The Big Lie

Michael Thomas

Daily Beast / Newweek, Dec 26, 2011

Wall Street has destroyed the wonder that was America.

Imagine a vast field on which a terrible battle has recently been fought, the bare ground cratered by fusillade after fusillade of heavy artillery, trees reduced to blackened stumps, wisps of toxic gas hanging in the gray, and corpses everywhere.

Flurry of local #OccupyWallStreet actions and successes show strength and staying power of movement

Excerpted via Rose Aguilar:

” the movement is far from dead.

Here in California, the movement is exploding. In a recent study called “Diffusion of the Occupy Movement in California,” UC Riverside researchers surveyed 482 incorporated towns and cities in California and found that 143 – nearly 30 percent – had Occupy sites on Facebook between December 1 and December 8.

According to the study, many of the small and medium-sized towns are active with likes, posts and events on their Facebook pages. For example, the town of Arcata has about 17,000 people and 2,950 subscriptions on their page.

“The Occupy Barstow website proclaimed that Barstow is ‘about as far from Wall Street as you can get.’ But the Barstow occupiers probably did not know that there were also Occupy actions in Weaverville, Idyllwild, Calistoga, El Centro and many other small California towns, even in very remote areas,” write professor of sociology Christopher Chase-Dunn and graduate student Michaela Curran-Strange.

And the majority of Occupy cities are not in the Northern, more liberal, part of the state. They are almost equally divided between the north and south.

Continue reading “Michael Bauwens: Occupy Movement Alive and Well”

The Federal Election Commission recognizes 8 parties as national committees.

They are:

Democratic
Republican
Libertarian
Constitution
Reform
Green
Natural Law
Socialist

The FEC has no mechanism to de-list a party that has gone defunct. The Natural Law Party is defunct, except it is still on the ballot and active in Michigan.

Previous Post from Richard Winger:

Richard Winger: Yes, Congress Can Pass a Law Mandating That All National Party Candidates for Federal Offices Appear on All State Ballots

PhiBetaIota:  If we all come together, we can force Congress to pass a law that mandates all eight parties appearing on all state ballots for all federal offices.  We can do this in time for November 2012.  This is the “one thing” we can all come together on, and it would then impact on Electoral College allocation (proportional vice winner take all) and on participation in the rigged two-party presidential debates that are an outrage and offensive to all thinking citizens who appreciate the divesity that once chacterized the debates as managed by the League of Women Voters.

Wealth gap widens between lawmakers and constituents

 

 

Americans Elect a Fraud Machine?

Posted on 2011/12/25

 

Alert citizens appear to have Americans Elect fully understood.  It could still be captured for good, but right now it is corrupt beyond imagination.

Enhancing Democracy or Strengthening the Emerging Oligarchy: Which Will It Be?

Joseph Firestone

Corrente, 19 December 2011

EXTRACT:

This is the fifth in a series of posts on some of these new web-based platforms and how they relate to this central question of oligarchy vs. democracy. The first, “A System-Changing Solution for the OWS Movement?”, which I co-authored with Nancy Bordier, compared and contrasted two alternatives available to OWS, the Interactive Voter Choice System and Americans Elect (AE). The second focused on AE. The third analyzed No Labels (NL), and the fourth covered Ruck.us. Here, I’ll explore in more detail the question of the relationships among AE, No Labels, and Ruck.us, and explicitly consider the possibility of some combination of the three organizations, whether formal or informal, working together to impact the political system. I’ll also discuss the likely implications of such a combination for the American body politic.

Read full analysis.

See Also:

 

Beware “Americans Elect” [Ron Paul the Daily Paul]

Irregular Times on Americans Elect Fraud

Third Party Group “Americans Elect” – A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing? [Daily Kos]

Will “Americans Elect” Their President in 2012? [OpEd News]

Americans Elect Part IV: Paying Big Money for Signatures [Oregon]

Americans Elect: The Truth Behind the Corporate Scheme to Swipe the 2012 Election

Richard Winger: US Ballot Access & Americans Elect

Open Voting Consortium Video & Website

Open Voting Consortium (OVC) provided a voting system for the LinuxWorld conference at Moscone Center in San Francisco, Aug 5-7. The system is called an Electronic Ballot Printer, which prints voters’ choices in the voting booth.

Phi Beta Iota: Write-In voting has since been fully integrated.

Letter Reveals How Ron Paul Cashed in on Paranoia

Tim Murphy

Mother Jones, 23 December 2011

Even as he’s climbed to the top of the polls in Iowa and gone so far as to preemptively claim victory in New Hampshire, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) has spent much of the last week distancing himself from racist and homophobic articles that appeared in his eponymous newsletter in the 1980s and early 1990s. In part, that’s because anxious conservatives have decided to make an issue of it—last week, the Weekly Standard dispatched James Kirchik to rehash his original 2008 bombshell on the newsletters. It’s also because, as Dave Weigel explains, Paul has failed to put together a coherent response. On Wednesday, Paul walked out of an interview with CNN’s Gloria Borger when she pressed him on his role in publishing them.

The story hasn’t gone away, and now Reuters has the latest: A newly unearthed subscription pitch circa 1993, this time bearing the signature of Paul himself. It reads like a caricature of the conspiratorial, unhinged, early ’90s militia movement, the kind of thing that would make the John Birch Society blush. Written in the first person, it warns of threats from the “demonic fraternity” we know of as Yale’s Skull and Bones society, the Trilateral Commission, the “perverted, pagan” rituals at Bohemian Grove, a global government, “the coming race war,” the Council on Foreign Relation, and FEMA. Paul (or his ghostwriter, at least) carefully explains that you can trust his view that the federal government is behind AIDS, because he’s a doctor:

Read rest of article.

BigBatUSA:  The race war is over the top but real in the sense that Texas anticipated the illegal immigrant waves decades before Arizona, everything else solid including the threat to the public health of federally-mandated vaccinations.  On balance we give Ron Paul an A+ for seeing threats to the Republic decades in advance, a C- for not anticipating that political correctness (from Mother Jones of all places) might try to undermine him at some distant date when most–not all–of his fears have been validated by the passage of time and the exposure of the massive financial crime syndicate that Matt Taibbi, from Rolling Stone, and John Bogle of Vanguard, say is every bit as bad as Ron Paul anticipated.

See Also:

Gary North: Ron Paul EXPOSED — Real Reason Two-Party Tyranny is Terrified He Might Win in 2012