Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Economic Justice Equals Prosperity

As an admittedly enthusiastic supporter of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, I will be the first to acknowledge that the message emanating from this grassroots populism is lacking in sophistication. This is neither surprising, nor in any way does it denigrate the noble intent of these people.
Having written extensively on the massive economic/social injustice which permeates our societies along with the reasons of how and why this injustice exists, I understand precisely why the protesters of Occupy Wall Street all know that “something” is seriously wrong, but they cannot precisely identify what that something is. Part of the deliberate intent of our economic oppressors was to plunder our wealth using two vehicles which the vast majority of us find totally incomprehensible and absolutely boring: banking and taxation.
If you want to put someone to sleep, or drive people away from you at any/every social gathering, simply start to discuss the massive deficiencies of our monetary system or our taxation system. Indeed, I live with this frustration on a daily basis.
It’s quite easy to attract an audience these days by documenting the scope and magnitude of the massive economic injustice in our societies – which has now reached an all-time extreme. However, begin to detail precisely how our monetary system and tax systems have been “rigged” in order to rob us blind, or even expressly point to the actual solutions to these problems and interest dwindles.
The lack of willingness among the majority of the population to learn about these issues because they are “too complicated” or “too boring” is, of course, a reflection of the endemic apathy which has gripped our societies for several decades now. Sadly, this is a natural symptom of the affluence which existed in the decades prior to our economic exploitation. Even more tragically, this mass-apathy has been ruthlessly capitalized upon by the “top 1%”, or as I regularly label them: the ultra-wealthy.
One of the eternal lessons of history, however, is that “greed” is always short-sighted. The same people who have devoted every waking minute to how they could plunder as much of our wealth as possible were too intellectually-stunted to devote a single minute of serious thought as to how they would keep all of the wealth that they had misappropriated and hoarded.
Systematically stealing from a population of affluent-but-apathetic drones does not require much skill or even effort when our entire economies have been turned into one, giant rigged casino – with the banksters as “operators”. Conversely, with the vast majority of our populations now having been impoverished by this relentless plundering, the masses are no longer apathetic, and are finally ready to pay attention.
Wall Street and the ultra-wealthy are about to learn the same lesson which has been “taught” to those on top over and over again, throughout (at least) two thousand years of history (but never learned by these parasites): it is much easier to steal from the people than it is to keep what you have stolen.
Their obsessive, excessive greed blinds them to the simple arithmetic which has always doomed such acts of excessive plundering. When the ultra-wealthy steal and hoard too large a portion of overall wealth, the hollowing-out of the economy dooms it to inevitable collapse. That collapse, in turn, generates the “political will” (in one form or another) to take back a portion of what was stolen and then redistribute it among the general population.
Then this whole, futile cycle of greed starts all over again.
Emphasizing how old this “game” is, and how many times we have repeated this cycle of futility, two thousand years ago Greek philosopher Plutarch wrote these immortal words:
An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all Republics.
While some level of wealth-equity is obviously an issue of social justice, it is just as much a matter of simple arithmetic and elementary economics. We frequently hear economists and other experts use the analogy of the global economy being an “engine”. As with any engine, it requires fuel in order to operate.
In a capitalist economic system, obviously that fuel is “capital” – i.e. the collective wealth of the global population. When a tiny sliver of that population parasitically sucks-up and hoards the vast majority of that wealth, the “engine” runs out of gas and stalls. Of course our reality is much, much worse than that simple analogy.
As the ultra-wealthy have quietly stolen all of our wealth (i.e. capital) over the past several decades via banking and taxation, they substituted debt for actual capital – stealing more and more wealth, and piling on more and more debt. This has also reached an all-time historical extreme.
Western economies have literally been transformed into nothing but a collection of debt Ponzi-schemes, designed to funnel as much of our wealth as possible for as long as possible into the hands of the bond-parasites (via interest payments) – until the inevitable collapse occurs. Thus the reason the devious, deceptive bankers are so terrified about the global economy “stalling” (i.e. sinking into recession/deflation) is because all of these debt Ponzi-schemes are about to implode like a row of economic dominoes.
While it may already be too late to prevent the complete collapse caused by the economic psychopaths who have been allowed to rule over us, at the very least we must cease to move in the wrong direction, and begin to implement the few and obvious solutions which present themselves.
Fix a broken system:
We must smash all of the “too big to fail” banks into little pieces, since it is an elementary principle of capitalism that such oligopolies should have never been allowed to exist in the first place. The easiest way to do this is to simply allow them to drown themselves in their own debts, frauds, and Ponzi-schemes.
The global derivatives market must be completely abolished. All derivatives must simply be ruled null and void. People must understand that all the derivatives market ever was, and all that it is today is a gigantic casino to literally turn every aspect of our economies into massive, competing bets. Worse still, because the size of this casino has been allowed to swell to more than twenty times the size of the global economy itself, these derivatives have become (as Warren Buffet prophetically predicted) “financial weapons of mass-destruction”.
When Warren Buffet first made his remarks, his statement was theoretical. With the systematic destruction of the debt markets of Euro nations now a fait accompli, we see the damage which these financial “WMD’s” can cause when used – in this case via the fraudulent manipulation of the credit default swap market.
Put people to work:
Our massive, structural unemployment has now reached such an extreme that more than 50 million people across the Western world are not allowed to work. This unemployment has been malicious and intentional, the goal being to use massive, permanent unemployment to permanently depress wages and thus dull the inflationary impact of the banksters’ excessive money-printing.
The game was simple: while the bankers and those on top enjoyed all the benefits of their “inflation” via the printing press, those on the bottom made 100% of the sacrifices, through permanently depressed wages (for those lucky enough to have any job at all). What makes this heinous reality a “crime against humanity” is that our governments have always had the capacity to end this unemployment any time they wanted – at zero cost to themselves (i.e. us).
For 200 years, improving technology has eliminated labour faster than it creates new employment opportunities. And for nearly 200 years, every time that structural unemployment became a problem, our governments shortened the work week. This divided-up all the available labour among the whole population, until our current generation of Western governments ceased to do this, deliberately creating all of this hardship and misery to exclusively benefit those on top. We need to immediately transition to a four-day work week.
Tax back what was stolen:
All “income” taxes and all “consumption” taxes will inevitably (over time) transfer all wealth in an economy from those on the bottom to those on top. This is a matter of simple arithmetic. For absolute proof, we merely need to note that roughly half of the U.S. population now pays now income tax at all. After 100 years of this system of taxation oppression, roughly half the U.S. population now has nothing left to tax.
Meanwhile, these forms of taxation allow those on top to relentlessly accumulate larger and larger hoards of un-taxed wealth. Again the evidence is overwhelming. There has never been such a concentration of wealth among the top-1% in all of modern history.
The only means of fair taxation where everyone pays into the system (except the absolute poorest-of-the-poor) in equitable proportions is via a flat wealth tax. Introduce this system of taxation, and suddenly the $10’s of trillions in wealth currently sitting in the idle hoards of these misers would be exposed to taxation for the first time in 100 years. Gradually these extreme hoards of wealth will dissipate over time – unless the ultra-wealthy actually put that capital to productive uses, so that it starts to generate income and jobs (and thus fuels the global economy).
The Occupy Wall Street movement is the first, tentative step in a process which 2,000 years of history teaches us is absolutely inevitable. Whether it is this movement which (eventually) facilitates real, equitable changes in our economies, or whether it is ultimately replaced by something bigger and better, the “message” which these people are sending is simple: the pendulum of history has begun to swing back.

Breitbart Leaks Thousands Of Occupy Wall Street Emails


Gawker
Conservatives really have a hard-on for "infiltrating" Occupy Wall Street in an effort to discredit it. Now a computer expert has leaked thousands of emails from Occupy Wall Street organizers and told us he's identified members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous involved in the protest.
Tom Ryan is a New York-based computer security expert who runs a tiny New York-based outfit called Provide Security, which he boasts on his blog is a "team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world." He's best known for using fake social media profiles of a pretty lady to compromise the security of high-level military and intelligence officials.
Ryan and his computer buddies have been waging a months-long campaign to infiltrate and "map the ties" of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, which has had a hand in organizing the protest.
Yesterday Ryan leaked what he said were more than 3,900 emails sent to an Occupy Wall Street mailing list called September17discuss. Now they're being used by conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart to smear the movement. The emails show that Occupy Wall Street is a "conspiracy to 'destabalize' Global Markets," Breitbart says! (You can see the email archive here.)
In a phone interview, Ryan sounded similar notes of conspiracy. He claimed that members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous are secretly calling the shots in the Occupy Wall Street movement, provoking police violence and waging a concentrated effort to spread misinformation. He said that the supposedly peaceful organizers were secretly violent. And, because no right-wing smear is complete without a terrorism connection, Ryan adds in a blog post that he had seen Occupy Wall Street posts on the Al Qaeda recruitment forum Shamuk and Al-Jahad.
Ryan says he's identified the members of Anonymous behind Occupy Wall Street.
Continue reading...
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The truth from ANONYMOUS who organized the protests:
  • We are a decentralized non-violent resistance movement, which seeks to restore the rule of law and fight back against the organized criminal class.
  • One-tenth of one percent of the population has consolidated wealth in unprecedented fashion and launched an all-out economic war against 99.9% of the population.
  • We are not affiliated with either wing of the two-party oligarchy.  We seek an end to the corrupted two-party system by ending the campaign finance and lobbying racket.
  • Above all, we aim to break up the global banking cartel centered at the Federal Reserve, International Monetary Fund, Bank of International Settlement and World Bank.
  • We demand that the primary dealers within the Federal Reserve banking system be broken up and held accountable for rigging markets and destroying the global economy, effective immediately.
  • As a first sign of good faith we demand Ben Bernanke step down as Federal Reserve chairman.
  • Until our demands are met and a rule of law is restored, we will engage in a relentless campaign of non-violent, peaceful, civil disobedience.

Cornel West Is Proud To Be Arrested at the Supreme Court Saturday Oct 16...

Occupy Wall Street Anti-Semitic Say Conservatives

Side view of the Attack on Peaceful Protester

NYPD White Shirt KO's a Protester at Today's March 10/14/11



The overhand right from the officer comes in slow-motion at the 35-second mark.

The man punched, Felix Rivera-Pitre is HIV positive. He told Gothamist this morning:

  • "The cop just lunged at me full throttle and hit me on the left side of my face. It tore my earring out. I remember seeing my earring on the ground next to me and it was full of blood. I was completely dumbstruck. I'm HIV positive and that cop should get tested."

The only explanation he could give for the punch was that he "shot the cop a look."

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In the Mosh Pit with the Black Pots and Kettles

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

May your noses always be cold and wet.

Apologies for not being around for a few days; temporarily under the weather.

This is stacking up with brimming potential to be one of those memorable weeks where just about anything can happen. On the high end, false flag quadrant, the Israeli controlled western powers are wagging the dog and swinging dead cats all over the place. They want to see dead people and hopefully a lot of them in Iran. They’ve had their way so far with all the other wars so... if something is going to stop them it will have to be something different than the forces, people and things that didn’t stop them all the other times.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has gone viral and epidemic all over the world and the ranks keep swelling. Something has to give, overreact or break through soon enough.

People are being arrested for wanting to close their accounts at the large banks. There are several views about how this has been allowed to happen. Some say they entered the bank as protestors and that gave the usual, quasi legitimacy to temporal overreaction. What someone needs to tell these people is that they can just do online transfers of their savings and whatnot to whatever the next bank holding their money will be. If they want this activity made public they can simply announce a day when everyone does it; or a week, or a month. Whatever it takes to bring down the big banks and force legal action against Wall Street has to be done and relentlessly pursued until it is accomplished. Lloyd Blankfein and his friends need to be brought to trial, sent to prison or marooned on a rock somewhere with a few hundred pounds of Garbanzo beans, with fire making capacities and pot with some water.

Eric Holder of Fucked and Furious fame is panhandling for privacy at the corner of Shit and Go Blind, which we visited the other day. People as corrupt as or possibly even more corrupt than he is, such as Shabbos Goy, Darrel Issa, are lining up to take shots at the morally bankrupt, microcephalic attorney general. It looks like a mosh pit full of black pots and kettles. Cue Ozzy Osborne or Marilyn Manson; ‘together like you’ve never seen them before’?

♫Something’s gotta give, something’s gotta give, something’s gotta give♫

The usual politically correct nonsense is rearing its troglodyte profile above the once normal and now bent out of recognition societies and cultures of the moment. All formerly celebrated holidays are presently suspect and being plowed under for the pleasure of those who don’t believe in anything but their narrow little agendas of social control. Shake any one of the trees close to any of this action and half a dozen Zionistas will fall out of the branches. As Press TV accurately stated, you can have a gay sex channel in the UK but you can’t have a free and open media and that is no surprise given who controls 96% of it.

Political correctness is the bastard stepchild of the communist manifesto. The intent is to give the appearance of leveling the playing field so that everyone’s needs, even if it’s just those two guys standing in the corner dreaming of sheep, are recognized and put on an even footing with ten million other people dreaming of each other. Of course it has nothing to do with any of this but is just more ‘divide and conquer’, where the people enforcing these things, gain a power out of all proportion to the relevance of their right to enforce these things.

The breakdown of the whole infrastructure and its financial and moral underpinnings is absolutely calculated by the usual suspects who have been misjudged and impugned by history (until it got revised and rewritten) and let’s all take a nanosecond of time to commiserate with them before they go right back to their constant practice of seeking to impoverish and enslave the rest of us.

Well, one way or another, the whole thing is coming down and the real impetus behind all of it, regardless of how it may appear, is the cosmos using everyone good, bad and indifferent to bring about necessary change and whatever amount of suffering is required to make whatever points are the point of the whole exercise to begin with.

Yes, my friend, the symphony is being conducted from off stage and it really doesn’t matter who appears to be standing front and center. They aren’t doing anything that isn’t being allowed and directed for the purpose of demonstration. Totally compromised, psychopathic parrots like Hillary Clinton are just going through the motions and generally clueless concerning the real and final result of their speech and actions.

The wide range of accurate information in the minds of the Occupy Wall Street ‘rank and file’ is amazing. They’ve got a really good idea of what has been happening and is happening. All of this makes its way into the human consciousness from unknown locations and suddenly everyone knows it.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here between God and the Devil to make sure it’s all on the level... or something to that effect. Poetic license can be problematic when it comes to reality but then so can everything else that falls short of it and that pretty much means everything else.

It doesn’t matter what you call the whole process or to whom you attribute the power to bring it to the term of its course. It doesn’t matter if you think the bad guys finally messed everything up so that the mathematical certainty of evil destroying itself has finally arrived at the dénouement. It doesn’t matter if you believe it’s all under the control of a mysterious and indefinable consciousness. It doesn’t matter if you think the moon is made out of green cheese. What matters is that it is happening in front of you and inside of you and somehow, someway, it is taking place. That’s the critical focus (or should be) of the whole shebang.

I’m not any kind of gifted prognosticator but I would have to say that, irrespective of that, these next few weeks look like any given day some event will be enough to change this world beyond all expectation. It’s going to result in different things in different places, just as the alterations in consciousness are going to be radically different for different people depending on what has been in their head to begin with. This is Monday morning talking. I’ll be real interested to see what Thursday morning has to say, or next Monday for that matter.

Everything at every level is being affected so there’s no way to predict what might be the result of all of that. Anything, even of great magnitude, can now happen in a few minutes, an hour and a day. Hopefully (as I believe it to be true) everything is under control for the purpose of demonstration and we simply need to acknowledge that and proceed with an awareness of it. The idea that this is all blind chaos that somehow came to this moment through some sequence of empirically understood evolution is a frightening thought.

In any case, you are where you are as what you are. You’re the sum total of whatever you got up to that somehow made its way across the possibilities of the map of your existence to the location you find yourself in now, physically and consciousness wise. If you’re not happy with that, change it. That potential is also operating under the same rules of a few minutes, an hour, a day and so on, depending on what is required to get you in gear. Some can change. Some can’t change and some will be compelled to change. Good luck with how that applies to you. Alright then, stop, look and listen. The train is coming down the tracks and something also appears to be going on center stage. Don’t get confused about where you should be standing with both the performance and the train in operation at this time.


End Transmission.......

Citigroup buoyed by $3.7bn third quarter profit

Seventh straight quarterly profit for bank that was bailed out by US taxpayers

Citigroup Manhattan branch
Citigroup's third quarter profits exceeded expectations. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
Citigroup has continued its bounce back from near death announcing its seventh consecutive quarterly profit.
The bank made a third-quarter profit of $3.74bn (£2.37bn), up 74% from a year earlier, boosted by an accounting adjustment, a reduction in losses associated with bad loans and strength in its international operations.
The results benefited from a $1.9bn gain tied to a change in the valuation of Citi's debt but even without the accounting boost Citigroup exceeded analysts' expectations.
The bank's revenue fell 8% from a year earlier to $18.9bn dragged down by a slump in investment banking and trading, a business that suffered at all major Wall Street banks.
Citi chief executive Vikram Pandit said: "Citi continues to navigate a challenging economic environment and delivered another quarter of solid operating results."
Once the US's largest financial services firm, Citi had to be bailed out by the US taxpayer three years ago after racking up record losses on sub-prime loans and other toxic debts. Pandit has been streamlining the firm while returning it to profitability.
He had planned to sell the firm's private label credit-card business, which runs credit cards for Sears, Home Depot and others, but said he now plans to keep the business, which has traditionally suffered higher defaults than other credit card units.
"The portfolio not only fits the current credit environment but also our strategy of building and strengthening relationships with our corporate clients," Pandit said.
The bank's results follow similar results from JP Morgan last week, which announced revenue at its investment-banking unit had fallen 13% from the second quarter, hampered by a slow down in business amid the eurozone crisis and the row in Washington over raising the debt ceiling.
Wells Fargo, the US's fourth largest bank, also announced third-quarter earnings on Monday up 21% as the bank benefited from lower credit-loss provisions. In the latest quarter, Well Fargo's provision for credit losses fell to $1.81bn from $3.44bn.

America's Multi-Headed Monster


by Stephen Lendman
It’ combines and represents:
money power in private hands to make more of it at the public’s expense;
super-wealth and privilege;
one-party rule – corrupted money party duopoly power; and
major media managed news, not real information and analysis.
Angry street protesters nationwide must understand and focus on these above other issues. Achieving social justice depends on it.
Basic information on how America’s been run from inception is also essential.
It was established as a government of men, not laws. Then and now, democracy was illusory, not real. Constitutional language about “We the people of the United States” was manipulative deception.
In fact, only white property owners mattered, a small minority. They alone were enfranchised. Others were entirely shut out. Women were considered appendages of their husbands and child bearers, nothing else. Blacks were commodities, not people.
In 1865 they were freed, in 1870 enfranchised. It hardly mattered until passage of the mid-1960s Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Even then and now they haven’t worked as believed.
Religious prerequisites existed until 1810. Property owner enfranchisement lasted until 1850. Voters couldn’t elect senators until 1913. Women couldn’t vote until 1920.
Native Americans couldn’t until enfranchised by the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. Poll tax requirements existed until 1966. It hardly matters now with corporate-manipulated electronic machines voting, not citizens.
It’s worse because voters have no choice. Duopoly power prevents it. The electoral process is kabuki theater. Major media and PR scoundrels manipulate the public mind.
Everything is pre-scripted and pre-packaged. Secrecy and back room deals substitute for a free, fair and open process. Candidates are pre-selected. Big money owns them.
Key outcomes are predetermined. Duopoly power serves the privileged. Voters get the best democracy money can buy. Horse race journalism and trivia substitute for addressing real issues fairly, fully, and accurately.
Voter disenfranchisement is rife. Peremptorily removing many from voter rolls is commonplace. Intimidation, illegal practices, and obstacles deter others.
Millions can’t vote because of past criminal records, no matter how minor the offense. Millions more in America’s gulag can’t, including many wrongfully there.
In his book “Democracy for the Few,” Michael Parenti said American-style democracy was created to “resist the pressure of popular tides (and protect) a rising bourgeoisie’s (freedom to) invest, speculate, trade, and accumulate wealth.”
John Jay, America’s first Chief Supreme Court Justice said America should be run by and for “the people who own it.” John Adams wanted it run by “the rich, the well born, and the able.” It’s been that way from inception. Privilege alone mattered, not popular interests.
Democracy for the few was established. Populism was nowhere in sight. Nothing changed from then to now. In spite of commonly believed myths, people don’t govern directly or indirectly through representatives. People are governed by wealth and power, serving privileged interests only.
America’s founders were that time’s equivalent of a Wall Street crowd. They were property owners, bankers, merchants, lawyers and politicians. Bill of Rights freedoms were established for them alone.
Moreover, constitutional America isn’t constrained by checks and balances. Then and now, sitting governments act without popular approval. In fact, they’re entirely detached in a realm of their own.
Constitutional restraints are pure fantasy. Presidents and Congress do what they please. Washington is corporate occupied territory. Bankers sit stop the pecking order.
America’s national resources are squandered. Labor is exploited, underpaid, and abused. Monopoly capitalism and democratic freedoms can’t coexist. Americans can have whatever they want if they can pay for it.
Money power, privilege, corruption, greed and imperial arrogance substitute for equal rights and social justice.
Exorcizing that cancer is job one. Returning money power to public hands is key to having a chance. The 1913 Federal Reserve Act let powerful bankers usurp America’s money system in violation of the Constitution’s Article I, Section 8, giving only Congress the power to “coin Money (and) regulate the Value thereof….”
Thereafter, they victimized working Americans by using money, credit and debt for private self-enrichment by bankrolling and colluding with Congress and administrations to implement laws favoring them.
As a result, decades of deregulation, outsourcing, economic financialization, and casino capitalism followed. Purchasing power eroded. Asset bubbles were created. So were record budget and national debt levels, as well as depression-sized unemployment manipulated lower to conceal the state of working America.
Dire conditions also include high levels of personal and business bankruptcies, millions of lost homes, record impoverishment affecting society’s most vulnerable hung out to dry on their own, and America’s greatest ever wealth gap.
Today’s America is too broken and corrupted to fix. Nothing short of dismantling it and starting over can work, including a new Constitution put to a national referendum to vote up or down section by section.
That’s direct participatory democracy, the real kind with referendum voting on major issues too important to leave solely to elected officials.
Most important is making banking a highly regulated public utility, nationalizing or abolishing the Fed. Wall Street’s franchise must end. Giant banks must be broken up and nationalized, insolvent ones liquidated.
No more money power in private hands! No more government paying interest on its own money!
No more bailouts and other corporate handouts! No more privatizing profits and socializing losses! No more business as usual!
No more democracy for the few! No more duopoly power! No more government of, by and for super-wealth! No more imperial wars!
No more a nation not fit to live for everyone not privileged! No more police state laws!
No more cops serving as enforcers for crime bosses! No more tolerating their beating up on peaceful protesters!
No more media and PR scoundrels manipulating the public mind! No more managed news, infotainment and junk food news!
No more manufacturing consent! No more suppressing truths too ugly to reveal! No more state and corporate propaganda substituting for real news, information and analysis!
No more the way it’s always been since inception! No more faking it! No more money in politics! No more corporate bosses and political Washington having it all their way!
No more popular interests entirely shut out! Social justice change demands clean-sweeping out everything and starting over!
It bears repeating. Money power must return to public hands. Political duopoly power must end, and media giants must be broken up and prohibited so fake news, information and analysis no longer is tolerated.
Americans deserve direct democratic government of, by and for everyone equally. So do others living everywhere.
Wishing won’t make it so. Nor will it happen if dark forces succeed in infiltrating, manipulating, and subverting the way they always try to prevent social, economic and political change. Exposing, deterring, and expunging them when found is crucial.
Only unrestrained popular resistance for change works, doing whatever it takes for as long as it takes to get it.
There’s no other way! There’s no turning back! Go for it!
Quitting’s not an option! There can’t be to have any chance for success!
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.