This Powerful Clip Is Exactly Why We Support #OccupyWallStreetREAD: http://tinyurl.com/why-ows WATCH: http://www.DCDouglas.com LEARN MORE: http://occupywallst.org/ ____________________________________________________ Actor, voice over talent and non-political figure D.C. Douglas chimes in with his take on OWS - Occupy Wall Street. Thanks for the amazing support my video has received! Special thanks to John Cusack, Roseanne Barr, Karoli, OneVoice2, MoveOn.org, Charles Gaba & Daily Kos and Lawrence O'Donnell (for airing a portion on The Last Word 10/11/11)! Video features: Elizabeth Warren (Bookended) #OccupyBoston General Assembly Senator Byron Dorgan Alan Greenspan Senator Carl Levin Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs Senator Susan Collins Daniel Sparks, Goldman Sachs POS Representative Alan Grayson Senator Bernie Sanders Democracy Now Anchor

READ: http://tinyurl.com/why-ows
WATCH: http://www.DCDouglas.com
LEARN MORE: http://occupywallst.org/
____________________________________________________

Actor, voice over talent and non-political figure D.C. Douglas chimes in with his take on OWS - Occupy Wall Street.

Thanks for the amazing support my video has received! Special thanks to John Cusack, Roseanne Barr, Karoli, OneVoice2, MoveOn.org, Charles Gaba & Daily Kos and Lawrence O'Donnell (for airing a portion on The Last Word 10/11/11)!

Video features:
Elizabeth Warren (Bookended)
#OccupyBoston General Assembly
Senator Byron Dorgan
Alan Greenspan
Senator Carl Levin
Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs
Senator Susan Collins
Daniel Sparks, Goldman Sachs POS
Representative Alan Grayson
Senator Bernie Sanders
Democracy Now Anchor

Either you are a rebel or a slave by Chris Hedges + Bernie Sanders on #OccupyWallStreet

Either you are a rebel or a slave by Chris Hedges + Bernie Sanders on #OccupyWallStreet Posted on

September 29, 2011 by dandelionsalad
by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
Sept. 29, 2011

Image by marniejoyce via Flickr

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no long[er] exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.

Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.

The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.

Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children’s children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among us.

Copyright © 2011 Truthdig

Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. His latest books are Death of the Liberal Class, and The World as It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.
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[DS added the video.]


MiniRtist on Sep 29, 2011
09-29-11 1b – Leftward Ho! with Bernie Sanders – Countdown with Keith Olbermann

More videos: http://vodpod.com/dandelionsalad/tag/occupy+wall+street
***
Get Involved: Occupy Together
see
Save the Postal Service Rally + Occupy Wall St goes Postal
Chris Hedges: Occupy Wall Street Interview – We have a moral imperative to fight for life
#OccupyWallStreet: Police Kettling Protesters + Live Stream + Protesters arrested
#OccupyWallStreet Protesting Outside Wall Street + Live Stream
This Hero Didn’t Stand a Chance by Chris Hedges
Report from the Frontlines: The Long Road to #OccupyWallStreet and the Origins of the 99% Movement | David DeGraw
The Economy Sucks and or Collapse 2
http://vodpod.com/dandelionsalad/tag/economy

 

Is Poverty a Death Sentence?: Senator Sanders!

CONTACT: Senator Bernie Sanders

WASHINGTON - September 13 - Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at a Senate hearing he chaired today cited dramatic evidence linking poverty and shorter life spans. A new census report, meanwhile, said more Americans than ever before lived in poverty last year.

Sanders citied evidence that living in poverty greatly reduces access to health care and shortens life spans. “This is the first time in our history that children born in certain parts of the United States can expect to live shorter lives than their parents’ generation,” according to a report released at the hearing.

A separate Census Bureau report also released today said that more than 46 million Americans, about one in six, lived below the poverty line in 2010. The census report also said that that about 49.9 million Americans lacked health insurance, a number that soared by 13.3 million since 2000.

“Poverty in America today is a death sentence for tens and tens of thousands of our people which is why the high childhood poverty rate in our country is such an outrage,” Sanders said in an opening statement at the hearing.

The United States has both the highest overall poverty rate and the highest childhood poverty rate of any major industrialized country on earth, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. While 21.6 percent of American children live in poverty, the rate is 3.7 percent in Denmark, 5.3 percent in Finland, 6.7 percent in Iceland, 8.3 percent in Germany, 9.3 percent in France.  “I suppose we can take some comfort in that our numbers are not quite as bad as Turkey (23.5 percent); Chile (24 percent); and Mexico (25.8 percent),” Sanders said. 

At a time of medical breakthroughs in treatments for cancer and other terrible diseases, the reality is that life expectancy for low-income women has declined over the past 20 years in 313 counties in the United States. Those in the top 20 percent of American incomes live, on average, at least 6.5 years longer than those in the lowest income group.

“I recite these facts because I believe that as bad as the current situation is with regard to poverty, it will likely get worse in the immediate future,” Sanders said.  “As a result of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of Wall Street we are now in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the 1930s.  Millions of workers have lost their jobs and have slipped out of the middle class and into poverty. Poverty is increasing.

The hearing featured testimony from several key witnesses, including Dr. Garrett Adams. “I decided to establish a clinic in Beersheeba Springs, Tenn., because I had seen so many poor people who urgently needed health care.” He described one patient with vascular disease who cannot afford heart surgery as “a walking time bomb.”

Dr. Paula Braveman, head of the Center on Social Disparities in Health at the University of California San Francisco, testified about the lifelong effect of childhood poverty on health. “Reducing social and economic disparities in health affecting children will not only improve child health, it will increase opportunities to be healthy throughout life, because healthier children are more likely to grow up to be healthy adults.”

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United States Senator for Vermont

Senator Bernie Sanders Links:

HomePress Center

The American People are Angry: Bernie Sanders

Shared sacrifice? Bernie Sanders asks us to ACT

Dear Mr. President,

This is a pivotal moment in the history of our country. Decisions are being made about the national budget that will impact the lives of virtually every American for decades to come. As we address the issue of deficit reduction we must not ignore the painful economic reality of today - which is that the wealthiest people in our country and the largest corporations are doing phenomenally well while the middle class is collapsing and poverty is increasing.  In fact, the United States today has, by far, the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth.

Everyone understands that over the long-term we have got to reduce the deficit - a deficit that was caused mainly by Wall Street greed, tax breaks for the rich, two wars, and a prescription drug program written by the drug and insurance companies. It is absolutely imperative, however, that as we go forward with deficit reduction we completely reject the Republican approach that demands savage cuts in desperately-needed programs for working families, the elderly, the sick, our children and the poor, while not asking the wealthiest among us to contribute one penny.

Mr. President, please listen to the overwhelming majority of the American people who believe that deficit reduction must be about shared sacrifice. The wealthiest Americans and the most profitable corporations in this country must pay their fair share.  At least 50 percent of any deficit reduction package must come from revenue raised by ending tax breaks for the wealthy and eliminating tax loopholes that benefit large, profitable corporations and Wall Street financial institutions.  A sensible deficit reduction package must also include significant cuts to unnecessary and wasteful Pentagon spending.

Please do not yield to outrageous Republican demands that would greatly increase suffering for the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society.  Now is the time to stand with the tens of millions of Americans who are struggling to survive economically, not with the millionaires and billionaires who have never had it so good.    

Respectfully,

Sen. Bernie Sanders;
and Co-signers

Top 10 US Corporate Tax Avoiders Named on Senate Floor

posted by: Nancy Roberts 1 day ago

163 comments

Despite complaints about the U.S.'s burdensome 35% corporate tax rate, two-thirds of American corporations pay no taxes in a given year. In a speech last week on the Senate floor, Senator Bernie Sanders  (I) of Vermont called out the top 10 corporate tax avoiders:

Among those actually getting money back from the Feds:

• ExxonMobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009, paid no federal income taxes, received a $156 million rebate

• Bank of America received a $1.9 billion IRS refund despite $4.4 billion of profits

• General Electric had $26 billion in profits, and $4.1 billion refund (GE made it onto another top 10 list of top corporate lobbyists in 2010, spending $39 million)

• Chevron nabbed a $19 million refund after making $10 billion in profits

Wall Street made the list as well; the Senator's office notes,"Goldman Sachs in 2008 only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department."

Spreading the Burden, if not the Wealth

Given the nation's $1.6 trillion deficit, Senator Sanders suggests that the burden of deficit reduction be shared more equally, rather than hurting working people, sick children, and others ill-equipped for optimal lobbying.

Senator Sanders has called for eliminating corporate tax loopholes and getting rid of tax breaks for oil and gas companies. He has introduced a bill that would raise an estimated $50 billion through an "emergency" 5.4 percent extra tax on people with adjusted gross incomes of over one million dollars.

Sharing the pain...not happening

Senator Sanders says that serious times call for shared sacrifice. Those are beautiful words, but sharing sacrifice seems like a fairy tale in a country where the top five percent own nearly two-thirds  of our nation's wealth.

Despite the Supreme Court 's finding that corporations are basically people in the eyes of the law, corporations themselves cannot be moral or immoral -- they are entities, not sentient beings. We have a system that rewards the gamers, where winners take all, and influence peddling is rife; where the defense for a highly profitable company not paying taxes is that it is within the law. As American families face the looming April 15 tax deadline, it is tough to hear corporations claim that mere compliance is enough in a system where laws and loopholes can be bought and sold.