You Can Get Strangled to Death for Stealing Toothpaste, But Get Bonuses for Wrecking the American Economy

I just sent a contribution to the Halter campaign in Arkansas. If a few corporate toadies like Blanche Lincoln get thrown out on their asses by a populist movement, the others will have to sit up and take notice.

Once again, the Democrats are selling out the people who put them in power. Unfortunately, given the current situation, our only realistic hope is to back Democrats who vote for working-class interests and go after the others with the intention of getting rid of them.

This is an outrage! Killing someone for stealing crayons and toothpaste? You can bet if the thief had killed the store manager, it would be ruled murder. I agree with the article, people who do REAL harm to large numbers of lives never have to account for it. Hey, your pension is gone, sorry.  Hey, your mortgage payment doubled, sorry.  Hey, your health insurance doesn't cover the care you need, sorry. It really has turned into a war on the lower and middle class. One of these days, people are going to get enough of it and start fighting back.  Take your money out of the bank, they are crooks. Don't buy any of Walmart's merchandise, buying from them is a vote for low wages. Get out of the stock market, it's a mechanism to take assets from the middle class and give them to the upper class. Maybe our politicians don't represent us like they should. But we vote with our dollars everyday.

Again, the Democrats support one set of laws for peasants (citizens), and another for the rich and powerful.

They support the wealthy by protecting corporate profits at every opportunity.  Since the wealthy generally own the corporations, this is in effect putting money into the pockets of the wealthy.

It won't start to change until WE THE PEOPLE stop voting for this corporate-funded, pretend-opposition party, and start voting for REAL progressives.

The Green Party doesn't accept ANY corporate money and represents CITIZENS' interests, not corporate interests.  Your Green-Party vote sends a clear message to the corporatists WHY they didn't get your vote.

When the corporatists start losing "their" votes, they sit up and take notice.  Voting Green is the surest way to do this.  And if the Green Party gets a mere 5% of the vote, this will get them matching Federal funding.

Vote GREEN!

Some lawyer help us out here. What charges, short of murder obviously, could be brought against someone whose response to a threat is so over the top as to cause a death?

I suppose the police are thinking, "When one of us does that, we don't want charges brought, so the DA shouldn't bring any charges against a store manager who runs after someone with $5 worth of merchandise."

Now if Kyser had caused the death of the pursuing store manager, what then....?

We're in very bad shape.

Colleen Clark Cambridge, MA

The election consequences of the Obama administration's corporate protectionism to the still significant majority of the Democrats in the House and Senate are surely going to be acknowledged sooner rather than later.  Already, Obama's endorsed candidates like Blanche Lincoln have taken a backseat to more progressive Democrats.  

There are plenty of pundits and partisan media sites that try to disenfranchise the growing dissatisfaction within the Democratic Party by characterizing their concerns as being left wing. But I think ultimately, it's going to take a reassertion of the more progressive values and expectations that catapulted Obama into the presidency to remedy the growing Democratic apathy that serves to benefit the GOP re-emergence.