DNC Protesters First Target: Bank Of America

  Yep. Forget about President Obama or his healthcare reform, gay marriage or abortion. The protesters started off the day protesting against Wall Street, with Bank of America being the first in their sites. Good for you, ladies and gentlemen!

The Charlotte Observer:

A group calling itself the Coalition to March on Wall Street South is scheduled to host a march in Charlotte on Sunday, stopping first at the bank’s corporate headquarters before winding its way past Bank of America Stadium.

“Despite the fact that the bailouts were four years ago, and there’s been officially declared an end to the recession, the everyday reality for people is a much different story,” said Ben Carroll, an organizer of the coalition. “People still see and feel in their everyday lives that the banks are responsible for so many injustices in their communities.”

It’s not just the view of protest groups.

Americans reported record-low confidence in U.S. banks this year in Gallup’s annual report, with only 21 percent saying they had confidence in banks and 35 percent saying they had very little or no confidence.

   It will be a hot day for marching and other outdoor activity in uptown Charlotte as the temperature is at 91 currently.

   Bring along the Gatorade and water if you plan on being uptown today because you are going to need it.

   So, why the protest? Because the industry is still playing their same old games:

• Citigroup shareholders rejected CEO Vikram Pandit’s $15 million pay package at the bank’s annual meeting this spring, the first time a major bank’s shareholders had done so in a symbolic “say on pay” vote.

• JPMorgan Chase & Co. revealed it lost billions in federally insured deposits on an oversized trading position that straddled the line between hedging and betting. CEO Jamie Dimon initially called discussion about it a “tempest in a teapot,” but he ended up on an apology tour that culminated in congressional hearings.

• Barclays PLC agreed to pay $453 million to settle allegations that the bank manipulated a key interest rate to demonstrate false confidence in banks and make money through trading. CEO Bob Diamond was forced to resign, and executives were made to answer to the British Parliament.

• Wells Fargo agreed to pay $175 million to resolve claims that its mortgage brokers discriminated against black and Hispanic borrowers, pushing them into higher-cost loans.

• News reports said that no criminal charges would be filed following investigations into the vanishing of $1 billion in customer money during the collapse of trading firm MF Global.

• And most recently, Standard Chartered PLC said it would pay $340 million to a New York state regulator to settle charges that the bank laundered money for the Iranian government.      Source

  Let’s not forget BofA’s attempt at raising debit-card fees. That bank screwed me out of some cash a few years back and I will never have anything positive to say about this criminal enterprise.

Technorati Tags: DNC,Charlotte,NC,Bank of America,Protesters,Wall Street,2012 Elections,Current Events,The Occupy Movement

Republicans Are Unfit To Lead (OpEd)

Taken from Addicting Info under Creative Commons License

By Terrence    August 27, 2012

“A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker [sic: prostitute].” —H.L. Mencken

Back in the good ole days, ‘political silly season’ typically ran from early summer until the first week of October of election years. Silly season was that time when candidates for office ran afoul of their message, producing gaffes that their opponents would use against them. But since the beginning of the Republican jihad… intifada… call it what you will, silly season has lasted all year long, every year. And the pronouncements by many of these candidates and office holders have gone from mere gaffes to something far more telling about them; that they are unfit to lead!

Take, for instance, Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and candidate for the second highest seat in land; the Republican Party views Ryan as their academic overachiever, their source for wisdom to lead this nation. Ryan’s source for his budget proposal and monetary policy came from Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ a fantasy novel, a fiction. And that budget Ryan is pushing centering on draconian cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and other programs that aid the needy would actually increase the deficit.

And then there’s Todd Akin; Akin currently sits on the House Science Committee. Todd Akin’s view that “raped women cannot conceive” comes from the 13th century, an English legal tome called Fleta, asserting pregnancy was “prima facie” proof sex was consensual. There is absolutely no science related to his view, and a high school biology course would have taught him his opinion was errant. Not to mention, does this not strike you as something that would come from al Qaeda or the Taliban?

And this isn’t just on the national level, Reuters reports a Republican candidate for county sheriff in New Hampshire, Frank Szabo, backed down from a suggestion he would use “deadly force” to stop doctors from performing abortions, saying he “let his imagination get out of control.” In Lubbock, Texas, Republican Tom Head, a judge for which minorities may have a valid appeal against their convictions due to his racism, called for raising taxes warning of ‘Civil War, Maybe’ if President Obama wins. According to Carol Morgan, blogging on the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal website, “The extreme right wing of the Republican Party; the Eagle Forum and John Birch Society members, are poisoning what used to be a group of solid citizens just a few years ago. It’s like a scene from an old movie, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’”

These are only some of the most recent examples of “people rising to their highest level of incompetence” in government. They bring to mind George Orwell’s “In our time [sic: 1948 Britain] political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” And considering who are receiving these house committee assignments, using economic-political connections instead of any merit, truly demonstrates just how corrupt much of our government has become.

Benjamin Franklin wrote: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Republicans are redefining corrupt and vicious, in red state after red state, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is disenfranchising 5 million voters (see ‘Voter ID laws: the Republican ruse to disenfranchise 5 million Americans‘), 3 percent of Democratic voters… and they are, by significant margins, Democratic voters, across the nation.

And while this circus is going on, Republicans are pursuing their end-game: enacting and making real Ayn Rand’s fantasy world. Paul Ryan, himself, voted to give Big Oil billions in taxpayer-funded handouts just one week after agreeing in a town hall meeting in Waterford, Wisconsin about the need to end subsidies to oil companies. Why would Ryan pull such a flip-flop? Because Ryan and his family are making thousands of dollars from oil companies that lease their land. So you might say that Ryan wants to place himself on the public dole in the stead of thousands of starving children.

Well it’s time to grow up. Here is an analogy to make it simple, some folk are unfit to leave the farm. Their rightful place in this world is behind a plow (humor: if not in front of it). For the world is simply too complex a place for them to wrap their feeble, little minds around it. And since ‘Newt and the boys’ purge of common sense from the Republican Party, one is very hard-pressed to find a single Republican up to that task, especially when they live within a delirium based upon a fantasy.

So let us start demanding some justice, justice against the perpetrators of the civil rights abuses from ALEC, justice against office holders corrupting our government for the benefit of the one percent, justice against the one percent financing the corruption of our government, and let us demand accountability!

D.H. Lawrence wrote: “Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves.” Let us not bequeath to our children and grandchildren slavery.

Technorati Tags: The Republican Party,Conservatives,The Tea Party,Paul Ryan,Mitt Romney,Todd Akin,2012 Elections,Current Events