He voted for special interests in Financial Reform Legislation.

He voted against extending unemployment insurance benefits during this time of joblessness.

Conclusion: Man of the people, not so much.

The bill also would have supplied a $16 billion boost in Medicaid funding for states, which would mean about $500 million for Massachusetts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That figure is lower than an earlier proposal, which would have supplied a $24 billion boost, or $760 million for Massachusetts. It also includes a variety of tax changes, and money for summer jobs programs.

This is money that could have gone directly into our local economy. The amount of pain this Republican No vote is going to cause our citizens is incalculable.

More on this story here here and here

By the end of this week, 903,000 long-term unemployed who otherwise would have received benefits will have missed checks. By the end of next week that number will reach 1.2 million.

This vote by our elected representatives demonstrates a lack of or ineffective planning on how to deal with this economic catastrophe. The question (How Do I Survive?) comes through loud and clear in the 900+ comments to this story. What’s your answer to the question?

read the rest of the story…

“When you put people out of work, you cripple the quality of life of their entire families. When you start dismantling the public schools and driving teachers from the classrooms, you damage — and in many instances cripple — the lifetime prospects of untold numbers of pupils. When you undermine a recovery that is as fragile as this one, which is as fragile as a crate of eggs, you undermine the economic health of the entire nation.”

If think of yourself as caring, thoughtful, and patriotic, then contact your elected representative’s and tell them to continue support for stimulus funding.

Read the full story…

Citigroup Plutonomy Report Part 1.pdf
Citigroup Plutonomy Report Part 2.pdf

Thank you Bill.

Bill Moyers: Plutocracy is not an American word but it’s become an American phenomenon. Back in the fall of 2005, the Wall Street giant Citigroup even coined a variation on it, plutonomy, an economic system where the privileged few make sure the rich get richer with government on their side. By the next spring, Citigroup decided the time had come to publicly “bang the drum on plutonomy.”

And bang they did, with an “equity strategy” for their investors, entitled, “Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer.” Here are some excerpts:

“Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper…[and] take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years…”

“…the top 10%, particularly the top 1% of the US– the plutonomists in our parlance– have benefited disproportionately from the recent productivity surge in the US…[and] from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor.”

“…[and they] are likely to get even wealthier in the coming years. [Because] the dynamics of plutonomy are still intact.”

And so they were, before the great collapse of 2008. And so they are, today, after the fall. While millions of people have lost their jobs, their homes, and their savings, the plutonomists are doing just fine. In some cases, even better, thanks to our bailout of the big banks which meant record profits and record bonuses for Wall Street.

Now why is this? Because over the past 30 years the plutocrats, or plutonomists — choose your poison — have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding. Remember that Citigroup reference to “market-friendly governments” on their side? It hasn’t mattered which party has been in power — government has done Wall Street’s bidding.

Don’t blame the lobbyists, by the way; they are simply the mules of politics, delivering the drug of choice to a political class addicted to cash — what polite circles call “campaign contributions” and Tony Soprano would call “protection.”

This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet. According to a study from the Pew Research Center last month, nine out of ten Americans give our national economy a negative rating. Eight out of ten report difficulty finding jobs in their communities, and seven out of ten say they experienced job-related or financial problems over the past year.

So it is that like those populists of that earlier era, millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. Then, the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy.

Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs.

Via, http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/

On this Patriots day (the start of the Revolutionary war) Massachusetts (and other groups) leads the way for the rest of the states to send a strong message to those greedy (to big to fail) banks.

Via Huffingtonpost
Chants of “move those dollars” and “move that money” rang out last week in the Hart Senate Office Building during an event for supporters of the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation. The group is spearheading a 10 Percent Is Enough campaign to fight usury, the practice of charging excessive interest rates and fees. They had reason to celebrate, with the announcement that Massachusetts would move nearly a quarter of a billion dollars away from banks that refused to cap their interest rates to meet a state guideline of 18%.

Economic Downturn, Financial Rescues, and Bush-Era Policies Drive the Numbers

Click to download the PDF of this Report

By Kathy Ruffing and James R. Horney via cbpp.org

If not for the tax cuts enacted during the Presidency of George W. Bush that Congress did not pay for, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that began during that period, and the effects of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression (including the cost of steps necessary to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term.

While President Obama inherited a bad fiscal legacy, that does not diminish his responsibility to propose policies to address our fiscal imbalance and put the weight of his office behind them. Although policymakers should not tighten fiscal policy in the near term while the economy remains fragile, they and the nation at large must come to grips with the nation’s deficit problem. But we should all recognize how we got where we are today.

The rest of the story

To see the full video click the photo or here.

To get the full transcript of the event click here.

by Dante Atkins via Daily Kos: State of the Nation

The year 2006 was shaping up to be a good one for Democrats. The toxic combination of George W. Bush and the corruption and cronyism of the Republican Congress was brewing a perfect storm that seemed to be pointing to Democratic victories in areas where they might not otherwise be expected. And nowhere was that more true than in the Mountain West.

In this land of big sky, rugged earth, and independent spirits, Democratic candidates were not only on the verge of winning big in the competitive areas such as Colorado and Montana, but they were also fighting hard in the deepest of red areas: strongly conservative states such as Wyoming and Idaho. The prevailing wisdom was that these areas preferred Republicans because voters demanded less government interference in their lives and thus tended to side with the small-government conservatives against big-government “tax-and-spend” liberals.

It was in this context that on October 2 of that year, Markos Moulitsas e-penned an editorial in an unlikely place: the electronic version of the libertarian publication CATO, appropriately dubbed CATO Unbound. In his essay, “The Case for the Libertarian Democrat,” Moulitsas quoted a then-pseudonymous Daily Kos diarist to explain the common cause then forming between those with libertarian ideals and those with a progressive vision:

As hekebolos further noted, defense contractors now have greater say in what weapons systems get built (via their lobbyists, blackmailing elected officials by claiming that jobs will be lost in their states and districts if weapons system X gets axed). The energy industry dominates the executive branch and has reaped record windfall profits. Our public debt is now held increasingly by private hedge funds. Corporations foul our air and water. They plunder our treasury.

This list, I’m sure, could be added to. Oil and oil services companies can even dictate when and how the most powerful nation on earth decides to go to war. A cabal of major corporate industry is, in fact, more powerful than the government of the most powerful nation on earth–and government is the only thing that can stop them from recklessly exploiting the people and destroying their freedom.

That, in essence, is why I am a Democrat, and why my original blog post on libertarian Democrats struck a chord with so many. We cherish freedom, and will embrace any who would protect it. But that necessarily includes, in this day and age, the government.

(Click for the rest of the story) It’s worth your time, IMO.

I had been working for the last few years as a therapist at BHS Hollywood Family Recovery, treating “dual-diagnosis” clients in an outpatient drug program. BHS had been in trouble since the economy tanked in August, with County contracts gradually drying up during the course of the year.

After several rounds of layoffs, the CEO Henry van Oudheusdenhad, MSW, sent out a global email describing the millions lost in the last month. He ended the letter with an assurance that we will all band together and move forward as one. A few days later, Henry showed up to meet with our group at Hollywood. He looked haggard and stressed, and he perspired when he talked, which was his way. He was a heated guy. He talked breathlessly about how difficult this is, his love for this program, and how he didn’t want to lose the program altogether but that it would be “reset” at ten percent of its current capacity. Then he went on, oddly, to praise the strength and flexibility of BHS even in the face of great adversity. Afterward, he spoke with each employee separately. He told some to pack up immediately and asked others to stay a few weeks to help transition clients to other agencies, which we all knew would be impossible.

BHS Hollywood recovery is in the heart of Hollywood, on Sunset and Highland, just across from Hollywood High School. We got gang-bangers with neck tattoos, fallen porn stars, Hollywood hopefuls who had come to L.A. to be closer to their dream, not to achieve it. The ones who ended up in therapy tended to have histories of horrendous child-abuse, which left them prone to emotional storms and an incoherent understanding of the past and the future — Addiction’s ideal habitat. I grew attached to my clients, which seemed to help them, and some got over their addictions and got better. It was a good feeling when that happened. Others “went out,” or relapsed. I thought “went out” was a strange way of putting it at first, but I came to appreciate its descriptive power. When you call a client and get a message that his phone is no longer in service, you know that he has sold it along with his watch and his computer, that he has disconnected himself from the grid and gone out.

Ex-addicts run BHS. One of the top executives is supposed to have walked Sunset Strip during her using days. They are known collectively as “Corporate” and operate out of a grim stucco-sprayed structure in Gardena, also known as “Corporate.” I remember my first corporate Christmas party. On the walls a few plastic Santas competed half-heartedly with giant matching wooden “scrawls” of the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions. A line of BHS employees — most of them ex-addicts — snaked around those walls toward another room. In that room, Corporate stood behind a table in white aprons, ladling out “barbecued” turkey and mashed potatoes. Most of us were embarrassed and a little spooked to be fed, literally, by Corporate.

After the recession, Corporate preached about increasing productivity, which meant more billable hours. The two therapists at BHS Hollywood were already seeing up to twenty clients a week and the chemical dependency counselors 30 or 40. We were being asked to sacrifice quality for quantity but didn’t fully feel the pressure because of that word “productivity.” It was hard to see talking intimately to people as a “product.” Halfway through the year, corporate sent out a mass email with the headline, “BHS is going green!” This turned out to mean that Corporate would no longer supply plastic plates and cups. I wondered how Corporate could quantify treatment and yet be so misty and euphemistic about cost-cutting.

Around the same time, Corporate started “letting people go.” Before the recession, people only got “let go” at BHS if they “went out.” After the recession, every month brought rumors of sweeps. They’re going to be closing a facility or firing 10 percent of the staff, we would hear. And then people would disappear. One day a co-worker just stopped showing up and we learned after the fact that he had been let go last week, along with thirty other employees at 6 separate facilities. In August, Corporate instituted furloughs one Friday a month. In September, a rumor began to float that Hollywood was on the cutting block. We were a small site with relatively expensive rent — not cost-effective, expendable. It was just a matter of time.

When the blow came, the receptionist and most of the chemical dependency staff were “let go” immediately. Ex-addicts with felony convictions, they would not find new jobs in this economy and were looking at unemployment and welfare. The program director, myself and the remaining CD counselor were given a month “to transition” clients either to BHS’ Boyle Heights facility or to another agency. The problem was Boyle Heights could only take a fraction of our clients, and most of the other agencies had either closed down or were full. We were a county-contracted agency with the usual government make-work that goes along with that, but we also helped a lot of people no one else would touch and formed strong bonds with them. Three of my clients began to talk about suicide. A few others “went out.” Some left my office in tears or anger. I thought about my clients constantly during that last month but had no words to inspire security. On my last day, Corporate assured me that my clients would “be taken care of,” but not one had been placed anywhere.

A few days before I left, I had a dream that I was smoking crystal meth with a client. Having been “let go,” did I identify with “going out?” Or did I simply share my client’s desire to extinguish emotions that had no solution or object? After all, who even to blame for this catastrophe? Corporate for their callous kow-towing to the bottom-line? California for cutting services to those whose minds and bodies most depend on them? The media for not attending to the plight of people at street level. My greatest fear is that our disappearance will seem to make no difference. Our clients might “go out” or kill themselves, but who will notice?