Who are the 99 percent? Who are we?

(Ramin Talaie - BLOOMBERG)

“I did everything I was supposed to and I have nothing to show for it.”

It’s not the arrests that convinced me that “Occupy Wall Street” was worth covering seriously. Nor was it their press strategy, which largely consisted of tweeting journalists to cover a small protest that couldn’t say what, exactly, it hoped to achieve. It was a Tumblr called, “We Are The 99 Percent,” and all it’s doing is posting grainy pictures of people holding handwritten signs telling their stories, one after the other.

“I am 20K in debt and am paying out of pocket for my current tuition while I start paying back loans with two part time jobs.”

These are not rants against the system. They’re not anarchist manifestos. They’re not calls for a revolution. They’re small stories of people who played by the rules, did what they were told, and now have nothing to show for it. Or, worse, they have tens of thousands in debt to show for it.

“I am a 28 year old female with debt that had to give up her apartment + pet because I have no money and I owe over $30,000.”

College debt shows up a lot in these stories, actually. It’s more insistently present than housing debt, or even unemployment. That might speak to the fact that the protests tilt towards the young. But it also speaks, I think, to the fact that college debt represents a special sort of betrayal. We told you that the way to get ahead in America was to get educated. You did it. And now you find yourself in the same place, but buried under debt. You were lied to.

World Financial Crisis for dummies

Great, simple explanation by Benjamin Fulford  of the fraudulent nature of the financial system worldwide.

US – World Financial Crisis Explained By Benjamin Fulford 1-11-11

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Chicago. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later.

Heidi keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers’ loans). Word gets around about Heidi’s “drink now, pay later” marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi’s bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Chicago.

By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi’s gross sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi’s borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.

At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS. These securities then are bundled and traded on international securities markets.

Naive investors don’t really understand that the securities being sold to them as AAA secured bonds really are debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation’s leading brokerage houses and are sold and bought world-wide.

One day, even though the bond prices still are climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi’s bar. He so informs Heidi.

Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and Heidi’s 11 employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINKBOND prices drop by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the bank’s liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community. The suppliers of Heidi’s bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms’ pension funds in the BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multibillion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from their cronies in government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who have never been in Heidi’s bar.

Now do you understand?

In Less Than A Minute Alan Grayson Explains #OccupyWallStreet To The 1 Percent

2012 House candidate Alan Grayson owns those trying to discredit Occupy Wall Street by explaining to the panel what #OccupyWallStreet is all about.

Ok, there is a lot of anti-republican talk which I don’t totally appreciate (The composition of the 99% is BOTH Republican and Democrat), but the explanation is so quick and simple that anyone that tries to discredit the movements is totally left out of the argument.

While on Real Time with Bill Maher former congressman, and future 2012 House candidate, Alan Grayson explained to the panel the 1% what Occupy Wall Street is all about.

Here is the video:

The latest edition of Real Time featured one of Bill Maher’s patented balance things out with three Republicans and a Democrat panels, but the Democrat was Alan Grayson. While P.J. fellow panelist P.J. O’Rourke broke out his bathing and hippie jokes, former Rep. Grayson schooled him on Occupy Wall Street.

Banks Bailout Stings Unemployed

Source: Technorati

A techie lost his job during the 2008 downsizing and tried to renegotiate with his banks on his car loan. Denied! He sold everything he had to keep making the payments since his unemployment ran out last April. Friday he was notified he qualified for the new Federal extension so he could again buy food at the store and pay his bills and make up at least one of his two payments owed.

This morning he was visited by the repo man. Bam! Chase Bank received $25 billion in the bank bailouts and they repossessed the man’s car being 52 days late on the first payment and not even 30 days on the second. He called the bank and tried to get them to wait until his unemployment check arrived, but Chase said, “Not my problem, surrender the vehicle.”

Something doesn’t sit right with me on this. Why is the government bailing out banks when the real tragedy is the millions of “We The People” who are losing our cars and homes due to corporate greed? The bailout should be coming to the people and not the corporations.

Watch “The Corporation,” “Food, Inc.,” “Crude Awakening,” “Hacking Democracy” and “The Union: Business Behind Getting High” and more that demonstrate how private corporate and big money interests are getting preferential treatment over “We The People” of these United States of America. Get active in your government and express that it is not laws and legislation that we need, but a reality check on what matters more than money–people matter, money doesn’t.

Hearing someone say, “I’ll be dead before that happens” or “It’s not my problem” can really turn a stomach foul. Think about your grandchildren’s grandchildren and what they will inherit. Do you care about the future of our Spaceship Earth?

Greed is a sin. Turn away from sin.

Source: Technorati

2011 in U.S. looks painfully like 1932

Nearly 20 percent of American workers unemployed – facing what looked like an endless future without full-time work, losing homes and struggling against downward mobility.
Many Americans marching in the streets – and even resorting to violence.

That was 1932.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger’s 1957 book “The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933” described the times: “Farmers stopped milk trucks along Iowa roads and poured the milk into the ditch. Mobs halted mortgage sales, ran the men from the banks and insurance companies out of town, intimidated courts and judges, demanded a moratorium on debts.”
Now we come to 2011. In August, 14 million American workers were officially unemployed – a rate of 9.1 percent. But add in the unemployed who have given up looking for work and people who want a full-time job but are working part-time and you get more than 25 million people – a rate of 16.2 percent.
More than 6 million American workers have been out of work more than six months; 4.5 million have been out of work a year or more.

This should be a reality check on the gravity of the situation this country faces.

Read more: On SacBee.com