Action Alert

Eyes on the Prize: MLK’s Lessons for Occupy

by Valerie Schloredt

When he was assassinated in April, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. had just begun “The Poor People’s Campaign.” This focus on economic injustice, which included plans for a mass encampment of poor people in Washington, D.C., was remarkably similar to that of today’s Occupy movement. The connection is clear to present-day activists Kazu Haga and Jonathan Lewis, who are promoting King’s philosophy of nonviolence to Occupy groups, both for moral guidance and practical strategy.

60 Minutes video

Free Health Care Clinic Set For Weekend At Cal Expo

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KCRA) -- People are already lining up at Cal Expo for a free health clinic that launches Friday.

RAM California will offer free medical, dental and vision care to thousands of people this weekend. The event spans four days, Friday through Monday.

Organizers expect to screen at least 1,000 people each day.

As you have probably heard by now, HR 1837, the "Salmon Extinction Bill" sponsored by Congress Devin Nunes (R-CA), has passed the House of Representatives. And while we know that both Senator Feinstein and Senator Boxer are opposed to the bill, we have heard that Congressman Jeff Denham is trying to negotiate a compromise with Senator Feinstein.

"This bill would allow for full pumping of water exports at the Delta pumps, strip away water rights from Delta area landowners, and dismember the San Joaquin River Restoration Act - a component of Delta restoration," according to Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, Executive Director of Restore the Delta.

The bill is backed by the corporate welfare/big government Republicans and Democrats who want to steal northern California water and send it to corporate agribusiness interests on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley that have become rich off years of feeding off the federal trough of subsidized water and agricultural subsidies.

Rick Santorum's School Scandal

Santorum has campaigned on the fact that his seven kids have been home-schooled, which has earned him a loyal following of foot soldiers within the evangelical movement. (The same goes for Rep. Michele Bachmann, who on Tuesday dropped out of the presidential race.) Over the past year, Santorum has appeared at a handful of home-schooling conferences. In April, he won the Home School Legal Defense Association's straw poll. There's even a "Homeschoolers for Santorum" Facebook page.

But Santorum wasn't always so opposed to government-run schools—especially one Pennsylvania cyber charter school that offered students free computers, internet service, and online classes. Between 2001 and 2004, that online school allowed the Santorum family to live in Virginia, while sticking Pennsylvania taxpayers with a $100,000 bill.

37 Reasons to Avoid Genetically Modified Foods

Posted on Jan 31, 2012 in Featured Articles, Health, Food News, & Big Pharma
Kevin Hayden – TruthisTreason.net

The adulteration and modification of some of the planet’s most widely used crops has changed our food landscape. Chemicals, preservatives, genetic modification and low-cost substitutions and fillers have wrecked meals that were once healthy for us. Stepping inside of a grocery store nowadays, we find ourselves in a dangerous and toxic new world. The introduction of genetically modified organisms into the food supply in the 1990′s, coupled with rampant use of carcinogens such as aspartame, and substitutions like high fructose corn syrup, set the perfect stage to form a deadly concoction known as processed food. Sadly, this is what encompasses the average American diet.

This is probably the most important article you'll ever read if you're going to college, or thinking about it ... or know someone who is

A Review of The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History – and How We Can Fight Back by Alan Michael Collinge

By Carolyn Betts and Catherine Austin Fitts

The Preface begins:

“The truth is that I never considered student loans to be an especially interesting topic. College debt, I believed, was a necessary evil – to be repaid expeditiously and then forgotten even more quickly. However, what I once thought of as an uninteresting issue has come to dominate my life.”

This highly informative book was written by a 1998 graduate of Cal Tech with three degrees in aerospace engineering who, after a student loan nightmare that took him from an original relatively modest $38,000 Sallie Mae loan to an obligation of $80,000 by 2002 and $103,000 by mid 2005. At that point he started the website www.studentloanjustice.org in an effort to hook up with others in similar straits, share stories and become politically active in restoring consumer protections for student loans.

I recommend opposing the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2012. The U.S. is not at war with any country. Nor is U.S. threatened by any group of criminals. Therefore, the U.S. does not need a war-time budget. The only defense needed is a few ships on each of the coasts. Veterans must get the best possible treatments for physical and mental injuries. I support job training for all Americans unable to find work.

The U.S. military is not a global police force. No country can possibly afford to pay for this useless manifestation of arrogance. Any secret provisions of this bill directly violate the Constitutional requirements to spell out all government expenditures. Detention of suspects without a public and fair trial also violates the 5th amendment of the Constitution. The excessive military expenditures by the U.S. government threatens the future economic viability of the U.S. economy.

The only expenditures needed for Iraq and Afghanistan are those needed for a speedy and safe exit by all U.S. personnel. These recommendations will be opposed by all who equate military might with the mission of the U.S. to shape the world. They can not see the foolishness of such a conceit. Americans expect their elected officials to put the health and wealth of their country ahead of useless and self-defeating projections of power

Mark Ames: How UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi Brought Oppression Back To Greece’s Universities

Yves here. Reader sidelarge raised the issue yesterday in comments, of UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi’s role in abolition of university asylum in Greece. The story is even uglier than the link he provided suggests.

By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted from The eXiled

A friend of mine sent me this link claiming that UC Davis chancellor “Chemical” Linda Katehi, whose crackdown on peaceful university students shocked America, played a role in allowing Greece security forces to raid university campuses for the first time since the junta was overthrown in 1974. (H/T: Crooked Timber)

Watch the video ... Actually it's worse, when you look at it the right way

The L-Curve graph represents income, not wealth. The distribution of wealth is even more skewed. Quoting from a recently-published book by political philosopher David Schweickart,

If we divided the income of the US into thirds, we find that the top ten percent of the population gets a third, the next thirty percent gets another third, and the bottom sixty percent get the last third. If we divide the wealth of the US into thirds, we find that the top one percent own a third, the next nine percent own another third, and the bottom ninety percent claim the rest. (Actually, these percentages, true a decade ago, are now out of date. The top one percent are now estimated to own between forty and fifty percent of the nation's wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%.)

Billionaire Wants To Shift Tax Burden to Middle Class

by: Robert Cruickshank
Sun Nov 20, 2011 at 08:00:00 AM PST

If you look up "tone deaf" in the dictionary right now, you might find a photo of Nicholas Berggruen. He's the billionaire investor who founded the "Think Long Committee for California" last fall to revive corporate friendly "reform" policies. In news that should shock nobody at all, their tax proposals involve shifting the burden away from the rich and corporations and onto what's left of the middle class.

[...]

In short: corporate taxes go down, income taxes go down for everyone but especially for the rich, and the sales tax goes up (in fact if not in rate). The middle class - what's left of it, at least - would shoulder the burden of taxation in California even more than they already do.

[...]

Under the Think Long plan, all the rates would go down, but the rich would see a big drop from 9.3% to 7.5%. And yet as the article notes, with the sales tax changes the overall impact would mean that everyone else pays more. Because the income tax would only kick in at $45,000 for joint filers, it's the middle class that gets hit hardest.

I was going to post this sometime in the last few weeks, but didn't, because my impression was that the Sacramento Police were acting very professional ... I had no idea the UC Davis cops would turn out to be thugs

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Want to stop foreclosures by the banksters and keep the banks accountable? Please sign this petition, written by Patrick Porgans, to stop foreclosures, hold the banks accountable and keep people in the homes. Please send this out to all of your friends and relatives! For more information, contact pp [at] planetarysolutionaries.org.
We the People - Occupy Wall Street "99 Percenters"

WEB ADDRESS:
http://www.change.org/petitions/we-the-people-occupy-wall-street-99ers

PETITION TO GOVERNOR BROWN - STOP THE FORECLOSURE- HOLD BANKS ACCOUNTABLE

"WE THE PEOPLE"

In California, foreclosures continue to batter homeowners, averaging out at 1,866 a day, 77 an hour each day the past 10 months, or 1.3 foreclosures per-minute. That’s surely on the minds of many Occupy Wall Street “99ers.”

According to Shum Preston, spokesman for the California attorney general’s office, there was a recent “surge in foreclosures” between July and August bringing an additional 560,000 homes into the foreclosure process.

Get your free sticker from Faithful America here:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2518/p/salsa/web/common/public/content?content_item_KEY=10439