Support Clemency for Troy Davis

Click here to email Georgia's governor and demand clemency for Davis.

Catch my interview on Monday night

My YouTube videos about racism landed me an interview.

At 8:30 central time on Monday, March 30th I'll be interviewed over the phone by Blog Talk Radio user Victim of Racism and we will discuss my videos, why I made them and the response they've gotten, white supremecy, how to combat it, David Duke (since I live in Louisiana) and other such related things. Calls from listeners will be taken as well so if you wanna call in and chat, let's do it.

here's the link
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Victim-of-Racism

If you can't catch it when it's being recorded, it will be available as a podcast at that same link immediately after it's over.

Banking On Credit Unions [I'm so lucky to have smart parents]

From nader.org:

While the reckless giant banks are shattering like an over-heated glacier day by day, the nation’s credit unions are a relative island of calm largely apart from the vortex of casino capitalism.

Eighty five million Americans belong to credit unions which are not-for-profit cooperatives owned by their members who are depositors and borrowers. Your neighborhood or workplace credit union did not invest in these notorious speculative derivatives nor did they offer people “teaser rates” to sign on for a home mortgage they could not afford.

Ninety one percent of the 8,000 credit unions are reporting greater overall growth in mortgage lending than any other kinds of consumer loans they are extending. They are federally insured by the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) for up to $250,000 per account, such as the FDIC does for depositors in commercial banks.

click here for the whole thing

The main point of the article is that there are some "credit unions" that are credit union in name only, basically. Big corporate ones who work like the big loan shark banks.

Lucky for myself and my family, we belong to an NCUA backed credit union. I was recently back in Texas and went in to my local credit union to talk about a CD account of mine that had recently matured. The atmosphere in there was really laid back, just like I'd always remembered our credit union being. Also much like the credit union over here in New Orleans that I use to deposit checks, it's just so quiet and calm, not how you'd expect a bank to be at this time. But, it's not really a "bank" in 21st century terms anyway.

It's not like we're on easy street or anything, because we're surely not at the moment, but it's good to know that my family's banking methods did not contribute to the downfall of our economy.

Not to rub it in anyone's face, or anything...

But if you're a credit union member, make sure they are not tempted to turn in to Wall Street style casinos, because:

The one area that is now spelling some trouble [...] comes from the so-called “corporate credit unions”—a terrible nomenclature—which were established to provide liquidity for the retail credit unions. [...] They invested in those risky mortgage securities with the money from the retail credit unions. These “toxic assets” have fallen $14 billion among the 28 corporate credit unions involved.

An Open Letter to Craig, the Sexist

Dear Craig,

You've been dating my sister for about four or five weeks now. For the last couple of weeks, your plans have been to move in together and get married, and maybe have a baby.

If you can't see whats wrong with this picture, lets keep looking.

I'm not one for snooping on people's Facebook profiles, but after you added my girlfriend as a friend on that site she noticed a comment you had from the beginning of January, just days before you began dating my sister, from a girl named Mary saying how much she loved you, how you guys were going to be together forever, and that she was so happy that she was "having babygrl." You have yet to explain who this person is and what she meant by "having babygrl." It sounds as if she's expecting a child, but it could be another "misunderstanding," right Craig? I'm sure all fifteen pages of your criminal record are a bunch of misunderstandings too (it's amazing what you can do with the internet and a license plate number, eh Craig?).

If you still can't see whats wrong with this picture, lets keep looking.

Early on, you had some moments of threatening suicide if you didn't get to see my sister. My parents witnessed this behavior with their own eyes. It was at this point that you should have been taken away by some higher authority. But you weren't.

Lets keep looking.

Several details of the past few weeks can be found almost ver batim (that means "word for word" in Latin, if you didn't know) in this article, "Warning Signs That You're Dating a Loser." I don't want to call you a "loser," Craig. Afterall, guys like you have been running the world since the beginning of human history. You guys aren't losers, but you are losing. However slowly, you are a dying breed. Sexism still reigns supreme, but it is in it's final days. It may be many more decades, but your way of thinking is on it's way out.

The difference between you and I is that I have ambition. I have something that I believe makes me a better person when I learn more about it, and that's music. I have recently come to believe that becoming a better musician makes me a better citizen of the world. It allows me to interact with people in a positive way and somehow make the world a little bit better while I'm here. This probably sounds like a bunch of faggy bullshit to you, Craig. But that's your problem.

You, Craig, will never take responsibility for your actions. With you, every problem is a woman's fault. It was your mom's fault that she kicked you out of her house and you had no where to sleep but your car. It was my sister's fault that she "wouldn't stand up for you" when everyone was realizing how dangerous you were. It's her friends' fault that everyone thinks you're bad because they supposedly lie about you. My sister's former best friend really just has a homosexual crush and is trying to get you out of the picture (even if that were true, it would be a hell of a lot better than what's going on now). And I'm sure Mary is just some crazy "bitch" telling another lie about you on your profile, which is why you had to delete her words.

You will probably go on for the rest of your life thinking that you are superior to women, and that controlling them and using them makes you more of a man. You will never realize that this behavior holds down society's progress and enslaves people to bigotry. As I said, this cycle is slowing, but you're a part of what's keeping it going.

That, Craig, is why nobody fucking likes you.

Sincerely,
adam

Prisoners on Parade

Courtesy of Alternet:

Last week in Maricopa County, Ariz., more than 200 Latino immigrants were chained, dressed in prison stripes and forced to march down a public street from a county jail to a detainment camp in a desert industrial zone outside Phoenix.

[...]

The Phoenix New Times pointed out that Arpaio’s immigrant parade was scheduled for the same day that MCSO Captain Joel Fox was scheduled to appear in court to appeal a $315,000 fine levied against him for channeling an illegal $105,000 campaign donation to the Republican Party in the name of a shadowy entity called the “Sheriff’s Command Association.”

click here for the whole article

This is really fucked up, sick, wrong, racist, nothing that would make me proud as an American.

Just so happens I was studying some prison statistics just before I came across this article. I think I'll be sharing my findings soon, if I get the time to dig further in to it.

What the centrists have wrought

Paul Krugman, NY Times:

I’m still working on the numbers, but I’ve gotten a fair number of requests for comment on the Senate version of the stimulus.

The short answer: to appease the centrists, a plan that was already too small and too focused on ineffective tax cuts has been made significantly smaller, and even more focused on tax cuts.

According to the CBO’s estimates, we’re facing an output shortfall of almost 14% of GDP over the next two years, or around $2 trillion. [...] So the original $800 billion plan was too small, especially because a substantial share consisted of tax cuts that probably would have added little to demand. The plan should have been at least 50% larger.

click here for the entire article

It's a damn shame you have to have 60% membership of the Senate just to pass a bill that isn't even good enough to begin with, and if you've only got 59% that plan gets watered down even further.

Gee can't say I saw this coming...

Deregulation Caused the Salmonella Outbreak

From the NY Times
"Wary Shoppers Cause Slide in Peanut Butter Sales"

The Department of Agriculture, which oversees school lunch programs, banned the Peanut Corporation of America from doing any further business with the government. The company’s chief executive, Stewart Parnell, was removed from the Agriculture Department’s Peanut Standards Board, which advises the agriculture secretary on quality and handling standards.

Read further, if you need to.

What was the CEO of a private corporation doing on the standards board of a federal agency meant to regulate his own business?

Sure, regulators should be knowledgeable of their fields, but a sitting chief executive? Is that not a conflict of interest from the get-go? I mean, the Times just nonchalantly mentions, "Yeah, this guy is no longer advising his own regulators, now that his company has spread salmonella all over the country," like it's just a random detail of the overall story. Hopefully Obama understands cause-and-effect more than the Bush administration did, but perhaps a little research is afoot to see who is on the federal agencies and who they're really loyal to: themselves or the People?

Hey, at least Parnell's previous work did not involve Arabian horses.

Is the Entire Bailout Strategy Flawed? Let's Rethink This Before It's Too Late

By Joseph Stiglitz, by way of Alternet:

For a while, there was hope that simply lowering interest rates enough, flooding the economy with money, would suffice; but three quarters of a century ago, Keynes explained why, in a downturn such as this, monetary policy is likely to be ineffective. It is like pushing on a string.

[...]

What's the alternative? Sweden (and several other countries) have shown that there is an alternative -- the government takes over those banks that cannot assemble enough capital through private sources to survive without government assistance.

It is standard practice to shut down banks failing to meet basic requirements on capital, but we almost certainly have been too gentle in enforcing these requirements. (There has been too little transparency in this and every other aspect of government intervention in the financial system.)

To be sure, shareholders and bondholders will lose out, but their gains under the current regime come at the expense of taxpayers. In the good years, they were rewarded for their risk taking. Ownership cannot be a one-sided bet.

click here for all of it

Joseph Stiglitz used to work for the World Bank. He was basically kicked out for telling journalists like Greg Palast exactly what they do: fuck people over, whole countries even (Latin American ones often).

Stiglitz knows globalization inside and out; he's been on the inside and now he's on the outside. He's probably one of the most important economists there is, because he was a free trade baron who did a 180 in favor of the public interest. It doesn't get much cooler than that.

So I'm saying we should trust Joe on this one, consider this idea, look to Sweden, and fix this mess before we're all standing in bread lines, reminiscing about how we loved our SUVs and MacBooks so much. Maybe when the Senate votes down Obama's budget, this idea can get tabled.

It would behoove all of us to call our representatives and send them this message:

NATIONALIZE THE BANKS!

Obama's Executive Order on Gitmo

Courtesy of The Washington Independent:

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release January 22, 2009

EXECUTIVE ORDER

REVIEW AND DISPOSITION OF INDIVIDUALS DETAINED AT THE GUANTÁNAMO BAY NAVAL BASE AND CLOSURE OF DETENTION FACILITIES

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, in order to effect the appropriate disposition of individuals currently detained by the Department of Defense at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base (Guantánamo) and promptly to close detention facilities at Guantánamo, consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice, I hereby order as follows:

[...]

Sec. 2. Findings.

[...]

(d) It is in the interests of the United States that the executive branch undertake a prompt and thorough review of the factual and legal bases for the continued detention of all individuals currently held at Guantánamo, and of whether their continued detention is in the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and in the interests of justice. The unusual circumstances associated with detentions at Guantánamo require a comprehensive interagency review.

click here for the whole order

Holy shit that's actually pretty cool.

That's all I got.

Okay, well we'll see how long it takes to get this ball rolling as it's currently written. Likely outcome: nothing. Maybe they'll close Guantanamo, but I doubt many of the innocent people held there are going to go free with in the next year or two.

Who knows?

Obama's appointees: If you're surprised, it's your own fault

From Alternet:

Ray LaHood: The Obama Appointment You Should Be Really Worried About

Soon, the U.S. Senate will hold a confirmation hearing on the president-elect's choice of Ray LaHood for Secretary of Transportation.

[...]

In case you haven't been following the news, LaHood is a conservative Illinois Republican with little transportation expertise and almost no administrative experience, who has earned a LCV lifetime voting score on critical environmental issues of 27 percent, and who maintains deep financial connections to the very industries he's now supposed to regulate.

click here for all of it

Bu-bu-bu-but Mr. Obama said he wuz gonna change shit......

Anyone who bought Obama's rhetoric during the campaign needs to do some rudimentary thinking about what elections are and what politicians say when they're about to be a candidate on a ballot. In other words, re-take your high school Government class.

There were at least two whole campaigns of hundreds of thousands of people who were "throwing their vote away" on third parties who argued that Obama would be more of the same, that the choice between McCain and Obama wasn't as big of a difference as it seemed on the surface.

I understand the excitement of electing an African American as president of the United States, I really get that. It's got some great symbolism to it, to say the very least, and make no mistake--I was smiling on November 4th, 2008. It really did feel good. But anyone with even a half-assed knowledge of history could have seen this coming: many such people voted for Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney.

Sometimes it really sucks to be right.

Oscar Grant

From alternet:

On Jan. 1, Oscar Grant, an unarmed 22-year-old African American man, was shot and killed by a white Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer.

[...]

Following the shooting, BART police tried to confiscate all the videos taken by witnesses. They failed. Three clips videos made it onto YouTube, where they were viewed hundreds of thousands of times and eventually picked up and played on the news, bringing the story to national attention.

click here for the whole thing

I'm literally at a loss for words.

Obama Doesn't Plan to End the Occupation in Iraq

FINALLY from Alternet.org:

The New York Times is reporting an "apparent evolution" in president-elect Barack Obama's thinking on Iraq, citing recent statements about his plan to keep a "residual force" in the country

[...]

It's an interesting choice of terms. "Residual" is defined as "the quantity left over at the end of a process." This means that the forces Obama plans to leave in Iraq will remain after he has completed his "withdrawal" plan. No matter how Obama chooses to label the forces he keeps in Iraq, the fact is, they will be occupation forces.

click here for all of it

It's funny (or not) how everything Obama is doing now was so plainly foreseeable during the campaign, but the liberal blogosphere pretended it wasn't, and you couldn't vote for Nader this time, couldn't even talk about him. We couldn't have "another Bush" in the White House. So we'll settle with another Clinton in the White House instead? Clinton was a better Republican than George Bush! He gave us NAFTA, maintained a bloated military budget and made sure we kicked some brown people's asses in Kosovo while cutting aid to poor people at home. Now, I realize that anything would be better than Bush right about now, but you can't call this real "change," other than the fact that Obama is (half) black.

It just seems like a lot of liberals were just waiting until Obama got elected before they would actually pay attention to his actions. Now he owes us nothing.

(Oh, and this is completely in line with everything that that "crazy, unviable, conspiracy theorist" Ralph Nader was saying during the campaign, once again)

Don't Attack Iran

The November 5th Movement

November5.org:



November 5. 2008 from Tarek Milleron on Vimeo.

That's what I'm talkin' about.

Feet. Fire.

Barack Obama is the president elect: IT IS TIME FOR PROGRESSIVES TO GET SERIOUS

We progressives finally got something that feels good: a victory. Or so it seems.

Sure, it's really awesome to have a black president (elect), but we can't forget that he DID NOT MAKE ANY PROGRESSIVE PROMISES during his campaign.

All you Obama voters: he doesn't owe you anything!

We MUST demand real change from our newly elected leaders, or else they will turn into another Clintonian Republicratic corporate regime who may perhaps balance the budget, but also cut social programs and keep the military budget bloated in the process. And what are they going to do about the war? Nothing, unless we act. The People ended the Vietnam War, we ended the first Gulf War and we can end this one the same way. Now more than ever, we've got the chance to get our troops OUT of Iraq.

We've got a chance to get gay marriage legalized in more states.

We've got a chance to reform the health care system.

We've got a chance to crack down on corporate crime and promote fair trade,

but WE HAVE TO ACT.

and I mean ACT, like get outside, show our faces, raise our voices, sign real petitions with real ink and write real letters to real congressmen. We cannot sit back and wait for these Democrats to do the right thing on their own: THEY'VE NEVER EVER DONE THAT.

The time is now, and WE CAN DO IT.

Steal Back Your Vote

Greg Palast is involved with a project right now called Steal Back Your Vote. He's trying to get the word out about how the same types of people who rigged the last two elections are at it again. I'm on Greg's mailing list and here's some info from the latest one:

Odd thing about the 207 voters of precinct 999 in Dona Ana County, New Mexico.

Not a single one could choose between George Bush and John Kerry in 2004.

Or at least that’s what their ballots said.

The Secretary of State at the time told me, “Some of those people just can’t make up their minds.” Dirt-poor Dona Ana is 63% Hispanic and the precinct is made up entirely of overseas voters, mostly the Chicano soldiers in Iraq or on duty. The machines say that Hispanic soldiers don’t care who becomes their commander-in-chief.

Or maybe, the machines failed to register their votes.

Few Americans realize that in 2004, 1,389,231 ballots were never counted because they were “spoiled.” How do ballots spoil? They get left out of the ‘fridge?

Here’s an unfun fact: not everyone’s vote spoils the same. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission found that the chances of an African-American voter losing their vote is 900% higher than a white voter. Hispanic votes vanished at a rate 500% higher than Anglo votes.

www.StealBackYourVote.org

(emphasis mine)

If anyone's going to spoil this election, it's not going to be Ralph Nader, it's going to be essentially the Republican party, more specifically their cronies in the election system.

Now onto researching Diebold.

Debatable Debates / MoveOn delusions

Debatable Debates
by Ralph Nader

This past spring, the foreign affairs reporters, not columnists, for the New York Times and the Washington Post concluded that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are advancing foreign and military policies similar to those adopted by George W. Bush in his second term.

Where then is the “hope” and “change” from the junior Senator from Illinois?

Moreover, both Obama and McCain want more nuclear power plants, more coal production, and more offshore oil drilling.

[...]

Both support the gigantic taxpayer funded Wall Street bailout, without expressed amendments. Both support the notorious Patriot Act, the revised FISA act which opened the door to spy on Americans without judicial approval, and Obama agrees with McCain in vigorously opposing the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

go to nader.org for the rest

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MoveOn delusions

I'm a "member" of Moveon.org, in that, they send me emails and call me a "member." I've given them a total of like $3.

Here's a quote from the latest email they've sent:

TOP 5 REASONS OBAMA SUPPORTERS SHOULDN'T REST EASY

1. The polls may be wrong. This is an unprecedented election. No one knows how racism may affect what voters tell pollsters—or what they do in the voting booth. And the polls are narrowing anyway. In the last few days, John McCain has gained ground in most national polls, as his campaign has gone even more negative.

2. Dirty tricks. Republicans are already illegally purging voters from the rolls in some states. They're whipping up hysteria over ACORN to justify more challenges to new voters. Misleading flyers about the voting process have started appearing in black neighborhoods. And of course, many counties still use unsecure voting machines.

3. October surprise. In politics, 15 days is a long time. The next McCain smear could dominate the news for a week. There could be a crisis with Iran, or Bin Laden could release another tape, or worse.

4. Those who forget history... In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote after trailing by seven points in the final days of the race. In 1980, Reagan was eight points down in the polls in late October and came back to win. Races can shift—fast!

5. Landslide. Even with Barack Obama in the White House, passing universal health care and a new clean-energy policy is going to be hard. Insurance, drug and oil companies will fight us every step of the way. We need the kind of landslide that will give Barack a huge mandate.

Yeah it's going to be REALLY hard to pass universal health care when HE'S NOT RUNNING ON THAT TO BEGIN WITH! Barack Obama is not our liberal savior, he's a Democrat. He's a Democrat. He's a Democrat. He hasn't even promised to fight for universal or truly clean energy during his campaign, so it wouldn't just be the big oil and pharmaceutical companies we have to fight, we'd have to fight Obama as well. Just like the rest of the Democrats, if you vote for them just for the fact that they have a chance of winning and you're a liberal and the GOP is "way worse," they're not going to owe you a damn thing if they get into office. The mandate has to be RIGHT NOW.

"BUT HE'S BLACK!!!!!"

Okay, as cool as it would be (or probably will be, but don't rest easy!), to have a (half) black president for once, that's about the entire extent of the "change," Barack Obama would make. Look no further than his voting record, and WHAT HE ACTUALLY SAYS!

As I recall from the piece of shit, canned "town hall" debate, Obama's all for drilling and keeping our military very much present in the middle east (as the Nader article notes as well). Where's the change in that? Chump change, that's what that is.

Chump change.

It's Already Stolen

From Rolling Stone, courtesy of Greg Palast:

According to an investigative report out today in
Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long investigation, reveal a systematic program of "GOP vote tampering" on a massive scale.

- Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado
have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.

Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge - ten times the average state's rate of removal.

- While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush.

Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of
'Jim Crow' tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.

- A fired US prosecutor levels new charges - accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as
"fraudulent."

- Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called "caging” ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters. The Rolling Stone duo predict that, this November 4, it will be far worse.


(no link to more, must buy a copy of Rolling Stone)

I fully expect Obama to win but I also fully expect many of his potential supporters to basically be blacklisted, pretty literally.

Meanwhile, conservatives rail away about ACORN, exaggerating their "fraud," trying to deflect attention away from the real disenfranchisement that's been going on since 2000 and probably before then.

Fuck Ron Paul

Houston Chronicle, courtesy of RealArt:

Some Galveston officials aren't too pleased with
their congressional representative, Ron Paul, R-Lake Jackson, for voting against
the $22.8 billion disaster recovery aid package on Wednesday.

[...]

"We've worked hard all our lives," said Gene Lossow.
"We take care of ourselves. I don't need FEMA or anything else. We got
insurance."

the rest

It's called an emergency for a FUCKING reason. If Congress can nearly pass a 700 billion dollar bailout for Wall Street, what's another 30 billion for people who NEED IT? Meanwhile dumbfucks like this Gene Lossow guy and way too many people on this articles comment board say, "Deal with it mutherfuckers! I gots my insurance!"

Behind The Deregulatory Curtain

By Ralph Nader:

Indeed, the right-wing pundits and the revisionists in
Congress are spending an inordinate amount of time falsely claiming that our nation’s current financial disaster stems from the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed by Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. The primary purpose of this modest law is to require banks to report on where and to whom they are making loans. Community organizations have used the data produced as a result of this law to determine if banks were meeting their lending obligations in the minority and lower-income communities in which they do business. Congress passed this law because too many lenders were discriminating against minority borrowers. “Redlining” was the name given to the practice by banks of literally drawing a red line around minority areas and then
proceeding to deny people within the red border home loans – even if they were otherwise qualified. The law has been in place for 30 years, but the right-wing f ringe claims it somehow is responsible for predatory lending practices that date back just to the beginning of this decade.

click here for the whole thing

Dont' let anyone tell you this Wall Street meltdown was a result of regulation rather than deregulation.