Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Sherbert (a slight return)....

Sorry, my non-existent audience, if you've noticed that I've been silent for these many months -- it seems like every time I want to comment on current events, both the Democrats and the Republicans say and do something more idiotic than the thing I wanted to rip into them about in the first place, and the next thing you know, I'm 8 months into a silent spell.

I didn't add my voice to the Movement of the 99% beyond the facebook comments because it seemed blatantly obvious to all but the wilfully-blind and intentionally-ignorant that the times, they are a'changin. When corporations control the government, textbooks suggest you have the start of fascism, and I'll agree with that premise. There were many other voices crying out during the peak of the Occupy Movement, and in some ways the coordinated beating down of the various Occupy [YOUR TOWN HERE] will force a political maturation beyond the drum circles, three-word chants, and free food for the masses. Since I wasn't directly involved, I didn't feel my voice needed to be added to the commentary, and I couldn't really expound upon the subject any better than those actively involved within the movement.

So what drove me out of exile and back onto this platform? A couple things. First, the story that serial-cheater Newt Gingrich has signed a pledge forbidding adultery in his "defense of marriage," a very act that makes the audible sound "CHUTZPAH" when vocalised.

"Serial-cheater Newt Gingrinch has signed a pledge forbidding adultery"

*CHUTZPAH!*

Now, all of this is his (and a great number of culture fascists) belief that marriage is so weak, so fragile, that allowing two consenting adults of the same sex to wed, and get the benefits of such union, would make any of his multiple marriages less sacred.

If it weren't so serious a case of homophobic discrimination it would almost be laughable. I've got friends and family members who are gay, and I want them to have the same rights I'm entitled to if I ever get married. I see no difference between my hypothetical relationship, and any of their very real and loving relationships.

The fact that serial cheaters like Newt and Rush are the biggest proponents of this mythical idea that marriage is weakened by allowing gays to marry points to the very weakness of their argument, and proof that you just can't fix stupid.

Okay, topic one down, what was the second thing that brought me out of early retirement? Funny enough, it also involves Newt, who opined that, having not learned a bit about labor history, we should return to the days of child labor.

Not only that, but he's also advocating for a return to unpaid labor for corporate America -- a throw-back to the simple days of slavery, when people weren't paid for their labor, and corporate America profited.

Both ideas, not-so-oddly, were applauded and found great support amongst the audience, a point hammered home by Keith Olbermann.

So, the GOP has been reduced to the party of child and slave labor, the party that believes corporations are people, and that pizza is a vegetable.

Anything else?

Well, yes. Senator Ron Johnson, dumbass from Wisconsin, asserts that good workers don't make minimum wage, that essentially, good workers get promoted, or otherwise move on to high-paying (some might say, non-existant!) jobs that have magically flooded the market.

Senator Johnson, who married into a family with millions in their bank accounts, seems to miss the flip side of the argument -- that good companies don't pay their workers minimum wage, that instead a good company, feeling a part of the community in which they earn their profits, provide a living wage to their workers so that they can afford housing, food, health care.

Good companies don't force communities to subsidise their failure to provide a living wage to their workers by providing housing assistance, health care assistance, and other social welfare programs to people who work full or near-full time, like workers of billion-dollar corporations like Wal-Mart, who spend millions fighting labor unions fighting to empower workers, hiring lobbyists to court Democratic and Republican lawmakers. Good companies don't pay their executives millions in stock options and bonuses while declaring poverty, saying workers, and labor unions, have to sacrifice for the benefit of the company.

So this post comes full circle, an argument in support of the Movement of the 99%, Occupy Wall Street, and Occupy [YOUR TOWN HERE].

And lastly, in an effort to soften my image as extreme leftist, I provide this cute image of my childhood heroes, Bert and Ernie, my favorite gay couple on Sesame Street.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Sheep and Goats....

Forbes Magazine tell us that social security can not go bankrupt and gives us a convincing argument of why that is so.

So why, then, are billionaires and the plutocrats in mainstream politics forever telling us we are doomed?

Because, they have a Randian alternative to social security, one where THEY benefit from all that money being exchanged.

See, billionaires want to kill social security so they can make trillions off us poor working folks when they set up mandated privatised retirement accounts. With those accounts set up, the billionaires and their brokers can make big bucks speculating with our money, with little risk to them but BIG risk to us if their betting and wheeling and dealing doesn't pay off. Like a casino, it's house rules, and the game is set up so that the house wins.

Charlie Sheen has been blasted far and wide for his crazier-than-fuck behavior at his one-man shows he's doing around the country, but more and more I see it as a cleverly-crafted social critique of the highest order. When people in the audience complain about his performance, he says, "I've already got your money!"

Bill Maher, I think susses out the critique too, by comparing Sheen to Wall Street:



Wall Street billionaires are giving big bucks to mainstream politicians -- and effectively framing the message -- to make sure social security goes away, because in the end they know it doesn't matter if OUR privatised retirement accounts get zeroed out by THEIR speculation -- either way, they already have our money.

To these militant objectivists, they are Ayn Rand's John Galt, and what happens to us if they lose our money isn't even of secondary concern to them. It is survival of the fittest, and so long as they have our money -- or at the very least skim the trillions to be made off the top of our money if they have their way -- that is their primary, Randian concern, and if we are to work til we're 85 because we can't live on the crumbs left by their bad decisions, so be it, because, they already have our money.

In their world, there is no safety net, because the existence of poor folks is anathema to THEIR progress to Galtian perfection. Ayn Rand is their god, and her solution is now being pushed by the GOP.

Being publicly agnostic with a shading of atheism, it's perhaps odd I would turn to the Christian Bible for insight and guidance, but to me, there are very radical, very militant, very progressive lessons to be learned, and the GOP's march away from the Bible is warned against in the lesson of Matthew 31-40:
The Lord did say in so many words to the sheep -- "what you did for the most poor, destitute, old and sick of my brothers and sisters, you did the same for me," and the sheep were led into Heaven.

And the Lord did then turn to the goats, and in so many words said to them -- "what you did NOT do for the most poor, destitute, old and sick of my brothers and sisters, you did NOT do for me as well," and the goats were cast into Hell.
I ain't one to say who here are the sheep and who here are the goats, but I'll just close by asking the more religiously-minded of my Randian brothers and sisters, which path are you going to follow?

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

They call it "Class War"

They call it class war only when we fight back.



In the months since I last saw fit to open my yap on this here soapbox, the political landscape has been rocked by classic Republican over-reach. I've been poked and prodded by friend and enemy alike, urged to spew forth some wit and wisdom, some nugget of insight on what was happening, as if I had some expertise or inside scoop, instead of just rank speculation and opinion.

Anyhow, quite simply, the GOP, for years, have sold themselves as limited government types, which is popular in the boonies amongst the meth lab, dog- and cock-fighting, and copper-still types, who prefer to be left alone for obvious reasons.

Yet, in practice, they've proven to be as beholden to the leviathan as their Democractic colleagues to shove their ultra-extremist culture wars down our throats. With so many examples of their hypocritical, fascist behavior coming to the fore, it has simply been quite hard for this here redneck to concentrate on just one case when there were so many examples to point out.

So, I leave it to a New York liberal named Rachel Maddow (whom I crush on despite the obvious barriers) to come up with a perfect 11-minute dissection of the Republican "small government" myth:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy



I don't blame my teabagging brothers and sisters for falling prey to this myth -- they've been sold a raw deal based on a lifetime of fear and uncertainty.

Whether they be manipulated to fear shadows after 9/11, or to mistrust an American-born President with a foreign-sounding name (in a country built by immigrants, we're all kinda foreign-sounding!), they've been expertly duped by billionaires and their proxies -- it keeps the poor saps distracted, keeps them fearing their neighbors more than the corporate executive who is the REAL danger to their lives and livelihoods.

And, let's take a moment to remember the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which claimed the lives of 146 garment workers -- 129 women and 17 men -- who died from the fire or jumped to their deaths on 25 March 1911, just 100 years ago.

Weeks before, many of the workers -- mostly young, mostly recently-immigrated -- had tried to organise for better working conditions in the factory, and had been beaten and arrested by the cops, who, like now, served to protect the rich from the poor. The factory owners -- captains of industry who made millions off the labor of these poor women -- refused to provide a safe working environment in favor of more profits, and 146 people lost their lives to greed as a result.

The tragedy inflamed public passions and jump-started the American labor movement. Industry, unwilling to provide labor with a sliver of the wealth it had created, was forced to reluctantly bend slightly, giving workers the barest crumbs of benefits, benefits they've sought to take back piece by piece over the years.

And just 100 years later, the Republicans in Congress and in statehouses across the country seek to destroy organised labor -- which would have died an inglorious death on its own if left to its own devices -- at the behest of billionaires. And just as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire jump-started the American labor movement, so to the Republican/Corporate fascist over-reach will revive the American labor movement.

To that, I gotta give thanks to them short-sighted sumbeaches who done more for organised labor in a few short months than 100 years of shop-floor organising.