Watch “Barbara Ehrenreich – Smile or Die” on YouTube

 

I love the full (British) title of her new book: Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World

 

 

Libertarian Ants

and other absurdities, as if with our seven plus billion people we could, any one of us, make it on our own. yet the cries and whimpers against shared responsibility periodically reach a fever pitch in this land of the me and the home of the craveand yet we need each other. yes, we do, even as a needle to the skull. there are no libertarians among ants, none that live long, anyway.

OWTF!

This is part of a “declaration” by the Occupy DC people:

“Corporatized culture warps our perception of reality. It cheapens and mocks the beauty of human thought and experience, while promoting excessive materialism as the path to happiness. The corporate news media furthers the interests of the very wealthy, distorts and disregards the truth, and confines our imagination of what is possible for ourselves and society.”

While I agree with every word, how does this statement really help accomplish anything? Whining about our crappy culture is not the same as changing it. Didn’t Karl Marx point this out 150 years ago?

9-9-9

Herman Cain has a simple tax plan called 9-9-9 that should come under greater scrutiny and will if he continues to advance in the Republican primaries. The numbers stand for a 9 percent across the board national income tax, a 9 percent across the board corporate tax, and a 9 percent across the board national sales tax. This last is the most intriguing. It would immediately raise the price of everything 9 percent, with all of the proceeds going to the federal government. Let’s see how the average American likes it. Most Americans would not see their income taxes lowered (half pay no income tax) because their incomes are too low. All of a sudden, with no increase in their incomes, everything costs 9 percent more. That $4 gallon of gas is now $4.36. Same for a gallon of milk. Their entire cost of living jumps more than inflation has over the past decade. Meanwhile, rich people, already enjoying the greatest wealth disparity in more than 100 years, do see their incomes go up, and greatly, for those tax reductions benefit them far more than they do anyone else.

The Tea Party people seem to like Herman Cain. Let’s see what they think when the riots begin.

kinder,gentler

Came across a story recently asserting that countries which were formerly British colonies are doing better than those which were formerly French. As if. You draw your own conclusions and, by the way, Germany is doing better now than Italy so I guess we know who the better fascist dictator was.

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words matter

I was talking to a neighbor about our local billionaire who is busy with his winery and might very blithely poison our little town’s water supply with his pesticides. My neighbor says “that’s okay” because the water flows through the billionaire’s property and if we can’t do whatever we want with our property then we’ve lost our “freedoms” because of “regulations”, a typical right-wing/libertarian viewpoint in this day and age.

But “freedom” does not mean “doing whatever you want”. The word for that is “anarchy”. You cannot run a meth lab on your property. You cannot run a whorehouse on your property. Why? Because we have laws. When they use the word “regulations” they really mean “laws”.

Using the appropriate words, you see that these people are advocating “lawless anarchy”, not “freedom”.

Words matter.

unconstitutional

this article spells out the 6 federal policies that the tea party candidates believe are unconstitutional and therefore ought to be struck down, including:

social security
medicare
the united nations
the minimum wage
unemployment insurance
the civil rights act (in outlawing discrimination by private businesses)
(also to be included are the health insurance mandate and aspects of the americans with disability act)

aside from the united nations thing, what do all of these have in common? they benefit the weak, the old, the sick, the poor, and the disadvantaged.

it’s hard for me to believe that this nation would be better off if the weak were weaker, the sick were sicker, the poor were poorer, old people were left more destitute and the disadvantaged were more disadvantaged.

now, the tea party people might say that all they really want is for individual states to control all of these things, but isn’t this argument kind of disingenous? if the states all provided these things to the same level as the federal government now does, would that then be acceptable? of course the states do not all have the same leverage, and equal opportunity “for all” would be denied on that basis. for the same reason we have a national army, we also have a national safety net: e pluribus unum, in other words. “providing for the general welfare” as the constitution says.

on the other hand, as a californian i couldn’t really give a crap about the morons in texas and florida and elsewhere who are happy to make certain people’s very existence illegal! if we’re going to dissolve the united states, then i’m right where i ought to be anyway. good luck, alaska! they love their tea party in that state where 40% of the per capita income comes from the federal government. hypocrites or idiots? you decide.

this week in politics

special election in Mass. kills health care reform possibly for a generation

supreme court rules that corporations have a “first amendment right” to unlimited political bribery and corruption

air america goes out of business

*sigh*

for the people

so with all this outrageous talk of socialism, marxism, terrorism, capitalism and nazism, i got to thinking that social organization throughout history has come down to only a variation on a theme – them in power being rather more or rather less generous to them that are not. you can talk benevolent or malevolent dictatorships, you can talk King Richard versus Prince John, you can talk about Roosevelt versus Reagan, Pharoahs of Egypt and Senators of Athens – always it is those in power and how they either give a feast for their subjects, or they don’t. I’m in favor of the more generous as opposed to the less. Don’t see much more in it to talk about!

The GOP and Fox have concluded that strict obstructionism and continuous anti-Obama hysteria are both good politics and good for ratings. The innocent bystanders of people without health care or incipient mob violence mean nothing to these people. The school speech hoopla is just one of this week’s episodes in a deliberate strategy of making a mountain out of every molehill. The end goal is Obama fatigue – this is how our heroes fall in modern America. We get bored with having to hear about them all the time. Expect a lot more of the same to come …

at the same time, expect more and more people to simply tune out anything those blowhards have to say. they’re crying wolf with regularity now, at everything from speeches to schoolchildren to federally funded abortions for illegal immigrants …

yawn