over $100,000 a year. Welders with there own truck make $350.00 a hour. Most CEO's here started doing these same jobs started hiring more people and the next think you know they have 50 employees. My nephew and his freind started a electrical company 5 years ago and now have 26 employees. These guys work very hard and deserve evrey thing they get.
Of course people who rob banks don't deserve it. They broke the law. Law street bankers are playing by the rules. If you don't like it change the rules don't blame the ones who follow them.
I don't believe government should bail anybody out. EVER. It makes a unfair playing field.
The Cold War is back didn't you hear. Russia just walked in and took over half of Ukraine. Well the mighty US just sat there and watched. Where was the UN on this? Time to shut the UN down.

( S I G H )

I'm with Alice. We need the long term unemployed who are mostly in our 50's to get together with younger workers just out of college who are having a hard time finding work to brainstorm new businesses based on the worker owned coop model. Who's in?

Where do you think the money they have comes from? Working Americans created that wealth and the banksters appropriated it by gaming the system, creating little or not wealth themselves. As Thom points out, giving letting workers keep more of the money generated by their labor stimulate the economy much more than letting people in the financial community speculate on goods and raw materiels, driving up their price for everyone. In reality, there is no such thing as private funds when disparities in income are so great.

Kend, I don't ever trust your version of events so I don't necessarily at all accept your description of the Canadian postal workers' arrangement but let's assume it's accurate. That illustrates the reason for poverty and middle class incomes of working people and quite simply it comes down to power. The Canadian postal workers have power through their unifying and so gaining bargaining power through their union and through their collective action and that is what the "working poor", in their outsourced, contingent jobs and otherwise unorganized workplaces, lack.
It may be true that unions sometimes cause us as a society to err on the side of "too many rights" for workers but that, I would hold, is better than the converse, i.e., erring on the side of too few but I wouldn't, however, agree that such error is actually being made. I think the future and hope of workers and of our society is not in the perennial union/management conflict of the traditional business model but in what Alice advocates for, worker owned businesses or co-ops. Through partnership any coflicts can be fairly resolved.

Julia I guess I do have to agree that more money in workers hands is a good thing it will get spent and stimulate the economy. I just believe instead of forcing it out of the hands of private companies we should reduce taxes. maybe raise the ceiling for low income workers to a higher amount before they even start paying taxes. I am no expert at US taxes so I guess I should be careful what I say. I see the problem is government is deciding where our money gets spent instead of us. The governments track record on spending isn't very good. your Feds just went into debt about 6 trillion in the last 5 years and really have nothing to show for it.
Mark I can tell you our post office is in big trouble. They just announced a few months ago no more home delivery. All mail will be picked up a "super boxes". I think unions have there place but in this case they have gone way overboard. In fairness the internet sure didn't help.
Alice and I dont agree often but I love the idea of worker co ops. As I mentioned before some of my employees are on a profit sharing system with the hope they will buy me out someday.

Liberty allows a plethora of opportunities
The Good ..People working together to create Business's. co-op /private or publicly traded ect.
The Bad.the corrupt board of directors voting themselves all the dividends!then purposely crashing the stock, shaking off the pension holders/non voting shares! then buying it back again.the beginings of monopoly.pump and dump.let's pump and dump them back. reap what you sow!Crooks
The Ugle. Multinational Banking Cartel over centuries of greed have chained every Country in the World to their own Central Reserve, Buying up most corporations around the globe
The Truth ...no peoples/ Business can compete ..450 billion a year that is the profit margin for the FED Private corp.one country alone ! How can any other Corp. compete!!!Lets level the playing field !!!Thank you

Quote jkh6148: I study the Holocaust and have compiled a file on it and know it to be a forgery.How do you mean? Any key points that would support your claim? I am not arguing with you...anything is possible. I just don't know...I wasn't there, myself. Thank goodness! Of course, it would also be interesting why you think Hartmann's book is anything like those other stories. I haven't read any of them so I'm an open book. ;-} Well, actually, I have read some of the others you refer to. But that was a long time ago...and I don't remember much.
I did, however read John Sack's An Eye For An Eye which can be downloaded for free here:
https://archive.org/details/AnEyeForAnEye
That book is about how the Jews, after WWII, set up their own concentration camps and tortured and murdered Poles and Germans who they believed were Nazi collaborators or members of the Nazi party. They even hauled in children into those camps. They confiscated homes and property too. I guess what comes around goes around! But now, Israel is treating the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews.

It certainly makes no sense, unless you take into consideration the fact that the "Reagan Revolution" was nothing more than a fascist coup; one that has only gathered steam and momentumn ever since. In the tradition of Moussini, and the philosophy of corporatism from centuries past, today's fascists believe in the collusion of government and the business sector to the political and economic exclusion of the populace, aggressive war, hegemony, propaganda, and and the use of hyper-nationalism. I hate to say it, but nothing will stop it until it's own flawed and idiotic philosophy causes this unsustainable model to implode into its own footprint.

THE PROTOCOLS of the LEARNED ELDERS of ZION
At various times throughout the modern period, the myth of a "Jewish world conspiracy" has attracted adherents. Jews have been accused of plotting to take over the world by undermining the existing social and political order.
The myth of the "Jewish world conspiracy" springs from diverse sources. Myths which draw on popular anti-Semitic notions which have their roots in medieval Europe from the time of the Crusades. Tales were circulated among the masses, of secret rabbinical conferences whose aim was to subjugate and exterminate Christians. One source of the myth, is the medieval anti-Jewish Christian accusation that, as the people of the devil, Jews, like the devil, aim to control the world. Others have highlighted the charge that Jews aim to avenge their centuries-old oppression by Christians, or the idea that Jews inherently strive for national and/or world power.
Political anti-Semitism, defined as hostility toward Jews based on the belief that Jews seek to obtain national and/or world power, experienced a momentous upsurge after 1879 in Europe. We can largely attribute the dramatic rise in political anti-Semitism between 1879 and 1939 to the emergence and rapid development of the international socialist movement and, concomitantly, to the popularization of the notorious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion".
"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a viciously anti-Semitic book. It is the second most widely published book in history. It has taken root in bigoted, frightened minds around the world, has strongly influenced the masses, and bolstered the credibility of the myth, that Jews control governments. It is a classic in paranoid, racist literature. Taken by the gullible as the confidential minutes of a Jewish conclave convened in the last years of the nineteenth century, it has been heralded by anti-Semites as proof that Jews are plotting to take over the world. The book is a complete fabrication.
In truth, the text is a forgery. The direct predecessor of the "Protocols" can be found in the "Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu," published by the non-Jewish French satirist Maurice Joly in 1864, and segments of Sir John Redcliffe's (using the pseudonym of Hermann Goedsche) novel "Biarritz".
The "Protocols" plagiarize nearly word for word the fictional political speeches of Machiavelli contained in Joly's book, in which Napoleon III conspires to dominate the world. The actual "Protocols" substituted the Jewish elders for the French emperor.
In his "Dialogues," which make no mention of Jews, Joly attacked the political ambitions of emperor Napoleon III using the imagery of a diabolical plot in Hell. The "Dialogues" were caught by the French authorities soon after their publication, and Joly was tried and sentenced to prison for his pamphlet.
Joly's "Dialogues" while intended as a political satire, soon fell into the hands of a German named John Redcliffe (Hermann Goedsche). Goedsche was an anti-Semite in the middle of the 19th century who believed in a conspiracy between Jews and Masons to dominate the world. He was also a spy for the Prussian secret police. Goedsche adapted Joly's "Dialogues" into a mythical tale of a Jewish conspiracy as part of a series of novels entitled "Biarritz" which appeared in 1868. In a chapter called, "The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel," he spins the fantasy of a secret centennial rabbinical conference which meets at midnight and whose purpose is to review the past hundred years and to make plans against European civilization for the next century.
Goedsche's plagiary of Joly's "Dialogues" soon found its way to Russia and was translated into Russian in 1872. Although it was part of a novel, it was printed separately as an anti-Semitic pamphlet in Russia and was widely circulated as a truthful account.
The Protocols were actually written in Paris sometime between 1895 and 1899 by an agent of the Russian secret police reworking the earlier works of Joly and Goedsche into a new edition called the, "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" The manuscript of the "Protocols" was brought to Russia in 1895 and was printed privately in 1897.
The "Protocols" as they are usually published, are divided into twenty-six separate chapters each of which are a lecture on how to subvert western civilization. They spell out the alleged secret plans of Jewish leaders seeking to attain world domination by inciting Christians to fight against each other, to undermine the Christian world politically, economically, and morally, and to establish upon the ruins a new world state ruled by the Jews. They represent the most notorious political forgery of modern times. Although thoroughly discredited, the document is still being used to stir up anti-Semitic hatred. In addition the "Protocols" are vigorously anti-democratic as well.
The political controversies that sparked the writing of the "Protocols" was soon forgotten but the anti-Semitism remained. In 1905, the "Protocols" were first published by Sergei Nilus, a little-known Czarist official in Moscow and an agent of the Russian secret police. Nilus, who might have been one of the authors of the "Protocols" became their main promoter as part of an campaign of anti-Semitism. He circulated several editions each with a different account of how he discovered the document. In his 1911 edition Nilus claimed that his source had stolen the document from a non-existent Zionist headquarters in France. Other "editors" of the "Protocols" maintained that the document was read at the First Zionist Congress held in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland.
In the civil war following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, reactionary armies made extensive use of the "Protocols" to incite widespread slaughters of Jews. While the early publications of the "Protocols" were in Russia, it was spread to the rest of Europe by Russian emigrants after the fall of the Tsars in 1917, where they claimed that it provided proof that the Jews were behind the Russian Revolution.
The "Protocols" reached Germany sometime around 1918. One of those who brought them to Germany was Alfred Rosenberg, an Estonian of German heritage who first encountered it as a student in Moscow. Rosenberg soon became an anti-Semite convinced of the authenticity of the "Protocols." When he fled after the Russian Revolution, he took the "Protocols" with him.
The "Protocols" offered to many non-Jews an explanation and a scapegoat for the chaos that marked Europe in the aftermath of World War I. What may have convinced people who normally might have been suspicious of the authenticity of the "Protocols" was the claim that the "Protocols" had been authored by the Jews themselves and had fallen accidentally into the hands of the intended victims of the Jewish plot. Funded by the Pan-German League, the Berlin edition was first to succeed the Russian Nilus version. It was brought to public attention in the middle of January 1920 by Gottfried zur Beek, (pseudonym for Ludwig Muller von Hausen), a retired army captain and editor of an anti-semitic monthly. The German version was noteworthy for a new embellishment explaining in breathless detail how the "Protocols" had been stolen by a Russian spy from a Jewish messenger on his way from the secret Zionist meeting in Basel to a "Jewish Masonic lodge" in Frankfurt. The evil "Judeo-Mongols" had instigated a war to "stab Germany in the back" and were now embarked upon a "golden international" racial and "Mammonistic" rampage that had to be halted soon.
In Germany Rosenberg soon became involved with a mystical group that was a precursor to National Socialism known as the "Thule Society" where he frequently lectured about the "Protocols". Rosenberg was there to explain the mysteries of the "Protocols" when Adolf Hitler appeared on the stage of right-wing politics in 1921. Rosenberg was at Hitler's side during the attempted putsch in Munich in 1923. By then the "Protocols" had become one of the central themes of Nazi thought. The "Protocols" were the basis for much of, "Mein Kampf" and formed an important part of the Nazis' justification of genocide of the Jews in World War II. Also, Rosenberg's book, "The Myth of the 20th Century" became the most important exposition of Nazi philosophy.
It was already known that the "Protocols" were a forgery when Hitler received his first copy. The exposure of the forgery began as soon as the "Protocols" began to appear in western Europe but the coup de grâce occurred in 1921, one year after the "Protocols" was first published in Great Britain. In August, 1921, the "Times of London" printed a devastating exposure of the forgery by printing extracts from the, "Protocols" side-by-side with the passages from Joly's book that had been plagiarized. A whole book documenting the forgery was also published in the same year in America by Herman Bernstein "The Truth About "The Protocols of Zion". From that point, the "Protocols" were dismissed by thinking people everywhere. However, it did not stop the wide circulation of the "Protocols" by Russian emigrants and later by Hitler. Even the decision by a Swiss court after consultation with three experts in May, 1935, did not affect the distribution of the "Protocols" by the Third Reich.
The "Protocols" served to rationalize anti-Semitism and genocide in Hitler’s Germany. The myth of the Jewish world conspiracy permeated Hitler’s thinking, and he linked Germany’s economic hardship during the 1920s to the secret plot.
Once in power Hitler invoked the "Protocols" to justify anti-Semitic legislation, and suppression of all opposition to the Third Reich. For example, the first anti-Semitic measure in April of 1933, a one-day boycott of Jewish stores, was deemed a defense against the Jewish plot of economic domination.
On May 13th, 1943 Goebbels had a long and quite remarkable conversation with Hitler. Most of it was a monologue by Hitler about the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Goebbels had recently reread the "Protocols" and concluded they were "as modern as the day they were first published". He was "astounded" at the remarkably thorough way in which they laid out the Jewish striving for world domination. "If the Zionist protocols are not genuine, they were created by a brilliant critic of the period."
Goebbels, who had heard Hitler go on about the international Jewish conspiracy since the mid 1920s, found Hitler's comments extremely interesting. Hitler, he added, had no doubts about the origins of the infamous forgery written by the tsar's political police. "The Fuhrer believes that the Zionist protocols are absolutely genuine." Hitler said, "No one could be so brilliant as to describe the Jewish striving for world domination as well as the Jews themselves." The Jews, he continued, did not, "work from a predetermined program but according to their race instinct ... Modern peoples had no alternative but to exterminate the Jews."
The war that the Nazis waged against the Jews was not just a war of physical annihilation. The anti-Semitic agitation of the Nazis was international in scope. It was an international war of propaganda to convince the rest of the world of the evils of Judaism. One of the primary weapons that the Third Reich used for this international anti-Semitic propaganda campaign against the Jews was the "Protocols". Under the direction of Joseph Goebbels, the "Protocols" was translated into many other languages, and the world was flooded with cheap editions of the forged document.
Not even proof of the fallacious nature of the "Protocols" dampened interest in them. For many anti-Semites, public disclosures of the falsity of the "Protocols" only strengthened the belief in its authenticity. Anti-Semites around the globe still actively circulate the "Protocols". Even today, the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is one of the principal propaganda weapons of anti-Semitism. The document is also favored by such U.S. right-wing extremists as the Ku Klux Klan, Neo Nazis, and the Aryan Nations. The most common U.S. edition was published by hatemonger Gerald L. K. Smith’s Christian Nationalist Crusade.
It is still distributed by those who deny the Holocaust as well. The Institute for Historical Review, the intellectual center of the movement denying the Holocaust, continues to sell the "Protocols". Ernst Zündel, who states openly that he is an admirer of Hitler and claims the Holocaust never happened, still quotes from the "Protocols".
Nor is the United States the only country and English the only language where the "Protocols" are still being distributed as "fact". The "Protocols" are available in virtually every European country. Translated into Arabic, the "Protocols" have become a standard text for anti-Semitism in the Middle East. Translated into Japanese, millions of copies are still being distributed around the Pacific Rim.
http://www.teachkidspeace.org/doc1014.php
http://www.holocaust-history.org/short-essays/protocols.shtml
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/protocols.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/hoax.html
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-challenges.html
HENRY FORD and the JEWS, NEIL BALDWIN, Copyright 2001, Perseus books Group
ROOTS of HATE, Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust, WILLIAM I. BRUSTEIN, Copyright 2003, Cambridge University Press.
THE JEWISH ENEMY, Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, JEFFREY HERF, Copyright 2006, BELKNAP PRESS of HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
JKH/361-08

HENRY FORD'S
INTERNATIONAL JEW
Though some present-day bigots have flocked to newer ideologies such as denial of the Holocaust, much anti-Semitism still revolves around the basic conspiratorial ideas expressed by older anti-Semitic texts. By offering older texts at their web sites, today’s haters demonstrate the longevity of their beliefs, thereby legitimizing them to both dedicated followers and potential recruits.
Henry Ford Sr., the industrial genius who perfected the mass production of motorcars before World War I and thereby revolutionized the way we live, was a reclusive man who brooked no opposition or criticism. Ford’s attempt to prevent unionism at his plants produced strikes and violence, mostly provoked by Ford’s own strikebreakers. He opposed various symbols of social and cultural change around him, including Hollywood movies, out-of-home childcare, government regulation of business, Eastern European immigration, and new styles in dress and music.
In the period from 1910 to 1918, Ford became increasingly anti-democrat, anti-immigrant, anti-labor, anti-liquor, and anti-Semitic. In 1919, he purchased a newspaper, the "Dearborn Independent" which first attacked Jews in its May 22nd, 1920, issue and continued to do so in 91 subsequent editions. The series of articles attacking the Jewish people was meant to be an ongoing educational series that would, as Ford envisioned it, "tell all - just open up and let some air in on the Jewish Question - once and for all".
The "Independent" printed the first series of articles titled "The International Jew: the World’s Foremost Problem," "The Scope of Jewish Dictatorship in the United States" "Jewish Degradation of American Baseball," and other stories like them claimed the Jews were using communism, labor unions, gambling, and even jazz music to weaken the American people. For the next 18 months, the paper labeled Jews as an "international nation" which had an unfair advantage in business over Christians, who relied on individualism to get ahead, and accused Jewish automobile dealers of conspiring to undermine Ford Company sales policies. It blamed Jewish financiers for World War I so that they could profit from supplying both sides and that the national debt was Jewish-inspired to enslave Americans.
The "International Jew" blamed nearly all the troubles it saw in American society on Jews. It portrayed them as monolithic, malicious schemers plotting to control the planet, and attacked them for speaking out about injustice and defending their constitutional rights. Ford's anti-Semitic tirades found a ready audience, with circulation increasing tenfold from about 70,000 in 1920 to a peak of 700,000 in 1924.
Having heard in advance about the Dearborn Publishing Company's plan to attack Jews, E.G. Pipp, editor of "The Dearborn Independent," resigned in disgust in April, 1920, and was replaced by William J. Cameron. Ernest Liebold, Henry Ford Sr's. personal secretary, began to collect anti-Semitic material. Liebold passed this material to Cameron, who oversaw the articles that compose "The International Jew," likely writing many of them himself. "When we get through with the Jews," Liebold was quoted in court as saying, "there won't be one of them who will dare raise his head in public."
E.G. Pipp commenced publication of his "Pipp's Weekly" on June 19th, 1920. In the plain-spoken and bluntly written periodical he struck back at his old boss, advising readers that:
"We do not claim to be a Jewish paper, nor devoted entirely to the cause of the Jews. We look on the Ford attacks on the Jew as an attack on Americanism and as such believe it is the duty of non-Jews to answer the attacks."
As for usage of "the Jew" in the singular mode, found frequently in the particular language of anti-semities, it carries more effective weight as fraught with menace. Making the assumption that "one Jew is identical with all the others" means that the "race" can justifiably be impugned as a whole.
For the next 18 months, Cameron ran the "International Jew" as a series, and later collected the articles and published them as a book. Ford’s aide Liebold hired former military intelligence investigators to assist Cameron in gathering so-called "evidence" that "proved" Jewish control of world finance; Jewish organization of radical political movements; and Jewish manipulation of diplomacy to cause wars in which Christians died to enrich Jews. The investigators dredged up rumors that president Woodrow Wilson took secret orders over the phone from Justice Brandeis and that a Jewish member of the Federal Reserve Board personally thwarted Ford’s plan to purchase nitrate mines from the Federal government.
A few months after the series began, Ford’s operatives introduced him to a Russian émigré, Paquita de Shishmareff. She showed Ford a copy of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," now well-known as a malicious forgery created by the Russian czar’s secret service at the turn of the century that purportedly recorded a series of Cameron, who modernized Brasol's translation and used it as the foundation for "The International Jew". secret lectures by a Jewish elder outlining a conspiracy to overthrow European governments. Ford passed the Protocols to Cameron, and the Independent turned its attention to bringing this "blueprint" for world domination to the public.
The Independent charged that the national debt was Jewish-inspired to enslave Americans, and that German Jewish financier Paul Warburg had emigrated to America "for the express purpose of changing our financial system" by creating the Federal Reserve. The paper labeled Jews an "international nation" which had an unfair advantage in business over Christians, who relied on individualism to get ahead. The paper even described American Jewish aid for oppressed Jews overseas as part of the conspiracy.
One "Dearborn Independent" article lauded "The Protocols" as "too terribly real for fiction, too well-sustained for speculation, too deep in its knowledge of the secret springs of life for forgery." In an interview published in the "New York World" February 17th, 1921, Henry Ford put forward the case for the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" He said:
"The only statement I care to make about the "Protocols" is that they fit in with what is going on. They are sixteen years old and they have fitted the world situation up to this time. They fit it now."
He made this statement when Jewish leaders and the Jewish Press in America were fulminating against the series of articles printed in Ford's newspaper "The Dearborn Independent" during the years 1920 to 1922.
Many of the paper's anti-Semitic articles were reprinted by the Dearborn Publishing Company in four paper-bound volumes: "The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem" (November, 1920); "Jewish Activities in the United States" (April, 1921); "Jewish Influences in American Life" (November, 1921); and "Aspects of Jewish Power in the United States" (May, 1922), Collectively known as "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem". Each of the chapters in Gerald L.K. Smith's version of the "International Jew" begins with a quotation from "The Protocols," and one chapter, "An Introduction to the Jewish Protocols," is devoted to it entirely. With half a million copies in circulation in the United States; a copy could be obtained at any Ford dealership. The volumes were later published in a variety of languages and disseminated widely in the United States and abroad. "The International Jew" has remained a particularly powerful tool for haters trying to validate their hostile beliefs. Though Ford publicly apologized twice for publishing, "The International Jew" online anti-Semites continue to use his name to promote it.
Hitler himself learned much from the collection and owned several personal copies. Hitler greatly admired Henry Ford for his accomplishments as an industrialist and for his anti-Semitic views, and he also kept a large picture of Ford on his desk. Citing Ford in "Mein Kampf," Hitler wrote:
"Every year makes [the Jews] more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions: only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence."
For seven years, the "Independent" continued to run anti-Semitic articles until the target of one series, California Farm Cooperative organizer Aaron Sapiro, sued Ford for libel. Sapiro was the third Jew to sue Ford for libel, and the first to get to trial. Ford refused to testify, and apparently staged an automobile accident so he could hide in a hospital. The judge finally declared a mistrial, but Ford decided to settle out of court. Although Ford never testified, after the mistrial was declared, he issued public statements and apologies to individuals and Jews as a group. Jewish leaders had called for a boycott of Ford motorcars, and his fear of slumping sales might have played a role in Ford’s decision to put the Sapiro case behind him. Ford shortly thereafter sold the newspaper.
Louis Marshall, chairman of the American Jewish Committee, negotiated an agreement whereby Ford publicly announced that, "articles reflecting on the Jews" would never again appear in the "Independent." Ford claimed that he was "mortified" to learn the "Protocols" were forged, described himself as, "fully aware of the virtues of the Jewish people" and offered them his, "future friendship and good will."
By 1927 Ford had repudiated the "International Jew" but hundreds of thousands of people around the world had been encouraged by his initial endorsement to accept the "Protocols" as genuine. His anti-Semitism reduced him in 1927, for one of the few times in his life, to the position of acknowledging error and asking publicly for forgiveness. Dispite his claims to be rid of antisemitism, by 1939, signs like these appeared on the parking-lot gates of Ford's Rouge River plants:
Jews are traitors to America and should not be trusted -- Buy Gentile.
Another sign read,
Jews Teach Communism
Jews Teach Atheism
Jews Destroy Christianity
Jews Control the Press
Jews Produce Filthy Movies
Jews Control Money.
During the 1930s German Jews visiting the United States reported that the growth of the Nazi Party, "had been stimulated, to a great extent, by the anti-Jewish publications which had been sponsored by Henry Ford in the United States."
In August 1938, Henry Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, a Nazi decoration for distinguished foreigners. The "New York Times" reported it was the first time the Grand Cross had been awarded in the United States and was to celebrate Henry Ford's 75th birthday. Even though his family implored him not to receive the medal, Ford still accepted it.
Ford anticipated Hitler's ideas that the Jews had conspired to start the First World War, "'I know who caused the war -- the German-Jewish bankers. I have the evidence here." Ford declared, slapping his pocket. "Facts. I can't give them out yet because I haven't got them all. But I'll have them soon."' Ford claimed the Jews formented the First World War so that they could profit from supplying war materiel to both sides, and he blamed Jews for starting the Second World War. "The whole thing has just been made up by Jewish bankers."
Ku Klux Klan editors later assembled ninety-six of Henry Ford's antisemitic essays from "The Dearborn Independent" and bound them in a volume they entitled "The International Jew". The book subsequently was reprinted in Germany by the Nazi "World Service." On January 12th, 1942, an embarrassed Henry Ford wrote letters to Imperial Wizard James A. Colescott and Sigmund Livingston, then ADL national chairman, saying that he did "not subscribe or support, directly or indirectly, any agitation which would promote antagonism against my Jewish fellow citizens." Ford threatened the Klan with legal action unless it ceased publication and circulation of his misbegotten essays. He pointed out that he "destroyed copies" of "The International Jew" when he first apologized and had refused to give "permission or sanction to anyone to use my name as sponsoring such publication, or being the accredited author thereof."
During the Nürnberg Trial of Nazi war criminals after the Second World War, two of the twenty-one defendants present, Hitler Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach and Radio Propaganda Chief Hans Fritzsche, cited the German edition of "The International Jew" as a major influence on their antisemitic views.
"The International Jew" has been in the public domain. It can be reprinted by anyone who wishes to do so. In the late 1950s, anti-Semite and hatemonger Gerald L. K. Smith’s Christian Nationalist Crusade edited and published an abridged version of "The International Jew" culled from the original "Dearborn Independent" articles.
http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/dearborn.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/ford1.html
http://www.adl.org/special_reports/ij/protocols.asp
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/ford1.html
A CONCISE HISTORY of AMERICAN ANTISEMITISM, ROBERT MICHAEL, copyright 2005, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ANTISEMITISM in AMERICA, LEONARD DINNERSTEIN, Copyright 1994, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
HENRY FORD and the JEWS, NEIL BALDWIN, Copyright 2001, Public Affairs of the Perseus Book Group,
JKH/018-10

THOM - I AM CURIOUS
I have the book but have not read it, but now I think I will. I study the Holocaust and have compiled a file on it and know it to be a forgery.
THOM, did it ever occur to you how much THE CRASH OF 2016 sounds like the PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION?
INSTEAD of the learned elders meeting every 100 years to plot the manipulation of the world's economies in their quest to dominate the world for their favor - it is the "economic royalists" secretly plotting "to destroy America" every 80 yrs in their quest to maintain their riches and power. THOM you know there are people and groups in this country who will be saying that you are right and that the "ecomomic royalists" are the JEWS of AMERICA. EVEN though you did not intend it to be, those people and groups might very well place your book on their shelves beside THE PROTOCOLS and THE INTERNATIONAL JEW.

oooops - dont know how to delete

Thom - What you say is true, but politicians and corporations globally are in the "absolute power corrupts ..." mode, and the only way to stop the train is to expose and correct the root cause. Band-aids won't work.
There was an event eons ago, and the responses of our ancestors to it, that began our loss of freedom and our addiction to being ruled, led, governed. GOOD NEWS: Since there was a root cause, and choices were made, if those choices are no longer working for us, we (globally) can change them.
I am part of a small non-profit. We've been doing research on this very subject for over 3 years and we've defined the abovementioned event; the choices made in response (we show proof); and a 3-step process to get from the troubled world of today (as you describe in your blog) to a place where humans globally live in alignment with our natural human design. Would love to share details and our website with you - please ask.
p.s. - Have you seen Block/McKnight's The Abundant Community? Their ideas align closely to our conclusions and approach.

Thom - What you say is true, but politicians and corporations globally are in the "absolute power corrupts ..." mode, and the only way to stop the train is to expose and correct the root cause. Band-aids won't work.
There was an event eons ago, and the responses of our ancestors to it, that began our loss of freedom and our addiction to being ruled, led, governed. GOOD NEWS: Since there was a root cause, and choices were made, if those choices are no longer working for us, we (globally) can change them.
I am part of a small non-profit. We've been doing research on this very subject for over 3 years and we've defined the abovementioned event; the choices made in response (we show proof); and a 3-step process to get from the troubled world of today (as you describe in your blog) to a place where humans globally live in alignment with our natural human design. Would love to share details and our website with you - please ask.
p.s. - Have you seen Block/McKnight's The Abundant Community? Their ideas align closely to our conclusions and approach.

"jkh6148" warns us that Thom's new book, "Crash Of 2016", could be used for purposes Thom never intended, by certain folks who don't like Jews very much.
Haven't we seen this movie before? They're playing a dangerous little game, exploiting old class-based resentments by making "Jews Of America" the whipping post, the target of all that rage now felt by the dispossessed, the marginalized, the foreclosed, the overworked & underpaid, and so on... like a match to gunpowder. Wanna see some heads roll? Economic royalists are "evil Jews". Fire away!
Here we go again. It's "blame the Jew" time! Hey, my maternal grandmother was Jewish. By Hebrew law, that makes me a Jew. Gee, maybe I better run for cover and hide somewhere; this is gettin' kinda creepy ya know? I'm not much into guns, though. Maybe I oughta get myself a taser….
But seriously. I think this is what I dislike most about humans, or the human race. It's this compulsion to target and scapegoat certain individuals and/or groups of people, for no reason except this "need" for someone to blame whenever times are hard, when most people are hurting and scared. This alone has caused the untimely, cruel deaths of millions of innocent souls, just within the past century. And for no good reason. Only to satisfy the appetites of predators like Nazis and Jew-haters. They come in all flavors: Muslim-haters, immigrant-haters, gay bashers, misogynists, white supremacists… a virtual smorgasbord of hate. Noam Chomsky warns us of this in his book, "Understanding Power", where he states that approximately a third of the American adult population is comprised of predatory types like this, the hate-mongers among us.
Yeah… I get kinda nervous or spooked when I start hearing shit like "Jew" this and "Jew" that. I never could quite get this "Jew" thing. I mean, piggish "royalists" come from all religions; it's not just "The Jew". I just don't get it. Why do folks have to single out this group and that group, to arbitrarily blame for the sins and the sufferings of all?
Dump-a-rama. Humanity's oldest sport. - Aliceinplunderland

Jean Paul Sartre called Anti-Semitism - and, thereby, any prejudice - "the poor man's snobbery".
Anti-Semitism and criticism or opposition to Israeli policy are separate things. Muslims, who are long time victims of Israeli policy, sometimes, unfortunately, conflate the two (as do Israelis who want to dismiss or silence any opposition).

Kend, if your post office is like ours then it's not the union or internet causing trouble but a manufactured, made up crisis to give a pretext for privatization - to give the service to salivating profiteers. Our post office has a similar "crisis".
What happened is that the Republican, Bush Era Congress, in 2006, in the middle of the night (no one knows exactly who or how many were present and, by some procedural technique I am unfamiliar with, dispensed with quorum requirements), by voice vote (so nobody knows who or exactly how many voted how) passed the A.L.EC. (American Legislative Exchange Council, the dark alliance between big business and Congress whose purpose is to craft and pass laws that are good for business special interests but bad for the people, a kind of Corruption Central) sponsored law, the Postal Service Enhancement and Accountability Act, which contained within it a little noticed provision that requires the U.S. Postal Service to prefund the healthcare benefits of its retirees 70 years in advance - for Post Office employees not even born yet. That's a completely crazy requirement and mandated cost. No business does what that provision requires the U.S. Post Office to do. Indeed, if any business would it would be history in short order.
Without that law the USPS would've been operating at about a billion dollar profit in 2013, about a billion and a half in 2012 and 2011. The Post Office gets no taxpayer subsidies but makes all of its money from its very reasonable fees for its service, from stamps, etc.. Before the law the Post Office was doing so well it was about to replace its entire fleet of gas and diesel powered vehicles with electricly powered ones. And Internet does nothing to harm the Post Office (if it did ALEC members UPS and Fed Ex wouldn't be salivating over it looking to steal it from the people - or "privatize it"). If anything internet gives the Post Office more business and revenue. With Internet sales replacing bricks and mortar stores home and office delivery of the online purchases is an essential part of that and thus an ever growing need.
So then the reasons for the willful destruction of the Post Office are clear, not only the very obvious theft of it by profiteers and extortionists or its "privatization", but also mentioned is the fact of its being the largest unionized employer in the United States and that would be business oligarchs would simply have to hate the U.S. Post Office for its being a very prominent positive example of unionization (and of government employees, no less) within an efficient operation and of a marvelously well functioning government owned enterprize. As Henry Kissinger said when acting to overthrow the Allende regime in Chile and eradicate the legitimate government of Viet Nam. He said we can't allow the "threat of a good example" of a socialist state or of an indigenous population governing itself competently without direction from European or American colonial masters.
Anyway Kend, I suspect the reasons for the trouble with the Canadian post office are similar to those of the trouble with ours. Anyway, I'll research it.

mark from what I understand our problem is a combination of many things. but employee benifets are one of the biggest. I read that as much as 80% of all pension funds in Canada are under funded. Most funds are based on at least a 7% return but most are getting less tha 3%. To me the math doesn't add up. A employee contributes about $400 a month and the employeersers match it and the employee works for 25 years and somehow he receives 2 or 3 thousand a month for 40 years. combine that with the fact employees don't stick around anymore. There are very few long term employees anymore. Things are different here we don't have to stay anywhere for health care reasons. ken

Thank you Mark, for making such an excellent point; an important distinction that exists between anti-semitism, and opposition to Israeli policy.
As a young woman, having just been told I am Jewish (by a reliable source), I had all kinds of romantic fantasies of going to Israel, making Israel my "second home", or my "home away from home" or whatever. But now approximately 35 years later, the thrill is gone. Having witnessed three & a half decades of the Israeli-Palistinian conflict, I can no longer identify with Israel. Classic case of the hunted & persecuted becoming predators themselves! Aided & abetted, naturally, by Yankee Doodle Dandy's self-serving interventions... not to mention mountains of arsenal, made in the USA, donated to the noble cause of stealing oil and land that doesn't belong to either country. Because in this enlightened age, Might still makes Right and Winner Takes All and Screw You.
I'd bet all but my last dime some Israelis are as revolted by Mister Yahoo's policies as I am.
Shalom. - Aliceinkosherland

Be careful what you say, Kend? Why would you start now?
Kend, do you drink a lot? You throw around a bunch of unfounded presumptions, draw a bunch of unsupported conclusions and just make a bunch of stuff up. I don't know why we don't just ignore you like some babbling looney on the street corner.
Why shouldn't money be "forced out of the hands of private companies"? You mean by that that you shouldn't have to fairly compensate your workers? That's what you call money being "forced out" of your hands?
It is all because you don't that these problems exist. Raising "the ceiling for low income workers to a higher amount before they even start paying taxes" wouldn't work, Kend. They already don't pay any taxes, they are so undercompensated. You are applying a solution that fits the problems of business owners, lowering their tax brackets or "letting them keep more of 'their' money", as it were, and applying it to someone whom it doesn't fit, the people who work for someone else. Those who work for someone else don't even have any money that doesn't come from the owners of business - or their employers.

Aliceinwonderland ~ I'm terribly sorry to hear that. Your response is understandable. Is that possibly also why you tend to shy away from discussions of faith and haven't responded to my previous posts about the "Just A Little Light" music video phenomenon and the Autobiography of John L. Davies book I mentioned? ...If you don't mind my asking... I'm really dying to hear your opinion.
You see, I have other theories why you haven't responded and am trying to ascertain enough information to verify at least one of them. It would appear you either haven't read or haven't been able to see my posts. I'm almost certain you aren't intentionally ignoring me; however, it would be nice to verify if you are. You're response to this post--or lack thereof--will answer all my questions. Thanks for your time and patients!!
PS Don't knock yourself for being Jewish. They are, after all, the chosen people. They certainly were chosen for a reason. Remember, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For the light there is darkness. For the yin, there is the yang. For every good jew there is a member of the synagogue of Satan. It's just part of the physical laws of the universe; and, no reason not to be very proud of your heritage. Remember, Jesus Christ was a jew. Personally, I think he would be proud of you regardless of race or religion. You are in good company.
Listed below are the posts and topics in question. Thanks again!
http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2014/03/cmon-americalets-keep-lights
Post #34
http://oaklandwiki.org/His_Honor,_the_Buckaroo
http://www.amazon.com/His-Honor-Buckaroo-Autobiography-Davie/dp/0943077125
This Blog--post #15

The Russians are coming!
Kend, Russia didn't "just walk in and take half of Ukraine". That was done by referendum. The United States just tried to take over Ukraine with a CIA orchestrated coup. The United States always ignores the UN and does whatever it wants.

Marc, I'm shocked and baffled. Mind you, this isn't stated adversarially or with sarcasm. Up 'til now I knew absolutely nothing of these posts you speak of, that you sent directed to me. I would never deliberately ignore anyone unless that person has somehow alienated me, which you certainly haven't. If you'd be so kind as to give me adequate time to do so, I'll be happy to respond.
Could it be that for some mysterious, unfathomable reason I failed to recognize these were addressed specifically to me? If so, my heartfelt apologies. - Aliceinwonderland

Aliceinwonderland ~ No need to apologize. I've experienced this before with my closest friends and family concerning these--and other--topics. (For thirty years or so now.) I'm not sure if it is a divine hand or what that makes responding on their parts so impossible; yet, I've grown used to it. The mere fact that you've responded at all is quite refreshing. Please take your time looking at those two topics. I'm about to turn in for tonight; but, will check back tomorrow night, and so on, until you can respond. Thanks again! You don't know how much this means to me.
WORKER-OWNED COOPERATIVES, Thom! That's the answer, for all who aren't self-employed! Otherwise we're just bustin' our fannies to make someone else rich. - Aliceinwonderland