Lord Cantor Spurns the Mob (#OWS)

Cantor, Lord of the House Republicans, sipped his tea at the "Values Voters Summit" and sighed.

"That mob is discommoding my friends on Wall Street," he snapped a finger at a passing waiter. "Do be a good lad, and give that rabble our order that they disperse."
"Sorry, m'lord," was the reply. "Some of them are my cousins. Mostly they are looking for work and a chance at a decent lifestyle. Could you not authorize the Treasury to spend money repairing the damage from the hurricane in your district, and so forth?"
"Nonsense!" Cantors eyes flashed with rage. "That would require returning our tax rates to the era of Lord Reagan. We may revere his name, but his tax rates were positively socialist and his willingness to talk things over with this political opponents is out of fashion. Men, take that communist away and throw him onto the streets!"
The servants hesitated. The oldest asked, hesitantly, "But, my lord, what will his family do? How can any family live when our jobs are exported and most of the wealth of the nation is in the hands of the 400?"
Lord Cantor stood enraged. "Let them eat Koch!" he commanded, "Obey Us, or We shall bring America's economy to a halt. Don't think that We won't! Your pensions and the health care of your children shall go first!"
There was a pause, as the servants conferred among themselves. Should they obey Lord Cantor, or were they loyal to the 99 per cent of America from whom they had sprung?
Truly it was a hard choice; to obey and earn a temporary security, or to hazard their livelihoods, their meager fortune, and their sacred Honor in a quest to bring back an America free from the Aristocracy of Wealth. Truly it was a time to come together and to talk it over.
What came next?

Register to Vote TODAY! #OWS

Voting Is Power!

Washington State voter registration deadline is today

The voter registration deadline to vote in the upcoming general election in Washington is this Friday, October 7th. Be sure you've registered to vote and if necessary mailed in your form by October 7th. Remember, if you have changed your address or moved since you last registered, you need to re-register. No need to go to an office or wait in line. Just click here to fill out a form. If you are already registered to vote at your current address, you do not need to re-register, but please forward this notice to all your friends. - Forwarded by permission ... The Rock the Vote Voter Registration Center

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$arah $till Need$ Your Ca$h

The day after announcing,
she was not running for President,
Palin still asks for money

While quitting the race for the White House, Sarah Palin is still asking you for money.
Give deeply, True Believers!
Sarah Needs Your Money!!!!

Is Your Biking Problem Really A Parking Problem? (a #ctww challenge)

Shed optimized for bikes

Last week I cleaned out the shed so that was optimized for parking our bicycles for easy access. They had sat in the back of our shed, unused for over a year because getting to them was a complicated process of moving a bunch of tools and stuff. I wanted to arrange things so that grabbing our bikes was as easy as opening the door to the shed, in the hope that this would increase our actual usage.
So far, this has worked! Putting the bikes up front and the tools in the back (and getting rid of a lot of junk) enabled me casually to bicycle places I would otherwise have walked or driven. It's not even that inconvenient for using the tools; it's just not that hard to lean over a bike and grab the shovel. Certainly that's easier than moving all my tools or trying to lift my bike over them!
One example of this working is today. Today The Lovely Wife was canning tomatoes, which is a really great thing to do, but it was displacing our dinner preparations. We decided on the spur of the moment that I would go get takeout. I washed up from gardening, and instead of hopping in my car, rolled my bike from the shed.

Kris and part of our crop!

 Rain was threatening, so I didn't want to walk, but the bike got me there and back just ahead of getting soggy.  Success!
This fit in week's Change the World Wednesday Challenge:

This week replace at least one car trip with a bicycle or walking trip.

 If you find yourself not biking as much as you'd like, consider whether part of the problem has to do with how you park your bike. If it's just as easy to grab your bike as your car keys, you may be on your way!

You Pay Sales Tax - Why Won't Wall Street? #occupyWallStreet

You pay sales tax on stuff you need, but Wall Street doesn't pay sales tax on stocks.
A 1% sales tax on stocks, derivatives and so forth would eliminate our budget deficits AND reduce market volatility. People who hold stock for retirement would not be affected since over the course of 20 or 30 years, 1% of the stocks initial value is nothing.
Lots of politicians have talked about replacing the income tax with a national sales tax -well fine, extend it to stock sales and it's a deal!

The 99 Per Cent Solution: What Will It Precipitate?

A Message From the 1960s

Who knows where the Occupy Wall Street movement will go?
I know firsthand there is a lot of fear and anger among the vast majority of Americans who feel our nation slipping away, but it is hard to figure out where to focus those feelings.

I remember Billy Joel warning us decades ago of the collapse of American industry, as the jobs were shipped away, but most of my friends assumed that we'd be o.k., because we had education and technology - we'd work smarter not harder, and it would all work out. They wouldn't close down our white collar factories like they did Allentown:

Surely this couldn't happen to us!

"Well we're living here in Allentown
And they're closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem they're killing time
Filling out forms
Standing in line.

...Well we're waiting here in Allentown
For the Pennsylvania we never found
For the promises our teachers gave
If we worked hard
If we behaved.

So the graduations hang on the wall
But they never really helped us at all
No they never taught us what was real
Iron or coke,
Chromium steel.

And we're waiting here in Allentown.
But they've taken all the coal from the ground
And the union people crawled away.

Every child had a pretty good shot
To get at least as far as their old man got.
If something happened on the way to that place
They threw an American flag in our face, oh oh oh.

Well I'm living here in Allentown
And it's hard to keep a good man down.
But I won't be getting up today..."

Well, now that the manufacturing jobs have been exported, it turned out to be pretty easy to export the white collar jobs too. Our nation is rapidly changing from a First World Nation - which imports raw materials and exports finished goods - into a Third World Nation - which exports raw materials and imports finished goods. This is great news for our Aristocracy of Wealth, who enjoy being the 1% who own most everything, but not good news for the 99%, who have to get used to the prospect of living like a Chinese factory worker.
The Corporate-backed Tea Party tapped this rage for a while, and directed it against the enemies of the Aristocracy. This is a traditional tactic of aristocracies threatened by mass protests - turn one group of working people against another. The question yet to be answered is whether this will work in 2012. There is still a strong Know-Nothing group in America, happy to fight against their own economic interests so long as it means they aren't some sort of "liberal". And the Aristocracy is fantastically wealthy; America has a greater concentration of wealth than in any time in its history, and a far greater concentration than many contemporary Third World nations. As we saw in the Wisconsin recall elections, the Aristocracy is willing to spend money to keep power and as we see across our nation, it's willing to destroy democracy in the process by keeping people from voting.

These are interesting times, and I don't have any answers except that everyone should participate. Politics is how grown-up run our lives and, like doing the dishes and changing your car's oil, you have to do it - you can put it off for a while but sooner or later it has to be done.