Knock Knock, Revolution!

Why Ron Paul?

We here at Knock Knock don’t care for politics mostly because it’s just another business enterprise where politicians receive money and vote according to the corporations who pay them – and no one is truly Republican or Democrat as we have seen in the past 12 years, there is no difference between the two as their policies have been the same.

However, there is one candidate that we are looking forward to for his honest and truly unique views.

Ron Paul is a once in a lifetime candidate. He is not like the other bigwigs who get endorsements from Goldman Sachs (Obama Mitt Romney) or Bank of America.

He actually believes in being a civil servant that he turned down the Congressional Pension!

Ron Paul served in Congress since the 70’s and his policies and voting records show that he has been consistent.

His entire campaign has been run on donations from average Americans who have been supporting him for years, and has received the most amount of donations from soldiers in the military who support his policies of ending all wars.

His ideas and policies have been the only one that has been making sense to the American people

Here are a few things you should know:

Only candidate to SUPPORT OCCUPY WALL STREET – Ron Paul has been a huge supporter of the movement and backed up everything that it was been trying to do

He has been an opponent of Corporations and Lobbyists paying off Congress for a long time and spoke out about this issue – the only Republican who has done so

He is against the Federal Reserve Bank – the Central Bank made up of 1/3 of the banks in America, a private entity separate from the US Govt. that control the tax dollars of Americans and control the printing and distribution of money. Includng lending money to other Central Banks around the world, and lending money to its own banks and investment groups such as AIG Interest Free, while those same banks lend money to Americans at 30% interest rates. Ron Paul wrote the book End the Fed, and has tried to Audit the Federal Reserve in an attempt to open the secret accounting books and see what is really happening with our taxes, something the Federal Reserve refuses to share with Congress.

Stop all the Wars that America is involved in – Ron Paul has been the only Republican candidate who voted against going to war in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and his voting record has been consistent since the 70’s

Stop the War on Drugs – we had a post a while back about a grandmother who was arrested for ordering prescription drugs online without a prescription (lack of insurance) – a SWAT team came to her house and she suddenly became a criminal in the eyes of the law. How is this just?

 Ron Paul believes that drugs should be legalized including marijuana instead of sending away pot smokers away for 3 – 5 years (how is it rapists get less than that?) – no one should go to jail because of that, yet millions of people have and it wastes tax dollars and ruins many people’s lives.

He’s the only candidate who was actually in the army! He was a flight surgeon and helped save lives.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – Ron Paul has been fighting against the horrible, basic military rule in dealing with gays in the military and has been supportive of gays in the military – the only Republican candidate to do so.

More to come soon

Taken from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-greenwald/meet-the-001-percent-war_b_1034971.html

Article By Robert Greenwald, Filmmaker, Brave New Foundation

There’s the top 1% of wealthy Americans (bankers, oil tycoons, hedge fund managers) and there’s the top 0.01% of wealthy Americans: the military contractor CEOs.

If you’ve been following the War Costs campaign, you already know that these corporations are bad bosses, bad job creators and bad stewards of taxpayer dollars. What you may not know is that the huge amount of money these companies’ CEOs make off of war and your tax dollars places them squarely at the top of the gang of corrupt superrich choking our democracy. These CEOs want you to believe the massive war budget is about security — it’s not. The lobbying they’re doing to keep the war budget intact at the expense of the social safety net is purely about their greed.

In many areas, including yearly CEO salary and in dollars spent corrupting Congress, these companies are far greater offenders than even the big banks like JP Morgan Chase or Bank of America.

Egregious Military Contractor CEO pay

The top 0.01% of earners make at least $9.14 million per year, a rarefied strata of income that includes defense company CEOs and Wall Street bank chieftains alike. But a deeper dive demonstrates how defense companies outpace the big banks’ knack for enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Military Contractor CEO Pay in 2010

• Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush: $22.84 million.

• Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens: $21.89 million.

• Boeing CEO James McNerney: $19.4 million.

Just to put that in context, consider how these annual payoffs compare to the people we’re used to thinking of as poster children for the top 1 percent:

Financial Sector CEO Pay in 2010

• JP Morgan Chase CEO James Dimon: $20.81 million.

• Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf: $18.97 million.

• Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan: $1.94 million.

Considering how they stack up to financial sector heads, war industry CEOs aren’t just members of the 1%; they’re the super-elite among them, the one-hundredth of a percent.

Lobbying Domination

Disgusted by the overwhelming corporate influence in Congress? Look no further than the big military contractor companies, whose flagship companies spend enough on lobbying to dwarf even financial sector titans.

War Industry Lobbying Expenditures for 2010

• Lockheed Martin: $12.7 million.
• Northrop Grumman: $15.7 million.
• Boeing: $17.89 million.

Again, just to provide some context, here are the same lobbying totals for some of the most recognized names in the financial sector.

Financial Sector Lobbying in 2010

• JP Morgan Chase:$7.41 million.

• Wells Fargo: $5.43 million.

• Bank of America: $3.98 million.

The war industry gets away with blowing our money on job-killing spending because it can bend Congress to its whim. In the process, the industry is like a vacuum sucking up brain power and engineering resources that could and would establish and grow entirely new wholesome industries. It’s no surprise that Americans confront a 9.1% unemployment rate and an under-employment rate flirting with 20 percent this year.

Want to know where all the money went that could be putting people back to work or keeping U.S. manufacturing industries competitive? The war industry CEOs dumped lobbying cash on Congress and diverted all that wealth to their private bank accounts.

Striking a blow for democracy

The war contractors’ iron grip on the wealth and politics of our country has caught the attention of our friends at Occupy Wall Street, who are targeting war profiteers in its draft list of demands with a call to bring home “all military personnel at all non-essential bases” and to end the “Military Industrial Complex’s goal of perpetual war for profit.”

We’re allies of the Occupy movement, which swells from the 99%’s disgust and dysfunction with our system. A democracy for and of the people that favors the 0.01% at the expense of the 99.99% of us is no democracy at all.

We here at Brave New Foundation and the War Costs campaign have been inspired by the incredible work of the Occupy movement, so we created our latest video to help push this critical piece of their message: war for profit has to end. We’re asking viewers to share our video with their local Occupy groups and organize a guerrilla screening at an Occupy protest in your city.

The Occupy protests have a lot to teach us, and the leaderless movement is at minimum an indictment of our political system. They’ve stopped whispering, and we’ve all started shouting.

Occupy your city and show this video to your community.

Again always google-check the ingredients in your food, even chocolate and basic ingredients like sugar, even baking powder/soda has aluminum (you can buy aluminum free)

What is soy lecithin?

In the early 1900′s, ‘soy lecithin’ was just a waste product produced during the “degumming” process of soybean oil. By 1908 the soybean crushing and soy oil refining companies were having trouble disposing of the large amounts of foul smelling, fermenting waste product. It is a chemical waste product, and disposing of any waste product costs money – as companies have to pay the city to dispose it.

So the soy plants tried to find ways of utilizing it to save money. Soy plants in Germany decided to name this waste product ‘soy lecithin.’ By 1939 scientists had found more than 1,000 different ways to use soy lecithin.

Why is it bad?

Soy Lecithin is not healthy in anyway – it is a chemical waste product from soy that was just marketed very well – lecithin by itself is not bad and add the name soy because it came from the process and you have a healthy sounding chemical product.

If the soybeans are not organic, then the soy lecithin will contain herbicides and pesticides. And soybeans are often genetically modified which is an additional concern.

Why soy lecithin is in Chocolate and many other foods such as Nature Valley Granola Bars? 

Unfortunately it’s not added to chocolate to give you any nutritional value. Soy lecithin is an emulsifier, so it’s added to chocolate to keep the cocoa and the cocoa butter together.

And it’s added to bakery goods to make the dough less sticky and easier to rise.
Basically it is a chemical to keep the chocolate soft and smooth – also works as a preservative

Soybeans and hormones 

There are high levels of phytoestrogens in soy lecithin, because phytoestrogens can elevate your estrogen levels if eaten in high doses and can lead to breast cancer

COMMON MISCONCEPTION – soybeans themselves to DO NOT have phytoestrogens, and are healthy for you – however SOY LECITHIN contains phytoestrogens, which is produced from the chemical process and is now in the chemical waste.

Soy products in America may contain these same chemicals, but so far no one is sure – frankly American made soy products are probably from Genetically Modified Soybeans so avoid if possible unless organic.

A lot of unknowing people are allergic to soy lecithin as well.

CONCLUSION:

AVOID SOY LECITHIN - ALWAYS READ THE CONTENTS OF THE FOOD YOU ARE BUYING! If it says Soy Lecithin PLEASE AVOID! It is in many foods and can go unlisted sometimes and every little bit adds up and will affect your health.

SIDE NOTE:

 The need for lecithin supplementation is rare. We can get it from our everyday food – also where the supplements are coming from are questionable – it always better to eat healthy and get any vitamin or mineral supplements naturally through our food. Especially since it has come to light that even vitamin and mineral supplements have unlisted preservatives.

Stick with the natural sources such as egg yolks and bee pollen.

Vegans - peanuts, wheat and oatmeal.

http://preventdisease.com/news/09/073009_soy_lecithin.shtml

Read more: http://www.livestrong.com/article/493764-bad-effects-of-lecithin/#ixzz1i2WpzRA4

www.theorganicpages.com - This everything Organic Resource allows you to look up wholesalers who sell organic foods and other organic products

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

This website gives you all the stats you need on the US Debt

On the left side of the site you can find your state and see the debt per state, average debt per individual, and unemployed numbers

On your right you can see the projections for the future as well as the past debt clocks

Out of 82 Million US families – 23 million people are unemployed

48 Million are on Food Stamps

http://www.usdebtclock.org/world-debt-clock.html#

Amount of debt in the UK, France, Greece, and Ireland is unfortunate – looks like the US is catching up quickly though.

On December 6th, over 40 cities took part in Occupying Foreclosed homes. Many people went back into their foreclosed homes, and occupied their homes.

“In 2008, we discovered bankers and speculators had been gambling with our most valuable asset, our homes—betting against us and destroying trillions of dollars of our wealth. Now, because of the foreclosure crisis Wall Street banks created with their lies and greed, millions of Americans have lost their homes, and one in four homeowners are currently underwater on their mortgage.

Not only do we have thousands of people without homes, we have thousands of homes without people. Boarded-up houses are sitting empty—increasing crime, lowering the value of other homes in the neighborhood, erasing the wealth that lifts families into the middle class.”

There are a lot of stories you can read at the website: http://occupyourhomes.org/

You can still take part! Go over to events to see how you can help in your community!

There were success stories, one of which, a mother after husband died was being foreclosed on because she was going bankrupt - with the help of the Occupy movement, Occupiers occupied her home until she was able to extend her stay one more month before homelessness.

A lot of what the Occupy movement is doing is looking out for Americans all across the country, if you go to the Occupy encampments, you’ll see average Americans forced into bankruptcy and homelessness that stay with Occupy because they’ve lost everything. This isn’t the America we worked so hard to build, we need to look after one another.

“The banks noticed - Bank of America warned their employees nationwide about the 99% standing up for their homes. Banks came to the negotiating table with home occupiers in West Oakland, Seattle, and San Jose. Foreclosure auctions were blocked in Georgia and California, stopping the sale of dozens of homes.”