kpete

kpete's Journal

April 27, 2014

OBAMA: "When ignorant folks advertise ignorance--you don't have to do anything--just let them talk"

President Obama on Sunday said that Clippers owner Donald Sterling's racist comments show that racism still lives in the U.S.

"When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk. That's what happened here," Obama said when asked about Sterling's comments during a press conference with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, according to CNN.

The president said that Sterling's comments prove that "the United States continues to wrestle with the legacy of race and slavery and segregation."

"That's still there, the vestiges of discrimination. We've made enormous strides, but you're going to continue to see this percolate up every so often," he continued.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/obama-sterling-racist-comments

April 26, 2014

Gilded Age vs. NOW: Instead of Carnegie founding libraries-we have Trump yelling at people on TV

The New Gilded Age: A bigger con job than the first one
Inequality has reached 19th-century levels – but that era had a dynamism and optimism that ours can only fake

There are unquestionably things to prefer about our own era: Women, people of color and LGBT folk participate more or less fully in our cultural and political life, and the discourse of rights has evolved in directions few 19th-century Americans could have imagined. (Pot is almost legal now — but opium and cocaine were legal then!) But in economic terms, the first Gilded Age was a period of production and expansion (perhaps unsustainably so), whereas the New Gilded Age is its negative image, a period of contraction and consumption. Instead of Andrew Carnegie founding libraries, we have Donald Trump yelling at people on television like a low-rent parody of the Calvinist God. Instead of rising wages for almost everyone and universal free education, we offer ever cheaper goods made in countries we used to bomb, a mortgage you can’t afford on a house you don’t want in the middle of a former soybean field, and the prospect that one day you’ll get to sit on an airplane in a temporary bubble of pretend wealth – on your boss’s dime! — drinking Champagne and listening to tinny string-quartet music while the rest of us curse at our kids and cram our oddly shaped packages under the seat.

more:
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/26/the_new_gilded_age_a_bigger_con_job_than_the_first_one/

April 26, 2014

RNC: Don’t Lump GOP With Bundy!

LOL:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/what-cliven-bundy-supporters-are-saying-after-race-comments

April 26, 2014

The NRA Meets Its Potent New Foe: Moms

The NRA Meets Its Potent New Foe: Moms
Watch as parents and survivors brandish a new we

WOW!!!:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/nra-everytown-indianapolis-shannon-watts

April 26, 2014

"It's time the GOP have their noses soundly rubbed into the shit Cliven Bundy has left on the floor"

?w=300&h=249

***against this backdrop:

" the inauguration of President Barack Obama was hailed as a turning point in US race relations. The country was said to be entering a new era of post-racial politics, on the path to a future of greater diversity and tolerance. But while crowds flocked to Washington to witness the swearing in, others were refusing to join the party. Racially motivated threats against Obama rose to new heights in the first months of his presidency, with the US seeing nine high-profile race killings in 2009. Meanwhile white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups claim their membership is growing and that visits to their websites are increasing. Filmmakers Rick Rowley and Jacquie Soohen went inside the white nationalist movement to investigate."
http://blip.tv/...

http://blip.tv/visionontv/people-power-white-power-usa-3076407

******************

FRI APR 25, 2014 AT 10:13 PM PDT
***The Cliven Bundy Story is NOT Over
by Seahawk

.............................

I am of the opinion any mediate who lets the GOP off the hook for this affair is doing nothing more than giving them cover to harbor the next Cliven Bundy and I begin to question what lies within their hearts.

This is the not epilogue, this is the preface. It's high time the GOP was shamed into coming back into the fold of rational - reasonable action. Stop voting to kill Obamacare, stop blocking jobs bills, stop ignoring climate change, stop trying to suppress the vote.

It's time the GOP have their noses soundly rubbed into the shit Cliven Bundy has left on the living room floor of our nation. Allowing the GOP to squirm away without a full throated mea culpa do nothing but enable the next Bundy, the next George Zimmerman, the next Oklahoma City bomber.

I am not at all comfortable with letting the GOP off the hook because I know they have not learned their lesson.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/26/1294777/-The-Cliven-Bundy-Story-is-NOT-Over

********************

from -Charles M. Blow:

The legacy of slavery must be liberated from political commentary.

Casual, careless and incorrect references to slavery, much like blithe references to Nazi Germany, do violence to the memory of those who endured it, or were lost to it, and to their descendants.

There is no modern-day comparison in this country to the horrors of slavery.

None!
Leave it alone.

Remember, honor and respect.
That’s all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/opinion/blow-a-ranchers-romantic-revisionism.html?_r=1

April 26, 2014

The 1 percent’s midterms scam: Why it’s not about which party wins in ’14

SATURDAY, APR 26, 2014 03:15 AM PDT
With a rich Congress, White House and federal courts, here's why one constituency is going to win – no matter what
MICHAEL LIND

.................

Politicians in the United States tend to be vastly better off than the people they represent. They are wealthier, more educated, and more likely to come from white-collar jobs… If millionaires were a political party, that party would make up just three percent of the country, but it would have a majority in the House of Representatives, a filibuster-proof super-majority in the Senate, a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court, and a man in the White House. If working-class Americans — people employed in manual-labor and service-industry jobs — were a political party, that party would have made up more than half of the country since the start of the twentieth century, but legislators from that party (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before getting into politics) would never have held more than two percent of the seats in Congress.

.....................

the rest:
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/26/the_1_percents_midterms_scam_why_its_not_about_which_party_wins_in_14/

April 26, 2014

Federal Judge Rules U.S. Companies Can Be Sued for Aiding South African Apartheid Regime

Federal Judge Rules U.S. Companies Can Be Sued for Aiding South African Apartheid Regime

Glen Ford: Federal judge says non-US citizens can bring lawsuits against companies like Ford and IBM for collaborating with the South African apartheid regime - April 25, 14

JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jessica in Baltimore. And welcome to this edition of The Ford Report.

Now joining us is Glen Ford. He is the cofounder and executive editor of the Black Agenda Report.
Thanks for joining us, Glen.

GLEN FORD, EXEC. EDITOR, BLACK AGENDA REPORT: Hi. Thank you for inviting me.
DESVARIEUX: So, Glen, let's talk about a recent ruling by a U.S. district court judge in Manhattan. She said that IBM and Ford can be sued for collaborating with the South African apartheid regime. In fact, the ruling says that noncitizens of the U.S. can bring lawsuits involving corporate violations of international law.

So, Glen, just give us some background here. What did corporations like IBM and Ford actually do to support the apartheid South African regime?

FORD: Well, this case, this judge's action appears to be opening a door that it seemed had been closed in earlier rulings. In a Supreme Court ruling, the high court said that Royal Dutch Shell couldn't be sued for its collaboration with the government in Nigeria and the crimes that had been perpetrated in Nigeria. This judge--who's the judge, by the way, who was part of the massive stop-and-frisk ruling about a year and a half ago--this judge said that IBM and Ford can be charged under this act and that she sees no distinction between corporations being liable for taking part in acts of genocide and crimes against humanity and torture and such, no distinction between corporations and people. And that's an interesting element of law. And she said that she sees on the face of it that the plaintiffs do have the right to charge that IBM and Ford knowingly assisted the apartheid regime, IBM by supplying the computers that were used to keep track of dissidents who were later tortured and jailed and disappeared and executed, and Ford by making the vehicles that the South African security forces used to suppress the rebellions in South Africa. So this is a potentially wide door.

However, we have to remind your viewers that this same judge, Judge Scheindlin, who handed down the far-reaching stop-and-frisk decision in New York, was also upbraided by her colleagues later on. So we'll see how this fares in the U.S. judicial system.

MORE:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11764

April 26, 2014

Ronald Reagan owns Cliven Bundy: He’s born of GOP racial and anti-government hostility I

Ronald Reagan owns Cliven Bundy: He’s born of GOP racial and anti-government hostility
It's no shock that conservative heroes always end up being racists. The Republican playbook made them that way
PAUL ROSENBERG

........................

Under Reagan, the Northern strategy became key, its targets known as “Reagan Democrats.” And Cliven Bundy was the perfect embodiment of everything this strategy was built around.

“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me!” Reagan famously said. Of course Reagan’s story was a lie, as this 1948 radio campaign ad he cut clearly shows: It was Reagan himself who abandoned his roots — his Elizabeth Warren-style economic populism, his support for unions and a can-do New Deal government. But he always pretended that he hadn’t changed, the Democratic Party had. The implicit claim was that the party that once helped the white ethnic working class had villainously turned against them to help the lazy, shiftless blacks, instead. Hence Bundy’s sense of victimhood from big government and his racist resentment of blacks were, once again, two sides of the same coin — the lousy wooden nickel that Reagan cheerfully sold to millions of voters just like him back in the day.

Wooden nickel, meet bad penny. Sooner or later, the real racist always turns up.

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/25/ronald_reagan_owns_cliven_bundy_hes_born_of_gop_racial_and_anti_government_hostility/

April 26, 2014

Koch Brothers Group SCRUBs Cliven Bundy Support From Social Media Accounts

WASHINGTON -- Americans for Prosperity Nevada, the state affiliate of the Koch Brothers-backed group, appears to have hastily deleted social media posts expressing support for Cliven Bundy, the renegade rancher who exposed himself as a racist in recent press conferences.

A tweet sent by AFP Nevada on April 10 urging followers to read more about the #BundyBattle, which involves Bundy's refusal to pay fines for allowing his cattle to graze on public land, has been deleted. A Facebook graphic that the group posted criticizing the Bureau of Land Management for enforcing grazing laws against Bundy has similarly disappeared.

Previously, the page read: "The BLM spent HOW MUCH to round up cattle? ONE MILLION DOLLARS." As of Friday afternoon, it reads: "This content is currently unavailable"

AFP Nevada, a anti-government, libertarian organization, did not immediately return a request for comment. But the group is the latest to join the massive, frantic stampede of political organizations and media figures distancing themselves from Bundy in the wake of his comments. Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.) both condemned the rancher's remarks, and various Fox News personalities called them repugnant as well.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/koch-brothers-cliven-bundy_n_5213481.html?&ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000016

April 26, 2014

Dear Republicans, As a hardcore Democrat, I want you all to know that I think Cliven Bundy is...

Dear Republicans,

As a hardcore Democrat, I want you all to know that I think Cliven Bundy is absolutely awesome. You know, I totally get why you all were drawn to this guy: he says honestly and openly what you all agree with, but are too chickenshit and dishonest to say. But make no mistake, he is your Marlboro Man as far as I'm concerned. Whenever I hear any of you say 'small government' or 'low taxes' I am going to think of Cliven Bundy. He is you and you are him.

Sincerely,

bbb
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/25/1294706/-Final-Bundy-The-epilogue

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