THE NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT

Yesterday, my congressional candidate brother, Will, visited  Cousin Gary visiting from Southern, CA. Gary had never been to an Occupy Wall Street protest because, as he put it, “I’m not interested in closing ports and businesses where people have jobs. And, I don’t want to lay down in the street.”

He also confessed to not quite understanding what the point is. While vitriolic radio show hosts criticize and condemn the movement as pointless and leaderless, I notice that all National news organizations are covering this movement- because  it has legs.  As one local protester, Rick Mines put it, “Protesting the concentration of wealth and power held by less than 1 percent of the population is an effort to  save capitalism.  Capitalism has to be fair,”  (And I would add regulated.)
You can’t compete when some guy is putting $100 million down to put a  Supreme Court Justice in place, or when 80% of congress regards their major job in governing is to get rich by way of  hand-outs, insider trading, and million dollar jobs when they leave. I take heart because the long term apathy among the general population is finally over. You couldn’t get people to take to the streets. That has changed all over the world as well as  in our highly conservative mountain counties, Tuolumne, Calaveras and Amador.

It was a small band on a cold December evening during the busy Christmas season. Two young students were there. The only other woman said to me, “In our county we are all part of the 99%. We don’t have any concentration of wealthy here. But, it is still important to let people know, its time to take a stand and we desperately need change and jobs and a robust middle class.”

This sign speaks to an issue that may be more important than the government laws that tilt toward the wealthy.  It is a slippery slope to a fascist state when we weaken our first amendment rights.  There are many good things in the NDAA, like protections for whistleblowers. But, we are not to know if sub-par maintenance of our airplanes is a factor in crash. We cannot know who contributed what to the congressional committee people overseeing the granting of government contracts. On any contract,  any savings realized cannot be directed to the National Debt once the money has been set aside and is not used for that project. No clue to where that money WILL go. Suspected terrorists will not have the same rights of trial, detention, and ability to defend themselves as we do now. There are good things in the act, but  many slippery areas. The idea to audit the Defense Department Budget was soundly rejected. Hmmm. It’s on-line. Read it.

OCCUPY WALL STREET, WHO ARE WE?

Amazing that about 70 people gathered at the Sonora Courthouse Park on Saturday to “Occupy Wall Street”, but nobody knows who organized the event. The local paper expressed puzzlement.  People from a group dubbing itself The 99% were there. Others came from Tuolumne County Citizens for Peace. There were Republicans, Democrats, Green Party, Peace and Freedom members, and I don’t know who else.  In short, a cross-section of our community, with the same concerns.

The corrupting  political influence of big money;  the growing,  inequitably taxed,wealth of 1% of the people  at the cost of the declining income of 99% of the people;  Wall Street greed and fraud that plunged us into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression;  a broken political system hobbled by Republican extremists willing to block any helpful measures;  and a President who has failed to stand up to extremists on Wall Street and in the Congress.

Our tax money, bailed out the titans of the financial world whose scammers went unpunished while they brazenly raised their CEO’s  compensation by millions in the face of mass unemployment, the under employed, and foreclosures breaking the back of working families across this nation.

I didn’t see anger so much as frustration, determination;  parents with small  children who know their children are going to inherit this mess.

And, most refreshing of all, young people who are beginning to understand how undermined their future has become. Corporate profits are up 22 percent while squeezing wages and salaries and ratcheting up production. Working people have fewer safeguards; they fear for their jobs if they come out and protest;    Retirement income is threatened  while our failed congress  pushes to take away benefits, worker based health insurance, social security and every safeguard the unions have provided working people in the last century. The Governor of Wisconsin and his assembly  proposed a bill  to forbid Union Organizing.

It’s interesting that the OWS movement has not made up a list of demands, as in this is our agenda, and this is what we demand and it drives the media nuts. They don’t know how to attack them. They can’t call them outrageous. There are too many to ignore, as in  500,000 in Zuccotti Park in New York City, an encampment.  So the pugnacious, conservative radio hosts call them stinky, unbathed – which they are. Some of them live within walking distance of their own homes, but they choose the sleeping bag in the park.  They were forbidden a bullhorn so protestors  use  sign language and the echoing power of their own voices to communicate.  What a wonderfully human and Democratic gathering to give heart to a suffering nation.

Judging from this large group in the Courthouse Park in Sonora, a small town in a rural Motherlode county, the movement has legs. And it isn’t difficult to divine what our needs are.  Just read the signs.

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