Chicago Mercantile Exchange CEO Craig Donohue was mic checked by working families as he gave a speech to attendees at a trading industry conference in Houston. Four protesters chanted a preprepared message to Donohue and the audience for more than a minute before being escorted out of the room. In particular the protesters complained that CME was getting $1 billion in taxpayers' money while threatening jobs in Chicago.

From a press release issued by Stand Up Chicago:

“Mr. Donohue, as you stand here today, preparing to give the 1% tips on how to get even richer, you are 1,000 miles away from the struggling families of Chicago and Illinois and they are further from your thoughts, even though CME will line its pockets with over 1 billion of their tax dollars over the next ten years.”

“You were only able to get that money by making empty threats to relocate. The 99% of Chicago and Illinois can’t afford to travel here so we are here to ask you a question on their behalf and on behalf of all 99% families everywhere.

Security officers and conference representatives surrounded the protesters and asked them to leave before they could finish their address. The protesters cooperated, allowing themselves to be slowly escorted out of the room, continuing to deliver their message as they went.

One protester managed to capture the Mic Check on video. Even though the video fades to black while the group is being escorted out of the conference room, a final haunting question is audible: “‘What will working families get for their billion dollar investment?’”

When the Illinois state legislature, pressured by empty threats of relocation, voted in late 2011 to give the CME Group over $1 billion in tax breaks over the next ten years, the working families of Chicago and Illinois became unwilling stakeholders in the highly profitable exchange.

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via The Chris Matthews Show, of all things. Now gone viral.

The Chris Matthews Show features our own version of the "Mad Men" opening this week, starring President Obama. Our take of this iconic sequence portrays the struggles of President Obama's 2012 campaign, showcasing his rivals and highlighting the issues that may complicate his bid for reelection in 2012.

The making of it, here.

You may have read or heard rumors that "Anonymous" hacktivists planned to shut down the internet in a Global Blackout on Saturday, March 31. Not so, say Anonymous hacktivsts known to be truly connected to the collective group. However, if such a thing were to happen, it won't be them.

Citizens of the Internet. We are Anonymous.

It has come to the collective's attention that there have been threats made by Anonymous to "shut down the internet". These threats are NOT those of the collective as a whole!

Be aware that Anonymous itself is an idea. Everyone has the right to an idea. Because of this, anyone can use the name 'Anonymous'. An attack on internet service providers may possibly be by Anonymous, but not the collective as a whole.

There's also quite a possibility that the government may be behind the threats as an effort to push stricter internet laws. Remember, the government has conducted false flag operations in the past.

Or, this can simply be a ploy to discredit Anonymous in the eyes of the public.

The collective uses the internet to operate and plan ops. Therefore they have no reason to attack internet service providers. In the end, it would hurt more innocent people than corrupt government officials, and that's never the goal of the collective.

There's no justice in harming the innocent and there's no excuse for it!

Governments have used our differences to keep us arguing and fighting each other so that we overlook what really matters. Our choices are simple, we can either learn to accept each other for who we are, or die divided by relatively insignificant issues.

Pointless bickering isn't going to get us anywhere and that's exactly what the corrupt individuals in our various governments want.

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Police have cleared out the Occupy Kansas City encampment that went up last October in Penn Valley Park near the Liberty Memorial.

Officers brought a SWAT team to along for fFriday's eviction, but the removal was peaceful and no force was used.

Several tents had been on the land across from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, with protesters holding vigils as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Most were protesting economic issues such as high corporate profits and income inequality.

Kansas police told the occupiers on Tuesday they needed to leave, and officers returned Friday to clear out the park.

A city crew used a dump truck to cart off tents and all occupy belongings that still remained in the park.. Large waths of dead grass remained as reminders of the months-long protest.

Occupy Kansas members say they will continue as a group.

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And now, some four years later, they have become huge. It thrills me no end when good people make it, and I have always had this gut-level feeling Mumford & Sons were destined for big stuff. Clearly, they are in that direction.

I love hunches, especially when they pay off - which I can't say all the time.

This weekend it's Mumford Sons, live at the Haldern Pop Festival in Germany, recorded on August 13, 2010 and featuring an enthusiastic crowd going along for the ride.

Enjoy the weekend - it's just getting started.

Friday night at Union Square, the NYPD apparently decided that drum circles were illegal and arrests the drummers as they sing The Imperial March from Star Wars.

Open thread below.

The latest stories from the front lines of the labor fight across the country ...

Freshman Oklahoma state senator Ralph Shortey recently introduced a bill that would ban “the sale or manufacture of food or products which contain aborted human fetuses.” After a collective brow-raise over such a bizarre proposal, Shortey told the Los Angeles Times he got the idea “while doing some research on the Internet.”

So is there an issue with aborted fetuses ending up as foodstuffs? No. And there never has been.

Shortey’s bill is a wild overstatement of the latest front in the anti-abortion fight, one being prosecuted on an obscure Oklahoma anti-abortion website that has been trying to organize a campaign to boycott PepsiCo because of a research contract it has with a company called Senomyx for beverage sweetener research that the anti-abortion activist charge involves using the HEK-293 cell line in laboratory tests. HEK-293 is a cell line developed in Holland in the early 1970s through the fusion of a kidney cell from an aborted fetus and a virus that immortalized the cells, or allowed them to keep replicating in a laboratory. “Senomyx does not provide ingredients to PepsiCo, nor do they manufacture PepsiCo products. Our work with Senomyx is focused on beverage sweetener research to help us reduce sugar in future global products,” according to Pepsi.

But solving a problem is not the real goal of proposing a ban.

Shortey’s bill sits squarely in a tradition of vilification that’s existed longer than English, mass media, or even Christianity. It’s the timeless Blood Libel: the blood drinking straw man who’s been given different titles over the millennia. Not only do abortionists kill babies, the bill implies, they want us all to commit the most culturally repulsive of all offenses—cannibalism.

The first recorded Blood Libel is from 31 AD. It’s told by two Jewish historians, who lived in the first century in then-Roman Alexandria, Egypt: Philo, in his account of Flaccus the Lieutenant-Governor of Egypt; and Flavius Josephus, in his work, “Against Apion.”

Here’s what these sources tell us: Apion was a skilled hyperbolist and Lieutenant-Governor Flaccus was a desperate politician who tried to avert Caligula’s wrath.

Around 30 AD, Apion, a Graeco-Egyptian grammarian and writer, had spent a great deal of time spreading nasty snipes about the Jewish citizens of Alexandria. His motives for this pastime have been lost to history, but Apion claimed Jews worshiped weird gods and refused to have images of the emperor in their temples. Oh, and to make this all worse, he whispered to many a curious audience that the Jews had been led out of Egypt because they were lepers.

Apion created a narrative. He wrote that it was a part of Jewish law to kidnap a Greek once a year and fatten him up and taste his entrails. Jews were cannibals

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In the video above, you'll see a 29-year-old woman die alone on the cold, concrete floor of a jail cell after pleading with hospital staff and police for help. She had already been to two other hospitals seeking help for the pain after what she thought was triggered by a sprained ankle. On her last day alive, she finally complained about her and refused to leave the hospital. The hospital had her arrested.

Via:

Anna Brown was homeless and had so much pain in her legs that she couldn’t walk.

When Brown, 29, refused to leave the emergency room at St. Mary’s Health Center in Richmond Heights, Mo., a suburb near inner St. Louis, the police thought she was on drugs and arrested her for trespassing. She’d already been examined, and a doctor said she was healthy enough to go to jail.

The police carried her into a jail cell by her arms and ankles, her body slackened. There were a couple of beds in the cell, but they left her on the concrete floor. A couple of officers stood by the door as she writhed and moaned, and then they walked away. “They thought she was a drug seeker,” an officer said later.

She had stopped moving within 15 minutes and was pronounced dead a short time later.

She’d had blood clots in her legs and lungs, an autopsy found, and no drugs in her system. Family members are now considering a lawsuit in the 6-month-old case, whose details were brought to light by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in an investigation published Sunday that included video of Brown at the emergency room, in the police car and dying in her jail cell. She leaves behind two children and a raft of anger and confusion.

Anna Brown's spiral into poverty and homelessness is just as tragic as her death, and highlights failures within many systems that were in place to help the unemployed (Yes, Anna had been a working tax-payer) and women with children, and the homeless. It's frightening to think of how many more Anna's are out there struggling who now won't even have as much of a chance as Anna Brown after budget cuts everywhere hit those most in need. And Anna Brown, dead at 29, didn't have much of a chance at all.