New Orleans

Reports from Seattle on blogs and websites indicate there were lines of people pulling out there money.  Once again ABC had footage of a modest sized business owner with $3 million in accounts pulling his money out in Seattle and putting it into credit union accounts.   I was less enthralled with the footage of an interview with Kristen Christian, who had announced a Bank Transfer Day, and has gotten a lot of ink with a Facebook page and this, that, and the other, with her ham-handed attempt at distancing herself from the Occupy movement, which has been more helpful in getting traction here than any other force.  I assume she got typically bad advice from someone that she needed to distance herself specifically from the tactics of the few, rather than showing the good judgment of just keeping her mouth shut on the Occupy movement and push forward on the bank transfer themes.  Watch any politician on TV, young sister, and they will teach the value of keep stepping rather than sewing dissension on irrelevant side issues.

Nonetheless, this is all good, and in fact needs to continue to be a major push by way more people.   Banks and all of the Homeland Security mess that attends the opening and closing of accounts do not make it easy to move money from place to place, so in fact the effort to continue to “green line” these big banks and consumer rip-off artists must continue to build to continue to divest their ridiculous coffers and subsidize their management bonuses and Wall Street level salaries.

This is part of what it means to build “citizen wealth” in our communities.  This is not simply a protest effort, but it is the way that lots of individuals and families can create their own “community reinvestment” initiatives to return money to work in their communities rather than simply piling up on the balance sheets of the huge, bailed out “ghost” banks with their inflated portfolios and their refusals to loan and extend real credit to help pull the country out of the great recession.

If 1 million means $4.5 billion out and $45 billion for our communities, then why not 10 millions to move $45 billion out and $450 billion into our communities to create livelihoods and better, more vibrant cities for all of our families?

ew Orleans

King has his own problems, so god knows in this time of high unemployment it is easy to understand how desperate he must be facing the fact that his 5^th district in Iowa is disappearing and forcing him to pack off to greener fields.  The old 5^th in western Iowa is one of those rare places in America that still passes for the farm belt with its bit cities being the old dusty whistle and wagon train stops in Sioux City and Council Bluffs.  King wouldn’t be the one to tell anyone this, but I can still remember reading about the farm protests and strikes in that district during the depression over the price of milk and their demands for bank holidays.  These days the district is almost un-American, meaning that its demographics are radically different than the rest of the country.  Here’s a snapshot of one of the few districts left in America where you can honestly say they are “white, right, and ready to fight,” or at least two of those three anyway.

U.S. Census data put Representative King’s record in the context of the people who he represents. Iowa District 5 is 49.34 percent urban, 3.66 percent non-white, and has a population that is 3.58 percent Latino and 2.96 percent foreign-born. 4.65 percent of adults working in Rep. King’s district commute using public transportation, on a bike or on foot. 4.42 percent of adults aged 25 and older in King’s district have a Master’s, PhD or Professional Degree.

King doesn’t worry about his disappearing constituents understanding that all he is doing is political grandstanding and pandering.  Reading the comments on the blogs a number of them were confused about why the funding for ACORN was still going on (it wasn’t!) and was it “automatic” (it isn’t!), but thankful the funding stream was finally shut off (huh?!?).

Time would be wasted trying to engage in a conversation about how preposterous it is to contemplate such an unconstitutional “bill of attainder” for the “new” ACORNs as the blogger calls them or the “successor” ACORNs, because we would have to pretend this might ever become law, rather than another unreported press release from a self-aggrandizing bore, who is seen as an embarrassment to the state by no less than the Des Moines Register. It has been widely reported that the New York successor and others have mustered review governmental agencies and proven that they are not successors to ACORN and therefore would now be eligible for whatever crumbs fall their way.

Congress must just be a place where people like King like to hear themselves talk, since no one else back home or anywhere else is interested in listening to this nonsense.

Houston

http://boards.hbo.com/topic/Maher-Overtime/Submit-Questions-Overtime/2000007509

and on his facebook page here:

http://www.facebook.com/Maher?ref=ts

You know 287(g), because we talked about it often here.  This is the Homeland Security contract that sends money to untrained, unsupervised cops in cities and counties in different jurisdictions for them to act like they work for the immigration folks and scoop up undocumented immigrants.  In most cases this has led to a mess of racial profiling cases, lawsuits by the hundreds, and liabilities that just won’t stop.  A recent New Yorker article said that Maricopa County had paid more than $40,000,000 in claims on lawsuits based on Arapio’s reign of terror against anyone with brown skin in that sun scorched city.  And, all of this has been sanctioned and sanitized by Napolitano, first as governor and apologist for Arpaio when she was in Arizona, and now as enabler while she is in DC.  My companeros with the National Day Laborers Organizing Network (www.ndlon.org) are even picketing in front of the HBO studio today to demand the question be asked.  Suerte to Pablo, Chris, and the gang for standing up now, so let’s do this thing.

Obama gets it, but doesn’t seem to see the contraction.  Yesterday in talking about the bust in Cambridge of a buddy, African-American professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard, he could see it clearly, but he wasn’t looking far enough.

He needs to remember his own words from yesterday:

“What I think we know separate and apart from this incident,” Obama stated of Gates’ controversial July 16 arrest, “is that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.

“When I was in the state legislature in Illinois, we worked on a racial-profiling bill, because there was indisputable evidence that blacks and Hispanics were being stopped disproportionately. And that is a sign, an example of how race remains a factor in our society.”

Bill Maher is not my personal piece of cake.  He was in New Orleans recently and the rest of my tribe went to see him and thought he was great, so what do I know.  I can’t get past the fact that he seems such a smart aleck, but whatever.  He can still do the right thing here.  Being a self-proclaimed liberal can’t be all talk.  Eventually even a Bill Maher needs to take the smirk off his face and stand up hard.  Let’s make him do it now!

When we finish with Maher, next we will move to send the President the phone number for Napolitano.  Maybe he could talk to her about this racial profiling problem and get her to do something about it.  Maybe we could sent him a picture of her ID and remind the President that Napolitano works for him.

But, first, onto Maher!