Michael Moore found a never discovered film of Roosevelt's State of the Union in 1944, a few months before he died. In that State of the Union, he was too ill to come before congress, so he had it filmed during his address on radio. Roosevelt once called in the National Guard to protect the striking workers who were being beaten up and shot by company hired goons and police during the Depression. My how things have changed.
I just saw the Michael Moore masterpiece "Capitalism: A Love Story." I or the audience did not laugh once during the whole film!
What is most revealing is what an executive at the Wall Street Journal said on video and a Citi Group Bank executive wrote in a memo about the State of Our Economy. Both are convinced that we no longer have a Democracy and the Plutocrats on Wall Street and the Banks run the country.
You really need to watch the film to get what I call my visceral feeling in my stomach that I got from watching this film from the plutocrats and their many victims. Here are some highlights of brutal facts about how Reagan started the process of completely changing our society so the those at the top can have it all. The Citi Group document showed that the top One Percent own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent of the American people.
Citi Group was really worrying that a rebellion from the people is starting. This is well illustrated by the resistance of home owners to move out of their homes and fired workers refusing to leave the factory. Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) a long-serving House member from the Toledo area, encouraged homeowners to stay in their homes after the banks foreclosed and ask the bank to produce a mortgage document which many cannot do.
I saw Marcy Kaptur yesterday as a panelist on the Maher Show on HBO last Friday. She and Janeane Garofalo, an actress and activist, really stuck it to the greedy Capitalists. In Capitalism even Church Bishops were condemning the Greed on Wall Street and Corporations. Moore was able to include fairly recent rebellious movements in our country in the workplace. He also showed that when workers are owners and only work for part of the profits, productivity and ideas are maximized. Moore wondered why Americans talk so much about want Democracy when all the places they work are Dictatorships. My Way or the Highway!
The banks that the taxpayers saved are now taking away our homes that were paid for but many seniors wanted more money and took out these crooked mortgages and are losing their homes left and right throughout the country.
About 80 percent of the mortgage fraud was done by the lenders. Country Wide which committed the greatest amount of fraud did favors for powerful people in Congress such as Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad of North Dakota got extremely low rates at the time the average American was getting these mortgages that was impossible not to default on. Note that some Democrats who killed the public option Baucus (MT) and Kent Conrad (ND) have so few people that they have only ONE HOUSE MEMBER. Normally it takes up to 500,000 people for one House district. Both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin thought that including the Senate as now constituted will result in a Democracy in name only. How true that has turned out to be. The Republicans after 2006 stopped well over one hundred bills coming out of the House.
I think many liberals including myself are not giving President Obama enough time to do what he said he wants to do. We must remember that he is a master politician to win the election and even gave us a hope of having a decent Health Care and Reform bill. I still trust him to do the right thing until he betrays our trust.
As I said before, my biggest worry is about some of the people around him. I have the impression that Lawrence Summers whom I do not trust is having less influence than I thought. Geithner who has been a person who always followed orders may have come into his own and may be acting more independently due the influence of Bernanke who seems to me to be the best of the bunch. But I always worry because Bush appointed him.
Jim Kawakami, Oct 5, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
Second Bill of Rights
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Second Bill of Rights was a proposal made by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt during his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944to suggest that the nation had come to recognize, and should now implement, a second bill of rights. Roosevelt did not argue for any change to the United States Constitution; he argued that the second bill of rights was to be implemented politically, not by federal judges. Roosevelt's stated justification was that the "political rights" guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had "proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness." Roosevelt's remedy was to create an "economic bill of rights" which would guarantee:
- A job with a living wage
- Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies
- A home
- Medical care
- Education
- Recreation
Roosevelt stated that having these rights would guarantee American security, and that America's place in the world depended upon how far these and similar rights had been carried into practice. ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights
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