Vott a question!

Doesn't anyone see that former fascist Germany, Swiss Bankers and the Mob have made The United States into the New Old World by corrupting our politicians, high-ranking military, department of justice, and financial institutions? The people who are torturing us now are the same organization which tortured our parents, grandparents, and great-parents all the way back to the Germania from which they fled.

Of course Germany is doing well. They get our bilk. Plus, we have been able to help them launder so much loot since WWII. I'm rather ticked off that ThyssenKrupp is all over the place while we buy their steel and have none of our own. I'd rather walk 27 flights of stairs.

We can thank the Germans for centralizing and cruelly industrializing our agriculture and fuels, putting them in control of the Queen with the help of the good old American Bar Association, FTC, and SEC.

Those who are thanking Bank of America can recall it is originally the Bank of Italy- arrived just before the fire, then stepped in to save San Francisco, like a Phoenix from the ashes.

We are too arrogant to learn from a successful European nation. And we think allowing corporations to have a free hand in our economy is great for corporations and they have convinced most of us that it must great for all of us as well. In the end, this is a sure way to ruin everything in pursuit of short term profits and to hell with the future of everyone else.

Michele Bachmann (who apparently can't pronounce "Iwo Jima", "chutzpah", "poignant" or "united") wants to get rid of Great Society welfare programs so that we can be like China. Is she aware that a third of the children in China are undernourished? (Answer: What is she aware of?)

Yes but just give Angela Merkel a chance...she'll screw things up really good.

"Angela Merkel wants the German government and the ECB to buy the debts of Greece and Portugal and other countries in trouble, because otherwise they’re going to default. This would mean losses for the French and German banks have bought these governments’ bonds. As governments are unable to roll over their loans – that is, to re-borrowing the funds as past borrowings fall due – banks and other investors insist on much higher yields to compensate them for the risk of default. They also buy default insurance, paying a premium over the interest rate that governments pay. But the investors and guarantors then turn around and demand that the government take all the risk and promise to bail out the governments – leaving the banks with large interest premiums while taking insurance speculators off the hook. So there is an underlying hypocrisy at work.

If governments default on these bonds, the banks will lose money. So the banks are now saying that they’re sorry they insisted that the ECB not create money. Creating it to pay the banks turns out to be a good thing, they say. It’s only bad if it benefits labor and employers instead of the financial sector.

Mrs. Merkel insists that she has no qualms at all about pushing Greece and other debtors into poverty and demanding that debtor economies act as defeated countries and forfeit their land, their water and sewer systems and even the Parthenon to the creditors as if they were conquered militarily. So the question is whether Germany and Europe can do this without an army, as used to be the case.

Greek labor unions and citizens are protesting and holding general strikes to protest the fact that the EU is turning out not to be the peaceful and basically socialist project anticipated half a century ago, when the European Economic Community was formed in 1957. It is a financially bellicose, extractive attempt to create a financial oligarchy and impoverish Europe, stripping the assets of debtors to pay creditors. This partly explains why Mrs. Merkel is finding such opposition even in her own right-wing party. Many Germans do not want to see themselves taxed to bail out their banks for the reckless lending these banks have made – and the even more reckless “road to serfdom” ideology that prevents EU governments from financing their own budget deficits. The euro is threatening with being pulled apart by the greed, short-sightedness and ideological extremism of the anti-debtor, anti-labor neoliberals who have gained control of the legal system and much of the political system.

European banks have the same fallback position that U.S. banks had here in 2008 after Lehman Brothers failed. They are threatening to wreck the economy if the government doesn’t save them from taking a loss on loans gone bad as a result of the over-indebted economy. They have the power to disrupt the payment system and hold the economy hostage if the government doesn’t take their losses onto the public balance sheet. "

http://michael-hudson.com/2011/09/debt-deflation-on-the-rise/

As I stood near the light house, throwing out little bits of bread to the birds, I noticed that the poor gulls never stood a chance against the hordes of little starlings and sparrows. The gulls just stood there on the ground, or lumbered aloft, unable to outmaneuver the smaller birds. The only thing the larger birds, at times, have going for them...when it works...is to scare all the little birds away. But in this instance...the little birds were shafting the bigger birds and getting their due. Even when I would throw a bit right at the gulls, the little birds rushed in to gobble up the goodies. Maybe we need to take a lesson from the little birds.

I agree that people are very fickle...one moment sounding holier-than-thou and preaching equality...the next moment, after they have managed to gain money and/or power, they become the greedy and selfish bastards that they once preached against. I see it also in immigrants who manage to get across the border and become Americans and then use disparaging slurs against those who have managed to sneak across the borders in search of the same things that they once sought. Wetbacks calling Wetbacks Wetbacks...or any other disparaging terms are often levied against their own trying to make it in America. And it is not just America. This happens everywhere.

President Obama, once he gained money and power (and the Presidency), has made it on the backs of people who believed in him, the voters, because of his actions and words in Chicago and his campaign messages and promises. But once he got to the level of the highest office of the US and gained access to immense money and power, he turns his back on that manufactured persona, however well meaning (or not) in the beginning.

I am sure there are a lot of burgeoning and gifted, ambitious, would-be leaders amongst the crowds that rail out against the injustices of those who have "made it". And I have no doubt that even they would not hold true to their convictions once they attain influential power and wealth after having used the masses as fodder for their rise. But once these icons turn on us we are foolish to continue to count on them for our well being.

We have to realize when gods become devils or we will continue to be blindly led to their firey pits. We have to detect and recognize the sneaky games they play or we will all continue to be their slaves. The two-party system, the Republicans and Democrats, and the false idea that "we have no other choice" mentality will only get us to those firey pits much faster. We have to break out of their mental chains and not play their games anymore. The game is rigged! And our participation only serves to make it look like we have a valid and workable system. It is really no better than any third world dictatorship pretending to be a democracy.

Of course it did. Fracking in NE Ohio, northern Pennsylvania and western New York State makes it certain that we will see more and more earthquakes of increasing severity unless this type of extraction technique is stopped immediately!

If your excitement is really as extreme as it seems to me, you're nothing but risking your own health. What you don't see is, the average American is pretty conservative. Even if you blame President Bush for what happened during his presidency: responsible for this are all Americans!

And Obama: you can't really hope, there might be a progressive majority possible at the left of this president. Not in America! The average American is so darn conservative and stubborn, if you honestly consider this, you might give up on all of them. Politically you have to deal with those facts, otherwise you're not living in reality. Well, I think Obama is doing this. But he has to raise money for his campaign to go ahead. I want him to go ahead. He's the best man we have -- seriously.

It's mainly men who are so terribly selfish. Many of those who now protest in the occupy movement will stop protesting, as soon as they get a chance to become part of the rich and mighty. And those women they will marry will be as dumb and selfish as all spouses and say AMEN to whatever their husbands do. It has always been like this. Whom can you actually trust? Nobody..... but -- wait a minute.....

Maybe I trust you a bit, because you're so desperately writing. You won't ever get anything out of this. This won't make you rich. And it won't change anything.

Glenn Greenwald sure hit the nail on the head!

"The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed “a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.

The simple fact is that progressives are supporting a candidate for President who has done all of that — things liberalism has long held to be pernicious. I know it’s annoying and miserable to hear. Progressives like to think of themselves as the faction that stands for peace, opposes wars, believes in due process and civil liberties, distrusts the military-industrial complex, supports candidates who are devoted to individual rights, transparency and economic equality. All of these facts — like the history laid out by Stoller in that essay — negate that desired self-perception. These facts demonstrate that the leader progressives have empowered and will empower again has worked in direct opposition to those values and engaged in conduct that is nothing short of horrific. So there is an eagerness to avoid hearing about them, to pretend they don’t exist. And there’s a corresponding hostility toward those who point them out, who insist that they not be ignored.

The parallel reality — the undeniable fact — is that all of these listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates, only by Ron Paul. For that reason, Paul’s candidacy forces progressives to face the hideous positions and actions of their candidate, of the person they want to empower for another four years. If Paul were not in the race or were not receiving attention, none of these issues would receive any attention because all the other major GOP candidates either agree with Obama on these matters or hold even worse views." --Glenn Greenwald

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/31/progressives_and_the_ron_paul_fallacies/...

I voted yes because it's also been a problem in Arkansas. Last year towns in the area of fracking (N.E. AR) were experiencing several earthquakes a week and apparently we are now experiencing the same thing as OH, suspected caused by fracking, which is now halted temporarily. We;ll see. Personally I have no doubts it's due to fracking. All the evidence points directly at fracking as the direct cause. No problems till the fracking started.

As for those birds, once again in the town of Beebe, AR, I find their explanations a little strange, like a coverup. I think it has a lot to do with environmental issues and not fireworks. Afterall, people have been setting off fireworks for many years and this has never happened until recently. And why here? Interestingly, it's in the same area as the fracking and earthquakes. Any connections? Makes me wonder.

And write to Obama (White House) and tell him this is an impeachable offense. Also your congresspeople, either with your support or with your condemnation. (I wrote 3 today, not including the president.)

It's not being bonkers to vote for Obama if the only other choice is someone like Santorum or even Romney.

Join the ACLU! Give them money! We need to support and enable the organizations fighting for us, and the ACLU is one of the most effective.

It's all to neanderthal to me. I was reading from a print out, here in WI, from a 1906 newspaper...this being around the time of the big Ford Model T movement in the industrial revolution, but they were discussing wind energy from their wind mills on their farms, and how productive and infinite it was. They talked about seeing a future of warmth, lighting and economic growth being produced from the same air we breathe. Wow, when did special interests and money take the place of our future?