A Message From the Poor, Obscenely Rich Guy

[Your Humble Scribe has Flu. Please don't expect too much.]

Jamie Dimon, King of JPMorgan Chase, Wall Street, and a large piece of The World, politely chides me in an e-mail today:  "I don't understand why you didn't open my email before. Totally typical of the disrespectful behavior I've come to expect from people like you. People who refuse to understand how important I am. 

So listen up. I'm saying something REALLY IMPORTANT here and you need to pay attention. For your own good.

--Jamie Dimon, CEO, JPMorgan Chase"

So here's what "HE" has to say -

"You people. You just won’t go away.

Once those Occupiers were finally cleared from our neighborhood in New York City in 2012, my fellow CEOs and I thought we’d finally get some peace. We were all about sending some token checks to a few distressed homeowners and then getting back to ruling the universe from atop our mountains of unprecedented wealth.

But no.

Last March when that impudent Senator Warren suggested that my bank should merit CRIMINAL prosecution, my friend Attorney General Eric Holder made the perfectly innocent observation we are simply too big and profitable to prosecute. YOU PEOPLE JUMPED ALL OVER HIM! You joined 333,000 others signing petitions and marching into my US Attorney Offices all over the country demanding “End to Big to Jail!”

Then in May you and your friends at the Home Defenders League and Occupy Our Homes actually surrounded the Department of Justice, demanding that my friends and I go to jail. (I heard 32 of you were arrested. I don’t know why it wasn’t all 500 of you – I guess our justice system really is broken!)

When Occupy Our Homes asked for your help to keep former police officer, cancer survivor and foreclosure fighter Jacqueline Barber in her home, you stood with her signing petitions and flooding my good friends at Wells Fargo and GMAC with phone calls. Another perfectly good foreclosure spoiled.

And, OMG, this Local Principal Reduction thing? All sorts of Mayors and towns using eminent domain to reset mortgages? Not funny. My friends and I make the rules and if we want your opinion we’ll give it to you.

And that doesn’t even include the steady stream of reports, news articles, the “Bank Crime Spree” and“100 Days to Fix What Wall Street Broke” campaigns. Do you think I want to hear the stories of everyone who ACCIDENTLY got screwed over? What’s the expression about breaking a few eggs?

This sort of thing has real consequences, people. I totally had to pay $13 billion, the largest penalty by a corporation to a government ever in the history of the world. Not that I can’t afford it, but I so TOTALLY had other plans for that money.

So, look, whatever else you do to celebrate this holiday season, please DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE give ANY money to Action for the Common Good. Their so-called Campaign for a Fair Settlement has been enough trouble and now they are growing - joining up with low wage workers, immigrant rights groups, and who knows who else through this new Center for Popular Democracy thing. Well, I can tell you one thing for sure. It's not popular with me.

Grinchily yours,

Jamie Dimon, CEO, JPMorganChase


PS. Obviously, this isn’t really from JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon. Instead we had some fun thinking about all the problems that Chase is facing right now, much is which is due directly to your work, and thought it would be funny to share what Mr. Dimon might be thinking with you.

Happy holidays from all of us here at Action for the Common Good. – Brian Kettenring, Andrew Friedman, and Ana Maria Archila, Co-Executive Directors

PPS. If you want to continue to annoy Wall Street CEO’s like Jamie Dimon, you can contribute to Action for the Common Good here: https://acg-fairsettlement.nationbuilder.com/contribute_2013

Shocking Signs of Democracy on the Federal Bench

[Your Humble Scribe has some weird version of Da Flu this week, and is correspondingly not very fun.  So I'm just going to plant the seed on this one, and let you do the research.  "Bear with, Bear with...".]

France-24 this morning, and no doubt all the reliable, dedicated 1st Amendment lovers on your local and Network Stations, report that a Federal Judge described the NSA's information-trawling as unconstitutional, and its scope as "almost Orwellian".

We await President Spineless's decree that all the NSA's highly-paid computer nerds will be transferred to giving us all Health Care....

P.S. Spineless sent me a 3-dimensional Christmas Card this week, signed by his dogs. I'm not kidding.

GunFails: A Nasty Laugh a Minute

I mentioned  "GunFails" the other day, in Celebrating the Right to Bear Arms. It's a wonderful collection of "Firearm Follies", by David Waldman. Today Waldman reports that this has been "Just your basic, routine, 40+ GunFAIL events week".

There are 14 hunting "accidents", and four "accidents" occurring while someone was cleaning a still-loaded gun.

David Waldman has a wonderfully laconic style as he recounts this gruesome madness and mayhem. He tells us,

"Five "home invasion" shootings are among the entries this week, plus one that fell from the owner's pocket and shot his wife, one that shot its brand new owner immediately following its purchase, and one used to shoot yet another suspected "intruder" who turned out to be the gun owner's caretaker who'd come to check on him.
Continuing the Christmas shopping season's hottest trend, another gun carrier has accidentally discharged his weapon while out at the stores, this time shooting himself in the parking lot outside a Lowe's home improvement store in Pocatello, ID."

Then things get nasty.

"The child victims of GunFAIL were mercifully few last week. Just five were found, ages 5, 15, 15, 16 and 17. Many of you have, no doubt, by now become aware of the story of the 3-year-old killed in Indianapolis on Saturday. That particular tragedy does not go unrecognized, but it won't be included until our next installment."

I invite you to contemplate that for a moment. (Making a couple of assumptions here.) Imagine you're the parent of a 3-year-old, the bright-eyed, gurgling, apple of your eye. Your gunloving, right-to-bear-arms-believing spouse causes the "accidental" death of your baby. Do you forgive them? "Understand"? AGREE with them?

Or do you shoot the stupid cretin?

Gawd help us!

David Waldman is to be congratulated on an excellent, useful job.  You can get the details of each incident, well written-up, here.

As I, and no doubt millions of other sane people, have pointed out, you need a test, a license and regular checks, to drive a car, a machine that might, if things go horribly awry, kill someone. In God's chosen country, you can be a felon, an addict, a repeat offender, an idiot or a nutcase, and you can go right ahead and obtain a device whose only purpose is to kill people.

Duh!

One Law For The Poor, None For the Rich

"Teen Kills 4; Judge Lets Him Off Because He is Rich!" from the Daily Kos - read the story here.

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

Daily Kos toots its own horn -

“Even CNN says we're awesome”

"This is what CNN said in their post-mortem on filibuster reform:

What was known as the nuclear option yesterday is known as the Reid Rule today. Time will only tell* if the Reid Rule is productive or destructive. But we'll leave that to the historians.

As for how it became the Reid rule, it took a coordinated and sustained effort from an unlikely place—progressive activists on the blogosphere.

Daily Kos was the first group to start organizing for filibuster reform, way back in 2010. People called us crazy when we did.

Well, three years and an astonishing 900,000 actions later, we made filibuster reform the mainstream Democratic policy position—and we won a vote on it on the floor of the United States Senate."

[*FOOTNOTE for CNN: The expression is "only time will tell".  How much are your writers paid?]

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Welcome

Welcome to my Blog, The War On The 60s! - currently scoring record numbers of hits, thankyou very much!

Please enjoy, become a Follower, and see you soon!

[If you enjoy what you read here, have some computer expertise, and would care to volunteer an hour or two of your time to help organize this blog a little better, I'd love to hear from you! E-mail thewaronthe60s@gmail.com]

The birth of the Trendies: boutiques in Carnaby Street, London, in the 1960s; with the Post-War austerity finally over, young people now had massive spending power. (I'm pretty sure the bike in the foreground is a Triumph...)

"The War On The 60s" is the title of a book which I'm proposing to write.  The title is fairly evocative, I hope! - but let me explain a little more.

Ever since the 1960s happened, the “turbulent”, “sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll”, “We don't want your stinking war” decade has had a bad rap. “The War on The 60s” has ranged from verbal propaganda to actions that are not only sinister, but threaten our fundamental principles as a society.

This book I hope will help explain the 60s to the new young idealists, and perhaps remind those who shared the experience, what was so unique, beautiful and valuable about it - so good that it's been under attack ever since.

To those who dislike the 60s, it will help them to see that the period actually represented much of what is best in our humanity, with a magnificent heritage including the environmental movement, our first Black President and our first woman Secretary of State.

Then I hope you'll agree that “It’s time for a new 60s!”

Peace and Love,

Richard Lancaster.

Monsanto are still at it - of course

This just in from SierraRise:

`Senator Blanche Lincoln used to serve as Chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. She was sometimes called "the Senator from Wal-Mart," ^[7] and her other clients have included oil giants Valero and ConocoPhillips, everybody's favorite cable provider Comcast, and credit giant Experian. She's clearly an influential figure in Washington, and now she's ready to cash in for "the world's most evil corporation."'

Yes, she's sold her pathetic, shrivelled soul to Monsanto.

Read on - "It's easy to see why Monsanto was voted the world's most evil corporation for 2013. ^[1] Two examples from just the last 30 days might almost be enough to win the title all on their own.

Last week, 20 environmental activists were brutally assaulted for protesting the biotech giant in Argentina. ^[2] And in the November 5 election, Monsanto broke spending records to defeat a Washington ballot initiative that would simply label genetically engineered food (GMOs). ^{[3, 4]} What are they hiding?

But we've been shining a light on Monsanto's shady activities. Thanks to SierraRise supporters like you, it's not just the Big Ag corporation's products that are potentially toxic, but also their reputation.

Rather than fix these disastrous practices, Monsanto is trying to buy a better image. ^[5]

They recently hired former Senator Blanche Lincoln ^[6] and the high-powered PR firm FleishmanHillard to improve their reputation and help block more labeling initiatives in 2014. Now when you want to know what's in your food, the forces against us will be stronger than before.

This means we need to fight back against the Monsanto agenda harder than ever. Let's start by sending 75,000 letters reminding our government to listen to we the people, not them the corporations and PR firms, and label GMOs now!

Monsanto -- the maker of toxic chemicals like Agent Orange -- is also the largest producer of risky genetically modified seeds. Corn with built-in insecticides? Squash impervious to virus? We have a right to know what we're eating. Many other countries around the world do require GMO labeling -- but Monsanto is bringing in the big guns to make sure they can keep hiding that critical information from our families.

Senator Blanche Lincoln used to serve as Chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. She was sometimes called "the Senator from Wal-Mart," ^[7] and her other clients have included oil giants Valero and ConocoPhillips, everybody's favorite cable provider Comcast, and credit giant Experian. She's clearly an influential figure in Washington, and now she's ready to cash in for "the world's most evil corporation."

Corporations always do this -- why fix a problem if you can pay someone to hide it? That's why so many of us decided to join the SierraRise community. We're sick of corporate lobbyists running the show -- this is a democracy and all of our voices matter. By speaking up now, we can be louder than Senator Lincoln or any other Monsanto lobbyist or executive.

The FDA has the power to enforce labeling and protect our health -- but not if we let Monsanto's lobbyists go unanswered.

We deserve to know what's in our food. Send your letter to the FDA today demanding customer choice -- we need labels on GMO foods!

In it together,

Nathan Empsall
SierraRise Senior Campaigner

P.S. Five signatures are even more powerful than one -- after you take action, be sure to forward this alert to your friends, family, and colleagues!"

Nelson Mandela

As we duly mourn the South African hero, here's a very pertinent comment from Bill Fletcher, via the excellent organisation for Journalists, Institute for Public Accuracy (http://www.accuracy.org)

`Fletcher is a columnist for BlackCommentator.com and a former president of TransAfrica Forum. He just wrote: "Nelson Mandela will be mourned and celebrated. But something else will happen. There will soon, probably very soon, be efforts to reinterpret his life. I do not mean leaving things out, as happened in the otherwise excellent film just released about his life. Rather, as we have experienced here in the USA with great leaders like King and Malcolm, there will be efforts to convert Mandela into a very safe character in order to advance the ends of the global elite. We will, for instance, not hear much about Mandela’s refusal to renounce armed struggle against apartheid, even though such a renunciation could have resulted in his release much earlier. We will not hear much about his expressions of gratitude to the Cuban people for their consistent support to the people of Angola, Namibia and South Africa who were fighting the South African apartheid regime. We will not hear about Mandela’s consistent, unwavering support for the Palestinian people’s struggle for national liberation."'

 

I write at some length about the "cleaning" of Martin Luther King's image in my Book Proposal, "The War On The 60s".

Incidentally, this Blog scored a new record number of hits yesterday: 256.  And we're already at 173 today! Thanks, everyone!