Celebrate Columbus Day by Taking Back America!

Below are two comments that I wrote. One is to the CEO of Bank of America about their decision to gouge even more profits at the expense of their customers, and the second is a response to a very clever picture from "How to Raise Your Vibration," which has contorted a dollar bill(s) to read, "We need a revolution." They fit nicely together, I think.

Mr. Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America,

You have made the outrageous decision to squeeze even more money from a citizenry and clientele that is beleaguered by an economic downturn and innumerable accomplished and impending foreclosures, a downturn that was caused specifically by the fraud, deception, and malfeasance of banks, accounting firms, ratings companies, brokerage firms, and many corrupt corporations, yours included.

Charging your customers a $5 monthly fee to access money in their own account (money that you already make money on by holding it and loaning it) is beneath contempt.

I was a loyal B of A customer for many years, but I will have nothing more to do with your firm until your egregious gouging of customers ceases.

This latest outrage is the last straw. I am urging everyone on my social network and everyone on my blogs to find a local savings and loan for their banking needs and turn their back on vultures who prey on the vulnerable while stuffing themselves with ever more unconscionable profits and bonuses while stiffing customers and society at large. Furthermore, I am encouraging my contacts to encourage the same from all their contacts!

Without a radical change of course for your bank, we will prove that you are not too big to fail!

(I ended with my usual, but newly amended aphorism to be found at the end of this post).

The following was posted on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/How-to-Raise-Your-Vibration/204840666199710

We do need a revolution, but a revolution brought about by thinking, not guns; a revolution brought about by wisdom, not clichés and obfuscating talking points; a revolution through moral behavior, not mindless violence; a revolution in values, not the false values designed to disenfranchise or subdue others, but a true valuing of the individual AND the society that allows the many to prosper and not just the few.

As the great Gil Scott-Heron said, "The revolution will not be televised." Why? Because we have allowed the corrupt few to steal our media and our political system for a "free marketing, deregulating" lie.

It is time to take our institutions back.

Government is not our enemy. But a government controlled by corrupt corporations and the politicians who do their bidding is by far our biggest danger. No group of terrorists world wide could wreak such havoc on our society or the world as the destruction we have allowed these corporate vultures to rain down on us with absolute impunity.  And everyday, their political lackeys and media mouthpieces propose ever greater outrages.

The revolution may not be televised, but it can be organized and energized, and it is time that we do our part to help bring down this false prophet, PROFIT! Prosperity? Absolutely! But profiteering, like the pirates of old, must be stopped cold. We must rid our society of banksters and profiteers. Fair wages; equal protection under the law; health, safety, and a clean environment: these are the things that a fair and functional society can provide. However, these are the very things that are anathema to a system based on the perpetual degradation and exploitation of the many for the protection and profits of the few. This oligarchy needs to fall and be replaced by a new vision and model of governance practicing real American values of rewarding hard work, seeking to ensure fair treatment, and balancing the rights of the individual and the society to the mutual benefit of both.

Truth...Justice...these really have been taken away from us, or rather, we willingly gave them up for the dangling carrot of personal profit over honesty, integrity, and conscience. We have created several generations who believe only in the first half of the Golden Rule, "Do Unto Others!", and we have been sold the idea that "As you would have them do unto you," is bad for business. Well, if that is true, then it's a bad business that we are in!

We don't need a Superman, we just need to be real Americans again. Our kryptonite has been selfishness, greed, and a disregard for our fellow man (Yes, on this Columbus Day, I know that our history is rife with the antithesis of my "real American society," filled with the repeated intrusion of this Kryptonite, but history has also shown a slow, but steady progress and evolution toward the ideals of Truth and Justice, and despite this latest, thirty-year set back, we can help to restore that progress by joining the fight.

Whether you are of the 99% or the 1%, I encourage you to join the fight to restore integrity to our system.

"The Greatest Threat to Democracy is Hypocrisy! The Greatest Threat to Hypocrisy is Democracy! Seek Truth! Speak Truth!" Tim McMullen

Through the Looking Glass—The Irrational Assault on America

You know, sometimes it really does feel like we are living in a Looking-Glass world. The frantic deregulation and merger frenzy of the last thirty years, stoked by the unfettered greed of banks, insurance companies, giant accounting firms, pharmaceuticals, media organizations, energy companies, and the Chamber of Commerce (to name but a few) nearly bankrupted this nation; the anti-tax policies and upward redistribution of wealth of the Bush years unquestionably brought on the greatest economic meltdown since the depression; colossal, criminal, corporate fraud and malfeasance have been exposed repeatedly, yet no real political or legal response has been forthcoming.

Instead, the "know-nothing" Tea Party swept politicians into power with the craziest campaign imaginable. Take all the things that nearly destroyed us—unfettered corporate greed, no public accountability for private or public corruption, an orchestrated attack against the regulation of criminal corporations, unlimited secret political spending by corporations wedded to an all-out assault on public and private unions and their political power—and reenergize each of these assaults on the middle-class ten-fold.

This illogical, delusional, self-destructive, Mad-Hatter Tea Party craze has now consumed the entire Republican’t party (as well as a few putative Democrazies) who are now clamoring and clambering over each other in a race to dismantle the last remaining shreds of the social, economic, and political safety nets of the diminishing pool of middle-income workers and the ever-increasing ocean of lower-income and unemployed workers.

Instead of attacking the obvious causes of our economic woes (including two illegal wars costing us over three billion dollars weekly), these elected representatives (read corporate political shills) and their deregulated media mouthpieces have mounted legislative campaigns to extend tax cuts and corporate subsidies for the wealthiest 1% while denying even minimal economic protections for workers; they are attempting to entirely eliminate funding for all public media, the only entities providing real, even-handed journalism in this country; they are attempting to severely curtail or destroy workers rights and protections with an unprecedented assault on collective bargaining; they have introduced a full-fledged campaign to decimate women’s rights by radically redefining rape, criminalizing miscarriages, allowing hospitals to refuse to save a woman’s life if doing so requires an abortion, and authorizing the legal murder of abortion providers; they have continued attacks on the rights of LGBT community; they continue their attempt to demonize immigrants and undocumented workers; and they have begun to decimate or eliminate environmental protections while legislatively denying scientific evidence and disallowing that evidence to affect our environmental policies.

The unimaginable harms of these initiatives, considered separately or collectively, is truly mind-boggling. As I learned from more than twenty-five years of collective bargaining, “once you give it up, you never get it back.” Just envision the havoc that any one of these proposals will wreak on our society, and then try to imagine what it would take to fix it once it is in place.

If we don’t get involved, NOW, in private conversations, in public demonstrations, in political campaigns; if we don’t immediately inform our elected representatives, both local and national, of our positions on these vital issues; if we don’t write our local newspapers and media outlets with rational, focused responses to the vitriolic distortion and lies of wacky political demagogues and crackpot pundits, the cause of democracy here and around the world will be setback for generations, perhaps many generations, to come.

“The Greatest Threat to Democracy is Hypocrisy! Seek Truth! Speak Truth!” Tim McMullen