If Liz were Queen

Independent: “Oh listen dear, they are playing our song–The Jim Crow Rag.”
It is hyperbole for me to compare my plight as a white women running as an independent candidate for the Third US Congressional District of Texas to that of Black people who for years faced horrible discrimination that included threats of bodily harm that in fact were often carried out if they dared to even attempt to register to vote, much less vote or run for office.  But as I learn of all the “special” requirements for an independent candidate, the extra hoops that we must jump through just to get our names on the ballot in November, I imagine that I know a tiny part of the humiliation that people must have felt when they had the Jim Crow laws thrown in their faces.

To put the discrimination against independent candidates into perspective:  according to WIKI, 30% of American voters say that they are Independents–almost 1/3 of all the voters.

Yet  independent candidates are treated as second class citizens in our “democracy.”  Independents face hurdles that candidates from the two main parties never have to consider and we are enormously handicapped from the very beginning of the process.

Knowing what I know now, I am absolutely thrilled that I have the opportunity to appear at the forum this Saturday February 13 in Plano Texas that is sponsored by the Women League of Voters–a rare opportunity for me to appear on the same stage as the other three “official” candidates.

And in grudging fairness, I suppose if the ruling class of Democrats and Republicans didn’t make it so difficult for the riffraff to get on the ballot, the state would go broke just getting all the names posted.

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THE THREE BIG STRIKES AGAINST INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES

STRIKE ONE: Primaries exclude independents from the crucial first round of voting. That’s correct.  You will not see my name “Emma Berry” on any primary ballot.

STRIKE TWO: Discriminatory ballot access requirements  are heavily biased against independent and third-party candidates.  For example, in the state of Texas, in order for me to get my name on the ballot, I will need to get the names, addresses, signatures, voter registration numbers of 500 voters in my district.  None of these people can have voted in the primary. If they have, they will not be eligible to sign my petition.  I cannot begin to gather these signatures until after the primary in March, and I will have to turn the signed, notarized documents into the Secretary of the State of Texas no later than

STRIKE THREE: Independents are just that–independent.  We are out there all alone.  We do not have funds from a party from which we can draw.  We don’t have big name politicians celebrity endorsements.  Rather than Independents, a better name for us would be Ordinary Citizen Candidates.

Yes, unfortunately the  citizens of our state have a leader who can best be described as a Robin Hood in Reverse, although I have heard Texans call Rick Perry much worse.

If Perry’s privatization schemes involving the privatization of our roadways are ever carried to their ultimate fruition, the citizens of Texas will be charged a fee to back out of our own drive ways.

His most horrible scheme to date, however, is his give-away of taxpayer dollars to corporations in the name of “job creation.”  The ” Texas Enterprise Fund” is just another fine example of a “conservative’s” give away of taxpayer dollars to support corporate welfare for the rich.

The State unemployment fund has transferred $161.5 million to Perry’s job fund scheme since the “conservative” morons in the Texas legislature gave him permission to do so.  The state unemployment fund (Texas’ Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund) is running out of money to pay benefits to all the state’s laid-off workers, including those laid off by corporations subsidized by the Texas Enterprise Fund.

THINK ABOUT FOR A MINUTE TEXANS: The money that has been taken out of your weekly/monthly paychecks to pay for your unemployment in case you lose your job has been funneled to rich multibillion dollar corporations who need it worse than you do.

I think we need a new definition of the word “conservative” because what I see that is defined as “conservative” looks more like “criminal” to me.  I didn’t give Rick Perry or the Texas legislature permission to rob my contributions for my unemployment insurance, did  you? I also think we need to remind people like Rick Perry that part of his responsibility is to be a good steward of the money garnered from the workers of Texas who actually to pay their taxes.

Here is just one example of Rick Perry’s fraudulent give-away to the rich:

Perry forked over $20 million dollars to the Bank of America. They have not kept their agreement with the state to create jobs.  Now Bank of America will return $8.45 of that $20 million.  Where is the other $11.55 million of the taxpayer’s money?  Where is the interest on that money?  You can bet if Bank of  America has loaned this money to a taxpayer that we would be paying through the nose for it.

I am surprised that Rick Perry has not been tarred and feathered.  It’s embarrassing that the people in this state could be so stupid as to elect this moron twice.

Bill Maher has come up with what may be the solution to getting health care reform passed through Congress:  The Democrats must pretend to be against it.  Then the Republicans will be for it.

Maybe the problem is that neither party has any ideology anymore — its just all about getting the money you need to run commercials at election time, and being against whatever the other party is for.  Bill Maher

In spite of the misguided declarations of the highest court in our land to bestow the title of person-hood on corporations–the fact remains that a corporation is NOT a person, nor should corporations be given the rights that are afforded to individual citizens.

MORE APPROPRIATE ANALOGIES THAN “PERSON” FOR A CORPORATION:

A corporation could best be described as a pirate ship at loose on the high seas claiming allegiance to no one but its crew (CEO’s and preferred shareholders) and stealing from any and everyone (including its own employees, customers and common shareholders) while giving little to nothing in return.

The corporation is a viper and our elected officials have given it a carte blanche to nurse at the teat of our taxpayer coffers for years.

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Given the greedy, selfish, arrogant, entitled nature of a corporation as demonstrated by its leaders over the past year–Lloyd Blankfein is the first example that comes to mind–the American people have not seen their worst side even yet.  There is more to come, if we allow it, believe me.

These people are ruthless and their greed absolutely knows no bounds. We need to send people to Washington who care enough to stop them.  We need to send people to Washington who still know the meaning of words like anti-trust, monopolies, stealing, and lying.

We need to send people to Washington who are not bound up in the same cloak of entitlement, arrogance, and nepotism that we see demonstrated by the leaders of Wall Street.

WHY?  BECAUSE THINGS ARE NOT NEARLY AS BAD AS THEY WILL BECOME IF WE DON’T.

Have you, like I, surely not said time after time:  “This is REALLY it!  Now they won’t get away with this.  Now they’ve done it! etc.” . . . only to realize that once again these people (government leaders and their Wall Street pals) have done something even more outrageous than you imagined possible and our elected officials are not doing a thing about it.

None of this will end until we the people stand up and demand it with our votes by sending replacements to Congress.  These people are not going to change.  They are not going to wake up one morning and decide to represent the majority of the American people–and without that, we do not have a democracy.

AND if you think that changing party will make a difference, then you most certainly have not been paying attention.  The Democrats and the Republicans have a pact.  They have been playing a good cop/bad cop game with the American people for at least 30 years.  They are like the professional wrestlers on TV–hot air and BS.  We have been going down the same self-defeating trail of failed conservative economic neo-liberalism for the past 30 years.  The Democrats and Republicans take turns being the hand and glove.  Bill Clinton may have ended his term with a budget surplus–but what did he do with it?  He turned it over to George Bush who promptly gave the majority of it back to the top 5% of the wealthiest people in our nation.

What’s the difference?

I see none.

In addition, we have Bill Clinton to thank for NAFTA, his mean-spirited welfare “reform”, and the Bank Modernization Act of 1999.  Quite frankly I believe that Bill Clinton did as much damage our nation’s economy as did George Bush.

Instead of looking busy.  Instead of pretending to address the problem of illegal immigration with their phony solutions such as border fences which are in fact nothing but more government welfare handouts to large rich corporations who are already draining our nation dry, our elected officials could actually start addressing a few of the root causes of the problem of illegal immigration.  But of course, many of them are on the government dole themselves as professional politicians who have held their offices for 20 or 30 years.  There is often little daylight between them and the corporate government welfare recipients who have been sucking hard on the government teat for 40 years or more.

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FIRST STEP:  Eliminate Farm subsidies to the rich and to Corporate Agribusinesses. Limit farm subsidies to the less than 2% of Americans who still live on their land and try to scratch out a living by farming.

These  farm  subsidies, government welfare to the rich, distort the market prices.  The billions that we give in farm subsidies to corporate agribusinesses like ADM and Cargill enable them to overproduce a commodity like corn, for example.  Then we taxpayers say–Oh aren’t we lucky! The price for corn is so low. But what happens is that this government welfare for the rich enables the big boys to drive the smaller farmers out of business and this  has happened all across American for the past 30 years.

What most of us taxpayers forget that this is OUR MONEY, OUR TAX DOLLARS, that is funding these Wall Street predators and their investors. AND THEY TREAT US LIKE WE ARE THE BEGGARS?  It is the money of ordinary tax-paying Americans like you and I that has enabled the rich to run the small farmers off their land.  It’s not that these corporate agribusinesses have so much “business savvy”, it’s because they have our hard-earned tax dollars that have been handed over to them by our elected officials in DC who are supposed to represent us.

Between 1996 and 2002, an average of $16 billion/year was paid by programs authorized by various U.S. farm bills dating back to the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, the Agricultural Act of 1949, and the Commodity Credit Corporation (created in 1933). Source: WIKI

Of the close to $1.4 Billion in subsidy payments to farms in Texas, roughly only 18% of the farms receive a portion of the payments. SOURCE

The Archer Daniels Midland Corporation (ADM) has been the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history. ADM and its chairman Dwayne Andreas have lavishly fertilized both political parties with millions of dollars in handouts and in return have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers. ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period. At least 43 percent of ADM’s annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM’s corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30.  SOURCE

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SECOND STEP:  Renegotiate the NORTH AMERICAN “FREE” TRADE AGREEMENT (NAFTA)

NAFTA paved the way to the ruination of the Mexican corn farmers and some would say the ruination of the economies of all of North America.  Prior to the passage of NAFTA illegal immigration from Mexico was not a serious issue.  We had fewer than 2 million illegal immigrants in our country and that number had been stable for years.

It was only a year or two after NAFTA came into force on January 1, 1994 that there was a surge in illegal immigration from Mexico to the USA.   NAFTA benefited the large agribusinesses of the US and a few billionaires in Mexico and Canada.  It helped to demolish the economies of both the USA and Mexico for the poor and working classes of both nations.  Today, 16 years later it has even eroded the middle class in our nation.

Thus far the ordinary Mexican citizens  have borne the brunt of NAFTA, but we ordinary citizens in the USA are fast catching up.

What happened in Mexico was that the market for corn (a staple) was flooded with cheap, government subsidized US corn. Because of NAFTA, the US corporate agribusinesses did not have to pay the tariffs and other import duties that they would have normally been subject to.  It was a big free for all and those of you who owned stock in these big Wall Street Welfare recipients  such as ADM were rewarded with larger dividend payments.  What happened to the small Mexican farmers?  They could not sell their corn because they could not compete with the prices of the U.S. corporate government welfare recipients.  They were eventually forced off their land (over 1.3 million of them).  Many took a hike across the border.

There were and are many other impacts that NAFTA had an continues to have on the Mexican economy than to ravage its corn markets.

As for us in the USA? Most estimates that I find put the total job loss in the USA that can be attributed to NAFTA at 2 million job.  I personally would put that figure much higher because most of these sources only measure the direct loss such as a factory being dismantled and shipped overseas whereas there were many other losses of jobs and businesses that were in the community where the manufacturing plant was located–grocery stores and other retail stores in the area that went out of business because their customers moved away and those who remained did not have much money.

“It is clear that the costs to workers outweighed the benefits in all three nations. The process differed from country to country, and given the greater size and wealth of the United States, the impact there has not been as great as it was in Mexico and Canada. But the overall pattern was similar. In each nation, workers’ share of the gains from rising productivity fell and the proportion of income and wealth going to those at the very top of the economic pyramid grew.

Americans were promised that NAFTA would generate large numbers of net new good jobs. Instead, over a million jobs that would otherwise have been created were lost, and wages were pressured downward for a large number of workers with less than a college education.

Mexican employment did increase, but much of it in low-wage “maquiladora” industries, which the promoters of NAFTA promised would disappear. The agricultural sector was devastated and the share of jobs with no security, no benefits, and no future expanded. The continued willingness every year of hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens to risk their lives crossing the border to the United States because they cannot make a living at home is in itself testimony to the failure of NAFTA to deliver on the promises of its promoters.”

SOURCE

CONGRESS FOR THE MOST PART—WHETHER THEY ARE DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN DON’T WANT TO SOLVE REAL PROBLEMS

(and they don’t because the truth is that the majority of the incumbents in Congress, unlike most ordinary Americans, profit from Wall Street shenanigans and the status quo)

That’s why the best they come up with are pseudo solutions, faux solutions, non-solutions—after all, they have to keep up the appearances that they are doing something. When all else fails, they use inflammatory rhetoric to stir up racial and ethnic hatred and fear. Believe me, it is NOT the Mexican immigrants that we should fear—it is most of the self-serving incumbents installed in the US Congress for the past 20 or 30 years whom we should fear the most.

Congress reminds me in great part of those people from the Dilbert cartoons who work diligently to look busy and as if they are accomplishing something when in fact they are purposefully doing nothing more than appearing to look busy.

THE BASIC RULE FOR ALL PROBLEM SOLVING: IDENTIFY AND ADDRESS THE ROOT CAUSE

Real solutions can only be those that treat and change things at the ROOT CAUSE. All other solutions are band-aids that will only momentarily forestall hemorrhaging. An analogy is treating the headache from a brain tumor with an aspirin. It gets rid of the headache and makes you feel better for a while, but the root cause of the problem remains and will return with a vengeance. So it is with immigration and with the “solutions” that have been suggested thus far.

For example, building a fence is like taking an aspirin to treat a brain tumor. The only difference is that the fence is quite a bit more expensive. The fence, like the aspirin, does not address the root cause. It does not address the desperate need that drives thousands of Mexicans to risk their lives in crossing the border.

At least I think that we have progressed far enough on the topic that even most uninformed among us now realize the physical impossibility of rounding up and returning between 12 and 18 million people to Mexico. There may be a few holdouts who still cling to the possibility of this myth as a solution, but not nearly as many “morans” as there were five years ago. At least we don’t have to listen to politicians bellowing this as a viable solution anymore. That fact right there is enough cause for celebration even though we have miles to go before the problem of illegal immigration is solved.

Immigration is one of the political footballs in the USA that is kicked back and forth between the two parties as part of their dog and pony show to make it look like they are doing something when in fact neither side is doing a damn thing to solve or even alleviate this source of human misery.

That’s right.  That is one of the first steps to solving the illegal immigration problem in the USA.  TELL CONGRESS TO END FARM SUBSIDIES OF OUR TAXPAYER DOLLARS TO THE RICH AND FAMOUS “FARMERS” AS WELL AS TO WALL STREET AGRIBUSINESSES LIKE ADM AND CARGILL.  Farm subsidies were never intended for the rich and for multibillion dollar Wall Street and private corporations.  Instead these subsidies were intended to give a hand up to the small family farmers.

That’s right, and the additional connection of the US government and your elected Democrat and Republicans officials in DC to the immigration problem  are the trade agreements that they support and pass.  These trade agreements go hand-in-hand with the farm subsidies in regard to their relationship to our immigration problems.  You see, when NAFTA passed, that meant that the small Mexican corn farmers had to compete with the highly government subsidized corn of corporate monoliths like  Cargill and ADM.  That’s on the same level as the local hardware store on the square of my home town in West Texas competing with the New WalMart.

The legal phrase for it is “nolo-contendre” or “no- contest.

What do people do when their means for earning a livelihood is removed from them?  More often than not they must move to greener pastures in order to survive  and that is just what many Mexicans have literally done.

What most Americans still don’t get is that it is our elected officials, the professional politicians who have created the immigration problem. Yes, the incumbents like Sam Johnson who have been in Washington for 20 years who support farm subsidies for rich Wall Street corporations and ruinous trade agreements such as NAFTA. Prior to 1993 before NAFTA was passed, the USA did not have an immigration problem.  We had fewer than 2 million people in this country illegally.  Today we have estimates that range from 12 to 20 million people who are illegally in the USA

One thing you can say for the Wall Street crooks and shysters–they stick together.

This morning’s Huffington Post announced that Former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, who brokered the investment bank’s controversial sale to Bank of America, is taking over as chairman and CEO of CIT Group as the commercial lender continues to restructure its business following a brief stay in bankruptcy protection last year.

Yes, the same John Thain who paid out $3.6 billion in bonuses to Merrill employees just before the deal closed, and who spent more than $1 million to redecorate his office at Merrill, despite its massive losses.

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Maybe someday ordinary Americans who comprise the majority of voters in this country will actually come together and vote the professional politicians who use their power to enrich themselves and their families out of office.

NOTHING WILL CHANGE UNTIL WE THE PEOPLE CHANGE CONGRESS AND BY THAT I MEAN REMOVE AT LEAST 263 OF THE INCUMBENTS FROM BOTH HOUSES.

I had to smile this morning as I read a piece from the BBC News titled UK Economy Faces Crisis.  Actually it’s not just the UK, it is also Greece, Portugal and Spain who are staring a severe economic crisis in the face.  Over the past few days the G7 finance ministers discussed this growing crisis.

While the richer nations of the European Union such as Germany and France are unwilling to bail out their poorer cousins, they are  adamant about not allowing the IMF to bail out these nations.   They know better than to use the IMF because these are the same people who cooked up the notion of the IMF. The IMF’s managing director has always been European and its President is always from the USA.  Europe and American control the IMF.  These people know what the IMF is and they know how its loan system operates to take advantage of and humiliate nations who are forced to go begging to the IMF for a loan.

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Over the past two years I’ve written many posts on the topic of the IMF.  A lot of Americans don’t fully understand how it works.  If you are one of those people, here is some enlightenment for you on the topic of the IMF.

This organization has the role of going into a country that is so poor that they must ask for help and essentially pulling down their panties before multinational corporations come in and rape the people of that country. IMF are the middlemen the deal brokers–but they do not represent the poor countries.  They represent the multinational corporations.

At the core of the IMF aggressions against national economies that can least afford it are what they euphemistically refer to as “structural adjustments.“  I call it “pulling off the panties of the poor nations to facilitate the upcoming rape.”

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AND WHO PAYS MONEY THAT SUPPORTS THESE NEFARIOUS ACTIVITIES OF THE IMF?

Why you and I do–the Americans like you and I who actually do pay our taxes.  Also citizens of other countries have some of their tax dollars donated without their permission to the IMF as well.  We are the ones whose tax money is given without our permission to support the vile actions of Wall Street and the murderous corporations that they support.

How are these funds passed through our Congress? Requests for this money are attached as barnacles to other bills, hidden in pages of other global pork for Wall Street, that’s how.

For example, in June of last year, funding for the IMF was slipped into a $106 billion war supplemental bill.

The House rebuked President Obama for trying to ignore restrictions to international aid payments, voting overwhelmingly for an amendment forcing the administration to abide by its constraints.

House members approved an amendment by a 429-2 vote to have the Obama administration pressure the World Bank to strengthen labor and environmental standards and require a Treasury Department report on World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) activities.

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Obama, in a statement made as he signed the bill, said that he would ignore the conditions.

They would “interfere with my constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations by directing the Executive to take certain positions in negotiations or discussions with international organizations and foreign governments, or by requiring consultation with the Congress prior to such negotiations or discussions,” Obama said in the signing statement.

Why didn’t Obama fire Tim Geithner long ago?  That is a question that a lot of Americans would like to have answered.  Geithner has tarnished Obama’s image as much as Obama’s backroom deals in the White House with Pharmaceutical companies.  It looks more and more like Obama represents Wall Street and not Main Street and as for a transparent government–well Obama must have misread his teleprompter when he was telling us about his “transparent” government.

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As far as the Queen and many Americans are concerned, Tim Geithner, Lloyd Blankfein, Ben Bernanke and half of Wall Street should be prosecuted and sent to prison for their thefts from the American taxpayers.

AIG-Gate: The World’s Greatest Insurance Heist

by Ellen Hodgson Brown / February 7th, 2010

Rumor has it that Timothy Geithner is on his way out as Treasury Secretary, due to his involvement in the AIG scandal that is now unraveling in hearings before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Bob Chapman writes in The International Forecaster:

Each day brings more revelations of efforts of the NY Fed and Goldman Sachs to hide the details of the criminal conspiracy of the AIG bailout. … This is a real crisis on the scale of Watergate. Corruption at its finest.

But unlike the perpetrators of the Watergate scandal, who wound up looking at jail time, Geithner evidently has a golden parachute waiting at Goldman Sachs, not coincidentally the largest recipient of the AIG bailout. At least that is the rumor sparked by an article by Caroline Baum on Bloomberg News, titled “Goldman Parachute Awaits Geithner to Ease Fall.” Hank Paulson, Geithner’s predecessor, was CEO of Goldman Sachs before coming to the Treasury. Geithner, who has come up through the ranks of government, could be walking through the revolving door in the other direction.

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