From marksafron at att.net  Mon Oct  1 11:44:37 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2012 11:44:37 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] The Real Referendum
Message-ID: <5E5F50E2-CBB9-4694-AF79-8CF554214F8D@att.net>



The Real Referendum
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times

01 October 12

 
Republicans came into this campaign believing that it would be a referendum on President Obama, and that still-high unemployment would hand them victory on a silver platter. But given the usual caveats - a month can be a long time in politics, it's not over until the votes are actually counted, and so on - it doesn't seem to be turning out that way.

Yet there is a sense in which the election is indeed a referendum, but of a different kind. Voters are, in effect, being asked to deliver a verdict on the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society, on Social Security, Medicare and, yes, Obamacare, which represents an extension of that legacy. Will they vote for politicians who want to replace Medicare with Vouchercare, who denounce Social Security as "collectivist" (as Paul Ryan once did), who dismiss those who turn to social insurance programs as people unwilling to take responsibility for their lives?

If the polls are any indication, the result of that referendum will be a clear reassertion of support for the safety net, and a clear rejection of politicians who want to return us to the Gilded Age. But here's the question: Will that election result be honored?

(If exit polls show that a majority voted for Obama but the vote "count" goes to Romney; I think we might have our own "Spring" this fall. I don't think the people will stand for another election like 2000 where Gore won by 500,000 votes; but 5 people - "The Supremes" decided for Bush without ALL the votes being counted in Florida. I find this thought very unsettling. Maybe I should get my paranoids removed.   M.S.) 


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From agnes at mcn.org  Mon Oct  1 15:35:02 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2012 15:35:02 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: [VFP-116] Fw: A plea from Daniel Ellsberg
Message-ID: <3779B5AD5F5E48C1B944A22A5E116B60@toshibauser>


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Steve Scalmanini 
To: VFP-116 ; Parents for Peace 
Sent: Monday, October 01, 2012 11:38 AM
Subject: [VFP-116] Fw: A plea from Daniel Ellsberg


  

Here's an action you can take immediately.  

Steve 





----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Norman Solomon <info at solomonforcongress.com>
To: Sscalmanini at Yahoo.Com 
Sent: Monday, October 1, 2012 10:01 AM
Subject: A plea from Daniel Ellsberg



Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg is deeply concerned about the threats to attack Iran. He says "it is crucial that we voice our opposition before it is too late," and he's urging us to sign the petition described in my note below.
Thanks --
Norman



            Ten years ago, in the streets of Baghdad, I saw people of all ages and thought: ?Will my country bomb you??

            The same question was on my mind years later when I spoke with hundreds of people from all walks of life in Tehran.

            Now, many journalists are reporting that a military attack on Iran is likely -- within months.

            Please add your name to a petition that has been endorsed by the Iranian human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi.

            The petition says: "We call upon the leaders of the governments of the United States and Israel to end their threats of launching a military attack on Iran. Instead, leaders should engage in genuine diplomatic dialogue. We unequivocally oppose any attack on Iran."

            To become a signer of the petition, click here. On the same page, you can read the statement that Ms. Ebadi sent to the petition?s sponsor, RootsAction.org (an online group that I co-founded).

            Few politicians in this country are speaking up clearly and unequivocally against a military attack on Iran. So it?s all the more important for us to speak out now.

            Best wishes,
            Norman

            P.S. -- A number of people have inquired about my campaign debt. It continues to dwindle, but about $3,000 remains to be paid. If you can chip in now, please click here. Thanks a lot.
           





--------------------------------------------------------------------


            Follow Norman

               


--------------------------------------------------------------------



           

           
     



      Paid for by Norman Solomon for Congress Committee
      www.SolomonForCongress.com  




P.O. Box 150775
San Rafael, CA 94915-0775

     
      Powered by NGP VAN, Inc. 





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From ananda at mcn.org  Mon Oct  1 17:23:42 2012
From: ananda at mcn.org (Cecile Cutler)
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2012 17:23:42 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fwd: Stop 'Smart' Meters! International Day of
	Action this Thurs. Oct. 4th!
References: <075FA14FB05B42C789A95F7310425312@hal2009>
Message-ID: <E1AF706D-18CB-4298-8DF3-E2136796286D@mcn.org>



Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Chris Skyhawk" <hawkwork at mcn.org>
> Date: October 1, 2012 6:50:25 AM PDT
> To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
> Subject: Fw: Stop 'Smart' Meters! International Day of Action this Thurs. Oct. 4th!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dear Stop Smart Meters! Supporter,
> 
> People are fed up. Fed up with being forced to have an unwanted,
> intrusive device attached to their home. Fed up with utility company
> threats, coercion, and lies. Fed up with having their essential services
> disconnected or being charged a hefty fee if they don?t want to subject
> their families to fire risk, higher bills, privacy invasion, and health
> damage.
> 
> ?Smart? meters are not ?progress? ?cost saving? or ?green.?  They are
> ruining lives, reducing reliability and costing us dearly.  The "smart
> grid" and its "mesh networks" are a madman?s greedy vision gone horribly
> wrong.
> 
> /Remember- these are the same guys who brought us the Enron scandal./
> 
> "Smart" Meters are cheaply made but highly profitable plastic fire
> hazards, spying on, radiating, and gouging utility customers.Hundreds of
> smart meter fires and electrical hazards have destroyed people's homes
> and livelihoods and risked their lives.  It's time to take action.
> 
> /*_Day of Action Details_*/
> 
> *ON OCTOBER 4^th - THIS THURSDAY**- People around the world are wising
> up- rising up- and saying NO to this dystopian ?smart? future.*
> 
> The *International Day of Action to Stop Smart Meters!* is being
> organized by the National Campaign to Stop Smart Meters! and the
> Wireless Radiation Protection Coalition.  More than twenty events are
> planned in a dozen states and Canada, including Sacramento, CA, Eureka,
> CA, Kelowna BC, Naperville, IL, Maui, HI, and Detroit MI!
> 
> Check out the website for full details:
> http://actiondaytostopsmartmeters.or
> <http://actiondaytostopsmartmeters.org/>g
> 
> Events planned in California include:
> 
> *Eureka*: 4 p.m. PG&E Office 2555 Myrtle Avenue.
> 
> *San Rafael*: 4pm PG&E Service Center 1220 Andersen Dr (at Lindaro St)
> 
> *Sacramento*: 5:45pm SMUD 6201 S Street SMUD Boardroom Auditorium
> 
> *Santa Cruz*: 5pm Clock Tower Water & Pacific
> 
> *Seal Beach*: Leisure World, Seal Beach Blvd.
> 
> *San Diego*: details tba contact director[at]electrosmogprevention[dot]org
> 
> All events are listed at: http://actiondaytostopsmartmeters.org/?page_id=20
> 
> ? If you don?t see your local area listed, why not *plan your own
> event*?This is a grassroots effort and people are planning a variety of
> gatherings, such as leafleting, going door to door, attending public
> meetings, holding signs at busy intersections, and vocal protests at
> utility offices. October 4^th  (or anytime next week) people all around
> the world are taking action together to defend our right to health,
> safety and privacy in our own home!More on planning your own event:
> http://actiondaytostopsmartmeters.org/?page_id=18
> 
> ? Materials to promote next Thursday?s event are available on the Action
> Day website- including *posters, leaflets, and sample press releases*.
> It?s easy to modify these with local information.Materials here:
> http://actiondaytostopsmartmeters.org/?page_id=22
> 
> ? US press release: http://actiondaytostopsmartmeters.org/?page_id=25
> 
> *TELL OBAMA TO STOP SMART METERS!*Whether or not you are participating
> in an event, *call the White House *on Oct. 4^th * at 202-456-1111* and
> demand that President Obama take responsibility for the smart grid mess-
> and immediately enforce a recall on ?smart? metering systems.For our
> health, safety, and privacy.For our families.
> 
> Please send details about your local event to
> info at actiondaytostopsmartmeters.org
> <mailto:info at actiondaytostopsmartmeters.org> so it can be listed on the
> site.You can send photos and video of your event to the same address.
> 
> Thank you all for spreading the word about the Day of Action via social
> media, by phone, and in person.
> 
> Together we can take back our power!
> 
> Josh
> 
> Joshua Hart MSc
> Director, Stop Smart Meters!
> http://stopsmartmeters.org
> 
> Stop Smart Meters! is a grassroots-funded campaign.
> Please chip in if you can! http://stopsmartmeters.org/donate
> 
> 
> 



From ananda at mcn.org  Mon Oct  1 18:49:54 2012
From: ananda at mcn.org (Cecile Cutler)
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2012 18:49:54 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Petition | Senators Boxer and Feinstein:
	Investigate the ongoing danger from the Fukushima nuclear
	reactors | Change.org
Message-ID: <C49547F5-0495-4252-88A9-3AE2F70F1B5F@mcn.org>


http://www.change.org/petitions/senators-boxer-and-feinstein-investigate-the-ongoing-danger-from-the-fukushima-nuclear-reactors?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

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From rkarch at mcn.org  Mon Oct  1 19:37:05 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2012 19:37:05 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Petitioning Senators Boxer and Feinstein to
	Investigate From Fukushima Nuclear Reactors
Message-ID: <45E77C7F-E567-44C0-B165-3F52DE25EFDB@mcn.org>

Petitioning Senators Boxer and Feinstein:  

 http://www.change.org/petitions/senators-boxer-and-feinstein-investigate-the-ongoing-danger-from-the-fukushima-nuclear-reactors?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

This petition will be delivered to:
Senators Boxer and Feinstein 		
Senators Boxer and Feinstein: Investigate the ongoing danger from the Fukushima nuclear reactors

by Carol Wolman

The spent fuel pools at Fukushima are a bomb waiting to go off. Each pool contains irradiated fuel from several years of operation, making for an extremely large radioactive inventory without a strong containment structure that encloses the reactor cores:Several pools are now completely open to the atmosphere because the reactor buildings were demolished by explosions; they are about 100 feet  above ground and could possibly topple or collapse from structural damage coupled with another powerful earthquake;
The loss of water exposing the spent fuel will result in overheating can cause melting and ignite its zirconium metal cladding ? resulting in a fire that could deposit large amounts of radioactive materials over hundreds of miles...

 http://www.change.org/petitions/senators-boxer-and-feinstein-investigate-the-ongoing-danger-from-the-fukushima-nuclear-reactors?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Oakland, CA
Sign this petition
with 1,215 supporters
285 NEEDED

 http://www.change.org/petitions/senators-boxer-and-feinstein-investigate-the-ongoing-danger-from-the-fukushima-nuclear-reactors?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email


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From rkarch at mcn.org  Tue Oct  2 09:35:30 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2012 09:35:30 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Ballot Recommendations From Alliance for Democracy
Message-ID: <3247132C-E636-4CF9-937A-855D23399C99@mcn.org>

Ballot Recommendations on Propositions from 18 Organizations- Left, Right & Center

	Conservative and liberal organizations take opposite positions on the 11 ballot propositions in the upcoming election. The recommendations of 18 leading groups, including the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, Peace & Freedom and Green parties, labor unions, Sierra Club, League of Women Voters, Farm Bureau and Chamber of Commerce, can be viewed at the website http://ElectionInfo.org/ and on the attached chart below. 
	In summary, the liberal/progressive groups are almost unanimous in recommending Yes on Propositions 30, 34, 36, 37, 39 & 40. They recommend No votes on 31, 32, 33, & 38. Only on Prop 35, Longer prison sentences and larger fines for committing human trafficking crimes, are leftish orgs split. 
	This ballot recommendation chart was compiled by Caspar's Jan Boyd and produced by the Mendocino Coast Alliance for Democracy. It is available on the website  http://www.ElectionInfo.org courtesy of web designer Shan Rocciardi, and will be updated as additional ballot recommendations are received. Send feedback to tw at mcn.org, and please pass this email on to others who might appreciate knowing what their favorite organizations recommend.
		Tom Wodetzki, Alliance for Democracy, Albion
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From agnes at mcn.org  Tue Oct  2 18:37:55 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2012 18:37:55 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Loan Mods Cancelled En Masse,
	Foreclosures Ramping UP
Message-ID: <0962236EF72E4E198F40BB17275F5274@toshibauser>

Is Occupy too busy to act for homeowners being foreclosed on? we should be getting ready for a Foreclosure Town Halls date. We need to meet Sat. the 6th. Who is with me on this?
Agnes
----- Original Message ----- 
From: CJ Holmes 
To: CJ Holmes 
Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2012 9:43 PM
Subject: Loan Mods Cancelled En Masse, Foreclosures Ramping UP


BANK INSIDER NEWS BELOW.   [Foreclosure Town Halls 1m video, Press Release, Radio Announce]]

 

Please forward this news to all county officials, supervisors, county attorneys, county recorders, everyone in your address book, all local radio and tv stations.  

 

Copied below is an email solicitation for me, CJ Holmes, real estate broker, to sign up for an REO webinar with absolutely scary news about the cancellation en masse of loan mods.  

 

This hit my email on 9/30/12 at 8:14pm:

 

Dear CJ,

Please make arrangements to attend one of the webinars listed below.  You will be part of a group of select Sonoma cty  real estate professionals who will qualify to apply as an REO partner for one , or several of the financial institutions who have been affected by the recent cancellation of federal mortgage debt relief programs . HAMP has officially cancelled 1 million loan mods, as foreclosure filings are beginning to surge once again with the economy heading into the fourth quarter. of 2012. The Treasury Department is reporting that 229,185 permanent mods have already re-defaulted and that 16% of trial mods have quickly  gone back into foreclosure. These numbers are expected to rise significantly as the shadow inventory backlog becomes financially unmanageable for banks. 

In addition, the recent mandate by the administration that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac discontinue writing down underwater mortgages has paved the way for the initiation of a record number "strategic default" foreclosures.  A documented  1.1 million homeowners have simply "walked away" from undervalued homes to avoid heavy IRS penalties that are scheduled to resume January 1, 2013. 

These recent changes in legislation have prompted increased filings in Sonoma cty. Government controlled entities like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and HUD, as well as many of the nation's largest banks are scrambling to dispose of REO inventories as quickly as possible.

It's news like this that inspires me to do everything possible to stop foreclosures NOW.  

 

Counties need to immediately eminent domain ALL securitized loans and foreclosures of securitized loans and stop the banks from more fraudulently foreclosing.  If we don't stop the banks, they will foreclose the rest of the 40,000,000 securitized loans they have left in this country, and everyone and our economy will be ruined.

 

In the Foreclosure Town Halls, I will explain exactly how the eminent domain of mortgages can be done quickly at the county level strictly for public benefit (not private profit) and immediately halt all foreclosures on every one of those loans.  

 

These loans can then be modified (my suggestion) to 80% loan to market value, with credit given for the original down payment, 2% interest rate, 30 year fixed, payments being made to the county.  Allowances can be made (payments deferred) for those that lost jobs until they become employed again.  

 

This will keep owners in their homes, stabilize market values, allow real estate transactions to return to normal,  eliminate the tremendous fear of loss pervading our economy.   It will provide a tremendous revenue stream for our counties, and combined with a public bank, will provide all the credit for redevelopment, infrastructure, and refinancing the county needs without having to go to private investors.

 

The vacant foreclosures taken by eminent domain can provide homes for those that lost homes to foreclosure, again with loan terms as mentioned above to these new owners, providing the best restitution possible for the bank theft of their homes.

 

Foreclosure Town Halls are taking off like wildfire - with 3 firm dates, 13 cities seeking venues and dates, and interest from 5 other states.  Get your date scheduled now.  

 

Thanks,  cj

 

CJ Holmes, Founder 

Home Owners For Justice

The Most Trusted Name in Real Estate
Real Estate Analyst, DRE 01234197


www.HOFJ.org

(707) 578-5727

(707) 578-5873 f

818 Mendocino Ave

Santa Rosa, CA  95401

 



 

 

 

  
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From agnes at mcn.org  Tue Oct  2 19:36:05 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2012 19:36:05 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Take Action! It's Time for a Robin Hood Tax
	on Wall Street
Message-ID: <513FF663DDCE405BA20DE12BC3EF9C9E@toshibauser>

A Message from the Center for Media and Democracy
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Center for Media and Democracy 
To: agnes at mcn.org 
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 8:58 AM
Subject: Take Action! It's Time for a Robin Hood Tax on Wall Street


           
           September 18, 2012
            CONTACT: Nikolina Lazic at nikolina at prwatch.org



            TELL CONGRESS IT'S TIME FOR A ROBIN HOOD TAX!
            Wall Street gambling and greed collapsed the global economy and we are still reeling.

            Politicians claim America is ?broke? to justify layoffs and draconian cuts in critical services. 

            We have a better idea. 

            Yesterday, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, introduced a bill to place a tiny tax on the sale of stocks, bonds, and derivatives. This bill has the potential to raise billions in desperately needed revenue while clamping down the Wall Street casino that continues to threaten our financial stability.

            Join PRwatch.org and RootsAction.org and hundreds of other organizations in calling for a Robin Hood Tax.

            It's not a tax on the people, its a tax for the people! 

            Please forward this email widely to like-minded friends.

            -- The PRWatch.org team

            
           P.S. The Center for Media and Democracy is a non-profit investigative reporting group. Our websites are PRWatch.org, SourceWatch.org, BanksterUSA.org, ALECexposed.org and FoodRightsNetwork.org. We are joining hundreds of other groups and organizations in calling for a Robin Hood Tax. 


            
            Center for Media and Democracy
            520 University Avenue, Suite 260
            Madison, Wisconsin 53703-4929
            Phone: 608-260-9713 | Fax: 608-260-9714
            E-mail: editor at prwatch.org
            Donate | Privacy Policy | Unsubscribe 
           
     

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From marksafron at att.net  Tue Oct  2 22:51:31 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2012 22:51:31 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Loan Mods Cancelled En Masse,
	Foreclosures Ramping UP
In-Reply-To: <0962236EF72E4E198F40BB17275F5274@toshibauser>
References: <0962236EF72E4E198F40BB17275F5274@toshibauser>
Message-ID: <28310085-1427-4A4F-9C00-A5A1B92F494C@att.net>

I'll be there.
On Oct 2, 2012, at 6:37 PM, Agnes Woolsey wrote:

Is Occupy too busy to act for homeowners being foreclosed on? we should be getting ready for a Foreclosure Town Halls date. We need to meet Sat. the 6th. Who is with me on this?
Agnes
----- Original Message -----
From: CJ Holmes
To: CJ Holmes
Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2012 9:43 PM
Subject: Loan Mods Cancelled En Masse, Foreclosures Ramping UP

BANK INSIDER NEWS BELOW.   [Foreclosure Town Halls 1m video, Press Release, Radio Announce]]
 
Please forward this news to all county officials, supervisors, county attorneys, county recorders, everyone in your address book, all local radio and tv stations. 
 
Copied below is an email solicitation for me, CJ Holmes, real estate broker, to sign up for an REO webinar with absolutely scary news about the cancellation en masse of loan mods. 
 
This hit my email on 9/30/12 at 8:14pm:
 
Dear CJ,

Please make arrangements to attend one of the webinars listed below.  You will be part of a group of select Sonoma cty  real estate professionals who will qualify to apply as an REO partner for one , or several of the financial institutions who have been affected by the recent cancellation of federal mortgage debt relief programs . HAMP has officially cancelled 1 million loan mods, as foreclosure filings are beginning to surge once again with the economy heading into the fourth quarter. of 2012. The Treasury Department is reporting that 229,185 permanent mods have already re-defaulted and that 16% of trial mods have quickly  gone back into foreclosure. These numbers are expected to rise significantly as the shadow inventory backlog becomes financially unmanageable for banks.

In addition, the recent mandate by the administration that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac discontinue writing down underwater mortgages has paved the way for the initiation of a record number "strategic default" foreclosures.  A documented  1.1 million homeowners have simply "walked away" from undervalued homes to avoid heavy IRS penalties that are scheduled to resume January 1, 2013. 

These recent changes in legislation have prompted increased filings in Sonoma cty. Government controlled entities like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and HUD, as well as many of the nation's largest banks are scrambling to dispose of REO inventories as quickly as possible.

It?s news like this that inspires me to do everything possible to stop foreclosures NOW. 
 
Counties need to immediately eminent domain ALL securitized loans and foreclosures of securitized loans and stop the banks from more fraudulently foreclosing.  If we don?t stop the banks, they will foreclose the rest of the 40,000,000 securitized loans they have left in this country, and everyone and our economy will be ruined.
 
In the Foreclosure Town Halls, I will explain exactly how the eminent domain of mortgages can be done quickly at the county level strictly for public benefit (not private profit) and immediately halt all foreclosures on every one of those loans. 
 
These loans can then be modified (my suggestion) to 80% loan to market value, with credit given for the original down payment, 2% interest rate, 30 year fixed, payments being made to the county.  Allowances can be made (payments deferred) for those that lost jobs until they become employed again. 
 
This will keep owners in their homes, stabilize market values, allow real estate transactions to return to normal,  eliminate the tremendous fear of loss pervading our economy.   It will provide a tremendous revenue stream for our counties, and combined with a public bank, will provide all the credit for redevelopment, infrastructure, and refinancing the county needs without having to go to private investors.
 
The vacant foreclosures taken by eminent domain can provide homes for those that lost homes to foreclosure, again with loan terms as mentioned above to these new owners, providing the best restitution possible for the bank theft of their homes.
 
Foreclosure Town Halls are taking off like wildfire ? with 3 firm dates, 13 cities seeking venues and dates, and interest from 5 other states.  Get your date scheduled now. 
 
Thanks,  cj
 
CJ Holmes, Founder
Home Owners For Justice

The Most Trusted Name in Real Estate
Real Estate Analyst, DRE 01234197

www.HOFJ.org
(707) 578-5727
(707) 578-5873 f
818 Mendocino Ave
Santa Rosa, CA  95401
 
<image001.png>
 
 
 
  

TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list send an email to occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org put "Un-Subscribe me" in the Subject.

For listserv technical problems please contact: listmanager at mcn.org

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From rick at mcn.org  Tue Oct  2 11:31:48 2012
From: rick at mcn.org (Rick Childs)
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2012 11:31:48 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] End of the American Middle-Class and Election
	Probability Analysis
Message-ID: <6ECB7B4DC7164F869CA02A30DC04EC5E@rcdesktop>

I share these two great sites with you:
Last night on PBS's Newshour, an interview with Hedrick Smith, discussing his book, "Who Stole the American Dream," analyzing how the rich have gotten all the economic productivity gains in the past 30 years  (in both video and transcript for dialup users):   http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec12/smith_10-01.html

And, an incredibly fascinating site put out by the NY Times analyzing the Presidential election (polls, probability of winning each state, daily updates - on the left side - based on recent polls and events, etc.) for each battleground state;  click on the tab about 1/3 of the way down the page to see all states.  It reports, for example, Obama leads Romney in Florida 51%-49% with a 71% probability of winning the state on Nov. 6.  Obama is currently given an 85% likelihood of winning the national election.  Another tab shows probabilities of who'll win the Senate in each state (Eliz. Warren has a 69% probability of winning in Mass.).  One of the most amazing political sites on the internet I've found:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

Enjoy,
Rick Childs
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From jupiter at mcn.org  Wed Oct  3 09:12:21 2012
From: jupiter at mcn.org (Linda Jupiter)
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2012 09:12:21 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fwd: Stop 'Smart' Meters! International Day
	of Action this Thurs. Oct. 4th!
In-Reply-To: <E1AF706D-18CB-4298-8DF3-E2136796286D@mcn.org>
References: <075FA14FB05B42C789A95F7310425312@hal2009>
	<E1AF706D-18CB-4298-8DF3-E2136796286D@mcn.org>
Message-ID: <B6909120-135D-4FD0-A866-FEFDB1810E16@mcn.org>

Good morning, all,
Anyone interested in stopping Smart Meters?
I'm tabling for Obama from 10-12 but we could meet in front of the  
PG&E building at 410 N. Main Street at 2 p.m. with Stop 'Smart Meters'  
signs.
Any takers?
Linda



On Oct 1, 2012, at 5:23 PM, Cecile Cutler wrote:

>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
>> From: "Chris Skyhawk" <hawkwork at mcn.org>
>> Date: October 1, 2012 6:50:25 AM PDT
>> To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
>> Subject: Fw: Stop 'Smart' Meters! International Day of Action this  
>> Thurs. Oct. 4th!
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Dear Stop Smart Meters! Supporter,
>>
>> People are fed up. Fed up with being forced to have an unwanted,
>> intrusive device attached to their home. Fed up with utility company
>> threats, coercion, and lies. Fed up with having their essential  
>> services
>> disconnected or being charged a hefty fee if they don?t want to  
>> subject
>> their families to fire risk, higher bills, privacy invasion, and  
>> health
>> damage.
>>
>> ?Smart? meters are not ?progress? ?cost saving? or ?green.?  They are
>> ruining lives, reducing reliability and costing us dearly.  The  
>> "smart
>> grid" and its "mesh networks" are a madman?s greedy vision gone  
>> horribly
>> wrong.
>>
>> /Remember- these are the same guys who brought us the Enron scandal./
>>
>> "Smart" Meters are cheaply made but highly profitable plastic fire
>> hazards, spying on, radiating, and gouging utility  
>> customers.Hundreds of
>> smart meter fires and electrical hazards have destroyed people's  
>> homes
>> and livelihoods and risked their lives.  It's time to take action.
>>
>> /*_Day of Action Details_*/
>>
>> *ON OCTOBER 4^th - THIS THURSDAY**- People around the world are  
>> wising
>> up- rising up- and saying NO to this dystopian ?smart? future.*
>>
>> The *International Day of Action to Stop Smart Meters!* is being
>> organized by the National Campaign to Stop Smart Meters! and the
>> Wireless Radiation Protection Coalition.  More than twenty events are
>> planned in a dozen states and Canada, including Sacramento, CA,  
>> Eureka,
>> CA, Kelowna BC, Naperville, IL, Maui, HI, and Detroit MI!
>>
>> Check out the website for full details:
>> http://actiondaytostopsmartmeters.or
>> <http://actiondaytostopsmartmeters.org/>g
>>
>> Events planned in California include:
>>
>> *Eureka*: 4 p.m. PG&E Office 2555 Myrtle Avenue.
>>
>> *San Rafael*: 4pm PG&E Service Center 1220 Andersen Dr (at Lindaro  
>> St)
>>
>> *Sacramento*: 5:45pm SMUD 6201 S Street SMUD Boardroom Auditorium
>>
>> *Santa Cruz*: 5pm Clock Tower Water & Pacific
>>
>> *Seal Beach*: Leisure World, Seal Beach Blvd.
>>
>> *San Diego*: details tba contact  
>> director[at]electrosmogprevention[dot]org
>>
>> All events are listed at: http://actiondaytostopsmartmeters.org/?page_id=20
>>
>> ? If you don?t see your local area listed, why not *plan your own
>> event*?This is a grassroots effort and people are planning a  
>> variety of
>> gatherings, such as leafleting, going door to door, attending public
>> meetings, holding signs at busy intersections, and vocal protests at
>> utility offices. October 4^th  (or anytime next week) people all  
>> around
>> the world are taking action together to defend our right to health,
>> safety and privacy in our own home!More on planning your own event:
>> http://actiondaytostopsmartmeters.org/?page_id=18
>>
>> ? Materials to promote next Thursday?s event are available on the  
>> Action
>> Day website- including *posters, leaflets, and sample press  
>> releases*.
>> It?s easy to modify these with local information.Materials here:
>> http://actiondaytostopsmartmeters.org/?page_id=22
>>
>> ? US press release: http://actiondaytostopsmartmeters.org/?page_id=25
>>
>> *TELL OBAMA TO STOP SMART METERS!*Whether or not you are  
>> participating
>> in an event, *call the White House *on Oct. 4^th * at 202-456-1111*  
>> and
>> demand that President Obama take responsibility for the smart grid  
>> mess-
>> and immediately enforce a recall on ?smart? metering systems.For our
>> health, safety, and privacy.For our families.
>>
>> Please send details about your local event to
>> info at actiondaytostopsmartmeters.org
>> <mailto:info at actiondaytostopsmartmeters.org> so it can be listed on  
>> the
>> site.You can send photos and video of your event to the same address.
>>
>> Thank you all for spreading the word about the Day of Action via  
>> social
>> media, by phone, and in person.
>>
>> Together we can take back our power!
>>
>> Josh
>>
>> Joshua Hart MSc
>> Director, Stop Smart Meters!
>> http://stopsmartmeters.org
>>
>> Stop Smart Meters! is a grassroots-funded campaign.
>> Please chip in if you can! http://stopsmartmeters.org/donate
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list send an email to occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org 
>  put "Un-Subscribe me" in the Subject.
>
> For listserv technical problems please contact: listmanager at mcn.org

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From rkarch at mcn.org  Wed Oct  3 09:45:51 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2012 09:45:51 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] George Lakeoff: What to Watch for in the
	Presidential Debates
Message-ID: <EAD6BEE1-A86A-43D8-B681-2F9DB6F4AAED@mcn.org>


 
(illustration: TIME Magazine)

 


What to Watch for in the Presidential Debates

By George Lakoff, Reader Supported News

02 October 12

 
 
've been applying cognitive linguistics and neuroscience to politics in six books over the past two decades. The ideas in those books were on display in many of the speeches at the Democratic National Convention. Look for them in the debates. They include:

All politics is based on moral values, with strict conservatives and progressives having different moral values.

There are also morally complex voters - moderates, independents, swing voters - who are progressive on some issues and conservative on others. The activation of one in the brain turns of

All issues are conceptually "framed" - that is, they have a mental structure that fits one's moral system.

Facts matter, but only when they clearly fit one's morally-based frames. Facts and figures, when used, should create a moral point in a memorable way. And if the facts don't fit your frames, the frames stay (since they are in your brain) and the facts are ignored or ridiculed.

Political language is rarely neutral. Because all words are defined in conceptual frames, all political language is defined in terms of morally-based frames.

Effective political speech uses language based on one's own frames and avoids language based on the opponent's frames. The opponent's language, even if negated and argued against, activates his frames in the brains of the public.

If the moderator uses the other side's frames, shift to yours.

The best defense is a good offense: a narrative based on your frames. Always go on offense.

Tell why your views are patriotic.

Tell the truth.

Repeat. Repetition is necessary.
The presidential debates have other vital constraints as well. Here is the basic advice for candidates in the debates.

State your values as the basis of any policy discussion. That tells why you think the policy is right. Be positive.
Limit discussion of policy details. Policies - and the facts and figures behind them - should only be discussed when they exemplify your values. Avoid isolated facts and figures. Tell stories with clear morals.
Be clear and to the point. Connect empathetically with your audience.
Say straightforwardly what you believe. Be authentic. Tell the truth. Authenticity matters.
Values, clarity, connection with empathy, and authenticity lead to trust. Trust is absolutely vital. Can you be trusted to do what you say you'll do?
Present an authentic view of yourself that the public can identify with and be proud of.
Presidential debates are not won or lost on how good a policy wonk a candidate is. The above list is what counts.

In this election, there are a few basic ideas that are absolutely crucial:

Democracy is based on citizens caring about and taking responsibility for all citizens, as well as for themselves. The American government is the instrument that the people use to guarantee protection and empowerment for all.

We all, together, provide what is needed for a decent life. Individual accomplishment rests on what other Americans have provided. No one makes it without the rest of America. The private depends upon the public.

Building the economy requires investment - in public infrastructure, education, research, and much more.

Success is much more than money. It is your contribution to America as a whole - whether it is teaching, raising children, providing food, healing the sick, making useful products, guaranteeing our rights and out safety, or running businesses that make life better. America needs them all.

A number to remember: Most people may not be aware of it, but 96 percent of all Americans make use of what other citizens provide through our government: 96 percent of us have received tax deductions for mortgages, education, and dependent children, business subsidies, unemployment insurance, veterans' benefits, as well as all the other benefits that we all enjoy because of what we give and have given each other. This applies to almost all Americans, rich or not, Republican or Democrat. If your work contributed, or will contribute, to our country, you have earned, or will earn, whatever you have gotten. You are the 96 deserving percent. The other 4 percent are youngsters - to young to have benefited yet, but they will inevitably join the 96 percent soon.

These are largely progressive, not conservative ideas. They are about citizenship, not about going it alone, about a commitment to our country, not just a commitment to oneself.

That is the central issue in this election. It is a moral issue. Who are we as Americans? Are we citizens who join together to form a great nation? Or are we isolated individuals, with no commitments to each other, at the mercy of corporations whose central goal is their short-term profit.
 
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From rachel at mcn.org  Wed Oct  3 09:50:06 2012
From: rachel at mcn.org (Rachel Binah)
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2012 09:50:06 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] George Lakeoff: What to Watch for in the
	Presidential Debates
In-Reply-To: <EAD6BEE1-A86A-43D8-B681-2F9DB6F4AAED@mcn.org>
References: <EAD6BEE1-A86A-43D8-B681-2F9DB6F4AAED@mcn.org>
Message-ID: <A5DCFDAB-9CB0-4158-976D-87CD7A531CF6@mcn.org>

I have always felt that using 'their' language, reinforces their  
message and negates ours.  Rachel Binah
On Oct 3, 2012, at 9:45 AM, Richard Karch wrote:

>
>
> (illustration: TIME Magazine)
>
>
>
>
> What to Watch for in the Presidential Debates
>
> By George Lakoff, Reader Supported News
>
> 02 October 12
>
>
>
> 've been applying cognitive linguistics and neuroscience to  
> politics in six books over the past two decades. The ideas in those  
> books were on display in many of the speeches at the Democratic  
> National Convention. Look for them in the debates. They include:
>
> All politics is based on moral values, with strict conservatives  
> and progressives having different moral values.
>
> There are also morally complex voters - moderates, independents,  
> swing voters - who are progressive on some issues and conservative  
> on others. The activation of one in the brain turns of
>
> All issues are conceptually "framed" - that is, they have a mental  
> structure that fits one's moral system.
>
> Facts matter, but only when they clearly fit one's morally-based  
> frames. Facts and figures, when used, should create a moral point  
> in a memorable way. And if the facts don't fit your frames, the  
> frames stay (since they are in your brain) and the facts are  
> ignored or ridiculed.
>
> Political language is rarely neutral. Because all words are defined  
> in conceptual frames, all political language is defined in terms of  
> morally-based frames.
>
> Effective political speech uses language based on one's own frames  
> and avoids language based on the opponent's frames. The opponent's  
> language, even if negated and argued against, activates his frames  
> in the brains of the public.
>
> If the moderator uses the other side's frames, shift to yours.
>
> The best defense is a good offense: a narrative based on your  
> frames. Always go on offense.
>
> Tell why your views are patriotic.
>
> Tell the truth.
>
> Repeat. Repetition is necessary.
> The presidential debates have other vital constraints as well. Here  
> is the basic advice for candidates in the debates.
>
> State your values as the basis of any policy discussion. That tells  
> why you think the policy is right. Be positive.
> Limit discussion of policy details. Policies - and the facts and  
> figures behind them - should only be discussed when they exemplify  
> your values. Avoid isolated facts and figures. Tell stories with  
> clear morals.
> Be clear and to the point. Connect empathetically with your audience.
> Say straightforwardly what you believe. Be authentic. Tell the  
> truth. Authenticity matters.
> Values, clarity, connection with empathy, and authenticity lead to  
> trust. Trust is absolutely vital. Can you be trusted to do what you  
> say you'll do?
> Present an authentic view of yourself that the public can identify  
> with and be proud of.
> Presidential debates are not won or lost on how good a policy wonk  
> a candidate is. The above list is what counts.
>
> In this election, there are a few basic ideas that are absolutely  
> crucial:
>
> Democracy is based on citizens caring about and taking  
> responsibility for all citizens, as well as for themselves. The  
> American government is the instrument that the people use to  
> guarantee protection and empowerment for all.
>
> We all, together, provide what is needed for a decent life.  
> Individual accomplishment rests on what other Americans have  
> provided. No one makes it without the rest of America. The private  
> depends upon the public.
>
> Building the economy requires investment - in public  
> infrastructure, education, research, and much more.
>
> Success is much more than money. It is your contribution to America  
> as a whole - whether it is teaching, raising children, providing  
> food, healing the sick, making useful products, guaranteeing our  
> rights and out safety, or running businesses that make life better.  
> America needs them all.
>
> A number to remember: Most people may not be aware of it, but 96  
> percent of all Americans make use of what other citizens provide  
> through our government: 96 percent of us have received tax  
> deductions for mortgages, education, and dependent children,  
> business subsidies, unemployment insurance, veterans' benefits, as  
> well as all the other benefits that we all enjoy because of what we  
> give and have given each other. This applies to almost all  
> Americans, rich or not, Republican or Democrat. If your work  
> contributed, or will contribute, to our country, you have earned,  
> or will earn, whatever you have gotten. You are the 96 deserving  
> percent. The other 4 percent are youngsters - to young to have  
> benefited yet, but they will inevitably join the 96 percent soon.
>
> These are largely progressive, not conservative ideas. They are  
> about citizenship, not about going it alone, about a commitment to  
> our country, not just a commitment to oneself.
>
> That is the central issue in this election. It is a moral issue.  
> Who are we as Americans? Are we citizens who join together to form  
> a great nation? Or are we isolated individuals, with no commitments  
> to each other, at the mercy of corporations whose central goal is  
> their short-term profit.
>
>
> TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list send an email to  
> occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org put "Un-Subscribe me" in the Subject.
>
> For listserv technical problems please contact: listmanager at mcn.org

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From rkarch at mcn.org  Thu Oct  4 14:46:10 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2012 14:46:10 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Who Won the Debate?
Message-ID: <32248056-774A-4B76-BE94-B41A635E5520@mcn.org>

supportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/13795-focus-did-romney-win-the-debate

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama after the first presidential debate at the University of Denver, Oct. 3, 2012, in Denver. (photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)

 


Did Romney 'Win' the Debate?

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

04 October 12

  
The instant analysis after the first presidential debate - even on liberal-leaning MSNBC - was that Mitt Romney was the decisive "winner." But Romney not only ducked the specifics of his plans but looked sneaky and nervous in doing so, writes Robert Parry.

n the presidential debate that I watched on Wednesday night, Republican challenger Mitt Romney was shiftier than Dick Nixon in 1960 and less coherent than George W. Bush in 2000, but the TV pundits, including on MSNBC, overwhelmingly declared him the winner.


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From rkarch at mcn.org  Thu Oct  4 21:30:12 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2012 21:30:12 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Lessons from Quebec Protesters
Message-ID: <82EE65E2-EB0A-4D72-82D1-68E9D6F35B1C@mcn.org>

10 Lessons American Protesters Can Learn from Quebec?s Students




While U.S. police continues to aggressively and unconstitutionally dissuade citizens from exercising their First Amendment rights, protests are still an effective method for bringing about change. For example, after nine tireless months, Quebec?s student movement has finally declared victory. When the government threatened to raise tuition on college students by 87 percent, they came out in mass to protect affordable education. As author Naomi Klein stated,  ?This is why radical movements are mercilessly mocked. They can win.?

The students? diligent approach and subsequent success is not something to be overlooked, notes The Guardian. Here are 10 lessons American protesters can learn from Canada?s student movement:

1. Vote

Ultimately, the students won their plight by voting out the former premier, Jean Charest, and giving Pauline Marois, a candidate sympathetic to the students? cause, the job instead. Marois, in turn, immediately cancelled the planned tuition hikes and ended the newly passed anti-protesting laws. While many American activists are justifiably disenchanted with the democratic process and are attempting to find alternative solutions, they can still vote in the meantime. Voting doesn?t need to mean choosing between two candidates who don?t represent their views, but backing someone who participates in their struggle, like frequent Occupy arrestee and Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein.

2. Expose Injustice

To put an end to the student movement, Quebec?s government passed Bill 78, which put massive, targeted restrictions on the students? right to protest. Because this law blatantly contradicted Canada?s  constitution, it enraged an even larger segment of the population. Suddenly, Canadians who were not particularly moved by the student struggle joined the efforts to protect their country?s freedom of speech. American protesters must showcase the police brutality and unlawful arrests intended to discourage demonstrations to prove how the rights Americans take for granted are actively being taken away, hopefully enlivening them to take action and build support.

3. Popular Movements Require a Populace


One of the biggest successes of the student movement is that it actually attracted up to half a million people simultaneously. While protests of a few hundred people are not meaningless, they do not carry the same clout as those with hundreds of thousands in attendance. The majority of the country can be sympathetic to the plight, but until they participate in some manner, the government will consider them too apathetic to worry about. Find ways to encourage people out of their homes and places of work and into the streets so that their numbers cannot be ignored.

4. Persistence Is Key

The students of Quebec stuck with the movement since the beginning of the year. Even when tens of thousands flooded the streets, protesters did not take for granted that their voices were heard, continuing to go out and bang on pots and pans each night. A constant presence was essential in reminding authorities that they were not going anywhere and that their concerns were not to be taken lightly. Protests every six months are nice, but protests every evening show you mean business.

5. Find Common Ground and Align

Two of the largest student organizations in Quebec, CLASSE and FEUQ, employed different tactics and different end goals. At the same time, however, they had a significant amount of overlap in their desires and chose to focus on the similarities to work together and bring about change. Besides, a diversity in tactics can even be helpful and the variety in approaches helped to win over more supporters and bring more attention to the cause.

6. Stand By Your Allies

Don?t cut off those who are united in your cause. Hoping for compromise, Quebec?s government agreed to hold talks with the more temperate student groups, but would not allow representatives from CLASSE to participate in these discussions. Instead of taking the opportunity to put their own interests first, these student groups walked out on the talks altogether. Too often, American protesters bicker amongst their peers rather than uniting in their shared struggle.

7. Reach Out to Unions

When mobilizing a movement, one of the quickest ways to grow your numbers is to connect with large groups of people who are already politically active, namely unions. While the student unions themselves were the most crucial, their networking with labor unions was also important. Students met with miners and public sector workers who were also facing massive problem to build coalitions. Although worker strikes never occurred, it was discussed at length, and the persistent threat definitely gave credence to the students? sway.

8. Pick a Cause

The Canadian students adopted a single cause to rally around, which proved effective in achieving change. One of the criticisms most commonly aimed at Occupy is that it is not clear what it stands for. As many Occupiers will tell you, however, the biggest problem is that the amount of problems with the United States cannot be limited to a short list. Nonetheless, activists could benefit from building groups that target specific, tangible goals, be it instituting campaign finance reform, fighting foreclosures or lowering college tuition. That does not mean abandoning reform on all fronts, but rather dividing to focus on specific issues, while still coming together to support peers? efforts on days of action.

9. Champion Education Specifically

If you?re looking for one particular cause to rally people behind, education is a great place to start. Not only does offering affordable education to everyone give opportunities to people who would otherwise be impoverished, but it also encourages people to think critically and question the status quo. Furthermore, in the spectrum of causes, education is one of the least controversial subjects. Theoretically anyway, people want the country?s youth to be smart and skilled. While citizens as a whole may be oblivious to the extent education is legitimately under attack (with slashed budgets, the demonization of teachers and undue emphasis on standardized tests), when you can show that the elite do not care about providing quality education, you?ll gain a lot of support.

10. Do Not Become Complacent with Your Victories

If the government has tried to screw you over before, chances are they?ll do it again. CLASSE understands that it is better to remain vigilant and continue their efforts rather to rest on their laurels and assume the problem is fixed. Sure, the recent election seems promising, but a consistent, diligent presence by the student unions will help to dissuade the government from trying to backtrack a couple of years down the road.


Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/10-lessons-american-protesters-can-learn-from-quebecs-students.html#ixzz28Oad2ro7
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From deejayliz at yahoo.com  Fri Oct  5 14:12:51 2012
From: deejayliz at yahoo.com (Liz Helenchild)
Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2012 14:12:51 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: My gay son denied his Eagle Scout award
In-Reply-To: <506f1c8d70747_41f6125090887544@production--change-main--resque--04.mail>
References: <506f1c8d70747_41f6125090887544@production--change-main--resque--04.mail>
Message-ID: <1349471571.38894.YahooMailNeo@web161203.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>




----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Karen Andresen via Change.org <mail at change.org>
To: deejayliz at yahoo.com 
Sent: Friday, October 5, 2012 10:44 AM
Subject: My gay son denied his Eagle Scout award
 

 
? 
 
My son Ryan's Boy Scout troop won't let him be an Eagle Scout because he's gay.       
Sign My Petition   
Liz -
My son Ryan has been a Boy Scout since he was 6 years old, and now, a few days before his 18th birthday, he has fulfilled all the requirements to be an Eagle Scout. But because Ryan recently came out to his friends and family as gay, leaders from our local Boy Scout troop say they won't approve Ryan's Eagle award.
To me, Ryan is perfect. But not everyone treats him that way -- in fact, Ryan has been a victim of severe bullying. That's why, for his final project to become an Eagle Scout, Ryan worked with younger kids to create an anti-bullying "Tolerance Wall" at a local middle school: 288 different tiles showing acts of kindness.
That's the kind of kid my son is. Instead of lashing out, he helps others feel less alone. That's why I'm so angry that our local Boy Scout troop leaders want to treat my son as less than other kids just because he's gay.
I started a petition on Change.org asking our local Boy Scout council (near San Francisco) to approve Ryan's Eagle award. Click here to add your name.
Ryan worked so hard to earn his Eagle Scout rank. For 12 years, he has worked to attain badges, do community service, and become the kind of exemplary young man the Boy Scouts claim to produce. Gay or straight, I love my son just the same. And I don't want anyone to treat him differently or make him feel bad about himself because of who he is.
Although the national Boy Scouts have remained firm in their anti-gay discrimination, local Boy Scout councils have started to fight back. Several councils even clarified that they will allow gay scouts after they were petitioned to do so on Change.org. I know that if enough people sign my petition, our local council will give my son Ryan the Eagle Scout award he deserves.
Click here to sign my petition demanding that our local Boy Scout council give my son Ryan his Eagle award.
Thank you for helping me stand up for my son.
Karen Andresen
Moraga, California 
This email was sent by Change.org to deejayliz at yahoo.com ??|?? Start a petition 
Unsubscribe. Edit your email notification settings.     
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From nsdusoir at mcn.org  Fri Oct  5 14:53:23 2012
From: nsdusoir at mcn.org (Howard Ennes)
Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2012 14:53:23 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fwd: Gay son
References: <379CAA86-7493-4C90-91C8-D47B41F552B5@mcn.org>
Message-ID: <B8C915AC-9B49-4F4F-9AC0-770F99C20F40@mcn.org>

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Howard Ennes <nsdusoir at mcn.org>
> Date: October 5, 2012 2:51:59 PM PDT
> To: Liz Helenchild <deejayliz at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Gay son
> 
> LIZ HELENCHILD ??
> 
> 	Thank you for this alert . . .  it's amazing and heartening to realize how many folks care and are speaking out!
> 
> 	For what it's worth, this is what I said:
> 
> 	"It's not just that I am a 95-year-old Life Scout with three grown children, but I am an American and Ryan is every bit as equal.  Shame on the BSA 'leaders' of Troop 212, SF ?? leaders to what?  bigotry?"
> 
> 	I'd love to be able to speak direct to these so-called 'leaders" -?? to what?  Fascism?
> 
> Howard Ennes
> 160 Woodland Drive
> Fort Bragg, 
> 	California 95437
> 
> 
> 

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From cdurkee at mcn.org  Fri Oct  5 15:30:46 2012
From: cdurkee at mcn.org (Carrie Durkee)
Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2012 15:30:46 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: My gay son denied his Eagle Scout award
In-Reply-To: <1349471571.38894.YahooMailNeo@web161203.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
References: <506f1c8d70747_41f6125090887544@production--change-main--resque--04.mail>
	<1349471571.38894.YahooMailNeo@web161203.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <66F0719F-7858-40C9-968F-6A5548B5BB1A@mcn.org>

Thanks all. 
Carrie
On Oct 5, 2012, at 2:12 PM, Liz Helenchild wrote:

> 
> ----- Forwarded Message -----
> From: Karen Andresen via Change.org <mail at change.org>
> To: deejayliz at yahoo.com 
> Sent: Friday, October 5, 2012 10:44 AM
> Subject: My gay son denied his Eagle Scout award
> 
>  
> 
> My son Ryan's Boy Scout troop won't let him be an Eagle Scout because he's gay.
>  
> Sign My Petition
> Liz -
> My son Ryan has been a Boy Scout since he was 6 years old, and now, a few days before his 18th birthday, he has fulfilled all the requirements to be an Eagle Scout. But because Ryan recently came out to his friends and family as gay, leaders from our local Boy Scout troop say they won't approve Ryan's Eagle award.
> To me, Ryan is perfect. But not everyone treats him that way -- in fact, Ryan has been a victim of severe bullying. That's why, for his final project to become an Eagle Scout, Ryan worked with younger kids to create an anti-bullying "Tolerance Wall" at a local middle school: 288 different tiles showing acts of kindness.
> That's the kind of kid my son is. Instead of lashing out, he helps others feel less alone. That's why I'm so angry that our local Boy Scout troop leaders want to treat my son as less than other kids just because he's gay.
> I started a petition on Change.org asking our local Boy Scout council (near San Francisco) to approve Ryan's Eagle award. Click here to add your name.
> Ryan worked so hard to earn his Eagle Scout rank. For 12 years, he has worked to attain badges, do community service, and become the kind of exemplary young man the Boy Scouts claim to produce. Gay or straight, I love my son just the same. And I don't want anyone to treat him differently or make him feel bad about himself because of who he is.
> Although the national Boy Scouts have remained firm in their anti-gay discrimination, local Boy Scout councils have started to fight back. Several councils even clarified that they will allow gay scouts after they were petitioned to do so on Change.org. I know that if enough people sign my petition, our local council will give my son Ryan the Eagle Scout award he deserves.
> Click here to sign my petition demanding that our local Boy Scout council give my son Ryan his Eagle award.
> Thank you for helping me stand up for my son.
> Karen Andresen
> Moraga, California
> This email was sent by Change.org to deejayliz at yahoo.com   |   Start a petition 
> Unsubscribe. Edit your email notification settings.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list send an email to occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org put "Un-Subscribe me" in the Subject.
> 
> For listserv technical problems please contact: listmanager at mcn.org

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From marksafron at att.net  Fri Oct  5 15:51:25 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2012 15:51:25 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: My gay son denied his Eagle Scout award
In-Reply-To: <66F0719F-7858-40C9-968F-6A5548B5BB1A@mcn.org>
References: <506f1c8d70747_41f6125090887544@production--change-main--resque--04.mail>
	<1349471571.38894.YahooMailNeo@web161203.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
	<66F0719F-7858-40C9-968F-6A5548B5BB1A@mcn.org>
Message-ID: <6823BB88-3D85-47BA-B0E1-DFA140CFF220@att.net>

Hey everybody. The first post from Liz was fine and I signed the petition. But because you folks are using the Occupy listserve to communicate I now have 3 copies (so far) on my computer. Please email directly to whomever you wish to speak to. There'll be a lot less clutter.
Thank You, Mark 

On Oct 5, 2012, at 3:30 PM, Carrie Durkee wrote:

Thanks all. 
Carrie
On Oct 5, 2012, at 2:12 PM, Liz Helenchild wrote:

> 
> ----- Forwarded Message -----
> From: Karen Andresen via Change.org <mail at change.org>
> To: deejayliz at yahoo.com 
> Sent: Friday, October 5, 2012 10:44 AM
> Subject: My gay son denied his Eagle Scout award
> 
>  
> 
> My son Ryan's Boy Scout troop won't let him be an Eagle Scout because he's gay.
>  
> Sign My Petition
> Liz -
> My son Ryan has been a Boy Scout since he was 6 years old, and now, a few days before his 18th birthday, he has fulfilled all the requirements to be an Eagle Scout. But because Ryan recently came out to his friends and family as gay, leaders from our local Boy Scout troop say they won't approve Ryan's Eagle award.
> To me, Ryan is perfect. But not everyone treats him that way -- in fact, Ryan has been a victim of severe bullying. That's why, for his final project to become an Eagle Scout, Ryan worked with younger kids to create an anti-bullying "Tolerance Wall" at a local middle school: 288 different tiles showing acts of kindness.
> That's the kind of kid my son is. Instead of lashing out, he helps others feel less alone. That's why I'm so angry that our local Boy Scout troop leaders want to treat my son as less than other kids just because he's gay.
> I started a petition on Change.org asking our local Boy Scout council (near San Francisco) to approve Ryan's Eagle award. Click here to add your name.
> Ryan worked so hard to earn his Eagle Scout rank. For 12 years, he has worked to attain badges, do community service, and become the kind of exemplary young man the Boy Scouts claim to produce. Gay or straight, I love my son just the same. And I don't want anyone to treat him differently or make him feel bad about himself because of who he is.
> Although the national Boy Scouts have remained firm in their anti-gay discrimination, local Boy Scout councils have started to fight back. Several councils even clarified that they will allow gay scouts after they were petitioned to do so on Change.org. I know that if enough people sign my petition, our local council will give my son Ryan the Eagle Scout award he deserves.
> Click here to sign my petition demanding that our local Boy Scout council give my son Ryan his Eagle award.
> Thank you for helping me stand up for my son.
> Karen Andresen
> Moraga, California
> This email was sent by Change.org to deejayliz at yahoo.com   |   Start a petition 
> Unsubscribe. Edit your email notification settings.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list send an email to occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org put "Un-Subscribe me" in the Subject.
> 
> For listserv technical problems please contact: listmanager at mcn.org


TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list send an email to occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org put "Un-Subscribe me" in the Subject.

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From agnes at mcn.org  Sat Oct  6 11:39:32 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2012 11:39:32 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Bank Whistleblower leaflet
Message-ID: <DC807B611AE34183BB5F3B4A0E160ADB@toshibauser>

Richard i hope this works.This can be done anytime.
Agnes
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Lisa Wuriu 
To: california-occupy-homes at googlegroups.com ; foreclosurepreventionzones at googlegroups.com 
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2012 10:42 PM
Subject: Bank Whistleblower leaflet


For those of you who might be distributing bank whistleblower leaflets to bank employees on Thursday (or really anytime!), here's the leaflet.  I just read that the bank's bathrooms might  be another good place to leave them.

Lisa Wuriu
Occupy Sac

https://www.dropbox.com/s/t38pg9uz4bnysda/BankFullPageFlyer.pdf


https://www.dropbox.com/s/2i849mylej3oq8r/WhistleblowerPressMaterials.docx
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From agnes at mcn.org  Sat Oct  6 12:13:44 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2012 12:13:44 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Take Action! It's Time for a Robin Hood Tax
	on Wall Street
Message-ID: <E4EFFA6442EC428596D561D9B5996694@toshibauser>

A Message from the Center for Media and Democracy
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Center for Media and Democracy 
To: agnes at mcn.org 
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 8:58 AM
Subject: Take Action! It's Time for a Robin Hood Tax on Wall Street


           
           September 18, 2012
            CONTACT: Nikolina Lazic at nikolina at prwatch.org



            TELL CONGRESS IT'S TIME FOR A ROBIN HOOD TAX!
            Wall Street gambling and greed collapsed the global economy and we are still reeling.

            Politicians claim America is ?broke? to justify layoffs and draconian cuts in critical services. 

            We have a better idea. 

            Yesterday, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, introduced a bill to place a tiny tax on the sale of stocks, bonds, and derivatives. This bill has the potential to raise billions in desperately needed revenue while clamping down the Wall Street casino that continues to threaten our financial stability.

            Join PRwatch.org and RootsAction.org and hundreds of other organizations in calling for a Robin Hood Tax.

            It's not a tax on the people, its a tax for the people! 

            Please forward this email widely to like-minded friends.

            -- The PRWatch.org team

            
           P.S. The Center for Media and Democracy is a non-profit investigative reporting group. Our websites are PRWatch.org, SourceWatch.org, BanksterUSA.org, ALECexposed.org and FoodRightsNetwork.org. We are joining hundreds of other groups and organizations in calling for a Robin Hood Tax. 


            
            Center for Media and Democracy
            520 University Avenue, Suite 260
            Madison, Wisconsin 53703-4929
            Phone: 608-260-9713 | Fax: 608-260-9714
            E-mail: editor at prwatch.org
            Donate | Privacy Policy | Unsubscribe 
           
     

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From agnes at mcn.org  Sat Oct  6 19:15:56 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2012 19:15:56 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Loan Mods Cancelled En Masse,
	Foreclosures Ramping UP
Message-ID: <3BC288E8FEC24DCFB7710CF97B461AF4@toshibauser>

At the G.A. we talked about the Town Hall Meetings that CJ Holmes was running to get information about how County Board of Supervisors could utilize their authority to begin declaring Eminent Domain for the common welfare because these foreclosures are causing lost taxes, cut budgets for police, fire and teachers, harming the economy. Eminent Domain would be used to 1. acquire forecloures from banks, 2. reassess the property for Fair Market Value, 3.the city or county would pay the bank for that amount, 4.require the homeowner to pay the city or county  their mortgage payments and keep people in their homes. Please read CJs website and help us- OM,  make a plan for a community town hall meeting to deal with rampant corruption and massive cancellation of loan modifications.
Agnes
----- Original Message ----- 
From: CJ Holmes 
To: CJ Holmes 
Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2012 9:43 PM
Subject: Loan Mods Cancelled En Masse, Foreclosures Ramping UP


BANK INSIDER NEWS BELOW.   [Foreclosure Town Halls 1m video, Press Release, Radio Announce]]

 

Please forward this news to all county officials, supervisors, county attorneys, county recorders, everyone in your address book, all local radio and tv stations.  

 

Copied below is an email solicitation for me, CJ Holmes, real estate broker, to sign up for an REO webinar with absolutely scary news about the cancellation en masse of loan mods.  

 

This hit my email on 9/30/12 at 8:14pm:

 

Dear CJ,

Please make arrangements to attend one of the webinars listed below.  You will be part of a group of select Sonoma cty  real estate professionals who will qualify to apply as an REO partner for one , or several of the financial institutions who have been affected by the recent cancellation of federal mortgage debt relief programs . HAMP has officially cancelled 1 million loan mods, as foreclosure filings are beginning to surge once again with the economy heading into the fourth quarter. of 2012. The Treasury Department is reporting that 229,185 permanent mods have already re-defaulted and that 16% of trial mods have quickly  gone back into foreclosure. These numbers are expected to rise significantly as the shadow inventory backlog becomes financially unmanageable for banks. 

In addition, the recent mandate by the administration that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac discontinue writing down underwater mortgages has paved the way for the initiation of a record number "strategic default" foreclosures.  A documented  1.1 million homeowners have simply "walked away" from undervalued homes to avoid heavy IRS penalties that are scheduled to resume January 1, 2013. 

These recent changes in legislation have prompted increased filings in Sonoma cty. Government controlled entities like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and HUD, as well as many of the nation's largest banks are scrambling to dispose of REO inventories as quickly as possible.

It's news like this that inspires me to do everything possible to stop foreclosures NOW.  

 

Counties need to immediately eminent domain ALL securitized loans and foreclosures of securitized loans and stop the banks from more fraudulently foreclosing.  If we don't stop the banks, they will foreclose the rest of the 40,000,000 securitized loans they have left in this country, and everyone and our economy will be ruined.

 

In the Foreclosure Town Halls, I will explain exactly how the eminent domain of mortgages can be done quickly at the county level strictly for public benefit (not private profit) and immediately halt all foreclosures on every one of those loans.  

 

These loans can then be modified (my suggestion) to 80% loan to market value, with credit given for the original down payment, 2% interest rate, 30 year fixed, payments being made to the county.  Allowances can be made (payments deferred) for those that lost jobs until they become employed again.  

 

This will keep owners in their homes, stabilize market values, allow real estate transactions to return to normal,  eliminate the tremendous fear of loss pervading our economy.   It will provide a tremendous revenue stream for our counties, and combined with a public bank, will provide all the credit for redevelopment, infrastructure, and refinancing the county needs without having to go to private investors.

 

The vacant foreclosures taken by eminent domain can provide homes for those that lost homes to foreclosure, again with loan terms as mentioned above to these new owners, providing the best restitution possible for the bank theft of their homes.

 

Foreclosure Town Halls are taking off like wildfire - with 3 firm dates, 13 cities seeking venues and dates, and interest from 5 other states.  Get your date scheduled now.  

 

Thanks,  cj

 

CJ Holmes, Founder 

Home Owners For Justice

The Most Trusted Name in Real Estate
Real Estate Analyst, DRE 01234197


www.HOFJ.org

(707) 578-5727

(707) 578-5873 f

818 Mendocino Ave

Santa Rosa, CA  95401

 



 

 

 

  
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From agnes at mcn.org  Sat Oct  6 21:14:32 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2012 21:14:32 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: URGENT: Foreclosure Town Halls - take back
	our real estate NOW
Message-ID: <B04A775AD3D04FF99152CF33C5D5F80F@toshibauser>

Occupy Mendo,
3,000 families will be facing foreclosure in CA.by the end of the year and 800,000 families have been wrongfully foreclosed in the U.S.
Mark,
please read CJs message. All,plan to attend the GA at the Sr.Ctr.  for this important agenda Item-Attention, Mark Saffron, facilitator-10/20/12.
Agnes

----- Original Message ----- 
From: CJ Holmes 
To: CJ Holmes 
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2012 8:35 AM
Subject: URGENT: Foreclosure Town Halls - take back our real estate NOW


I've just been informed that the mega-banks plan to stop all loan modifications by the end of the year.  

They will foreclose with impunity for their own riches and well-being, without a care for the people or the county they decimate.

 

And please don't forget that all foreclosures on securitized loans, and the loans themselves in the first place, are fraudulent [must read article by Catherine Austin Fitts].

 

We must beat the banks to the punch and keep our real estate for the people, not for the trillion dollar hedge funds and banks.

 

In our Foreclosure Town Halls we explain simply and completely, how local officials, backed by the people's will, can "take over" all securitized loans and vacant foreclosures for the county. 

 

This will immediately stop all foreclosures on these loans.  Period.  

 

AND keep people in their homes.

 

AND it will provide each owner a new loan at 90% of market value, 2% interest, 30 year fixed (for example).  

 

AND it will provide the county with a huge income stream as these loan payments will be made to the county bank for the next 30 years, not some sovereign wealth fund somewhere being bailed out by the Fed and our Treasury.

 

This will be the foundation of the people taking back control of their real estate and their destiny as a community.

 

Want to stop foreclosures NOW?  Then get a Foreclosure Town Hall scheduled asap so both the people and the local officials can understand as soon as possible the tremendous benefit and urgency of doing this NOW.

 

Please spread the word with our Press Release, and public service announcements for radio and tv.  

 

Call me to get a Foreclosure Town Hall on the schedule.  First come, first served!  J

 

Thanks for your support.   cj

 

CJ Holmes, Founder 

Home Owners For Justice

The Most Trusted Name in Real Estate
Real Estate Analyst, DRE 01234197


www.HOFJ.org

(707) 578-5727

(707) 578-5873 f

818 Mendocino Ave

Santa Rosa, CA  95401



 

 

 

 
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From rkarch at mcn.org  Sun Oct  7 08:41:25 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2012 08:41:25 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Important Loan Mods Cancelled En Masse,
	Foreclosures Ramping UP
References: <3BC288E8FEC24DCFB7710CF97B461AF4@toshibauser>
Message-ID: <F44B9CCF-15A2-44E8-AF8D-368642B4C57B@mcn.org>

> Agnes,  This sounds great.  What exactly should we do help foster Eminent Domain in our county?  Letters to Supervisiors.   What else?  rk
> Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Loan Mods Cancelled En Masse, Foreclosures Ramping UP



> Reply-To: rkarch at mcn.org
> 
> At the G.A. we talked about the Town Hall Meetings that CJ Holmes was running to get information about how County Board of Supervisors could utilize their authority to begin declaring Eminent Domain for the common welfare because these foreclosures are causing lost taxes, cut budgets for police, fire and teachers, harming the economy. Eminent Domain would be used to

> 1. Acquire foreclosures from banks,   2. Reassess the property for Fair Market Value,

> 3.City or county would pay the bank for that amount,  4.require the homeowner to pay the city or county  their mortgage payments and keep people in their homes.

> Please read CJs website and help us- OM,  make a plan for a community town hall meeting to deal with rampant corruption and massive cancellation of loan modifications.
> Agnes
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: CJ Holmes
> To: CJ Holmes
> Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2012 9:43 PM
> Subject: Loan Mods Cancelled En Masse, Foreclosures Ramping UP
> 
> BANK INSIDER NEWS BELOW.   [Foreclosure Town Halls 1m video, Press Release, Radio Announce]]
>  
> Please forward this news to all county officials, supervisors, county attorneys, county recorders, everyone in your address book, all local radio and tv stations. 
>  
> Copied below is an email solicitation for me, CJ Holmes, real estate broker, to sign up for an REO webinar with absolutely scary news about the cancellation en masse of loan mods. 
>  
> This hit my email on 9/30/12 at 8:14pm:
>  
> Dear CJ,
> 
> Please make arrangements to attend one of the webinars listed below.  You will be part of a group of select Sonoma cty  real estate professionals who will qualify to apply as an REO partner for one , or several of the financial institutions who have been affected by the recent cancellation of federal mortgage debt relief programs .HAMP has officially cancelled 1 million loan mods, as foreclosure filings are beginning to surge once again with the economy heading into the fourth quarter. of 2012. The Treasury Department is reporting that 229,185 permanent mods have already re-defaulted and that 16% of trial mods have quickly  gone back into foreclosure.These numbers are expected to rise significantly as the shadow inventory backlog becomes financially unmanageable for banks.
> 
> In addition, the recent mandate by the administration that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac discontinue writing down underwater mortgages has paved the way for the initiation of a record number "strategic default" foreclosures.  A documented  1.1 million homeowners have simply "walked away" from undervalued homes to avoid heavy IRS penalties that are scheduled to resume January 1, 2013. 
> 
> These recent changes in legislation have prompted increased filings in Sonoma cty. Government controlled entities like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and HUD, as well as many of the nation's largest banks are scrambling to dispose of REO inventories as quickly as possible.
> 
> It?s news like this that inspires me to do everything possible to stop foreclosures NOW. 
>  
> Counties need to immediately eminent domain ALL securitized loans and foreclosures of securitized loans and stop the banks from more fraudulently foreclosing.  If we don?t stop the banks, they will foreclose the rest of the 40,000,000 securitized loans they have left in this country, and everyone and our economy will be ruined.
>  
> In the Foreclosure Town Halls, I will explain exactly how the eminent domain of mortgages can be done quickly at the county level strictly for public benefit (not private profit) and immediately halt all foreclosures on every one of those loans. 
>  
> These loans can then be modified (my suggestion) to 80% loan to market value, with credit given for the original down payment, 2% interest rate, 30 year fixed, payments being made to the county.  Allowances can be made (payments deferred) for those that lost jobs until they become employed again. 
>  
> This will keep owners in their homes, stabilize market values, allow real estate transactions to return to normal,  eliminate the tremendous fear of loss pervading our economy.   It will provide a tremendous revenue stream for our counties, and combined with a public bank, will provide all the credit for redevelopment, infrastructure, and refinancing the county needs without having to go to private investors.
>  
> The vacant foreclosures taken by eminent domain can provide homes for those that lost homes to foreclosure, again with loan terms as mentioned above to these new owners, providing the best restitution possible for the bank theft of their homes.
>  
> Foreclosure Town Halls are taking off like wildfire ? with 3 firm dates, 13 cities seeking venues and dates, and interest from 5 other states.  Get your date scheduled now. 
>  
> Thanks,  cj
>  
> CJ Holmes, Founder
> Home Owners For Justice
> 
> The Most Trusted Name in Real Estate
> Real Estate Analyst, DRE 01234197
> 
> www.HOFJ.org
> (707) 578-5727
> (707) 578-5873 f
> 818 Mendocino Ave
> Santa Rosa, CA  95401
>  
> 
>  
>  
>  
>   
> 
> TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list send an email to occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org put "Un-Subscribe me" in the Subject.
> 
> For listserv technical problems please contact: listmanager at mcn.org

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From agnes at mcn.org  Mon Oct  8 18:42:05 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2012 18:42:05 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Invitiation: Foreclosure Town Hall Phone
	Conference Monday nights 5:30p Pacific
Message-ID: <2E485C9A323C46C58DD764A359318F97@toshibauser>

Everyone,Please forward this to the Board of Supervisors email address which is http://co.mendocino.ca.us/bos/. They can takeover failing mortgages by Eminent Domain now. It will be too late in January to take over these failing mortgages. See the reason below.
Agnes
----- Original Message ----- 
From: CJ Holmes 
To: CJ Holmes 
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2012 8:54 AM
Subject: Invitiation: Foreclosure Town Hall Phone Conference tonight 5:30p Pacific


Special guest speaker, CJ Holmes, founder Home Owners For Justice.  www.HOFJ.org

Oregon Occupy Foreclosures, our interoccupy.net teleconference every Mon, 5:30 PM Pacific Time, enters a new phase with a special guest, CJ Holmes, on Mon, Oct 8. Please click this link, register for the calls, and let others in your groups know we are making a difference for homeowners, tenants and others in the Pac NW.  http://interoccupy.net/blog/ai1ec_event/oregon-occupy-foreclosures/?i

This week, CJ Holmes of Home Owners for Justice will discuss Eminent domain and its place in mortgage reform and anti-foreclosure actions. Let's Invite homeowners, activists, and anyone interested in identifying the people who have brought their problems and deceptive practices into our neighborhoods.

COMMENTS FROM CJ'S PRESENTATION ON 10/2 to Occupy Bernal, San Francisco:
"At last Tuesday evening's Educational Workgroup program, real estate broker CJ Holmes asserted that as of sometime in early 2013, our foreclosure fighting techniques will be obsolete. According to her--and you are encouraged to visit her homeowners for justice website www.hofj.org, the banking cartel will have largely insulated themselves from any inhibitions permissible to forestall foreclosures related to securitized mortgages.

Securitized mortgages, remember, are the mortgages no longer held intact by a single lender, but have instead been divided into pieces of investment debt. You might think of it as something like a mutual fund. What stock do you own when you own a mutual fund? A little bit of a lot of different businesses. The point here, which CJ made, is that with securitized mortgages there is no "there" to talk to about mortgages. The mortgage is broken up into literally hundreds even thousands of investors. 

What the banks have done, according to CJ, is off-shore and anonymize the broker of these fractured mortgages. What that means is that any complaint which might currently have weight with a bank or investment firm will have no weight with a telephone operator in India employed by a blind corporation based in Malaysia. In short, there will be no bank and its officers for us to assail during the foreclosure process. PERIOD. No John Stumpf. No Nationstar. Nobody will be home. And the foreclosure avalanche will commence, according to CJ.

Is she right? I don't know. But her recommendation is that we prepare for this possibility by acquainting County Supervisors (who oversee land title matters throughout the U.S.) with this possibility, and prep those Supervisors regarding the option of THE COUNTY EMINENT DOMAINING THE TROUBLED SECURITIZED MORTGAGES AND DEMANDING PROOF OF TITLE. CJ argues that since clear title cannot be produced (because it has been atomized into hundreds of investment shards) the county could take possession of these loans for free and reissue modified loans to the families otherwise in foreclosure.  Combined with the establishment of a public bank, this could create a powerhouse of wealth for the people.

There's more to the model CJ has put forward, but all I will supply here is a taste. A public bank receiving moderate interest on a ton of real estate will generate enough public revenue to reduce onerous taxes on working class incomes AND MAINTAIN public programs."

I look forward to chatting with you this evening.  

Thanks,  cj

CJ Holmes, Founder 
Home Owners For Justice

The Most Trusted Name in Real Estate
Real Estate Analyst, DRE 01234197

www.HOFJ.org
(707) 578-5727
(707) 578-5873 f
818 Mendocino Ave
Santa Rosa, CA  95401












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From ellen.rosser at gmail.com  Mon Oct  8 22:37:23 2012
From: ellen.rosser at gmail.com (ELLEN ROSSER)
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2012 22:37:23 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fwd: a petition to help a foreclosed family
 purchase their home before being evicted. Peace and blessings, Ellen
Message-ID: <CAFGqSt5A=m88c-2eenfF8x+zRBfiVV72OffSOsK0p0c2-3rzZw@mail.gmail.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Jeannette Gearing via Change.org" <mail at change.org>
Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2012 12:46:09 +0000
Subject: I can barely read through the tears
To: ellen.rosser at gmail.com

After my husband's business went under, it broke my heart when we
couldn't pay the mortgage on our family farm, where we've lived for
nineteen years and where my seven children grew up.

But we turned things around -- we've pulled together the money we need
to buy our farm and family home in cash. Yet we can't, because our
bank won't let us.

U.S. Bank won't even consider an offer from us to buy our home until
after they evict us on November 5. I can?t let this happen to my
family.

I started a petition on Change.org asking U.S. Bank to accept our
offer to purchase our own home -- before we're evicted on November
5th.

Click here to sign my petition:
http://www.change.org/petitions/u-s-bank-allow-the-gearing-family-to-purchase-their-own-home-back-from-foreclosure?utm_source=action_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=11616&alert_id=KzgLMPeBZt_boIbVULpGD

We've been trying to work with the bank for months so we can keep our
home, but every time we call we're forwarded along from representative
to representative, and all of them just say they can't negotiate with
us.

I'm hoping that this petition will make a difference in helping my
family keep our home. We all have been so humbled by all the love and
support from everyone. I can barely read the comments people leave on
my petition each night through the tears.

Will you add your name too? Click here to sign my petition to U.S.
Bank, and help our family keep the farm:
http://www.change.org/petitions/u-s-bank-allow-the-gearing-family-to-purchase-their-own-home-back-from-foreclosure?utm_source=action_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=11616&alert_id=KzgLMPeBZt_boIbVULpGD

Thank you so much for your help.
- Jeannette Gearing


You are receiving this action alert as a Change.org member. We send no more than
one action alert per week. To stop receiving these important alerts on
behalf of our
organization sponsors, you can unsubscribe by copying the url below
and pasting it into
your browser:

http://www.change.org/account_settings/action_alerts_opt_out?email_id=AYNKULHBBLPEZWWJPGQQ&utm_source=action_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=11616&alert_id=KzgLMPeBZt_boIbVULpGD


From marksafron at att.net  Mon Oct  8 23:24:02 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2012 23:24:02 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Correct address for the Bd. of SUPES.
Message-ID: <6F3F7A0C-FB8C-43E9-B9B9-E917156680FE@att.net>

http://www.co.mendocino.ca.us/bos/contact.htm


From marksafron at att.net  Mon Oct  8 23:29:49 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2012 23:29:49 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Wall Street's Next Profit Scheme
Message-ID: <DE7C7C55-5EC4-46F9-BA53-CD2EB62FFACD@att.net>

Wall Street's Next Profit Scheme
By Michael Hudson, Michael Hudson's Blog

8 October 12

 
Across America, schools, roads, and water systems are for sale to the highest Wall Street bidder.

The pace of Wall Street's war against the 99% is quickening in preparation for the kill. Having demonized public employees for being scheduled to receive pensions on their lifetime employment service, bondholders are insisting on getting the money instead. It is the same austerity philosophy that has been forced on Greece and Spain - and the same that is prompting President Obama and Mitt Romney to urge scaling back Social Security and Medicare.

Unlike the U.S. federal government, most states and cities have constitutions that prevent them from running budget deficits. This means that when they cut property taxes, they either must borrow from the wealthy, or cut back employment and public services.

For many years they borrowed, paying tax-exempt interest to wealthy bondholders. But carrying charges on these have mounted to a point where they now look risky as the economy sinks into debt deflation. Cities are defaulting from California to Alabama. They cannot reverse course and restore taxes on property owners without causing more mortgage defaults and abandonments. Something has to give - so cities are scaling back public spending, downsizing their school systems and police forces, and selling off their assets to pay bondholders.

This has become the main cause of America's rising unemployment, helping drive down consumer demand in a Keynesian nightmare. Less obvious are the devastating cuts occurring in health care, job training and other services, while tuition rates for public colleges and "participation fees" at high schools are soaring. School systems are crumbling like our roads as teachers are jettisoned on a scale not seen since the Great Depression.

Yet Wall Street strategists view this state and local budget squeeze as a godsend. As Rahm Emanuel has put matters, a crisis is too good an opportunity to waste - and the fiscal crisis gives creditors financial leverage to push through anti-labor policies and privatization grabs. The ground is being prepared for a neoliberal "cure": cutting back pensions and health care, defaulting on pension promises to labor, and selling off the public sector, letting the new proprietors to put up tollbooths on everything from roads to schools. The new term of the moment is "rent extraction."

So having caused the fiscal crisis, the legacy of decades of property tax cuts financed by going deeper into debt are now to be paid for by leasing or selling off public assets. Chicago has leased its Skyway for 99 years to toll-collectors, and its parking meters for 75 years. Mayor Emanuel has hired J.P.Morgan Asset Management to give "advice" on how to sell privatizers the right to charge user fees for previously free or subsidized public services. It is the modern American equivalent of England's Enclosure Movements of the 16th to 18th century.

By depicting local employees as public enemy #1, the urban crisis is helping put the class war back in business. The financial sector argues that paying pensions (or even a living wage) absorbs tax revenue that otherwise can be used to pay bondholders. Scranton, Pennsylvania has reduced public-sector wages to the legal minimum "temporarily," while other cities are seeking to break pension plans and deferred-wage contracts - and going to the Wall Street casino and play losing games in a desperate attempt to cover their unfunded pension liabilities. These recently were estimated to total $3 trillion, plus another $1 trillion in unfunded health care benefits.

Although it is Wall Street that engineered the bubble economy whose bursting has triggered the urban fiscal crisis, its lobbyists and their Junk Economic theories are not being held accountable. Rather than blaming the tax cutters who gave bankers and real estate moguls a windfall, it is teachers and other public employees who are being told to give back their deferred wages, which is what pensions are. No such clawbacks are in store for financial predators.

Instead, foreclosure time has arrived to provide a new grab bag as cities are forced to do what New York City did to avert bankruptcy in 1974: turn over management to Wall Street nominees. As in Greece and Italy, elected politicians are to be replaced by "technocrats" appointed to do what Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair did to England: sell off what remains of the public sector and turn every social program into a profit center.

The plan is to achieve three main goals. First, give privatizers the right to turn public infrastructure into tollbooth opportunities. The idea is to force cities to balance budgets by leasing or selling off their roads and bus systems, schools and prisons, real estate and other natural monopolies. In the process, this promises to create a new market for banks: lending to vulture investors to buy rights to install tollbooths on the economy's basic infrastructure.

Elected public officials could not engage in such predatory and anti-labor policies. Only the "magic of the marketplace" can break public labor unions, downsize public services and put tollbooths on the roads, water and sewer systems while cutting back bus lines and raising fares.

To achieve this financial plan, it is necessary to frame the problem in a way that rules out less anti-social alternatives. As Margaret Thatcher put matters, TINA: There Is No Alternative to selling off public transportation, real estate, and even school systems and jails.

Dismantling Public Education and Police Departments to Pay Bondholders

Local tax policy used to be about education. The United States was divided into fiscal grids to finance school districts, along with roads and bus lines, water and sewer systems. Municipalities with better schools taxed their property more, but this made it more desirable to live in such districts, and thus raised rather than lowered real estate prices. This made urban improvement self-feeding. Lower-taxed districts were left behind.

This no longer is the American way. Education in particular has been demonized. California's formerly great school system is the most visible casualty of the state's Proposition 13, the property tax freeze enacted in 1978. The Los Angeles Apartment Owners Association employed its political front man, Howard Jarvis, as a lobbyist to promise voters that little would change by cutting back education and libraries. He claimed that "63 percent of the graduates are illiterate, anyway," so who needed books. Education and other parts of public spending was frozen as property taxes were slashed by 57% - from 2.5 or 3% down to just 1% of assessed valuation, and were frozen at 1978 price levels for owners who have kept their property. The result is that California's school system has plunged to 47th rank in the nation.

For neoliberals, the silver lining is that downgrading education makes citizens more susceptible to the Tea Party's false consciousness when it comes to how to vote in their economic interest. Back when Prop. 13 was passed, for instance, commercial investors promised homeowners that across-the-board tax cuts would make housing more affordable and that rents would fall. But they rose, along with real estate prices. This is the Big Lie of neoliberal tax cutters: the promise that cutting property tax will lower costs rather than provide a windfall for property owners - and also for banks as rising rental values are "free" to be capitalized into larger mortgage loans. New buyers need to pay more, raising the cost of living and doing business.

Back in 1978 on the eve of Proposition 13, commercial owners paid half the real estate taxes and homeowners the other half. But now the homeowners' share has risen to two-thirds, while commercial taxes have fallen to one-third. Bank loan officers have capitalized the tax cuts into larger mortgages, so housing prices have risen, not fallen. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa exclaimed ruefully last year that "the time is now to address the inequity of Prop 13 that allows large corporate interests to get a windfall meant for homeowners. We are not funding government. We are just decimating government and the services it provides."[1] He proposed a two-tier property tax, restoring higher rates for commercial and absentee investors.

School teaching is an exhausting occupation. That is one reason why teachers are one of America's strongest labor unions. Their wages have not risen as fast as their expenses, because they have agreed to take less income in the short run in order to get pensions after their working days end. These contracts are now under attack - to pay bondholders. States and cities are now insisting that bondholders cannot be paid without stiffing their labor force.

So we are now seeing the folly of untaxing property and replacing tax revenues with borrowing - paying tax-exempt interest to the nation's wealthiest bondholders. Cutting the property tax base thus finds its twin casualty in the wave of defaults on pension promises.

Real estate taxes have plunged from two-thirds of urban revenues in the 1920s to just one-sixth today for the United States as a whole. Federal grants-in-aid also are being cut back, and state aid to the cities is following suit. But instead of making housing more affordable, these tax cuts have "freed" rental value from the tax collector only to end up being paid to the banks.

Here too, California has led the way. In 1996 its voters approved Prop. 218, requiring any new tax, fee or property assessment to be approved by two-thirds of voters. (A few exemptions were made to keep local sewer and water systems viable.) This stratagem "starves the beast," with the "beast" being public infrastructure and social services. Police forces are being downsized and social programs are cut back. And as urban poverty increases, crime rates are rising, imposing an "invisible" cost of living.

The most important economic fact to recognize is thus that whatever the tax collector relinquishes tends to be capitalized into mortgage loans. And by leaving more rent available to be paid as interest, cutting property taxes obliges homebuyers to go deeper into debt. Lower property taxes thus mean higher housing prices - on credit, because a home or other real estate is worth whatever a bank will lend to new buyers. So by capitalizing the after-tax rental value into a flow of interest, bankers end up with the rent - and hence, with the property tax cuts.

That is what a free market means today - income created by public-sector investment, "freed" to be paid to banks as interest rather than to be recaptured by government.

Most urban revenue is a free lunch created by taxpayer-financed roads, schools, sewers and water systems. But neither real estate speculators nor their bankers believe that this investment by taxpayers should be recovered by taxing the increased site values created by providing these public services. Instead of making the public sector self-financing as it expands public services to create wealth, private owners are to get the benefit - while banks capitalize the gains into larger mortgage loans, which now account for 80% of bank credit.

The core of the bankers' "false consciousness" - the cover story with which Tea Party lobbyists are seeking to indoctrinate U.S. voters - is that taxes on land and financial assets punish the "job creators." Going on the offence, the beneficiaries of this public spending claim that they need to be pampered with tax preferences to invest and employ labor, while the 99% need to be kicked and prodded to work harder by being paid low wages. This false narrative ignores the fact our greatest growth periods are those in which U.S. individual and corporate tax rates have been highest. The same is true in most countries. What is stifling economic growth is the debt overhead - owed to the 1% - and tax cuts on free lunch wealth.

The Public Pension Squeeze is Part of the Overall Debt Crisis

Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan and Texas Governor Rick Perry have characterized Social Security as a Ponzi scheme. This is true in the obvious sense that retirees are supposed to be paid out of contributions to new entrants. That is how any pay-as-you-go system is supposed to work. The problem is not that the system needed to be pre-funded to provide the government with revenue to cut taxes on the 1%. The problem is that new contributions are drying up as the economy buckles under its expanding debt overhead.

Social Security can easily be paid. After the 2007 crash the Fed printed $13 trillion on its computers to give to bankers. It can do the same for Social Security - and for federal grants-in-aid to America's states and cities. It can pay state and local pension obligations in the same way it has paid Wall Street's 1%. The problem is that the Fed is only willing do what central banks were founded to do - finance government deficits - to give to the banks. The aim is to save bondholders and the banks' high-flying counterparties, not the 99%.

The problem is that the financial system itself is rotten. This has turned today's class war into a financial war, with the major tactic being to shape how voters perceive the problem. The trick is to make them think that cutting taxes will lower their living costs and make housing cheaper, rather than enabling banks to take what the tax collector used to take. That is the key perception that needs to be spread: cutting taxes leaves more "free lunch" income available for banks to lend against, loading the economy deeper into debt.

Here's why the present track can't possibly work. State and local pension funds are $3 trillion behind because they are only making 1% returns these days (the only safe return), not the 8+% that they were told to make in order to pay pensions by "capital" gains (that is, the bank-financed free lunch). The Fed is keeping interest rates low in an attempt to re-inflate real estate and other asset prices back to the happy decade of Bubblemeister Greenspan. If interest rates rise - by enough to enable California, Chicago and other localities to obtain enough interest to pay retirees what they promised - then banks will see the collateral for their mortgage loans fall.

So the Fed has locked the economy into low returns. Neither Democratic nor Republican politicians are willing to raise taxes on the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector. They vote in line with what their campaign contributors are paying for - to make Wall Street rich.

At issue is the old Who/Whom choice. Given the mathematical fact that debts that can't be paid, won't be, the question is who should get priority: the 1% or the 99%?

Debt-ridden austerity and downsizing government is being urged as if it is inevitable, not a policy choice to put bondholders and the 1% over the 99% - a reward for the lobbying money it has spent on buying politicians and misleading voters to believe that cutting property taxes and cutting taxes on the rich will help the economy.

But if America still lets the 1% write the laws - or what turns out to be the same thing these days, to contribute to the political campaigns of lawmakers - then the economy will get much poorer, quickly. The era of America growth will be over.

Something has to give: If bondholders won't be paid, states cannot pay labor's deferred wages in the form of pensions, and will have to cut back public services.

So it's time to default. Otherwise, Wall Street will turn us into Greece. That is the financial plan, to be sure. It is the strategy for today's financial war against society at large. In Latvia, I spoke to the lead central banker, who explained that wages in the public sector had fallen by 30 percent, helping push down private-sector wages nearly as far. Neoliberals call this "internal devaluation," and promise that it will make economies more competitive. The reality is that it will up the internal market and drive labor to leave.


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From marksafron at att.net  Tue Oct  9 08:51:58 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2012 08:51:58 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Another "538" place to check
Message-ID: <9C04957E-FCF1-4FD9-9B2A-C5C0730CA1D1@att.net>

http://elections.dailykos.com/


From rkarch at mcn.org  Tue Oct  9 09:10:23 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2012 09:10:23 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Poor Kids
Message-ID: <3442477A-03A9-4862-A4C0-29FD9FDBC5C4@mcn.org>

Complete story:           http://www.newsday.com/opinion/oped/dvorak-the-kids-no-one-wants-to-talk-about-1.4079196

talk about

Published: October 5, 2012 1:09 PM
By PETULA DVORAK, The Washington Post

Mitt Romney mentioned "poor kids" in Wednesday's debate. Then he corrected himself to say "lower-income kids, rather." He was right the first time. Poor kids.

That's all I can think when I hear the stories we've told again and again, about kids in the nation's capital sleeping in laundromats, train station toilets and bus shelters while mega-condos sprout all around them.

Poor kids.


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From marksafron at att.net  Tue Oct  9 10:39:41 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2012 10:39:41 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Richard asked me to put more up...
Message-ID: <62F3C50A-5E7D-495C-9A91-34207125F098@att.net>

about the site.
Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest
Leading Off:


WI-Sen: How is it possible to have a John McCain problem? Just ask Tommy Thompson:

Simply ask the U.S. Senate candidate exactly how many residences he owns. Just like U.S. Sen. John McCain, Thompson has a hard time keeping track.

"Three," the veteran Republican responded last week at a campaign event.

Thompson has three houses? Isn't there another one?

"No," he answered without hesitation.

But wait for it:

Only later did a correction come from his campaign staff:

He actually has one more place he calls home.

Thompson?who is running against Democratic U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin?had forgotten his condo off Lake Wisconsin in Sauk County. The property is currently assessed at more than $1.3 million.

Or you could ask me: I'm always forgetting about that million-dollar condominium I've got stashed away near a big scenic lake, too!


A

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From agnes at mcn.org  Thu Oct  4 10:23:53 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2012 10:23:53 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Materials for Leafletting Actions Tomorrow -
	Attached
Message-ID: <035B8E4A7C6E4CC0BA6694CB44D115E2@toshibauser>

Full Page Flyer!Anyone interested in joining me to leaflet tellers at B of A or WellsFargo please call me this morning .Banks close at 3:oo today. Or I will go alone in my conservative garb. No time to send out press release. I just heard of this Tuesday on a conference call and was sent flyer Wednesday.
RSVP 937-2377.
Agnes 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Jono Shaffer 
To: Jono Shaffer 
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2012 4:54 PM
Subject: FW: Materials for Leafletting Actions Tomorrow - Attached


Dear Whistle Blower Leafletters!

 

Attached are the materials for use tomorrow.  The press materials document needs you to edit it for your local event, I have highlighted in yellow the areas that need to be updated with your local details.  Obviously you should feel free to edit the local press release in any way that you want to work for the action you are doing. 

 

Be as creative as you want in terms of the action, if you go inside, you should expect to be asked to leave which will provide you with an opportunity to ask the bank manager why they don?t want the workers to know what their rights are.  You should consider asking for access to the employee break room to post the flyer since it is informing workers of the legal rights under federal law.

 

Good luck tomorrow!!  Please forward this to anyone you know who is participating in the action and cc me so I can add them to the master list.

 

Also please go to the google event document (link below) and add the details of your action so we can make sure to capture all the great events that folks are doing.

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhCBYoUwHLRidE9sMENHalZWUkRqNjdiaGNPNlc1UlE

Finally, please send a brief report of what happens and a list of any media that attends your action after you?re done tomorrow.

 

Thanks!

Jono Shaffer

 

 
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From marksafron at att.net  Wed Oct 10 18:58:39 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:58:39 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] The Case for a Robin Hood Tax | Opinion | The
	Harvard Crimson
Message-ID: <7A3661C1-503B-4A1E-9A5C-43CA0C569EC4@att.net>


http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/10/2/robin-hood-tax/

The Case for a Robin Hood Tax

The title of the tax alludes to its ethos: taking from the rich and giving to the poor. After months of pressure from nurses, health care, labor, environmental and faith-based activists, the Robin Hood Tax?a type of Financial Transaction Tax?has taken the next step towards become a reality. But there is a long road ahead. On Friday, September 14, Representative Keith M. Ellison (D-Minn.) introduced a bill, HR-6411 ?The Inclusive Prosperity Act,? in Congress that would place a tiny tax on Wall Street.

The bill begins, ?To impose a tax on certain trading transaction to strengthen our financial security, expand opportunity, and stop shrinking the middle class.? The idea is simple: in the wake of the financial crisis, Wall Street received a major bailout, while many social safety net, infrastructure, and other programs are struggling to provide vital services that millions rely on. The tax places a levy of less than half of one percent on big financial transactions including the trade of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and foreign currencies. Economist Robert N. Pollin, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute explains the basis of an FTT: ?It would mean that financial market traders would pay a small fee to the government every time they purchased any financial market instrument. This would be the equivalent of sales taxes that Americans have long paid every time they buy an automobile, shirt, baseball glove, airline ticket, or pack of chewing gum, eat at a restaurant, or have their hair cut.?

The Robin Hood Tax has the potential to raise up to $350 billion in annual revenues that could then be directed toward various social programs both domestically and globally. The money from this tax could go toward creating jobs, strengthening health care and education infrastructure, and investing in clean energy in the U.S., while establishing funding for programs to fight AIDS, poverty, and climate problems abroad.

This would not be the first time that the United States has had a financial transaction tax. The U.S. had a transfer tax in place from 1914 to 1966 that put a 0.2 percent tax on the sales and transfers of stocks. The tax was doubled in 1932 to assist in overcoming the budgetary challenges imposed by the Great Depression. The tax disappeared in 1966 when lawmakers repealed it in an effort to streamline the tax system.

More than 40 nations are currently reaping the benefits of an FTT and using the revenue to finance a variety of services, while suffering few or no financial repercussion as a result.

The bill just introduced in the House by Ellison was assigned to the House Committee on Ways and Means. The bill has 10 cosponsors, including Representative James P. McGovern (D-Mass.). However, it must secure more political backing in order to become a reality.

Money raised from the FTT would be spread over a range of endeavors?from expanding resources for state and federal investments that protect health, physical infrastructure, and jobs to funding international prosperity programs such as climate change and AIDS treatment and prevention programs. The tax has wide appeal and should be an exciting prospect for organizations that have faced budget cuts in the midst of the financial crisis, and for students and young professionals who care deeply about social and humanitarian issues.

Today, the Robin Hood National Day of Action, activists from around the Boston area will rally outside the office of Representative Michael E. Capuano (D-Mass.), who represents all of Cambridge, to ask him to co-sign the current bill aiming to implement a Robin Hood Tax, HR-6411.

Capuano?s history of support for universal healthcare, affordable housing, improved educational opportunities and funding, and international peacekeeping show that his interests are in line with those of the tax. He was a staunch advocate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, has fought for increased Section 8 housing, and has built himself up as a champion of peace and development in the aftermath of the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Capuano himself agrees that ?we remain too far from the goal of ?universal access, zero disparities?? in the realm of domestic healthcare. Supporting the Robin Hood Tax provides Capuano a unique opportunity to stand up for the values he so clearly professes and to ensure that vital programs get the funding they so desperately need.

As members of the Harvard College Global Health and AIDS Coalition, we have a particular interest in the tax, which could go to funding global AIDS programs that have received far too little attention in the U.S. budget in recent years. We now have the tools we need to eradicate the AIDS epidemic and the Robin Hood Tax could ensure that we invest the necessary resources to bring about its eradication. Health activists are not pressing Capuano for a radical change in his politics. He is simply being called to stand up for a tax that would unite his domestic and international interests through the broader vision of global health and social welfare. If all goes well on today, Capuano just might be our Robin Hood.

 
Anthony N. Almazan ?16 lives in Canaday Hall. Lucas B. Gemar ?15 lives in Winthrop House. Isabel R. Ostrer ?14 is a social studies concentrator in Quincy House.
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From agnes at mcn.org  Wed Oct 10 18:59:32 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:59:32 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Eminent Domain and the powers of the BOS
Message-ID: <204378CEC975429C9C970C2C64FDA104@toshibauser>

Dear occupy members,
         If you want to help foreclosed families you don't have to camp out on the streets or occupy the banks, just show you care by sending this letter to any and all Board of Supervisors. They have the power to change  the county economy and help foreclosured families now. It will be too late in January when banksters will have figured out how to neutralize our efforts.
Yours truly,
Agnes
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Agnes Woolsey 
To: Dan Hamburg 
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2012 6:52 PM
Subject: Eminent Domain and the powers of the BOS


Dear Dan Hamburg,Supervisor,

I write concerning the scheduled bank home foreclosures for 20012 and the strain it will put on the county budget due to the loss of tax revenues and the increasing cutbacks to public services to say nothing of the thousands of families and children left to fend for themselves on the streets.
       CJ Holmes has a remedy for that and advises Boards of Supervisors in Town Hall Meetings that Eminent Domain can be used to acquire the foreclosed homes in the interest of the public good (the economy). Then the homes can be reassessed for their current value and mortgages can be paid to the County and any local co-op bank to keep the money local. Please see CJ Holmes website explaining this at www.hofj.org  .
Sincerely,
Agnes Woolsey
member of Occupy Mendocino
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From marksafron at att.net  Wed Oct 10 20:56:51 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:56:51 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Board of Supervisors e-mail addresses
In-Reply-To: <E08E6F4D-22D3-40E2-AF4F-0AB5461C3654@mcn.org>
References: <E08E6F4D-22D3-40E2-AF4F-0AB5461C3654@mcn.org>
Message-ID: <018FA2FB-1BEA-4915-8AC1-6DDCFB08EC2D@att.net>

here ya go, Howard.


Board Members:

Carre Brown, 1st District Supervisor (E-mail)
John McCowen, 2nd District Supervisor (E-mail)
John Pinches, 3rd District Supervisor (E-mail)
Kendall Smith, 4th District Supervisor (E-mail)
Dan Hamburg, 5th District Supervisor (E-mail)

On Oct 10, 2012, at 8:51 PM, Howard Ennes wrote:

DAN ??

	Sorry to bother you, but perhaps you can help.

	We in Occupy Mendocino would like to be able to reach each member of the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors via e-mail.   We have tried                        

				< http://co.mendocino.ca.us/bos/ >

 but that doesn't seem to work in reaching individual Supervisors.  Since they are our employees, we feel that as County citizens,  we should be able to speak direct to each of them. 

	Therefore, I'm hoping you could provide us with a listing of e-mail address for each member of the Board.    Your courtesy will be appreciated.

										<HE signature.jpg>
Howard Ennes
160 Woodland Drive
Fort Bragg, 
	California 95437




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From marksafron at att.net  Thu Oct 11 08:59:22 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2012 08:59:22 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] It turns out that one of the 4 women was a
	patient.
Message-ID: <AB9ACBBB-2DDF-4917-82DA-28D23F13A181@att.net>

(So now, it's the Hypocritic Oath. M.S.) 



Updated: Stewart contends DesJarlais can't be trusted

MURFREESBORO ? Democratic Congressional candidate Eric Stewart suggested Republican incumbent U.S. Rep. Scott DesJarlais is a pro-life hypocrite during a 2:30 p.m. press conference today.

Stewart responded after The Huffington Post reported earlier today it had a phone recording made by DesJarlais in 2000 that back up accusations that DesJarlais, a medical doctor, pressured a mistress who was one of his patients to get an abortion.

?The news we got today is about hypocrisy,? said Stewart, a Democrat state senator from Franklin county.

DesJarlais Communications Director Robert Jameson did not deny the report, but contends the accusations are repeated attacks that came out in the previous election year in 2010.

?This is old news from the last election cycle that Tennesseans have already widely rejected,? Jameson said in an email statement. ?Desperate personal attacks do not solve our nation?s problems, yet it appears that there are those who choose to continue to engage in the same gutter politics that were characterized by national media as the nastiest in the nation just two years ago. Since the congressman?s opponents cannot attack him on his independent, conservative and pro-life record in Congress, they have once again resorted to pure character assassination.?

Stewart during his press conference repeated the accusations from The Huffington Post that paint DesJarlais as a pro-life and pro-family values hypocrite in Congress who in the past committed adultery four times, in addition to seeking an abortion for a mistress who was a patient.

?This disqualifies the congressman from representing this district,? said Stewart, a Democratic state senator from Franklin County. ?It?s disgusting. It?s not our values.?

Stewart said the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision is the law of the land and that each woman should make decisions about abortions while consulting with her family.?We need to do everything we can to reduce abortions,? Stewart said.


Stewart read the following statement during the press conference:

?As most of you know, stories have broken today that cause most anyone to question whether Congressman Scott DesJarlais is worthy of public office.

?Congressman Scott DesJarlais has consistently presented himself as a pro-life, pro-family-values person. He?s told the people of Tennessee this. He?s told the country this, and he?s told his supporters this.

?And today we all learned that a news story broke that showed the Congressman admitted to having four affairs. In addition to being a representative of the people as a U.S. Congressman, DesJarlais is also a medical doctor. The story today also revealed that he had an affair with one of h is own patients and then urged and pleaded with her to terminate the pregnancy.

?In the story that broke today, we also learned that Congressman DesJarlais doesn?t deny any of this. Congressman DesJarlais took an oath to be faithful in marriage and broke that oath at least four times. Congressman DesJarlais took an oath as a physician to ?do no harm? and broke that oath. Congressman DesJarlais has broken faith with the people of the 4th District.

?And on top of this, he has continued to hold himself out to the public as someone who is pro-life and pro-family, and today doesn?t deny that as a medical doctor he had an affair with a patient, got that patient pregnant and then begged and pleaded with her to terminate the pregnancy.

?Scott DesJarlais has proven over and over again that he cannot be trusted, and this latest revelation is absolutely disqualifying.?
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From marksafron at att.net  Thu Oct 11 09:48:50 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2012 09:48:50 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Liberalism's Glass Jaw - NYTimes.com
Message-ID: <7094C648-774B-4083-A480-D654778DE8CD@att.net>

(One of the best assessments of the first debate. A comment I saw online also spoke to our great expectations when Obama was inaugurated: "We thought he'd be a combination of King and Gandhi but, he is neither. He's a politician that has to deal with the daily reality of Congress." M.S.) 
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/douthat-liberalisms-glass-jaw/?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20121010

Liberalism?s Glass Jaw

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Barack Obama at the Presidential Debate on October 3, 2012, in Denver, Colorado.
Last month, Republicans staring at defeat in November alternated between blaming Mitt Romney and blaming the American people, when they should have been looking harder at the flaws in contemporary conservatism. Now that Romney has surged back into contention, liberals are making a similar mistake. They?re focusing too intently on the particular weaknesses of President Obama?s debate performance, rather than on the weaknesses in Obama-era liberalism that last Wednesday?s Denver showdown left exposed.

Four years ago, the Obama presidency was hailed as the beginning of an extended liberal renaissance ? a new New Deal, a resurrected Camelot, a return to the glory days of Lyndon Johnson before Vietnam wrecked his presidency. Health care reform was the highest priority, but it was supposed to be only the beginning. With the Democrats enjoying huge Congressional majorities, everything seemed to be on the table: immigration reform, a program to combat climate change, card-check legislation, a wave of trust-busting in the banking sector ? and at the least, the very least, a return to Clinton-era tax rates.

There is no world in which all of these hopes could have been perfectly realized. But the ways in which they?ve been disappointed have delivered some hard lessons. It isn?t just that Obama failed to live up to the (frankly impossible) standard set by his 2008 campaign and the media adoration that accompanied it. It?s that the nature of his failures speak to the limits of the liberal project, and the tensions and contradictions within the liberal coalition.

Liberals have rallied behind a White House whose only real jobs program is ?stay the course.?

Sometimes Obama-era liberalism has disappointed because it has failed outright. The defeat of cap-and-trade legislation and the stillborn push for immigration reform exposed the deep fissures within the Democratic Party, and particularly the divide between the enlightened do-goodism of the party?s upper-middle-class supporters and the economic interests of its remaining blue-collar constituents.

The steadily worsening deficit picture, meanwhile, has been a reminder that an expanding government balance sheet makes sense only if you can persuade taxpayers to pay more to cover it, which Obama?s party hasn?t done. More important, given the limit to how much money can be extracted from the wealthy, it makes sense only if you persuade middle class taxpayers to pay more, which Obama?s party hasn?t even tried to do.

But the Obama administration?s legislative successes have offered hard lessons to liberals as well. Indeed, it?s the failures of the successes, if you will, that have cast the longest shadow across his re-election effort.

First, there was the failure of stimulus bill to deliver anything like the kind of rebound that Obama?s technocrats confidently projected. This failure isn?t necessarily an indictment of the theory behind Keynesian economics. But at the very least it exposes two limitations on Keynesianism in practice: the difficulties that even experts can have assessing the true state of the economy, and the ways in which the push and pull of democratic politics makes it difficult to simply keep throwing money at a problem.

Then came the White House?s failure to sell the public on its health care bill, which exacerbated the stimulus?s underperformance ? by leading to months of wrangling when Washington should have been reckoning with the economy instead ? and then cost the Democrats dearly at the polls in 2010. This failure of salesmanship doesn?t in and of itself discredit the bill?s provisions. But at the very least it demonstrates that the redistributive policies liberals favor will be accepted only if they?re founded on a secure base of economic growth ? growth that Obama?s policies, unlike F.D.R.?s or L.B.J.?s, have conspicuously failed to produce.

More broadly, all of Obama?s signature accomplishments have tended to have the same weakness in common: They have been weighed down by interest-group payoffs and compromised by concessions to powerful insiders, from big pharma (which stands to profit handsomely from the health care bill) to the biggest banks (which were mostly protected by the Dodd-Frank financial reform). It may have been an empty rhetorical gesture, but the fact that Romney could actually out-populist the president on ?too big to fail? during the last debate speaks to the Obama-era tendency for liberalism to blur into a kind of corporatism, in which big government intertwines with big business rather than restraining it.

Again, every administration has its share of disappointments, and every ideology has to make concessions to political reality. But what we don?t see in this campaign cycle is much soul-searching from Democrats about the ways in which their agenda hasn?t worked out as planned.

Instead, in a country facing a continued unemployment crisis and a looming deficit crunch, liberals have rallied behind a White House whose only real jobs program is ?stay the course? and whose plan to deal with long-term deficits relies on the woefully insufficient promise to tax the 1 percent. When Obama insiders wax optimistic about what a second term might bring, they mostly talk about pursuing legislation on climate change and immigration yet again, without explaining why things will turn out differently this time around.

This lack of a plausible vision, more than his stutters and missed opportunities, is what doomed the president in last week?s debate. His responses to Romney were strikingly backward-looking ? alternating between ?we?re already doing that? and ?we tried that under Republicans, and it didn?t work,? and rarely pivoting effectively to ?here?s what we should do next.?

It?s not that Romney offered some detailed, brilliantly persuasive alternative. He didn?t, and couldn?t, because his party has at best a sketch of a policy agenda rather than a blueprint. But Romney isn?t running for re-election, and this was a case where merely seeming forward-looking, energetic and reassuring was enough to remind Americans of all the ways that the Obama era has disappointed them ? and in so doing, sent shivers down liberalism?s glass jaw.


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From ndevall at mcn.org  Thu Oct 11 08:09:51 2012
From: ndevall at mcn.org (Norman de Vall)
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2012 08:09:51 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] =?iso-8859-1?q?Fwd=3A_=5BThe_Notary_Bulletin=5D?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?_New_=93Notarial_Evidence=94_Form=2C_Mortgage_Fraud_Number?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?s_and_other_great_resources_for_Notaries?=
References: <0.1.38.FED.1CDA7988093CE36.0@omp.notice.nationalnotary.org>
Message-ID: <9F22F137-77E2-4A71-9F1E-D96A87502A9F@mcn.org>

Good Morning??
Thought this would be of interest.
Norman


Begin forwarded message:

> From: "National Notary Association" <NNA at notice.nationalnotary.org>
> Subject: [The Notary Bulletin] New ?Notarial Evidence? Form, Mortgage Fraud Numbers and other great resources for Notaries
> Date: October 11, 2012 3:09:29 AM PDT
> To: ndevall at mcn.org
> Reply-To: "National Notary Association" <reply2 at notice.nationalnotary.org>
> 
> Having trouble viewing this message? Click here
> 
> 
>  
> 
>  	
> New to the Notary Bulletin? Learn more about your news and information resource.
> 
> October 2012
> 
> This week in The Notary Bulletin
> 
> ?Notarial Evidence? Forms Introduced For Mortgages
> Notary Signing Agents are beginning to see a new recordkeeping requirement at loan closings, as one financial institution applies a key regulatory standard arising out of the foreclosure crisis and housing market collapse to the origination of new loans.
> 
> New Federal Compliance Requirements Could Cause Spike In Mortgage Fraud Numbers
> Reports of mortgage fraud continue to grow, and the numbers are likely to see an even higher spike with the implementation of new regulations by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), according to the Lexis Nexis 2012 Mortgage Fraud Report.
> 
> Home Sales Trend Upward; Re-Fi?s Expected To Slide Next Year
> In the coming year, Notary Signing Agents can expect more closings from the sale of new and existing homes, but may experience a significant drop in mortgage refinancing assignments, according to forecasts from several industry associations.
> 
> October 2012 Bulletin Quiz: Avoid Being Led Astray By ?Tricks? And ?Treats?
> In honor of Halloween this month, our October quiz will test how well you properly deal with attempted ?tricks? during a notarization, and if you recognize when someone?s offering you an inappropriate ?treat? to try and compromise your impartiality.
> 
> Hotline Tip: What Information Goes In The ?By? Space On A Certificate?
> 
> Please leave feedback, comments or questions about any and all articles from this issue of the Notary Bulletin on ourFacebook Page. Thank you!
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From agnes at mcn.org  Fri Oct 12 09:32:50 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:32:50 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Urgent call to attend Tues. BOS meeting in F.B.
Message-ID: <9DBD9CB7CFB843D2A1E1EE92586003DA@toshibauser>

The Mendocino Bd of Supervisors meets in Fort Bragg this Tuesday: Oct. 16th.
Here's our chance to pressure the Supes into attending a Town Hall meeting like the one in Berkeley where C J Holmes will speak there also on Tuesday to inform Supervisors of the ir Eminent Domain powers to head off future foreclosures and take foreclosed properties to be sold back to the owner at re-assessed valuation. Please plan to come with signs demanding they use Eminent Domain to save the economy ruined by the big banks.
           Please read link sent earlier.
Agnes
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From agnes at mcn.org  Fri Oct 12 10:08:13 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2012 10:08:13 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Emailing: 3m%20supervisor%20read.pdf
Message-ID: <B87165AF43FF4FD296151D66EB4B25FA@toshibauser>

I plan to read this release from CJ at the BOS meeting this Tuesday in Fort Bragg Town Hall. Please read it and come to support fighting forclosures committee.
Sincerely,
Agnes
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From agnes at mcn.org  Fri Oct 12 10:12:03 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2012 10:12:03 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Press Release: "Rags to Riches" Foreclosure
	Town Halls
Message-ID: <EF61320237E245AB9EA0109A57149143@toshibauser>

please read the Town HallFlyer andprintone out  to post in town.
Agnes
----- Original Message ----- 
From: CJ Holmes 
To: CJ Holmes 
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:12 PM
Subject: Press Release: "Rags to Riches" Foreclosure Town Halls


Foreclosure Town Halls Schedule
Supervisor Open Mike Foreclosure Town Hall Invitation
Foreclosure Town Hall Flyer  please pass out & post as possible



-----------------------------------------------------------
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For further information contact:
CJ Holmes, Founder, Home Owners For Justice
cjholmes at cjholmes.com, fax 707-578-5873, phone 707-578-5727

10/9/12

"FORECLOSURE TOWN HALL" SOLUTIONS COULD TURN TOWNS FROM "RAGS TO RICHES"

The new "back-fire" in the national home-loss holocaust is called Home Owners for Justice--HOFJ.org. 

Check it out. It's going viral.

In less than 2 weeks, founder C.J. Holmes has had a rush of bookings for her "Foreclosure Town Halls" up and down her home state of California. The neighboring states of Oregon and Colorado are in talks with her to schedule appearances there. New York State, Florida, Pennsylvania and Georgia have joined the lineup and are asking for her time.

Holmes is a riveting speaker. She generates excitement with this clear, powerful message: the displacement of families and seizure of their homes is illegal. The victims of this giant swindle are not helpless. 

She explains how communities can fight back with dynamic tools people can use to stop the loss of their homes and revive their crippled finances.

Five of 19 upcoming California town halls have firm dates. Berkeley is set for October 16, San Bernardino for October 20, Santa Barbara for October 21, Santa Rosa for Oct 24 and Fresno for October 27.

Holmes's format is short and sweet. She outlines the problem and the shady dealings that are causing it, describes the remedy--avoiding any of the "it's too complicated to understand" assertions that have been repeated endlessly by the lenders and parroted by the media--and takes questions from the audience. She stays in touch with those who seek her advice, to steer them through the deliberate confusion they're confronted with.

The Foreclosure Town Halls are for free (donations gratefully accepted), and the importance of attending cannot be overstated, particularly by all local elected officials.  This is the chance to change the destiny of each community - turn it from rags to riches - that must not be missed.

Everybody get on board!

CJ Holmes, Founder 

Home Owners For Justice

The Most Trusted Name in Real Estate
Real Estate Analyst, DRE 01234197


www.HOFJ.org

(707) 578-5727

(707) 578-5873 f

818 Mendocino Ave

Santa Rosa, CA  95401

 



 

 
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From marksafron at att.net  Fri Oct 12 11:37:39 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2012 11:37:39 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Charley Pierce: The Real Paul Ryan Is Bad for
	America
Message-ID: <5232C883-7BFA-4219-BEF2-59AB66853DF6@att.net>

(I always enjoy Charles Pierce, whether he's writing for Esquire or as a panelist on Wait! Wait, don't tell me!)
The Real Paul Ryan Is Bad for America

By Charles Pierce, Esquire Magazine

12 October 12

 
For the second time in as many presidential elections, Joseph Biden got to debate a young, attractive Republican candidate who was demonstrably less qualified to to be president than I am to be chairman of the World Bank. Joseph Biden is a very lucky man. The Great Political Matchmaker in the Sky keeps handing him people who are trying - and failing - to fight above their weight class, and he keeps blowing through what can now legitimately be called the Bum of the Quadrennium Club.

There is a deeply held Beltway myth of Paul Ryan, Man of Big Ideas, and it dies hard. But, if there is a just god in the universe, on Thursday night, it died a bloody death, was hurled into a pit, doused with quicklime, buried without ceremony, and the ground above it salted and strewn with garlic so that it never rises again. On foreign policy, Ryan occasionally rose, gasping, to the level of obvious neophyte. (He was more lost in Afghanistan than the Russian army ever was.) On domestic policy, his alleged wheelhouse, he was vague, untruthful, and he walked right into a haymaker he should have seen coming from a mile off, when he started bloviating about Biden's role in the "failed" stimulus program, only to have Biden slap him around with Ryan's own requests for stimulus money for his home district back in Wisconsin. He also made it quite clear that a Romney-Ryan White House will do everything it can to eliminate a woman's right to choose. This should make for some fine television commercials over the next few weeks.

(A brief note here about Martha Raddatz, who's an old pal from our baby journo days in Boston. She did a fine job holding feet to the fire until her last three questions. She asked the two men to define their Catholicism only through the issue of abortion, which is not only insulting, but also limited a more interesting line of inquiry, given the open opposition of the Catholic bishops to the zombie-eyed granny-starving that is the hallmark of Ryan's career. And that closing if-you-were-a-tree question was simply embarrassing.)

Moreover, the battering that Biden gave Ryan brought something into sharp relief that the Republican party has been fudging ever since Romney put the zombie-eyed granny-starver on the ticket - that, for his entire political career up to that point, on critical economic issues, Paul Ryan was an extremist even by the standards of the modern Republican party, which are considerably high indeed. He was for full privatization of Social Security. He was for the absolute elimination of the defined-benefit Medicare and Medicaid programs. Since being selected, it has become clear that the Romney people have forced him to soften these positions. (His stance on Medicare, for example, has evolved from Kill It Now to Arrange for Its Slow Death Later.) On Thursday night, Biden dragged out the old Paul Ryan - and, I would argue, the real Paul Ryan - and put him on display, and he made the new Paul Ryan own him. For one brief moment, he almost got Ryan to commit to Social Security privatization again. You could hear the screams from Romney headquarters all the way up the Charles to where I was watching.

Ryan got hit on the stimulus. He looked ridiculous trying to defend his refusal to specify what "loopholes" he and Romney plan to close to make the magic arithmetic in their tax plan work; Raddatz treed him completely on the mortgage-interest deduction, on the elimination of which neither Ryan nor his running mate will commit to a position. He looked even more ridiculous when Biden started pounding him on his career-long quest to end Medicare and throw old people onto the tender mercies of large insurance companies. Biden kept saying "vouchers" until Ryan, at one point, said, "It's not a voucher. A voucher is a check you get in your mailbox."

Wait. So if Paul Ryan gets his way, and Medicare as we know it gets eviscerated in favor of a pot full of offal on which Paul Ryan has slapped a label reading "Medicare," and my inadequate health-insurance allowance comes by e-mail, then it's not a "voucher" because it wasn't a check I got in the mail? And this is the issue on which Paul Ryan is supposed to be Genius on roller skates. This was humiliating enough, but when they started talking about war and peace, specifically in Afghanistan, Ryan looked like a toddler trying to cross the Hindu Kush.

He stammered. He vanished into his syntax. He gave Biden the chance to ask him if he preferred that American soldiers carry the fighting in the worst parts of the country rather than Afghan troops, a devastating comeback for which Ryan had no answer. He kept rambling about maintaining the country's "credibility" until, if you closed your eyes, he started to sound like Robert McNamara in 1965. And when Raddatz asked him, deftly, what would be worse, another war in the Middle East or Iran with a nuclear bomb, he leaped in precipitously with the latter, while about 75 percent of the country, including the two other people on stage with him, looked at Ryan as though he'd lost his mind. He did, however, demonstrate a certain talent for pronouncing long foreign words that his briefers had taught him on Tuesday. Also, he explained winter.

For years, Paul Ryan has been the shining champion of some really terrible ideas, and of a dystopian vision of the political commonwealth in which the poor starve and the elderly die ghastly, impoverished deaths, while all the essential elements of a permanent American oligarchy were put in place. This has garnered him loving notices from a lot of people who should have known better. The ideas he could explain were bad enough, but the profound ignorance he displayed on Thursday night on a number of important questions, including when and where the United States might wind up going to war next, and his blithe dismissal of any demand that he be specific about where he and his running mate are planning to take the country generally, was so positively terrifying that it calls into question Romney's judgment for putting this unqualified greenhorn on the ticket at all. Joe Biden laughed at him? Of course, he did. The only other option was to hand him a participation ribbon and take him to Burger King for lunch.

You know what's the difference between Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan?

Lipstick.


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From marksafron at att.net  Sat Oct 13 00:00:52 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2012 00:00:52 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] A much more entertaining debate.
Message-ID: <32854A17-C175-40AA-9DE0-C9F0FFFE1918@att.net>

http://nyti.ms/RTNNch


From marksafron at att.net  Sat Oct 13 08:43:00 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2012 08:43:00 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] What a great sense of humor.
Message-ID: <D7621B02-B281-4A9A-8C8D-C2D443818BA3@att.net>

?It all started when I was a little boy. One day, my father gave me an apple. I soon sold it for five dollars and bought two apples and sold them for ten. Then I bought four apples and sold them for twenty. Well, this went on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until my father died and left me three hundred million dollars!? ? The New Yorker, 2010

That?s how David Koch ? of the infamous billionaire Koch Brothers ? joked about his success in a 2003 speech to fellow alumni of the exclusive boarding school he attended as a youth.
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From tammy at mcn.org  Fri Oct 12 13:07:17 2012
From: tammy at mcn.org (Tammy Davis)
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:07:17 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Higher Education - Just Another Liberty Taken Away
Message-ID: <58E7D53412C54837A89B5F53199FEC5A@Windows7HP>

I am attending the last semester of classes, at CR here in Fort Bragg, that I need in order to transfer to a 4-year program. I completed my freshmen year at community colleges in San Diego (my hometown) back in 1986 and the cost of the so-called ?non-tuition? tuition was $7 per credit hour. A writer for North County Times (San Diego County) wrote an article in Jan. 2010 that states the cost at that time was $26 per credit hour for California community colleges. The cost today, not three years later, is $46 per credit hour. Professors are forced to choose textbooks from an extremely narrow selection of very expensive, brand new editions. One of the latest trends is the availability of textbook rentals. This sounded like a pretty good thing to me initially, as I figured that for books that you know you will no longer want to keep after the semester is over, I might as well save money. Two of the books I am using now are rentals. One of them was not identified as a required text until the class started and it showed up on the syllabus. I had the option of renting a physical book or procuring an e-copy of the book, and the difference in price was minimal. I started to purchase the e-book as I needed the text right away. I noticed a few webpages into the transaction, that the e-book was also a rental (there was one sentence in small font under the button used to make the purchase). I was extremely frustrated and ended up ordering the regular book rental and had to wing it during the first couple weeks of class. $60 +/- for an e-copy of a book that I was not able to keep is outrageous! For this same class (an online class), The students are required to purchase access to an interactive companion website...and I believe that cost was $48. The CR website could have been used as the instructional aid, but then the cost couldn?t have been so easily passed on to the students. I was planning on transferring into an online degree program with Sonoma or Humboldt Universities, but even their online programs are cost prohibitive. So, only people that have enough money are entitled to higher education. And just think, California State Universities were free until Ronald Reagan took the office of Governor. When the powers that be were drafting up their plan for tuition costs

I?m not sure exactly where to start in fighting this issue, but I have done a little ground work and perhaps in the Spring, as I may not be continuing with classes right away, I will dig my heels in. I have attached an article that I found on the CR website which outlines just the cuts to education this past year. The other attachment is the article I mentioned above which talks about community colleges that offer four-year degree programs...which I think in rural areas especially there is a critical need.

Sorry, I tend to be long-winded,
Tammy
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From agnes at mcn.org  Fri Oct 12 09:33:24 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:33:24 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Foreclosure Town Hall
Message-ID: <A7DD69C4E81A4A22938258391C93FE91@toshibauser>


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Susan Harman" <susanharman1 at gmail.com>
To: <california-occupy-homes at googlegroups.com>; 
<foreclosurepreventionzones at googlegroups.com>
Cc: "Jesse L. Arreguin" <jarreguin at ci.berkeley.ca.us>; 
<KWorthington at ci.berkeley.ca.us>; "Nancy Nadel" <nnadel at oaklandnet.com>; 
<rkaplan at oaklandnet.com>; "Ada Chan" <achan1 at oaklandnet.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2012 10:29 AM
Subject: Fwd: Foreclosure Town Hall


>
> 
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From rkarch at mcn.org  Sat Oct 13 12:29:39 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2012 12:29:39 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Joe Biden Was Right to Laugh
Message-ID: <A961768A-608E-4C5F-8149-D772FDC9AD36@mcn.org>


 
Joe Biden at the vice presidential debate in Danville, Kentucky. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

 


Joe Biden Was Right to Laugh

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

13 October 12

 
've never thought much of Joe Biden. But man, did he get it right in last night's debate, and not just because he walloped sniveling little Paul Ryan on the facts. What he got absolutely right, despite what you might read this morning (many outlets are criticizing Biden's dramatic excesses), was his tone. Biden did absolutely roll his eyes, snort, laugh derisively and throw his hands up in the air whenever Ryan trotted out his little beady-eyed BS-isms.

But he should have! He was absolutely right to be doing it. We all should be doing it. That includes all of us in the media, and not just paid obnoxious-opinion-merchants like me, but so-called "objective" news reporters as well. We should all be rolling our eyes, and scoffing and saying, "Come back when you're serious."

The load of balls that both Romney and Ryan have been pushing out there for this whole election season is simply not intellectually serious. Most of their platform isn't even a real platform, it's a fourth-rate parlor trick designed to paper over the real agenda - cutting taxes even more for super-rich dickheads like Mitt Romney, and getting everyone else to pay the bill.

The essence of the whole campaign for me was crystalized in the debate exchange over Romney's 20 percent tax-cut plan. ABC's Martha Raddatz turned the questioning to Ryan:

MS. RADDATZ: Well, let's talk about this 20 percent. 

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well - (chuckles) - 

MS. RADDATZ: You have refused yet again to offer specifics on how you pay for that 20 percent across-the-board tax cut. Do you actually have the specifics, or are you still working on it, and that's why you won't tell voters?
Here Ryan is presented with a simple yes-or-no answer. Since he doesn't have the answer, he immediately starts slithering and equivocating:

REP. RYAN: Different than this administration, we actually want to have big bipartisan agreements. You see, I understand the -
"We want to have bipartisan agreements?" This coming from a Republican congressman? These guys would stall a bill to name a post office after Shirley Temple. Biden, absolutely properly, chuckled and said, "That'd be a first for a Republican congress." Then Raddatz did exactly what any self-respecting journalist should do in that situation: she objected to being lied to, and yanked on the leash, forcing Ryan back to the question.

I'm convinced Raddatz wouldn't have pounced on Ryan if he hadn't trotted out this preposterous line about bipartisanism. Where does Ryan think we've all been living, Mars? It's one thing to pull that on some crowd of unsuspecting voters that hasn't followed politics that much and doesn't know the history. But any professional political journalist knows enough to know the abject comedy of that line. Still, Ryan was banking on the moderator not getting in the way and just letting him dump his trash on audiences. Instead, she aggressively grabbed Ryan by his puppy-scruff and pushed him back into the mess of his own proposal:

MS. RADDATZ: Do you have the specifics? Do you have the math? Do you know exactly what you're doing?
So now the ball is in Ryan's court. The answer he gives is astounding:

REP. RYAN: Look - look at what Mitt - look at what Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill did. They worked together out of a framework to lower tax rates and broaden the base, and they worked together to fix that. What we're saying is here's our framework: Lower tax rates 20 percent - we raise about $1.2 trillion through income taxes. We forgo about 1.1 trillion [dollars] in loopholes and deductions. And so what we're saying is deny those loopholes and deductions to higher-income taxpayers so that more of their income is taxed, which has a broader base of taxation -
Three things about this answer:

1) Ryan again here refuses to answer Raddatz's yes-or-no question about specifics. So now we know the answer: there are no specifics.

2) In lieu of those nonexistent specifics, what Ryan basically says is that he and Romney will set the framework - "Lower taxes by 20 percent" - and then they'll work out the specifics of how to get there with the Democrats in bipartisan fashion.

3) So essentially, Ryan has just admitted on national television that the Romney tax plan will be worked out after the election with the same Democrats from whom they are now, before the election, hiding any and all details.

So then, after that, there's this exchange.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Can I translate? 

REP. RYAN: - so we can lower tax rates across the board. Now, here's why I'm saying this. What we're saying is here's a framework - 

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I hope I'm going to get time to respond to this. 

REP. RYAN: We want to work with Congress - 

MS. RADDATZ: I - you'll get time. 

REP. RYAN: We want to work with Congress on how best to achieve this. That means successful - look - 

MS. RADDATZ: No specifics, yeah.
Raddatz did exactly the right thing. She asked a yes-or-no question, had a politician try to run the lamest kind of game on her - and when he was done, she called him on it, coming right back to the question and translating for viewers: "No specifics."

Think about what that means. Mitt Romney is running for president - for president! - promising an across-the-board 20 percent tax cut without offering any details about how that's going to be paid for. Forget being battered by the press, he and his little sidekick Ryan should both be tossed off the playing field for even trying something like that. This race for the White House, this isn't some frat prank. This is serious. This is for grownups, for God's sake.

If you're going to offer an across-the-board 20 percent tax cut without explaining how it's getting paid for, hell, why stop there? Why not just offer everyone over 18 a 1965 Mustang? Why not promise every child a Zagnut and an Xbox, or compatible mates for every lonely single person?

Sometimes in journalism I think we take the objectivity thing too far. We think being fair means giving equal weight to both sides of every argument. But sometimes in the zeal to be objective, reporters get confused. You can't report the Obama tax plan and the Romney tax plan in the same way, because only one of them is really a plan, while the other is actually not a plan at all, but an electoral gambit.

The Romney/Ryan ticket decided, with incredible cynicism, that that they were going to promise this massive tax break, not explain how to pay for it, and then just hang on until election day, knowing that most of the political press would let it skate, or at least not take a dump all over it when explaining it to the public. Unchallenged, and treated in print and on the air as though it were the same thing as a real plan, a 20 percent tax cut sounds pretty good to most Americans. Hell, it sounds good to me.

The proper way to report such a tactic is to bring to your coverage exactly the feeling that Biden brought to the debate last night: contempt and amazement. We in the press should be offended by what Romney and Ryan are doing - we should take professional offense that any politician would try to whisk such a gigantic lie past us to our audiences, and we should take patriotic offense that anyone is  trying to seize the White House using such transparently childish and dishonest tactics.

I've never been a Joe Biden fan. After four years, I'm not the biggest Barack Obama fan, either (and I'll get into why on that score later). But they're at least credible as big-league politicians. So much of the Romney/Ryan plan is so absurdly junior league, it's so far off-Broadway, it's practically in New Jersey.

Paul Ryan, a leader in the most aggressively and mindlessly partisan Congress in history, preaching bipartisanship? A private-equity parasite, Mitt Romney, who wants to enact a massive tax cut and pay for it without touching his own personal fortune-guaranteeing deduction, the carried-interest tax break - which keeps his own taxes below 15 percent despite incomes above $20 million?

The Romney/Ryan platform makes sense, and is not laughable, in only one context: if you're a multi-millionaire and you recognize that this is the only way to sell your agenda to mass audiences. But if you're not one of those rooting gazillionaires, you should laugh, you should roll your eyes, and it doesn't matter if you're the Vice President or an ABC reporter or a toll operator. You should laugh, because this stuff is a joke, and we shouldn't take it seriously.
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From agnes at mcn.org  Sun Oct 14 08:29:37 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2012 08:29:37 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw:  Fw: Foreclosure Town Hall
Message-ID: <B9BA9BA0E67041FAB68BE67C5A7FD938@toshibauser>


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Agnes Woolsey" <agnes at mcn.org>
To: "Mark Safron" <marksafron at att.net>
Cc: "Steve Scalmanini" <sscalmanini at yahoo.com>; <jenniespanos at yaho.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2012 8:23 AM
Subject: Re: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Foreclosure Town Hall


> Mark,
>       On the 16th the BOS of Mendocino County will meet,at F.B. Town Hall. 
> You may make a concern known during the Public Comment Period if you fill 
> out a card.Please come, wear your Occupy hat and support the movement to 
> stop fraudulent foreclosures.
>       Occupy Mendocino members were on the street Friday the 13th and 
> agreed to come to the F.B. meeting and support me as I read  information 
> from CJ Holmes site re a Town Hall meeting laying out solutions to the 
> Foreclosure crisis looming ahead.
>
>
> There also is such a Foreclosure Town Hall Meeting scheduled for the 16th 
> in
 Bekeley where CJ Holmes speaks. And one in San Bernadino on the 20th, Santa
> Barbara on the 21st, Santa Rosa on the 24th and Fresno on the 27th.
>        I hope we can get a date for Fort Bragg or Ukiah if we can rouse 
> Occupy Ukiah to take action. visit CJ at www.hofj.org for solutions and 
> schedule.
> Sincerely,
> Agnes
>
> 



From jupiter at mcn.org  Sun Oct 14 10:13:54 2012
From: jupiter at mcn.org (Linda Jupiter)
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2012 10:13:54 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw:  Fw: Foreclosure Town Hall
In-Reply-To: <B9BA9BA0E67041FAB68BE67C5A7FD938@toshibauser>
References: <B9BA9BA0E67041FAB68BE67C5A7FD938@toshibauser>
Message-ID: <D46FBAEC-1A02-468F-9684-D68232300EA1@mcn.org>

Here's the agenda, Agnes.
I have a session planned from 8:30-11, so will come by after that.
Public expression is nice and early.
Linda

1.     OPEN SESSION

(a)         Roll Call

(b)         Pledge of Allegiance

(c)         Welcoming Remarks


2.    PROCLAMATIONS

Items in this section are automatically adopted unless specifically  
pulled by a Supervisor. Proclamations are generally addressed on  
Mondays and may be presented or commented on as needed.


3.    PUBLIC EXPRESSION

Members of the public are welcome to address the Board on items not  
listed on the agenda, but within the jurisdiction of the Board of  
Supervisors. The Board is prohibited by law from taking action on  
matters not on the agenda, but may ask questions to clarify the  
speaker's comment. The Board limits testimony on matters not on the  
agenda to 3 minutes per person and not more than 10 minutes for a  
particular subject at the discretion of the Chair of the Board.

Individuals wishing to address the Board under Public Expression are  
welcome to do so throughout the meeting. To best facilitate these  
items, please review and complete the public comment/speaker form  
available at the back of the Boardroom and present to the Clerk. If  
you wish to submit written comments, please provide 10 copies to the  
Executive Office staff, located in the County Administration Center,  
Room 1010. All meetings are tape-recorded, so speakers are reminded to  
announce their names as they approach the podium.


4.   CONSENT CALENDAR

The Consent Calendar is considered routine and non-controversial and  
will be acted upon by the Board at one time without discussion.  Any  
Board member may request that any item be removed from the Consent  
Calendar for individual consideration.

See section at the end of this document for the full listing of  
Consent items


5.   COUNTY EXECUTIVE OFFICE AND DEPARTMENTAL MATTERS

EXECUTIVE OFFICE

(a)         Chief Executive Officer's Report

Recommended Action/Motion: That the Board of Supervisors accepts the  
report of the Chief Executive Officer.

(b)        Discussion and Possible Action Including Review, Adoption,  
Amendment, Consideration or Ratification of Legislation Pursuant to  
the Adopted Legislative Platform

Recommended Action/Motion: That the Board of Supervisors provides  
direction to staff regarding matters of legislation.

(c)         Informational Presentation by the City of Fort Bragg

Recommended Action/Motion: None at this time; this presentation is for  
the Board's information only.

(d)        Informational Presentation by the Jere Melo Foundation

Recommended Action/Motion: None at this time; this presentation is for  
the Board's information only.

(e)        Informational Presentation by the Mendocino Land Trust

Recommended Action/Motion: None at this time; this presentation is for  
the Board's information only.

(f)          Informational Presentation from State Parks  
Representative Loren Rex Regarding Haul Road, Located North of Ward  
Avenue in Fort Bragg

Recommended Action/Motion: None at this time; this presentation is for  
the Board's information only.

(g)        Informational Presentation by the Redwood Forest Foundation

Recommended Action/Motion: None at this time; this presentation is for  
the Board's information only.

(h)        Informational Presentation by the Westport Municipal  
Advisory Council (WMAC)

Recommended Action/Motion: None at this time; this presentation is for  
the Board's information only.

PLANNING AND BUILDING SERVICES

(i)          Progress Report on the Mendocino Town Plan Update and  
Economic Revitalization Planning Regarding the Noyo Harbor

Recommended Action/Motion: None at this time; this presentation is for  
the Board's information only.

TRANSPORTATION

(j)          Presentation on Usal Road, 2011 Restoration Project and  
Status Report on Ten Years of Road Ecology Efforts on Fort Bragg  
Sherwood Road and Ten Mile Road Also Subject to Winter Closure  
(Countywide)

Recommended Action/Motion: None.  This is an informational item only.


6.    BOARD OF SUPERVISORS AND MISCELLANEOUS

(a)         Supervisors' Reports


7.    BOARD OF DIRECTORS MATTERS

The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors meets concurrently as the  
Board of Directors of the: In-Home Supportive Services Public  
Authority Governing Board; Mendocino County Air Quality Management  
District; Mendocino County Library District; Mendocino County Public  
Facilities Corporation; Mendocino County Water Agency; and the Board  
of Supervisors Acting as the Governing Board of the Successor Agency  
for the Redevelopment Agency of the County of Mendocino.


8.   MODIFICATIONS TO AGENDA

Items added to the agenda subsequent to agenda publication, up to 72  
hours in advance of the meeting, pursuant to Government Code section  
54954.


9.    CLOSED SESSION

Notice to the public regarding closed session:  As provided in the  
Ralph M. Brown Act, Government Code sections 54950 et seq., the Board  
of Supervisors may meet in closed session with members of its staff,  
County employees, and its attorneys.  These sessions are not open to  
the public and may not be attended by members of the public.  The  
matters the Board will meet on in closed session are identified below  
or are those matters appropriately identified in open session as  
requiring immediate attention and arising after the posting of the  
agenda.  Any public reports of action taken in the closed session will  
be made in accordance with Government Code sections 54957.1.


10.  COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED AND FILED

Communications received and filed are retained by the Clerk throughout  
the Board proceedings. To review items described in this section,  
please contact the Executive Office staff in Room 1010.


4.   CONSENT CALENDAR - CONTINUED

The Consent Calendar is considered routine and non-controversial and  
will be acted upon by the Board at one time without discussion.  Any  
Board member may request that any item be removed from the Consent  
Calendar for individual consideration.

Items Recommended for Denial/Rejection:

CLAIMS AGAINST THE COUNTY

(a)         Claim of David Miller

Items Recommended for Approval:

MINUTES

(b)        Minutes of the September 24, 2012, Regular Board Meeting

(c)         Minutes of the September 25, 2012, Regular Board Meeting

APPOINTMENTS

(d)        Approval of Recommended Appointments/Reappointments

Recommended Action/Motion: That the Board of Supervisors approves the  
following appointments/reappointments:

Board or Commission

Appointee
Category

Area Agency on Aging (AAA Governing Board)
Stacey Cryer
County Representative
Civil Service Commission

Ron Orenstein
Commissioner - 3rd District
Health and Human Services Agency (HHSA) Advisory Board

Paula Cohen
4th District Representative (Member #17)
Health and Human Services Agency (HHSA) Advisory Board

Susan Baird Kanaan
2nd District Representative (Member #15)
Library Advisory Board

Valerie Frey
4th District Representative
Little River Airport Advisory Committee

Roy Helsing
Pilot Representative
Mendocino-Little River Cemetery District

Cheri Osborne
Trustee
Mental Health Board

John G. Wetzler
5th District ? Consumer/Family Representative
Noyo Harbor District

*Robert D. Armitage
Commissioner
Policy Council on Children and Youth (PCCY)

Bryan Lowery
Children Services Management Representative (Member #2)
Workforce Investment Board

Sharon Heather Govern
Business Representative (Member #12)
* This position is jointly appointed by the Board of Supervisors and  
the Fort Bragg City Council

ASSESSOR/CLERK-RECORDER

(e)        Approval of Appointments-In-Lieu of Election

Recommended Action/Motion: It is recommended that all candidates who  
filed, as shown on the Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder's certificate,  
be Appointed-In-Lieu of Election to their respective district.

BOARD OF SUPERVISORS

(f)          Approval of Letter to Assemblymember Wesley Chesbro in  
Support of the Jere Melo Memorial Highway, a Portion of State Highway  
Route 1, in the City of Fort Bragg (Sponsor: Supervisor Smith)

Recommended Action/Motion: Approve the letter of support to  
Assemblymember Wesley Chesbro for the Jere Melo Memorial Highway, a  
portion of State Highway Route 1 in the City of Fort Bragg.

(g)        Approval of Letter to California Department of Parks and  
Recreation Requesting Full District Status for Mendocino Parks  
(Sponsors: Supervisors Hamburg and McCowen)

Recommended Action/Motion: Approve sending the letter requesting full  
District status for Mendocino Parks to Acting Director Janelle Beland,  
with copies to Assemblyman Wes Chesbro and Senator Noreen Evans,  
authorizing the Chair to sign same.

DISTRICT ATTORNEY

(h)        Approval of Submission of the Fiscal Year 2012/13 Anti-Drug  
Abuse (ADA) Grant to the Board of State and Community Corrections  
(BSCC), and Authorization of the District Attorney as Signatory  
Authority for the Grant Application

Recommended Action/Motion: Approve the submission of the grant  
application to the Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC) for  
the Anti-Drug Abuse (ADA) Program. Please send three copies of the  
signed agenda summary to the District Attorney's Office.

HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES AGENCY

(i)          Approval of Agreement with BlackTalon Enterprises, Inc.  
(Napa, CA) in the Amount of $118,872 to Provide Uniformed Security  
Officers at the Health and Human Services Agency, Willits Integrated  
Service Center, Public Health, Veterans Buildings, North and South  
Yokayo Campus in Ukiah, CA and the Avila Center in Fort Bragg through  
2012-2013

Recommended Action/Motion: Approve and authorize the Board Chair to  
sign the agreement with BlackTalon Enterprises, Inc. in the amount of  
$118, 872 to provide uniformed security officers at the Health and  
Human Services Agency, Willits Integrated Service Center, Public  
Health, Veterans buildings, North and South Yokayo Campus in Ukiah, CA  
and the Avila Center in Fort Bragg through 2012-2013; and authorize  
the HHSA Director to sign any future amendments to the agreement that  
do not increase the annual maximum amount.

(j)          Approval of Amendment to Mental Health Agreement No.  
12-032 with Olga Segal, M.D. in the Amount of $123,500 to Provide  
Medication Evaluations and Medication Follow-Up Services for Fiscal  
Year 2012/2013

Recommended Action/Motion: Authorize and approve amendment to  
agreement MH#12-032 with Olga Segal, M.D. in the amount of $123,500 to  
provide medication evaluations and medication follow-up services in  
fiscal year 2012/2013; and authorize the Health and Human Service  
Agency Director to sign any future amendments to the agreement that do  
not increase the annual maximum amount.

HUMAN RESOURCES

(k)        Acceptance of the 2013 Non-Medicare Eligible Retiree Health  
Plan Renewal Report and Establishment of Rates for the Final Year of  
the Retiree Health Plan (Sponsors: Human Resources and Executive Office)

Recommended Action/Motion: 1) Accept the 2013 Non-Medicare Eligible  
Retiree Premium Renewal Report  2) Direct staff to retain 2012 Retiree  
Health Plan rates at the subsidized level of $663.33 per month for  
retirees and $922.56 per month for dependents for Plan Year 2013.

(l)          Approval of Appointment of Chair McCowen and Vice-Chair  
Hamburg to Participate on the Selection Panel for Award of Contract  
Negotiations and Employer - Employee Relations Services (Sponsors:  
Human Resources and Executive Office)

Recommended Action/Motion: That the Board approves the appointment of  
Chair McCowen and Vice Chair Hamburg to participate on the final  
selection panel for Contract Negotiations and Employer - Employee  
Relations Services.

PLANNING AND BUILDING SERVICES

(m)      Acceptance of Informational-Only Update Regarding the  
Issuance of Emergency Coastal Development Permit No. EM 1-2012

Recommended Action/Motion: No action necessary at this time;  
informational item.

(n)        Authorization of the Issuance of Coastal Development Permit  
No. 14-2012 (Lee)

Recommended Action/Motion: That the Board of Supervisors endorse the  
Coastal Permit Administrator's decision and authorizes the issuance of  
Coastal Development Permit No. 4-2012.

SHERIFF-CORONER

(o)        Ratification of Agreement with The Altavista Group to  
Perform Professional Consulting Services Relating to the Acquisition  
of 9-1-1 Equipment and Services; and Further Approval of a Budget  
Adjustment that Provides for the Expenditure, as well as Full  
Reimbursement to be Received from the State 9-1-1 Emergency  
Communications Office

Recommended Action/Motion: Ratify the agreement with The Altavista  
Group for performance of professional consulting services relating to  
the acquisition of 9-1-1 equipment and services; and further, approve  
the budget adjustment that provides for the expenditure, as well as  
full reimbursement to be received from the State 9-1-1 Emergency  
Communications Office.

TRANSPORTATION

(p)        Adoption of Resolution Approving and Executing Amendments  
to Department of Transportation Agreement No. 110103, Preliminary  
Engineering for the Reeves Canyon Road (C.R. 219) Bridge Replacement  
over Forsythe Creek (Redwood Valley Area)

Recommended Action/Motion: By Resolution, authorize the Director of  
Transportation, or his designated representative, to sign any and all  
amendments to the agreement that will not result in an increased cost  
beyond the amount specified.






The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors meets concurrently as the  
Board of Directors of the: In-Home Supportive Services Public  
Authority Governing Board; Mendocino County Air Quality Management  
District; Mendocino County Library District; Mendocino County Public  
Facilities Corporation; Mendocino County Water Agency; and the Board  
of Supervisors Acting as the Governing Board of the Successor Agency  
for the Redevelopment Agency of the County of Mendocino.




MENDOCINO COUNTY AIR QUALITY MANAGEMENT DISTRICT

(q)        Approval of the Air Quality Management District's  
Application for Subvention Funds from the California Air Resources Board

Recommended Action/Motion: Approve the Air Quality Management  
District's application for Subvention Funds, authorize the Air  
Pollution Control Officer to sign and transmit the application to the  
California Air Resources Board and request the Clerk of the Board to  
provide the Minute Order to the District of the Board's action.








Additional Meeting Information for Interested Parties

?         The Board of Supervisors complies with ADA requirements and  
upon request, will attempt to reasonably accommodate individuals with  
disabilities by making meeting material available in appropriate  
alternative formats (pursuant to Government Code Section 54953.2).  
Anyone requiring reasonable accommodation to participate in the  
meeting should contact the Executive Office by calling (707) 463-4441  
at least five days prior to the meeting

?         If you wish to address the Board on any matter on the  
agenda, please review and complete the public comment/speaker form  
available at the back of the Board Chambers. If you wish to submit  
documentation, please provide 10 copies to Executive Office staff,  
located in the Administration Center, Room 1010

?         A copy of the Agenda Packet is available for public review  
in the Executive Office, Room 1010. Proposed actions and supporting  
documents are considered draft until acted upon by the Board

?         Additional information on specific agenda items may be  
obtained by contacting the sponsoring departments. Contact information  
for County departments may be obtained at www.co.mendocino.ca.us/departments.htm

?         Board proceedings are broadcast on the local Public Access  
Channel to accommodate greater public access; tune in at the  
corresponding Open Session time as posted on the front page of the  
Agenda

?         LIVE WEB STREAMING OF BOARD MEETINGS:  
www.mendocinoaccess.org. For technical assistance, please contact  
Mendocino Access Television at (707) 357-0624

?         Please reference the departmental website to obtain  
additional resource information for the Board of Supervisors: www.co.mendocino.ca.us/bos



Thank you for your interest in the proceedings of the Mendocino County  
Board of Supervisors



Linda














On Oct 14, 2012, at 8:29 AM, Agnes Woolsey wrote:

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Agnes Woolsey" <agnes at mcn.org>
> To: "Mark Safron" <marksafron at att.net>
> Cc: "Steve Scalmanini" <sscalmanini at yahoo.com>;  
> <jenniespanos at yaho.com>
> Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2012 8:23 AM
> Subject: Re: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Foreclosure Town Hall
>
>
>> Mark,
>>      On the 16th the BOS of Mendocino County will meet,at F.B. Town  
>> Hall.
>> You may make a concern known during the Public Comment Period if  
>> you fill
>> out a card.Please come, wear your Occupy hat and support the  
>> movement to
>> stop fraudulent foreclosures.
>>      Occupy Mendocino members were on the street Friday the 13th and
>> agreed to come to the F.B. meeting and support me as I read   
>> information
>> from CJ Holmes site re a Town Hall meeting laying out solutions to  
>> the
>> Foreclosure crisis looming ahead.
>>
>>
>> There also is such a Foreclosure Town Hall Meeting scheduled for  
>> the 16th
>> in
> Bekeley where CJ Holmes speaks. And one in San Bernadino on the  
> 20th, Santa
>> Barbara on the 21st, Santa Rosa on the 24th and Fresno on the 27th.
>>       I hope we can get a date for Fort Bragg or Ukiah if we can  
>> rouse
>> Occupy Ukiah to take action. visit CJ at www.hofj.org for solutions  
>> and
>> schedule.
>> Sincerely,
>> Agnes
>>
>>
>
>
>
> TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list send an email to occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org 
>  put "Un-Subscribe me" in the Subject.
>
> For listserv technical problems please contact: listmanager at mcn.org

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From marksafron at att.net  Sun Oct 14 11:02:49 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2012 11:02:49 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent
Message-ID: <BB83E0C7-1203-4F5C-B6D6-61BFCF7D9402@att.net>

Excellent article. Highly recommended.

(Will they ever learn? History repeats itself to our detriment. M.S.) 



A painting of 17th-century Venice, with a view of the banks of the Grand Canal and the Doge?s Palace, by Leandro Bassano.


The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent
By Chrystia Freeland, The New York Times
14 October 12

 
n the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the heart of its economy was the colleganza, a basic form of joint-stock company created to finance a single trade expedition. The brilliance of the colleganza was that it opened the economy to new entrants, allowing risk-taking entrepreneurs to share in the financial upside with the established businessmen who financed their merchant voyages.

Venice's elites were the chief beneficiaries. Like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. Today, we think of social mobility as a good thing. But if you are on top, mobility also means competition. In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d'Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren't on it, you couldn't join the ruling oligarchy.

The political shift, which had begun nearly two decades earlier, was so striking a change that the Venetians gave it a name: La Serrata, or the closure. It wasn't long before the political Serrata became an economic one, too. Under the control of the oligarchs, Venice gradually cut off commercial opportunities for new entrants. Eventually, the colleganza was banned. The reigning elites were acting in their immediate self-interest, but in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for them, and for Venetian prosperity more generally. By 1500, Venice's population was smaller than it had been in 1330. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as the rest of Europe grew, the city continued to shrink.

The story of Venice's rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty," as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.

The history of the United States can be read as one such virtuous circle. But as the story of Venice shows, virtuous circles can be broken. Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish.

That was the future predicted by Karl Marx, who wrote that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further - ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.

You can see America's creeping Serrata in the growing social and, especially, educational chasm between those at the top and everyone else. At the bottom and in the middle, American society is fraying, and the children of these struggling families are lagging the rest of the world at school.

Economists point out that the woes of the middle class are in large part a consequence of globalization and technological change. Culture may also play a role. In his recent book on the white working class, the libertarian writer Charles Murray blames the hollowed-out middle for straying from the traditional family values and old-fashioned work ethic that he says prevail among the rich (whom he castigates, but only for allowing cultural relativism to prevail).

There is some truth in both arguments. But the 1 percent cannot evade its share of responsibility for the growing gulf in American society. Economic forces may be behind the rising inequality, but as Peter R. Orszag, President Obama's former budget chief, told me, public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends.

Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.

Historically, the United States has enjoyed higher social mobility than Europe, and both left and right have identified this economic openness as an essential source of the nation's economic vigor. But several recent studies have shown that in America today it is harder to escape the social class of your birth than it is in Europe. The Canadian economist Miles Corak has found that as income inequality increases, social mobility falls - a phenomenon Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has called the Great Gatsby Curve.

Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. This is the new Serrata. An elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enrolled their daughters in an exclusive private school; I've done the same with mine.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, I interviewed Ruth Simmons, then the president of Brown. She was the first African-American to lead an Ivy League university and has served on the board of Goldman Sachs. Dr. Simmons, a Harvard-trained literature scholar, worked hard to make Brown more accessible to poor students, but when I asked whether it was time to abolish legacy admissions, the Ivy League's own Book of Gold, she shrugged me off with a laugh: "No, I have a granddaughter. It's not time yet."

America's Serrata also takes a more explicit form: the tilting of the economic rules in favor of those at the top. The crony capitalism of today's oligarchs is far subtler than Venice's. It works in two main ways.

The first is to channel the state's scarce resources in their own direction. This is the absurdity of Mitt Romney's comment about the "47 percent" who are "dependent upon government." The reality is that it is those at the top, particularly the tippy-top, of the economic pyramid who have been most effective at capturing government support - and at getting others to pay for it.

Exhibit A is the bipartisan, $700 billion rescue of Wall Street in 2008. Exhibit B is the crony recovery. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that 93 percent of the income gains from the 2009-10 recovery went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household.

The second manifestation of crony capitalism is more direct: the tax perks, trade protections and government subsidies that companies and sectors secure for themselves. Corporate pork is a truly bipartisan dish: green energy companies and the health insurers have been winners in this administration, as oil and steel companies were under George W. Bush's.

The impulse of the powerful to make themselves even more so should come as no surprise. Competition and a level playing field are good for us collectively, but they are a hardship for individual businesses. Warren E. Buffett knows this. "A truly great business must have an enduring ?moat' that protects excellent returns on invested capital," he explained in his 2007 annual letter to investors. "Though capitalism's ?creative destruction' is highly beneficial for society, it precludes investment certainty." Microsoft attempted to dig its own moat by simply shutting out its competitors, until it was stopped by the courts. Even Apple, a huge beneficiary of the open-platform economy, couldn't resist trying to impose its own inferior map app on buyers of the iPhone 5.

Businessmen like to style themselves as the defenders of the free market economy, but as Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, argued, "Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition."

In the early 19th century, the United States was one of the most egalitarian societies on the planet. "We have no paupers," Thomas Jefferson boasted in an 1814 letter. "The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families."

For Jefferson, this equality was at the heart of American exceptionalism: "Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?"

That all changed with industrialization. As Franklin D. Roosevelt argued in a 1932 address to the Commonwealth Club, the industrial revolution was accomplished thanks to "a group of financial titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care, and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used." America may have needed its robber barons; Roosevelt said the United States was right to accept "the bitter with the sweet."

But as these titans amassed wealth and power, and as America ran out of free land on its frontier, the country faced the threat of a Serrata. As Roosevelt put it, "equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists." Instead, "we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already."

It is no accident that in America today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the Gilded Age. Now, as then, the titans are seeking an even greater political voice to match their economic power. Now, as then, the inevitable danger is that they will confuse their own self-interest with the common good. The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice's oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.


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From agnes at mcn.org  Sun Oct 14 16:04:29 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2012 16:04:29 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Town Hall meeting date?
Message-ID: <183F9BE3C16E48B1BD5121ED767AD9FA@toshibauser>

Occupiers at the Friday bank vigil   got copies of the letter from CJ concerning foreclosure.   Please come to the Tues. the 16th BOS meeting at our F.B. Town Hall to hear and support my message regarding our call for a Foreclosure Town Hall Meeting-date to be announced.

CJ has sent me the requirements below. This Tuesday in F.B. at 10:00 am I may need someone to sign a card to speak and cede me their 3 minutes so I can finish reading my notes.
              Mark, please put FTH on the GA agenda for this Satuday  the 20th (3rd at. at Sr. Ctr.) so we can plan a date and a venue in early November which can meet CJ's requirements. See below.
Thanks,
Agnes
Fighting Foreclosures
----- Original Message ----- 
From: CJ Holmes 
To: Agnes Woolsey 
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2012 9:21 AM
Subject: RE: Town Hall meeting date?


This week and next week are pretty booked (16, 18, 20, 21, 24, 27).

Maybe week after that?  evening is fine, or weekend is open.  Let me know what date and I'll get it on the calendar.  Here is the FTH requirements.  Thanks for all your efforts and support.  cj

 

Seating for as many as are expected to attend:

Churches

School auditoriums

 

Equipment:

Microphone system

Projector screen for presentations

Podium to hold laptop

Table for projector (I have a projector)

Electrical cord

Table at door for donations and name tags

 

Plan approx 3 hours of use:

? hr setting up

1.5 hr for presentations

30 min Q&A

? putting things away

 

MOST IMPORTANT:

Please make a priority to get all county supervisors there including their staff, the county attorney(s), county recorder, and as many local citizens as possible. 

 

From: Agnes Woolsey [mailto:agnes at mcn.org] 
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2012 9:15 AM
To: CJ Holmes
Subject: Town Hall meeting date?

 

Hi C.J.,

        Occupy Mendocino plans to go to the Board of Supervisors meeting which is planned for Tuesday Oct. 16th in Fort Bragg. I plan to read your letter which has no date for a Foreclosure town Hall  meeting  with you.  We have begun to put up flyers and will notify press and radio. Need to know a date you would be available. BOS usually meet on Tuesdays in Ukiah.Occupy Ukiah is now dormant. Should we put a tentative date or none on the Foreclosure Town Hall ?

         Respectfully,

Agnes Woolsey 

p.s. A good part of OM is occupied with election phone baking now. I expect more support after Nov. 6th. Like you I feel this can't wait.  People are being shut out of their homes.  
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From marksafron at att.net  Mon Oct 15 11:13:08 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2012 11:13:08 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Will Ohio's H.I.G.-Owned E-Voting Machines Give
	Romney the White House?
Message-ID: <CF9B3195-A13C-41A1-B92E-3090E1E8E09D@att.net>

Will Ohio's H.I.G.-Owned E-Voting Machines Give Romney the White House?

By Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman, OpEdNews

15 October 12

 
Electronic voting machines owned by Mitt Romney's business buddies are set to count the votes in Cincinnati could decide the 2012 election.

The narrative is already being hyped by the corporate media. As Kelly O'Donnell reported for NBC's Today Show on Monday, October 8, Ohio's Hamilton County is "ground zero" for deciding who holds the White House come January, 2013.

O'Donnell pointed out that no candidate has won the White House without carrying Ohio since John Kennedy did it in 1960. No Republican has EVER won the White House without Ohio's electoral votes.

As we document in the e-book WILL THE GOP STEAL AMERICA'S 2012 ELECTION (www.freepress.org) George W. Bush got a second term in 2004 thanks to the manipulation of the electronic vote count by Ohio's then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell served as the co-chair of the state's committee to re-elect Bush/Cheney while simultaneously administering the election.

The widespread use of electronic voting machines from ES&S, and of Diebold software maintained by Triad, allowed Blackwell to electronically flip a 4% Kerry lead to a 2% Bush victory in the dead of election night. ES&S, Diebold and Triad were all owned or operated by Republican partisans. The shift of more than 300,000 votes after 12:20 am election night was a virtual statistical impossibility. It was engineered by Michael Connell, an IT specialist long affiliated with the Bush Family. Blackwell gave Connell's Ohio-based GovTech the contract to count Ohio's votes, which was done on servers housed in the Old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Thus the Ohio vote tally was done on servers that also carried the e-mail for Karl Rove and the national Republican Party. Connell died in a mysterious plane crash in December, 2008, after being subpoenaed in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit focused on how the 2004 election was decided (disclosure: we were attorney and plaintiff in that suit).

Diebold's founder, Walden O'Dell, had vowed to deliver Ohio's electoral votes-and thus the presidency-to his friend George W. Bush. That it was done in part on electronic voting machines and software O'Dell happened to own (Diebold has since changed hands twice) remains a cautionary red flag for those who believe merely winning the popular vote will give Barack Obama a second term.

This November, much of the Ohio electorate will cast its ballots on machines again owned by close cronies of the Republican presidential candidate. In Cincinnati and elsewhere around the state, the e-voting apparati are owned by Hart Intercivic. Hart's machines are infamous for mechanical failures, "glitches," counting errors and other timely problems now thoroughly identified with the way Republicans steal elections. As in 2004, Ohio's governor is now a Republican. This time it's the very right-wing John Kasich, himself a multi-millionaire courtesy of a stint at Lehman Brothers selling state bonds, and the largesse of Rupert Murdoch, on whose Fox Network Kasich served as a late night bloviator. Murdoch wrote Kasich a game-changing $1 million check just prior to his winning the statehouse, an electoral victory shrouded in electronic intrigue. The exit polls in that election indicated that his opponent, incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland, had actually won the popular vote.

Ohio's very Republican Secretary of State is John Husted, currently suing in the US Supreme Court to prevent the public from voting on the weekend prior to election day. As did Blackwell and Governor Robert Taft in 2004, Husted and Kasich will control Ohio's electronic vote count on election night free of meaningful public checks or balances

Hart Intercivic, on whose machines the key votes will be cast in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, was taken over last year by H.I.G. Capital. Prominent partners and directors on the H.I.G. board hail from Bain Company or Bain Capital, both connected to Mitt Romney. H.I.G. employees have contributed at least $338,000 to Romney's campaign. H.I.G. Directors John P. Bolduk and Douglas Berman are major Romney fundraisers, as is former Bain and H.I.G. manager Brian Shortsleeve.

US courts have consistently ruled that the software in electronic voting machines is proprietary to the manufacturer, even though individual election boards may own the actual machines. Thus there will be no vote count transparency on election night in Ohio. The tally will be conducted by Hart Intercivic and controlled by Husted and Kasich, with no public recourse or accountability. As federal testimony from the deceased Michael Connell made clear in 2008, electronically flipping an election is relatively cheap and easy to do, especially if you or your compatriots programmed the machines.

So as the corporate media swarm through Ohio, reporting breathlessly from "ground zero" in Cincinnati, don't hold your own breath waiting for them to also clarify that the voting machines in what may once again be America's decisive swing state are owned, programmed and tabulated by some of the Romney campaign's closest associates.


Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of WILL THE GOP STEAL AMERICA'S 2012 ELECTION? an e-book at http://freepress.org/store.php#a2012.

Harvey Wasserman edits nukefree.org and co-writes KILLING OUR OWN: THE DISASTER OF AMERICA'S EXPERIENCE WITH ATOMIC RADIATION. His SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior editor of www.freepress.org. Listen to "Solartopia! Green-Power Hour" at www.talktainmentradio.com every Wednesday from 8-9 p.m.


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From agnes at mcn.org  Mon Oct 15 14:58:58 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2012 14:58:58 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Vote-Steve's recommendations
Message-ID: <A53484C1CD9A49BCA4F9E9A59758693F@toshibauser>

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Steven Antler 
To: steve antler 
Sent: Monday, October 15, 2012 9:50 AM
Subject: Vote-Steve's recommendations


Dear Friends,
    It is essential that everyone VOTE. The outcome on the propositions will determine a lot about the future of our state.
    The Republican party is in the hands of people who will give away everything to the super-rich, destroy the environment and cause a war. We need a strong showing that these policies don't represent the will and desires of the vast majority of the American people.

    Vote YES on Propositions 30, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39 and 40. In Mendocino county, VOTE YES on Measures F and G.

    Vote NO on Propositions 31, 32, 33, and 38.

    Make sure to send in your absentee ballots now. If you're a poll voter, then you must vote on Tuesday, November 6th.
    Influence your friends and family locally and nationally. If you have questions, please contact me, BUT VOTE!
    Best, Steve Antler 937-5925
    
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From agnes at mcn.org  Mon Oct 15 15:07:06 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2012 15:07:06 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw:  Fw:  Fw: Foreclosure Town Hall
Message-ID: <19300EFB60704D67953E6337DEA96306@toshibauser>

please respond if you will be at F.B. Town Hall Tues. the 16th. Please sign up on a card to speak about Occupy's concerns. I need your suport.
Agnes
Subject: Re: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Fw: Foreclosure Town Hall


Here's the agenda, Agnes.
I have a session planned from 8:30-11, so will come by after that.
Public expression is nice and early.
Linda


1.     Open Session                                                                                                                                                                       

(a)         Roll Call

(b)         Pledge of Allegiance

(c)         Welcoming Remarks



2.    Proclamations                                                                                                                                                               

Items in this section are automatically adopted unless specifically pulled by a Supervisor. Proclamations are generally addressed on Mondays and may be presented or commented on as needed.



3.    Public Expression                                                                                                                                                        

Members of the public are welcome to address the Board on items not listed on the agenda, but within the jurisdiction of the Board of Supervisors. The Board is prohibited by law from taking action on matters not on the agenda, but may ask questions to clarify the speaker's comment. The Board limits testimony on matters not on the agenda to 3 minutes per person and not more than 10 minutes for a particular subject at the discretion of the Chair of the Board.

Individuals wishing to address the Board under Public Expression are welcome to do so throughout the meeting. To best facilitate these items, please review and complete the public comment/speaker form available at the back of the Boardroom and present to the Clerk. If you wish to submit written comments, please provide 10 copies to the Executive Office staff, located in the County Administration Center, Room 1010. All meetings are tape-recorded, so speakers are reminded to announce their names as they approach the podium.



4.   Consent Calendar                                                                                                                                                      

The Consent Calendar is considered routine and non-controversial and will be acted upon by the Board at one time without discussion.  Any Board member may request that any item be removed from the Consent Calendar for individual consideration.

See section at the end of this document for the full listing of Consent items



5.   County Executive Office and Departmental Matters                                                        

EXECUTIVE OFFICE

(a)         Chief Executive Officer's Report

Recommended Action/Motion: That the Board of Supervisors accepts the report of the Chief Executive Officer.

(b)        Discussion and Possible Action Including Review, Adoption, Amendment, Consideration or Ratification of Legislation Pursuant to the Adopted Legislative Platform

Recommended Action/Motion: That the Board of Supervisors provides direction to staff regarding matters of legislation.

(c)         Informational Presentation by the City of Fort Bragg

Recommended Action/Motion: None at this time; this presentation is for the Board's information only.

(d)        Informational Presentation by the Jere Melo Foundation

Recommended Action/Motion: None at this time; this presentation is for the Board's information only.

(e)        Informational Presentation by the Mendocino Land Trust

Recommended Action/Motion: None at this time; this presentation is for the Board's information only.

(f)          Informational Presentation from State Parks Representative Loren Rex Regarding Haul Road, Located North of Ward Avenue in Fort Bragg

Recommended Action/Motion: None at this time; this presentation is for the Board's information only.

(g)        Informational Presentation by the Redwood Forest Foundation

Recommended Action/Motion: None at this time; this presentation is for the Board's information only.

(h)        Informational Presentation by the Westport Municipal Advisory Council (WMAC)

Recommended Action/Motion: None at this time; this presentation is for the Board's information only.

PLANNING AND BUILDING SERVICES

(i)          Progress Report on the Mendocino Town Plan Update and Economic Revitalization Planning Regarding the Noyo Harbor

Recommended Action/Motion: None at this time; this presentation is for the Board's information only.

TRANSPORTATION

(j)          Presentation on Usal Road, 2011 Restoration Project and Status Report on Ten Years of Road Ecology Efforts on Fort Bragg Sherwood Road and Ten Mile Road Also Subject to Winter Closure (Countywide)

Recommended Action/Motion: None.  This is an informational item only.



6.    Board of Supervisors And Miscellaneous                                                                                             

(a)         Supervisors' Reports



7.    Board of directors matters                                                                                                                             

The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors meets concurrently as the Board of Directors of the: In-Home Supportive Services Public Authority Governing Board; Mendocino County Air Quality Management District; Mendocino County Library District; Mendocino County Public Facilities Corporation; Mendocino County Water Agency; and the Board of Supervisors Acting as the Governing Board of the Successor Agency for the Redevelopment Agency of the County of Mendocino.            



8.   Modifications to Agenda                                                                                                                                     

Items added to the agenda subsequent to agenda publication, up to 72 hours in advance of the meeting, pursuant to Government Code section 54954.



9.    Closed Session                                                                                                                                                                 

Notice to the public regarding closed session:  As provided in the Ralph M. Brown Act, Government Code sections 54950 et seq., the Board of Supervisors may meet in closed session with members of its staff, County employees, and its attorneys.  These sessions are not open to the public and may not be attended by members of the public.  The matters the Board will meet on in closed session are identified below or are those matters appropriately identified in open session as requiring immediate attention and arising after the posting of the agenda.  Any public reports of action taken in the closed session will be made in accordance with Government Code sections 54957.1.



10.  Communications Received and Filed                                                                                                        

Communications received and filed are retained by the Clerk throughout the Board proceedings. To review items described in this section, please contact the Executive Office staff in Room 1010.



4.   Consent Calendar - Continued                                                                                                                     

The Consent Calendar is considered routine and non-controversial and will be acted upon by the Board at one time without discussion.  Any Board member may request that any item be removed from the Consent Calendar for individual consideration.

Items Recommended for Denial/Rejection:

CLAIMS AGAINST THE COUNTY

(a)         Claim of David Miller

Items Recommended for Approval:

MINUTES

(b)        Minutes of the September 24, 2012, Regular Board Meeting

(c)         Minutes of the September 25, 2012, Regular Board Meeting

APPOINTMENTS

(d)        Approval of Recommended Appointments/Reappointments

Recommended Action/Motion: That the Board of Supervisors approves the following appointments/reappointments:

      Board or Commission
     Appointee Category
     
      Area Agency on Aging (AAA Governing Board) Stacey Cryer County Representative 
      Civil Service Commission
     Ron Orenstein Commissioner - 3rd District 
      Health and Human Services Agency (HHSA) Advisory Board
     Paula Cohen 4th District Representative (Member #17) 
      Health and Human Services Agency (HHSA) Advisory Board
     Susan Baird Kanaan 2nd District Representative (Member #15) 
      Library Advisory Board
     Valerie Frey 4th District Representative 
      Little River Airport Advisory Committee
     Roy Helsing Pilot Representative 
      Mendocino-Little River Cemetery District
     Cheri Osborne Trustee 
      Mental Health Board
     John G. Wetzler 5th District ? Consumer/Family Representative 
      Noyo Harbor District
     *Robert D. Armitage Commissioner 
      Policy Council on Children and Youth (PCCY)
     Bryan Lowery Children Services Management Representative (Member #2) 
      Workforce Investment Board
     Sharon Heather Govern Business Representative (Member #12) 
      * This position is jointly appointed by the Board of Supervisors and the Fort Bragg City Council
     

ASSESSOR/CLERK-RECORDER

(e)        Approval of Appointments-In-Lieu of Election

Recommended Action/Motion: It is recommended that all candidates who filed, as shown on the Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder's certificate, be Appointed-In-Lieu of Election to their respective district.

BOARD OF SUPERVISORS

(f)          Approval of Letter to Assemblymember Wesley Chesbro in Support of the Jere Melo Memorial Highway, a Portion of State Highway Route 1, in the City of Fort Bragg (Sponsor: Supervisor Smith)

Recommended Action/Motion: Approve the letter of support to Assemblymember Wesley Chesbro for the Jere Melo Memorial Highway, a portion of State Highway Route 1 in the City of Fort Bragg.

(g)        Approval of Letter to California Department of Parks and Recreation Requesting Full District Status for Mendocino Parks (Sponsors: Supervisors Hamburg and McCowen)

Recommended Action/Motion: Approve sending the letter requesting full District status for Mendocino Parks to Acting Director Janelle Beland, with copies to Assemblyman Wes Chesbro and Senator Noreen Evans, authorizing the Chair to sign same.

DISTRICT ATTORNEY

(h)        Approval of Submission of the Fiscal Year 2012/13 Anti-Drug Abuse (ADA) Grant to the Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC), and Authorization of the District Attorney as Signatory Authority for the Grant Application

Recommended Action/Motion: Approve the submission of the grant application to the Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC) for the Anti-Drug Abuse (ADA) Program. Please send three copies of the signed agenda summary to the District Attorney's Office.

HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES AGENCY

(i)          Approval of Agreement with BlackTalon Enterprises, Inc. (Napa, CA) in the Amount of $118,872 to Provide Uniformed Security Officers at the Health and Human Services Agency, Willits Integrated Service Center, Public Health, Veterans Buildings, North and South Yokayo Campus in Ukiah, CA and the Avila Center in Fort Bragg through 2012-2013

Recommended Action/Motion: Approve and authorize the Board Chair to sign the agreement with BlackTalon Enterprises, Inc. in the amount of $118, 872 to provide uniformed security officers at the Health and Human Services Agency, Willits Integrated Service Center, Public Health, Veterans buildings, North and South Yokayo Campus in Ukiah, CA and the Avila Center in Fort Bragg through 2012-2013; and authorize the HHSA Director to sign any future amendments to the agreement that do not increase the annual maximum amount.

(j)          Approval of Amendment to Mental Health Agreement No. 12-032 with Olga Segal, M.D. in the Amount of $123,500 to Provide Medication Evaluations and Medication Follow-Up Services for Fiscal Year 2012/2013

Recommended Action/Motion: Authorize and approve amendment to agreement MH#12-032 with Olga Segal, M.D. in the amount of $123,500 to provide medication evaluations and medication follow-up services in fiscal year 2012/2013; and authorize the Health and Human Service Agency Director to sign any future amendments to the agreement that do not increase the annual maximum amount.

HUMAN RESOURCES

(k)        Acceptance of the 2013 Non-Medicare Eligible Retiree Health Plan Renewal Report and Establishment of Rates for the Final Year of the Retiree Health Plan (Sponsors: Human Resources and Executive Office)

Recommended Action/Motion: 1) Accept the 2013 Non-Medicare Eligible Retiree Premium Renewal Report  2) Direct staff to retain 2012 Retiree Health Plan rates at the subsidized level of $663.33 per month for retirees and $922.56 per month for dependents for Plan Year 2013.

(l)          Approval of Appointment of Chair McCowen and Vice-Chair Hamburg to Participate on the Selection Panel for Award of Contract Negotiations and Employer - Employee Relations Services (Sponsors: Human Resources and Executive Office)

Recommended Action/Motion: That the Board approves the appointment of Chair McCowen and Vice Chair Hamburg to participate on the final selection panel for Contract Negotiations and Employer - Employee Relations Services.

PLANNING AND BUILDING SERVICES

(m)      Acceptance of Informational-Only Update Regarding the Issuance of Emergency Coastal Development Permit No. EM 1-2012

Recommended Action/Motion: No action necessary at this time; informational item.

(n)        Authorization of the Issuance of Coastal Development Permit No. 14-2012 (Lee)

Recommended Action/Motion: That the Board of Supervisors endorse the Coastal Permit Administrator's decision and authorizes the issuance of Coastal Development Permit No. 4-2012.

SHERIFF-CORONER

(o)        Ratification of Agreement with The Altavista Group to Perform Professional Consulting Services Relating to the Acquisition of 9-1-1 Equipment and Services; and Further Approval of a Budget Adjustment that Provides for the Expenditure, as well as Full Reimbursement to be Received from the State 9-1-1 Emergency Communications Office

Recommended Action/Motion: Ratify the agreement with The Altavista Group for performance of professional consulting services relating to the acquisition of 9-1-1 equipment and services; and further, approve the budget adjustment that provides for the expenditure, as well as full reimbursement to be received from the State 9-1-1 Emergency Communications Office.

TRANSPORTATION

(p)        Adoption of Resolution Approving and Executing Amendments to Department of Transportation Agreement No. 110103, Preliminary Engineering for the Reeves Canyon Road (C.R. 219) Bridge Replacement over Forsythe Creek (Redwood Valley Area)

Recommended Action/Motion: By Resolution, authorize the Director of Transportation, or his designated representative, to sign any and all amendments to the agreement that will not result in an increased cost beyond the amount specified.



            

            

The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors meets concurrently as the Board of Directors of the: In-Home Supportive Services Public Authority Governing Board; Mendocino County Air Quality Management District; Mendocino County Library District; Mendocino County Public Facilities Corporation; Mendocino County Water Agency; and the Board of Supervisors Acting as the Governing Board of the Successor Agency for the Redevelopment Agency of the County of Mendocino.





Mendocino County Air Quality Management District 

(q)        Approval of the Air Quality Management District's Application for Subvention Funds from the California Air Resources Board

Recommended Action/Motion: Approve the Air Quality Management District's application for Subvention Funds, authorize the Air Pollution Control Officer to sign and transmit the application to the California Air Resources Board and request the Clerk of the Board to provide the Minute Order to the District of the Board's action.









Additional Meeting Information for Interested Parties

?         The Board of Supervisors complies with ADA requirements and upon request, will attempt to reasonably accommodate individuals with disabilities by making meeting material available in appropriate alternative formats (pursuant to Government Code Section 54953.2). Anyone requiring reasonable accommodation to participate in the meeting should contact the Executive Office by calling (707) 463-4441 at least five days prior to the meeting

?         If you wish to address the Board on any matter on the agenda, please review and complete the public comment/speaker form available at the back of the Board Chambers. If you wish to submit documentation, please provide 10 copies to Executive Office staff, located in the Administration Center, Room 1010

?         A copy of the Agenda Packet is available for public review in the Executive Office, Room 1010. Proposed actions and supporting documents are considered draft until acted upon by the Board

?         Additional information on specific agenda items may be obtained by contacting the sponsoring departments. Contact information for County departments may be obtained at www.co.mendocino.ca.us/departments.htm

?         Board proceedings are broadcast on the local Public Access Channel to accommodate greater public access; tune in at the corresponding Open Session time as posted on the front page of the Agenda

?         LIVE WEB STREAMING OF BOARD MEETINGS: www.mendocinoaccess.org. For technical assistance, please contact Mendocino Access Television at (707) 357-0624

?         Please reference the departmental website to obtain additional resource information for the Board of Supervisors: www.co.mendocino.ca.us/bos



Thank you for your interest in the proceedings of the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors



Linda




























On Oct 14, 2012, at 8:29 AM, Agnes Woolsey wrote:



  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: "Agnes Woolsey" <agnes at mcn.org>
  To: "Mark Safron" <marksafron at att.net>
  Cc: "Steve Scalmanini" <sscalmanini at yahoo.com>; <jenniespanos at yaho.com>
  Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2012 8:23 AM
  Subject: Re: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Foreclosure Town Hall



    Mark,

         On the 16th the BOS of Mendocino County will meet,at F.B. Town Hall. 

    You may make a concern known during the Public Comment Period if you fill 

    out a card.Please come, wear your Occupy hat and support the movement to 

    stop fraudulent foreclosures.

         Occupy Mendocino members were on the street Friday the 13th and 

    agreed to come to the F.B. meeting and support me as I read  information 

    from CJ Holmes site re a Town Hall meeting laying out solutions to the 

    Foreclosure crisis looming ahead.





    There also is such a Foreclosure Town Hall Meeting scheduled for the 16th 

    in

  Bekeley where CJ Holmes speaks. And one in San Bernadino on the 20th, Santa

    Barbara on the 21st, Santa Rosa on the 24th and Fresno on the 27th.

          I hope we can get a date for Fort Bragg or Ukiah if we can rouse 

    Occupy Ukiah to take action. visit CJ at www.hofj.org for solutions and 

    schedule.

    Sincerely,

    Agnes








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From agnes at mcn.org  Tue Oct 16 17:37:44 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2012 17:37:44 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: David's paper re: eminent domain
Message-ID: <AC0649D2E515475A89A4A47F9E6837B4@toshibauser>

from the CAOccupy movement.
from Agnes- a good read.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Lisa Wuriu 
To: california-occupy-homes at googlegroups.com ; foreclosurepreventionzones at googlegroups.com 
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2012 1:05 PM
Subject: David's paper re: eminent domain


Attached is David's paper regarding eminent domain.  Well worth reading.
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From agnes at mcn.org  Tue Oct 16 20:10:01 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2012 20:10:01 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] eminent domain and communities setting precedents
	fot the BOS
Message-ID: <73848810EF9148C9B3A8BF72ADBFA5BA@toshibauser>

If you are wondering about the feasability of counties to transfer foreclosed and tax delinquent properties read this. I sent it to the Bos. Thanks to Sheila Dawn who told me and Dan Hamburg in a letter she gave him. Hooray Sheila, reporter and researcher!
Thanks for all the wonderful support and emails- all 10 of you.
Love you bunches,
Agnes
http://detroitworksproject.com/wp-content/uploads/policy_audits/101222_HR&A_1_Policy_Audit_Public_Land.pdf
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From agnes at mcn.org  Tue Oct 16 20:49:42 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2012 20:49:42 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: MERS cases in Nevada and Washington
Message-ID: <93CB294B51944F58B27B4542E99F87F1@toshibauser>

An interesting court case says that MERS cannot forclose on homeowners unles they can produce the original mortgage note signed by the homeowner. The banks had bundled securitized loans and sold them to investors multiple times losing the chain of title. So MERS has an impossible job. More reason to use eminent domain to transfer foreclosed properties  to counties and stop the avalanche of expected foreclosures-3,000 more in 2012.
Agnes
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Lisa Wuriu 
To: california-occupy-homes at googlegroups.com ; foreclosurepreventionzones at googlegroups.com 
Cc: CJ Holmes 
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2012 12:36 PM
Subject: MERS cases in Nevada and Washington


http://www.examiner.com/topic/foreclosure

http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2018934163_mers17.html
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From marksafron at att.net  Tue Oct 16 22:33:09 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2012 22:33:09 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Borowitz: Romney Sets New Personal Best for
	Faking Empathy
Message-ID: <1F54F699-1814-482D-9088-372E9ED07F4E@att.net>

ROMNEY SETS NEW PERSONAL BEST FOR FAKING EMPATHY

HEMPSTEAD, NY ?Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney set a new personal record tonight by pretending to care about average Americans for nearly ninety minutes.

Mr. Romney began the second Presidential debate by simulating concern for a college student named Jeremy?s employment future and maintained a consistent level of feigned concern on a variety of subjects for the remainder of the night.

?It was an awesome display of stamina,? said Mr. Romney?s running mate, Paul Ryan, who watched Mr. Romney pretending to be empathic from a shelter in Virginia, where Mr. Ryan was pretending to feed a homeless orphan.

Mr. Romney?s new empathy record surpasses his previous mark, set seven days ago at a rally in Sidney, Ohio, where he pretended to give a shit about his audience for nearly an hour.

Tonight?s display of bogus sensitivity made a big impression on a post-debate focus group, as a majority of participants agreed with the statement, ?Mitt Romney has the facial expressions of someone who cares about me.?

Moments after the debate, Mr. Romney pronounced himself ?thoroughly drained? by the forced display of humanity.

?This empathy stuff is exhausting,? he told reporters. ?On Day One, it?s going to stop.?

Throughout the evening, Mr. Romney traded barbs with President Obama, the first black person he has talked to since his speech at the N.A.A.C.P.


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From marksafron at att.net  Wed Oct 17 12:56:28 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2012 12:56:28 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] =?windows-1252?q?Alan_Grayson=3A_Romney=92s_Sec?=
 =?windows-1252?q?ret_Plan_to_=5BFill_In_The_Blank=5D?=
Message-ID: <6EF75044-930C-404F-A5C0-366637818ED5@att.net>

Dear Mark:
I watched the Presidential Debate last night. There was a general absence of NASCAR moments, although Romney's insistence that the President actually didn't say what the President actually did say about the Benghazi attack came close. Leaving that aside, the impression that I was left with is that Romney is running a giant con game, and the American people are his marks. 

Romney has a secret plan to cut unemployment. 

Romney has a secret plan to eliminate the federal deficit. 

Romney has a secret plan to cut the cost of higher education. 

Romney has a secret plan to eliminate tax deductions and exemptions and credits.

Romney has a secret plan to cut federal spending. 

Romney has a secret plan for equal pay for women. 

Romney has a secret plan for healthcare reform. 

Yeah, right. Whatever. And that was just the first 30 minutes. 

This is showing my age, but I remember Richard Nixon's secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. As I pointed out in a speech on the Floor of the House, Nixon's secret plan was so secret that even Nixon didn't know it. Because it didn't exist; it was a campaign gimmick. But 1968 America was so hungry for peace that 43.4% of the voters bought it, and that was enough to put Nixon in the White House. Nixon then continued the war in Vietnam with US troops for four more years. At the cost of twenty thousand more American soldiers dead, and who knows how many Vietnamese? 

Over the metaphysical poker table, Romney is saying to the ghost of Nixon, "I'll see you one secret plan, and I'll raise you ten more." 

Many elections turn on the issue of credibility. This Presidential race will turn on the issue of gullibility. The Romney campaign begs the question: Are we really so easily taken in? Are we all babes in the woods? Did we all just crawl out of the cabbage patch? Has Uncle Sam become Uncle Sucker? 

I hope not. 
Alan Grayson
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From nsdusoir at mcn.org  Wed Oct 17 14:29:27 2012
From: nsdusoir at mcn.org (Howard Ennes)
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:29:27 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Letter to the Editor or Community Forum??
Message-ID: <3DE965B8-A13E-4913-9946-3C99D0C8540C@mcn.org>

My dear Connie ??

	Just in case your reporter didn't catch the commentary about foreclosures and eminent domain at the Board of Supervisors' meeting in Fort Bragg last Tuesday, perhaps you might consider this as a letter or for the Community Forum.
											
	This past Tuesday Oct. 16 several local Occupy people spoke before the Mendocino Board of Supervisors about the feasibility of using the peoples' power of eminent domain to break the strangle-hold that the big banks, with their fraudulent foreclosures procedures, have on our local economy.

	In my unsolicited role as an 'elder' of 95+ years I reminded the Board of what my friend Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1936:

	". . .  Economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America . . .  In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for.   Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike."

	And in words that seem quite relevant in 2012 he spoke of "the smooth evasion that says: Of course we believe these things. We believe in social security. We believe in work for the unemployed. We believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die! We believe in all these things. But we do not like the way that the present administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them, we will do more of them, we will do them better and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything!"

	I reminded the Board, also, that Jesus went into the Temple and cast out the money-changers, saying "My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves."

	Certainly I am no theologian, but I do know that the temple I live in now is Mendocino County and Fort Bragg in particular.  There is no place in my Temple for those who pillage and deal fraudulently with me and my friends.  

	With your power of Eminent Domain in Mendocino County, you can throw out  these thieves.  I hope you do it now.

											Howard Ennes,
											Fort Bragg





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From marksafron at att.net  Wed Oct 17 14:35:34 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:35:34 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Letter to the Editor or Community Forum??
In-Reply-To: <3DE965B8-A13E-4913-9946-3C99D0C8540C@mcn.org>
References: <3DE965B8-A13E-4913-9946-3C99D0C8540C@mcn.org>
Message-ID: <1F4D68BF-1254-4F47-AAF7-705243CB64EA@att.net>

I like it, but I would add the number of fraudulent foreclosures from Agnes' info.
Regards, Mark 

On Oct 17, 2012, at 2:29 PM, Howard Ennes wrote:

My dear Connie ??

	Just in case your reporter didn't catch the commentary about foreclosures and eminent domain at the Board of Supervisors' meeting in Fort Bragg last Tuesday, perhaps you might consider this as a letter or for the Community Forum.
											<PastedGraphic-1.tiff>
	This past Tuesday Oct. 16 several local Occupy people spoke before the Mendocino Board of Supervisors about the feasibility of using the peoples' power of eminent domain to break the strangle-hold that the big banks, with their fraudulent foreclosures procedures, have on our local economy.

	In my unsolicited role as an 'elder' of 95+ years I reminded the Board of what my friend Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1936:

	". . .  Economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America . . .  In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for.   Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike."

	And in words that seem quite relevant in 2012 he spoke of "the smooth evasion that says: Of course we believe these things. We believe in social security. We believe in work for the unemployed. We believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die! We believe in all these things. But we do not like the way that the present administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them, we will do more of them, we will do them better and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything!"

	I reminded the Board, also, that Jesus went into the Temple and cast out the money-changers, saying "My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves."

	Certainly I am no theologian, but I do know that the temple I live in now is Mendocino County and Fort Bragg in particular.  There is no place in my Temple for those who pillage and deal fraudulently with me and my friends.  

	With your power of Eminent Domain in Mendocino County, you can throw out  these thieves.  I hope you do it now.

											Howard Ennes,
											Fort Bragg






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From agnes at mcn.org  Wed Oct 17 20:04:55 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2012 20:04:55 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Letter to the Editor
Message-ID: <74F1038140274E9E92A0610212F09D83@toshibauser>


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Agnes Woolsey 
  To: ava at pacific.net 
  Cc: agnes at mcn.org ; CJ Holmes 
  Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2012 8:00 PM
  Subject: Re: Letter to the Editor 


  Letter to the Editor;

  A number of Occupy Mendocino members spoke before the County Board of Supervisors on October 16th in Fort Bragg Town Hall. We urged the Supervisors to use their oversight of landtitle matters , including eminent domain to halt foreclosures for the public good and demanding proof of title from the lenders. This would be a means of transferring the troubled securitized loans to the county if they set up a land bank as was done in Detroit. visit http://detroitworksproject.com/wp-contentuploads/policy audits/101222HR&AI PolicyAuditPublicLand.pdf
          According to CJ Holmes-of  Home Owners for Justice ,www.hofj.org     this would bring a new revenue stream to the county since the lenders of Securitized Loans cannot be proven  due to forged documents "robo-signed"- assignmnents and trustee substitutions and the foreclosures based on them that are already in county records prepared by banks and their lawyers. 
  The County could take possession of both the securitized loans and the foreclosures based on them, for just the cost of clerical work and re-issue modified loans to the property owners, thus creating a new revenue stream for the county.
  Real estate market transactions could return to normal . Low cost credit  could be available for county projects.The wealth of the community would stay for our benefit. 

  Please consider attending a Foreclosure Town Hall meeting  locally., possibly at the County Board of Supervisors Office on the first Tuesday in November. CJ Holmes will present powerful evidence that the foreclosure avalanche is getting worse as banks are moving  all their loan servicing and modifications to off-shore subsidieries, thereby circumventing the Attorney General Settlement and oversight by the U.S. Government .

  We urge you to let the Supervisors know you support their use of Eminent Domain. We at Occupy urge everyone to attend FTH, particularly elected representatives as this solution to the forclosure crisis is a golden opportunity to stop the destruction of our communities, jobs and hard won family finances.


  Sincerely,
  Agnes Woolsey,
  P.O. Box 163
  Mendocino
  937-2377
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From marksafron at att.net  Wed Oct 17 20:05:01 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2012 20:05:01 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] A binder full of women?
Message-ID: <B95DEF69-BF42-4570-AE6F-FE19EFC03729@att.net>

Oh Mitt, just one slip of the lip...

http://www.amazon.com/Avery-Durable-Binder-EZ-Turn-17032/product-reviews/B001B0CTMU/ref=cm_cr_dp_synop?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending#R2LS2JEOGCB6XC

From marksafron at att.net  Wed Oct 17 20:17:16 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2012 20:17:16 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Of course, there's always the truth.
Message-ID: <08969765-A886-4071-8290-4FF1FE4FDF63@att.net>


All Blogs  Talking Politics  Mind The Binder
Mind The Binder
Published Oct 16 2012, 10:46 PM by David S. Bernstein368
 

Hey, I know about that binder! And guess what -- Mitt Romney was lying about it.

From the rush transcript: 

CROWLEY: Governor Romney, pay equity for women?

ROMNEY: Thank you. An important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.

And I -- and I went to my staff, and I said, "How come all the people for these jobs are -- are all men." They said, "Well, these are the people that have the qualifications." And I said, "Well, gosh, can't we -- can't we find some -- some women that are also qualified?"

And -- and so we -- we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.

I went to a number of women's groups and said, "Can you help us find folks," and they brought us whole binders full of women.

I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my Cabinet and my senior staff, that the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states, and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America.

Now one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort.
Not a true story.

What actually happened was that in 2002 -- prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration -- a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.

They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.

I have written about this before, in various contexts; tonight I've checked with several people directly involved in the MassGAP effort who confirm that this history as I've just presented it is correct -- and that Romney's claim tonight, that he asked for such a study, is false.

I will write more about this later, but for tonight let me just make a few quick additional points. First of all, according to MassGAP and MWPC, Romney did appoint 14 women out of his first 33 senior-level appointments, which is a reasonably impressive 42 percent. However, as I have reported before, those were almost all to head departments and agencies that he didn't care about -- and in some cases, that he quite specifically wanted to not really do anything. None of the senior positions Romney cared about -- budget, business development, etc. -- went to women.

Secondly, a UMass-Boston study found that the percentage of senior-level appointed positions held by women actually declined throughout the Romney administration, from 30.0% prior to his taking office, to 29.7% in July 2004, to 27.6% near the end of his term in November 2006. (It then began rapidly rising when Deval Patrick took office.)

Third, note that in Romney's story as he tells it, this man who had led and consulted for businesses for 25 years didn't know any qualified women, or know where to find any qualified women. So what does that say?

READ MORE: Mitt Romney's Shadow Years 

Filed Under: Mitt Romney, 2012 Elections, Presidential Debates
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From agnes at mcn.org  Thu Oct 18 07:47:28 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 07:47:28 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Letter to the Editor ,revised date
Message-ID: <E4E1A052BFB349C68E3BCA9541E0ADE0@toshibauser>





  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Agnes Woolsey 
  To: ava at pacific.net 
  Cc: agnes at mcn.org ; CJ Holmes 
  Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2012 8:00 PM
  Subject: Re: Letter to the Editor 


   Letter to the Editor; see revised date, please.

  A number of Occupy Mendocino members spoke before the County Board of Supervisors on October 16th in Fort Bragg Town Hall. We urged the Supervisors to use their oversight of landtitle matters , including eminent domain to halt foreclosures for the public good and demanding proof of title from the lenders. This would be a means of transferring the troubled securitized loans to the county if they set up a land bank as was done in Detroit. visit http://detroitworksproject.com/wp-contentuploads/policy audits/101222HR&AI PolicyAuditPublicLand.pdf
          According to CJ Holmes-of  Home Owners for Justice ,www.hofj.org     this would bring a new revenue stream to the county since the lenders of Securitized Loans cannot be proven  due to forged documents "robo-signed"- assignmnents and trustee substitutions and the foreclosures based on them that are already in county records prepared by banks and their lawyers. 
  The County could take possession of both the securitized loans and the foreclosures based on them, for just the cost of clerical work and re-issue modified loans to the property owners, thus creating a new revenue stream for the county.
  Real estate market transactions could return to normal . Low cost credit  could be available for county projects.The wealth of the community would stay for our benefit. 

  Please consider attending a Foreclosure Town Hall meeting  locally, a date and place to be announced. CJ Holmes will present powerful evidence that the foreclosure avalanche is getting worse as banks are moving  all their loan servicing and modifications to off-shore subsidieries, thereby circumventing the Attorney General Settlement and oversight by the U.S. Government .

  We urge you to let the Supervisors know you support their use of Eminent Domain. We at Occupy urge everyone to attend FTH, particularly elected representatives as this solution to the forclosure crisis is a golden opportunity to stop the destruction of our communities, jobs and hard won family finances.


  Sincerely,
  Agnes Woolsey,
  P.O. Box 163
  Mendocino
  937-2377
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From jupiter at mcn.org  Thu Oct 18 10:28:12 2012
From: jupiter at mcn.org (Linda Jupiter)
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 10:28:12 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] eminent domain and communities setting
	precedents fot the BOS
In-Reply-To: <73848810EF9148C9B3A8BF72ADBFA5BA@toshibauser>
References: <73848810EF9148C9B3A8BF72ADBFA5BA@toshibauser>
Message-ID: <7882AFAF-A762-4FC4-955D-E2F942167657@mcn.org>

Great work, Sheila and Agnes.
Thanks,
Linda



On Oct 16, 2012, at 8:10 PM, Agnes Woolsey wrote:

> If you are wondering about the feasability of counties to transfer  
> foreclosed and tax delinquent properties read this. I sent it to the  
> Bos. Thanks to Sheila Dawn who told me and Dan Hamburg in a letter  
> she gave him. Hooray Sheila, reporter and researcher!
> Thanks for all the wonderful support and emails- all 10 of you.
> Love you bunches,
> Agnes
> http://detroitworksproject.com/wp-content/uploads/policy_audits/101222_HR&A_1_Policy_Audit_Public_Land.pdf
> TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list send an email to occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org 
>  put "Un-Subscribe me" in the Subject.
>
> For listserv technical problems please contact: listmanager at mcn.org

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From marksafron at att.net  Thu Oct 18 11:45:35 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 11:45:35 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Romney's Bain Capital to Send High-Tech Jobs to
	China Right Before the Election
Message-ID: <548EF502-3C7A-4A33-BF9A-E59C57B0B142@att.net>

Romney's Bain Capital to Send High-Tech Jobs to China Right Before the Election

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

17 October 12

 
The story of Sensata Technologies is about the hollowing out of America's economy by a rapacious 1 percent.
On the day before an election that's supposed to hinge on jobs, taxes and the middle class, Bain Capital, the company Mitt Romney founded, will close the doors of a factory in Freeport, Illinois, and ship 170 good, high-tech jobs to China.

The employees of Sensata Technologies were forced to train their Chinese replacements, and the American flag that long flew over the factory was reportedly removed while the Chinese engineers were visiting the site. A group of workers have set up camp across from the factory - calling it "Bainport" - and some supporters have tried to block the trucks hauling equipment out of the plant. According to Dave Johnson, there have been several arrests.

Sensata workers have asked to meet with Mitt Romney and hoped to enlist his help keeping their jobs in the United States, but he has refused, instead remaining on the campaign trail where he speaks often about "getting tough" with China.

The most important part of the story is that Sensata Technologies is profitable operating in Illinois. Net income last year was $355 million, up 16 percent from 2010. The company reported total revenues of $1.8 billion in 2011, up almost 19 percent from the year before. According to a company financial statement, "both 2011 net revenue and adjusted net income represent record levels for the company."

So this has nothing to do with "making hard choices" in the process of turning around a failing business, which is how the Romney campaign describes Bain's corporate raiding. Bain's partners are looking for a modest boost in profits by locating the plant closer to the booming Asian automotive market (Sensata makes high-tech automotive parts). They'll get a small tax break for relocating the plant - the one Mitt Romney insisted did not exist during the first debate - and possibly defer taxes on some of the income the company generates.

It takes both capital and labor to make a successful business like Sensata Technologies. In order to make a few more bucks, 170 of the people who helped make the company thrive will be cast aside like so much trash. The layoffs will surely have a ripple-effect in Freeport - a town of 25,000 with a declining population and a poverty rate well above the national average. The move is the epitome of corporate America's lack of patriotism - it's capital unmoored from any sense of responsibility for the people that make the profits or the communities where they live. The city passed a resolution Monday asking Romney to intervene.

But the Sensata story has, so far, had little impact on the presidential race, mostly because Mitt Romney has no direct involvement in the operations of the company he established (despite continuing to make millions as a "passive retired partner"). But this is reading the story of Bain Capital too narrowly. Mitt Romney is directly responsible for its business model.

As Tom Gaulrapp - a lifelong resident of Freeport and 33-year employee of Sensata - told the Huffington Post's Amanda Terkel, "They're still using his business model. He's the one who taught them how to do this. These guys were put there by him. So you can say he doesn't run the day-to-day operations, but he's still at blame for the way they do business."

Mitt Romney started the firm, and built it up on a strategy of buying firms with little money down, loading them with debt, raiding their pension funds and breaking their unions and then "harvesting them" - in his words - for a profit. Romney is the only person to ever serve as Bain's CEO - since his departure, the firm has been run by a managing committee.

The story is bigger than Sensata, and bigger than Bain. The issue is the turn America's corporate culture has taken, and what the consequences of its model are for our economy and, indeed, our society. And it is Mitt Romney's embrace of that model - ravage capitalism that is loyal to no nation-state and blind to every human virtue but profit - that should be disqualifying.

In the New York Times, Chrystia Freeland, author of "Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else," wrote (sent out on 10/14 M.S.)  about the historical tendency of elites to self-destruct by extracting wealth from the broader community to such a degree that the society becomes dysfunctional and mired by social problems. She recalls how the Venetians became the most prosperous society in the world during the 14th century by opening their economy to a broad swath of the population. Then, at the height of its golden age, "the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d?Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren?t on it, you couldn?t join the ruling oligarchy."

She then notes parallels to the United States, which featured one of the most egalitarian economies through much of the last century, but is now plagued by rising inequality and decreasing economic mobility. She writes:

The 1 percent cannot evade its share of responsibility for the growing gulf in American society. Economic forces may be behind the rising inequality, but as Peter R. Orszag, President Obama?s former budget chief, told me, public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends. 

Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent... 

Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. This is the new [Venice]. An elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enrolled their daughters in an exclusive private school; I?ve done the same with mine.
Much of this is the result of the 30-year assault on organized labor. It's worth noting that Sensata Technologies is a non-union shop, which is a big reason the firm can move profitable operations abroad without much resistance.

Employment, in raw jobs numbers, should not be the defining issue of this election viewed in isolation. We also need to consider what kinds of jobs are being created. A recent study conducted by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) found that while only 21 percent of the jobs lost during the recession were low-paying (with median hourly wages from $7.69 to $13.83), a majority of those created during the recovery - 58 percent - have come with such low wages.

These trends are not Mitt Romney's doing, but he is the walking, talking personification of what's been happening in the American economy. Mitt Romney was an innovator in offshoring. He and his family will make a few more dollars as a result of shipping those jobs to China, at the expense of the workers who "built that" in the first place. That's why the story of Sensata Technologies should have an impact in this race.


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From adross at mcn.org  Thu Oct 18 13:51:49 2012
From: adross at mcn.org (Ad Ross)
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 13:51:49 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] republican tax plan
Message-ID: <7419D352-15D4-4A2C-92AA-880BB9C726B2@mcn.org>


http://www.romneytaxplan.com/



-------------------------------------------

Sent from my obsolete desktop.

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From sanutter at mcn.org  Thu Oct 18 15:20:39 2012
From: sanutter at mcn.org (susan nutter)
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 15:20:39 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] OBAMA PHONEBANKS NEED OCCUPIERS
Message-ID: <2B8F6CC2DA2642F5AD18BBC21D08CAC7@nutter>

COME OCCUPY A PHONEBANK. LET SANUTTER at MCN.ORG KNOW IF YOU CAN COME. BRING YOUR CELL PHONE AND CHARGER. LET SNUTTER KNOW IF YOU NEED A PHONE.  OBAMA NEEDS OCCUPY MENDOCINO'S SUPPORT.

PHONE BATTLEGROUND STATES FOR OBAMA

 

Phonebanks at Living Light Conference Room, ground floor rear of The Company Store, 301 Main St., Fort Bragg; park in lot on West Redwood Ave.:

 

Saturday, October 20,          1pm - 4pm

 

Phonebanks at Harbor Lite Lodge Conference Room, 120 N. Harbor Drive, Fort Bragg; park in lot on right:

 

Sunday, October 21, 4pm - 7pm

Tuesday, October 23,            4pm - 7pm

Wednesday, October 24,     4pm - 7pm

Thursday, October 25,           4pm - 7pm

Friday, October 26,                4pm - 7pm

Saturday, October 27,           4pm - 7pm

 

Sunday, October 28,              4pm - 7pm

Monday, October 29,             4pm - 7pm

Tuesday, October 30,           4pm - 7pm

 

Phonebanks at Living Light Conference Room, ground floor rear of The Company Store,  301 Main St., Fort Bragg; park in lot on West Redwood Ave.:

 

Wednesday, October 31,     4pm - 7pm

Thursday, November 1,      12 - 3pm

             3 - 6pm                      

Friday, November 2,           12 - 3pm 

             3 - 6pm 

Saturday, November 3,       12 - 3pm 

              3 - 6pm 

Sunday, November 4,          12 - 3pm 

    3 - 6pm

 

Phonebanks at Harbor Lite Lodge Conference Room, 120 N. Harbor Drive, Fort Bragg; park in lot on right:

 

Monday, November 5           10am - 1pm

    1pm - 4pm 

Tuesday, November 6,         10am - 1pm

    1pm - 4pm ELECTION DAY

 
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From agnes at mcn.org  Thu Oct 18 16:06:11 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:06:11 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: [Occupy Homes Planning] D6 2012: Reclaim Our
	Homes, Reclaim Our Future
Message-ID: <17163CE8109E41E3A4ABEA49C7128171@toshibauser>

Any one can sign up for these teleconferences.from Agnes
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Lisa Wuriu 
To: california-occupy-homes at googlegroups.com ; foreclosurepreventionzones at googlegroups.com 
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2012 12:12 PM
Subject: Fw: [Occupy Homes Planning] D6 2012: Reclaim Our Homes, Reclaim Our Future


Occupy Our Homes is asking organizations and Occupy groups to participate in a nationwide December 6 "Reclaim Our Homes, Reclaim Our Future" Day of Action. Let's discuss this on our next Tues conference call.  I'm looking forward to hearing your ideas for actions.  
Lisa

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Matt Browner Hamlin 
To: Foreclosure D-6 List 
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2012 7:40 AM
Subject: [Occupy Homes Planning] D6 2012: Reclaim Our Homes, Reclaim Our Future








12.6.12: ?Reclaim Our Homes, Reclaim Our Future?


Four years after an economic meltdown precipitated by Wall Street greed, fraud, and recklessness in the housing market, Americans continue to face an epidemic of unjust foreclosures. While homeowners and renters seek help to keep their homes, banks have rushed to foreclose and evict, and in too many communities, homes remain vacant while neighbors sleep on the street. 

But homeowners, housing justice activists, homeless advocates, and occupiers have come together to fight back under the banner of the Occupy Our Homes movement. Community organizations and occupy groups came together last December to challenge the housing crisis and confront the crooks at the banks who are stealing our homes. On December 6, 2011, scores of groups around the country participated in a day of action for housing justice, launching the Occupy Our Homes movement.

Homeowners, renters, and the homeless joined forces to fight the banks and reclaim our communities. All over the country, activists declared housing a human right. We came together, occupying our homes to prevent eviction, disrupting foreclosure auctions, restoring vacant homes to community use, and protesting the banks that caused this mess in the first place.

And we showed time and again that when people fought for their homes, they could win.

But the fight is far from over. Despite dozens of victories for homeowners around the country, banks are still choosing to foreclose instead of taking payments. Banks are still refusing to negotiate with families who seek only a fair solution that keeps them in their home. Banks are still using fraudulent tactics like robo-signing to speed through illegal foreclosures?months after a weak settlement meant to stop this practice. Bank-owned houses continue to sit empty and untended, destroying property values and pushing more and more families underwater.

A year since the start of the Occupy Our Homes movement, we are recommitting to reclaiming our homes and our futures. On Thursday December 6th 2012, we call on communities to turn the spotlight on the crisis that continues to hold our neighborhoods and our economy hostage.  

We will take action together:

  a.. Eviction defenses/home occupations 
  b.. Reclaiming vacant homes for the homeless 
  c.. Establishing foreclosure and eviction-free zones 
  d.. Foreclosure auction sit-ins 
  e.. Marches on the banks 

Occupy Our Homes started with a simple idea: bring the bold, creative energy of the Occupy movement into hard-hit communities and build power through victories for the 99%. We've won homes, churches, community landmarks, and stopped evictions while relieving debt and reclaiming land along the way.

On Thursday December 6th, 2012, we?ll re-invest in this movement to defend our homes, hold Wall Street accountable, and affirm the human right to housing. Join us in solidarity with homeowners, tenants and the homeless to build a just housing system?for the 99%. 

If you as an individual or any Occupy group or community-based organization are interested in participating in the D6 actions, please complete this form and someone from Occupy Our Homes will be in touch.

This release is viewable online at http://www.occupyourhomes.org/blog/2012/oct/16/12612Announcement/.


www.OccupyOurHomes.org


-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Foreclosure/OWS Action Planning" group.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to foreclosure-ows-day-of-action+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foreclosure-ows-day-of-action?hl=en-US.
 
 
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From agnes at mcn.org  Thu Oct 18 16:19:29 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:19:29 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] eminent domain and communities setting
	precedents fot the BOS
References: <73848810EF9148C9B3A8BF72ADBFA5BA@toshibauser>
	<7882AFAF-A762-4FC4-955D-E2F942167657@mcn.org>
Message-ID: <694405E4E85D4D84A231DE4EEBE17A99@toshibauser>

You're welcome, Linda. I spoke to the "Love in Action" meeting at St. Michael'sEpisc.Church today telling them about Occupy's involvement in Home Owners for Justice and the need tofind a venue for the Forclosure Town Hall meetingat which CJ would speak. I await a response from the office staff (absent today). If anyone has ideas where and when we should have a FTH meeting please bring ideas or contacts to the Sat. G.A. meeting.
Agnes
  ----- Original 
  Message ----- 
  From: Linda Jupiter 
  To: Sheila Dawn Tracy ; Agnes Woolsey 
  Cc: occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org 
  Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2012 10:28 AM
  Subject: Re: [Occupymendocino] eminent domain and communities setting precedents fot the BOS


  Great work, Sheila and Agnes.
  Thanks,

  Linda






  On Oct 16, 2012, at 8:10 PM, Agnes Woolsey wrote:


    If you are wondering about the feasability of counties to transfer foreclosed and tax delinquent properties read this. I sent it to the Bos. Thanks to Sheila Dawn who told me and Dan Hamburg in a letter she gave him. Hooray Sheila, reporter and researcher!
    Thanks for all the wonderful support and emails- all 10 of you.
    Love you bunches,
    Agnes
    http://detroitworksproject.com/wp-content/uploads/policy_audits/101222_HR&A_1_Policy_Audit_Public_Land.pdf 
    TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list send an email to occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org put "Un-Subscribe me" in the Subject.

    For listserv technical problems please contact: listmanager at mcn.org


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From marksafron at att.net  Fri Oct 19 17:48:42 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2012 17:48:42 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Call for agenda items
Message-ID: <8500E0C2-F832-4C49-B513-2BC9CF2B85C7@att.net>

Send them to me, please.
marksafron at att.net 


From agnes at mcn.org  Fri Oct 19 19:01:33 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2012 19:01:33 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Town Hall meeting date?
Message-ID: <CB100F2B076E45F58ED06E5FEB3FAF06@toshibauser>

please keep this in mind for the Saturday GA meetingat the Senior Center. Please explore where we might show this in an evening.
Agnes
----- Original Message ----- 
From: CJ Holmes 
To: Agnes Woolsey 
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2012 9:21 AM
Subject: RE: Town Hall meeting date?


This week and next week are pretty booked (16, 18, 20, 21, 24, 27).

Maybe week after that?  evening is fine, or weekend is open.  Let me know what date and I'll get it on the calendar.  Here is the FTH requirements.  Thanks for all your efforts and support.  cj

 

Seating for as many as are expected to attend:

Churches

School auditoriums

 

Equipment:

Microphone system

Projector screen for presentations

Podium to hold laptop

Table for projector (I have a projector)

Electrical cord

Table at door for donations and name tags

 

Plan approx 3 hours of use:

? hr setting up

1.5 hr for presentations

30 min Q&A

? putting things away

 

MOST IMPORTANT:

Please make a priority to get all county supervisors there including their staff, the county attorney(s), county recorder, and as many local citizens as possible. 

 

p.s. A good part of OM is occupied with election phone baking now. I expect more support after Nov. 6th. Like you I feel this can't wait.  People are being shut out of their homes.  
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From agnes at mcn.org  Sat Oct 20 09:23:08 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2012 09:23:08 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Letter to the Editor ,revised date
References: <E4E1A052BFB349C68E3BCA9541E0ADE0@toshibauser>
	<SNT145-W120CC9909F29C67327EAF01DD760@phx.gbl>,
	<54C054A959C34E769EB6D9B9A6978C5E@toshibauser>
	<SNT145-W103F5EA6840E61D4EA414F4DD750@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <79479E40F4A24398A769A9E14BE3FB20@toshibauser>

Today the 20th is the third Saturday of October. Please come to the Senior Center at 2:00 pm and help me plan at the General Assembly FTH meeting with the public. I need help with publicity. I need help contacting elected officials to come to the Foreclosure Town Hall meeting. I will work for the Obama Phone bank on Sunday but please, phone bankers, come to the Occupy meeting today. We can't abandon the homeless due to foreclosures by the dirty banksters and their lawyers.
Agnes
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Ann Rennacker 
  To: agnes woolsey 
  Sent: Friday, October 19, 2012 1:14 PM
  Subject: RE: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Letter to the Editor ,revised date


  Agnes, I think our next meeting is a week from Saturday, not tomorrow.  I have another event to attend, in Boonville, which is an opportunity to meet Jared Huffman in Boonville and enlist his help with a lot of our Ocean Protection issues.  He is a candidate for Congress and very progressive, and the event is hosted by John & Barbara Lewellyn.  Some of us a carpooling and we are meeting at the Harvest Mkt parking lot and leaving at 12 noon.  The event is 1-3 in Boonville.  Call David Gurney (961-1339) to see if there is room in his van if you want to attend - Jared Huffman will look at your letter and listen to your proposal, and he can sponsor bills and influence lawmakers.  Good chance to network.  Or contact John at 895-3270.  You are like a pit bull with a bone - in an old lady costume!  I'm impressed & inspired by your courage.   Ann
   


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  From: agnes at mcn.org
  To: annxpress at live.com
  Subject: Re: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Letter to the Editor ,revised date
  Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:51:55 -0700


  We need to decide on a date and place locally tomorrow.
  Agnes

  ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Ann Rennacker 
    To: richard karch ; agnes woolsey 
    Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2012 9:16 AM
    Subject: RE: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Letter to the Editor ,revised date


    Good Agnes.  When CJ Holmes comes to do a presentation, we must invite Dan Gjerde, Meg Courtney, Mayor Dave Turner, Marie Jones, other key players in the City & County Gov't to attend and get them fired up about this solution to many problems here.  Ann
     


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    From: agnes at mcn.org
    To: advocatenews at mcn.org
    Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 07:47:28 -0700
    CC: occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org; udj at pacific.net
    Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Letter to the Editor ,revised date






      ----- Original Message ----- 
      From: Agnes Woolsey 
      To: ava at pacific.net 
      Cc: agnes at mcn.org ; CJ Holmes 
      Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2012 8:00 PM
      Subject: Re: Letter to the Editor 


       Letter to the Editor; see revised date, please.

      A number of Occupy Mendocino members spoke before the County Board of Supervisors on October 16th in Fort Bragg Town Hall. We urged the Supervisors to use their oversight of landtitle matters , including eminent domain to halt foreclosures for the public good and demanding proof of title from the lenders. This would be a means of transferring the troubled securitized loans to the county if they set up a land bank as was done in Detroit. visit http://detroitworksproject.com/wp-contentuploads/policy audits/101222HR&AI PolicyAuditPublicLand.pdf
              According to CJ Holmes-of  Home Owners for Justice ,www.hofj.org     this would bring a new revenue stream to the county since the lenders of Securitized Loans cannot be proven  due to forged documents "robo-signed"- assignmnents and trustee substitutions and the foreclosures based on them that are already in county records prepared by banks and their lawyers. 
      The County could take possession of both the securitized loans and the foreclosures based on them, for just the cost of clerical work and re-issue modified loans to the property owners, thus creating a new revenue stream for the county.
      Real estate market transactions could return to normal . Low cost credit  could be available for county projects.The wealth of the community would stay for our benefit. 

      Please consider attending a Foreclosure Town Hall meeting  locally, a date and place to be announced. CJ Holmes will present powerful evidence that the foreclosure avalanche is getting worse as banks are moving  all their loan servicing and modifications to off-shore subsidieries, thereby circumventing the Attorney General Settlement and oversight by the U.S. Government .

      We urge you to let the Supervisors know you support their use of Eminent Domain. We at Occupy urge everyone to attend FTH, particularly elected representatives as this solution to the forclosure crisis is a golden opportunity to stop the destruction of our communities, jobs and hard won family finances.


      Sincerely,
      Agnes Woolsey,
      P.O. Box 163
      Mendocino
      937-2377

    TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list send an email to occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org put "Un-Subscribe me" in the Subject. For listserv technical problems please contact: listmanager at mcn.org
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From agnes at mcn.org  Sat Oct 20 11:16:25 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2012 11:16:25 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] dateand place for Foreclosure Town Hall Meeting
Message-ID: <7D22C94C111E429D9DA6C7EA73F158AC@toshibauser>

Attention Fighting Foreclsures committee members and other active members: Please come to the GA today.       For the Foreclosure Town Hall meeting with CJ,  I have tentatively reserved the F.B. Public Library Community Room for October 25th -6:30-9:30 pm and will see if CJ can attend, if not we can change the date to Nov.1,2012. We need help with publicity and outreach.
Urgently,
Agnes
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From agnes at mcn.org  Sat Oct 20 17:39:37 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2012 17:39:37 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: BOS email addresses
Message-ID: <2D373E824DC64FF8A1679437126C4E03@toshibauser>


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Janet Clark 
To: agnes at mcn.org 
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2012 11:04 AM
Subject: BOS email addresses


Good morning, Agnes.

I'm sorry I didn't get to this email quicker; it's been a very busy morning.
Here are the email addresses you requested:

mccowen at co.mendocino.ca.us
browncj at co.mendocino.ca.us
pinchesj at co.mendocino.ca.us
smithk at co.mendocino.ca.us
hamburgd at co.mendocino.ca.us

I hope this info. will be helpful.

Thank you for contacting the Board of Supervisors,



Janet Clark
Administrative Assistant
Board of Supervisors
& Executive Office
Office: (707) 463-4441
Desk: (707) 463-7225
Fax: (707) 463-5649
clarkj at co.mendocino.ca.us
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From agnes at mcn.org  Sun Oct 21 09:52:51 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2012 09:52:51 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: place and date to be annonced
Message-ID: <95C9828EDF9B476CAA5AC9E0624A8F05@toshibauser>


  From: Agnes Woolsey 
  To: CJ Holmes 
  Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2012 11:10 AM
  Subject: place and date for FTH- Fort Bragg


  Dear CJ,
             The small group attending the Occupy General assembly (8)decided we needed two weeks of leg work so that we could rally an audience for you at a later date maybe inDecember. I was not happy with this but many high energy folks are working on the phone bank.
  More patience needed,
  Agnes- 
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From marksafron at att.net  Sun Oct 21 10:51:47 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2012 10:51:47 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Foreclosure Meeting poster.
Message-ID: <FD8E2356-0D5F-4BE5-9285-CB6A86C25BDC@att.net>



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From marksafron at att.net  Sun Oct 21 11:06:31 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2012 11:06:31 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] P.S. on poster
Message-ID: <DED11853-9113-44C4-97E0-F8C3B25460FE@att.net>

I need to drive someone to an appointment in S.F.  Any corrections or suggestions should be made before 4 PM today (Sunday) If you want this sent to the printer on Monday. 

Otherwise, I should be back by Monday PM.
Regards, Mark 

From agnes at mcn.org  Sun Oct 21 14:05:04 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2012 14:05:04 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Eminent Domain- a solution to foreclosure
Message-ID: <89EE2DAC8F4E4911915E7AA95A096B6E@toshibauser>

Steve,
 Jed Davis of  Potter Valley wants to work with Occupy Ukiah to call for a Foreclosure Town Hall in Ukiah. Please contact him at 621-0484. We are organizing for one in F.B.
Annie , please print this in your Independent News if possible.
Love ya,
Agnes Woolsey
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Agnes Woolsey 
To: Ukiah Daily Journal 
Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2012 1:53 PM
Subject: Fw: Eminent Domain- a solution to foreclosure



----- Original Message ----- 
From: Agnes Woolsey 
To: Editor Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2012 1:51 PM
Subject: Eminent Domain- a solution to foreclosure


Letter to the Editor;
About ten members of Occupy Mendocino attended the 10/16/12 Board of Supervisors Meeting in FortBragg. We presented a solution to the foreclosure crisis inviting them to a Foreclosure Town Hall Meeting where CJ Holmes would present information, basically this.

The Board of Supervisors, who oversee landtitle matters have the option of  HALTING FORECLOSURES BY "EMINENT DOMAINING" THE TROUBLED SECURITIZED LOANS AND DEMANDING PROOF OF TITLE from the lenders.

Clear title cannot be proven due to the millions of forged robo-signed-assignments and trustee substitutions already in county records prepared by banks and their lawyers that deem themselves above the law.

With no lender to prove ownership of these loans there would be no one to compensate. For just the cost of clerical work the county could reissue modified loans to property owners,the county could take possession of both the securitized loans and the foreclosures based on them. Plenty of low cost credit would be available for county projectse 

 With  the  establishment of a public bank, real estate  markets could return to normal. Low cost credit would be available for county projects, the  wealth of the community would remain in the community for community benefit.

We urge everyone to attend Foreclosure Town Halls, particularly elected representatives as these solutions to the foreclosure crisis are the people's golden opportunity to stop the sabotage and destruction of their communities, jobs, hard won family finances for their future.
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From rkarch at mcn.org  Sun Oct 21 23:19:59 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2012 23:19:59 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Bill Moyers-Matt Taibbi | The 1%'s Power and
	Privileges
Message-ID: <2E2C14E9-3EF3-460C-A6C7-C855755C5CDA@mcn.org>

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/14116-the-1s-power-and-privileges

he One Percent is not only increasing their share of wealth - they're using it to spread millions among political candidates who serve their interests. Example: Goldman Sachs, which gave more money than any other major American corporation to Barack Obama in 2008, is switching alliances this year; their employees have given $900,000 both to Mitt Romney's campaign and to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future. Why? Because, says the Wall Street Journal, the Goldman Sachs gang felt betrayed by President Obama's modest attempts at financial reform.
To discuss how the super-rich have willfully confused their self-interest with America's interest, Bill is joined by Rolling Stone magazine's Matt Taibbi, who regularly shines his spotlight on scandals involving big business and government, and journalist Chrystia Freeland, author of the new book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.

"We have this community of rich people who genuinely believe that they are the wealth creators and they should get every advantage and break," Taibbi tells Bill. "Whereas everybody else is a parasite and they're living off of them."

Freeland adds, "You know, 2008 is not so long ago, and already, the anti-regulation chorus is so strong. How dare they have the gall to actually argue that too much regulation of American financial services is what is killing the economy?"
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From Syd at mcn.org  Mon Oct 22 14:02:25 2012
From: Syd at mcn.org (SYD BALOWS)
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:02:25 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fwd: Winds of change ?
References: <8EBCB3FF-5E3E-483B-AA1B-11CC903F9252@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <2F92939B-3657-4901-8BD9-100DC82102A1@mcn.org>



> 
> 
>>> 
>>> To all,
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> I did not write this but I have espoused
>>> 
>>> these concepts for quite a period of time..
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> I am interested in your opinions on it.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> Marvin
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Subject: Fwd: Winds of change ? 
>>> Sent: Thu, Oct 18, 2012 2:08:38 PM
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>>              
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> Proposed Congressional Reform Act of 2012:
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> Winds of Change.....
>>> 
>>> Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward
>>> 
>>> This email to a minimum of twenty people on their
>>> 
>>> Address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> In three days, most people in The United States of America will have this message.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> *Congressional Reform Act of 2012
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 1. No Tenure / No Pension.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they're out of office.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> The Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.
>>> 
>>> 3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise.Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 12/31/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> Congressmen/women made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their
>>> 
>>> Term(S), then go home and back to work.
>>> 
>>> If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S. ) to receive
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> The message. Don't you think it's time?
>>> 
>>> THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> If you agree with the above, pass it on. If not, just delete.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> You are one of my 20+ - Please keep it going, and thanks.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 
>>> ----------
>>> From: Pomeranz, Harold <harold.pomeranz at stifel.com>
>>> Date: Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 12:06 PM
>>> To: Paula Cantor <pfc903 at aol.com>, Paul Schlossberg <paul at dfwconsulting.net>, Paul Lieberman <pilldoc306 at gmail.com>
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>> 
>>> Begin forwarded message:
>>> 
>>>> From: Marvin Broitman <mbroit at optonline.net>
>>>> Date: October 21, 2012 10:53:46 AM EDT
>>>> To: Ronee <ronee1122 at aol.com>, <jbroit at optonline.net>, Broitman Leeza <leebroit at gmail.com>, <ruthmb at optonline.net>, <stanpb at optonline.net>, Broitman David <dbroitman at gmail.com>, <shellysimon at optonline.net>, <sjmorris at Rampartinsurance.com>, Zinner Stan <stanzinner2002 at yahoo.com>, "Paul Lieberman" <pilldoc306 at gmail.com>, Don Office Rose <DonaldRRose at verizon.net>, <harold.pomeranz at stifel.com>, <charles.holzberg at rampartlife.com>, "Myrna Holzberg Hom" <myrhol at aol.com>, <nmparsoff at aol.com>
>>>> Subject: FW: Fwd: Winds of change ?
>>>> 
>>> ********************************************************************************
>>> All electronic messages sent and received by Stifel Nicolaus
>>> Associates are subject to review by Stifel Nicolaus.  Stifel Nicolaus
>>> may retain and reproduce electronic messages for state, federal, or
>>> other regulatory agencies as required by applicable law.  
>>> IMPORTANT: Please do not use e-mail to request or authorize the
>>> purchase or sale of any security or commodity, send fund transfer
>>> instructions, or otherwise conduct any securities transactions.  Any 
>>> requests, orders, instructions, or time-sensitive messages sent by
>>> e-mail cannot be accepted or processed by Stifel Nicolaus.  The 
>>> accuracy of any information sent by Stifel Nicolaus through e-mail 
>>> cannot be warranted or guaranteed by Stifel Nicolaus or its affiliates.
>>>  
>>> Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated
>>> Member NYSE & SIPC
>>> Headquarters:  501 N. Broadway, St. Louis, MO   63102
>>> 314-342-2000
>>> 
>>> Stifel Nicolaus Canada Inc.
>>> Member IIROC & CIPF
>>> Headquarters: 79 Wellington St W, 21st Floor, Toronto, ON M5K 1B7
>>> 416-815-0888
>>> 
>>> ********************************************************************************
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 

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From sheila.dawn50 at yahoo.com  Mon Oct 22 16:24:13 2012
From: sheila.dawn50 at yahoo.com (Sheila Dawn)
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:24:13 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Occupymendocino] GA Minutes of Oct. 20th
Message-ID: <1350948253.16668.YahooMailNeo@web112309.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>

Facilitator: Mark
Stacker: Claire
Secretary: Sheila

???? A group of seven attended the GA in the new meeting room (off the side entrance) at the Senior Center.
???? An hour of the meeting was spent on the first two agenda items: Getting feedback from those who attended the Oct 16th BOS-(Bd. of Supervisors) meeting at the Ft. Bragg Town Hall and discussing the possibility of having CJ Holmes come to Ft. Bragg to inform officials and the public on what is involved in having the County take over foreclosures of properties without clear ownership of loan documentation.
???? Agnes would like to get the item of Foreclosure Town Hall on the Supervisors agenda. She has inquired about places to have that mtg. but has had no responses.? She also tentatively reserved the Library on two successive Thurs. evening dates for a community forum on foreclosure.
???? Sheila reported that she handed a letter to Supervisor Smith supporting the need for a local solution to the current foreclosure problem and referencing two books, The Occupy Handbook edited by Janet Byrne and Citizen Moore by Roger Rapoport which address solutions to the problem.? In particular, the last chapter if the Michael Moore book specifically speaks to operating 'Land Banks' that are county run in Moore's home county of Genessee, Michigan. Moore book specifically speaks to operating 'Land Banks' that are county run in Moore's home county of Genessee, Michigan. 
??? She also posted two flyers giving CJ's website on bulletin boards in both Albion & Mendocino.
??? Tommy, whose home is currently in foreclosure, reported being in contact with Mike Thompson's office. He said they listened, allowed him to fax documents to the bank from their office but essentially had no power to influence the banks in their proceedings. He also mentioned the banks had no record of receiving the faxes he sent. He will be leaving the area within the next two months for Florida to help aging relatives.
??? In response to Sheila's comment that we need to establish a base of support from homeowners & community groups who are trying to deal with the effects of foreclosures, Mark suggested putting up a poster to encourage people to contact? designated OM members to network with others who wish to put energy into a Town Foreclosure meeting.

?Several suggestions were offered in getting ,not only the numbers of foreclosures in Fort Bragg, (Zillow.com) but also names and contact info. Sheila noted that in Lake County that info was posted outside the Tax Assessor's office. Tommy volunteered to check out that possibility while in Ukiah.
? Agnes said she would need help from a coordinating committee to help contact the various individuals and community groups who showed interest.
? It was also stated that a firm commitment from BOS and City Council members to attend the meeting where CJ Holmes would present info on foreclosure solutions was necessary.
? Agnes noted that Gov't programs to help home owners through HAMP & HARP are being shut down.
?? Several members committed to following up with a phone call to local officials to encourage their support.
?
?? A threefold motion was made by Claire: Contact the groups that participated in the Love in Action meeting attended by Agnes to see if they wish to? support a Foreclosure Town Hall meeting; put out flyers in coastal towns to get? people with foreclosure problems interested in the same; contact individual Supervisors and City Council members to ascertain their commitment to the idea. It was approved with Agnes voting against.? She stated she did not want to put off the meeting with CJ until a later undetermined date.

Finances: $22 was collected from members. It will go to the Treasurer and a financial report was hoped to be received by Jessie at the next meeting.

?? In other agenda items, Mark reported that the Go Daddy website is anxious not to lose our business and so there has been a delay in switching to the less expensive website approved at the 10/6/12 meeting.
??? The group also agreed to forego the expense of keeping the OccupyMendocino.com (as opposed to the OccupyMendocino.net site) as a fall back link to those who typed in that name in error.
? The wording for the flyer was worked out to prevent further delays. Agnes & Claire agreed to 
give their contact #'s.
?? The next meeting is scheduled for Nov. 3rd. Same time(2 to 4 P.M.), same place.
????????????????????? Respectfully submitted,
??????????????????????? Sheila Dawn
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From agnes at mcn.org  Tue Oct 23 12:32:57 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 12:32:57 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Reminder: Your Conference is on Tue Oct 23
	2012 at 11:00am PT / 2:00pm ET
Message-ID: <5E2E4F38BCC44F0D9A20A522AECD8EEE@toshibauser>

MaestroConference EMailToday  the Maestro Conference was  a very informative telephone conference with Occupy members all over CA.See address below.
 You can join in every Tuesday between 11:00 and 12:00,by calling the number below. That's where I got information about the big picture on home foreclosures and the attendence at CJ Holmes' FTH meetings. At the Berkeley Tues. meeting with CJ there were 20 attendees but they were lit on fire to become dedicated activists for Eminent Domain and land bank possibilities within the power of their County's  Board of Supervisors.
>From the conference call I learned that CJ can and has sent names of foreclosed families. Most realtors have this info.

Cheers,
Agnes




----- Original Message ----- 
From: info at InterOccupy.org 
To: agnes at mcn.org 
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2012 3:00 AM
Subject: Reminder: Your Conference is on Tue Oct 23 2012 at 11:00am PT / 2:00pm ET



Just a reminder that you are a participant in the following conference:

"California Homes Fraud-closure Campaign" 
Tue Oct 23 2012 11:00am PT / 2:00pm ET - 1 hours 30 minutes 

To join the conference call:

Call-In Number: +1 (916) 235-1003
Your PIN: 487082#

To see the Participant Dashboard during the conference click
http://maestroconference.com/dashboard?phone=9162351003&PIN=487082

Please do not share this PIN; it is unique to you.

Notes from your Host:
Agenda and Notes for the Call are available here:http://bit.ly/CHFC-Agenda-Notes

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From agnes at mcn.org  Tue Oct 23 12:53:56 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 12:53:56 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Oakland package
Message-ID: <B3090992170D4F98B12FE95CE4F1A445@toshibauser>

Please see site below for areport on the Berkeley FTH meeting. Great 
results!
Agnes




http://interoccupy.net/blog/oakland-adopts-a-comprehensive-foreclosure-prevention-package/= 



From rkarch at mcn.org  Tue Oct 23 13:45:05 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 13:45:05 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Must Read: New Yorker endorses Obama
Message-ID: <DBB93090-5E71-4101-B15E-B56B1CCA6820@mcn.org>

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/10/29/121029taco_talk_editors




From agnes at mcn.org  Tue Oct 23 20:12:11 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:12:11 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Emailing: InterOccupy Oakland Adopts a
	Comprehensive Foreclosure Prevention Package.htm
Message-ID: <0718A75AA55E447C9A77A85BC8A02802@toshibauser>

InterOccupy | Oakland Adopts a Comprehensive Foreclosure Prevention Package
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Oakland Adopts a Comprehensive Foreclosure Prevention Package
By andrea On October 22, 2012 ? 8 Comments 
 

Oakland Adopts a Comprehensive Foreclosure Prevention Package

On October 16, the Oakland City Council approved a Comprehensive Foreclosure Prevention Package.[1]  The package includes door to door outreach to roughly 3,500 residents in risk of foreclosure.[2]  Residents in foreclosed properties will be referred to housing counselors and have access to legal assistance and a city team that will help advocate on behalf of borrowers to the bank.  Tenants and homeowners will also learn about the rights that they have as a result of the passage of the Homeowners Bill of Rights[3] and the Attorney General?s settlement. One of the most innovative parts of the plan is a pilot program called ROOT that will buy back homes for borrowers facing foreclosure and restructure the loans to be fixed rate and affordable.

The package was officially announced a week earlier in a press briefing by Mayor Jean Quan, Congressperson Barbara Lee and State Assembly person Nancy Skinner.[4]  This package is the culmination of a partnership among community organizations, service providers and the city of Oakland. Community organization in the Bay Area have been pushing for local strategies coming from the city to hold banks accountable and help keep people in their homes and this package is a good example of that.[5]



Replicate Elsewhere?  

Many groups elsewhere have offered pieces of a program like this, but Oakland is a leader in creating a comprehensive package to help threatened homeowners.  Another leader in this area and a model for parts of Oakland?s package is the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA);[6] their ?Save the Dream Tour? included week-long events in different cities to help distressed homeowners negotiate with the banks.

Activists with Occupy San Jos? (OSJ) hope to help other organizations create political pressure for similar Comprehensive Foreclosure Prevention Packages elsewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area.  OSJ and the Green Party of Santa Clara County organized a Foreclosure Summit, Sept. 15, 2012, attended by roughly 50 people.  The program focused on three key elements of foreclosure prevention:  financial literacy, legal and political action.  Project Sentinel?s  work in financial literacy was cited as making an important contribution to decreasing victimization of homeowners.  Thomas Spielbauer discussed his work as an attorney representing distressed homeowners.  CJ Holmes, founder of Homeowners for Justice, discussed what had been done politically and continuing needs.

Spencer Graves, lead organizer for the Summit, outlined the need for something like the comprehensive foreclosure prevention package just passed by Oakland.  This includes a need to recruit volunteers to contact distressed homeowners, as Oakland is preparing to do.  Graves further mentioned the San Francisco Foreclosure Audit, which ?identified what appear to be one or more clear violations of law? in 84 percent of the 382 foreclosures studied.  If 84 percent of foreclosures anywhere involve clear violations of law, it suggests massive lawlessness on the part of major financial institutions.  William K. Black, professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri ? Kansas City and a lead litigator during the Savings and Loan crisis of 20 years ago, says we have effectively decriminalized elite financial fraud.  This suggest a need for a system that will identify evidence of fraud and make that available to distressed homeowners and prosecutors.  Without it, our current system of dealing with foreclosures seems to be one more example of crony capitalism, reviled by both the right and the left in the US today.





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Causa Justa::Just Cause, ?Housing Wins on Both Sides of the Bay?, ?www.cjjc.org/news?, accessed 2012.10.19.

[2] City of Oakland Office of the City Clerk, ?Concurrent Meeting of the Oakland Redevelopment Successor Agency and the City Council 10/16/2012?, Meeting Details regarding File # 12-0070 on ?Foreclosure Prevention/Mitigation Activities? in attachment ?View Report.pdf?; ?http://oakland.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx?, accessed 2102.10.22.  

[3] ?Homeowner Bill of Rights?, occupy.pbworks.com, ?http://occupy.pbworks.com/w/page/54691519/Homeowner%20Bill%20of%20Rights ?.

[4] ?Mayor Unveils Plan to Alleviate Oakland Foreclosure Crisis?.  KQED. ?www.kqed.org/news/story/2012/10/09/109172/mayor_unveils_plan_to_alleviate_oakland_foreclosure_crisis?category=economy?.

[5] ?Home Ownership Foreclosure Prevention?, Working Solutions, ?http://tmcworkingsolutions.org/category/business-resources/foreclosure-prevention ?.

[6] Wikipedia, ?Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America?, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhood_Assistance_Corporation_of_America

SUBMITTED BY: Occupy San Jos? News and Views Working Group

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From marksafron at att.net  Tue Oct 23 22:21:55 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 22:21:55 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Occupy members,
	please post this to other listserves.
Message-ID: <916FD7B7-4A50-4622-9942-282A846476B7@att.net>



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From rkarch at mcn.org  Tue Oct 23 22:37:14 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 22:37:14 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fwd:  Occupy members,
	please post this to other listserves.
References: <916FD7B7-4A50-4622-9942-282A846476B7@att.net>
Message-ID: <14CD7803-508F-44EC-BBD9-B5F178DD70AF@mcn.org>

Will do Mark.  I'll also print some and post a few places around town.  Thanks for getting this together.  rk

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Mark Safron <marksafron at att.net>
> Date: October 23, 2012 10:21:55 PM PDT
> To: occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org
> Subject: [Occupymendocino] Occupy members, please post this to other listserves.
> Reply-To: rkarch at mcn.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
> TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list send an email to occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org put "Un-Subscribe me" in the Subject.
> 
> For listserv technical problems please contact: listmanager at mcn.org

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From rkarch at mcn.org  Wed Oct 24 09:05:16 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2012 09:05:16 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Occupy  Worldwide
Message-ID: <8641F0F0-CD8E-4174-BD62-8AE79E3F4C35@mcn.org>



http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/7468-occupy-wall-street-take-the-bull-by-the-horns

From marksafron at att.net  Wed Oct 24 11:49:35 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2012 11:49:35 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Better version of Debate #3
Message-ID: <065C256A-CB69-4F00-9046-F03C1AADC286@att.net>

http://nyti.ms/RiZuYX


From agnes at mcn.org  Wed Oct 24 17:06:19 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2012 17:06:19 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Santa Rosa Foreclosure Town Hall Article
Message-ID: <0A03D8CB4C2348C394329B6B49E41498@toshibauser>

If you are in Santa Rosa, don't miss this meeting.
Agnes Woolsey
----- Original Message ----- 
From: CJ Holmes 
To: CJ Holmes 
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2012 1:41 PM
Subject: Santa Rosa Foreclosure Town Hall Article


http://www.occupy.com/article/first-foreclosure-town-hall-kicks-northern-california

 

Please pass this on to everyone you know, nationwide, particularly congregations, unions, and local elected officials.  We can and must  stop this travesty and we need more people on board as soon as possible to make it happen.

 

Let's get every county in the nation to implement a de-facto county-level foreclosure moratorium.  It can be done overnight.  That's job #1.

 

Thanks,  cj

 

CJ Holmes, Founder 

Home Owners For Justice

Real Estate Analyst, DRE 01234197


www.HOFJ.org

(707) 578-5727

(707) 578-5873 f

818 Mendocino Ave

Santa Rosa, CA  95401

 



 

 
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From marksafron at att.net  Wed Oct 24 22:54:14 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2012 22:54:14 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Please watch and circulate widely...
Message-ID: <36953B6B-1298-4567-8BCC-B331E23585C4@att.net>

Great video!

It's the It's My Party girl! with a blast from the past and charge for the future?..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M_hcioeOyk

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From marksafron at att.net  Wed Oct 24 23:06:30 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2012 23:06:30 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] US Suit: 'Brazen' Mortgage Fraud at Countrywide,
	BofA
Message-ID: <E1F37915-3C31-47BE-800E-E6EEE84C630D@att.net>

US Suit: 'Brazen' Mortgage Fraud at Countrywide, BofA

By The Associated Press

24 October 12

 
The latest federal lawsuit over alleged mortgage fraud paints an unflattering picture of a doomed lender: Executives at Countrywide Financial urged workers to churn out loans, accepted fudged applications and tried to hide ballooning defaults.

The suit, filed Wednesday by the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, also underscored how Bank of America's purchase of Countrywide in July 2008, just before the financial crisis, backfired severely.

The prosecutor, Preet Bharara, said he was seeking more than $1 billion, but the suit could ultimately recover much more in damages.

"This lawsuit should send another clear message that reckless lending practices will not be tolerated," Bharara said in a statement. He described Countrywide's practices as "spectacularly brazen in scope."

Bank of America had no immediate comment.

Countrywide was a giant in mortgage lending, but was also known for approving exotic, even risky, loans. By 2007, as the market for subprime mortgages collapsed, Countrywide was anxious for revenue.

The lawsuit alleged that the company loosened its standards for making loans while telling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were buying loans from Countrywide, that standards were getting tighter.

Fannie and Freddie, which packaged loans into securities and sold them to investors, were effectively nationalized in 2008 when they nearly collapsed under the weight of their mortgage losses.

To churn out more mortgage loans, Bharara said, Countrywide introduced a program called the "Hustle," shorthand for "High-Speed Swim Lane." It operated under the motto, "Loans Move Forward, Never Backward."

The program eliminated checks meant to ensure that mortgages were being made to borrowers who could afford them, according to the lawsuit.

For example, loan processors no longer had to complete worksheets that helped them assess whether income levels that borrowers entered on their loan applications were reasonable.

If processors entered a borrower's information into a computerized underwriting program and the program raised flags, employees were encouraged to change the numbers, the suit said.

It also said that bonuses were awarded based solely on the number of loans that an employee could generate, not on their quality.

The process led to "widespread falsification" of mortgage data, Bharara charged. And when Countrywide executives became aware of the dangerously high number of borrowers defaulting, it hid the problem, according to the lawsuit.

In early 2008, for example, Countrywide offered bonuses for employees who could "rebut" the high rate of defaults. The standards were low, according to the lawsuit: If a review found that the income a borrower listed on his application seemed unreasonable, an employee could rebut the finding "simply by arguing that the stated income was reasonable."

The lawsuit gives seven examples of mortgages made for homes in California, Alabama, Florida and Georgia in which the borrowers' income and other qualifications were falsified.

For example, one loan application, for a home in Miami, said that the borrower was an airline sales representative earning $15,500 per month, when the borrower worked for a temp agency and earned $2,666 per month. The borrower defaulted within seven months, the suit said.

A loan application for a home in Birmingham, Ala., failed to disclose $81,000 in debt that the borrower was carrying. That borrower defaulted within a year, the suit said.

The lawsuit accused Countrywide, and later Bank of America, of selling thousands of Hustle loans to Fannie and Freddie. The lawsuit says that that the Hustle program continued through 2009.

According to the lawsuit, Fannie and Freddie don't review loans before they purchased them. Instead, they relied on banks' statements that the loans met certain qualifications.

Bharara said the lawsuit was the first civil fraud suit brought by the Justice Department concerning loans later sold to Fannie and Freddie. When Fannie and Freddie collapsed, investors were wiped out.

Taxpayers have spent $170 billion to keep Fannie and Freddie afloat, and it could cost $260 billion more to support the companies through 2014 after subtracting dividend payments to taxpayers, according to the government.

The lawsuit says that Fannie and Freddie suffered $1 billion in losses because they had to pay for Countrywide's defaulted loans. The lawsuit also complains that Bank of America is refusing to buy back mortgages "even where the loans admittedly contained material defects or even fraudulent misrepresentations."

Bank of America's purchase of Countrywide originally earned it plaudits from lawmakers because Bank of America was viewed as stepping in to eliminate a bad actor from the mortgage market.

But the purchase, instead of padding Bank of America's mortgage business, has drawn a drumbeat of regulatory fines, lawsuits and losses.

Bank of America reported last week that while it is issuing more mortgages - $21 billion worth last quarter, up 18 percent from a year earlier - its mortgage unit is still losing money as the bank works through crisis-era problems.

In the past year and a half, Bharara's office has settled lawsuits against CitiMortgage, Flagstar Bank and Deutsche Bank over mortgages. Its lawsuits against Wells Fargo and Allied Home Mortgage are pending.


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From marksafron at att.net  Thu Oct 25 10:24:24 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 10:24:24 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Enjoy -- them all.
Message-ID: <31C5D6E6-D3C4-4273-A011-9D53AD2FD839@att.net>

http://actually.org/#lizz


From rkarch at mcn.org  Thu Oct 25 10:26:52 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 10:26:52 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] You Don't Own Me
Message-ID: <167E9C27-41A1-4B53-AAB7-9FC6E43F39FE@mcn.org>


"You Don't Own Me " PSA fixed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M_hcioeOyk
Women constitute more than half of the population. In 2008, 60% of voters were women. It is estimated that 10 million more women than men will vote in this e...

1 of 1Choose a Th
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From rkarch at mcn.org  Thu Oct 25 10:41:35 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 10:41:35 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] B of A   Sued
Message-ID: <788BFA80-F7EB-4895-A2DB-E496D13BE358@mcn.org>

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/320-80/14168-us-suit-brazen-mortgage-fraud-at-countrywide-bofa


 
The Bank of America is being sued by the federal government for mortgage fraud. (photo: Occupy.org)

 


US Suit: 'Brazen' Mortgage Fraud at Countrywide, BofA

By The Associated Press

24 October 12

 
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From rkarch at mcn.org  Thu Oct 25 13:47:05 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 13:47:05 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Note to circulate
Message-ID: <55E057EE-3369-4F2A-866E-DC7E75E95680@mcn.org>




ARE YOU FACING FORECLOSURE?

DO YOU KNOW SOMEONE WHO IS GOING THROUGH THIS NOW?

WILL YOU COME TO A MEETING  TO TELL YOUR STORY AND WORK ON SOLUTIONS?

THIS MEETING IS FOR ALL CONCERNED CITIZENS IN OUR COMMUNITY

TO EXPLORE SOLUTIONS TO HALT FORECLOSURE.

WE BELIEVE THERE ARE WAYS TO KEEP PEOPLE IN THEIR HOMES.

EMPTY HOUSES AFFECT  YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD.


CALL 937-2377   OR   964-8758

SPONSORED BY OCCUPY MENDOCINO 
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From agnes at mcn.org  Thu Oct 25 13:51:55 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 13:51:55 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Are You Facing Foreclosure
References: <6FFBE161-842C-4642-905E-8978658451D3@mcn.org>
Message-ID: <DD2388AB15E34B4AB010489C1A62C560@toshibauser>

I'm going to make these flyers into half page leaflets to hand out at Farmer's Market and any gathering I go to. I sugget all of you do the same.
Agnes
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Richard Karch 
  To: Agnes Woolsey 
  Cc: Mark Safron 
  Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2012 11:42 AM
  Subject: Are You Facing Foreclosure


  THE TOP ONE IS A POSTER MARK MADE.  A PDF FILE.   The lower one is going out to list serves that do not take pdf files.







  ARE YOU FACING FORECLOSURE?


  DO YOU KNOW SOMEONE WHO IS GOING THROUGH THIS NOW?


  WILL YOU COME TO A MEETING  TO TELL YOUR STORY AND WORK ON SOLUTIONS?


  THIS MEETING IS FOR ALL CONCERNED CITIZENS IN OUR COMMUNITY


  TO EXPLORE SOLUTIONS TO HALT FORECLOSURE.


  WE BELIEVE THERE ARE WAYS TO KEEP PEOPLE IN THEIR HOMES.


  EMPTY HOUSES AFFECT  YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD.




  CALL 937-2377   OR   964-8758


  SPONSORED BY OCCUPY MENDOCINO 
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From marksafron at att.net  Thu Oct 25 22:23:14 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 22:23:14 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Great Idea!
Message-ID: <9AE68322-ACB4-4229-A4A8-1D547AFE137F@att.net>

Let's all do it.


http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/279-82/14176-we-pay-more

We Pay More   


By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

25 October 12

 
Since I pinned a dollar bill on my jacket lapel with "I PAY MORE" written on it in black marker, I've had countless conversations during my travels across the United States that went something like this:

Them: "I pay more? What does that mean?"

Me: "This dollar bill right here is $1 more than General Electric, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank, and a bunch of other big corporations paid in federal taxes, since 2008, combined."

Them: "What? That's not right. I pay my taxes! Too much, actually."

Me: "But I bet you don't hire a bunch of lobbyists to make sure Congress keeps writing in more loopholes like they do, right?"

Them: "Well, no. I don't have that kind of money."

Me: "So you pay more. Pass it on."
Regardless of political persuasion, there isn't one person I've met who isn't infuriated by the fact that they pay more in federal taxes than a combined majority of most billion-dollar corporations. But what's even more infuriating is that under the Budget Control Act that was passed after our austerity-crazed Congress forced it into being during the summer-long debt negotiations of 2011, budgets for numerous essential social programs will be cut to the bone this January, under the false guise that our country is too broke to pay the bills.

Starting on January 3rd, the first $110 billion cut of the mandated $1.5 trillion deemed appropriate by Congress will go into effect. $55 billion will be cut from the Pentagon, while budgets for non-defense programs will be cut across the board by another $55 billion-8 percent for "discretionary" programs and 7.2 percent for "non-discretionary" programs. Under a similar $38 billion budget cut passed in Summer of 2011 to avert a government shutdown, nearly $1 billion was cut from clean drinking water funds, along with almost $1 billion from FEMA assistance for disaster victims, and hundreds of millions of dollars for nuclear waste cleanup and low-income heating assistance for poor families who don't have enough to keep warm. The latest round of cuts coming in early 2013 will affect Medicare.

While our government is forcing poor people to go cold and older folks to go without health care, they're doing absolutely nothing about the estimated $70-100 billion we lose every year to corporate tax dodging overseas, through loopholes that have been successfully written into the tax code by corporate lobbyists. There still isn't any legislation on the table that would do something about the $32 trillion that's estimated to be stashed by the 0.001% in overseas, tax-free bank accounts. That money, by the way, is actually more than the combined national debt of both the European Union and the United States.

But by simply passing Senator Carl Levin's CUT (Cut Unjustified Tax) Loopholes Act, which would reap $13 billion in new tax revenue every year for a decade by simply closing some of the more egregious loopholes, these major corporations would actually have to pay above a 0% effective corporate tax rate. None of January's budget cuts would be necessary. If you asked most Americans if they'd rather see their grandparents afford their health care or see Bank of America keep a few billion more in profits, I bet most Americans would go with grandma and grandpa.

One reason the Quebec student movement was so successful was that it used a unifying symbol as a visual aid - the red felt square. Student protesters in Quebec, along with allies worldwide, all pinned a red felt square to their shirts, jackets, coats and hoodies to symbolize the fact that America's students were all "in the red," and carrying their debt around with them everywhere they went. While corporate tax and budgetary issues in America remain complicated issues, I believe a simple visual aid - the "I PAY MORE" dollar - will go a long way.

So write "I PAY MORE" in black marker on a $1 bill. Make sure no federal officials see you doing it, since the act could technically be construed as the federal crime of defacing currency. Safety pin the dollar to your jacket, and have as many conversations as you can with your bank tellers, store cashiers, classmates, co-workers, churchgoers, family and friends. After you tell them what it means, tell them to do the same thing.

I pay more. So do you. Either as a percentage of our income, as an effective federal tax rate, and even as a dollar amount compared to our corporate counterparts. Let's put an end to these cuts by illustrating how unjust it is to make us pay for the cunning tax practices of the 1% and their lobbyists on Capitol Hill with a pound of flesh taken from our own future.


Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Manchester, New Hampshire. You can contact Carl at carl at rsnorg.org, and listen to his online radio talk show, Swag The Dog, at blogtalkradio.com/swag-the-dog.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.


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From agnes at mcn.org  Fri Oct 26 13:00:18 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 13:00:18 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Free Conference Call: DEFACTO FORECLOSURE
	MORATORIUM
Message-ID: <C16E65C159E84A1D8B2A0F65916FE45A@toshibauser>

See the MA Recorder and fraudulent foreclosure documents piled on his desk in Mass.
Agnes 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: CJ Holmes 
To: CJ Holmes 
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2012 12:25 PM
Subject: Free Conference Call: DEFACTO FORECLOSURE MORATORIUM


Monday, 10/29:  10a-11a Pacific Time:  Meet a Recorder that has instituted a DEFACTO FORECLOSURE MORATORIUM for his county.   Click link to register.  Everyone is invited.  Please forward and invite everyone to join the call.


All information and registration is available on the HOFJ Conference Call webpage:  http://hofj.org/default.asp.pg-ConferenceCalls

 

John O'Brien and his key associate Kevin Harvey are on a mission to stop the recording of forged documents.  They will present how they have enacted a "DE FACTO FORECLOSURE MORATORIUM" by refusing to accept and record documents which raise doubt as to their authenticity and the lawful process of foreclosure.  Every property owner in the country needs this protection.  

 

RECORDERS FIGHTING FORGED DOCUMENTS

O'Brien on forged documents [3m video]  "These banks acted as a criminal enterprise.  They crossed state lines, they recorded fraudulent documents, they committed forgery, and they committed mail fraud.  They used the Unites States Postal Service to mail these documents to registries of deeds."  John O'Brien

O'Brien letter and affidavit rejecting the recording of forged documents

Becker, PA Registrar's Quiet Title Action against MERS

Thigpen, NC Registrar's Lawsuit against robosigned docs

 

Next Call is scheduled for 11/15/12, from 10a-11a, Pacific Time.  As soon as the link is available, you may register anytime.  

We anticipate Becker, Thigpen, and O'Brien join us for updates and expanded support.

 

In addition, we are compiling forged documents and forged notary signatures to present to our DAs, Judges, Supervisors and City Council officials.

 



 

Thank you for supporting the cause.  cj

 

CJ Holmes, Founder 

Home Owners For Justice

Real Estate Analyst, DRE 01234197


www.HOFJ.org

(707) 578-5727

(707) 578-5873 f

818 Mendocino Ave

Santa Rosa, CA  95401

 



 


 

 

 

 

 
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From marksafron at att.net  Fri Oct 26 15:48:35 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 15:48:35 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] STIGLITZ: Some Are More Unequal Than Others
Message-ID: <8D3F2BB4-D597-4118-9533-304C02AB8C77@att.net>




Some Are More Unequal Than Others
This election has rightly been characterized as one that will deeply affect the future direction of the country: Americans are being given a choice with potentially large consequences. One arena in which there are profound differences that has not been adequately debated is the future course of inequality.

Mitt Romney has been explicit: inequality should be talked about only in quiet voices behind closed doors. But with the normally conservative magazine The Economist publishing a special series showing the extremes to which American inequality has grown ? joining a growing chorus (of which my book ?The Price of Inequality? is an example) arguing that the extremes of American inequality, its nature and origins, are adversely affecting our economy ? it is an issue that not even the Republicans can ignore. It is no longer just a moral issue, a question of social justice.

This perhaps provides part of the explanation for why inequality and poverty should suddenly appear as part of the Romney-Ryan makeover, as they attempt to portray themselves (to use a phrase of some 12 years ago) as compassionate conservatives. In Cleveland on Wednesday, Paul Ryan gave a speech that might lead one to conclude that the two Republican candidates were really concerned about poverty. But more revealing than oratory are budget numbers ? like those actually contained in the Ryan budget. His budget proposal guts programs that serve those at the bottom, and little could have done more to enrich those at the top than his original tax proposals (like the elimination of capital gains taxes, a position from which he understandably has tried to distance himself). Every other advanced country has recognized the right of everyone to access to health care, and extending access was central to President Obama?s health care reform. Romney and Ryan have criticized that reform, but have said nothing about how or whether they would ensure universal access. Most important, the macroeconomic consequences of the Romney-Ryan economic program would be devastating: growth would slow, unemployment would increase, and just as Americans would need the social protection of government more, the safety net would be weakened.

We?d all do well to pay a bit closer attention. That American inequality is at historic highs is undisputed. It?s not just that the top 1 percent takes in about a fifth of the income, and controls more than a third of the wealth. America also has become the country (among the advanced industrial countries) with the least equality of opportunity. Meanwhile, those in the middle are faring badly, in every dimension, in security, in income, and in wealth ? the wealth of the typical household is back to where it was in the 1990s. While the recession has made all of this worse, even before the recession they weren?t faring well: in 2007, the income of the typical family was lower than it was at the end of the last century. While Obama may not have done as much as he should to counteract the steep downturn he inherited from George W. Bush upon taking office ? and he underestimated the depth of the problems that had been passed along to him ? he did far more than his predecessor. And he could have done far more, as the dimensions of the problem became clearer to everyone, had he not faced such strong opposition in Congress.

There are many forces giving rise to this high and rising inequality. But the fact that America?s inequality is greater than other advanced countries? says that it?s not just market forces. After all, other advanced countries are subjected to market forces much like those confronting us. Markets don?t exist in a vacuum. Government policies ? or their lack ? have played a critical role in creating and maintaining these inequities.

Inequality in ?market incomes? ? what individuals receive apart from any transfers from the government ? has increased as a result of ineffective enforcement of competition laws, inadequate financial regulation, deficiency in corporate governance laws, and ?corporate welfare? ? huge open and hidden subsidies to our corporations that reached new heights in the Bush administration. When, for instance, competition laws are not enforced, monopolies grow, and with them the income of monopolists. Competition, by contrast, drives profits down. What is disturbing about Romney and Ryan is that they have done so little to distance themselves from the economic policies of the Bush administration, which not only led to poor economic performance, but also to so much inequality. Understandably, perhaps, Romney has not explained why those, like him, in the hedge fund and equity fund business should be able to use a loophole in the tax law to pay 15 percent taxes on their earnings, when ordinary workers pay a far higher rate.

Our government does less to correct these inequalities than we did in the past, or than other countries do, and as disparities in ?market? incomes have increased, its efforts have diminished. It?s not just a matter of redistribution, as some suggest. It?s in part a matter of ensuring that those at the top pay a fair share of their taxes. And it?s in part a matter of ensuring that those at the bottom and in the middle get a fair start in life, through access to education, adequate nutrition and health, and not being exposed to the environmental hazards that have come to plague many of our poor neighborhoods.

But Romney?s campaign likes to play tricks with numbers. When he unleashed a tirade against the bottom 47 percent of supposedly freeloading Americans (for which he has since apologized), he failed to note what should have been obvious and has been pointed out repeatedly since he made that remark:  those Americans do pay large amounts in taxes. These include (and I?m hardly the first to point this out) payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, excise taxes, and even part of the corporate income taxes that our major corporations manage to pass on to their customers. He failed to note, too, the many older Americans barely above poverty who receive social security payments, for which they contributed through a lifetime of work. Yes, the rich may pay a high and increasing share of the country?s total tax revenue, but that?s only because they have a high and increasing share of our national income? not because their rates have gone up. 

Many of the very rich, like Romney, are avoiding taxes because of numerous loopholes that favor the rich, and capital gains taxes that are taxed at less than half the rate of other income. The 14 percent rate Romney reportedly paid on his income last year is well below that of Americans of comparable income who worked for their money doing things like creating a real business. Tax havens like the Cayman Islands (condemned by the Group20 and all economic experts) facilitate another level of tax avoidance. That the practice is legal is not an economic justification ? the loopholes that allow it were put in place by the rich and the bankers, lawyers and lobbyists who serve them so well. We can be sure that the money is not in the Cayman Islands just because it grows faster in the bright sunshine there.

Putting all this together isn?t the politics of envy, as Romney?s camp likes to complain, or even about shaking a finger at the country?s real freeloaders. It?s about cold, hard economics. Tax avoidance and low rates on capital gains ? and the inequality they amplify ? are weakening our economy. Were the rich paying their fair share, our deficit would be smaller, and we would be able to invest more in infrastructure, technology and education ? investments that would create jobs now and enhance growth in the future. While education is central to restoring America as a land of opportunity, all three of these are crucial for future growth and increases in living standards. Tax havens discourage investment in the United States. Taxing speculators at a lower rate encourages speculation and instability ? and draws our most talented young people out of more productive endeavors. The result is a distorted, inefficient economy that grows more slowly than it should.

We can be sure that the money is not in the Cayman Islands just because it grows faster in the bright sunshine there.
The Romney campaign, however, has defended inequality or brushed it aside. To do so, it has employed a handful of economic myths. Here are a few of the most important:

(1) America is a land of opportunity. While rags-to-riches stories still grip our imagination, the fact of the matter is that the life chances of a young American are more dependent on the income and wealth of his parents than in any of the other advanced countries for which there is data. There is less upward mobility ? and less downward mobility from the top ? even than in Europe, and we?re not just talking about Scandinavia.

(2) Trickle-down economics works (a k a ?a rising tide lifts all boats?). This idea suggests that further enriching the wealthy will make us all better off. America?s recent economic history shows the patent falsehood of this notion. The top has done very well. But median American incomes are lower than they were a decade and a half ago. Various groups ? men and those without a college education ? have fared even worse. Median income of a full-time male worker, for instance, is lower than it was four decades ago.

(3) The rich are the ?job creators,? so giving them more money leads to more and better jobs. This is really a subset of Myth 2. But Romney?s own private sector history gives it the lie. As we all know from the discussion of Bain Capital and other equity firms, many made their money not by creating jobs in America but by ?restructuring,? ?downsizing? and moving jobs abroad, often using debt to bleed the companies of money needed for investment, and using the money to enrich themselves. But more generally, the rich are not the source of transformative innovations. Many, if not most of the crucial innovations in recent decades, from medicine to the Internet, have been based in large measure on government-financed research and development. The rich take their money where the returns are highest, and right now many see those high returns in emerging markets. It?s not a surprise that Romney?s trust fund invested in China, but it?s hard to see how giving the rich more money ? through more latitude to escape taxation, either through low taxes in the United States or Cayman Islands hide-aways ? leads to a stronger American economy.

(4) The cost of reducing inequality is so great that, as much as idealists would like to do so, we would be killing the goose that lays the golden egg. In fact, the engine of our economic growth is the middle class. Inequality weakens aggregate demand, because those at the middle and bottom have to spend all or almost all of what that they get, while those at the top don?t. The concentration of wealth in recent decades led to bubbles and instability, as the Fed tried to offset the effects of weak demand arising from our inequality by low interest rates and lax regulation. The irony is that the tax cuts for capital gains and dividends that were supposed to spur investment by the wealthy alleged job creators didn?t do so, even with record low interest rates: private sector job creation under Bush was dismal. Mainstream economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund now recognize the connection between inequality and a weak economy. To argue the contrary is a self-serving idea being promoted by the very wealthy.

(5) Markets are self-regulating and efficient, and any governmental interference with markets is a mistake. The 2008 crisis should have cured everyone of this fallacy, but anyone with a sense of history would realize that capitalism has been plagued with booms and busts since its origin. The only period in our history in which financial markets did not suffer from excesses was the period after the Great Depression, in which we put in place strong regulations that worked. It?s worth noting that we grew much faster, and more stably, in the decades after World War II than in the period after 1980, when we started stripping away the regulations. And in the former period we grew together, in contrast to the latter, when we grew apart.

As I have explained in detail elsewhere, the cost of these myths goes far beyond the damage to our economy, now and in the future. The fabric of our society and democracy is suffering. The worry is that those at the top are investing their money not in real investments, in real innovations, but in political investments. Their big contributions to the presidential and Congressional campaigns are, too often, not charitable contributions. They expect, and have received, high returns from these political investments. These political investments, exemplified by those the financial institutions made, yielded far higher returns than anything else they did. The investments bought deregulation and a huge bailout ? though they also brought the economy to the brink of ruin and are a source of much of our inequality. 

Such political investments undermine and corrupt our democracy. But there are other manifestations: America is fast becoming a country marked not by justice for all, but by justice for those who can afford it. (Just one of many examples is that no banker has been prosecuted, let alone convicted, for banks? systematic lying to the court regarding the fraudulent practices that played so large a role in the 2008 crisis.) And with the increasing influence of money, especially notable in this election, the outcomes of our political process are becoming more like one dollar, one vote than one person, one vote. It?s even worse, because political inequality leads to economic inequality, which leads in turn to more political inequality, in a vicious spiral undermining our economy and our democracy.

Recognizing all this is not class warfare. It is simply acknowledging the realities of life in the United States, which Romney has not done. That should be cause for concern: if you don?t recognize that there is a problem, and if you don?t understand the sources and consequences, you will never work to solve it.

Obama has at least touched on key elements: his education policies, from ?the race to the top? to the reforms of student loan programs, will enhance opportunity. His tax proposals will do a little bit about the extremes at the top. His jobs and investment programs will expand growth now, and in the future, and these will be of enormous benefit to those in the middle. Romney and Ryan have tried a hard tack to the center in their rhetoric in recent weeks. But let no one be deceived: their tax policies will lead to even more inequality at the top, the continued hollowing out of the middle, and more poverty at the bottom. Worst of all, they will lead to a more divided society that endangers our future ? our economy, our democracy and our sense of identity as a nation.

Joseph E. Stiglitz , a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and a former chief economist of the World Bank, is University Professor at Columbia University. His most recent book is ?The Price of Inequality.?


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From sharondoubiago at yahoo.com  Fri Oct 26 19:41:53 2012
From: sharondoubiago at yahoo.com (Sharon Doubiago)
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 19:41:53 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: today's letter
In-Reply-To: <1351297435.18971.YahooMailRC@web184702.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
References: <1351297435.18971.YahooMailRC@web184702.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <1351305713.65252.YahooMailNeo@web39304.mail.mud.yahoo.com>




----- Forwarded Message -----
From: ROBERT YODER <ryoder at pacbell.net>
To: Sharon Doubiago <sharondoubiago at yahoo.com> 
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2012 5:23 PM
Subject: today's letter

http://dearmrpresident-letters.blogspot.com/ 
Friday, October 26, 2012
The Gestapo, KGB, Stasi, SAVAK and NCTC 
Dear Mr. President,
?As the Founders all recognized, nothing vests elites with power?and profit?more than a state of war.? (?Obama moves to make the War on Terror permanent,? Greg Miller, The Washington Post, October 24, 2012). The Founding Fathers spent a lot of time putting up barriers to starting and continuing wars but you dismantled them in 4 short years. You have lulled Congress into accepting your drone wars, targeted assassinations and massive surveillance activities as legal even though they can?t know those legal justifications because of national security. And now we learn in Miller?s article that the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) headed by none other than your personal Rasputin, John O. Brennan, has spent the past 2 years codifying and institutionalizing the Kill List process to prepare for the next administration?s continuation of the process and unending war. Targeted assassinations have been, until relatively recently, rejected as
 barbaric and illegal when used by our enemies, but once again, working behind closed doors you have bureaucratized and made permanent the process for summary executions. Also in typical bureaucratic fashion, to obfuscate reality, Kill Lists are now the Orwellian ?disposition matrix? and Kill List Tuesdays are ?terror Tuesdays.? The lists and terrorist suspects never end, the terrorist organizations have become ?franchises? like McDonald?s or Wendy?s and one is easily substituted for another. The assassination of Awlaki?s 16-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, is dismissed with, ?he should have a far more responsible father.? We have passed a major psychological watershed in America when extrajudicial killings and permanent war is accepted as policy. But ?continuous war does not end violence,? rather, it guarantees its permanent expansion,? Miller writes. ?[W]ar is when power is least constrained and profit most abundant,?
 Foreboding too, is that the NCTC not only keeps the secret criteria and chooses who will die, but is also the keeper of all data collected not just on suspected targets but on every U.S. citizen. The NCTC is accountable to no one but you and the safeguard on data collection (a time limit of 180 days) was quietly abolished by you in July. Welcome to Obamaworld, a frightening universe of summary executions, indefinite detentions and constant all-encompassing surveillance. This is the wet dream of the Gestapo, the KGB, the Stasi, the SAVAK and every other brutal secret police state in history.
 
The National Counterterrorism Center, site of a new bureaucracy to institutionalize the 'kill list'. Photograph: FBI 
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From elained at mcn.org  Thu Oct 25 09:01:37 2012
From: elained at mcn.org (Elaine and Ed)
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 09:01:37 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Oakland package
In-Reply-To: <B3090992170D4F98B12FE95CE4F1A445@toshibauser>
References: <B3090992170D4F98B12FE95CE4F1A445@toshibauser>
Message-ID: <DC1C276B-FAC4-4A34-94B3-7CB4A7D1F19E@mcn.org>

Agnes,

I've tried to acess that page with two different browsers - Safari and Firefox and with both I got the message: "page not found."

Ed Oberweiser


On Oct 23, 2012, at 12:53 PM, Agnes Woolsey wrote:

> http://interoccupy.net/blog/oakland-adopts-a-comprehensive-foreclosure-prevention-package/= 

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From elained at mcn.org  Fri Oct 26 15:51:36 2012
From: elained at mcn.org (Elaine and Ed)
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 15:51:36 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] FYI 10 Filthy-Rich,
	Tax-Dodging Hypocrites Pushing Disastrous Austerity on America
Message-ID: <BA98AA9B-AD45-44CE-940D-7D70A37AD62B@mcn.org>

10 Filthy-Rich, Tax-Dodging Hypocrites Pushing Disastrous Austerity on America

 The Fix the Debt coalition is using the so-called ?fiscal cliff? to push the same old corporate agenda of more tax breaks while shifting the burden on to the rest of us.

October 26, 2012  |  

  

Brace yourself for one of the most aggressive corporate lobbying campaigns of all time. And one of the most hypocritical.

?Fix the Debt ? is a coalition of more than 80 CEOs who claim they know best how to deal with our nation?s fiscal challenges. The group boasts a $60 million budget just for the initial phase of a massive media and lobbying campaign.

The irony is that CEOs in the coalition?s leadership have been major contributors to the national debt they now claim to know how to fix. These are guys who?ve mastered every tax-dodging trick in the book. And now that they?ve boosted their corporate profits by draining the public treasury, how do they propose we put our fiscal house back in order? By squeezing programs for the poor and elderly, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Fix the Debt claims their agenda is not just about spending cuts. But when it comes to their tax proposals, they use the slippery term ?pro-growth reform? to push for cuts in deductions that are likely to include credits for working families and ? you guessed it ? more corporate tax breaks. Chief among these is a proposal to switch to a territorial system under which corporate foreign earnings would be permanently exempted (instead of being taxed when they are returned to America).

This idea, also supported by the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission, would make it even more profitable for big corporations to use accounting tricks to disguise U.S. profits as income earned in tax havens. Citizens for Tax Justice estimates that such tax haven abuse will cost the Treasury more than $1 trillion over the next decade.

So who are the CEOs who are telling the rest of us to be responsible and tighten our belts after they?ve spent decades stiffing the U.S. Treasury? Of the 80 members of Fix the Debt?s CEO Fiscal Leadership Council, here are 10 that stand out as the biggest hypocrites:

1. Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric

Perhaps no tax-dodging U.S. corporation has done more to drain the U.S. Treasury than General Electric. Over the last 10 years GE reported more than $80 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits and yet paid a federal corporate income tax rate of just 2.3% .

One of GE?s favorite tricks is the ?Active Financing Exception.? U.S. corporations are supposed to pay U.S. taxes on interest income earned anywhere in the world. But GE enjoys this special exception for companies that have ?captive? foreign finance subsidiaries, such as their credit card arm. The measure was repealed as part of fair taxation reforms in 1986, but GE led a successful lobbying effort to bring it back in 1997. Although the exception was supposed to be temporary, Congress has renewed it six times. And, despite all the public hand-wringing over the deficit, lawmakers are seriously considering extending this and other corporate loopholes before the end of the year.

2. Jim McNerney, Boeing

Last year, Boeing was one of 25 major U.S. firms that paid their CEO more than they paid Uncle Sam in corporate income taxes, according to an Institute for Policy Studies report . The aerospace giant enjoyed a $605 million tax refund in 2011, despite reporting more than $5 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits. CEO Jim McNerney made $18.4 million in personal compensation. In fact, Boeing is a serial tax dodger , having paid federal corporate income taxes in only two of the last 10 years.

One of the ways Boeing avoids paying taxes is by taking advantage of the Research and Experimentation Tax Credit, which saved the $137 million last year alone. Government investment in basic research is not a bad idea, but current R&D credits are structured in a way that primarily benefits large, well-resourced high-tech firms like Boeing that would probably do the research anyway. CEO McNerney also chairs the Business Roundtable, which aggressively lobbies for more corporate tax breaks.

 

3. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs

Few corporations have been as dependent on U.S. taxpayers for their very existence as Goldman Sachs. The 2008 bailout of American International Group and the steady stream of low- and non-interest loans for the financial sector have kept the company alive.

CEO Blankfein says he?d accept a small increase in individual taxes for the wealthy in exchange for a comprehensive budget deal. But his corporate tax proposals would wipe out the revenue gains from rolling back the Bush tax cuts for top earners. Blankfein is a big supporter of the territorial tax system explained above. This is hardly a surprise, since Goldman Sachs already operates 37 subsidiaries in tax havens .

Blankfein has also used his position at the helm of the Financial Services Forum, a club for the CEOs of 20 top banks, to oppose financial transaction taxes -- small levies on trades of stock, derivatives, and other financial instruments. Goldman Sachs has made as much as $300 million per year from the volatile high-frequency trading strategies that would be hardest hit by such a transaction tax. In early October, 11 European governments announced a plan to implement such taxes, with expected revenues in the neighborhood of $ 75 billion per year . But Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms have blocked U.S. progress on this major revenue-raiser.

 

4. Brian T. Moynihan, Bank of America

After a decade of risky and reckless mortgage lending, Bank of America survived the 2008 financial crash with the help of a $45 billion bailout. Today, Bank of America sits on $128 billion in cash ? $18 billion of it is overseas ?and much of that is sitting in the company?s 115 tax haven subsidiaries .

Last year, after investors saw their stock price decline 58 percent and 30,000 Bank of America employees lost their jobs to layoffs, CEO Brian Moynihan saw his compensation quadruple to more than $8 million. His predecessor, Ken Lewis, raked in more than $50 million in the two years before the housing bubble that Bank of America had help inflate burst in 2008.

5. David Cote, Honeywell Corporation

Over the last three years, Honeywell received more than $2.7 billion in federal defense contracts and reported more than $2.5 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits. And yet thanks to corporate deductions, tax subsidies, and loopholes, Honeywell has claimed $377 million in federal tax refunds during this period.

Honeywell CEO David Cote has been a fixture at Congressional hearings calling for a territorial tax system for corporations. He is also Vice-Chair of the Business Roundtable, a club for big business CEOs that has called for an extension of all the Bush tax cuts, including those for millionaires and billionaires, as well as the tax cuts on unearned income from capital gains and dividends. These combined measures would add $1.5 trillion to the debt over the next ten years.

6. Randall Stephenson, AT&T

AT&T is another firm that paid its CEO more last year than they paid in federal corporate income taxes. CEO Randall Stephenson made $18.7 million , while the firm enjoyed a $420 million refund from Uncle Sam.

AT&T is a major beneficiary of ?accelerated depreciation? rules that allow companies to turbo-charge tax deductions in the early years of the life of an asset. A 2009 accelerated depreciation rule saved the company $5.2 billion on their 2011 taxes, according to the firm?s 10-K report. Although touted as a way to jumpstart spending in a downturn, such tax breaks often result in taxpayers bearing a substantial portion of the cost of investments firms would?ve made anyway 

7. Arne Sorenson, Marriott International

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Justice prosecuted Marriott International for using an illegal tax shelter swindle dubbed ? Son of Boss .? The scam involved setting up a series of complex paper transactions between company subsidiaries to create $70 million in fake losses that could be offset against Marriott?s real profits. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a long-time friend of the Marriott family and named after Marriott?s patriarch J. Willard Marriott, was the head of the hotel giant?s audit committee in 1994 at the time the board first approved the Son of Boss transaction. According to Bloomberg, Marriott has also shifted profits to a Luxembourg shell company and avoided hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes through one federal tax credit for so-called synthetic fuel that Senator John McCain dubbed an ?expensive hoax.?

8. Alexander Cutler, Eaton Corporation

Less than two years after accepting $90 million in taxpayer-financed subsidies to locate a new world headquarters in the suburbs of Cleveland, Eaton Corporation announced that it would be moving its headquarters and reincorporating as an Irish company. The move is part of a merger deal with Cooper Industries, another Fix the Debt coalition member. The two companies boast that Eaton?s departure after 100 years in Cleveland will cut their tax bill by $160 million . Meanwhile, Eaton is fighting a $75 million bill from the IRS for back taxes and penalties related to alleged violations of transfer pricing agreements.

 

9. Lowell McAdam, Verizon

Verizon is one of 30 companies identified by Citizens for Tax Justice as having paid ?less than nothing? in federal income taxes over the entire 2008-10 period. Despite earning $32.5 billion in profits during these three years, the firm got so much in tax subsidies that they wound up with a net tax refund of $951 million. That works out to a tax rate of negative 2.9%. In effect, every Verizon phone customer paid more in federal telephone excise taxes than Verizon paid in federal income taxes.

10. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft

A recent Senate investigation exposed how Microsoft has used Olympic class accounting acrobatics to avoid paying taxes. Specifically, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations charged that the software giant had devised a complicated transfer pricing agreement with a subsidiary in Puerto Rico to lower its tax bill on goods sold in the U.S. market by as much as $4.5 billion from 2009 to 2011. The investigation also accused Microsoft of avoiding billions in U.S. corporate income taxes by shifting royalty revenue to low-tax jurisdictions. Subcommittee Chair Carl Levin described Microsoft?s strategies as ?tax alchemy, featuring structures and transactions that require a suspension of disbelief to be accepted.? Such alchemy, while not illegal, is a major contributor to the national debt.

Sanders to CEOs: Look in the Mirror

When Fix the Debt launched their 80 CEO-strong coalition on October 25, Senator Bernie Sanders responded by stating, ?Before telling us why we should cut Social Security, Medicare and other vitally important programs, these CEOs might want to take a hard look at their responsibility for causing the deficit and this terrible recession.?

Instead, the Fix the Debt coalition members are portraying themselves as the honorable ones who are brave enough to push the tough austerity medicine that is the only remedy for our fiscal ills. Nonsense. We are the richest nation in the history of the world. Our problem is that too much of our wealth is going into the coffers of rich individuals and corporations and to pay for misguided wars.

There are numerous budget plans by Senator Sanders, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and others that would get us on the right track. At the Institute for Policy Studies , we?ve identified a dozen policies that would collectively raise trillions of dollars to in ways that would not only address the fiscal challenge but help make our economy more equitable, green, and secure. The report also points out that until we recover from the current unemployment crisis, we should not be contemplating any spending cuts that could deepen the crisis.

The Fix the Debt coalition is using the so-called ?fiscal cliff? as an opportunity to push the same old corporate agenda of more tax breaks while shifting the burden on to the middle class and the poor. If America?s CEOs really want to Fix the Debt, they should first commit to eliminating the loopholes that have allowed them to avoid paying their fair share of the cost of government, including investments necessary to keep our families and our communities strong and secure.

Sarah Anderson is Global Economy Project Director and Scott Klinger is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies . 

 
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From rkarch at mcn.org  Fri Oct 26 21:45:08 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 21:45:08 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Tattooed Candidate
Message-ID: <D42A26E7-6123-4994-B1F9-3EBF2D19B0F3@mcn.org>


October 19, 2012
New Yorker Cover Story: Mitt Romney?s Tattoos


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/10/cover-story-mitt-romney-norman-rockwell-tattoos.html#ixzz2ATI6eQuU


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From marksafron at att.net  Sat Oct 27 11:59:06 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2012 11:59:06 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] How to Rig an Election
References: <BD3C8B24-1ED5-475C-89C0-4C113924647B@att.net>
Message-ID: <71774989-0D04-496E-854D-65B78FA06B48@att.net>


How to Rig an Election


By Victoria Collier, Harper's Magazine

26 October 12

 
t was a hot summer in 1932 when Louisiana senator Huey "Kingfish" Long arranged to rig the vote on a number of amendments to his state's constitution that would be advantageous to his financial interests. Long was no stranger to rigged votes. This time around, however, the fix delivered by his machine was blatant and sloppy: his favored amendments won unanimously in sixteen New Orleans precincts and garnered identical vote totals in twenty-eight others.

Eugene Stanley, the incorruptible district attorney for Orleans Parish, presented evidence of fraud to a grand jury. Louisiana's attorney general, the less morally encumbered Gaston Porterie, stepped in to sabotage the case for Long. Nonetheless, two judges demanded a recount, at which point Governor O. K. Allen obliged Long by declaring martial law. Intimidated jurors found themselves sorting ballots under the supervision of National Guardsmen, who stood by to "protect" them with machine guns.

When this effort failed, another grand jury was convened. Their eventual finding of a massive conspiracy led to the indictment of 513 New Orleans election officials. Once again, Long used his famous powers of persuasion. At his behest, the Louisiana legislature modified the state's election law, giving ex post facto protection to the defendants. Election rigging, Long might have quipped, had become downright exhausting. But it worked.

From the earliest days of the republic, American politicians (and much of a cynical populace) saw vote rigging as a necessary evil. Since the opposition was assumed to be playing equally dirty, how could you avoid it? Most Americans would probably have confessed to a grudging admiration for New York City's Tammany Hall machine, which bought off judges, politicians, and ward captains, ensured the suppression of thousands of votes, and controlled Democratic Party nominations for more than a century.

By the beginning of the last century, however, sentiment had begun to shift. In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled that vote suppression could be federally prosecuted. In Terre Haute, Indiana, more than a hundred men had already been indicted for conspiring to fix the 1914 elections for mayor, sheriff, and circuit judge. The incumbent sheriff and judge went to jail for five years, and Mayor Donn M. Roberts spent six years in Leavenworth.

Roberts and his gang, declared the New York Times, had failed to grasp that "what is safe and even commendable one year may be dangerous and reprehensible the next." Almost overnight, commonplace corruption had become unacceptable, and vote rigging a serious crime. It took a strongman like Huey Long to remain an exception to the rule. But the overall trajectory seemed to point toward reform, accountability, and security. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, seventy-two years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton first demanded women's suffrage - the right that would, in Stanton's words, "secure all others." By the 1960s, Northern Democrats abandoned their Southern allies and pushed to end the mass suppression of black votes below the Mason?Dixon line. With the Voting Rights Act of 1965, many Americans began to believe that the bad old days of stolen elections might soon be behind us.

But as the twentieth century came to a close, a brave new world of election rigging emerged, on a scale that might have prompted Huey Long's stunned admiration. Tracing the sea changes in our electoral process, we see that two major events have paved the way for this lethal form of election manipulation: the mass adoption of computerized voting technology, and the outsourcing of our elections to a handful of corporations that operate in the shadows, with little oversight or accountability.

This privatization of our elections has occurred without public knowledge or consent, leading to one of the most dangerous and least understood crises in the history of American democracy. We have actually lost the ability to verify election results.

The use of computers in elections began around the time of the Voting Rights Act. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the use of optical scanners to process paper ballots became widespread, usurping local hand counting. The media, anxious to get on the air with vote totals, hailed the faster and more efficient computerized count. In the twenty-first century, a new technology became ubiquitous: Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting, which permits touchscreen machines and does not require a paper trail. Old-school ballot-box fraud at its most egregious was localized and limited in scope. But new electronic voting systems allow insiders to rig elections on a statewide or even national scale. And whereas once you could catch the guilty parties in the act, and even dredge the ballot boxes out of the bayou, the virtual vote count can be manipulated in total secrecy. By means of proprietary, corporate-owned software, just one programmer could steal hundreds, thousands, potentially even millions of votes with the stroke of a key. It's the electoral equivalent of a drone strike.

Symbolically speaking, this era was inaugurated by Chuck Hagel, an unknown millionaire who ran for one of Nebraska's U.S. Senate seats in 1996. Initially Hagel trailed the popular Democratic governor, Ben Nelson, who had been elected in a landslide two years earlier. Three days before the election, however, a poll conducted by the Omaha World-Herald showed a dead heat, with 47 percent of respondents favoring each candidate. David Moore, who was then managing editor of the Gallup Poll, told the paper, "We can't predict the outcome."

Hagel's victory in the general election, invariably referred to as an "upset," handed the seat to the G.O.P. for the first time in eighteen years. Hagel trounced Nelson by fifteen points. Even for those who had factored in the governor's deteriorating numbers and a last-minute barrage of negative ads, this divergence from pre-election polling was enough to raise eyebrows across the nation.

Few Americans knew that until shortly before the election, Hagel had been chairman of the company whose computerized voting machines would soon count his own votes: Election Systems & Software (then called American Information Systems). Hagel stepped down from his post just two weeks before announcing his candidacy. Yet he retained millions of dollars in stock in the McCarthy Group, which owned ES&S. And Michael McCarthy, the parent company's founder, was Hagel's campaign treasurer.

Whether Hagel's relationship to ES&S ensured his victory is open to speculation. But the surprising scale of his win awakened a new fear among voting-rights activists and raised a disturbing question: Who controls the new technology of Election Night?

"Why would someone who owns a voting-machine company want to run for office?" asked Charlie Matulka, a Democrat who contested Hagel's Senate seat in 2002. Speaking at a press conference shortly before the election, he added: "Is this the fox guarding the henhouse?" A construction worker with limited funding and name recognition, Matulka was obviously a less formidable competitor than Nelson. Still, Hagel won an astonishing 83 percent of the vote - among the largest margins of victory in any statewide race in Nebraska's history. And with nearly 400,000 registered Democrats on the rolls, Matulka managed to scrape up only 70,290 votes.

Hagel had never actually disclosed his financial ties to ES&S, and Matulka requested an investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee. His request was rejected. Equally futile was his call for a hand count of the ballots, since a state law specified that recounts had to be conducted using the very same "vote-counting device" that was used to begin with - in this case, the ES&S optical scanners.

Meanwhile, the new millennium, far from delivering a democratic promised land, presented Americans with the debacle of the 2000 presidential election, whose fate hung absurdly on "hanging chads" - the little pieces of punched-out ballot so contentiously examined during the monthlong recount. Few Americans knew (and many still do not know) that a faulty computer memory card triggered this fiasco. Late on Election Night, Al Gore's total in Volusia County, Florida, suddenly dropped when one precinct reported 16,000 negative votes. Fox News was immediately prompted by Florida governor Jeb Bush to call the election for his brother. On his way to a 3 a.m. public concession, Gore changed course when a campaign staffer discovered that he was actually ahead in Volusia County by 13,000 votes.

But the damage was done. Gore was cast as a sore loser in a hostile media environment. His effort to obtain a recount was described by Sean Hannity on Fox News as an attempt to "steal the election." Meanwhile, George W. Bush invoked his duty to get on with the business of running the country. The rest, as they say, is history.

We are now in the midst of yet another election season. And as November 6 approaches, only one thing is certain: American voters will have no ability to know with certainty who wins any given race, from dogcatcher to president. Nor will we know the true results of ballot initiatives and referenda affecting some of the most vital issues of our day, including fracking, abortion, gay marriage, GMO-food labeling, and electoral reform itself. Our faith-based elections are the result of a new Dark Age in American democracy, brought on, paradoxically, by techological progress.

The spread of computerized voting has carried with it an enormous potential for electronic skulduggery. In 2003, Bev Harris, a citizen sleuth and the author of Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, made a shocking and game-changing discovery: Diebold, then one of the primary manufacturers of voting machines, had left the 40,000 files that made up its Global Election Management System (GEMS) on a publicly accessible website, entirely unprotected. Diebold was never able to explain how its proprietary tabulation program ended up in such an exposed position. Harris downloaded the files, and programmers worldwide pounced, probing the code for weaknesses. "The wall of secrecy," said Harris, "began to crumble."

GEMS turned out to be a vote rigger's dream. According to Harris's analysis, it could be hacked, remotely or on-site, using any off-the-shelf version of Microsoft Access, and password protection was missing for supervisor functions. Not only could multiple users gain access to the system after only one had logged in, but unencrypted audit logs allowed any trace of vote rigging to be wiped from the record.

The public unmasking of GEMS by an average citizen (who was not a programmer herself) served as a belated wake-up call to the world's leading computer-security experts, who finally turned their attention to America's most widely used voting systems. Damning reports have since been issued by researchers from Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Rice, and Stanford Universities, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the Government Accountability Office (none of them institutions hospitable to "tinfoil hat" conspiracy theorists). Experts describe appalling security flaws, from the potential for system-wide vote-rigging viruses to the use of cheap, easily replicated keys - the same kind used on jukeboxes and hotel minibars - to open the machines themselves. In 2005, the nonpartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker, stated unequivocally that the greatest threats to secure voting are insiders with direct access to the machines: "There is no reason to trust insiders in the election industry any more than in other industries."

As recently as September 2011, a team at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory hacked into one of Diebold's old Accuvote touchscreen systems. Their report asserted that anyone with $26 in parts and an eighth-grade science education would be able to manipulate the outcome of an election. "This is a national security issue," wrote the Argonne team leader, Roger Johnston, using the sort of language that would normally set off alarm bells in our security-obsessed culture. Yet his warning has gone unheeded, and the Accuvote-TSX, now manufactured by ES&S, will be used in twenty states by more than 26 million voters in the 2012 general election.

Johnston's group also breached a system made by another industry giant, Sequoia, using the same "man in the middle" hack - a tiny wireless component that is inserted between the display screen and the main circuit board - which requires no knowledge of the actual voting software. The Sequoia machine will be used in four states by nearly 9 million voters in 2012.

Why did a physicist choose to hack into voting machines? "This was basically a weekend project," Johnston told me, expressing his amazement at the meager funding available to examine America's voting systems. "We did it because a lot of people looking at the machines are cybersecurity experts and programmers - and when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. They were largely looking at sophisticated, cyber-based attacks. But there are simple physical attacks, as we proved, that are easier to do and harder to prevent."

The voting-machine companies never responded to the Argonne reports. "That's not unusual," says Johnston. "The manufacturers seem to be in denial on some of these issues."

Why the denial? There are at least 3.9 billion good reasons. In 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), offering states $3.9 billion in subsidies to modernize their election administration and equipment, purportedly in response to Florida's hanging-chad fiasco of 2000. HAVA mandated that every polling place provide at least one voting system that allowed disabled people to vote with the same "privacy and independence" accorded to nondisabled voters. Thanks to confusing language in HAVA itself, and even a misleading report issued by the Congressional Research Service, one might easily assume that the mandate called for the purchase of DRE machines. In this way, the blind and visually impaired were unwittingly used as pawns to advance the agenda of the voting-machine industry. One election supervisor claims that Diebold went so far as to send him threatening letters after he sought out less expensive alternatives to service the disabled, even when these machines were compatible with Diebold's systems.

This was not the only deception surrounding the rollout of these electoral Trojan horses. In a 2007 Dan Rather expos?, The Trouble with Touch Screens, seven whistle-blowers at Sequoia charged that company executives had forced them to use inferior paper stock for ballots during the 2000 election. What's more, said the whistle-blowers, they had been instructed to misalign the chads on punch cards destined for the Democratic stronghold of Palm Beach County. "My own personal opinion was the touchscreen-voting system wasn't getting off the ground like they would hope," said Greg Smith, a thirty-two-year Sequoia employee. "So, I feel like they deliberately did all this to have problems with the paper ballots."

Such blockbuster allegations are perhaps unsurprising given the group of Beltway insiders who helped to pass HAVA. One central player was former Republican representative Bob Ney of Ohio, sentenced in 2006 to thirty months in prison for crimes connected with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff - whose firm was paid at least $275,000 by Diebold.

HAVA's impact has been huge, accelerating a deterioration of our electoral system that most Americans have yet to recognize, let alone understand. We are literally losing our ballot - the key physical proof of our power as citizens.

Even a former major elections official has heaped scorn upon HAVA's mission. DeForest Soaries was appointed by George W. Bush to head the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), which HAVA created to oversee security standards for new voting devices. Soaries stepped down in 2005, calling his office a "charade" and claiming that he had been deceived by both the White House and Congress. Washington politicians, Soaries declared in a 2006 radio interview, have apparently concluded that our voting system can't be all that bad - after all, it got them elected. "But there's an erosion of voting rights implicit in our inability to trust the technology that we use," he added. "And if we were another country being analyzed by America, we would conclude that this country is ripe for stealing elections and for fraud."

The sheer unreliability of this new technology is only half the problem. The other half is a series of mergers and acquisitions that have further centralized the voting-machine industry over the past decade or so. Election Day is now dominated by a handful of secretive corporations with interlocking ownership, strong partisan ties to the far right, and executives who revolve among them like beans in a shell game.

Bob and Todd Urosevich are hardly household names. Yet the two brothers have succeeded in monopolizing American election technology for decades through a pair of supposedly competing corporations: the Ohio-based Diebold and the Nebraska-based ES&S. The latter was founded by the Urosevich brothers in 1979 and is headquartered in Omaha, where it has an Ayn Rand?flavored corporate address on John Galt Boulevard. It is also, let us recall, the same company that may have won Chuck Hagel his Senate seat.

Diebold became the most infamous name in the industry in 2003, when its CEO, Walden O'Dell, a top fund-raiser for George W. Bush, made a jaw-dropping public promise to "deliver" Ohio's electoral votes to Bush. The following year, California banned Diebold's touchscreen system, and Secretary of State Kevin Shelley blasted the company as "fraudulent," "despicable," and "deceitful." O'Dell stepped down in 2005, right before the filing of a class-action suit that accused Diebold of fraud, insider trading, and slipshod quality control.

Concerned about its tarnished brand, the company removed its label from the front of voting machines. Then Diebold went one step further and changed the name of its voting-machine division to Premier Election Solutions.

In 2009, Diebold, which makes ATMs and other security systems, got out of the elections business altogether, selling Premier to ES&S. Here was a windfall for the Urosevich brothers in more than one sense: Bob had decamped to Diebold in 2002, when the company bought Global Election Systems, where he then served as president. Todd, meanwhile, remained at ES&S. This cozy arrangement was disrupted by a Justice Department antitrust intervention, which forced ES&S to split ownership of Premier with Dominion, the next big name in election technology. A month later, the deck was shuffled once again with Dominion's purchase of Sequoia.

Between them, Dominion and ES&S now count the majority of American ballots. There are, of course, newer technologies in development, including Web-based voting. This latest innovation is being peddled by the Spanish-owned Scytl, which named Bob Urosevich managing director of its Americas division in 2006.

One would think (or hope) that a private industry entrusted with America's votes would require the highest degree of personal integrity from its employees. As it happens, many of the key staffers behind our major voting-machine companies have been accused or convicted of a dizzying array of white-collar crimes, including conspiracy, bribery, bid rigging, computer fraud, tax fraud, stock fraud, mail fraud, extortion, and drug trafficking.

In 2001, for example, a grand jury indicted Philip Foster, Sequoia's southern regional sales manager, for malfeasance and conspiring to launder money. During the previous decade, he had facilitated a kickback scheme that funneled payments to a Louisiana elections official, who purchased Sequoia equipment while winking at millions of dollars in overcharges. The scheme, which also involved Foster's brother-in-law and fellow Sequoia employee David Philpot, was hardly an advertisement for the company. Yet Foster, who gained immunity for his testimony against the elections official, not only avoided jail time but was promoted to vice president of sales administration and strategies at Sequoia.(!)

One high achiever actually got his start in prison. Jeffrey Dean's vote-by-mail software - developed while Dean was serving a sentence for twenty-three counts of embezzlement - came to dominate the U.S. absentee-voting market. Once out of prison, Dean launched his own ballot-printing company with narcotics trafficker John Elder. They later sold it to Global Election Systems, where, readers will recall, Bob Urosevich served as president and COO, before the company was sold to Diebold.

This leads us to a crazy-making realization. Although many felons (and prior felons) can't cast a ballot in America - an estimated 6 million citizens will be disenfranchised in 2012 due to felony convictions - these particular felons are apparently free to design and manage our entire elections industry.

Since the American Revolution, election fraud has been attempted by every major political party, with frequent intraparty allegations, such as the claim of Ron Paul delegates that the rules were rigged against them at this year's Republican National Convention. To say that Democrats haven't committed their fair share of what were once quaintly called "shenanigans" would be disingenuous. Huey Long was a Democrat, as was virtually every candidate ever floated by Tammany Hall, not to mention Lyndon Johnson - whose election to the U.S. Senate in 1948, according to Robert Caro's Means of Ascent, relied on flagrant vote tampering. Still, the main beneficiary of recent trends in election stealing seems to be the American right.

This is no accident. As the twenty-first century unfolds, American politics continues to veer precipitously to the right, even as the demographic base for such a shift - older white conservative males - keeps shrinking. The engine of this seismic movement is a strategic alliance of corporate interests promoted by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. empire and orchestrated by Karl Rove and the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council. And meanwhile, the American right has in recent years been empowered by a slew of upset victories that range from unexpected to implausible, and that have frequently been accompanied by technical failures and anomalies, which are swept under the rug as rapidly as possible.

In 2002, the G.O.P. regained control of the Senate with such victories. In Georgia, for example, Diebold's voting machines reported the defeat of Democratic senator Max Cleland. Early polls had given the highly popular Cleland a solid lead over his Republican opponent, Saxby Chambliss, a favorite of the Christian right, the NRA, and George W. Bush (who made several campaign appearances on his behalf). As Election Day drew near, the contest narrowed. Chambliss, who had avoided military service, ran attack ads denouncing Cleland - a Silver Star recipient who lost three limbs in Vietnam - as a traitor for voting against the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Two days before the election, a Zogby poll gave Chambliss a one-point lead among likely voters, while the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Cleland maintained a three-point advantage with the same group.

Cleland lost by seven points. In his 2009 autobiography, he accused computerized voting machines of being "ripe for fraud." Patched for fraud might have been more apt. In the month leading up to the election, Diebold employees, led by Bob Urosevich, applied a mysterious, uncertified software patch to 5,000 voting machines that Georgia had purchased in May.

"We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Diebold consultant and whistle-blower Chris Hood recounted in a 2006 Rolling Stone article. "The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done. . . . It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state. . . . We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from [Bob] Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level."

Two years later, of course, John Kerry lost the presidency in Ohio. In this key swing state, election monitors were besieged by complaints of G.O.P. orchestrated voter suppression, intimidation, and fraud. Myriad voting-machine anomalies were reported, including "glitches" that flipped votes from Kerry to Bush. A phony terror alert in Republican Warren County (the FBI later denied issuing any such warning) allowed officials to move ballots illegally to an auxiliary building and count them out of public view. Presiding over the election was the Republican secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, a fiercely partisan fundamentalist Christian who also served as co-chair of Ohio's Committee to Re-Elect George W. Bush.

The exhaustive evidence of voting irregularities in Ohio was documented in a 2005 report commissioned by Representative John Conyers, "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio." At the time of that report, however, a major piece of the puzzle was still missing: the role of G.O.P. computer guru Michael Connell.

Connell was the Bush campaign's chief IT strategist. He was also a zealous anti-abortion activist whose two Ohio-based companies built websites and email systems for the Republican National Committee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and many of the most powerful figures in the G.O.P., including Karl Rove, Jeb Bush, and Jack Abramoff. It was one of Connell's websites that reported the surprising (many say unbelievable) surge of votes in Ohio that handed George W. Bush the White House for the second time.

In 2004, Connell was hired by Blackwell to design a website that would post Ohio election results to the public. Connell's contract also required that he create a "mirror site" that would kick in to display the vote totals if the official Ohio servers were overwhelmed by Election Day traffic. For the latter portion of the job, he turned to SmarTech, a little-known company headquartered in Chattanooga, Tennessee. SmarTech was as partisan as Connell himself, and the company's servers hosted hundreds of high-profile Republican websites (and, later on, an assortment of anti-Obama websites).

Four years later, Ohio attorney (and former Republican) Cliff Arnebeck began gathering evidence to file a racketeering claim against Karl Rove, which included the charge that Rove had masterminded the theft of the 2004 election. "We detected a pattern of criminal activity," Arnebeck told the British journalist Simon Worrall. "We identified Connell as a key witness, as the implementer for Rove." On November 3, 2008, he took a sworn deposition from Connell, who had repeatedly tried to quash Arnebeck's subpoena.

Initially Connell denied any role in choosing SmarTech to host the mirror site. Questioned further, he admitted that he "may have" made use of the Tennessee servers, but denied any knowledge of whether the mirror site had even been activated in 2004. His job, he insisted, was simply to display vote counts, "taking the public results as they are currently being reported and aggregating them into totals."

In fact, the SmarTech site went into action at 11:14 p.m. on Election Day. At this point, Arnebeck believes, the data being routed to Tennessee was used by G.O.P. partisans to target Ohio counties that were ripe for vote tampering. "The SmarTech people may have been guiding the manipulation of paper ballots in places like Warren County," Arnebeck told me.

Others argue that SmarTech's role was far more insidious and involved partisan control of the total vote count. Stephen Spoonamore, an IT specialist (and Republican) who has consulted on cybersecurity for Boeing, MasterCard, the Navy, and the State Department, has studied the electronic "architecture map" used by Ohio during the 2004 election. He speculates that SmarTech might have been able to use Connell's interface to gain access to and modify vote totals. In a sworn affidavit, Spoonamore said that the "variable nature of the story" and "lack of documentation available" would, for any of his banking clients, provoke "an immediate fraud investigation."

Arnebeck hoped to have Connell testify in open court against Rove. But the prospective witness died on December 19, 2008, at age forty-seven, when his single-engine Piper Saratoga, which he was piloting alone, crashed en route from Washington, D.C., to Ohio. The circumstances of his death were viewed with suspicion by his family and close friends and sparked a firestorm of conspiracy chatter on the Internet, but no criminal investigation was launched. Whether Rove and his collaborators orchestrated the electronic theft of the 2004 election will likely never be known. Still, Election Day exit polls make a compelling case that somebody may have been tampering with the presidential vote count, in Ohio and elsewhere.

Late on Election Day, John Kerry showed an insurmountable lead in exit polling, and many considered his victory all but certified. Yet the final vote tallies in thirty states deviated widely from exit polls, with discrepancies favoring George W. Bush in all but nine. The greatest disparities were concentrated in battleground states - particularly Ohio. In one Ohio precinct, exit polls indicated that Kerry should have received 67 percent of the vote, but the certified tally gave him only 38 percent. The odds of such an unexpected outcome occurring only as a result of sampling error are 1 in 867,205,553. To quote Lou Harris, who has long been regarded as the father of modern political polling: "Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen."

The statistically anomalous shifting of votes to the conservative right has become so pervasive in post-HAVA America that it now has a name of its own. Experts call it the "red shift."

The Election Defense Alliance (EDA) is a nonprofit organization specializing in election forensics - a kind of dusting for the fingerprints of electronic theft. It is joined in this work by a coalition of independent statisticians, who have compared decades of computer-vote results to exit polls, tracking polls, and hand counts. Their findings show that when disparities occur, they benefit Republicans and right-wing issues far beyond the bounds of probability. "We approach electoral integrity with a nonpartisan goal of transparency," says EDA executive director Jonathan Simon. "But there is nothing nonpartisan about the patterns we keep finding." Simon's verdict is confirmed by David Moore, a former vice president and managing editor of Gallup: "What the exit polls have consistently shown is stronger Democratic support than the election results."

Wouldn't American voters eventually note the constant disparity between poll numbers and election outcomes, and cry foul? They might - except that polling numbers, too, are being quietly shifted. Exit-poll data is provided by the National Election Pool, a corporate-media consortium consisting of the three major television networks plus CNN, Fox News, and the Associated Press. The NEP relies in turn on two companies, Edison Research and Mitofsky International, to conduct and analyze the actual polling. However, few Americans realize that the final exit polls on Election Day are adjusted by the pollsters - in other words, weighted according to the computerized-voting-machine totals.

When challenged on these disparities, pollsters often point to methodological flaws. Within days of the 2004 election, Warren Mitofsky (who invented exit polls in 1967) appeared on television to unveil what became known as the "reluctant Bush responder" theory: "We suspect that the main reason was that the Kerry voters were more anxious to participate in our exit polls than the Bush voters." But some analysts and pollsters insist this theory is entirely unproven. "I don't think the pollsters have really made a convincing case that it's solely methodological," Moore told me.

In Moore's opinion, the NEP could resolve the whole issue by making raw, unadjusted, precinct-level data available to the public. "Our great, free, and open media are concealing data so that it cannot be analyzed," Moore charges. Their argument that such data is proprietary and would allow analysts to deduce which votes were cast by specific individuals is, Moore insists, "specious at best." He adds: "They have a communal responsibility to clarify whether there is a vote miscount going on. But so far there's been no pressure on them to do so."

Some argue that the Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008 disprove the existence of the red shift. However, this may be a misinterpretation of complex political upheavals that occurred in each of those election years.

While Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives in 2006, and the White House in 2008, postelection analyses did in fact suggest extensive red-shift rigging. But in both election cycles, these efforts simply failed to overcome eleventh-hour events so negative that they drastically undercut the projected wins for the G.O.P.

In 2006, it was the exposure of Republican representative Mark Foley's sexual advances toward male congressional pages, and the long-standing cover-up of his behavior by G.O.P. leadership. The scandal swirling around the outwardly homophobic Foley broke in a very ugly and public way, engulfing the entire party and causing a free fall in its polling numbers. The Democratic margin in the Cook Generic Congressional Ballot poll, which had been at 9 percent in early October, jumped to 26 percent by the week of the election.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers months before the 2008 elections had a similar effect on John McCain's numbers. Pre-election polls showed that the American public blamed the Republicans for the imploding financial markets. "These political sea changes swamped a red shift that turned out to be under-calibrated," argues Jonathan Simon, who speculates that Barack Obama actually won by a historic landslide, driven by an overwhelming backlash against the policies of the Bush Administration.

By 2010, the electoral map was once again littered with upset victories that tipped the balance of power in America back toward the right. In Massachusetts, it was Tea Party candidate Scott Brown who achieved what the New York Times called an "extraordinary upset" in his race for the late Ted Kennedy's seat - and thereby erased the Democrats' filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate. A little more than an hour after the polls closed on January 19, the Associated Press declared that Brown had defeated Attorney General Martha Coakley, becoming the state's first Republican senator in thirty years.

By most accounts, Coakley, who was initially favored to win, ran a lackluster campaign. And her opponent was riding a wave of populist discontent with the Obama Administration. Yet even Brown's victory, widely predicted by January 19, raised some questions about voting technology. According to the EDA, in all seventy-one locations where ballots were counted by hand under public observation - more than 65,000 ballots in all - Coakley beat her opponent by 2.8 percent. Their analysis also showed that computer-counted communities were more Democratic by registration and historically less likely to support Republican candidates.

In Florida, Rick Scott was elected governor in November after an historically close race with his opponent, Alex Sink. Scott, a millionaire and Tea Party favorite, squeaked through with a 1.15 percent margin of victory, representing just 61,550 votes, after a number of Dominion machines in Hillsborough County failed to upload results. In the wake of what was described as a memory-card glitch, election workers manually rescanned about 38,000 early-voting ballots, without any supervision by the public or the press. Sink, who needed only 35,000 more votes to trigger a mandatory recount, conceded the following day.

Further darkening Florida's electoral atmosphere was Scott's record of legal travails. He had narrowly avoided indictment in the late 1990s for his role as CEO of Columbia/HCA, a private health-care company. HCA eventually admitted to substantial criminal conduct and paid a record $1.7 billion to the federal government. Whistle-blower lawsuits alleged that HCA engaged in a series of schemes to defraud Medicare, Medicaid, and TRICARE, the military's health-insurance program.

Scott left the company unscathed, with a reported $300 million parachute, then spent $73 million of his own money running for office. Two years later, he targeted 180,000 registered voters in an attempt to purge noncitizens from Florida's voter rolls. Many of the state's sixty-seven county election supervisors refused to carry out the purge. Leon County supervisor Ion Sancho called it un-American behavior. "This is an example of partisan manipulation of the process to try to affect the outcome," he told me. "It's sad but true."

In Wisconsin in 2010, the new Tea Party governor-elect, Scott Walker, unveiled a violently corporatist agenda destined for legal challenge - ensuring that the 2011 race for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court would be of crucial importance. The election was ultimately decided by Waukesha county clerk Kathy Nickolaus, who "discovered" 14,300 votes on her computer late on Election Night. This windfall handed the victory to the conservative incumbent, Justice David Prosser, for whom Nickolaus had worked for seven years. Prosser later joined the court's majority in upholding Walker's union-busting legislation, stripping workers of their collective-bargaining rights in the birthplace of the Progressive movement.

There is, finally, South Carolina's 2010 race for U.S. Senate, which Republican Jim DeMint won with 78 percent of the vote. What is mysterious is not the ultimate outcome, but the Democratic primary that preceded it, which tossed up a fairly fortuitous opponent for DeMint: Alvin Greene, an unemployed thirty-two-year-old accused sex offender living in his father's basement.

Greene, often described as "incoherent," ran no campaign: no website, no appearances at Democratic events, not even a yard sign. Yet he miraculously beat his opponent in the Democratic primary, former judge and four-term state legislator Vic Rawl, by an 18 percent margin. Voters and campaign workers reported that the ES&S touchscreen machines "flipped" votes to Greene all day long. Meanwhile, the absentee ballots - which were counted by hand - told a different story. In half of the state's forty-six counties, there was a 10 percent disparity between absentee ballots and those counted by machine; in Lancaster County, Rawl won 84 percent of the absentee vote.

Greene denied accusations (or, some would say, observations) that he was a G.O.P. plant, while declining to explain where he got the $10,400 needed to file as a candidate. Rawl lodged a formal protest and requested a new primary. That was quickly knocked down by the executive committee of the South Carolina Democratic Party - and DeMint sailed to a rout in November.

In the weeks following the South Carolina spectacle, the press engaged in round after round of analytic Twister, avoiding the most obvious question: Had another extremist just gained federal office on the basis of a rigged election? Their silence, however, was nothing unusual.

In his 2011 paper "To the American Media: Time to Face the Reality of Election Rigging," Jonathan Simon accuses the press of maintaining a Mafia-style omert? on the subject. "The gruesome truth," he writes, "is that American elections can be rigged, and are being rigged, because the American media treats election rigging as something that - all evidence notwithstanding - could never happen here."

Few people know this better than NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, whose booksFooled Again and Loser Take All document a wide assortment of G.O.P. vote-stealing tricks in every major election from 2000 to 2006. When the books were published, he told me, "I got no interviews and almost no reviews, despite the wealth of evidence I'd gathered. The corporate media was silent. But the left-wing press was hostile."

Indeed, his colleagues on the left seem most reluctant of anyone to grapple with the concept of large-scale election tampering. "I know Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Rachel Maddow," Miller says. "I've tried for years to get them to concede that possibility, but they won't do even that. There's clearly a profound unease at work. They just can't go there."

Why? No doubt the fear of being branded a conspiracy theorist inhibits many - that term having long served as a cudgel to suppress discussion of all sorts of crimes against democracy. As Miller puts it, "There is no more exquisite method of silencing dissent, or shutting down inconvenient inquiry, than to charge someone with conspiracy theory."

Like their counterparts in the media, Democrats in office today appear unwilling to defend what matters most. They stand in complicit silence as improbable results are spat from the innards of unaccountable voting machines.

"For Democratic legislators and candidates, openly questioning the integrity of American democracy feels like committing political suicide," says Ben Ptashnik. A former Vermont state senator, Ptashnik ran for office in 1996 specifically to spearhead the state's Clean Elections Act - whose provisions were largely struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court nearly a decade after its passage. Ptashnik believes that election rigging remains an untouchable phenomenon in American politics. "Very few leaders are willing to fight it, which is probably why Kerry backed off in 2004. But the evidence is piling up. Democrats have to get their heads out of the sand and realize we're looking at our worst nightmare: Karl Rove's projected forty-year G.O.P. dynasty."

Ptashnik speaks with particular bluntness about the state of American democracy. "Today, Karl Rove and the Koch brothers are pushing a corporatist, anti-union agenda," he says, "cynically allying with anti-immigrant nativists and Christian fundamentalists." He compares the situation to that of Germany during the 1930s, when anticommunism drove industrialists and much of the working class into the arms of fascism. It is Germany, however, that has now become the standard-bearer for clean elections. In 2009, that nation's constitutional court upheld the basic principle of the public nature of democratic elections. By ruling that the vote count must be something the public can authenticate - and without any specialized expertise - the decision directly challenged the use of computers in elections.

Ireland followed suit in June 2012, sending all its electronic voting machines to the scrap heap. Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan called the computerized voting system a poorly conceived, scandalous waste of money and said he was "glad to bring this sorry episode to a conclusion on behalf of the taxpayer."

The November elections will be a watershed for American democracy. A handful of contested Senate seats stand between a right-wing juggernaut and a moderate-progressive counterforce. A few battleground states - notably Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin - hold the key to the presidential election, which may determine the ideological balance of the Supreme Court for decades to come.

Mitt Romney is regarded tepidly by the right wing of his own party. His Mormon faith and the moderate positions he took as governor of Massachusetts have limited his ability to rally the activist base. Consequently, even a weakened Obama may prove too powerful an incumbent to rig out of the White House.

But if the Republicans gain complete control of Congress, they can probably render Obama toothless for his second term and blame him for the economic upheavals that are sure to come in the next four years. Their focus, then, will probably be on the Senate, where Democrats still hold a precarious edge.

No matter how cynical we may have become about our elections, doing nothing to secure an accurate vote count is not an option. It may be too late to completely prevent vote rigging in the 2012 election. But the spotlight of increased public scrutiny may deter the most brazen acts of fraud - and perhaps dissuade those who believe that shifting votes by minuscule percentages in the electronic dark will go unseen.

Where paper ballots still exist, we can demand that local election clerks allow them to be counted by hand before they leave the precinct. Organizing citizen volunteer groups to count them may be necessary. Sheila Parks, who founded the Center for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots, has also urged citizens with legal standing to file injunctions to impound ballots, memory cards, and even voting machines after the polls close. "This prevents tampering with any of these items after an election," she told me, "and gives us access to them with a secure chain of custody."

Staring at the outside of a black-box voting system and attempting to detect fraud, however, will not ultimately produce clean elections. It is an exercise in futility if we do not take the next steps now. In preparation for the 2014 election, we must demand that our representatives pass comprehensive election reform, including publicly financed races and a secure, transparent vote count. A privatized, secret ballot count must be viewed as a violation of our civil rights. Once that principle is clear, as it is now in Germany and Ireland, the rest will naturally follow. If we the people do not feel the outrage, or lack the courage to fight for this most basic right of American self-governance, who will?




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From marksafron at att.net  Sat Oct 27 14:03:21 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2012 14:03:21 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Why Obama Now
Message-ID: <C4253CA8-4319-4049-9B61-2CBAFA943069@att.net>

If you know any Republicans who can't or won't read show them this simple animation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9G8XREyG0Q&feature=player_embedded#!

From rkarch at mcn.org  Sat Oct 27 23:01:56 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2012 23:01:56 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] 2 great iPhotos
Message-ID: <4B7C2D74-1370-4C29-9242-3940091D893D@mcn.org>

Several  Fridays back

IMG_1082
 


IMG_1084
 


IMG_1085
 

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From annxpress at live.com  Sun Oct 28 08:35:23 2012
From: annxpress at live.com (Ann Rennacker)
Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2012 08:35:23 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] =?windows-1252?q?FW=3A_=5BShared_Post=5D_CNBC_E?=
 =?windows-1252?q?xec=92s_Children_Murdered=2C_1_Day_After_CNBC_Reports_?=
 =?windows-1252?q?=2443_Trillion_Bankster_Lawsuit?=
In-Reply-To: <639f90a858dd11c02f5433959c6ac609@theintelhub.com>
References: <639f90a858dd11c02f5433959c6ac609@theintelhub.com>
Message-ID: <SNT145-W7776D2C422E61DDBE1ADDBDD7C0@phx.gbl>



This is a chilling story about a CNBC Exec whose two children were killed the day after his network aired a story about a $43 Trillion lawsuit brought against money launderers and Govt officials complicit in the bankster fraud coverup.  The story got pulled, and I don't know about the lawsuit, except it names the big guys at the top and foreclosure fraud!
> To: annxpress at live.com
> Subject: [Shared Post] CNBC Exec?s Children Murdered, 1 Day After CNBC Reports $43 Trillion Bankster Lawsuit
> Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2012 08:55:53 
> From: wordpress at theintelhub.com

> Ann (annxpress at live.com) thinks you may be interested in the following post:
> 
 CNBC Exec?s Children Murdered, 1 Day After CNBC Reports $43 Trillion Bankster Lawsuit
 http://theintelhub.com/2012/10/27/cnbc-execs-children-murdered-1-day-after-cnbc-reports-43-trillion-bankster-lawsuit/
 
 		 	   		  
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From jupiter at mcn.org  Sun Oct 28 16:10:52 2012
From: jupiter at mcn.org (Linda Jupiter)
Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2012 16:10:52 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fwd: US sues Bank of America for $1bn over loans
References: <CAKGeRFRm2U+DRkAPQGO3w5u3HgznLsTAFBxFPG2OQb_yo9Z0jA@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BAFEFBBE-470E-436E-985B-77A593DA8AB4@mcn.org>

>
>
> If this email is not displayed correctly, please click on the  
> following link or open your browser and
> paste the link into the address field: http://view.ed4.net/v/M2ZOXX/4VA08V/53PVLI/WLVERO/
>
>  	
> 	
> Breaking news
> Wednesday October 24 2012
>
>
> Breaking News
>
> US sues Bank of America for $1bn over loans
> The US Department of Justice sued Bank of America for more than $1bn  
> on Wednesday, alleging the bank committed civil fraud by selling  
> defective home loans to US government-backed mortgage companies.
> The lawsuit said that Countrywide, the California-based mortgage  
> originator that BofA bought in 2008, implemented a process called  
> the ?Hustle? to deal with loans at high speed without checking their  
> quality.
> Thousands of loans were then sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,  
> which guarantee most US mortgages, and later defaulted, the Justice  
> Department?s lawsuit claims.
>
> http://link.ft.com/r/M2ZOXX/OFSDSJ/IY3VMR/30RS2Y/4VA76Y/ZH/h?a1=2012&a2=10&a3=24
>
>
>
>
> Tools
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> ? THE FINANCIAL TIMES LTD 2012
> ABOUT THIS EMAIL You have received this email because you have  
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> Change Briefings  ?   Unsubscribe  ?   Change Email Address  ?    
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> -- 
> In Solidarity,
> frank of the 99%
>

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From marksafron at att.net  Mon Oct 29 08:22:55 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2012 08:22:55 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] You might want to make a call.
Message-ID: <9E67D5C3-2DE8-4EFC-8163-E35B5018A9CD@att.net>

Keith Olbermann Fan Page
DOJ: 1-202-353 1555 Please call the DOJ and let them know how you feel about the voting machines that the Romney family have purchased for this election. Specifically in Ohio. I just called and there is a voice mail you can leave your concern on. Thank you and have a good evening.

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From marksafron at att.net  Mon Oct 29 16:50:38 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:50:38 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] The heart of the crisis
References: <2358916803.-1686335218@org.orgDB.mail.democracyinaction.org>
Message-ID: <6BD15888-5EA8-452C-8D3A-118FBAD2E292@att.net>






Though most of members of Congress are on the campaign trail, Wall Street lobbyists aren?t taking a break.

The Big Banks want to defang a provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law that would prevent them from pushing unaffordable home loans on unsuspecting families. The banks are demanding an absolute get out of jail free card ? total immunity ? even if they make unaffordable loans.

Aggressive sales of unaffordable loans containing hidden fees, tricks and traps were at the heart of the financial crisis and the foreclosure disaster.

Don?t let them get away with it.

Urge your senators to oppose legal immunity for banks that make unaffordable loans.

To prevent a repeat of the financial crisis, Dodd-Frank requires that banks make sure borrowers are able to pay back their loans. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is currently working on putting this commonsense requirement in place.

The Big Banks are pushing back.

They?ve recruited Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) to attach get-out-of-jail-free language for the banks to a non-controversial piece of legislation, the Responsible Homeowner Refinancing Act (S. 3522), a bill which will make it easier for consumers to refinance at current low-interest rates.

The Corker amendment, if allowed to pass, would grant the banks legal immunity, even when they push predatory loans they know that consumers won?t be able to pay back.

Our senators should know by now that letting the Big Banks do whatever they want is a recipe for disaster.

Make sure your senators know that you know about the reckless Corker amendment, and tell them to oppose it.

		Thanks for all you do,

Rick Claypool
Public Citizen?s Online Action Team
action at citizen.org


P.S. Do one more easy thing before you move to the next message in your inbox. Forward this email to five friends, family members, neighbors or colleagues. They?ll appreciate knowing what matters to you. And your voice will be amplified by every person who joins you in taking action.

Visit our Financial Reform page to learn more about Public Citizen's work to hold big banks accountable. Go to http://action.citizen.org/unsubscribe.jsp if you do not want to receive future emails from Public Citizen.

? 2012 Public Citizen ? 1600 20th Street, NW / Washington, D.C. 20009 ? www.citizen.org




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From marksafron at att.net  Mon Oct 29 17:40:57 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2012 17:40:57 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Can the Company Fire You for the Way You Vote?
Message-ID: <35255AC5-9559-42E5-8E7C-93205124F197@att.net>

Can the Company Fire You for the Way You Vote?
By Michael Paarlberg, Guardian UK ]
28 October 12

 
So many stories of employers pressuring their workers to vote for Romney have come out that you might think workplace intimidation was invented just for this election.

Romney certainly hasn't done much to dispel this perception. In a conference call to the National Federation of Independent Business, the GOP candidate was recorded encouraging business owners to:

"[M]ake it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections."
A number of Romney backers took it upon themselves to spell out more clearly to their workers what "the best interest for their job" really means. David Siegel, CEO of Florida's Westgate Resorts, emailed his employees that a second term for Obama would likely give him "no choice but to reduce the size of this company". Republican donor-activists Charles and David Koch were no less subtle when they sent 45,000 employees of their Georgia Pacific paper company a list of whom to vote for, warning that workers "may suffer the consequences" if Obama is re-elected.

Florida-based ASG Software CEO Arthur Allen informed his employees that he was contemplating a merger that would eliminate "60% of the salaries" of the company ? should Romney lose. In Ohio, coal mine owner Robert Murray left employees in no doubt that they were expected to attend a Romney rally ? off the clock and without pay. In Cuba, at least they pay workers for show demonstrations.

Democrats are apoplectic. But as Romney assured those who have the power to hire and fire thousands of people, there is "nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business". He's right. Heavy-handed? Yes. An abuse of authority? Probably. Against the law? Not likely. News outlets, on the other hand, are merely confused.

"Can your boss really tell you who to vote for?" asked the Atlantic incredulously, before concluding the answer is "probably yes". Should this be a surprise? Seeing that your boss can legally tell you to do nearly anything else, down to what you may wear, when you may eat and how often you may go to the bathroom (and, if he wishes, demand samples when you do), the question comes across as a little na?ve. So, too, is the corollary "Can you be fired for expressing political views at work?" Again, the answer is probably yes, which should only be a shock to anyone who has never held a job in an American private-sector workplace.

In truth, as an "at-will" (that is, non-union) employee, you can be fired for much less. In Arizona, you can be fired for using birth control. If you live in any one of 29 states, you can be fired for being gay. You can be fired for being a fan of the Green Bay Packers if your boss roots for the Bears.

Lest you think employer authority ends when you clock out, only four states ? California, Colorado, New York and North Dakota ? protect workers from being fired for legal activity outside of work. For the rest, workers can and have been fired for anything from smoking to cross-dressing, all in the privacy of their homes. The growing practice of employers demanding job applicants to hand over their Facebook passwords underscores the blurring of the work-life divide in this information age.

But free speech and voting rights are supposed to be more sacrosanct than the integrity of your Facebook account, so one would expect there to be greater political safeguards at work than there actually are. This is not to say they don't exist. Federal law makes it illegal to "intimidate, threaten or coerce" anyone against voting as they wish. But as Siegel, Allen and the Koch brothers have shown, the distinction between possible coercion or intimidation and "worker education" is rather fuzzy in the eyes of the law.

Rather, the federal government largely punted questions of employee free speech to states, a legacy of federalism that hasn't had the best track record when it comes to voting rights. In a state-by-state breakdown, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh finds such laws vary widely. About half of Americans live in states that provide some worker protection for political speech or from pressure to vote a certain way, such as threat of job loss. Florida is not one of them. Ohio bars employers from forcing workers to sign a petition, but not from standing in front of cameras next to a "Coal Country Stands With Mitt" banner.

Of course, what's on the books is one matter; enforcement is another. Even if you are lucky enough to live in New Mexico and have a signed letter saying you were fired for your Obama tote bag, it typically takes litigation to get your job back. And many people don't have the time or money to go through a court battle, even if the law is on their side.

If anything is happening on the legal end, things are getting worse. The 2010 US supreme court Citizens United case greatly expanded the parameters of what is considered "employer free speech". Most famously, the decision lifted restrictions on corporate campaign spending and gave rise to Super Pacs. But the broader implications are unclear. If Citizens United gives companies free rein to mobilize their resources politically as they wish, one former FEC official suggests that employees could be considered resources which companies may mobilize.

This is why the recent political turn of employee intimidation isn't an anomaly. It's an election year manifestation ? aided by the supreme court ? of fundamental power imbalances that exist in most workplaces. Brooklyn College political scientist Corey Robin sees a historical pattern:

"During the McCarthy years, the state outsourced the most significant forms of coercion and repression to the workplace. Fewer than 200 people went to jail for their political beliefs, but two out of every five American workers was investigated or subject to surveillance.
"Today, we're seeing a similar process of outsourcing. Government can't tell you how to vote, but it allows CEOs to do so."
Robin concluded:

When workers are forced to go to rallies in communist countries, we call that Stalinism. Here, we call it the free market.

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From rkarch at mcn.org  Mon Oct 29 22:12:11 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2012 22:12:11 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Can the Company Fire You for the Way You Vote?
In-Reply-To: <35255AC5-9559-42E5-8E7C-93205124F197@att.net>
References: <35255AC5-9559-42E5-8E7C-93205124F197@att.net>
Message-ID: <FDFCE1F5-A7E1-4C2D-BD21-A289EE925A06@mcn.org>

This makes me wonder how much these guys have held back on job growth just to defeat Obama .rk


On Oct 29, 2012, at 5:40 PM, Mark Safron wrote:

> Can the Company Fire You for the Way You Vote?
> By Michael Paarlberg, Guardian UK ]
> 28 October 12
> 
>  
> So many stories of employers pressuring their workers to vote for Romney have come out that you might think workplace intimidation was invented just for this election.
> 
> Romney certainly hasn't done much to dispel this perception. In a conference call to the National Federation of Independent Business, the GOP candidate was recorded encouraging business owners to:
> 
> "[M]ake it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections."
> A number of Romney backers took it upon themselves to spell out more clearly to their workers what "the best interest for their job" really means. David Siegel, CEO of Florida's Westgate Resorts, emailed his employees that a second term for Obama would likely give him "no choice but to reduce the size of this company". Republican donor-activists Charles and David Koch were no less subtle when they sent 45,000 employees of their Georgia Pacific paper company a list of whom to vote for, warning that workers "may suffer the consequences" if Obama is re-elected.
> 
> Florida-based ASG Software CEO Arthur Allen informed his employees that he was contemplating a merger that would eliminate "60% of the salaries" of the company ? should Romney lose. In Ohio, coal mine owner Robert Murray left employees in no doubt that they were expected to attend a Romney rally ? off the clock and without pay. In Cuba, at least they pay workers for show demonstrations.
> 
> Democrats are apoplectic. But as Romney assured those who have the power to hire and fire thousands of people, there is "nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business". He's right. Heavy-handed? Yes. An abuse of authority? Probably. Against the law? Not likely. News outlets, on the other hand, are merely confused.
> 
> "Can your boss really tell you who to vote for?" asked the Atlantic incredulously, before concluding the answer is "probably yes". Should this be a surprise? Seeing that your boss can legally tell you to do nearly anything else, down to what you may wear, when you may eat and how often you may go to the bathroom (and, if he wishes, demand samples when you do), the question comes across as a little na?ve. So, too, is the corollary "Can you be fired for expressing political views at work?" Again, the answer is probably yes, which should only be a shock to anyone who has never held a job in an American private-sector workplace.
> 
> In truth, as an "at-will" (that is, non-union) employee, you can be fired for much less. In Arizona, you can be fired for using birth control. If you live in any one of 29 states, you can be fired for being gay. You can be fired for being a fan of the Green Bay Packers if your boss roots for the Bears.
> 
> Lest you think employer authority ends when you clock out, only four states ? California, Colorado, New York and North Dakota ? protect workers from being fired for legal activity outside of work. For the rest, workers can and have been fired for anything from smoking to cross-dressing, all in the privacy of their homes. The growing practice of employers demanding job applicants to hand over their Facebook passwords underscores the blurring of the work-life divide in this information age.
> 
> But free speech and voting rights are supposed to be more sacrosanct than the integrity of your Facebook account, so one would expect there to be greater political safeguards at work than there actually are. This is not to say they don't exist. Federal law makes it illegal to "intimidate, threaten or coerce" anyone against voting as they wish. But as Siegel, Allen and the Koch brothers have shown, the distinction between possible coercion or intimidation and "worker education" is rather fuzzy in the eyes of the law.
> 
> Rather, the federal government largely punted questions of employee free speech to states, a legacy of federalism that hasn't had the best track record when it comes to voting rights. In a state-by-state breakdown, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh finds such laws vary widely. About half of Americans live in states that provide some worker protection for political speech or from pressure to vote a certain way, such as threat of job loss. Florida is not one of them. Ohio bars employers from forcing workers to sign a petition, but not from standing in front of cameras next to a "Coal Country Stands With Mitt" banner.
> 
> Of course, what's on the books is one matter; enforcement is another. Even if you are lucky enough to live in New Mexico and have a signed letter saying you were fired for your Obama tote bag, it typically takes litigation to get your job back. And many people don't have the time or money to go through a court battle, even if the law is on their side.
> 
> If anything is happening on the legal end, things are getting worse. The 2010 US supreme court Citizens United case greatly expanded the parameters of what is considered "employer free speech". Most famously, the decision lifted restrictions on corporate campaign spending and gave rise to Super Pacs. But the broader implications are unclear. If Citizens United gives companies free rein to mobilize their resources politically as they wish, one former FEC official suggests that employees could be considered resources which companies may mobilize.
> 
> This is why the recent political turn of employee intimidation isn't an anomaly. It's an election year manifestation ? aided by the supreme court ? of fundamental power imbalances that exist in most workplaces. Brooklyn College political scientist Corey Robin sees a historical pattern:
> 
> "During the McCarthy years, the state outsourced the most significant forms of coercion and repression to the workplace. Fewer than 200 people went to jail for their political beliefs, but two out of every five American workers was investigated or subject to surveillance.
> "Today, we're seeing a similar process of outsourcing. Government can't tell you how to vote, but it allows CEOs to do so."
> Robin concluded:
> 
> When workers are forced to go to rallies in communist countries, we call that Stalinism. Here, we call it the free market.
> 
> 
> TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list send an email to occupymendocino at lists.mcn.org put "Un-Subscribe me" in the Subject.
> 
> For listserv technical problems please contact: listmanager at mcn.org

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From sanutter at mcn.org  Tue Oct 30 11:22:54 2012
From: sanutter at mcn.org (susan nutter)
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2012 11:22:54 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Your Homeowner's Mortgage Bill of Rights
Message-ID: <1E10990264B840B1B59F9940D66555C6@nutter>


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Senator.Evans at outreach.senate.ca.gov 
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 10:53 AM
Subject: Your Homeowner's Mortgage Bill of Rights





            Problems viewing this E-mail? Please click here. 
           
            A new "Homeowner Bill of Rights" and watch out for scam artists 

             
           

            Despite the recovering economy, many of my constituents are still in danger of losing their homes. There is nothing worse than being in this situation and getting the runaround from your bank. But help is on the way. Recently, I co-chaired a Conference Committee which wrote a new "Homeowners' Bill of Rights" as part of legislation that will go into effect January 1.

              a.. You have the right to be fully informed of the bank's intent to seek a foreclosure and whether options such as loan modifications are available to you.
              b.. You have the right to be thoroughly evaluated for these options before a bank starts a foreclosure process. Banks cannot "dual track" with a foreclosure while you are applying for another option.
              c.. You have the right to appeal if bank denies your loan modification application.
              d.. You have the right to a continuing single point of contact in dealing with your mortgage.
            If you would like to know more about this new law, please go to the Attorney General's webpage at http://www.oag.ca.gov/hbor.

            Beware of Mortgage Modification Scams

            A recent alert from the California Department of Corporations and the California Department of Real Estate warned homeowners about "loan modification consultants" who illegally ask for payments in advance and advise avoiding foreclosure by signing your home over to a third party, stopping payments or defaulting on your mortgage.

            If you need more information about these scams, please view the Consumer Alert at: http://www.corp.ca.gov/Consumer/pdf/AG_Mortgage_Foreclosure_Alert.pdf
           
             
           

             
           California State Senator Noreen Evans - District 2 
                  The 2nd Senate District includes portions or all of six counties: Humboldt, Lake, Mendocino, Napa, Solano & Sonoma. 
                  Web site: http://sd02.senate.ca.gov/
                  E-mail: Senator Noreen Evans 
                  Capitol Office
                  State Capitol,
                  1303 10th Street
                  Sacramento, CA 95814
                  Phone: 916-651-4002
                  Fax: 916-323-6958 Santa Rosa Office
                  50 D St., Suite #120A
                  Santa Rosa, CA 95404
                  Phone: 707-576-2771
                  Fax: 707-576-2773 Ukiah Office
                  200 South School Street
                  P.O. Box 785
                  Ukiah, CA 95482
                  Phone: 707-468-8914
                  Fax: 707-468-8931 
                  Eureka Office
                  710 E Street Suite #150
                  Eureka, CA 95501
                  Phone: 707-445-6508
                  Fax: 707-445-6511 Napa Office
                  1040 Main Street, Suite #205
                  Napa, CA 94559-2605
                  Phone: 707-224-1990
                  Fax: 707-224-1992 Vallejo Office
                  401 Amador Street 
                  Vallejo, CA 94590
                  Phone: 707-648-5312
                  Fax: 707-648-5383
                 
           
             
           
                 (c) 2012 California State Senate 
           
     






       
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From agnes at mcn.org  Tue Oct 30 15:24:03 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2012 17:24:03 -0500
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fwd: Fw: Petition to Eric Holder
In-Reply-To: <1780C988423149EC8638B18204EB83CE@nutter>
References: <1780C988423149EC8638B18204EB83CE@nutter>
Message-ID: <50905383.6050806@mcn.org>




-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Fw: Petition to Eric Holder
Date: 	Mon, 29 Oct 2012 11:22:02 -0700
From: 	susan nutter <sanutter at mcn.org>
To: 	<Undisclosed-Recipient:;>





Subject: Voting machines tied to the Romneys could decide the election 
in Ohio

Dear Friend,

If this year's presidential election comes down to the electoral votes 
in Ohio, the deciding votes could be cast on electronic voting machines 
manufactured by a company - Hart Intercivic - with deep financial ties 
to the Romney family.

Hart Intercivic is majority owned by H.I.G. Capital which controls two 
of the five seats on the Hart Intercivic board. An investment fund with 
deep ties to the Romney family and the Mitt Romney for president 
campaign, H.I.G. Capital was founded by Tony Tamer, a major bundler for 
the Romney campaign, and it is one of the largest partners of Solamere 
Capital, an investment fund founded by Tagg Romney and Spencer Zwick, 
Mitt Romney's chief fundraiser from the 2008 presidential campaign. This 
makes the Romney family part owner of the voting machine company, 
through it's interest in H.I.G. Capital.

A 2007 study conducted by Ohio's Secretary of State showed that Hart 
Intercivic's touch screen voting machines could be easily corrupted.

I just signed a petition telling the Department of Justice to not let 
Republicans steal the election in Ohio with Romney-owned voting 
machines. Click on the link below (or copy and paste the URL) to find 
out more and sign the petition.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/romney_hart/?r_by=-1675387-x4B8Vtx&rc=confemail

------------------------------------------------------------------------






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From agnes at mcn.org  Wed Oct 31 07:17:32 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2012 09:17:32 -0500
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fwd: [VFP-116] Fw: Analyst proves GOP is stealing
	elections
In-Reply-To: <1351621127.63863.YahooMailNeo@web140003.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
References: <1351621127.63863.YahooMailNeo@web140003.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <509132FC.1050402@mcn.org>

Peter, please send this to Occupy Mendocino list serve:
Occupyers,
please read this link and  take action, write to the Attorney General 
Eric Holder and Demand Hand
Counts of the vote and delay broadcasting election results until hand 
counts of every precinct is done.


*Subject:* Analyst proves GOP is stealing elections

http://rsnorg.org/news-section2/318-66/14223-retired-nsa-analyst-proves-gop-is-stealing-elections-part-i

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From agnes at mcn.org  Wed Oct 31 07:26:10 2012
From: agnes at mcn.org (Agnes Woolsey)
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2012 09:26:10 -0500
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fwd: [VFP-116] Fw: Analyst proves GOP is stealing
	elections
In-Reply-To: <1351621127.63863.YahooMailNeo@web140003.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
References: <1351621127.63863.YahooMailNeo@web140003.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <50913502.9010308@mcn.org>

Occupy Members,
Please send an email to Attorney General Holder and demand that election 
results are postponed until a hand count of ballots in every precinct is 
done. The GOP is stealing votes in every large precinct across the US 
except Utah.
Agnes


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[VFP-116] Fw: Analyst proves GOP is stealing elections
Date: 	Tue, 30 Oct 2012 11:18:47 -0700 (PDT)
From: 	Peter Sears <petersears95469 at yahoo.com>
Reply-To: 	VFP-116 at yahoogroups.com
To: 	Veterans for Peace <vfp-116 at yahoogroups.com>




*Subject:* Analyst proves GOP is stealing elections

http://rsnorg.org/news-section2/318-66/14223-retired-nsa-analyst-proves-gop-is-stealing-elections-part-i

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From rkarch at mcn.org  Wed Oct 31 09:52:35 2012
From: rkarch at mcn.org (Richard Karch)
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2012 09:52:35 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Stealing Elections
Message-ID: <E3F8CC14-FE7C-4D77-A120-972D5E85B234@mcn.org>


Occupiers,
Please read this link and  take action, write to the Attorney General Eric Holder and Demand Hand 
Counts of the vote and delay broadcasting election results until hand counts of every precinct is done.

Agnes
Write to Eric Holder here:    askdoj at usdoj.gov

Retired NSA Analyst Proves GOP Is Stealing Elections Part I

By Denis Campbell, LA Progressive

28 October 12

 
hy is Mitt Romney so confident? In states where the winner will be decided by less than 10%, of the vote he already knows he will win. This is no tinfoil hat conspiracy. It's a math problem. And mathematics showed changes in actual raw voting data that had no statistical correlation other than programmable computer fraud. This computer fraud resulted in votes being flipped from Democrat to Republican in every federal, senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial election since 2008 (thus far) and in the 2012 primary contests from other Republicans to Mitt Romney.

This goes well beyond Romney's investment control in voting machine maker Hart Intercivic and Diebold's close ties to George W. Bush. Indeed all five voting machine companies have very strong GOP fundraising ties, yet executives (including the candidate's son Tagg Romney) there is no conflict between massively supporting one party financially whilst controlling the machines that record and count the votes.

A retired NSA analyst has spent several sleepless nights applying a simple formula to past election results across Arizona. His results showed across-the-board systemic election fraud on a coordinated and massive scale. But the analysis indicated that this only happens in larger precincts because anomalies in small precincts can be more easily detected.

"Easy to Cheat"

Retired NSA analyst Michael Duniho has worked for nearly seven years trying to understand voting anomalies in his home state of Arizona and Pima County. This publication has written extensively about apparent vote machine manipulation in a 2006 RTA Bond issue election that is still being fought in the courts. Said Duniho, "It is really easy to cheat using computers to count votes, because you can't see what is going on in the machine."

When Duniho applied a mathematical model to actual voting results in the largest voting precincts, he saw that only the large precincts suddenly trended towards Mitt Romney in the Arizona primary ? and indeed all Republicans in every election since 2008 ? by a factor of 8%-10%. The Republican candidate in every race saw an 8-10%. gain in his totals whilst the Democrat lost 8-10%. This is a swing of up to  20 point, enough to win an election unless a candidate was losing very badly.

Since sifting through and decoding massive amounts of data was his work for decades on behalf of the National Security Agency, he wanted to understand why this was ONLY happening in large precincts.

Nose Counting

The idea of examining large precinct results came via a link to a report written by Francois Choquette and James Johnson. Choquette became curious about South Carolina primary results in the February Republican contest. There a poll observer noted an unusually big gain of votes for Mitt Romney in larger precincts than in smaller ones. Choquette wanted to know why?

He examined and applied all of the normal statistical markers to see where a variance might occur: income level, population density, race, urban vs. rural, even party registration numbers. He found no correlation to explain why Romney votes trended upward while Paul and Santorum votes trended downward -yet only in large precincts.

Choquette then looked at all 50 states and found roughly a 10% switch in votes from GOP to Democrat everywhere except Utah, where the presumption was, as it was Mitt's religious home state and very conservative, there was no chance of Romney losing.

Choquette even saw in Maricopa County, which is Phoenix and its suburbs, that in 2008 Romney used this technique against John McCain. But McCain beat him by too much for a 10% fraud gain to matter. McCain tried to do the same thing in the general election to President Obama but 9 million votes nationally were too many to make up.

Examining every county across America was too massive an undertaking for any one person so he included a simple set of instructions and encouraged others to do the same with raw vote totals in their county/state.

Download the text files of all raw actual vote results by precinct from the Secretary of State's Office.


Arrange them in precinct order.

Put in all of the candidate totals for each precinct.

Sort the data by total vote smallest on the top.
Now here it gets a bit dense: He needed to add columns that show cumulative totals by candidate then compare them by candidate to establish trend lines.

That reveals trends should remain statistically constant throughout an election.

Stealing Votes

But as the spreadsheet shows, the larger the precinct, the numbers start to change dramatically.

"If percentages did not change from one precinct to the next, we would see a flat line, but what we are seeing is sloped lines downward for Democrats and upward for Republicans (or, in the case of the Presidential primary, upward for Romney and downward for his opponents), said Duniho."

In every election contest, the trend lines dramatically crossed for no apparent reason. It was revealed that votes were being systemically bled off for Rick Santorum and Ron Paul and then being credited to Mitt Romney.

Once Duniho completed the spreadsheet, he pumped in actual vote totals from other Arizona election contests.

He looked at every 2010 race in Arizona from Governor Brewer to Senator McCain and Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. The trends lines all did the exact same thing. Someone had manipulated the election outcome, most likely one person inserting a programme inside the system's central computer? that flipped votes.

The results were astounding.

They showed that Governor Brewer actually lost her election and Gabby Gifford's razor thin less than 1% point re-election victory over Tea Party Conservative Jesse Kelly was closer to a 20 point victory for her.

Duniho added, "We need to have strong hand count audits to confirm the integrity of these elections. This means comparing hand counts with official reports of the election."

Ohio Precedent

This isn't the first time Republicans have been charged with vote theft. It happened in the 2004 presidential election, in Ohio and Florida. In Ohio, GOP consultant Michael Connell  claimed that the vote count computer program he had created for the state had a trap door that shifted Democratic votes to the GOP.

He was subpoenaed as a witness in a lawsuit against then-Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, and lawyers for the plaintiff asked the Dept. of Justice to provide him with security because there were two threats made against Connell's life by people associated with Karl Rove. But in Dec. 2008, before the trial began, Connell was killed in a plane crash outside Akron Ohio.

There were problems in Florida, as well.

A study by the Quantitative Methods Research Team at the University of California at Berkeley found that anomalies between Florida counties using touch-screen voting and those using other methods could not be explained statistically. Noting the higher-than-expected votes for Bush in three large Democratic counties, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, Michael Hout, a Berkeley professor who did the study said there were strong suspicions of vote-rigging.

"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," Hout said. "The study shows that a county's use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once in a thousand chances."

Don't Trust, Verify

Indeed the only way to 100% verify this election fraud would be through handcounts of ballots by precinct, matching those results to the reported totals. But as was mentioned earlier, a group in Pima County has been trying unsuccessfully to get access to ballots to conduct such a count for almost five years since anomalies first surfaced in voting machines in 2006.

Is there a judge in Arizona likely to suddenly reverse past trends and allow access to conduct such a handcount of ballots 12 days before a national election? And if not, why not? Maybe someone needs to commission the Anonymous hacker group to re-level the playing field because the courts are not going to do it.

The results of Duniho's analysis can only happen if votes are being stolen, and the only way that's possible is if the computerised machines are programmed to steal them. Welcome to Zimbabwe.

More than 100 million Americans will cast their ballots thinking their vote will be fairly counted. It should be. Yet the crooks know they can safely flip up to 10% of votes without consequence. Anything more than that is statistically suspect.

President Obama won by such a huge margin in 2008 that even with this anomaly built into the system, he cruised to victory. This year the election is much closer. Can American democracy afford yet another election crisis placing three of the four last national Presidential election results in question or worse: The outcome was stolen, the outcome a victim of election theft?

Don't Take Our Word

Use the spreadsheet above to do the maths in your own state, county or precinct. The results are compelling. Then demand that the Justice Department stop this insane view that results need to be reported by 11 pm for the television networks. Demand hand ballot counts!

We use paper ballots in the UK and results do not even begin to trickle in until 3 am. The final outcome can take up to three days to finalise. But voters in Britain know the count is accurate because every ballot is transparently hand-counted. When I read this article that Serbia, Belarus and Kazakhstan were sending election monitors to watch the US Election?, I knew we'd jumped the shark.

We are already being victimized by vote fraud on a scale that, in another country, would lead to calls for international election monitors. It is time for Americans to stop being victims of ghosts in the machine.

Denis G. Campbell is the author of 6 books including ?Billionaire Boys Election Freak Show,' ?The Vagina Wars' & ?Egypt Unsh at ckled.' He is the editor of UK Progressive Magazine and provides commentary to the BBC, itv Al Jazeera English, CNN, MSNBC and others. His weekly ?World View with Denis Campbell' segment can be heard every Thursday on the globally syndicated The David Pakman Show. You can follow him on Twitter via @UKProgressive and on Facebook. 
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From marksafron at att.net  Wed Oct 31 16:59:33 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2012 16:59:33 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] It may be too late to do something but...
Message-ID: <4E0C568B-9137-4766-BB1A-F623A22FA95D@att.net>

...we could still try.

Dear Friends and Activists: 

There used to a concept called public policy, the idea that it is the 
responsibility of our government, on behalf of the general welfare of 
the people, to take necessary action to protect us by making laws 
that change the way people behave. And yet, despite overwhelming 
evidence that man-made carbon dioxide pollution is radically changing 
our global climate, government appears to be determined to do just 
the opposite, by accelerating the burning of fossil fuels. 

We need a crash program of global reforestation, reversal of carbon 
dioxide levels in the atmosphere starting with elimination of ALL 
fossil fuel usage, and strong international cooperation to make this 
happen. To those who say we cannot afford to do these things, witness 
the cost of just one storm, 50 billion and counting. What's the cost 
of replacing the infrastructure of just a couple major coastal 
cities? Another decade or so at this rate and we can kiss them all 
goodbye. 

Please send your message to Congress now 

Action Page: Time To Get Serious About The Global Warming Disaster 
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1103.php 

And after you submit the action page above, feel free to request one 
of our new "STOP Global Warming" bumper stickers, with a dramatic 
graphic of our beautiful blue planet on fire. You can have one for no 
charge, not even shipping, just for the asking. Of course, if you can 
make a donation of any amount, this is what makes it possible for us 
to send free stickers to anyone who cannot make a donation right now. 

Anyway, that's the good news, now here's the bad news. When you put a 
pot of water on the stove and turn on the heat, does it boil right 
away? No, it gets warmer relatively gradually until it reaches the 
boiling point. In the case of earth's climate, the turning up of the 
heat is represented by the increased carbon dioxide levels ALREADY in 
the atmosphere. 

We're going to say that again another way. Even if new carbon dioxide 
emissions were reduced to zero, the 400 parts per million already out 
there would STILL bring us to tragic catastrophe. We not only need to 
stop further damage to our atmosphere, and we are not even trying to 
do as much as that, we need to reverse and repair the damage already 
done. 

One news outlet is suggesting that hurricanes on this scale are now 
the "new normal". Not true. It's going to get much, much worse. What 
we are witnessing are the first teeny tiny baby steps of a 
civilization ending global climate catastrophe. This one, despite its 
size, barely had hurricane level winds when it hit. Imagine the same 
storm at 150 mph or more. It's coming to a coast near you unless we 
make radical changes to stop it. 

That's just how much scary trouble we're in. And we'd better get real 
about it quick, fast and in a hurry. 

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed 
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible. 
Contributions to The People's Email Network are not tax-deductible 
for federal income tax purposes. 

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at 
http://www.peaceteam.net/in.htm 

Or if you want to cease receiving our messages, just use the function 
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From marksafron at att.net  Wed Oct 31 17:43:39 2012
From: marksafron at att.net (Mark Safron)
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2012 17:43:39 -0700
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Bank of England Director: Occupy Was Right
Message-ID: <3C6EB183-B678-48EE-B4C8-F39C17411026@att.net>

Bank of England Director: Occupy Was Right

By Richard Hall, The Independent UK

31 October 12

 

Andrew Haldane praises 'loud and persuasive' protesters who succeeded because 'they are right'

he Occupy movement received vindication from unlikely source tonight, as a senior executive at the Bank of England credited it with stirring a "reformation of finance".

In a glowing appraisal of the movement's achievements, Andrew Haldane, executive director of financial stability, said Occupy protesters had been "both loud and persuasive", and had attracted public support because "they are right".

"Some have suggested ... that Occupy's voice has been loud but vague, long on problems, short on solutions. Others have argued that the fault-lines in the global financial system, which chasmed during the crisis, are essentially unaltered, that reform has failed," Mr Haldane said in a speech tonight.

"I wish to argue that both are wrong - that Occupy's voice has been both loud and persuasive and that policymakers have listened and are acting in ways which will close those fault-lines. In fact, I want to argue that we are in the early stages of a reformation of finance, a reformation which Occupy has helped stir."

Speaking at an Occupy Economics event in central London, Mr Haldane said that Occupy had been "successful in its efforts to popularise the problems of the global financial system for one very simple reason: they are right." He added that protesters who camped out near St Paul's Catherdal in London and dozens of other cities including New York,"touched a moral nerve in pointing to growing inequities in the allocation of wealth".

Mr Haldane ended with a direct appeal to activists to continue putting pressure on governments and regulators. He said: "You have put the arguments. You have helped win the debate. And policymakers, like me, will need your continuing support in delivering that radical change."

Mr Haldane's comments were welcomed by Occupy activists last night. Ronan McNern, a spokesman for Occupy London Stock Exchange, said: "It's good to hear more voices like Mr Haldane's coming through. His comments are definitely welcome. They could have done something about this a lot faster."

He added: "If this is a beginning, there is a long way to go. Banking reform is only part of the problem. It's a system-wide issue where certain people are profiting off other people."

Occupy protesters first descended on the London Stock Exchange on 15 October 2011, in a copy-cat demonstration of other protests around the world that called for action against economic inequality and corporate excess.

After being blocked from entering the main square in which the stock exchange was located, tents were set up in the church yard of St Paul's - which led to friction between the church and campers.

The camp remained, however, until February of this year, when protesters were evicted by the City of London Corporation - the authority that runs the Square Mile.



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From petersears95469 at yahoo.com  Wed Oct 31 20:17:27 2012
From: petersears95469 at yahoo.com (Peter Sears)
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2012 20:17:27 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Occupymendocino] Fw: Analyst proves GOP is stealing elections
In-Reply-To: <B7CDD2A5-D6FC-45E4-9D81-8753BFD819AD@gmail.com>
References: <B7CDD2A5-D6FC-45E4-9D81-8753BFD819AD@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1351739847.41337.YahooMailNeo@web140001.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>






?Subject: Analyst proves GOP is stealing elections


http://rsnorg.org/news-section2/318-66/14223-retired-nsa-analyst-proves-gop-is-stealing-elections-part-i
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