so fun to see the open thread with 'rain' theme. Greetings to you all , good see you having raising hell, awareness, and dancing to music as well.

After more than a few miles spent walking in the rain with a guide enjoying the wild life here, Jakkalbessie and I have spent the day uploading final stories and pictures to our travel blog on our most recent 4 weeks in Kruger National Park in South Africa, read some news, take care of some bills.

Just took a break and decided to post my first here at Caucus99percent.

One of these days will learn how to post pics here.

All the best !

Is that the guy from Star Trek?

Dangerous democracy

Catalonia's Supreme Court indicted the acting head of the Catalan regional government on Tuesday after he pushed ahead with a referendum on independence from Spain last year despite such a vote being ruled unconstitutional by the courts.

The preliminary charges of disobedience, abuse of authority and usurping authority are leveled at Artur Mas, the most visible face of Catalan separatist aspirations, just two days after his party won a regional election.

Secessionist parties on Sunday secured an absolute majority in the regional parliament, although they won 48 percent of the votes cast.

Unless the whole is greater than the sum of its parts , we've got a problem

the forces of Eurasia, and the forces of Oceania, are both bombing brown people.

I am authorized to say the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end.

Doubleplusgood.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wram5rPEQbQ]

interesting

The Teamsters, one of the nation's largest labor unions, voted unanimously on Tuesday to withhold its endorsement of Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton.
In a closed-door meeting on Tuesday in Charleston, S.C., the group's board voted 26-0 to hold off on endorsing Clinton, according to Fox News' James Rosen.
...
And if Clinton doesn't withdraw her support of President Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, the president of The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations recently hinted that she may lose their support too.

Bernie Sanders Tells the Truth: Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich on His Surging Campaign specifically about the digital monopolies.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you recently, in an op-ed piece in The New York Times, talked about the digital monopolies and the need to break up some of these companies now that have such enormous influence over our lives—the Googles and the Amazons and the Facebooks. Could you talk about that?

ROBERT REICH: Well, up until quite recently, we had antitrust scrutiny, very careful antitrust scrutiny of some of these big high-tech firms. They are creating larger and larger entry barriers. It’s harder for other companies to get into the business, because they have platforms that are basically network monopolies over whether it’s search or shopping or whatever you want. And those huge—that huge market power, those network monopolies end up giving them the power to keep competitors out—ultimately charge higher prices, but also deter innovation. We need to apply antitrust law. I don’t mean we necessarily have to bust them up, but we’ve got to make sure that we don’t stifle innovation, and we’ve got to make absolutely sure that consumers down the line are not ending up paying too much.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you mention in your book—I thought it was a fascinating nugget—that Google and Apple are spending more money acquiring the patents of others than they are—and fighting over these patents in court cases, than they are in actually new research and development.

ROBERT REICH: And also on litigation and on lobbying. I mean, Google is now the number one lobbyist in Washington. It’s simply kind of a consequence of having more and more market power. And it’s not—I’m not saying Google is a bad company. I’m not saying Apple is bad. I’m not saying that anybody—people—companies are not bad—people are not companies, companies are not people, despite what the Supreme Court says. But what you’ve got to be careful of in an economy is the aggregation of market power that turns into political power, inevitably. And we’ve seen that again and again. And that’s what antitrust laws were created for in 1890, the Sherman Act. And yet antitrust scrutiny has waned over time.

AMY GOODMAN: ... (Sanders) and was asked about his position on financial institutions and his support for reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking and was repealed in 1999. This is a part of what he said.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: We have six of the largest financial institutions in this country who have assets equivalent—assets of about $10 trillion, which is equivalent to about 60 percent of the GDP of the United States. So, point number one, you have a handful of huge financial institutions that have enormous economic clout. They issue a significant amount of the mortgages in this country and the credit cards in this country. So the first issue is, for a vibrant economy, do we think it is a good idea for a handful of financial institutions to have that much economic clout? ...
What Wall Street has done is create a business model which says, "We really don’t care about small and medium-sized businesses. What we care is about being an island unto ourselves," coming up with the most esoteric financial tools imaginable, that nobody in the world knows, but enables Wall Street to make huge, huge amounts of money in highly dangerous and speculative activities. That led us to the Wall Street crash of 2008, which created the worst economic downturn since the Great Recession. I personally believe that the business model of Wall Street is fraud. ...
....So, to my mind, what we have to do is, A, re-establish Glass-Steagall, maintain those separate entities, but second of all, more importantly, we have got to break them up.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Bernie Sanders. Actually, Glass-Steagall was repealed under the Clinton administration in 1999, Robert Reich.

ROBERT REICH: Bernie Sanders is right: We’ve got to re-establish Glass-Steagall. Repealing it—

AMY GOODMAN: And explain why it’s so important.

ROBERT REICH: Well, because after the crash of 1929, the United States set out to prevent that kind of crazy risk taking by the banking sector that led to the crash of 1929—we’re not talking about 2008, we’re talking about 1929. One thing we did was separate commercial banking from investment banking, so that people’s deposits, the ordinary savings of ordinary people, would not be used for gambling operations by the investment banks. We ought to maintain that. I mean, that’s one of the reasons that we got into trouble again.

We also need to bust up the biggest banks. Bernie Sanders actually understated the reality. ..I mean, they are so large that they are—just because of their political clout and their scale, they are gaining more and more market share of the entire banking industry. That’s dangerous. It’s dangerous for the economy. It’s dangerous for our political culture, because those banks have a great deal of political power.

So, that's why I boycott Facebook. I can't live without the google, but I can live without facebook and Apple and Amazon.
Just liked his clarity in this interview.

Hey --
I'm emailing you now because I think it's about time this country had a smart, tenacious, passionate woman as president.
Pitch in $1 or more before tonight's midnight fundraising deadline, and help elect Hillary: Thanks. Bill

If that's not a fraud Bill Clinton, then it's just awful. I don't know, may be something is wrong with me, but I find that ... don't know, but not what I would want if I were HRC. Ok, forget it.