MMmmNACHOS calls for folks to take the fight from the Internet to the streets. Beware of what you wish for. We have had four-decades of demonization demoggery: The Politics of Division. The assault weapons are out there, and both Left and Right see the others as the most vile of dilusional enemies, responsible for our problems. Look around the world: whenever there is trouble, it's tribes (of the 99%) fighting and slaughtering other tribes (of the 99%), while the 1% laughingly haul their loot to their tax-free off-shore or foreign bank accounts.

We have had a huge influx of population entering the bottom (poverty) sector (from bottom and middle). This increase of un- and under-employed, just puts downward pressure on wages all up the scale -- benefitting: Guess Who? Note that throughout this Recovery from The 2007 Crash, who got bailed-out and who wasn't? Duhhhh. Socially we ARE gonna wind up in a third-world colonial situation; prepare for it. And our kids --(under-educated, out looking for anyone to "give" them a job -- doing what?)-- are gonna find life tougher and tougher. Read the Tea-Party's leaves.

When the government found it had the tools to manage the composition of society, and the availability of the money-supply; it either had the obligation to work for The People (the 99%), or the opportunity to sell it's services to the highest bidders (of the 1%). Meanwhile, as described well above, (Reber #10) the technological-economic environment has changed fundamentally. So, why is there any question about what has been and is happening?

Note: The news today is that companies are starting to bring manufacturing plants back to the US. Good news? Perhaps not. Perhaps it's simply a sign that US-Labor (relatively over-priced by global standards) has been broken, to where US workers are now competetive in the global marketplace. But, hey -- it's a job, take it.

Meanwhile we babble amongst ourselves, following scripts passed down through corporate media-channels, about each day's diversionary "topic-du-jour."

Why o why is Social Security on the table at all??? According to Senator Bernie Sanders, SS is fully funded for the next 22 years. Why would we need to go to chain CPI to extend SS out to 50 years? Sounds like post office legislation to me. As long as President Obama surrounds himself with Wall Street "advisers," we will never get his ear. He will continue to ignore us. I have emailed him on his White House website re chain CPI and the Post Office, and only get a form letter in return that says nothing, never addresses my concerns and, as far as the PO goes, silence from the White House. I do not understand why Obama would tour the U.S. to promote jobs but never, ever address postal jobs being lost all because of that ridiculous GOP legislation that demands the postal service to prefund pensions out for the next 75 years to be paid within a 10 year window, and can only be paid out of stamp revenues.

I retired 22 years ago and let me tell you, the SS cola does not keep up with inflation particularly if you live in a rural area where petrol and food costs more because of transportation costs. And Obama wants to cut that, too?? He's taxing me. Taking away what little I have.

Then there's the Medicare cuts the president is proposing. What are they? I haven't heard anyone give a picture as to what's proposed. Is President Obama slashing Medicare to extend Obamacare? Will all of us wind up with inadequate health care as a result? Right now my healthcare premiums take 20% of my income. Add dental, medications, and my share of medical payments, that's almost one-third of my income....quite a chunk.

DeAnneMarc - I agree, if you choose to live your life in a haze from drug use (light drugs) it is your choice. When it comes to drugs like heroin, coke or crack, there should not be a choice to use, due to the great deal of suffering these types of drugs have done to the children of our nation through the use of such drugs by their parents and the damage done. Someone has to protect the rights of the children of our nation and when it comes to the use of hard drugs the parents choose to use and their choice to let their children suffer the consequences. This is something that is always left out of the discussion concerning the consumption of drugs in America. Children’s rights to life over the right to abuse them with the adult’s drug of choice. You want to light up a pipe or joint that is up to you, you want to abuse hard drugs that choice is up to society to police, literally. I grew up in the first generation that used drugs like pot, acid and hash. Hard drugs were never glamorized or endorsed by the our generation, to many came home from an unpopular war with hard drug habits and it destroyed a sizable part of our generation that were called upon to serve in Asia. Hard drugs should continue to be included in a war on drugs. Lighter drugs as I have mentioned should be left up to the individual, even though these drugs can also damage a child’s family needs when used by their parents. This is a very uncomplicated and simplistic answer, but I have seen the damage first hand and I do not need a complicated analysis or book to say what should or should not be done in the so called War on Drugs. Been there, seen that…K.W.

What god do you think is going to pull our asses out of the fire we are now in? I have seen no proof of any action that some deity is out their working for our good. Just the opposite as far as I can ascertain! Just bugs the hell out of me, excuse the reference to hell, when people sit on their butts and think all will be well if god blesses us one and all. Since we all share freedom of speech, for now anyways, I felt compelled to make this statement. I am not saying you should not believe, that is your choice in life; just do not expect some god to fix things for this country. Our forefathers knew better than to include god into our politics. I am not angry at your god, I just doubt his or her existence and any impact that he or she has made on mankind. Those of us who are kind and good do so because we believe that is the right thing to do, not because we are ordered to do so by doctrine written by other men eons ago. Have a good night....

HalFonts ~ Half your present income? Well, it sounds like we are both on the same page in this book. However, the kids today aren't going to listen to your sage advice as sincere as it may be. Regardless, thanks for offering these poor kids some sincere sage advice. ;-) God Bless them all!

You can come up with any and every idea that's right and make sense.But when both parties are against the American people and the parties are about saving themselves only, What do you do? You also have a country with citizens that will not even stand up for themselves. A congress that cant see how they will destroy themselves. America has a very rough ride ahead. I wish I felt pity for it, for there is obviously a change coming. When your leaders are blind, the obvious is a fall. You can't steal from what isn't there for long.

The real question is how to make the blind see and stay on the path again?

We had politicians that cared about themselves and their people once.

MMmmNACHOS wrote ~ "The 40 year war on drugs has wasted billions of dollars incarcerating harmless dime bag users as if they were violent rapist murderers.

If you wanna get a true grip on our drug laws and their history read Judge James P. Grays book "Why Our Drug Laws have Failed and What We Can Do to Change Them". What's interesting about this book is that its author served on the California Circuit Court and later its Appeals Court, and gives a first hand account of the mess our government has created a much larger mess with it's Zero Tollerance Drug Laws. As well he shares with the reader some history regarding Americas hang-ups with drugs and the fear campains used to get the public on board with a "War on Drugs", which is actually a war on you and me weither you use drugs or not.
As well he shares what other countries have done to successfully quill the issue of "crime" that comes with such irrational drug laws by actually legalizing drugs and offering state funded drug rehabilation clinics to the general public...Which has proven successful in grossly lowering street crime and reducing prison population of non-dangerous people; all at a cost of less than 1/2 of what it annually cost to incarcerate a person here in the U.S.
STOP the insanity...LEGALIZE & EDUCATE!!!

Another great book on Drugs is Mark Torgoff's "Can't Find My Way Home" Here you can read timeline anacdotes about 20th century America's drug history as told by those that lived through it's different periods."

Thanks Buddy! DAM. ;-)

DANNEMARC...FEEL FREE TO COPY AND PASTE POST 117 FROM FRIDAYS DISCUSSION(s) over the weekend.

What I really wanna know is; When will Americans get off their sedintary asses and take this fight from the Internet to the streets. It's sad that here we are living in the "information age" under a Democratic Government (quickly being reduced to surfdom by Corporate Fascist)...Neverthe less a Government founded on the premiss that is Of, For, and By the People...Everyone is whinning and crying, yet no one is taking action against those we have elected that continue to allow Corporations to plunder and loot our wellbeing as a rich and prosperous country. A country that is suppose to be one that offers the Equal RIGHT to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

So how about it!?!?Who here is ready to live up to our duties as U.S. Citizens and revive the philosophies and virtues that once made us true leaders for Peace, Independence, and Justice...Set forth by example and not illegal occupation and forcing a "brand" onto others.

2950-10K ~ wrote: "Stop holding out the olive branch and fight the scoundrels!"

Personally, I couldn't agree more. However, if you ask me, that option isn't written into the script. This Government seems as though it is being run by a Hollywood Director since the Administration of President Ronald Wilson (666) Reagan.

If you are waiting for rhyme and reason, my brother, I would suggest that you do not hold your breath.

President Obama stated: “What’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.” But the reality is that fewer and fewer Americans will be prepared for their income needs during retirement as their savings are and will continue to be meager, pension plans will be less secure and viable, and 401(k) retirement plan investments will become more risky. Why, because there is a significant paradigm shift occuring in the economy that academia, economist, and national political leaders are oblivious to. That is, tectonic shifts in the technologies of production are destroying and devaluing the worth of jobs, and replacing people with "machines" as the primary means of producing products and services needed and wanted by society.

As long as working people are limited by earning income solely through their labor worker wages, they will be left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1 percent of the people that the system is rigged to benefit. The tiny minority is the prosperous ownership class who own and control most of the productive capital wealth of the nation. Without policies to ensure that FUTURE productive capital economic growth is financed to create new owners, broadly including EVERY citizen as individual owners, working people and the middle class will continue to stagnate, resulting in a stagnated consumer economy. More troubling is that this continued stagnation will further dim the economic hopes of America’s youth, no matter what their education level, and, of course, dampen prospects for economic security in retirement. The result will have profound long-term consequences for the nation’s economic health and further limit equal earning opportunity and spread income inequality. As the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of productive capital increases, the gap between labor workers and capital owners will increase, which will eventually result in upheaval. Thus, it is imperative that we set a corrective course to put us on the path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice.

In this essential respect, President Obama is failing the American people by allowing the limited financial securities present today to be siphoned off without the prospects for building stronger, more self-reliant alternative financial security. The ONLY way this can be accomplished is to create the means for viable ownership of productive capital by EVERY American and not just for the tiny elite who now own our corporations, and thus effectively the nation's productive asset wealth.

The proposed Capital Homestead Act would make it possible for every American to become a viable owner of FUTURE productive capital. According to its architects, it would “enable every man, woman, and child to accumulate wealth and receive dividend incomes from newly issued shares in new and growing companies, without being taxed on the accumulations (including property and shares gained through inheritance, savings, and arrangements like Employee Stock Ownership Plans/ESOPs, Community Stock Ownership Plans/CSOPs, and Community Investment Corporations/CICs). In addition to serving as a source of capital credit for corporate workers, CHAs would also provide an ownership-building account for individuals who do not work for profit-making enterprises, such as school teachers, civil servants, military personnel, police, and health workers, and for individuals who have no remunerative employment, such as the disabled, the unemployed homemakers and children.”

Under the Just Third Way and Capital Homesteading more just and simple tax system, the following is proposed:

• Eliminate all tax loopholes and subsidies,

• Provide an exemption of $100,000 for a family of four to meet their ordinary living needs,

• Encourage corporations to pay out all their profits as taxable personal incomes to avoid paying corporate income taxes and to finance their growth by issuing new full dividend payout shares for broad-based citizen ownership,

• Eliminate the payroll tax on workers and their employers, but

• Pay out of general revenues for all promises for Social Security, Medicare, Medicare, government pensions, health, education, rent and subsistence vouchers for the poor until their new jobs and ownership accumulations provide new incomes to substitute for the taxpayer dollars to fill these needs.

• The tax rate would be a single rate for all incomes from all sources above the personal exemption levels so that the budget could be balanced automatically and even allow the government to pay off the growing unsustainable long-term debt, but the poor would pay the first dollar over their exemption levels as would the hedge fund operator and others now earning billions of dollars from capital gains, dividends, rents and other property incomes which under some tax proposals would be exempted from any taxes.

• As a substitute for inheritance and gift taxes, a transfer tax would be imposed on the recipients whose holdings exceeded $1 million, thus encouraging the super-rich to spread out their monopoly-sized estates to all members of their family, friends, servants and workers who helped create their fortunes, teachers, health workers, police, other public servants, military veterans, artists, the poor and the disabled.

• The Federal Reserve would stop monetizing unproductive debt, including bailouts of banks "too big to fail" and Wall Street derivatives speculators, and

• Begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every man, woman and child to establish a Capital Homestead Account or "CHA" (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income.

• The CHA would process an equal allocation of productive credit to every citizen exclusively for purchasing full-dividend payout shares in companies needing funds for growing the economy and private sector jobs for local, national and global markets,

• The shares would be purchased on credit wholly backed by projected "future savings" in the form of new productive capital assets as well as the future marketable goods and services produced by the newly added technology, renewable energy systems, plant, rentable space and infrastructure added to the economy.

• Risk of default on each stock acquisition loan would be covered by private sector capital credit risk insurance and reinsurance, but

• Would not require citizens to reduce their funds for consumption to purchase shares.

The end result is that citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing current global trends where all citizens will eventually become dependent for their economic well-being on our only legitimate monopoly –– the State –– and whatever elite controls the coercive powers of government.

Support the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797

Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice

Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm