New Alliance Against Corporatism: Nader, Ron Paul, Kucinich Speak...

[jackovesk]

Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, and Dennis Kucinich offer words of wisdom to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has tremendous potential, but only if we can resist the wedges that the corporate/government cabal continues to try to drive between us.

There are differences of philosophy between progressives and libertarians, but we CAN agree on at least four issues upon which we can make immediate and concrete demands. Success on these demands would go a very long way toward saving the United States and prevent us from falling deeper into serfdom and slavery.

We may never have a better chance than right now.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej1DGHG38bg&feature=youtube_gdata

PS - "If we can set-aside our differences (Left-Right/Democrat-Republican) and come together as 'One' against those that wish to 'Destroy Us' we might just have a chance of 'Defeating' these Sociopathic Psychopaths..!

PSS - I hate that word 'Progressive' reminds me of Al Gore & His 'Global Warming SCAM'

In a purely political sense does anyone really know 'What' the 'ambiguous' word 'Progressive' actually means..?

[modwiz]

I don't know how well people are acquainted with Webster Tarpley. He is a man with great ideas based on quite a bit of knowledge of what is going on. A point or two about where fingers are not pointing could be made if you are looking for problems rather than solutions. I say please read this relatively succinct four point demand concept he has put together to bring a meaningful focus to the protesters energies.

He is right on when he said there have to be demands that can be acted on, right now.

http://tarpley.net/2011/09/29/emergency-program-for-anti-wall-street-protestors/

Here is point number four and his closing statements:

4. Pay for healthcare and social services with a 1% Wall Street Sales Tax. When they hear demands like these, Fox news commentators will demand to know how these programs can be paid for. The answer is simple: the Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax. Today the total financial turnover of the banksters in terms of buying, selling, and other trading comes to well over three quadrillion dollars yearly – that’s more than 3,000 trillion dollars. The rest of us pay sales tax on most purchases, often including the groceries, but Wall Street zombie bankers and hedge fund hyenas pay absolutely zero on that colossal sum. The most unfair aspect of the entire US tax system is that Wall Street pays virtually no taxes. It is time for the bankers to cough up 1% of every stock, bond, and derivatives transaction, be it program trading, high frequency trading, or computerized flash trading at the rate of one million transactions per second. The total revenue could be split between the federal government and the states, and would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps even trillions – depending on how determined the speculators are to keep up their dirty deals. There is nothing impossible about this demand: the federal government had a financial transaction tax from the time of World War I to 1967. And even today, the largely right wing governments of the European Union are about to enact their own Tobin tax. Why can’t it be done here as well?

These are immediate agitational demands that can be readily understood by any person. They can form the leading edge of a struggle to break the political power of Wall Street. In addition, a full recovery from depression and the attainment of full employment for the first time since 1945 will require the nationalization of the Federal Reserve, and the issuing of successive tranches of $1 trillion of 0%, very long-term Federal credit for the building of infrastructure, with a goal of creating 30 million new productive jobs with adequate capital investment per job.

Another essential point is that Wall Street is the biggest nest of warmongers anywhere in the world. Anyone seeking to gain influence over the anti-Wall Street movement should be willing to condemn and denounce Obama’s wanton aggression against Libya, as well as to call for an immediate pullout of US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. Anyone who refuses to do this should be regarded with grave suspicion.

The alternative to such concrete demands is, whether we like it or not, to remain in the orbit of Obama’s Democratic Party. Earlier this year, students, workers, and others occupied the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin in response to attacks on working people coming from the fascist governor, Walker. The resistance against Walker was betrayed first of all by the Democratic Party, which announced that it would not fight for wages and benefits, but only for trade union rights in the abstract. That is a good program for trade union bureaucrats, but not so good for working people, who bore the brunt of Walker’s austerity. A president who was on the side of the people would have gone immediately to Madison, Wisconsin to hold a town hall on the occupied grounds of the state capitol, an event that would have looked much different than the canned, pre-screened teleprompter town halls Obama likes to address. A real president would have taken Attorney General Holder and Labor Secretary Solis along to investigate the denial of civil rights and labor violations by Walker. Obama did none of these things. Rather, he damned the movement with a few words of faint praise, and cut it loose. The lesson is that the Democratic Party is more than willing to sell out mass struggles anytime it can. And it is only by having your own program of anti-Wall Street demands that you can become independent of the rotten two-party system.

[nottelling]

In a purely political sense does anyone really know 'What' the 'ambiguous' word 'Progressive' actually means..?

I think it means pushing forward with an agenda which is bound to be unpopular with large chunks of the constituency, but is considered "necessary" by those pushing it. As with all political double-speak, the term can be used to promote freedom or to further slavery - usually the latter (yes, I'm a cynic :) )

[Erich]

That's a beautiful video. Since I was about fourteen years old I have despised the paradigms created by our society and it feels wonderful to watch and listen to smart people with influence finally speak truth. Whatever happens we had this one moment.