Bruce Bartlett on Where the Right Went Wrong from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Bill Moyers talks with conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, who wrote "the bible" for the Reagan Revolution, worked on domestic policy for the Reagan White House, and served as a top treasury official under the first President Bush. Now he's a heretic in the conservative circles where he once was a star. Bartlett argues that right-wing tax policies -- pushed in part by Grover Norquist and Tea Party activists -- are destroying the country's economic foundation.

BILL MOYERS: Heather McGhee speaks of how the neoliberal economic experience of the last 30 years – including cutting taxes on the rich and waiting for the wealth and prosperity to trickle down -- has left her generation of Millennials standing under a spigot someone forgot to turn on. After a few drips and drops, it went dry. So did the very notion of equal opportunity for all. And today we’re living in a country deeply divided between winners and losers. Nowhere is that more evident than in our tax system – so distorted by loopholes, exemptions, credits, and deductions favoring the already rich and powerful that it no longer can raise the money needed to pay the government’s bills.

Among the people who saw this crisis coming was the conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, the supply-side champion who wrote the manifesto for the Reagan Revolution. Bartlett became a senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House and a top official at the Treasury Department under the first George Bush. Yet for all those credentials, he is today an outcast from the very conservative ranks where he was once so influential. That’s because Bruce Bartlett dared to write a book criticizing the second George Bush as a pretend conservative who slashed taxes but still spent with wild abandon.

The subtitle says it all: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.

For his heresy Bartlett was sacked by the conservative think tank where he worked. Undaunted, this card-carrying advocate of free markets and small government has been a prolific writer for popular and academic journals and has just published a new book: The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform - Why We Need It and What It Will Take. It’s a layman’s guide through the jungle of a tax system that, thanks to rented politicians and anti-tax ideologues like Grover Norquist, enable the one percent to make off like bandits while our national debt soars sky-high. I talked to Bruce Bartlett soon after he had finished his new book.

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Occupy Atlanta members were busy on Monday as they occupied AT&T at Atlanta's Midtown Center to protest corporate planned layoffs. 12 protesters were arrested, but Occupy Atlanta vows to keep up the pressure, along with members of the Communications Workers of America, until the communications giant cancels its plans to layoff workers.

Via:

Police arrested a dozen protesters affiliated with Occupy Atlanta on Monday after they invaded the lobby of the AT&T Midtown Center to protest recently announced layoffs by the telecommunications giant.

Despite the arrests, Occupy Atlanta spokesman Tim Franzen said the group, joined by members of the Communications Workers of America, plans to maintain a presence outside the building, where they've set up camp on the corner of Ponce de Leon Avenue and West Peachtree Street.

The campsite is public property, according to AT&T spokesman Joe Chandler. "We are working with the authorities, as we were earlier today," Chandler said.

An Atlanta police spokesman said the 12 demonstrators arrested Monday were charged with criminal trespass and taken to Fulton County Jail.

Franzen said Occupy won't leave until AT&T rescinds its plan to lay off 740 workers.

"At a time when unemployment is at a record high in the state of Georgia, we can’t afford to lose one more job," according to a statement on Occupy Atlanta's webpage

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AT&T did take a financial hit during it's failed T-Mobile deal - a whopping $6.7 billion loss- however, revenue was up in the 4th quarter from last year to $32.5 billion with record iphone sales and over 700,000 new customers.

While AT&T has their excuses for the layoffs, with record sales, huge profits, and more customers, doesn't that sound more like plain old corporate greed?

This will be one to watch...

Via:

A high-ranking cop who pepper-sprayed penned-in Occupy Wall Street protesters has been zapped with a lawsuit by two women who were in the line of fire.

Chelsea Elliott and Jeanne Mansfield are suing Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna in Manhattan Federal Court for blasting them in the face with pepper-spray during a protest last Sept. 24 near Union Square.

The incident was caught on video, and 1.5 million people watched it on YouTube, prompting outrage and drawing attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Bologna was docked 10 days of vacation for violating NYPD regulations.

The lawsuit claims Bologna violated the women's civil rights, and is seeking unspecified damages from Bologna and NYC for "physical pain and mental suffering."

On February 29th, Occupy Portland calls for a national day of non-violent direct action challenge society's obsession with profit and greed by shutting down the corporations.

We are rejecting a society that does not allow us control of our future. We will reclaim our ability to shape our world in a democratic, cooperative, just and sustainable direction.

We call on people to target corporations that are part of the American Legislative Exchange Council which is a prime example of the way corporations buy off legislators and craft legislation that serves the interests of corporations and not people. They used it to create the anti-labor legislation in Wisconsin and the racist bill SB 1070 in Arizona among so many others. They use ALEC to spread pro big business laws around the country.

For more information visit:

Portland Action Lab

[Caution: Contains some images that may be disturbing.]

The 23rd self-immolation in the last year, and the 2nd teenager to do so in the last three days. The other was an 18-year-old Tibetan nun.

Via:

Lobsang Gyatso, a 19-year-old monk from the Kirti monastery in Sichuan province's Aba prefecture, set himself ablaze on Aba's main street Monday afternoon, the London-based International Campaign for Tibet said.

Security forces beat Gyatso while extinguishing the flames, then took him away, the group said in an online statement posted late Monday. It was not immediately clear whether he survived.

Two Tibetans who tried to help Gyatso were severely beaten by police, ICT's statement said.

Also Via:

Protests by self-immolation have become more common in Tibet and in ethnic Tibetan regions of China, and at least 15 Tibetans are believed to have died from their injuries. Exiled Tibetan leaders say they fear a crackdown in the region to coincide with the Tibetan new year on February 22nd. The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has blamed the self-immolations on "cultural genocide" by the Chinese but he has not called for them to stop.

The video above contains rare recent footage of the Tibetan protests obtained by Guardian journalist Jonathan Watts, who managed to gain entry to a region of China that is off-limits to journalists.

Surprising is how large the protests really are, and the military presence kept by the Chinese to attempt to quash them. Yet even under these extremely oppressive conditions, the Tibetans continue their protests with banners calling for religious and other freedoms, as well as the return of the Dalai Lama.

Watts also tells that the people in China - with their government-controlled media - remain completely unaware of the strife in Tibet.

China considers those protesters who self-immolate to be "terrorists."

Protestor Tazed at Santorum Rally from www.gayusathemovie.com on Vimeo.

[This article was edited to correct previous reports that the two bloggers were arrested during the rally, that information turned out to be inaccurate.]

Two bloggers from Gay U.S.A. attended a rally for Rick Santorum in Tacoma on Monday evening to see what the GOP presidential contender had to say about the same-sex marriage bill signed into law by Washington state's governor earlier in the day.

Three protesters were arrested during the event, including one protester who later in the evening glitter-bombed Santorum as he shook hands with supporters. Other reports tie the protesters to the Occupy Tacoma group. Here is a snippet of their account of the evening:
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About four police officers approached the group. Nathan left the group to turn the GAY U.S.A. camera spotlight rig away from Santorum and to focus the light onto the crowd, as Lapinski filmed the mayhem.

Just then the police dragged one of the protestors out of the group. Santorum all the while continued talking from the elevated podium stage, high above and well away from the crowd. He was nowhere near the fracas and was never close to any protestors. The crowd was relatively calm as the protestors chanted, yet the police saw fit to grab two of them.

Nathan cast the spotlight down on the man being tazed so Lapinski could keep filming. The Santorum campaign personnel kept trying to pull the spotlight out of Nathan’s hand. But she kept plugging it back in.

About four police dragged one unnamed young man to the ground and while the man’s hands were behind his back they started to drag him and tazed him. It did not seem necessary to taze him as he was not resisting. He was well apprehended at the time of the tazing. They put the cuffs on him and dragged him along the floor away from the venue, while the crowd of Santorum supporters were chanting U.S.A. U.S.A. U.S.A.

Just then, the Santorum supporters started to grab Lapinski and Nathan and their camera equipment and were yelling at them. They were calling them names “you filth, you filth.” One woman shouted “when you lay dying you will think about this and you will know you are going to hell.” One man put his hand in his pocket as if to indicate he had a weapon. People in the crowd started to pull on both Lapinski and Nathan.

Yikes! The remark about "dying" I'm almost certain I've heard in a horror film, maybe "Children of the Corn"? Not sure, it could've been a past report about another Santorum gathering.

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Lawmakers backed drastic cuts in wages, pensions and jobs on Sunday as the price of a 130 billion euro ($170 billion) bailout by the European Union and International Monetary Fund to avert a messy default that would send shockwaves through the euro zone.

The cuts include a 22 percent reduction in the minimum wage and 150,000 jobs from the public sector workforce by 2015.

Scenes of running battles between police and rioters and flames engulfing cinemas, shops and banks underscored a sense of deepening turmoil in the country after more than four years of recession and two of punishing austerity.

The riots spread to Greece's second city of Thessaloniki, towns across the country and the islands of Crete and Corfu. In all, 150 shops were looted in the capital and 93 buildings set ablaze, wrecked or seriously damaged.

Occupy United claimed that 15 of the burned buildings were banks.

About 100 people - including 68 police - were wounded and 130 detained.

Athens city authorities said some of the wrecked buildings were of particular cultural, historic and architectural value.

The Attikon cinema, housed in a neo-classical building dating from 1870, was left a blackened shell.

The rioters were a minority, say various reports, yet others claim they numbered over 100,000 and spoke to the groundswell of anger among Greeks who say their living standards are already collapsing and more austerity will only deepen their misery.

Unemployment in Greece reached 20.9 percent in November, and half of young Greeks are jobless.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, photographs began circulating that identify several members of Greek parliament who were relaxing and watching a football game allegedly as the city of Athens burned.

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As we already saw with the "class act" of Dana Loesch's husband Chris and Fox contributor Steven Crowder and their sorry, racist excuse for what's supposed to pass for a "rap" video, the real wingnuttery at CPAC this year was with the panel segments as opposed to just the general contempt for liberals and horrid policy prescriptions being offered by the headliners.

Case in point, this panel as described by the CPAC web site -- Tea Party versus Occupy:

Unlike their leftist counterparts in the “Occupy” movement, Tea Party activists do not need to be paid or coerced into advancing their ideas, free market activists said during one of the closing panels at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Dana Loesch, Editor-in-Chief of BigJournalism.com, told audience members that progressives operate from a false assumption that says Tea Party activists will not demonstrate without offered some kind of inducement. In reality, she said, they actually describing themselves. Occupy members who were demonstrating outside of the CPAC conference in D.C. acknowledged that were being paid $60 to be there.

“It always amazes me how progressives think that conservatives can’t get organized or demonstrate without getting paid,” Loesch said. “They do it for free because they believe in it.”

Amy Kremer, chair of the Tea Party express, said that the movement she was identified with has more staying power because it has the right ideas. By contrast, the “Occupy” movement has resorted to unsavory tactics and has already lost credibility with the American people.

There's a bit more there, but they somehow forgot to mention this gem from panelist and Americans for Prosperity Pennsylvania State Director Jennifer Stefano:

STEFANO: The one thing I get asked is, what is the difference between the tea party and Occupiers... but I always say one thing. If you're standing in a room and you're not sure how to separate the tea partiers from the Occupiers, do one thing. Raise an American flag. The tea party will stand and put their hands over their heart and pledge to it while the Occupiers deficate on it.

I find that really humorous since the only person I seem to remember being proud of "dropping trou" lately, was her cohort on that panel, Dana Loesch.

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Anonymous released yet another video message today, this time his intended audience is the unemployed population in America.

Greetings Citizens of the United States,

We are Anonymous, We are all perfectly aware of the economic crises and job shortages in this country. We are aware that many of us are still without jobs and many have had to take lesser jobs for less pay outside of our chosen professions and educational training. We sympathize with you and your families and friends in this great time of need. We support you for you are also Anonymous. We are all one and the same and we are all in this together. We are all aware that our government and the corporate controlled media are lying to us about the actual number of unemployed Americans in this country. The numbers are skewed and the information that they feed to us, we the public is false. We are tired of telling them of what we need and what we have to have to keep our families and our communities together. Now is the time to show them.

On April First through the Fifteenth 2012, we are asking for every citizen to mail in and to fax our resume and job applications to the White House of United States and to our states Governor's office. Whether we are unemployed, under employed or unsatisfied in our current job placement, we are with you and are please to stand with you in this form of peaceful demonstration.

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A group of Occupiers attempted to “mic check” Sarah Palin's keynote speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Saturday.The audience drowned out the occupiers with boos, chants of “U.S.A.” and “Sarah!” before they were escorted away.

“See? You just won. You see how easy that is?” Palin asked as the protesters were removed from the room.

Not sure what Palin thinks they "won," but happy to leave it at that. I wouldn't want to have to listen to her explain it.

Thousands of people in Japan marched on Saturday to protest against nuclear power. Common Dreams has the details.

California Democrats held their annual convention in San Diego on Saturday, and about 100 Occupy members showed up for the event, too.

The Occupy movement is beginning to move into universities around the country. One professor in Chicago is teaching an "Occupy Everywhere" course and says that a third of the political science majors are enrolled in his class.

Two Occupy Oakland protesters were arrested after a march on Saturday. A woman was arrested for allegedly kicking a police officer, and a male protester who tried to pull her from officers was arrested for "attempting to unlawfully intervene." When he gets out of jail, I suppose he will have to allow the woman to kick away next time?

[Photo of the Year: Samuel Aranda - New York Times via Reuters]

2012 World Press Photo of the Year

The winning photo was taken inside a mosque in Sanaa, Yemen, that was being used as a field hospital by demonstrators against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. It's an extraordinarily powerful image, showing a woman holding a wounded relative in her arms.

1,000 Rally at Meeting over Two Dozen School Closings

More than one thousand students, parents, teachers and Occupy Wall Street protesters rallied in New York City on Thursday at a vote over the closing of two dozen public schools. The protesters, under the umbrella group Occupy the DOE, tried to stop the vote from happening. Using the human microphone, the protesters disrupted the meeting at times but were unsuccessful in stopping the closing of 23 schools. New York public school teacher Brian Jones and high school student Tafador Saurov helped organize the protests.