Obama Is Fighting For The Interests Of The 99%

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

The White House continued its embrace of the Occupy Wall Street protests on Sunday, using the strongest terms yet to identify President Barack Obama with the growing movement.

Obama will make it clear that he is fighting to make certain that the "interests of 99 percent of Americans are well represented" — the first time the White House has used the term to differentiate the vast majority of Americans from the wealthy.

Obama, who has been branded a "class warrior" by Republicans unhappy with his plans to increase taxes on the rich to pay for his jobs and deficit plans, has embraced the term.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-draws-closer-to-occupy-wall-street-says-obama-is-fighting-for-interests-of-the-99-2011-10#ixzz1b3mziBmU

[The_Dude 1,142]

Of course the White House is embracing these protests. It is the beginning of the election cycle and the massive turnout that was out in force for Obama in 08, probably won't be there in 12, so they are grasping for a cause, anything to get young voters out once again to vote.

[mawilson 2,133]

Obama Is Fighting For The Interests Of The 99%

That #######.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

"interests of 99 percent of Americans are well represented"

And I thought he represented all 100%. Silly me.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

And I thought he represented all 100%. Silly me.

Yep, silly you. The GOP has that 1% well covered.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

Yep, silly you. The GOP has that 1% well covered.

[Usui Takumi 1,562]

Makes you want to create a party called "The Start Over" party doesn't it.

[Leatherneck 693]

Who woulda thunk it...say it ain't so.

[Usui Takumi 1,562]

I swear I'm not Booyah when I say this but the 21st century is showing the US government to be a failure. Its time to start over.

[Leatherneck 693]

The climate is very polarized.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

Yep, silly you. The GOP has that 1% well covered.

That 1% pays 40% of the income tax. Not very 'fair' is it?

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

That 1% pays 40% of the income tax. Not very 'fair' is it?

Nope, it sure isn't. It's also not very fair that they carry away a quarter of the total income. Or that this 1% has seen incomes triple while the average income hasn't moved at all. Or that we're looking like a Banana Republic from an income distribution point of view rather than a developed country. None of that is very 'fair'. And none of that makes this a better country. Quite the opposite, actually.

We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

[lostinblue 1,989]

Communist, Nazi parties endorse ‘Occupy’ protests

In a move that may redefine the phrase “strange bedfellows,” the American Nazi Party issued an official endorsement of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement on Sunday afternoon. The announcement put the organization, a self-described “National Socialist” political party, in company with the Socialist Party USA, which explained its own support for the left-wing protesters in a nationwide conference call last Tuesday night and credited organized labor with the strength and sophistication of protests to date.

The American Nazi Party is the most politically sophisticated U.S. remnant — but by no means the only one — of white supremacist Adolph Hitler’s murderous 20th century movement. The party calls Hitler’s Mein Kampf “an ideological blueprint for healthy Aryan survival.”

In its statement on Sunday, the Westland, Mich.-based Nazi party wrote that the Occupy Wall Street protests are “TAYLOR [sic] MADE for National Socialists, as well as WN [White Nationalists] who are serious about DOING SOMETHING.”

“I urgently URGE all of you,” the statement’s unnamed author added, “to TAKE PART and JOIN IN when these protests hit your neck of the woods. Produce some flyers EXPLAINING the ‘JEW BANKER’ influence — DON’T wear anything marking you as an ‘evil racist’ — and GET OUT THERE and SPREAD the WORD!”

While Nazis seem unenthusiastic about visibly linking their flagship organization to the vocal protests that have popped up in dozens of U.S. cities, the same can’t be said of the Communist Party USA.

John Bachtell, an Illinois-based community organizer and Communist Party USA board member, addressed the “Occupy Chicago” protest on Saturday.

“I bring greetings and solidarity from the Communist Party,” Bachtell said to hoots and applause. “We are here, marching side-by-side. We’ll sleep here. We’ll be with this movement ’til the very �“ ’til we make all the changes that we know we have to make.”

Bachtell also organized the Tuesday evening conference call, with an online call to action that framed the Communist Party’s involvement as one part of a larger movement uniting the “Occupy” protesters with a “Week of Action for Jobs” organized by the AFL-CIO, and with congressional Democrats’ push to pass President Obama’s American Jobs Act.

Southern California Communist Party leader Arturo Cambron also addressed the call, praising “the growing of the occupying community.”

“We’ve been getting a lot of support from an unusual amount of very, very broad forces,” Cambron added. “The movement has gone [on] to get the endorsement of a lot of trade unions, including the Los Angeles Federation of Labor, which is I think one of the most powerful, most progressive labor organizations in the country.”

John Wojcik, labor editor for the People’s World, told the conference call that after a recent Occupy Chicago march, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka “was speaking to law students at the Chicago-Kent Law School just a few blocks away. And they heard him urge support for Occupy Wall Street, and offered them use of union halls [and] other resources. And he was using their language. He said we have an economy, a political process, that isn’t serving the 99 percent.”

Communist Party USA leader Jim Lane, calling in from Dallas, added that “the Texas AFL-CIO published contact information, urged participation everywhere, and sent their whole staff to the Austin action.”

With its embrace of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Nazis’ path has become remarkably similar to that of organized U.S. communists, with its primary distinguishing feature being the white supremacists’ near-universal blame of Jews for what they see as the worst features of capitalism.

“The pro-white movementites should be JOINING this Occupy movement and supporting it!” read a statement published Thursday on the American Nazi Party-affiliated “White Honor” website.

“Even Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP had to vote with open communists on some issues to achieve their goals. WE need to utilize and support every movement of dissent against this evil American empire, regardless of which end of the political spectrum it originates from.”

The NSDAP was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, rendered in English as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

On the same website, American Nazi Party chairman Rocky Suhayda wrote Thursday that it was “time to pull WN [White Nationalists’] heads out of their collective ####’s [sic], and JOIN IN the attack on Judeo-Capitalism.”

In a 2009 feature exploring why some white supremacists supported the newly inaugurated President Barack Obama, Esquire magazine noted that Suhayda’s claim to fame was “Being widely quoted bemoaning in the fact that so few Aryan-Americans had the cojones of the 9/11 hijackers: ‘If we were one-tenth as serious, we might start getting somewhere.’”

While the Occupy Wall Street movement has become a radical kitchen sink of left-wing social gripes focusing most of its rage on bankers and capitalism, anti-Semitic insinuations are now more common than when protests first began September 17 in New York City.

Speaking to Reason TV on October 12, Occupy Los Angeles protester Patricia McAllister said that “the Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, which is not run by the federal government — they need to be run out of this country.”

McAllister introduced herself to the cameraman as an employee of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

As the “Occupy” protests gather steam, nearly all of their momentum is still provided by organizers on the far left end of America’s political spectrum. But the entry of real-life Nazis indicates an unprecedented broadening of a U.S. protest movement.

The American Nazi Party’s official Twitter account proclaimed on Saturday that “The Protests Are Going To Become Much More Frightening…. One can only hope.”

http://news.yahoo.com/red-white-angry-communist-nazi-parties-endorse-occupy-044626630.html

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Glenn Beck was right!

[Brother Hesekiel 2,236]

Obama is fighting?

Obama is part of the 1%. He put one of Rubin's favorite boys, Geitner, in office, and Geitner is a big part of the problem, not the solution. Obama bailed out Wall Street, but not Main Street. Take this from a fiscal conservative Liberal: me.

Better yet, read this:

About a decade ago, I read an article in The Onion, "U.S. Offers PlatinumPlus Preferred Citizenship". Apparently, Tim Geithner did too, because from 2007-2011, this is the policy framework that he designed and executed, first as President of the New York Federal Reserve, and then as Treasury Secretary. Now, unequal democracy is not a new story, in many ways it's systemic and goes back hundreds of years. But what we're going to see in part this week is how Geithner deserves special recognition as sort of this decade's champion of making this system more explicit and entrenched.

What we're going to see this week, when the Government Accountability Office releases a more detailed version of an audit of the Federal Reserve's actions during that period, is more details on how this system worked. So let me give you some context on what the Fed bailouts meant, the details to match the persuasive message of the protesters in Zuccotti Park and around the world.

This is first and foremost a political story. It's a story of how bought government has changed what it means to be a citizen. So if you haven't sign our petition yet at www.GetMoneyOut.com, I hope this convinces you to do so.

The overall stats of the effects of the crisis are clear - median American pay has dropped by 10% since 2007, but on the high end, the rich have never been more powerful.

I'm not interested in a sob story about inequality, I want to talk about what Geithner *did*, structurally to bring about this situation. We're all aware of the two tiered political system in which protesters can be run over by police scooters but marauders in suits are put on the President's jobs council to chuckle nervously at Occupy Wall Street. But behind the political inequality lies a new order of credit allocation. Tim Geithner created a two-tiered monetary system, a kind of money they have which you can't get. He wasn't alone in doing this. Financial institutions spent hundreds of millions of dollars influencing federal officials to coalesce a bailout while politicians treated them as a special class of super Americans. But he more than anyone else in the crisis period was the central figure in the creation of our current aristocratic monetary order.

Let's start with the two types of money.

In late 2008, there were two types of people who had huge debts and depreciating collateral. Both types accrued their debts through the subprime mortgage crisis. Homeowners with fixed mortgages sat on rapidly depreciating homes in neighborhoods rife with foreclosures. Once the music stopped, they couldn't borrow against their homes at all, but if they wanted to get credit through credit cards, the interest rate could be upwards of 30%. This is sad, but it's not inherently immoral. It's what happens in a typical financial panic. At the time, bankers also had depreciating assets - they owned subprime mortgage debt, and they had fixed obligations as well. But if they wanted to borrow, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury made sure that they could as much credit as they wanted, against whatever collateral they had, for basically nothing. For instance, the Fed accepted almost $500 billion of CCC rated junk as collateral in loans. In other words, if you had a suburban tract home in the Inland Empire with a mortgage and a home equity line of credit, you were out of luck. But if you owned the debt on the home equity line of credit on that same suburban tract home home, you could have easily gone to the discount window or one of the emergency lending facilities and gotten cash with basically no interest charged.

In Group One are millions of Americans. In Group Two are Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and big American banks, European banks like Dexia, and a whole set of others who had access to the Fed, like the the Bank of Libya, and the wives of Wall Street titans (who had set up special purpose vehicles to take advantage of Fed lending). If you lost your job in 2009, too bad. If you had some savings at the bank or you are a retiree that relies on fixed income bonds, good luck getting more than 1% on your money. But if you were a hedge fund titan who realized that Bernanke had put a taxpayer guarantee against the entire banking system, you were swept up in high stock market returns from 2009-2010.

Sometimes this was even explicit; Geithner created one program in 2009, called the Public-Private Investment Program. Under this program, investors would buy toxic assets, but the government would protect them against much of the downside risk with public funds. In a deal with Citigroup, the Federal Reserve and Treasury took a little less than $300 billion of downside risk on "ring-fenced" bad assets. Oddly, there was no list of the assets when the deal was drawn up, that list would be created later. This is the equivalent of telling a friend if he lends you $25,000 now and you don't pay him back, you'll give him some of your random stuff, whatever you have lying around, later.

While these institutions were pleading with federal officials for bailouts, they were filling their coffers with campaign contributions and paying millions to swarm Capitol Hill to convince officials to bail them out.

And it worked.

During this same time period, Citi Group, which received $300 billion in tax dollars from the United States Treasury, spent more than approximately $13 million to influence lawmakers. Goldman Sachs spent $9 million on buying lawmakers in 2008.

And yes, there are individual scandals, like the government paying out a hundred cents on the dollar for credit default swaps that Goldman Sachs bought from AIG. That was simply a cash award to Goldman. There was Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan pawning off $30 billion of crappy Bear Stearns assets on the New York Federal Reserve, even as he sat on the board of the New York Federal Reserve. And there are the absurdly corrupt aspects of the bailouts, like the fact that the Fed subcontracted much of the actual work. The GAO bloodlessly noted that "most of the contracts, including 8 of the 10 highest-value contracts, were awarded noncompetitively, primarily due to exigent circumstances." Exigent? The upper tier even has its own language. There's also this excruciatingly corrupt point, which few have noticed: "FRBNY's existing restrictions on its employees' financial interests did not specifically prohibit investments in certain nonbank institutions that received emergency assistance." Yup, New York Fed employees could buy stock in companies they knew would benefit from their actions, as long as those companies were not banks. There has been no investigation, as far as I can tell, of whether they did so.

It's not the scandals that matter, or rather, it's that the scandals are the new norm that matters. The larger context here, what the Occupiers are protesting, is that Tim Geithner formalized a financial elite and gave them special rights they had not previously had, notably a government guarantee for their investing, rights which ordinary people don't get. You can see this in bank borrowing spreads; large banks get a subsidy of $34 billion of dollars a year, simply because investors think their bonds are backed by the US government. This is now written into law - Dodd-Frank requires regulators to draw up a list of systemically significant firms. These are pretty explicitly firms that are too big to fail.

Behind these investing advantages are legal advantages. No elite bankers have been prosecuted for the financial crisis, or the foreclosure crisis. NONE. And no, it's not hard to prosecute bankers, especially when they admit violating laws that are easily understandable and carry up to a year in jail, like the law saying you can't foreclose on active duty troops. This is something JP Morgan admitted doing 18 times in a Congressional hearing, yet the bank apparently got off with an apology. US Attorneys are busy prosecuting low level borrower scams, in a shameful display of how the Justice system has now become nothing but a sinecure for ambitious legal servants of the new class of American oligarchs. Meanwhile, if you're a homeowner with an underwater mortgage, you can't discharge your debt in bankruptcy, the way that corporations can or wealthy people can with second (or third or fourth) homes. And if a bank forges a document, or two or three or four, and uses it to foreclose without holding your mortgage note, well, no biggie. You have no rights as a debtor, but the bank has supreme rights as a creditor. Their money counts, yours does not.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dylan-ratigan/platinum-citizenship_b_1015571.html