Austerity has been imposed all over the world by the arrogant 1% ruling class and rich on the 99% to pay for the economic meltdown caused by the 1% (corporations, over-fed military war machines, oil/energy profiteers and the global economic elite epitomised by Wall Street).
People are without jobs, food, health care, homes, savings, pension funds (squandered by investment professionals) and HOPE.
Not only the young and old have a grim future, but the poor, sick, workers, unemployed and the middle class have a terrifying present.
Many have nothing more to lose.
Representatives of the world's 99% have taken to the streets in country after country and the Spring revolt continues in Greece, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yeman, Bahrain, etc., and now America.
It is principally the young in country after country who are in peaceful revolt despite arrests and violence inflicted on them. Many have been injured, tortured, imprisoned and killed.
It is young Americans who started the Occupy Wall Street movement which is being supported now in over 200 cities in the USA with massive rallies planned for October 15.
They were laughed at by the mainstream media and the champagne-drinking Wall Street employees as nothing more than a few young hippies.
With a multi-million dollar gift from Goldman-Sachs to the Police Benevolent Fund, the New York City Police were there to keep order by kettle arrests and brutality.
A little bloodshed got minimum attention from the mainstream media who were preoccupied chasing the more fascinating stories of Sarah Palin's Presidential bailout and the return of Seattle's acquitted murderess - admittedly both 'hot' babes.
Only Fox 'Faux' News caught on early to the genuine, organic movement of the masses which was emerging as a massive threat to their corporate owners and conservative clients.
This is a movement of anger, frustration and will to identify those responsible for the global catastrophe caused by unrestrained 'supply-side' economics perpetrated by the world's ruling class.
It is a movement which demands retribution and compensation.
It is a movement which demands change - change which puts the well-being of 99% of humanity before the 1%'s endless accumulation of wealth.
It is a movement without a political party affiliation and condemns all those whom we have elected and who have failed us.
It is the revival of the American Dream.
It is now supported by the American Dream Movement of Van Jones, MoveOn, Democracy for America, all progressive groups, the House Progressive Caucus, labor unions, the environmental and anti-war activists, etc.
And the Marines are coming to protect the protestors and to uphold their Constitutional duty to protect this country and its people. Video
They will be joined by other military and even members of the Tea Party Patriots.
Americans of all political pursuasions are waking up to the fact that we are one and one with the other peoples of the world.
Grubby Fox is claiming commies, anarchy, anti-semitism, blah, blah. They have offered no apology nor explanation for condoning and encouraging Tea Party violence against liberals in their virtual world of unreality.
Ratings-crazed mainstream media and Washington insiders are perplexed.
The sharp-witted President, facing a tough re-election campaign against the malignant Republican Party, has picked up its theme and gotten tough with the opposition.
Senate Majority leader Harry Reid engineered overturning a ridiculous privilege of Republican Senators to filibuster bills by adding endless unrelated amendments wasting time and preventing governance.
Republicans, deprived of one of their pet obstructionist privileges, vow to get even. Get even with the American people of course.
Democrats, who are not progressives, are waking up the the Occupy Wall Street movement and are actually doing something. To name one: an investigation into the illegal economic activities of Supreme Court Justice Thomas and his wife is demanded in a step to overturn the Citizens United decision from which he should have recused himself.
It appears that at least the Democrats want to identify with the protestors if not co-opt them for the party as the GOP co-opted the Tea Party.
Meanwhile the protestors and supporters have declared their independence.
You are either with we the people or against us.
Many believe that it will all come to nothing citing that the world's problems are too complex and the 1%'s power is too entrenched.
According to world economists such as Mervyn King, head of the Bank of England, we are headed into a worldwide depression far worse than the 1930's.
Whatever happens before November 2012 will affect the USA elections.
The question is: can the majority of American voters (who are not disenfranchised by Republican State anti-voting laws) understand what is at stake?
Or will they continue to blindly follow blind leaders?
UPDATE: The New York Times' editorial endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Again, there should be no surprise that the President's Jobs Bill was greeted with disdain by many members of Congress.
Senate Majority leader McConnell described it as a "re-election speech".
Many Tea Party House members boycotted the speech and refuse to consider the bill or any sort of economic stimulus.
Liberals are disturbed that the President offered up cuts in Medicare and Social Security as a sop to the GOP deficit hawks.
One Republican quite rightly pointed out that we cannot defund Social Security with the payment cuts the President proposes to stimulate consumer spending and corporate investment.
Americans want a President and Congress to fight for them and their best interests. A weak jobs plan and cuts in entitlements are not in their best interests.
There were several very workable proposals which could stimulate job growth and deserve to be passed.
One hopes that part of the bill will be seriously considered.
Congress cannot continue to ignore the growing number of Americans out of work with no future hope of jobs.
Nor can it continue to ignore irate taxpayers.
GOP members appear to believe that thwarting the President will put a Republican in the White House in 2012.
The American people have indicated in every recent poll that at least 82% of them think all members of Congress should be booted out.
Though the President's approval rating is down, he is still liked.
His disloyal oppostion may find they are the ones to be shown the door.
It is no surprise that the 12 members of the House and Senate disagreed in their first meeting on the framework of the budget mission entrusted to them to avoid across-the-board cuts.
One threatened to leave the committee if any military cuts were to be considered.
The chairman has not included entitlements, such as, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Others demand cuts in those programs in order to balance the budget even though they are solvent and self funding by taxpayer mandate.
Lobbyists are swarming in record numbers.
The only constituency which seems to be of NO INTEREST to legislators are citizen taxpayers.
Failure should not be in the cards, but is anticipated.
Whatever happens, the taxpayer will pay as will the most vulnerable.
The USA is nearly the August 2-3 deadline for raising the national debt ceiling or closing down government for lack of authorised funds to pay its bills including government pay, veterans' benefits, Social Security, etc.
No doubt Congress will be paid despite refusing to raise the ceiling or agree a budget.
It is so much more fun grandstanding, threatening and throwing tantrums. Besides, the media laps up the madness.
Moody's is already talking of lowering our Aaa rating and other countries are gleeful that our debt is valued a 'junk' (an exaggeration) and the dollar is weakening enough that it could be replaced as the international currency peg.
Democrats are bewildered at who in the Republican Party is making decisions or is capable of making decisions for the good of the country.
Unlikely heroes are House majority Speaker Boehner and Senate majority leader McConnell who float plan after plan within their mad party to save the economy.
Those plans are shot down by the far right as soon as they are announced. The far right wing and Tea Party are led by Eric Cantor (who owns hedge funds which will pay high dividends if the government defaults - just a little conflict of interest).
The President is keeping his temper, but his hair is greyer by the day.
This Petit Guignol has gone on so long that even the majority of the American people are catching on that most of the Republican Congressional members are childish, ruthless and useless.
They want their way and they want President Obama impeached or not reelected.
McConnell brags that removing the President is his primary objective along with re-writing the Constitution (I kid you not).
Republican governors are illegally rewriting the U.S. Constitution and their State Constitutions ad hoc bringing deep hardship to many across many red States.
They are also passing anti-voting laws in one red State after another to prevent young people, students, older people, handicapped, minorities, etc., from voting. We have returned to the Dred Scott era.
Two Presidential candidates, Sarah Palin and Rick Scott, want to secede from the Union.
Just what are they doing for or to America?
What about America and Americans?
Do we count for nothing?
What about our country's solvancy?
Their conduct is not only stupid, sociopathic, self-destructive and unpatriotic, it is treasonous.
Canny Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has brilliantly outlined the Republican Party's long-term plan to destroy the Democratic Party by removing collective bargaining for union members and by corporations out-spending both unions who are supporting their workers' rights and ordinary citizens.
Unions are the largest donors to campaigns which involve their members and support the Democratic Party and its candidates as the DP supports workers' rights.
Republican strategy is simple. Republican corporate PACs rushed over $2 million into Wisconsin to underwrite an aggressive defensive campaign to retain former Republican Speaker of the House David Prosser in the Wisconsin Supreme Court so that Governor Walker's union-bashing budget-repair bill would pass the Court challenge.
Supreme Court terms are for 10 years and Court's eight Justices are supposed to be neutral and impartial in their rulings.*
In the non-partisan primaries (not running as a designated Party candidate), Prosser trounced JoAnne Kloppenburg by a margin of approximately 25%.
Kloppenburg, Assistant Attorney General, is considered a liberal who did not have a chance to be elected a month ago.
Koppenburg defeated Prosser in the April 5 election by 204 votes and declared herself the winner on Wednesday.
Prosser may demand a recount and his advisors may insist on time-consuming court appeals if he loses a recount.
If there is a recount and appeal, neither candidate will sit on the Supreme Court when the law suit, which blocked Governor Walker's controversial budget-repair bill which strips public employees of their collective bargaining rights, comes before the Court in two months.
Republican strategy would happily deprive workers of a liberal's vote on the Court; however, international coverage and national support for teachers and other workers who will be forced to take massive pay cuts, may sensitize the Court to the potential U.S. Constitutional challenges it faces if it supports a bill that was passed without due process of WI Constitutional law.
Allowing a bill to stand as law that was passed without proper Congressional notice and without a quorum present is illegal.
The governor's repeated flauting of a Court order to stay the bill's publication and enforcement is also illegal. He has been forced by a lower court to abide by its temporary order before it can hear arguments on the legality of Congressional procedures taken by Wisconsin's House and Senate majorities in ramming the bill through.
People came from all over the U.S. to support workers in massive demonstrations.
Unions with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy saw the vote for Kloppenburg as a referendum on Walker's policies.
They telephoned over 96,000 voters to get out the vote for working people and Kloppenberg.
Prosser helped the campaign against himself by by expressing his partisan support of Governor Walker and for calling the Chief Justice of the WI Supreme Court, a woman, a "bitch" and threatened her with "I'm going to get you" on video.
That same woman will appoint the judge who will hear any Prosser appeal.
The City of Milwaukee trashed Walker's Republican successor at its Board of Commissioners leaving no doubt of voters' displeasure with the governor.
Walker limply blamed Wisconsin's second largest city and distinguished education center, Madison, for the losses.
The governor, whose candidates lost 19 counties that Republicans won in 2010, still does not see the vote as a referendum on his policies.
Voting patterns show that Democrats are revved up, Independents are disillusioned and many Republicans do not support Walker's confrontational policies either.
Democrats are gathering recall votes for six or more Republican Representatives and Senators. They have enough for one and almost enough for the second in just a few weeks.
The April 5 vote indicates that other Republicans who are vulnerable to recall in a fast-changing political landscape.
Walker continues to vow to continue his policies to destroy unions and he is joined by Republican governors in Florida, Indiana, Maine, New Jersey, Ohio, etc. All their approval ratings have dropped dramatically and some are softening or backpeddling in response to concern from their own Republican constituencies.
Walker himself faces recall in January 2012, which is the earliest date by law, unless he is impeached.
The reputation of the State is badly damaged and it has taken major financial losses from wasted, illegal actions which have increased taxpayer costs.
With ordinary taxpaying people as the only ones who are expected to sacrifice to balance budgets and impending local and national government shutdowns, the spotlight is now on the Republican governors, vicious Koch-stooge Tea Party and incompetent, self-serving politicians who cannot punch their way out of a paper bag.
All the corporate money in the world will not hide the 'long game' forever from the 99% of Americans who have to pay the financial 'blood' price for the rich and corporations who pay no taxes.
What will happen to the 1% when the sleeping giant of 99% finally wakes up?
In country after country, the people are rebelling and overthrowing rulers.
Can America's rulers not see that they may be next?
*The danger of endless court challenges with charges of fraud from a sitting WI Supreme Court Justice is that he will further undermine trust in the SC, the courts and the whole voting process over a few votes.
It could also prompt questions about partisan activist judges on courts where they are required by law to be impartial and fair.
It would prompt questions about the U.S. Supreme Court which has five activist Republican Justices who are re-writing the Constitution (by their decisions) for their corporate and conservative friends.
They have ruled that corporations have the right to invest unlimited funds, including foreign funds, to influence U.S. elections.
Even in aggregate, individual citizens and unions cannot compete in campaign spending.
The White House has expressed its preference for Rep Debbie Wasserman Schutz (D-FL) to run for chairman of the Democratic National Committee at its next annual meeting.
Donna Brazile has been appointed interim chair until the DNC election.
Former Gov Ted Strickland of Ohio from 2007-11 was one of the finalists for the role.
Strickland was preferred by more conservative Democrats.
Some were concerned about having a national DNC spokesperson who is a feminist and supports women's rights.
In fact, some were concerned that she is a woman, Jewish and from Florida as well.
Many of us are delighted.
Rep Wasserman Schultz is one of the Party's most effective media advocates and she is an exceptional fundraiser.
She will continue in the House of Representatives and an administrator will be appointed to handle day-to-day activites of the Party while she concentrates on her role as spokesperson and fundraiser.
She will succeed Tim Kaine who will run for Senator of Virginia.