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

Illegal Immigrants Protesting At DNC. WTF?

   Okay people, I’m telling you right from the start that this post is going to contain a little bit of fowl language because this story flat-out pisses me the fuck off! If you cannot handle some bad words…leave.

   From the Charlotte Observer:

All of them risked deportation to demand greater rights for undocumented immigrants.

They, along with 22 others, arrived in Charlotte Saturday evening on the “Undocubus.”

The bus riders are part of a group of some four dozen riders who will converge on uptown Sunday for the March on Wall Street South.

The group left Phoenix in July in a small caravan led by a 1972 tour bus emblazoned with the words “Sin Papeles Sin Miedo” and “No Papers, No Fear.”

   That’s just the beginning since our lovely Department of homeland Security has told law enforcement to keep their hands off of these illegals.

“I think it’s outrageous that they’re thumbing their nose at federal and United States law by parading themselves around the country and advertising that they’re illegal aliens in the country, and no one is taking action against them,” Pendergraph said.

He said he’s heard that local law enforcement was told not to arrest people on the Undocubus.

“Actually, I’ve spoken to people from Homeland Security, and that’s what people have told them, is hands off,” he said.

Since May 2006, 20,710 inmates at Mecklenburg County Jail have been identified as undocumented immigrants.

   What is wrong with this fucking picture? These mother-fuckers are here illegally, thus breaking the law, and yet they can’t be arrested and sent back to their native countries? These bitches are going to protest because they think that they don’t have enough rights? Here’s a fucking right that I’ll give you assholes, okay? If you don’t like the rights that you have in America, being here un-lawfully, then you have the right to go the fuck back to Mexico, criminals!

Technorati Tags: Illegal Immigrants,Immigration,Protesters,DNC,Charlotte,DHS,Current Events,2012 Elections

194 Things Obama Has Done… PART 1

   …and this is not all of them. I am splitting this list into 3 posts because it is a long read. Pass this around to your conservative friends. From PCTC:

He Returned The Executive Branch To Fiscal Responsibility After the Bush Debacle

1. Within his first week, he signed an Executive Order ordering an audit of government contracts, and combating waste and abuse.   http://1.usa.gov/...

2. Created the post of Chief Performance Officer, whose job it is to make operations more efficient to save the federal government money.   http://n.pr/...

3. On his first full day, he froze White House salaries.  http://on.msnbc.com/...

4. He appointed the first Federal Chief Information Officer to oversee federal IT spending. http://www.cio.gov

5. He committed to phasing out unnecessary and outdated weapons systems. To that end, he also signed the Democratic-sponsored Weapons Systems Acquisition Reform Act, which attempted to put a stop to waste, fraud and abuse in the defense procurement and contracting system.  http://bit.ly/... http://bit.ly/...

6. Through an executive order, he created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.  http://bit.ly/...

He Improved the Economy, Preventing a Bush Depression

7. Pushed through and signed the Democratic-sponsored American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as “the stimulus package.” The bill passed, even though only three Republicans voted for it. In a major departure from the previous administration, he launched recovery.gov, a website that allows taxpayers to track spending from the Act.   http://1.usa.gov/... http://1.usa.gov/...

8. The Bush-led Great Recession was costing the economy nearly 800,000 jobs per month by the time President Obama took office. But by the end of his first year, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act created and sustained 2.1 million jobs and stimulated the economyby  3.5%.  http://reut.rs/...

9. Not only did he completed the massive TARP financial and banking rescue plan, he also leaned on the banks and others, and recovered virtually all of the bail-out money. http://1.usa.gov/... http://bit.ly/...

10. He created the Making Home Affordable home refinancing plan.  http://1.usa.gov/...

11. Oversaw the creation of more jobs in 2010 alone than Bush did in eight years. http://bit.ly/...

12. Along with Democrats, and almost no Republicans, implemented an auto industry rescue plan, and saved as many as 1 million jobs.  http://bit.ly/...   Many are of the opinion that he saved the entire auto industry, and even the economy of the entire Midwest.  http://bit.ly/... This resulted in GM returning to its place as the top car company in the world.  http://lat.ms/... Willard Romney, on the other hand, advocated for the entire industry to go belly-up. http://nyti.ms/...

13. Doubled funding for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, which is designed to improve manufacturing efficiency.  http://bit.ly/...

14. Signed the Democratic-sponsored Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act giving the federal government more tools to investigate and prosecute fraud in every corner of the financial system, and create a bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to investigate the financial fraud that led to the economic meltdown.  http://abcn.ws/...

15. Signed the Democratic-sponsored Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act, which was designed to to protect consumers from unfair and deceptive credit card practices.  http://1.usa.gov/...

16. Increased infrastructure spending after years of neglect. http://bit.ly/...

17. Signed the Democratic-sponsored and passed Helping Families Save Their Homes Act, expanding on the Making Home Affordable Program to help millions of Americans avoid preventable foreclosures. The bill also provided $2.2 billion to help combat homelessness, and to stabilize the housing market.  http://bit.ly/...

18. Through the Worker, Homeownership, and Business Assistance Act of 2009, he and Congressional Democrats provided tax credits to first-time home buyers, which helped the U.S. housing market recovery.   http://bit.ly/... http://bit.ly/...

19. Initiated a $15 billion plan designed to encourage increased lending to small businesses. http://1.usa.gov/...

20. Created business.gov, which allows for online collaboration between small businesses and experts re managing a business. (The program has since merged with SBA.gov.)   http://www.business.gov

21. Played a lead role in getting the G-20 Summit to commit to a $1.1 trillion deal to combat the global financial crisis.   http://nyti.ms/...

22. Took steps to improve minority access to capital. http://bit.ly/...

23. Signed an Executive Order instructing federal agencies to review all federal regulations and remove any unnecessary and/or burdensome regulations from the books.  http://1.usa.gov/...

24. Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, saved at least 300,000 education jobs, such as teachers, principals, librarians, and counselors that would have otherwise been lost.   http://1.usa.gov/...

25. Dismantled the Minerals Management Service, thereby cutting ties between energy companies and the government. http://nyti.ms/...

26. Along with Congressional Democrats, provided funding to states and the Department of Homeland Security to save thousands of police and firefighter jobs from being cut during the recession.  http://bit.ly/...

27. Used recovered TARP money to fund programs at local housing finance agencies in California, Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Michigan.   http://on.msnbc.com/...

28. Crafted an Executive order establishing the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability to assist in financial education for all Americans. http://bit.ly/...

He Fostered Greater Transparency and Better Government, After the Excesses of the Bush Years

29. Signed an order banning gifts from lobbyists to anyone in the Executive Branch.  http://bit.ly/...

30. Signed an order banning anyone from working in an agency they had lobbied in previous years, and put strict limits on lobbyists’ access to the White House.   http://nyti.ms/...

31. Held the first-ever first online town hall from the White House, and took questions from the public.  http://bit.ly/...

32. Became the first to stream every White House event, live.  http://1.usa.gov/...

33. Established a central portal for Americans to find service opportunities.   http://www.serve.gov

34. Provided the first voluntary disclosure of the White House Visitors Log in history.  http://1.usa.gov/...

35. Issued an Executive Order on Presidential Records, which restored the 30-day time frame for former presidents to review records, and eliminated the right for the vice president or family members of former presidents to do the reviews. Provides the public with greater access to historic  White House documents, and severely curtails the ability to use executive privilege to shield them.  http://1.usa.gov/...

36. Improved aspects of the Freedom of Information Act, and issued new guidelines to make FOIA more open and transparent when processing FOIA requests.  http://1.usa.gov/...

Wall Street Reforms and Consumer Protection

37. Ordered 65 executives who took bailout money to cut their own pay until they paid back all bailout money.  http://huff.to/...

38. Along with Congressional Democrats, pushed through and got passed Dodd-Frank, one of the largest and most comprehensive Wall Street reforms since the Great Depression.  http://bit.ly/... http://bit.ly/...

39. Through Dodd-Frank legislation, created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau  http://1.usa.gov/...

40. Through Dodd-Frank, the Executive Branch fashioned rules that reduce the influence of speculators in the oil market.  http://bit.ly/...

41. Fashioned rules so that banks can no longer use YOUR money to invest in high-risk financial instruments that work against their own customers' interests.  http://bit.ly/...

42. Supported the concept of allowing stockholders to vote on executive compensation.  http://bit.ly/...

43. Endorsed and supported the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of 2009 that would close offshore tax avoidance loopholes.   http://bit.ly/... http://bit.ly/...

44. Negotiated a deal with Swiss banks that now permits the US government to gain access to the records of criminals and  tax evaders.  http://bit.ly/...

45. Signed the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act, which closed many of the loopholes that allowed companies to send jobs overseas, and avoid paying US taxes by moving money offshore.  http://1.usa.gov/...

46. Established a Consumer Protection Financial Bureau designed to protect consumers from financial sector excesses.  http://bit.ly/...

47. Oversaw and then signed a Democratic bill constituting the most sweeping food safety legislation since the Great Depression.  http://thedc.com/...

48. Through the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, extended the False Claims Act to combat fraud by companies and individuals usingmoney from the TARP and Stimulus programs.  http://bit.ly/...

He Ushered Through Many Changes That Enhanced Civil Rights and Anti-Discrimination

49. Along with Congressional Democrats, advocated for and signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which made it a federal crime to assault anyone based on his or her sexual orientation or gender identity.  http://bit.ly/...

50. Pushed through, signed and demanded the Pentagon enact a repeal of the discriminatory “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy that forced soldiers to lie in order to be eligible to fight for their country, and put our troops at risk by disqualifying many qualified soldiers from helping.  http://bit.ly/... http://bit.ly/...

51. Extended benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.  http://1.usa.gov/...

52. Appointed more openly gay officials than anyone in history.  http://bit.ly/...

53. Appointed first openly transgender Cabinet Official in History.  http://bit.ly/...

54. Changed HUD rules to prohibit gender and sexual orientation-based discrimination in housing   bit.ly/9RxEnP 

55. Changed his mind and publicly expressed support for the right to enter into a same-sex marriage.  http://bit.ly/...

56. Issued a Presidential Memorandum reaffirming the rights of gay couples to make medical decisions for each other. http://1.usa.gov/...

57. Wrote and signed an Executive Order establishing a White House Council on Women and Girls to ensure that all Cabinet and Cabinet-level agencies evaluate the effect of their policies and programs on women and families.     http://bit.ly/... http://1.usa.gov/...

58. Signed the Democratic-sponsored Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which restored basic protections against pay discrimination for women and other workers. This was after the GOP blocked the bill in 2007. Only 5 Republican Senators voted for the bill.   http://bit.ly/...

59. Expanded funding for the Violence Against Women Act. http://1.usa.gov/...

60. Under his guidance, National Labor Relations Board issued final rules that require all employers to prominently post employees' rights where all employees or prospective employees can see it, including websites and intranets, beginning November 2011.  http://1.usa.gov/...

61. Advocated that United Nations adopt a policy supporting gay rights worldwide.  http://lat.ms/...

62. Issued an order requiring hospitals to allow visitation by same-sex couples.   reut.rs/llNJek

63. Appointed Kareem Dale as the first ever Special Assistant to the President for Disability Policy.  http://1.usa.gov/...

64. Helped Democrats in Congress pass and signed the Civil Rights History Act. http://bit.ly/...

He Made Major Improvements in Foreign Relations and American Status Around the World

65. Visited more countries and met with more world leaders than any previous president during his first six months in office.   http://bit.ly/...

Technorati Tags: Brack Obama,President,PCTC Blog,2012 Elections,Politics,Current Events