Year: 2011

Osama bin Laden Won

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OK, it’s the 10th anniversary of 911, and looking back, I can draw no other conclusion.

As a result of the events of that day we are:

  • Embroiled in two ruinously expensive wars, neither of which has any meaningful end in sight.
  • Have no money for even the most basic infrastructure.
  • Have set up a state security apparatus that is structured, and frequently functions, as the core pillar of a police state.
  • Have convinced the generation after mine that the idea of a unipolar world, with US military and Hegemony is foolish.
  • Has turned us into torturers.
  • Has set to policies that create more terrorists.
  • Has massively expanded and radicalized, the right wing.

I would suggest that anyone who hasn’t read Eric Frank Russell’s magnum opus Wasp, in which a man is sent to be an agent provocateur on the planet of an empire at war with Earth, and his mission is not to collect intelligence or do damage, but rather to provoke an overreaction by the authorities:

“Phew!” Mowry raised his eyebrows.

“Finally, let’s consider this auto smash. We know the cause; the survivor was able to tell us before he died. He said the driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and started buzzing around his face.”

“It nearly happened to me once.”

Ignoring that, Wolf went on, “The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being its size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid, and in this case it didn’t even use it. Nevertheless it killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap.”

………

“However,” Wolf went on, “the problem becomes less formidable than it looks if we bear in mind that one man can shake a government, two men temporarily can put down an army twenty-seven thousands strong, or one small wasp can slay four comparative giants and destroy their huge machine into the bargain.” He paused, watching the other for effect, continued, “Which means that by scrawling suitable words upon a wall, the right man in the right place at the right time might immobilize an armoured division with the aid of nothing more than a piece of chalk.”

The country has changed, and none of these changes to our benefit, and none of them were really required, but rather the product of mindless over-reaction.

We are those drivers in that doomed car.

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!! (Much Delayed)

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I didn’t do anything over the past two weeks, because 2 weeks ago, there were none, and last week, I was busy getting ready for the SCA event, but there were 2 failures on the 2nd, and 1 this past Friday.

And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

  1. Patriot Bank of Georgia,Cumming, GA
  2. CreekSide Bank,Woodstock, GA
  3. First National Bank of Florida,Milton, FL

Full FDIC list

So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

It looks like it’s going to be a lot less than 2011, but it’s still gonna be a really bad year.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Alphonse “Da Woim” D’amato Wants the Banks Prosecuted

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He’s come out against the big banks and for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman:

New York state’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, is making national news regarding his opposition to a nationwide $20 billion foreclosure settlement involving some of the largest banks over questionable foreclosure practices and mortgage abuses.

While I didn’t support Schneiderman in the 2010 election, he deserves to be applauded for standing up to the big banks and some of the questionable practices that have attributed to America’s economic downturn.

Last Oct. 13, the attorneys general from all 50 states announced that they would join forces to investigate the bank foreclosure practices after there were several reports of faulty documents being used in the seizure of homes. Thirteen of the attorneys general serve on an executive committee, working with the Department of Justice and various other federal agencies to negotiate a settlement with the five largest mortgage servicers in the United States: Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Ally Financial.

Shaun Donovan, the secretary of housing and urban development, and other members of the Obama administration have been pressuring Schneiderman to go along with and support the settlement. It has been an intense campaign to change our attorney general’s mind.

Schneiderman has held his ground, and throughout the negotiations maintained the belief that the proposed $20 billion, which would mostly be designated to pay for loan modifications instead of going directly to Americans who were harmed by the banks’ practices, was not enough money. Also, if the banks and executive committee reached an agreement, it would prevent any further litigation or investigations against the large banks.

As a result of Schneiderman’s holdout, on Aug. 24 it was reported that he was “removed from a leadership role in negotiating a nationwide foreclosure settlement with U.S. banks.”
Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, who is heading the executive committee, accused Schneiderman of “actively working to undermine the very same multistate group that it had spent the previous nine months working very closely with.”

Bravo, Mr. Attorney General!

………

By pressuring the attorneys general’s executive committee to pass this fruitless proposal, President Obama and his administration are allowing the big banks, generous campaign contributors, to once again get away unscathed for their chancy and untrustworthy practices. In times like these, we need leaders like Schneiderman to challenge the big banks, making sure that victims receive justice and restitution and that overall reform changes the mortgage industry.

To allow a settlement to be reached that hinders future investigations into large banks’ foreclosure and mortgage practices is criminal. Fight on, Mr. Attorney General.

I don’t think that Mr. D’Amato’s motives are completely benign: As a Republican, he has vested interest in criticizing the Obama administration, and has never been particularly interested in pursuing corruption.

What he does know is how to pander to his constituents, and he clearly sees the enthusiastic embrace of Wall Street, and explicit toleration of its endemic corruption, by the Obama administration to be a political miss-step.

I agree, and I would further add that it’s also good policy, as we are creating moral hazard by not prosecuting the banksters.

Well, Here’s Some Good News

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‘Phant John Mica, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has decided that it’s too politically costly to shut down the FAA over his desire for union busting:

Unions were breathing a sigh of relief Friday morning after House Republicans punted a contentious anti-union issue preventing funding for the Federal Aviation Administration to the end of December, providing back pay to agency workers and giving opponents more time to organize and fight GOP-backed anti-labor provisions.

Rep. John Mica (R-FL), who chairs the the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, introduced a clean short-term extension of the FAA through December providing back pay to workers who were furloughed for nearly two weeks during a partial shutdown of the agency earlier this month. House GOP leaders plan to vote on the bill next week.

The extension, which cuts the agency’s overall budget by 5 percent, will be the 22nd for the agency since 2007, the last time Congress passed a full authorization bill. In the intervening years, Congress has failed to pass the measure over a dispute about modernizing the nation’s air traffic control system, but this year, the real sticking point for Democrats, was a GOP demand to change recently instituted federal labor regulation that made it easier for unions to organize at airline companies.

My guess is that some of his constituents at his town meetings gave him an earful over his union busting resulting in the layoffs of thousands of workers.

The next stage for the Dems should be to figure out why he folded, and rinse, lather, and repeat, but they won’t.

The Term for This Is Chillul Hashem*

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In this case, it’s “Rabbi” Moshe Zigelman, who is refusing to testify in a money laundering and tax evasion trial:

As U.S. District Judge Margaret Morrow contemplated federal law from her bench Wednesday morning, more than a dozen ultra-orthodox Jewish men with yarmulkes and sidelocks looked on in the courtroom. One held open a gilt-edged, elaborately embossed copy of the Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, tracing lines of the Hebrew text with his finger.

Appearing before the judge was Rabbi Moshe Zigelman, a 64-year-old devout Hasid who was refusing to testify before a federal grand jury, citing an ancient Jewish principle that forbids informing on other Jews.

Zigelman was ordered to testify in a tax-evasion case involving his Brooklyn-based Hasidic sect Spinka. He had earlier invoked the same principle, known as mesira, when he pleaded guilty to his part in the scheme in 2008 but refused to cooperate with authorities or testify in trial. He was sentenced to two years in prison.

What was going on here is that they were accepting “donations”, which the donors declared on their taxes, and then, after taking about 10-20% vigorish, they funneled funds back to the donors via an Israeli bank.(Wiki here)

First, lets be clear that clergy privilege does not apply here. This creep was a co-conspirator, not someone providing counseling.

What’s more, according to Shmarya Rosenberg’s excellent analysis, as well as those of normative Jewish scholars, mesira does not apply:

There are textbook exceptions to mesira even for those who hold that mesira applies in a democracy.

One of those exceptions is when the government knows certain people are guilty but needs testimony from one of them or another Jew to convict or capture the others. (In other words, there is a difference between speculation and knowledge.

Another exception is when refusing to give the government the information makes it seem as if Jews (or Orthodox Jews) do not follow or respect the country’s laws.

Hasidim use mesira to hide crimes and to enforce order in their communities.

It has nothing to do with the original intent of the mesira law, which was meant to save Jews from unjust punishments meted out by antisemitic governments, and from the unscrupulous Jews who used informing to hurt business opponents and social enemies, to extort them, and to gain favor from antisemitic government officials.

But in a democracy like the US, the fear of antisemitic unjust punishments does not apply.

The law of mesira would then only apply to spiteful informing done to settle personal grudges and the like, and it would not apply if the government was already convinced the subject is guilty.

In Rabbi Moshe Zigelman’s case, the government already knows Zigelman is guilty of money laundering, and it has already put the Spinka rebbe and others in prison. And it knows there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other co-conspirators, and it knows many of their names.

This is actually far more charitable than I would be.

Zigelman is not just a witness, he is an active co-conspirator, who is using mesira to cover his own corrupt tuchas.†

It is also, of course a Shanda before the Goyim, in that it allows the antisemites of the world to claim that Jews consider themselves above the law and cover up for each other.

This makes a mockery of the concept of Or LaGoyim,‡, which stipulates that Jews are to be held to higher standards, and not cover up each others corruption.

*Literally, a ““Desecration of God’s Name.”
†Ass.
‡Light unto the nations.

I Didn’t Know that Moose Went to UMass

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Because this story brings back some memories:

A man in western Sweden came home from work Tuesday night to find a drunken moose stuck in his neighbor’s tree.

The moose had apparently climbed part way up into the tree to reach an apple where it became stuck with only one hoof on the ground and the other three up in the tree, tangled in the limbs and branches of the tree.

When Per Johansson arrived home from work, he told reporters that he heard a bellowing noise coming from his neighbor’s yard.

I don’t think that I ever got that drunk at UMass, I was medically prohibited from drinking during my sojourn there, but I certainly dealt with people who were that drunk.

H/t Littledog at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Pimping My Brother’s Blog

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That’s the Chicago Way

My older (and even hairier, as unbelievable as it seems) brother segues off my report of the Republican party in Gabrielle Giffords district raffling off the same sort of gun that she was shot with to observe that this behavior will get worse unless their opposition goes after the for this:

What I found interesting was one section of a quote here that Miller made about the reactionary bloc, who he described as being:

“…’my way or the highway’ wing of the GOP who don’t pay much thought  to the political fallout [emphasis added] from their actions…”

This is a “curious incident of the dog in the night-time” (The Silver Blaze).

There is no fallout.

There is no a concerted campaign to broadcast and hammer this sort of actions, despite the fact this tactic has been so successful for the reactionary bloc.

Where are the adds from the DNC, MoveOn, and rest of the ‘progressive’ community calling this out, pointing out that this sort of behavior is the core of the political right.

It is the same point that Sean Connery makes in The Untouchables.

I share his pessimism that, “this idea doesn’t seem to percolate through the skulls of people who think community organizing, or triangulation, or patronage is the peak of politics. So we drift on unarmed.”

Until we find people who understand the idea that all negotiations stem from perceived power, and Barack Obama is not one of these people, we will continue to have the “Adults in the room” held hostage by the terrorists.

And the Daily Show Writers Rejoice

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Yes, the wife of wrestling magnate Jim McMahon, Linda, following a failed campaign in which she dumped millions of her husbands dollars on a epically failed campaign for the Senate in 2010, has decided to run again for the Connecticut Senate seat:

Linda E. McMahon, the wrestling mogul who spent $50 million of her own money in an aggressive but failed Senate run in Connecticut last year, will announce in the coming week that she will try again, according to two Republicans who are close to her.

Ms. McMahon, the two Republicans said, will seek the party nomination next year for the seat being vacated by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and who announced that he would not run for re-election. They requested anonymity to avoid being seen as upstaging Ms. McMahon’s announcement.

Her candidacy has the potential to alter the calculations of other candidates and potential candidates, if only because she has demonstrated an ability to finance a statewide campaign with little difficulty.

In last year’s Senate race, Ms. McMahon built a formidable political organization in just months and then led a hard-charging campaign that transformed a political newcomer into a highly visible figure in the state.

In the end, however, Ms. McMahon, the former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, lost to Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.

This time, Ms. McMahon plans to raise money from private donors instead of relying strictly on her own money, according to one Republican close to her. She decided to take this approach partly because of criticism last year that she was using her wealth to buy herself a seat in the Senate, the Republican said.

And because she understands the concept of throwing good money after bad, so she is looking for some useful idiots.

Still the comedic possibilities are endless.

It’s Jobless Thursday, and the Numbers Suck Again

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With initial claims worse than forecast, with an increase to 414,000 initial applications, with the 4 week moving average rising as well, though continuing claims fell slightly.

When you look at this, and a weak Beige Book from the Fed, and the fact that there were absolutely no jobs created in August, the idea that we are in any sort of recovery is laughable.

We’re in a deflationary spiral, and the already inadequate stimulus has been on the down slope for over 6 months, and somehow or other people believe that the austerity fairy will solve things, when it’s actually going to make it worse.

Cheesehead Jim Crow

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Wisconsin passes a voter ID law, which included a provision for a free voter ID card, and now the head of the Wisconsin DOT has instructed his staff to do their best to conceal this fact from potential voters:

An internal memo from a top Department of Transportation official instructs workers at Division of Motor Vehicles service centers not to tell members of the public that they can obtain voter identification cards free of charge — unless they know to ask for it.

The memo, recently obtained by The Capital Times, was written by Steve Krieser and sent to all state Department of Transportation and Department of Motor Vehicles employees on July 1, the same day employees were to begin issuing photo IDs in accordance with a controversial new voter photo ID law adopted earlier in the year.

As laid out in the memo, failure to check a box when applying for photo ID with the Division of Motor Vehicles will result in the payment of $28. Interviews conducted about the memo suggest the state is more interested in continuing to charge the fee, which is required for a photo ID used for non-voting purposes, than it is in removing all barriers and providing easy access to a free, photo ID.

“While you should certainly help customers who come in asking for a free ID to check the appropriate box, you should refrain from offering the free version to customers who do not ask for it,” Krieser writes to employees.

Like this is not a blatant attempt at voter suppression.

As to “Bull” Kreiser’s response when the story broke, he’s saying that:

In the meantime, Krieser says the Department of Transportation is planning to place signs at each of the DMV service offices that say people need to check the box on the form in order to receive an ID for free. He says the signs are “in the design phase” and could not give a date when they would be placed in DMV offices.

My guess is that there some serious typography issues here, so it will be 2022 before the signs are ready.

A family friend of ours grew up in Mississippi, and is old enough to remember the literacy tests.

Hers was straight forward, a simple section of the Mississippi constitution, and when she finished, the clerk says with a smile, “You should see the ones [section] we use for the n*****s.”

This feels just the same.

I’m Glad to Know that I am Not Alone

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It appears that Matt Taibbi feels the same way:

I was in an airport in Florida yesterday and was forced into a terrible, Sophie’s Choice-type choice.

I was hours early for a flight and stuck in a relatively small terminal crammed with people. Only one area in the whole wing had empty seats; an unused gate that contained a TV blaring the CNN broadcast of Obama’s Labor Day speech at full volume.

So it was either sit underneath a full-volume broadcast of our fearless president bellowing out his latest hollow promises, or the hellish alternative: retreat to gates full of screaming five year-old children, all of them jacked up on sugar and bawling their eyes out because it was the end of Labor Day weekend and their cruel parents were dragging them home from Disneyworld.

I ended up choosing the screaming children. The one open seat in a nearby gate was next to an extended family of Indian tourists. A four year-old boy from that group wearing a cape and brandishing a plastic light saber thought it was funny when he kept saber-swiping at my knees. But sitting through that was better than having to listen to Obama drape himself in Harry Trumanisms and talk about “shared prosperity.”

The interesting thing here is that I get the sense that Taibbi actually feels a sense of betrayal, while I’ve been down on Obama since 2007, so I can’t say that he ever raised my hopes, which makes my visceral distaste for him a bit more puzzling.

Hoocoodanode? The Frogs, That’s Hoocoodanode

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Yes, Wikileaks, the gift that keeps on giving,™ has yet more beneath the rocks information on just how f%$#ed up Wall Street was.

It turns out that the French were desperately warning the US Treasury Department that a crash was inevitable, because of endemic fraud in our financial system:

In 2007 top US and France officials knew rampant fraud being committed by regulators, rating agencies and Wall Street Banks would soon cause a global financial collapse.

While investors and nations around the world were happily giving trillions of dollars away to crooked Wall Street bankers top officials in the United States and France knew the market would soon collapse and people would be robbed of millions.

While raising the issue that the role of government regulators and rating agencies needed to be reviewed in the wake of the upcoming crisis, US officials ignored calls from the French government to enact necessary regulation to stop the rampant fraud that would soon result in investors losing tens of trillions of dollars they had invested into the markets.

The cable reveals that while discussing the ability of the French banks to survive the crisis, French President Sarkozy was pushing the US to enact regulations to forestall the crisis. Instead, Henry Paulson responded by telling Sarkozy not to overreacted because the” it would take months, not weeks, for credit to be re-priced” telling France this is “not a major crisis.”

Paulson went on to warn that the major problem was with the German banks and which would require a bailout from the taxpayer while warning that the assets held by banks but covered up from investors by being held off-balance sheet presented systematic risk to banks and to sovereign wealth.

The cable clearly reveals that taxpayer bailouts would be needed. Paulson further up sticks up for the Wall Street hedge fund saying they were not to blame for the crisis while acknowledging there were major Wall Street transparency issues.

To summarize, the cable reveals that top government officials in France and the US knew Wall street banks were committing fraud in the origination and packaging of sub-prime mortgage and lying to investors about the resulting securities they were creating and selling. Officials knew banks were also lying about their own liabilities and hiding them from investors by keeping the assets off their balance sheets. The government also knew that both regulators and ratings agencies were participating in the scheme.

So our regulatory apparatus was aware of deep and systemic control fraud on the part of our largest financial institutions over a year before the house of cards collapsed, but decided to do nothing.

This was no Black Swan.  This was a blatant and systemic looting of the system, with implicit taxpayer backstop.

Where are the prosecutions?

As an aside, the most tightly held secrets held by our state security apparatus are not about protecting the nation and its citizens, but rather about protecting the most powerful amongst us from embarrassment and ridicule.

We really need to embed the Swedish concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness) into our constitution.

H/t DC on the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Normally, I Don’t Think that a Politician’s Ethnicity Explains Much…

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But I think that there are times when they do provide a window into what someone is going to do.

Case in point, all signs indicate that Barack Obama will be singing the praises of a program called “Georgia Works” in his jobs speech on Thursday.

The program is best described as, “sending out jobless Americans on meager unemployment compensation stipends to work for free,” which.”tries to turn unemployment insurance into a kind of sing-for-your-supper ‘workfare” program.”

And there is also the fact that the program does not work:

According to data from the Georgia Department of Labor provided to the Huffington Post, just 16.4 percent of workers who participated in this program between 2003 when the program started and 2010 got hired by the company where they were placed, and only 24 percent got jobs at all. Currently, exactly 19 people are enrolled.

Obama’s characterization sounds more like Danish or Swedish active labor market policy, where government subsidizes serious retraining and then subsidizes wages. But the Georgia program, now run by a very right-wing Republican state administration, is a far cry from that.

Georgia’s top weekly benefit is just $330.

With unemployment stubbornly above 9 percent, and above 15 percent if you count discouraged workers and part-timers seeking full-time work, this program doesn’t make a dent in the problem. It doesn’t create jobs. It simply alters who gets available jobs, while putting downward pressure on wages. As Obama’s suggests, Smith gets his foot in the door ahead of Jones, by offering to work for free.

Why would Obama be interested in such weak tea?

First, there is no additional cost to government.

Second, it has a nice corporate, free-market flavor.

Third, it appeals to Republicans. Obama is fearful that Republicans may block the next extension of unemployment insurance, and this Republican-style embellishment might be part of a bipartisan deal.

Basically, it’s internship as slavery, which is expanding on the private level, and will now appear to have state sanction.

So, how does Obama’s ethnicity factor into this? Well, unlike most Americans of Sub-Saharan extraction, Barack Obama is not descended from slaves, rather, he is descended from slave owners, so he might have a rosier view of slavery as a way of addressing unemployment.

Meet the New Boss, Same As the Old Boss

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What can I say, but, “Let’s see some windmill chords”

Obama just killed the EPA’s attempt to make our air cleaner:

President Barack Obama today directed EPA to drop its highly controversial effort to set, under the auspices of the Clean Air Act, more stringent standards for ground-level ozone pollution, a key constituent of smog. Obama cited the need to reduce regulatory burdens and uncertainty among the business community in light of the struggling economy.

“With that in mind, and after careful consideration, I have requested that [EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson] withdraw the draft Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards at this time,” the President said.

The Clean Air Act requires EPA to review the standards for ground-level ozone once every five years. The standards include a “primary” standard for protecting public health and a “secondary” one aimed at safeguarding crops and the environment.

In 2008, the George W. Bush Administration set both standards at 75 ppb. But In January 2010, Jackson proposed tightening the standards to somewhere between 60 and 70 ppb, a range recommended by the agency’s scientific advisory committee.

Obama noted that the current ozone standard is due for review and possible revision again in two years.

It appears that there is not a single bit of Bush administration malfeasance that Obama won’t go to the wall to support.

What’s a few thousand dead kids and seniors over the prospect of a few million dollars in campaign contributions from polluters, after all?

Labor Day News that Will Be Thoroughly Buried

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Did you see the story on the news about thousands of nurses lobbying congressmen for a tax on financial transactions fund essential services and infrastructure:

From the Atlantic to the Pacific, an estimated 10,000 nurses and community participants joined actions in 21 states today demanding immediate attention to the economic crisis to heal America.

They called on Senators and Congress members in their local district offices to pledge to “support a Wall Street transaction tax that will raise sufficient revenue to make Wall Street pay for the devastation it has caused on Main Street.”

Did you hear about that on the news?

Neither did I.

(rest of press release after the break)

Events from soup kitchens to feeding the hungry, to community speak outs, to street theater took place from urban centers including Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Orlando, to smaller towns, such as Corpus Christi, TX, Marquette, MI, and Dayton, OH. National Nurses United, the largest U.S. union of nurses with 170,000 members, sponsored the actions.

In Richmond, VA, 120 RNs and allies descended on the office of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and were greeted by a squadron of police. The RNs responded with singing and a large picket line. Cantor’s office invited a delegation to meet with his chief of staff. Fifteen constituents lead by NNU nurses held the meeting.. Cantor’s staff heard moving testimony and said the congressman would “respond.” The local CBS and NBC stations filmed outside, as they were not allowed in. A “Lady Liberty” character greeted the delegation on Cantor’s office lawn as it exited the meeting, and heard stories of the pain caused on Main Street by Wall Street.

“America’s nurses every day see broad declines in health and living standards that are a direct result of patients and families struggling with lack of jobs, un-payable medical bills, hunger and homelessness. We know where to find the resources to bring them hope and real solutions,” said NNU Co-president Karen Higgins, RN, outside Cantor’s office.

Ringing a bell and shouting “Oye Oye,” a town crier dressed in colonial attire drew a crowd of nearly 200 nurses, activists and passersby as he decried the reckless actions of Wall Street and its impact on the working people of Boston’s Main Street in front of the office of Senator Scott Brown.

Watch a video of the Boston event at this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejgeLElHVkI and see a photo below.

In Pueblo, CO, a pledge delivered to Senator Udall asked “which side is the senator on: Wall Street or Main Street?”

One hundred people attempted to enter Senator Toomey’s office near Philadelphia but were blocked by security guards. At Rep. Peter King’s Long Island, New York office, 50 nurses and supporters entered his office to serve up the pledge but were kept out. See photo below.

Chicago’s nurses sang the blues as hundreds of nurses and others gathered in support of the pledge. See photo below.

The staff of Senator Rubio in Orlando, FL is accompanying nurses to feed local homeless. In downtown San Francisco a soup kitchen was assembled to feed the hungry and drew more than 500.

And outside the office of Rep. Darryl Issa, north of San Diego, a crowd of 300 nurses, including members of other unions and area residents, expressed outrage at allegations of self dealing by the congressman. An RN delegation entered his office and delivered the pledge. Outside, community members shared stories of enduring economic hardships. See picture below.

Nurses visited home offices of Republicans and Democrats throughout the day with a common message – American families are hurting, and they need jobs, healthcare, housing, quality education, nutrition, and a secure retirement.

In addition, the RNs are releasing data where available contrasting contributions the legislators have received from Wall Street with the plummeting economic conditions in their districts that has left substantial numbers of their constituents in crisis.

Rep. Paul Ryan, for example, a Wisconsin Republican, has accepted $2,417,672 in campaign contributions from Wall Street financial institutions the past 12 years, as a champion for Wall Street interests. But the payoff has been small for his district where 69,241 people are uninsured, 22,884 are dependent on food stamps, and 20,394 children and 7,939 seniors live in poverty.

Similarly, Sen. Michael Bennett of Colorado, a Democrat, has collected $2,409,806 in campaign contributions from Wall Street interests while his state languishes in the top 10 in foreclosures, has 184,689 children in poverty, 116,941 people dependent on food stamps, and 13,390 homeless.

NNU will also be calling for the establishment of Main Street commissions to push real solutions for Main Street communities, such as the Wall Street financial tax, in comparison to what NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro calls “the Wall Street ‘super committee’ set up in the recent debt ceiling deal whose main goal seems to be more cuts in programs that help people to funnel more resources to Wall Street and foreign banks and investors.”

A tax on Wall Street trading of stocks, derivatives, currencies, credit default swaps, and futures – which many other nations have now adopted – could raise hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for programs that “are desperately needed to reduce the pain and suffering felt by so many who feel abandoned across this nation,” says NNU Co-President Deborah Burger, RN.

“It’s time for Wall Street financiers, who created this crisis and continue to hold much of the nation’s wealth, to start contributing to rebuild this country, and for the American people to reclaim our future,” says DeMoro.

The $2.4 trillion in government bailouts to financial and other institutions already spent, noted DeMoro, alone would have funded 63 million jobs at the national median level of about $39,000 a year. “Instead we have over 25 million people who are unemployed or underemployed, and in the past decade U.S. based corporations added 2.4 million jobs in foreign countries while divesting in America, cutting 2.9 million jobs in the U.S.”

“We need to reallocate the money back to our communities, and our actions on September 1 are going to raise the demand to a new level to heal our nation,” said NNU Co-president Jean Ross.

Learn More About the Main Street Contract for America and Get Involved Here

Click here for information on the National Nurses United

Where I’ve Been the Past Couple of Days

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Click for full size


My room was on the 1st floor on the front right


The enclosed porch on the back right is new.


For the past two days, I’ve been camping at the Atlantia 30th year celebration, and the site, pretty much across VA route 20 from James Madison’s home in Montpelier, did not have any internet access (voice and text worked fine), so I wasn’t posting anything.

I was also 20 miles from Charlottesville, VA, where I spent the plurality of my youth growing up (6 years), so I checked out the old house on Brandywine Drive.

It appears that my Dad’s planting of ivy on the lower front yard took.

One of his other lawn innovations, a cairn which ran the length of the lawn, has mercifully been removed.

I recall many an unpleasant afternoon removing grass that grew in between the stones.

I hated that pile or rocks about as much as I did the plant to whose roots the flowering plum in Portland (big, long shoe sole puncturing thorns, but that’s another story), so the fact that is gone fills me with some glee.

I also swung by my old elementary school, Greenbriar.

It’s the first time that I’ve seen the old house in more than 35 years, though I was at the elementary school about 20 years ago.

As a measure of how little life I have, this is the first time that I have missed two consecutive days to post since I started blogging in 2007.  (I think that the total number of missed days is less than 10)