On March 1st, Bill Moyers gave his first public speech in three years, as the final speaker in the Dowmel Lecture series. In his speech, he addressed what he feels is "the greatest threat" to our country: the staggering inequality of wealth and the death of the middle class.

Read the full six-part report in one post. You can also download the full report with links and graphics or as a print-friendly document. HELP SPREAD THE WORD!

David DeGraw appeared on the Keiser Report to discuss his new book, "The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the USA." DeGraw: "The American public needs to understand that we have been attacked. We are in an economic war right now and all economic indicators say that things are going to get worse...."

These are the core common-ground issues that we must urgently rally around and support. Unless we organize and take decisive action on all these issues, we will all suffer the consequences of our collective inaction.

The most significant bias in the mainstream media is not the liberal or conservative views propagated to divide, distract, confuse and create apathy among the populace; the ultimate bias is in what is missing from the coverage...

The entire bailout is strategically designed to eliminate the US middle class. Every time you hear the word "bailout," you should think "coup d’état."

Now that we have a better understanding of how the Economic Elite dominate our lives, let’s take a look at exactly who they are…

As a record number of US citizens are struggling to get by, many of the largest corporations are experiencing record-breaking profits, and CEOs are receiving record-breaking bonuses. How could this be happening; how did we get to this point?

AmpedStatus Report: It's time for 99% of Americans to mobilize and aggressively move on common sense political reforms. This is the first part of a six-part report. Introduction & Part I: Casualties of Economic Terrorism, Surveying the Damage.

AmpedStatus Report: The economic elite have escalated their attack on the U.S. public by surging military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Kansas City school board narrowly approved a plan Wednesday night to close nearly half the district's schools in a desperate bid to avoid a potential bankruptcy. The board voted 5-4 after parents and community leaders made final pleas to spare the schools even as the beleaguered district seeks to erase a projected $50 million budget shortfall. The approved plan calls for shuttering 29 of 61 schools _ a striking amount even as public school closes rise nationwide while the recession eats away at academic budgets. "The urban core has suffered white flight post-the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education, blockbusting by the real estate industry, redlining by banks and other financial institutions, retail and grocery store abandonment," Kansas City Councilwoman Sharon Sanders Brooks said to applause from a standing-room-only crowd of more than 200 people. Tags: Education Economic Death Squad Debt Posted by: ampedstatus

A federal judge retained her position that it is unconstitutional for Congress to prevent funding for the activist group ACORN after a government request that she reconsider. U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon cemented her earlier decision in December and made the injunction against government intervention permanent, asking all federal agencies to spread the word that money to ACORN be allowed without delay. The judge wrote that it was "unmistakable that Congress determined ACORN's guilt before defunding it." Congress may investigate ACORN but cannot "rely on the negative results of a congressional or executive report as a rationale to impose a broad, punitive funding ban on a specific, named organization."" Tags: ACORN Economic Justice Congress Posted by: ampedstatus

Liberal and progressive organizations that helped propel him to the White House are turning on him now, little more than a year after he took office. Their collective discontent, on issues from health care to nuclear energy to the handling of terrorism suspects, could mean bad news for Democrats during this fall's congressional elections. Polls show that liberals and blacks still approve of the job Obama's doing. That approval, however, doesn't necessarily mean they will make the effort to vote, and many of the activists and groups that worked to get people to the polls in 2008 say they're not inclined right now to help Democrats in the fall. "The energized base which transformed the nation and elected our first black president (is) now disengaged," Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile says. "If this was September, I would hit the panic button." Tags: Obama Illusion Posted by: ampedstatus

Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich joins us to discuss two House debates in which he’s played a central role this week. The Ohio Democrat is threatening to vote against his party’s healthcare reform package because it does not contain a robust public option. Meanwhile Kucinich’s bill to force the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan was taken up on Wednesday. After a rare three and a half hour debate on the war the majority of House Democrats joined with Republicans to defeat the measure. Tags: Congress Posted by: ampedstatus

According to a recent report from The Project on Student Debt, the average student in the class of 2008 graduated with $23,000 of debt, "a figure 25 percent higher than what their older brothers and sisters owed when they graduated from college in 2004"; two out of every three college students now graduate with debt, and the Great Recession is requiring students to take out more loans than ever before. In the 2008-09 academic year, federal student loan borrowing "grew about 25% over the previous year, to $75.1 billion." A major reason for the ever-growing debt load America's students are taking on is the broken student lending system, a big part of which involves the government paying student loan companies to originate and service loans. The companies are the inefficient middle men that drive up costs for students without adding any value. To rectify this problem, progressives in Congress introduced the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), which expands and improves successful student aid programs like the Pell Grant and the Perkins Loan program, and eliminates billions of dollars in subsidies to wasteful private lenders. Last September, by a 253-171 vote, the House of Representatives passed this landmark student lending legislation. Now, SAFRA is a Senate vote away from the President's desk, and a group of Republicans and conservative Democrats, buoyed by "an aggressive lobbying campaign by the nation's biggest student lenders," is all that stands in the way of creating a more just and cost-efficient federal student lending system. Additionally, there are reports circulating that Senate Democrats may pair their "overhaul of federal student lending with healthcare reform" in one reconciliation package, which would allow SAFRA to pass with a simple majority vote in the Senate and avoid a filibuster by lender-friendly conservatives. Tags: Debt Economic Justice Posted by: ampedstatus

*There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. *As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race. * A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers. *If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste -- not class, caste -- permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era. Tags: racism Prison Drug War Obama Illusion Posted by: ampedstatus

House Democratic leaders Wednesday banned the practice of doling out no-bid contracts to private contractors, a move that will shake up the lobbying industry that has come to rely on securing these so-called earmarks for their corporate clients. At a meeting of the Democratic caucus, leaders unveiled the new rule that forbids private contractors from receiving earmarks, part of the party's effort to reclaim the reform mantle it used successfully in its 2006 midterm campaign to regain the majority. House Appropriations Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., whose panel issues thousands of these line-item grants each year, estimated the fiscal 2010 budget included more than 1,000 earmarks, worth billions of dollars, to private companies. Most were culled from the Pentagon's annual budget. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Bremerton, on Tuesday officially assumed the chairmanship of the defense-appropriations subcommittee, responsible for Pentagon spending." Tags: private military lobbying Congress Posted by: ampedstatus

Karl Rove's book Courage and Consequence is less memoir than hoax. The chapters that relate to the CIA leak scandal are yet another attempt to deflect attention from his central role in the betrayal of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as a covert CIA officer. His distortions and fabrications are consistent with his approach throughout this sordid and criminal affair. Wasting his opportunity to tell the truth, he offers absolutely nothing new, and his selective use of facts and quotes are a transparent effort to continue his long campaign to confuse people, unfortunately consistent with his past behavior. " Tags: Rove Propaganda Posted by: ampedstatus

The Supreme Court recently freed corporations to spend more money on aggressive election ads. But if businesses take advantage of this new freedom, the public probably won't know it, because it's easy for them to legally hide their political spending. Under current disclosure laws for federal elections, it's virtually impossible for the public to track how much a business spends, what it's spending on, or who ultimately benefits. Experts say the transparency problem extends to state and local races as well. Tags: Supreme Court advertising campaign finance Economic Death Squad Posted by: ampedstatus

Outgoing Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) had some choice words for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel during a recent radio interview in which he called the top Obama adviser "the son of the devil's spawn." "He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive," Massa said of Emanuel's desire to lock up vital votes on health care reform. "You think that somehow they didn't come after me to get rid of me because my vote is the deciding vote in the health care bill? Then, ladies and gentlemen, you live today in a world that is so innocent as to not understand what's going on in Washington, D.C." According to an account given by Massa, he and Emanuel have had tense confrontations in the past, including one particularly memorable incident in the shower of the Congressional gym. "Let me tell you a story about Rahm Emanuel," Massa started. "I was a congressman in my first eight weeks, and I was in the congressional gym, and I went down and I worked out and I went into the showers...I'm sitting there showering, naked as a jaybird and here comes Rahm Emanuel not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me because I wasn't going to vote for the president's budget. Do you know how awkward it is to have a political argument with a naked man?" Tags: no_tag Posted by: ampedstatus

There's been a lot of commentary about President Barack Obama's failure to construct a winning "narrative" for the elections of 2010. In 2008, there were millions of people "fired up and ready to go." But after a year plus of the Beltway-Rahm Emanuel strategy of never exposing oneself to political risk the grassroots energy of the campaign has been allowed simply to dissipate. Robert Reich argues that "if there was ever a time to connect the dots and make the case for government as a means of protecting the public from [corporate] forces. It is now." But at this point, about seven months before the midterms, transforming Americans' view of government is a tall task, especially when many of the George W. Bush policies have clearly prevailed. The problem with Obama's "narrative" lies in the substance of what has transpired over the past year. " Tags: Election Obama Illusion Posted by: ampedstatus

A New York City police officer is alleging that his department has arrest quotas that result in innocent people being arrested. Officer Adil Polanco told WABC channel 7 in New York that his precinct -- the 41st in the Bronx -- has a "20 and one" monthly quota, meaning each officer is expected to issue at least 20 summonses per month, and carry out at least 1 arrest. If the officer doesn't meet the quota, the result can be denial of overtime pay, shift changes and denial of days off, Polanco said. The force's "obsession with keeping crime stats down" is resulting in innocent people being arrested and charged, and often the targeted are minorities, reports WABC. Tags: no_tag Posted by: ampedstatus

The American Civil Liberties Union has never treated the Obama administration with kid gloves, but with their latest ad buy it's become increasingly clear that their patience for the continuance of some Bush-era policies has run quite thin. "What will it be Mr. President?" the ACLU asks in a full-page New York Times advertisement published Sunday. "Change or more of the Same?" The ad also features a portrait of Obama that morphs into Bush. The ACLU's images of the subtle transition between presidents is filtered and lacking in detail, and spans just four frames. However, it appears to be a take-off of a protest image that circulated Facebook and some progressive blogs late last year, showing a similar transition in eerie detail." Tags: Civil Liberties Obama Illusion Posted by: ampedstatus

Any day now, the Obama administration will announce $4.35 billion in extra federal funds for under-performing public schools. That’s fine, but relative to the financial squeeze all the nation’s public schools now face it’s a cruel joke. The recession has ravaged state and local budgets, most of which aren’t allowed to run deficits. That’s meant major cuts in public schools and universities, and a giant future deficit in the education of our people. Across America, schools are laying off thousands of teachers. Classrooms that had contained 20 to 25 students are now crammed with 30 or more. School years have been shortened. Some school districts are moving to four-day school weeks. After-school programs have been cancelled; music and art classes, terminated. Even history is being chucked. Tags: Education Posted by: ampedstatus

As the Obama administration touts No Child Left Behind and the “Race to the Top” competition for school grants, we speak to leading education scholar and former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch. She’s long been known as an advocate of No Child Left Behind, charter schools, standardized testing, and using the free market to improve schools. But she’s had a radical change of heart, as chronicled in her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Ravitch says, “The evidence says No Child Left Behind was a failure, and charter schools aren’t going to be any better.” Tags: Education Posted by: ampedstatus

Six months after U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson accused President Barack Obama of lying on national prime-time TV, the Springdale Republican's re-election bid has broken fundraising records and attracted unprecedented national scrutiny. Wilson and Rob Miller, his Democratic challenger from Beaufort, likely have raised a total of $6 million. While updated campaign finance reports won't be filed for another month, that total would blow past the S.C. record for a U.S. House race — and is on track to challenge the richest contests ever in the country. Both men are trying to deal with the intense attention their rematch — Wilson defeated Miller by margin of 54 percent to 46 percent in 2008 — is drawing. Tags: Election Congress campaign finance Posted by: ampedstatus

Just as Congress enters the final stretch of the financial regulatory reform effort, one of the Treasury Department's leading liaisons to the Hill, Damon Munchus, is bailing out to go work for a financial services lobbying and consulting firm. Munchus was one of Treasury's chief negotiators with the House Financial Services Committee. "This is not a mid-season trade in the NBA, where players just change jerseys and play the same way," said Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), a member of the committee. "There should be at least some kind of cooling off period." When he joined the Obama administration, Munchus -- like all other appointees -- signed an agreement not to lobby the administration for two years after leaving the government. But the pledge says nothing about lobbying Congress, which is absolutely part of what Munchus will do for his new employer, The Cypress Group." Tags: lobbying Economic Death Squad Congress Posted by: ampedstatus

But as spirited political movements have shown in the past, translating passion and activist fury into votes can be difficult. And so far, success at the ballot box has been elusive for these grass-roots conservative activists — if not entirely nonexistent. From Texas to Illinois to upstate New York, a string of lackluster showings for tea party-linked candidates have highlighted a central question about the group’s future: Can an organic and fledgling movement that lacks the institutional grounding and top-down organizational strength of either major political party transfer protest-oriented grass-roots energy into tangible success at the polls? Some observers raise the question of whether the tea party crowd is cut out to achieve electoral success — or whether it is more influential as a more radical, guerrilla movement. “I think they are tremendously influential as a force in the November election,” said Curt Anderson, a veteran GOP strategist and a top adviser to the Republican National Committee. “Except if you see them as an organized political force — in which case, they have been less relevant.” Tags: Tea Party Election Posted by: ampedstatus

A commuter in a diabetic coma, an 89-year-old man and children as young as 12 - just some of the targets of British police armed with skin-piercing 50,000-volt Taser guns. As the Home Office investigates bringing an even more powerful rifle version to Britain, Jason Benetto reports on the slow creep of arms onto our streets. The smartly dressed sales executive travelling on the number 96 bus across Leeds didn't notice his body descending into a state of severe hypoglycaemia. He didn't have time to ask his fellow passengers for help, or press the bell. Instead he slumped back in his seat in a diabetic coma, his head lolling from side to side. This was why he wore a special tag and chain around his neck: it advertised his diabetes. His mother and father, both retired GPs, had encouraged their son to wear it ever since he had started having to take insulin 20 years earlier. Tags: Tasers UK Posted by: ampedstatus

"Washington has awarded more than 107 billion dollars in payments to foreign and US companies doing business in Iran despite US sanctions, The New York Times has reported. That sum included nearly 15 billion dollars paid to companies that defied US sanctions law by making large investments that helped Iran develop its vast oil and gas reserves, said the paper. The Times compiled the figures from an analysis of government and business records." Tags: Iran Posted by: ampedstatus