Reposted from Libby Shaw by Libby Shaw

We have to thank Donald Trump for a few things. That said, if I had to choose between voting for Donald Trump and tying myself to a train track I would opt for the latter. The idea that Donald Trump could be POTUS turns the blood in my veins into ice. For we the voters already had a love affair with a buffoon who knew nothing. But everyone thought they knew his parents.  And the smirking frat boy seemed a nice enough guy with whom to have a beer and for whom to vote.

No one needs to be reminded that electing the clueless buffoon into office yielded an unmitigated disaster for our country. We will be paying for W.’s foreign policy and economic debacles for decades. Especially if we stupidly elect another Republican President who embraces trickle down economics. Which would be all of the establishment Republican Presidential candidates who are competing with Donald Trump for the Grand Prize to empty our federal treasury into the pockets of themselves and the 1%.

I am grateful to Donald Trump for a few things, though.

First of all he makes me laugh. I am originally from New York City and though I’ve lived in Houston for a long time I haven’t forgotten the wise guy bluntness and saying the unsayable.  So sometimes I turn on the TV to see what Donald Trump has to say because it will be likely so outrageous that it will make me laugh out loud. Others I know have a similar reaction. But sometimes the outrageous rings true.

Donald Trump indicted Jeb’s brother for turning the Republican Party into one in which gave “us” Barack Obama. According to Trump, Abraham Lincoln himself could not get elected as a Republican today. This sounds somewhat extreme but it is true. Except, of course, for the part in which President Obama ran brilliant campaigns in 2008 and 2012 that did not include cheating, stealing, voter recount shut-downs, a Supreme Court decision, and voter disenfranchisement.

But Trump is right in one respect.  The Republican Party has gone so far to the right that Ronald Reagan would be tarred, feathered and run out on a rail today. This might be a fact but the Presidential candidates waxed lyrical about St. Ronald the Great while standing on the debate stage in the Reagan library, in front of Reagan’s Air Force One on Wednesday night.

Trump was wrong about the need for Rick Perry to take an IQ test. It is more relevant for Rick Perry to take a test on human compassion.  Throwing millions of poor and sick Texans under the bus by refusing to accept federally expanded Medicaid was a pretty cruel thing to do.  

The Wednesday night 2nd Republican Presidential debate was a true horror show in my view.  I couldn’t watch the entire event but I did hang in there for two hours and twenty minutes.

I don’t think I ever heard so many unchecked blatant lies and stunning whoppers in one setting before. The moderator, CNN’s Jake Tapper’s goal  obviously intended to stir the pot and incite conflict between the candidates. Fact checking blew by the wayside.

When I realized that facts didn’t matter and the candidates could simply make stuff up and get away with it, my opinion of the debate changed.  

This was not an honest exchange of ideas or policies.  Nor was this about the future of our country and what we need to do to address essential challenges, such as climate change and income inequality.  Nope.  It was more like watching an episode of the Twilight Zone, a melange of science fiction, fantasy, horror and psychological thrillers. It lacked only the scary voices and music.

I did not see a cast of Republican Presidential hopefuls. But I did see an array of demagogues, carnival barkers, con artists and tricksters. I heard a lot about warmongering, fear, FEAR, and more FEAR, an invasion of immigrants, especially pregnant ones,  9/11 never happened according to Jeb as his brother kept us “safe,” the evils of President Obama and Planned Parenthood and mind you, the killing of a live born fetus with a beating heart and kicking legs.  

Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!  Enough is enough!

I couldn’t watch anymore.

When CNN and its moderator Jake Tapper ignored facts, substance and blatant lies, CNN turned the debate into Trump TV.

So we should be grateful to Donald Trump, I guess, for helping to rip off the mask of our mainstream media and its role in politics.  CNN promoted a show that included conflict and drama. Facts and substance be damned.

The mainstream media also not so subtly shows a bias for the candidates it thinks should rank at the top. Within minutes after the debate the pundits and talking heads gushed about Carly Fiorina’s performance.  That’s right. The candidate that made an outrageous and false statement about a born fetus with a beating heart that would be harvested for its brain. Facts be damned.  The show must go on.

The fact of the matter is, establishment Republicans and their hopeless water carriers in the mainstream media are afraid of Donald Trump. All of them expect someone else to knock out Trump and slap him back into world of reality TV that does not include politics. But few among the coward class are willing to go there.  All hope the super pacs and dark money groups will do the dirty work for them.

What else can one expect from a Party that worships money and power over everything else?  

At a recent rally for a fake veterans group Donald Trump reminded his audience of how the TV business relies on ratings for relevance.  Please join me under the orange croissant to learn why we should thank Donald Trump for crapping on the cable TV news industry.

Reposted from Libby Shaw by Libby Shaw

Photos of high speed rail frequently appear on my Facebook wall. Many of my friends and followers will routinely ask why the U.S. cannot have the same high speed rail systems that are common in Europe and Asia. Many of us who have traveled abroad have ridden high speed trains. I have in France where my in-laws live. The trains travel at 250 MPH, are very comfortable with more leg room than most airlines.  There are luggage racks outside of each each passenger compartment.  A dining car is always included and in the case of the Eurostar (the Paris-London tunnel train) elegant meals are served on china with glass for beverages (wine is included) and flatware instead of plastic. It’s very pleasant to look out the window and see the countryside while traveling. On most routes there is wifi, too. To tell you the truth I’d hop on a train in a NYC nanosecond if I had the choice to avoid U.S. airline travel.  I worked for the airlines soon after I graduated from college and I can tell you the business has gone straight down the tubes over the past 30 years. Most of us now dread what used to be an enjoyable experience.

One of my Facebook friends commented that we cannot have high speed rail b/c the Republican Party is against it.  Perhaps the reason for this is candidate Barack Obama proposed high speed rail when running for office in 2007.

The problem is not political process. Most of the countries that have built high-speed rail are democratic, and have submitted the projects to citizen review; others, like Germany and Russia, have federated governments similar to ours that divide general decision-making between levels of authority. Nor is it geography. The British and French completed a 31-mile tunnel under the British Channel 20 years ago, while many American cities are located in flat regions with few physical construction obstacles. Nor is it the characteristics of our urban areas. While U.S. cities are less dense than those of many other countries, the Northeast is denser, more transit reliant, and more populated than most areas served by high-speed rail abroad. Nor still is it money. Though the United States invests less in infrastructure than other developed countries do, America nevertheless remains an immensely wealthy nation perfectly capable of spending on new rail links if desired.

Over the past six years we have seen unprecedented obstruction on the part of the GOP.  This is especially true when anti-government tea party Republicans got elected into state and federal offices in 2010. They hate spending so much U.S. Senator Ted Cruz  (R-TX) and his tea party groupies shut down the federal government in 2013.  And as of today twenty six Republican men threaten to shut down the government again b/c of their war on women’s reproductive rights.

These Republicans have no regard for federal employees, especially the “non-essential” ones who will be furloughed without pay. Though their paychecks may stop federal employees’ mortgages, rent, car payments and college loans won’t shut down. Of course the politicians who stop the paychecks will continue to receive theirs.

Thanks to gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts in the red states these whacko birds, religious fanatics, racists and misogynists manage to get elected. And when they do Joe and Jane Taxpayer are lucky to get the bare basics in infrastructure funding but fine 21st century things like high speed rail isn’t going to happen on the tea party watch.

What’s missing is a federal commitment to a well-funded national rail plan. Instead, we have a political system in which the federal government, having devolved virtually all decision-making power to states, cannot prioritize one project over another in the national interest. We have a funding system that encourages study after study of unfundable or unbuildable projects in places that refuse to commit their own resources. And we have a bureaucracy that, having never operated or constructed modern intercity rail, doesn’t understand what it takes. This helter-skelter approach to transportation improvements is fundamentally incapable of supporting large-expenditure, long-range projects like high-speed rail.

Relying on state efforts to fund rail service will not happen in the red states.  When the Texas High Speed Rail and Transportation Corporation proposed service between Houston, San Antonio and Dallas, lobbyists for American and Southwest Airlines killed the idea.

We were once able to have nice things. But it has been some time since.

Reposted from jpmassar by jpmassarBernie Sanders is leading in New Hampshire; a new poll shows him in the lead in Iowa. The Conservative government in Canada looks likely to be defeated in a month if nothing changes. And now Jeremy Corbyn, a self-described “democratic-socialist” whom the Wall Street Journal, perhaps mockingly, refers to as “Britain’s Bernie Sanders,” seems all but certain to be elected as the Labour Party’s new leader, the latest polling showing him with a 32% lead over his closest rival.

The Journal continues with the comparison and the scare quotes.

…like Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential race, Mr. Corbyn has electrified disenchanted young voters, leading to a surge in support for his antiquated brand of socialism. New members have flocked to join the party, while his rallies overflow with fans enthralled by his “authenticity.”

Let’s look at some of Corybn’s “scary” positions.

Reposted from Things Come Undone by Things Come UndonePolitifact’s rating the truth about political claims leaves much to be desired for example the Title  of the article

In Context: Were Paul Ryan’s poverty comments a ‘thinly veiled racial attack’

My bold Was obviously intended to attract readers who were interested to know whether  Rep Ryan’s  comments

“we have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities, in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work; and so there’s a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

were racist. Polecat’s response to these questions was they were True!

“(PolitiFact National rated as True Ryan’s claim in the report that from 2010 to 2012, “deep poverty” — the percentage of households that make less than 50 percent of the poverty line — reached its highest level on record.)”

http://www.politifact.com/… Politifact  in their article then decided to ignore their own headline and Rated Rep Ryan’s claims True about facts nobody was questioning.

Lets research the truth of the claim Politifact conveniently forgot about Rep Ryan’s racism.
Yes the answer is Rep Ryan is a Racist! Nobody in politics since/because of Ronald Reagan  can claim that when a Politician talks about the Inner Cities he is not using Racist Code Words to talk about Minorities

That is not however what makes Rep Ryan’s claim racist its ok to talk about Minorites. What makes Rep Ryan’s claim racist is that he lied and that he lied to make Minorities look bad.

If Rep Ryan was right then the odds of poor children in the inner cities becoming rich would  be lower than the odds  of poor children becoming rich in Rep Ryan’s Congressional District.

So then lets compare the odds the kids in the bottom, poorest fifth of the income class from Americas three largest cities and the kids from the bottom, poorest fifth of the income class from Rep Ryan’s Congressional District can rise to the highest, richest fifth of the income class.

The odds that a child from the bottom fifth of the income class could move to the top fifth of the income class from New York is 9.7%, Los Angeles 9.6%, Chicago 6.1% I blame ex Mayor Daley and Mayor Rahm for Chicago’s poor numbers:( .

7.0% are the odds a child from the bottom fifth of the income class from Rep Ryan’s district Kenosha Wisconsin on the south eastern corner of the Illinois border on the map at the link below will move to the top fifth of the income class.

http://www.nytimes.com/…

So then at best Politifact can only claim Rep Ryan’s claim was only 1/3 true.

Lets not give Rep Ryan the benefit of the doubt that this was an honest mistake. Rep Ryan has a college educated Congressional Staff to fact check anything he wants. Are we to believe that a Man who ran for Vice President of the United States does not have every speech and talking point fact checked at tax payer expense? especially after the way the Press made fun of the last GOP nominee for Vice President Sarah Palin’s mistakes?

Rep Ryan must have over ridden his fact checkers advice because he is a complete racist liar… nobody with a computer and google would make such an obvious mistakes.

Lets keep looking at Rep Ryan’s claims about Inner City Men not working I believe in not only proving people wrong, but proving them wrong every way that I can so nobody can say well he was only wrong about one thing.

A Quick look at the facts about this issue proves interesting

Lets look at the claim about work and culture.  The 3 biggest cities in America are New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago my idea is to compare the states with the biggest Cities and I presume Inner Cities to Rep Ryan’s State of Wisconsin and see how they compare.  (Since I could not find numbers for congressional districts )

Illinois gets back only $.56 cents for every dollar they pay the Federal Government in taxes, New York $.79, California $.94 cents. Wisconsin actually gets $ 1.68 cents back for every dollar they pay in taxes.

http://wallethub.com/…Just how much Welfare can Inner Cities be getting if the States they are in still pay more taxes than they get in money from the federal government?

Hmm what if the Blue States finally got some balls and decided to cut off Wisconsin’s welfare? What if Wisconsin and the rest of the Red Dead Beat States had to start paying their own way?

Sensing an objection 🙂

Welfare! Inner City People, Dark People are dependent on Welfare! Federal Tax Dollars are for everything military bases, crop subsidies, Welfare Spending shows who is getting paid for not working!…Moron

Once again a look at the facts proves interesting

Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 64 percent of the population in 2010 and received 69 percent of the entitlement benefits.  In contrast, Hispanics made up 16 percent of the population but received 12 percent of the benefits, less than their proportionate share — likely because they are a younger population and also because immigrants, including many legal immigrants, are ineligible for various benefits.  Non-Hispanic African Americans account for 12 percent of the population and received 14 percent of the benefits.[6]

http://www.cbpp.org/…My Bold Tell me given that Hispanic and African American poverty rates are much higher than Whites how come they get 6% more welfare benefits than the size of their population? African Americans get 2% more benefits than the size of their population and Hispanics get 4% less welfare benefits than their population size.    Seems to me we have a culture of Republicans in Congress to lazy to fact check anyone who agrees with them. Its your friends not your enemies that get you in the most trouble.
If college was easy work everyone would have a college degree

California 29.5% of people have a Bachelor’s degreeIllinois 29.5% of people have a Bachelor’s degree

New York 31.7%  of people have a Bachelor’s degree

Wisconsin 25.4% of people have a Bachelor’s degree

http://www.census.gov/…

Stop playing games Drugs Drugs! Drugs!!! thats what keeps the inner cities down thats what Rep Ryan means when he talks about culture! Don’t intentionally be obtuse….Commie Punk
( I have to stop it with the Ouji board and channeling Right Wing Spirits )

Another look at the facts proves very interesting

Native American youth fared worst, with 15% having a substance use disorder, compared to 9.2% for people of mixed racial heritage, 9.0% for whites, 7.7% for Hispanics, 5% for African Americans and 3.5% for Asians and Pacific Islanders.

http://healthland.time.com/…My Bold  It seems we can’t blame drugs for inner city unemployment either. But it does seem that going to prison for drugs is more dangerous than actually taking illegal drugs.  The cure is worse than the disease or was oppression always the aim? People with money are more likely to do drugs because they don’t have to work so much, they can take more time off, they can afford to buy more drugs.  We should worry about police going easy on Whites and letting them get more addicted.

Your all stupid! Even if you got jobs your not qualified!


Or is racism not Teacher Unions why America scores low on tests compared to other nations and spends more money per student doing it?

In fact, the U.S. educational system is one of the most unequal in the industrialized world, and students routinely receive dramatically different learning opportunities based on their social status. In contrast to European and Asian nations that fund schools centrally and equally, the wealthiest 10 percent of U.S. school districts spend nearly 10 times more than the poorest 10 percent, and spending ratios of 3 to 1 are common within states.

On every major national test, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gap in minority and white students’ test scores narrowed substantially between 1970 and 1990, especially for elementary school students. On the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the scores of African-American students climbed 54 points between 1976 and 1994, while those of white students remained stable.

http://www.brookings.edu/…     I thought Charles Murray said IQ was fixed and genetic never mind he never found a stupid gene we should all take his word for it he is from Harvard after all./s
I thought Charles said it was a waste of time and money to try and educate Dark People?  Meanwhile in the Real World outside Charles and Rep Ryan’s fantazies Education Funding went up and

High school drop out rates down nearly 50% the number of people with Bachelor’s degrees up over 50% since 1990. Our schools are not failing. Funding for public schools doubled since 1990. There appears to be a 1 on 1 correlation between the amount of money you spend on education and the number of people who finish high school and the number who go on to get a Bachelor’s degree. This trend is over two decades long.)

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/…In 1990 1,225.9  billion was spent on education  In 2013  2,465.4 billion  so we slightly more than doubled school funding in the last 23 years.

http://my.firedoglake.com/…

Brian Williams interviewed Charles Murray Rep Ryan’s goto guy for facts/fables about Inner City Minorities for his last book and Brian never once pointed out that if Charles was right then were is the evidence of a stupid gene? Brian never thought to inquire about lower rates of school funding for minorities as a possible reason why test scores are lower??
If he had he would have found the same data I just did.  If  IQ was fixed and Darker people were more stupid than Whites then the Real World increase we saw in public school funding in the 1990’s should not have resulted in the number of high school dropouts dropping by nearly 50%  and the number of minorities with a B.A  more than doubling.  Public schools that service minorities and the poor of every race have seen almost a direct 1 to one correlation funding was doubled and high school dropout rates dropped nearly 50% and the number of minorities with a B.A  more than doubled. However with the richer more White school districts that have  a 10 to 1 advantage in education funding do we see a proportional  increase in grades? No
The law of Diminishing Returns has returned it seems. After a certain point the more you spend the less return you get. Reverse Darwinism seems to be wining the rich never are allowed to fall to their natural level a $10 to $1 advantage in school funding plus who they know means they will likely never be allowed fall to their natural level. President Bush our first Harvard MBA President should have been bagging groceries.
Brian and NBC I’m sure have even more fact checkers than Rep Ryan so they must also be racist I’m just a lowly cheeto eating  blogger I can’t out fact check NBC all by myself :).

The racists have to lie to make their case belief first then  they invent reasons to justify their belief later on Rep Ryan, Charles Murray, Brian Williams, NBC.  I thought Harvard would have taught its students the scientific method? I would have thought NBC and Brian would have fact checkers who as Reagan said “ Trust but Verify”.  I would have thought Rep Ryan…to be fair I have a very low opinion of the man.

Education Spending sometimes at 10 to 1 but Rep Ryan blames Inner City Culture fine lead by example send your own kids and/or grandkids? to under funded  inner city schools and lets see how well they do. Until then shut up you are  only embarrassing yourself trying to fact check your claims is like cutting an onion there is always a new layer of mistakes the further I dig the knife the longer this article gets.

Reposted from Tasini by GreyhoundEditor’s Note: An actual proposal, imagine… — Greyhound

Trillions of dollars lost, pensions ravaged, retired people who can’t pay to stay in retirement homes, peoples’ futures wrecked…that was so financial crisis days, huh?

But, if there is ever a moment to remember what a very stupid idea privatizing Social Security is, and why Bernie Sanders’ plan to expand and strengthen Social Security is so important, this is it. A teachable moment.

Reposted from Maggie’s Farm by Ojibwa

One must ask: Does Arizona Governor Doug Ducey roll out of bed every morning wondering, “How can I harass, humiliate, stigmatize or otherwise fuck over poor people today?” It seems he must, because Ducey and his barely upright-walkin’ toadies in the Arizona Republic Party, who control every branch of state government, spend a lot of time crafting policies to make poor people’s lives even shittier. Immigration policy, education, childcare, welfare and healthcare—it’s open season on programs that predominantly serve the poor and lower middle class.

Ducey et al don’t seem that concerned about, say, school performance, because another new report gives Arizona a D+, ranking us 47th in about every important indicator, including thevery bottom in spending. Nor do the knuckleheads seem worried about jobs and economic justice. Again, a recent report says Arizona trails most states in attracting quality jobs that constitute the new economy; boosters here hype job growth but 99 percent of it is in the service industry.

For a long time now the crackpot, bible-thumping bigots at the Capitol have been terrible at some very important stuff, like education, but when it comes to shaming and demonizing poor people, erecting barriers to hold them back, and making their lives more miserable, these bozos are laser-focused, creative and at the top of their game. Owned and operated by the chamber of commerce and other ALEC subsidiaries, this confederacy of weasily dickheads gets a gold medal in inventing ways to “incentivize” the poor to be “more responsible”—their Randian thinking being that people are poor because they’re lazy, not because they work part-time and go to school or work a full-time job and make $16,000.

Modernize Schmodernize
So tomorrow I’m going to a public meeting to listen to Gov. Ducey’s flacks explain their newest way to screw the poor. You gotta love it that they hold “public” meetings from 12:30 to 2:30 pm, and 3:00 to 5:00 pm, when most of the working poor are, hey wow, working! Whereas the tea party nitwits infesting our retirement communities have plenty of time to attend.

This meeting is about the Ducey administration’s proposal to “modernize” Medicaid, a sick euphemism that means people who are already dirt poor will be required to: 1) pay up to 2 percent of their household income into a healthcare account, 2) fork over co-pays of up to 3 percent of income, and 3) prove you’re looking for work or are in a job-training program. Also, Medicaid now has a five-year lifetime limit.

Every five years states can tinker with their Medicaid program by filing a request with the Feds, and Arizona’s five years is up next September. This new proposal puts to rest any crazy notion that Governor Ducey might use the opportunity to ask permission to do more for people in need. How silly of me to even think it. So far the Feds have allowed states to collect co-pays, but they haven’t approved a work requirement, and critics of Duceycare, like political consultant Robert Grossfeld, hope they don’t:

“This is straight out of the ALEC playbook,” he says, referencing the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing nonprofit that drafts model state legislation. “It’s pure Koch brothers, [and] it doesn’t surprise me at all” to see it from this administration.

[Ed: It doesn’t surprise him because Koch money supported Ducey’s campaign, Koch still funds organizations that attack Ducey’s opponents, and Ducey attended more than one of the brothers’ fundraising circle jerks. We return to The Fountainhead … ]

“The Ducey folks keep saying ‘more self reliance, more responsibility,’ and are just completely oblivious to what life is like for someone living on $16,000 a year . . . There’s all this stuff [in this proposal] about getting people healthy while a great many of these people are being challenged just to find a place to sleep and get food—let alone make co-payments. To someone making $16,000 a year, this isn’t necessarily helping them; this is just throwing up more barriers.”

Poor Shaming
It’s just more pissing on the poor. Point: Like other states competing for The Shit Stain of the Nation Award, Arizona tried drug testing welfare recipients—a popular rightwing electioneering meme. But like Florida and other places, after five years our piss test program saved zip and cost mucho. They nabbed three people over five years in Arizona, saving the state a whopping $3,500! At a cost of $2 million. Yeah, great fiscal management. But, hey, we inconvenienced and embarrassed a lot of poor people. Here, piss in this for food money.

Point, shit gets deeper: This May Arizona made national news of the cruel assortment again when Ducey & Co. set the welfare limit at one year. Most of the nation has a five-year cut-off, some states have two- or three-year limits, but no one has a one-year limit like Arizona’s. We’re Number One! So starting in September another 1,600 families with 2,700 children won’t get that big $275 every month—not much, but for thousands it’s the difference between Ramen noodles and going to bed hungry.

Point, and deeper: Obamacare! When the Supremes were still deciding what “state exchange” means, some elected officials, even Republicans, were worried about what might replace the ACA if the law were struck down. Well, Doug Ducey and the Arizona House and Senate werenot worried, because they had already passed a bill that took care of the matter. QED. The law said if the ACA goes down, Arizona won’t replace it with anything—nothing, zilch, nada, nichts, fuck no. The 154,000 or so people who signed up for Obamacare, and who would be without healthcare, Ducey called “collateral damage.”

Now he’s is at it again, with this cockamamie plan to further undermine healthcare for the poor. It’s little more than an end-run around Obamacare and Gov. Brewer’s somewhat surprising acceptance of the federal Medicaid expansion—an attempt to gut our once respected Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS), which serves about 1.7 million low-income, disabled, and elderly patients, as well as children. Ducey’s new scheme affects about 350,000 adults, those deemed able to work.

Some are working, shitty jobs, and many who are out of work have not chosen their lot, sayshealthcare provider Amy McMullen:

She says the modernization plan fits into the right-wing narrative that people are poor because of bad choices or laziness. “It’s not going to make people go out and get work. People are just going to end up without healthcare.” As far as she’s concerned, this proposal is simply code for “let’s blame the poor and make sure there’s no way they’re ever going to get out of poverty.”

McMullen is concerned because she manages three free healthcare clinics, and since Arizona accepted the federal expansion the number of people using her services has declined.However,

She expects that if this plan were to pass, her clinic would be overwhelmed by those who couldn’t afford, or were no longer eligible for Medicaid and that her staff would once again have to start turning away clients because of capacity issues.

Why the heck aren’t they “incentivizing” bankers to be more ethical, or corporations to be more socially conscious? Why aren’t they pissing into a cup? Their damage to the state far surpasses that of poor people trying to get by. And the pisser is, some of their legislative assaults on people end up costing the state. Drug testing welfare recipients certainly did. Cutting welfare benefits to a year might save the state a whopping $4 million, about 30 times less than a corporate tax break the legislature voted in. Nor will Ducey’s new Medicaid requirements affect the budget: “The focus is not on saving money,” said a spokesperson.

No, it’s on being a dick, by nickel and diming those who can least afford it. Peckerheads.

Reposted from Eclectablog – eclectic blogging for a better tomorrow by Eclectablog

Originally posted at Eclectablog.

Donald Trump’s “Let Detroit go bankrupt” moment?

Donald Trump has something to say to Detroit autoworkers: you make too much money. Talking about U.S. vehicle manufacturers moving production to Mexico in an interview with The Detroit News, Trump said this:

He said U.S. automakers could shift production away from Michigan to communities where autoworkers would make less. “You can go to different parts of the United States and then ultimately you’d do full-circle — you’ll come back to Michigan because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less,” Trump said. “We can do the rotation in the United States — it doesn’t have to be in Mexico.”

He said that after Michigan “loses a couple of plants — all of sudden you’ll make good deals in your own area.”

Reposted from LaFeminista by LaFeministaCharles Koch owes me a keyboard and monitor, there I was drinking coffee and reading the usual drivel from a major purveyor of economic and political corruption, then at the end this….

Koch went on to lambast “irresponsible government spending from both political parties that’s bankrupting out nation,” and a “foreign policy that repeats the mistakes of the past and feeds special interests at the expense of a national defense that truly makes Americans safe.” And he called on the assembled business leaders to reject “corporate welfare,” that he said is creating “a two-tier society” by “creating a permanent underclass, crippling our economy and corrupting the business community – present company excepted, of course.

The hypocrisy of the sound bite coupled with the truth, the  magnitude of the sanctimony, the sheer and utter mocking of the rest [bolded] of us.Being spat upon by one of the people most responsible for the current crisis of democracy is just too damn much for a Sunday morning.

Wars for oil, sacrificing the climate and bailing the whole damn financial system out for these vultures was not enough, no, we have to be ridiculed at the same time.

They can only get away with this cultural nihilism because of our spineless politicians and those that elect them. When a politician stands up they are painted as some form of crazy socialist radical by all and sundry. Yet those doing the putting down don’t even seem to get just how slighted and despised they are by the people they obey.

It is class warfare, but it is not the 99% doing the fighting, it is a tiny percentage asset stripping and jeering at us as they go. The wreckage of the financial crisis, the never ending drive to make us work harder for less and the blatant buying of our political system is not enough, not one bit, they have to deride us as well.

They are laughing at us.

They are right to do so.

Goddammit.

…but I wasn’t black, so I said nothing…

Everyone knows that famous “poem” (reproduced at the end), so just fill in Women, Gays, Intellectuals, and finally, the middle class. All of those categories, except middle class,  are “other” to the right wing/fundamentalist assault; just as non-Wahabiists are to ISIS, just as Palestinians are to Israelis. As we shall see below, the category of “other” transcends “-isms”; it is part of a millenia-old war between orthodoxy and the “heresy” of being healthily aware of your body. “Otherness” also transcends nations – the right wing assault in the US, is only a part of a global recrudescence of religious bigotry, tribalism, and obscurantism.

Global wars have many fronts, and each front has different rules. For example, in WW2, the Nazis treated the British as gentlemen and the Russians as untermensch. in today’s class war, the US 1% treats what is left of the educated, white middle class as gentlemen, and the “others” as untermensch. Hence, the casual brutality and slaughter of blacks, the routine denial of the rights of women and gays, and the less-than-human status assigned to “others” across the board.

If you know my writing, you know it is grounded in Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, but enhanced by Morris Berman’s take on the Naziism as a form of heresy.  BLM reminded me of Berman’s explanation of the emotional state of the Nazis:

Hohne (a historian) tries to argue the Arendt thesis for the banal and bureaucratic character of the Holocaust, but admits that the Jews were overwhelmed by a “murderous wave of unbridled sadism”. “Hour by hour…the SS and their local auxiliaries drove the Jews into gas chambers, beating, tormenting, insulting, and torturing.”…There is nothing banal and bureaucratic about this. it takes a certain type of frenzy to make such things happen; and I believe this sort of thing can only emerge from a powerful somatic configuration that is rooted in that profound and painful dichotomy of Self vs. Other, and the drunken aching longing to heal that split.

– Morris Berman, Coming to Our senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West

BLM has experienced the physical revulsion, the sadism, the torture that Berman is talking about. (While, pre-NRN, the Sanders wing had been taking the impersonal, intellectual stance of Hannah Arendt.) Somewhat less frequently, women and gays standing up for their rights have also been physically and emotionally assaulted and killed. Recently, the scientists (especially climate scientists) and teachers have begun to be intimidated, fired, and villified – so the assault is climbing Niemoller’s ladder, one rung at a time.My goal here is to re-visit a TL/DR diary on “otherness” and turn it into a vehicle to at least makes sense of the BLM-progressive dustup.

If you don’t think we are in Goodwin’s law territory, come below the orange gnostic symbol for more exegesis.

Reposted from Two Democratic Conventions by stancutler

There are parallels between international Jihadism based in ISIS and international Communism based in the USSR. Like Communism, Jihadism appeals the young, to the idealistic, to men and women all over the planet who believe that Western Capitalism is evil. There was once a romance associated with Communism, as there is now with the notion of a fundamentalist Muslim caliphate. In some ways, the current out-migration of young idealists to Syria is similar to the movement of young idealists to Spain in 1937.

Reposted from Street Prophets by Ojibwa

Our society urgently requires that citizens become more conscious of their enslavement by corporate government and thereafter engage in a political revolution to reduce corporate control of the levers of democratic government. Bernie Sanders gets this and has since forever.

His campaign is directed at a bottom-up, grassroots development that would help him first win the nomination and general election and thereafter help him by placing populist pressure on the corporate old guard, both conservative and liberal. Bernie will not ditch the grassroots organization as Barack Obama had done, but use it to pressure for real democratic change.

Please follow me below the orange pedagogical squiggle for more.

Reposted from I ♥ Democratic Socialism by Ojibwa

Welcome to Part 4, the last. Bernie Sanders’ ideas for an ethical economics are perfectly suited to our times of inequality and oligarchic corporatist government. This diary series explores the outlines of Bernie’s type of economic philosophy.

Link to Parts 1-3 can be found at the bottom of the diary, if you’d like to catch up with the series. This diary tackles the little matter of ownership.

We’re using a book from the 1960s. It is by the post-WWII British economist E.F. Schumacher, the perennially popular Small Is Beautiful (1973).  We follow the four parts of the book very closely in summary form. It is subtitled Economics As If People Mattered. Have no fear, there’s no technical language, or math, or any Marx. Well, it’s a tad long and the language is from the 60s, but so am I 🙂  

Please follow me for more below the orange corrective to the dismal science.