Republicans don't care how sick they make your children, how polluted our country becomes, nor how poor they make the 99%

House Republicans said Friday that they are planning to push a bill to force a decision on the pipeline and strip the President's authority to make that decision. Worse, they will attach this poison pill to the President's payroll-tax and unemployment benefit extension package -- considered a must-pass piece of legislation that contains crucial help for our long-term unemployed.



Tell Leaders Reid and Pelosi: No back room deals on Keystone XL


It's one of the Republicans' most brazen moves to shill for oil companies at the expense of the rest of us. And Senate Majority Leader Reid and House Minority Leader Pelosi need to know that they can't throw the fight against Keystone XL under the bus as they work to find a way to pass the president's payroll-tax and unemployment benefit extension package.


According to Politico's reporting of the closed-door meeting of House Republicans:

Speaker John Boehner referred to the package he's putting forward as turning "chicken-sh-- into chicken salad," according to people who attended the meeting in the Capitol basement.

Translation: He's going to pass President Barack Obama's preferred tax cut, but he wants some skin from Democrats for it.

That skin is the Keystone XL pipeline. The House bill would take Keystone XL decision making authority away from the President and State Department and force the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to make a decision in 30 days, substantially restricting FERC's discretion to reject the project in the process.2


The current review process by the State Department has been restarted to evaluate a new route in Nebraska, and unlike FERC, will notably consider the climate change impacts of the project, an area that wasn't taken into account in the State Department's initial sham process.


Tell Leaders Reid and Pelosi: Don't compromise on the Republicans' Keystone XL end run.


The House's push comes on the heels of a similar, but less drastic, bill by Republicans in the Senate, which would force a decision though it doesn't remove the President's authority.


Republican hostage taking has become standard practice when it comes to legislation to provide assistance to the most needy among us. It doesn't always work, but the President considers the payroll-tax and unemployment benefits extension to be central to his jobs bill, so unless Leaders Reid and Pelosi take a stand and refuse to cut a deal that includes fast tracking Keystone XL, this could make it into bill and become law.

After everything we've fought for, we need to push back hard to make sure Democrats in Congress don't cave in and allow Republicans to force Keystone XL through the back door.

Occupy Wall Street Vision Statement & potential Demands

We Envision:
[1] a truly free, democratic, and just society;
[2] where we, the people, come together and solve our problems by consensus;
[3] where people are encouraged to take personal and collective responsibility and participate in decision making;
[4] where we learn to live in harmony and embrace principles of toleration and respect for diversity and the differing views of others;
[5] where we secure the civil and human rights of all from violation by tyrannical forces and unjust governments;
[6] where political and economic institutions work to benefit all, not just the privileged few;
[7] where we provide full and free education to everyone, not merely to get jobs but to grow and flourish as human beings;
[8] where we value human needs over monetary gain, to ensure decent standards of living without which effective democracy is impossible;
[9] where we work together to protect the global environment to ensure that future generations will have safe and clean air, water and food supplies, and will be able to enjoy the beauty and bounty of nature that past generations have enjoyed.


10 Things We Want


A Proposal for Occupy Wall Street


Submitted by Michael Moore

1. Eradicate the Bush tax cuts for the rich and institute new taxes on the wealthiest Americans and on corporations, including a tax on all trading on Wall Street (where they currently pay 0%).

2. Assess a penalty tax on any corporation that moves American jobs to other countries when that company is already making profits in America. Our jobs are the most important national treasure and they cannot be removed from the country simply because someone wants to make more money.

3. Require that all Americans pay the same Social Security tax on all of their earnings (normally, the middle class pays about 6% of their income to Social Security; someone making $1 million a year pays about 0.6% (or 90% less than the average person). This law would simply make the rich pay what everyone else pays.

4. Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, placing serious regulations on how business is conducted by Wall Street and the banks.

5. Investigate the Crash of 2008, and bring to justice those who committed any crimes.

6. Reorder our nation's spending priorities (including the ending of all foreign wars and their cost of over $2 billion a week). This will re-open libraries, reinstate band and art and civics classes in our schools, fix our roads and bridges and infrastructure, wire the entire country for 21st century internet, and support scientific research that improves our lives.

7. Join the rest of the free world and create a single-payer, free and universal health care system that covers all Americans all of the time.

8. Immediately reduce carbon emissions that are destroying the planet and discover ways to live without the oil that will be depleted and gone by the end of this century.

9. Require corporations with more than 10,000 employees to restructure their board of directors so that 50% of its members are elected by the company’s workers. We can never have a real democracy as long as most people have no say in what happens at the place they spend most of their time: their job. (For any U.S. businesspeople freaking out at this idea because you think workers can't run a successful company: Germany has a law like this and it has helped to make Germany the world’s leading manufacturing exporter.)

10. We, the people, must pass three constitutional amendments that will go a long way toward fixing the core problems we now have. These include:

a) A constitutional amendment that fixes our broken electoral system by 1) completely removing campaign contributions from the political process; 2) requiring all elections to be publicly financed; 3) moving election day to the weekend to increase voter turnout; 4) making all Americans registered voters at the moment of their birth; 5) banning computerized voting and requiring that all elections take place on paper ballots.

b) A constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people and do not have the constitutional rights of citizens. This amendment should also state that the interests of the general public and society must always come before the interests of corporations.

c) A constitutional amendment that will act as a "second bill of rights" as proposed by President Frankin D. Roosevelt: that every American has a human right to employment, to health care, to a free and full education, to breathe clean air, drink clean water and eat safe food, and to be cared for with dignity and respect in their old age.

Cheers for Wall Street Protesters

Not all reaction to the Occupy Wall Street movement has been predictable. Jim Chanos, a hedge-fund chief, and Bill Gross, the highest profile bond-fund manager in America, expressed sympathy for the protesters. And the chief executive of Citigroup Inc. said he'd be "happy to talk with them." Here's a look at what notable financiers, politicians, and media stars have said about the protests.

Colin Powell, Former U.S. Secretary of State, Army General

"Demonstrating like this is as American as apple pie. We've been marching up and down and demonstrating throughout our history. ... There's an increasing gap between those who are doing very, very well, and I'm doing well, and those who are not doing as well, and those who are not doing as well are not seeing their lives improve. So there's frustration, there's angriness there." (Source: Politico)

Michael Moore, filmmaker

"We started rewarding people not for making things or inventing things. We reward people for making money off money and moving money around and dividing up mortgages a thousand times over, selling it to China. We're against greed and the fact that 1% could get nine slices of the pie and the other 99% are supposed to fight over the last slice." (Source: Piers Morgan)

Russell Simmons, hip-hop entrepreneur

"Simple idea, power to the people. It's not a difficult idea, that we get the special interests and the money out of Washington." (Source: Keith Olbermann)

Bill Gross, founder of Pacific Investment Management Co.

"Class warfare by the 99%? Of course, they're fighting back after 30 years of being shot at." (Source: Twitter)

Laurence Fink, CEO of BlackRock

"The protesting is a statement (that) the future is very clouded for a lot of people. These are not lazy people sitting around looking for something to do. We have people losing hope and they're going into the street…” (Source: Bloomberg)

Joseph Dear, chief investment officer, CalPERS

"The financial system gets bailed out, executives' salaries stay high and the incomes of people who work for a living, paycheck to paycheck, continue to decline." (Source: CNBC)