We need to blow the lid off where these congresscritters get there money and expose them. The money explains why they vote for NAFTA and other "free trade" agreements, NAFTA superhigways, Most Favored Nation trade status for China (import slave-labor goods to undercut American jobs), bailouts, and all the other policies which sell us down the river and now put us out on the street. Then we have to vote the InBUMbent Party out.

This economic crisis is not bad news for everybody. The Wall Street fat cats who got those bail-outs are now off bargain hunting on the stock market, and buying up the mutual funds in your 401k that you had to sell at rock bottom when you lost your job, just to eat. It's the theft of the century and its still going on, with the help of BOTH parties. The GOP thinks they've got the Tea Partiers in their pocket but they are wrong. They are trying to say, it's about No socialism, which is fine, I'm against it too. So why did they socialize the bad debt of the banks? Do they think we're that stupid that we don't remember what happened yesterday? This has to be a movement from all sides, left, right, independent, from Greens to Ron Paulers.

When the pols snubbed their noses at the people on the bailouts, they thought they had put us down once and for all, to show how much our opinion counted for. They trod on the people who said Don't Tread on Me. Remember the date, July 4th, surround the Capitol, Downsize DC. To me a good start for a Tea Party platform would be (just my thoughts):

-reverse the bail-outs. Give us our money back for the creation of jobs.

- throw out ALL the InBUMbents of both parties, with very few exceptions like maybe Ron Paul.

- end the Fed

- repeal NAFTA. The flood of cheap agribusiness corn into Mexico after NAFTA is what put millions of small Mexican corn farmers out of business, which is a big reason they came flooding up here for jobs. I remember Al Gore standing up there and debating Ross Perot over NAFTA, old Al Bore preaching at us it was good for everybody. Some environmentalist. All that pollution along the Rio Grande? From the maliquadoras = NAFTA = Al Gore.

- stop the trillion dollar wars which just make Halliburton and KRB rich and kill a lot of fine young Americans who have the military as the only job option.

- return to the Constitution, Second Amendment, our right to keep and bear arms. An armed American is a free American. No big brother spying, abolish the Military Commissions Act (allows the government to declare you or me enemy combatants and put us away with no trial)

- Prosecute Cheney for authorizing torture of men who were innocent, same with Pelosi. Oh if we prosecute the Bush administration we have to prosecute Pelosi too? Because she was briefed? Great! Throw her under the bus...here, let me give her a shove... We'll see about Bush later.

Remember, your money didn't just disappear. Someone took it.

HAVE A PEEK AT WHERE YOUR CONGRESSMAN'S MONEY COMES FROM. THEN WRITE A LETTER TO YOUR LOCAL PAPER AND ASK HIM WHAT THEY GET FROM IT. Better yet, circulate a letter in your hometown asking him to come home to address a community meeting. If you get around 200 signatures he can't say no.

Sacramento's Tent City


SACRAMENTO - The capital's tent city, sprawling messily on a grassed-over landfill, is home to some 200 men and women with nowhere else to go.

It has been here for more than a year, but in the last three weeks it has been transformed into a vivid symbol of a financial crisis otherwise invisible to many Americans.

The Depression had Hoovervilles. The energy crisis had snaking gas lines. The state's droughts have empty reservoirs and brown lawns. But today's deep recession is about disappearing wealth - painful, yes, but difficult to see.

Then this tattered encampment along the American River showed up on Oprah Winfrey's show, Al-Jazeera, and other news outlets around the world. On Thursday, city officials announced they would shut down the tent city within a month.

"We're finding other places to go," said Steven Maviglio, a spokesman for Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson. The camp is "not safe. It's not humane. But we're not going in with a bulldozer."

On a recent chilly morning in the tent city, traffic whined along the adjacent freeway. Cats criss-crossed the encampment. As the sky slowly brightened, shadowy figures emerged and headed for the bushes along the riverbank. There were no portable toilets. The dumpster was a new arrival.

Jim Gibson walked to a neighboring tent, where two of his friends - an unemployed car salesman married to a onetime truck driver - were brewing coffee on a propane stove.

Gibson looked like anybody's suburban dad, all jeans, polar fleece and sleepy eyes, his neatly trimmed hair covered by a ball cap. Seven months ago, Gibson, 50, a contractor, had a job and an apartment in Sacramento. Today, he struggles to stay clean and fed. A former owner of the American dream, Gibson is living the American nightmare.

"The only work I've found is holding an advertising sign on a street corner," he said.

Survival is the biggest time-filler here. Tents must be shored up against wind and rain. The schedule for meals, clothing giveaways, and shower times at local agencies must be strictly followed.

CeCe Walker, 48, back from coffee, breakfast, and a shower at Maryhouse, a daytime shelter for women, lugged a bag of ice for a half-mile.

"I've never camped in my life," she said, sorting through supplies damp from yesterday's melted ice.

The tent city sprawls along the river in small clusters of "neighborhoods." Walker and her neighbor, Charly Hine, 38, pitched their tents at the distant edge to stay away from noise and trouble.

One neighbor displays an American flag and a goose with the word "welcome" written on its breast. It is a favorite subject, its owner said, of news photographers. Another has a mailbox and a gate. The largest and most raucous neighborhood has some 70 tents pitched closest to the street. Near noon, Tammie and Keith Day were drinking beer around a cold fire pit, worrying about how she would get her diabetes medication and fretting about whether officials would shutter the tent city.

"We're homeless and being evicted?" Tammie fumed. "Now I've heard everything."

HAVE A PEEK AT WHERE YOUR CONGRESSMAN'S MONEY COMES FROM. THEN WRITE A LETTER TO YOUR LOCAL PAPER AND ASK HIM WHAT THEY GET FROM IT. Better yet, circulate a letter in your hometown asking him to come home to address a community meeting. If you get around 200 signatures he can't say no.