Letter to a Friend who is participating in an Occupation Location

The media is looking for the easy answer,  the finely honed sound bite and the airbrushed press release.  When Occupy Wall Street produced  a list (created and voted on in their General Assemblies) of their goals, the media ignored it, except for Keith Olbermann formerly of MSNBC who has now found a home at Current.TV.  If the insipid talking heads with good hair and million dollar salaries are clueless, the people aren't.  

In recent polls, the great majority of the population agrees with the complaints of the Occupiers of Wall Street. The people want the banksters and hedge fund sociopaths go to jail for screwing up the economy.  The people want to see production of goods gain momentum in this economy.  The people want to stop the free ride for the wealthy.  The people want to end the choke hold that the corporations have on our electoral processes and on our government.
The majority of the people want to see the end of personhood for corporations, and want to see jobs come back to the US.

    Sometime during the summer,  Mike Bloomberg announced that he had a fear of a populist uprising, mentioning it weeks before OWS.  He probably based this fear on guilt of knowing how he's been getting away with major theft, paying the lowest taxes as a member of the 1% since the robber barons paid taxes preceding the Great Depression.   He knows that index finds social unrest at the intersect point where food prices are high and income is low.  This is a world wide index, and our country is still relatively cushioned against widespread famine.  But, as our infrastructure is disassembled by the wealthy who pay practically nothing in taxes, and by multinational corporations posing as American companies who have no production in this country,  we devolve into a third world consumer nation. We may, for the first time since the Great Depression, have to deal with these issues ourselves.

According to Thom Hartmann, radio commentator on WWRL1600.com, if we adjusted the money for inflation, and compared it to 1961 levels, we would find that corporations paid 43 percent of their profits to tax, while now they pay 17 percent.


We, the USA, in the 1950s and 1960s manufactured 60 percent of the world's goods, with 6 percent of the worlds population.  In the 1970s, 37 percent of our GNP was from manufacturing, now it's 11 percent.  Something's gotta give.

  If the corporations were paying into the tax base at 1960s levels, all would be well. If we taxed imports, we may not have so many 99c stores, but we'd have a whole lot more jobs. If Mayor Mike was paying 50 percent corporate tax, he would be paying 750,000,000 this year in taxes, since his corporation Bloomberg earned 1.5 billion this year.  Perhaps his fear is based on his knowledge that he is getting away with murder.  
That kind of money would repair all the potholes on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.  (Next year, he could pay for the Belt Parkway).


  If our tax base was righted, Charlie Sheen would be paying 50,000,000 in tax, as would most CEOs of bigger corporations, and sports stars given to hosting pit bull fights and hiring under aged prostitutes.   Instead of going into yet another mansion that will be abandoned as soon as the addicted and addled get thown out of the game and off the screen, the tax money could go to rehabs for crack addicts and could build new factories to produce solar panels.  Why are we letting these fools get away with this crap??

If Exxon Mobil lost their subsidies...If Apple began to manufacture in the USA ..if the government taxed imports....

 Note to Occupation Sites:  Make sure you have the Portosans..the kids here have been going to the local Burger King, McDonald., but they've been getting turned away..now the local churches are helping, I was told, but I haven't seen it.

.I suggested the Ironworkers donate facilities, the guys who are working on WTC, since their brotherhood says they support the OWS... Someone should reach out to the unions to find if they can rig up some facilities..

The first week of OWS, the kids were about 40 or 50 during the day in the rain and even NPR wouldnt cover the story. They eventually relented, but only Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann will give decent coverage to the mushrooming of 900 international Occupy events

The kids here are doing a class action suit, since they feel the police lead them onto the Brooklyn road way, only to box them in and arrest them en masse. 

You might want to call into WWRL1600. to tell them of Occupy Albany and the lack of media coverage. they stream at wwrl1600.com.  Mark Reilly is a progressive radio host,  on the air from 6am to 9am M-F, has broadcast from OWS, to mention the media blackout on the rest of the Occupy protests.  Their number is 212 868 0975

Stay strong, and know you're doing the right thing.

Universal Health Care NOW!!!!

Joy Ryder SEZ:

How to make healthcare affordable? Expand medicare/medicaid to anyone who wants it. Let people pay according to their income, like Child Health Plus, in NY State.. AND....make medical school tuition(AND NURSING SCHOOL TUITION) FREE, like in EUROPE...with stipends for students, while they're studying, so they don't have to go to work the nite shift at McDonalds and fall asleep in their anatomy class... (there's obviously wiggle room here, tuition could be sliding scale too)    Graduated Doctors and NURSES can donate a month a year, or a year every decade to help out people overseas, in organizations like Doctors without Borders..now that's a way to win friends and influence people...Solving the health care crisis and developing Kucinich's Dept. of Peace, in one fell swoop!!

Global Warming has good sides, too!!

We had the color extravaganza, the dogwood trees or cherry blossoms or whatever you call them busting out all over, together with daffodils, rhodadendron, lilac and some green blossoms.  Pretty.  But then the weather swooped up to 89 degrees for the last few days, ending the delicate little spring light show, and bringing in the heat from outside.  Nice.  I"m not ready..I still have some slack on my arms that I was hoping to tone by say, June.  What ever happened to a weekly fast?  Do Christians who shop at big box stores still fast once a week?  I know I don't.  I wish I did.  I wouldn't be carrying around this extra baggage if I had been doing my Christian yoga thingie.

Now they're beating people up on my block

Hey..This neighborhood is really creepy...last week a white guy got jumped by five or more black kids on my block...he's on life support still..the cops came to my house asking me if I knew anything...another white kid who has lived around the corner said that his father had a rock thrown at him..he thought it was racially motivated...my own family is biracial..but i want to go live where people act like humans....the neighborhood used to be like sesame street all multi cultural, etc..everyone owning their own houses..but new people bought the houses, and rent them out for profit, so the people who are coming in are straight out of the shelter system, and do nothing but scream and curse all day long, and the kids run like a pack of dogs..with no supervision..ughh...in one year, my car's been shot and my car's been smashed by a trio of kids, aged 10, 8 and 3, careening down the road in an abandoned car with the emergency brake off...some sesame street..

In Memoriam

In addition to those who died in the Revolution, or 1812, this post is for
the ur-uncle who died of dysentery in camp in Maryland after being drafted into the Civil War, leaving behind a wife and an infant daughter...
for Special Ed, who went crazy in Korea and finally bought the farm after working as a chaplain after 9/11, taking his own life in an apartment in Brooklyn,
this is for my uncle Richard who got malaria in the Phillipines, in WWII, suffered from depression ever after, and walked into a commuter train on his way home from work,
or here's to another great Uncle who killed my great Aunt, the suffragette, in Jersey City, the man who suffered horrible jealosy after he got a plate in his head in The Great War,leaving his children motherless,
or for guys who came back from WWII and then drank themselves to death,
or for the guys in wheelchairs who live in the VA hospital, , the ones I've sung to with the Al Jolsen Society, who can't quite remember who Al Jolsen was,
For those Working Class HEROS and HEROINES, who hold down the Fort while the rich guys in DC move the troops around like so many chess pieces,
for my cousin, the Navy nurse in Bethesda Naval Hospital, on call this weekend, dressing burn victims,
to the Jarheads out in the desert, breathing Iraqi dust, who are honestly trying to win Iraqi hearts and minds, giving away candy to the little kids,
for the soldiers named Gonzalez or Rodriguez or Jimenez, without citizenship, fighting for the US because they want to be part of, (and will get, if they survive, citizenship, just like my Great Grandfather did, in the Civil War)..
.for the kids who are driving HumVees down RPG Alley,
for the soldiers in Afghanistan sincerely looking for Osama Bin Laden (even though the president has said he doesn't think about him very much) , bless you and keep you. Your aim is true.

The "I" Word - Letter to Chris Matthews (MSNBC Hardball Host)

I sent this letter to Chris Matthews at Christmas...I received no reply from him or any of his staff.. Thank God for patriots like Stephen Colbert, who recently publically criticized the Washington Press Corps, cowardly "journalists" who are too afraid to loose their cush jobs to actually report news...

Dear Mr. Matthews,
There have been rumblings about impeaching George Bush for some time, now. First it was because he ignored CIA, UN, and Pentagon intelligence sources, and chose anyway to invade Iraq, citing "imminent danger". Then it was discovered in the Downing Street Memo that he knew there was no "imminent danger", but was following the blueprint laid out by the Project for the New American Century (published in the late 90's) to invade the Middle East in order to maintain American global domination. Now we find out that the Bush Administration has been using our tax dollars to spy on such "subversive" groups as the Quakers.
Enough.
Unfortunately, MSNBC hasn't done much in the way of discussing impeachment. I understand that because you are an employee of a corporate conglomerate which enjoys tax benefits from this government, and because you are a member of the small percentage of high earners who don't have to pay much tax, you perhaps are discouraged from criticising this administration in any way, shape or form. It is for this reason that I am appealing to your journalistic sense, to report the facts. The Downing Street memo wasn't reported. I have not seen any Quakers being interviewed.
Rep. John Conyers has introduced a bill investigating grounds for impeachment, and several members of the House have signed on. This news needs to be covered. I hope you are willing to step up to the plate.

Sincerely, Joy Whelan

Christian Death

I went to church for the first time in a long time. I was in the local Catholic Church for the funeral of my mom's cousin Jane, who was 90 years old. She had been shoved full of tubes before she died, she had the death pneumonia and they put feeding tubes in her, and performed a tracheotomy...instead of letting her die with dignity...I read a book called "The Way We Die"...and it goes into detail about the body shutting down. We don't seem to respect this process, and fight it, instead...hacking away at the elderly body..I know of two cases of octogenarians dying from colonoscopies..the machines perforate the wall of the colon or intestines, leading to bacterial infections, leading to death...You don't need to be shoving around an old person's behind looking for whatever..I warned Peter's mother, who is 89, don't get a colonoscopy!!