Republican'ts Hate the Poor

Geez, so nice to see my well-coiffed FL Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Crocodile Tears, can at leasr mouth words about helping the poor while literallly having his fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, Governor Dick Scott, State of Cruel, wants more hundreds of millions in tax break for the rich and pinga for the poor, especially refusal to extend Medicaid coverage.

Don't listen to what the bastards say; watch what they do.

[Suddenly it’s OK, even mandatory, for politicians with national ambitions to talk about helping the poor. This is easy for Democrats, who can go back to being the party of FDR and LBJ. It’s much more difficult for Republicans, who are having a hard time shaking their reputation for reverse Robin-Hoodism, for being the party that takes from the poor and gives to the rich.

And the reason that reputation is so hard to shake is that it’s justified. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that right now Republicans are doing all they can to hurt the poor, and they would have inflicted vast additional harm if they had won the 2012 election. Moreover, GOP harshness toward the less fortunate isn’t just a matter of spite (although that’s part of it); it’s deeply rooted in the party’s ideology, which is why recent speeches by leading Republicans declaring that they do too care about the poor have been almost completely devoid of policy specifics.

The point is that a party committed to small government and low taxes on the rich is, more or less necessarily, a party committed to hurting, not helping, the poor.

For now, however, Republicans are in a deep sense enemies of America’s poor. And that will remain true no matter how hard the likes of Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio try to convince us otherwise.]
http://www.centredaily.com/2014/01/15/3985967/paul-krugman-gop-is-enemy-of-poor.html

Read more here: http://www.centredaily.com/2014/01/15/3985967/paul-krugman-gop-is-enemy-of-poor.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.centredaily.com/2014/01/15/3985967/paul-krugman-gop-is-enemy-of-poor.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.centredaily.com/2014/01/15/3985967/paul-krugman-gop-is-enemy-of-poor.html#storylink=cpy

"You're eating the young"

In the South, we used to call it eating the seed corn.  Farming requires saving some seeds for the crop next year.  In times of famine, desperate families would eat the corn saved for the following year because death by starvation would prevent planting future crops.


[This week in Huffington, John Rudolf profiles one community for which that vicious cycle is more vicious than most. "Newark's cops do not work at an ordinary job, like the rest of us," he writes. The dangers they routinely face, coupled with years of catastrophic budget cuts, make the men and women of the Newark PD more like "soldiers on the front lines of a ceaseless, low-intensity war."

With compelling interviews with Newark's finest and a steady barrage of devastating statistics, John paints a picture of a community in crisis. Newark has about as many cops on the streets today as it did in the 1970s. Well over a third of children live in poverty, and the city's heavily minority population suffers disproportionately from the effects of the jobs crisis.

A wave of police layoffs in 2010 coincided with sweeping state cuts in education. To look closely at the situation in Newark is to come face to face with a tragic truth: as a result of the ongoing financial crisis, we are not investing nearly enough in our children's safety or in their future opportunities. As Brendan O'Flaherty, a Columbia economics professor says, "Why would you decide that the first thing you want to cut is police and education? You're eating the young."] emphasis added
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/cutbacks-and-cops_b_1726063.html?utm_hp_ref=daily-brief?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=080312&utm_medium=email&utm_content=NewsEntry&utm_term=Daily%20Brief

Austerity for Thee, More Money for the Elites

Either supremely evil bastards or ignorant and insulated from laws of basic economics.  Oddly enough, a few beers makes me lean towards lenient view of merely ignorant.  Whiskey, however, makes me feel mean and want to fry the bastards.


[WASHINGTON -- The poor and middle classes have shouldered by far the heaviest burdens of the global political obsession with austerity policies over the past three years. In the United States, budget cuts have forced states to reduce education, public transportation, affordable housing and other social services. In Europe, welfare cuts have driven some severely disabled individuals to fear for their lives.

But the austerity game also has winners. Cutting or eliminating government programs that benefit the less advantaged has long been an ideological goal of conservatives. Doing so also generates a tidy windfall for the corporate class, as government services are privatized and savings from austerity pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens.

U.S. financial interests that stand to gain from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security cutbacks "have been the core of the big con," the "propaganda," that those programs are in crisis and must be slashed, said James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas.]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/austerity-wall-street_n_1690838.html

Feed the Hungry? Fugedabout It

[If you’re a liberal, you probably think that feeding people during the worst economic crisis in 80 years is exactly the kind of thing that government is supposed to do. But you won’t find many people who share that view in the House Republican caucus, and that’s one very big reason why neither John Boehner nor Eric Cantor feels any urgency about moving the bill forward. Getting Southern peanut farmers a handout is worth debating — but feeding the poor? Forget about it.]

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/24/why_the_farm_bill_is_doomed_for_now/

Dos Estados Unidos

(Ed. note, have but bare clue this means 2 United States, which meant to use as title until thought it would prove progressively ironic and provoke haters, just to get views.  Now, it looks kinda stupid.)


[By HOPE YEN
The Associated Press

The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net...


Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor. More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market, leaving them vulnerable as unemployment aid begins to run out. Suburbs are seeing increases in poverty, including in such political battlegrounds as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth.

"I grew up going to Hawaii every summer. Now I'm here, applying for assistance because it's hard to make ends meet. It's very hard to adjust," said Laura Fritz, 27, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., describing her slide from rich to poor as she filled out aid forms at a county center. Since 2000, large swaths of Jefferson County just outside Denver have seen poverty nearly double.] emphasis addedhttp://www.wftv.com/news/ap/social-issues/us-poverty-on-track-to-rise-to-highest-since-1960s/nPzs3/
See also http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/us-poverty-level-1960s_n_1692744.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&ir=Politics



Thanks for playing the consumerism game, suckers, laughs Goldman Sachs all the way to their vaults and foreign bank accounts.


Banks created liars loans mortgages, ripped off humans and municipalities without mercy nor any hint of remorse their rapacious greed would cause foreseeable evil social consequences, and have their profits coming back now with resulting obscene bonuses for cratering the world economy.


Homeless Children in America:  Not a bug but feature of capitalism without conscience and conservative chowderheads cutting budgets for social services:


[..After hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit in 2005, advocates for the homeless were horrified to find that the storms had left one in 50 American kids without a home, a record high, according to a report by the Coalition for Family Homelessness. But only a few years later the financial crisis outperformed nature in casting catastrophe on poor Americans. After record foreclosures, layoffs and budget cuts that hit poor families the hardest, America is a country where one out of 45 kids doesn’t have a home. That totals 1.6 million children in 2010 without a permanent place to live, an increase of 448,000 in just three years. Forty percent of the kids are under 6...


The Southern states, which are also some of the nation’s poorest, have the worst access to homeless shelters: Of Mississippi’s (poverty rate 25.87 percent) 82 counties, only 17 offer a family homeless shelter, according to the “Red, White and Blue Book,” which compiles information about services for homeless families. There are 23 in Alabama. Louisiana’s homelessness rate doubled between 2007 and 2009, and that year researchers estimated that 30 percent of the state’s homeless families ended up sleeping in their cars or in abandoned buildings...

“All of a sudden, around the early 1980s we started to see tons of families who were there because of poverty,” Ralph da Costa-Núñez, who worked in Mayor Ed Koch’s administration and is now CEO of Homes for the Homeless, tells AlterNet.

The reasons behind the jump in family homelessness are not complex, Núñez says. “It was the gutting of the safety net. Reagan cut every social program that helped the poor. Then there’s inflation so their aid checks are shrinking. Where are they going? Into the streets, into the shelters.”

The administration was especially keen to cut low-income housing programs. Peter Dreier writes that Reagan created a housing task force, “dominated by politically connected developers, landlords and bankers.” They and the president were in agreement that the market was the best way to address housing for the poor, and instituted cuts in government spending that yielded almost instant results. In 1970, Dreier writes, there were more low-income housing units than families who needed them, but “by 1985 the number of low-cost units had fallen to 5.6 million, and the number of low-income renter households had grown to 8.9 million, a disparity of 3.3 million units.”]  http://www.salon.com/2012/07/19/how_america_became_a_country_that_lets_little_kids_go_homeless_salpart/?source=newsletter

So do the math.  Raygunz cuts the budget for social services, his advisers want the magical unicorn of the free market to provide for low income housing, and then noted socialist and America hater William Jefferson Clinton gutted welfare.  Since free markets live and feed on profits and housing for the working poor would yield as high a return on investment, housing stock plummeted for poor folk.

So cuts + unicorn + more cuts = homeless children and trillions in profits for greedy bloodsucking bastards.

[LONDON, July 22 (Reuters) - Rich individuals and their families have as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to $280 billion in lost income tax revenues, according to research published on Sunday.

The study estimating the extent of global private financial wealth held in offshore accounts - excluding non-financial assets such as real estate, gold, yachts and racehorses - puts the sum at between $21 and $32 trillion.]  emphasis added because it pisses me off.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/super-rich-offshore-havens_n_1692608.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&ir=Politics

Fake Obama Spokesman with Awesome Ad

You shall know the truth and it will set you free; unless of course you have to conceal the truth by hiding tax returns which would show Willard manipulating tax avoidance havens, charitable trusts, and other dodges to minimize tax liability, then you might not get to become President as ordained by the god of mammon.



Found at http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/07/21/a-retroactive-apology/

Bain Capital: Selling "hair-thickening elixirs made from the tears of orphans"

[It doesn't seem too hard to believe that while Romney was in Salt Lake, he also continued to be involved in the major decisions at Bain—even if he wasn't available to pitch for the company softball team. The problem now is that he's spent a lot of time denying that he had anything at all to do with the firm after February 1999. He and Bain say he "retired" from Bain at that point, which is directly contradicted by the SEC filings. I'm guessing the truth is somewhere south of his denials—he may not have been "running" the firm, but he was still involved at some level. But if he were to admit that, then he'd have to answer specific questions about his knowledge of the steel mill that went bankrupt, the outsourcing companies, and so on. And there is nothing in the world Mitt Romney wants to do less than have to answer specific questions about Bain and what he did there.]
http://prospect.org/article/i-did-not-have-economic-relations-company

President Cheney Holds Fundraiser for Willard Romney

No public plans yet revealed for infant or virgin sacrifices by the Dark Lord of the Sith.  Pet owners, please however keep your cats and dogs inside to protect them from the maw of the Cheney Beast.


[By Philip Rucker, Published: July 11

When Mitt Romney arrives Thursday at the gates of Teton Pines, a majestic Wyoming country club where captains of industry flock each summer to golf on an Arnold Palmer-designed course, his purpose will be greater than spending another evening separating rich people from their money.

The presidential candidate will be taking a big step toward becoming the official head of the Republican Party, as he is feted at the club and then at a $30,000-a-couple dinner at the nearby home of Richard B. Cheney, the living thread connecting the past five GOP presidencies.


By hosting the fundraiser, the former vice president — who in his retirement remains a powerful leader of foreign policy neoconservatives yet a deeply polarizing figure outside of the Republican base — will make his grandest gesture to pass a torch to Romney.]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/dick-cheney-opens-wyoming-home-for-major-mitt-romney-fundraiser/2012/07/11/gJQAYREDdW_story.html?tid=pm_pop

The 1%: Paris Hilton's Dog

"Mammon Worshiping Elites:"

[Summer 2009. Unemployment is soaring. Across America, millions of terrified people are facing foreclosure and getting kicked to the curb. Meanwhile in sunny California, the hotel-heiress Paris Hilton is investing $350,000 of her $100 million fortune in a two-story house for her dogs. A Pepto Bismol-colored replica of Paris’ own Beverly Hills home, the backyard doghouse provides her precious pooches with two floors of luxury living, complete with abundant closet space and central air.

By the standards of America’s rich these days, Paris’ dogs are roughing it. In a 2006 article, Vanity Fair’s Nina Munk described the luxe residences of America’s new financial elite. Compared with the 2,405 square feet of the average new American home, the abodes of Greenwich Connecticut hedge-fund managers clock in at 15,000 square feet, about the size of a typical industrial warehouse. Many come with pool houses of over 3,000 square feet...

In 2005, the 25 hedge-fund managers averaged $363 million. In cash. Paul Krugman observes that these 25 were paid three times as much as New York City’s 80,000 public school teachers combined. And because their pay is taxed as capital gains rather than salary, the teachers paid a higher tax rate!]  (Double double emphasis added because this really angers me.)

http://www.alternet.org/story/156143/the_great_capitalist_heist%3A_how_paris_hilton%27s_dogs_ended_up_better_off_than_you_?akid=9050.203331.AfNcIW&rd=1&t=2 

Does this explain why public schools struggle, paying teachers pennies compared to billions made by vulture capitalists through preferential tax code treatment?

Ya think?

Not if your're a RepublicKant ideologue.  Then destroying teachers' unions, public school systems, and putting kids into clutches of corporate charter schools seems better to them.

Freakin' Great Jumpi' Jehosapat's dog.

Reminds of Annie Romney's horse.

United States Infant Morality

Chart from Juan Cole at Informed Comment

Predictably enough, the states with most political opposition to the Affordable Care Act and increased Medicaid spending make up those states with the most infant deaths.

Infant mortality rates have long use as a benchmark statistic for analyzing whether a a society provides for general welfare of citizens.

Infant deaths also correlate strongly to measures of poverty.  With poverty, pregnant women find themselves less able to receive neonatal health care, nutrition, and a whole host of factors which contribute to having healthy baby that survives over a year.

But these ass clown politicians in these states care not for livig humans; they care only for fetuses.

In my beloved by me state of FL, our governor 48.9% proudly proclaims the state government will spurn extra Medicaid funds, thus condemning infants to death and a lifetime of decreased opportunities because of low birth weight and lack of post natal care, putting his social Darwinist ideology ahead of actual human lives.

What church do you attend, Rick Scott?

PS:  Rates of death depicted in red above approach those of third world countries.  Yay America!

You Too Can Make $5.5 Million Per Hour

The beauty of modern capitalism will allow you unlimited opportunities to create wealth for yourself, and with the right tax advice and offshore tax avoidance havens, pay less taxes than ordinary schmucks.

Follow my easy steps to wealth and obscene profits:

Get job as head of head of utility company.

Work one day.

Resign.

Walk away with $44 million in severance pay.

Yes, that makes a great deal for the schmucks who own the stocks in their 401k accounts.

Free market capitalism rules!

Homeless Children in America

Update: That didn't take long.  Jesus, Rick, didn't our Jesus say let the little children come to Him?  That level of concern indicates to me He wants even poor children to get health care under Medicaid, to have roofs over their heads, to start a school day without belly pains from hunger.


Rick, you coulda thought about it a couple days instead of showiing what a heartless and cruel bastard you are.


Fie on thee thou craven poltroon!


[Florida Gov. Rick Scott said Friday it’s unlikely that Florida will expand its Medicaid program in order to lower the number of uninsured residents...


According to Census data released last year, Florida had the nation’s third-highest rate of residents without health insurance during the past three years.]
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/06/29/2874460/gov-rick-scott-says-he-likely.html 




Surely, Governor 48.9% in FL will take the extra funds from federal governement so homeless children can get health care at least.

[The U.S. Education Department reported that, for the first time, the number of homeless students in America topped one million by the end of the 2010-2011 school year. These kids live in shelters and on the streets, and increasingly in hotels and on the couches of friends and relatives. On one hotel-lined stretch of highway -- a road leading to Disney World -- Nilan heard of schools where there are as many as 25 homeless students in classes of 28. The government report said 1,065,794 homeless kids were enrolled in schools in the 2010-2011 school year, an increase of 13 percent from the previous year and 57 percent since the start of the recession in 2007.

"The number is horrifyingly high but it probably is half of what the number really could be if the kids could be counted," said Nilan. The count doesn't include homeless infants, children not enrolled in school, and homeless students that schools simply failed to identify.]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/28/homeless-students-us_n_1635709.html

Invisible People TV

http://www.youtube.com/user/invisiblepeopletv

Death of the Middle Class in America: "When floodwaters cover our homes, we expect that FEMA workers with emergency checks and blankets will find us."

Do you think the Romney's ever had to park their precious horse in a church parking lot?


[Every night around nine, Janis Adkins falls asleep in the back of her Toyota Sienna van in a church parking lot at the edge of Santa Barbara, California. On the van's roof is a black Yakima SpaceBooster, full of previous-life belongings like a snorkel and fins and camping gear. Adkins, who is 56 years old, parks the van at the lot's remotest corner, aligning its side with a row of dense, shading avocado trees. The trees provide privacy, but they are also useful because she can pick their fallen fruit, and she doesn't always­ have enough to eat. Despite a continuous, two-year job search, she remains without dependable work. She says she doesn't need to eat much – if she gets a decent hot meal in the morning, she can get by for the rest of the day on a piece of fruit or bulk-purchased almonds – but food stamps supply only a fraction of her nutritional needs, so foraging opportunities are welcome...


...There is no moral or substantive difference between a hundred-year flood and the near-destruction of the global financial system by speculators immune from consequence. But if you and your spouse both lose your jobs and assets because of an unprecedented economic cataclysm having nothing to do with you, you quickly discover that your society expects you and your children to live malnourished on the streets indefinitely...


The Great Recession cost 8 million Americans their jobs. Three years after the economy technically entered recovery, there are positions available for fewer than one out of every three job seekers. In this labor market, formerly middle-class workers like Curtis and Concita Cates and Janis Adkins and Sean Kennan cannot reliably secure even entry-level full-time work, and many will never again find jobs as lucrative and stable as those they lost. Long-term unemployment tarnishes résumés and erodes basic skills, making it harder for workers to regain high-paying jobs, and the average length of unemployment is currently at a 60-year high. Many formerly middle-class people will never be middle-class again. Self­identities derived from five or 10 or 40 years of middle-class options and expectations will capsize.]

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-sharp-sudden-decline-of-americas-middle-class-20120622#ixzz1yrJ4r2IY

Queen Ann Romney's Horse Taken Better Care of Than You

How can you spend 10 grand on clothing for a horse?  I watch all the old westerns and Marshall Dillon's horse ain't got no fancy duds.  


First link in story quoted below reminds that your precious little child only worth $1000 as a tax deduction.  So the Romneys' horse is worth 70 times your kid.  Just another way tax code pays the rich and eats the poor.


The Romneys: real Americans.

[Times are tough for you, you say? Having a hard time paying your bills, getting healthcare, and clothing your kids, you say?

Maybe you should apply to be Ann Romney’s horse.

Why? Because her Olympics-bound dressage horse Rafalca is very likely doing WAY better than you.

The Romneys showed a $77,000 loss on their 2010 tax return for the care and upkeep of Rafalca. That’s more than the median household income of $51,413.

But that’s not all. According to an infographic put together by Current, Rafalca’s numbers stacked up pretty well compared with average Americans:

• Shelter
  Average American family: $16,352
  Rafalca: $28,800
• Clothing
  Average American family: $1,142
  Rafalca: $10,000
• Health Care
  Average American family: $1,557
  Rafalca: $2,000
• Transportation
  Average American family: $7,164
  Rafalca: $15,420
• Food
  Average American family: $7,890
  Rafalca: $1,200

In fact, except for food, Rafalca does better than the average American family in pretty much all of the areas of life. If you switched to eating oatmeal and hay, you could probably get those costs down, too.

So, brush up on your piaffe skills. And your flying changes. And your half-passes. And yourpirouettes.

With any luck, you too could get a job as Ann Romney’s dancing horse. You just have to develop a taste for hay.

UPDATE: On second thought, maybe being Ann Romney’s horse isn’t such a good idea after all. Unless you’re REALLY into doing drugs:]

Recession Hurts the Poor More

Pity the Billionaire in a recession only able to afford a few Escalades to go in the ocean front home so big it needs a car elevator and angers neighbors because of excessive size. 


At least, Mitt, cut your own lawn to look like a common man like Jr. did when pretending to run for President--thanks President Cheney--and cutting all that brush on his manly man's ranch, "No bidets for you, Laura, this is a man's ranch!"


Children go hungry in this country every day, RepubliKKKans, and bloodsucking Paul Ryan's budget takes money from the needy.

[Florida’s tough economy has proved even more challenging for those living on the state’s financial fringes, with poverty, infant mortality and an unmet need for mental health care on the rise, a new report shows.

A study called The Well Being of Florida’s Children — Is Our Future at Risk? shows the poverty rate among Florida’s children has climbed 35 percent between 2006 and 2010, resulting in 1.8 million kids living in low-income households. The state’s rate of low birth-weight infants also is worse than the national average, with 10 percent of Florida children having developmental or behavorial problems.

The number of homeless students in Florida has almost doubled since 2006 and the rate of food insecurity among Florida’s children is worse than the national average, the study found.]http://www.postonpolitics.com/2012/06/new-report-shows-floridas-economy-has-hit-poor-hardest/

In a Recession, Work to Welfare Doesn't Work So Well

Every time you hear Willard Romney or Paul "Eat the Poor" Ryan talk about converting Medicaid and other social welfare programs to block grants, remember this really means states like GA will make it as hard as legally possible to get aid and then, having arbitrarily reduced $ paid to keep people alive, will then take unspent funds to offset deficits in the general budget and pay for tax breaks for the rich and corporations.


Instead of job creators, think baby killers.


[...In Georgia, as in many states, gaining cash assistance has become increasingly difficult since the landmark welfare reform signed into law by President Clinton in 1996. Nationally, the share of poor families with children that were drawing welfare cash benefits plummeted from 68 percent to 27 percent between 1996 and 2010, according to an analysis of federal data by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). During the same period, the number of poor families with children grew from 6.2 million to 7.3 million....

Budget shortfalls have pared the promised supports. The size of the federal TANF grants to states has stayed flat, but shrinking in inflation-adjusted terms. States are given discretion in allocating the grants, and most have diverted increasing slices of this money to plug holes in their budgets, leaving less for cash assistance.

The one feature of welfare reform that has endured, say experts, is the emphasis on slashing welfare rolls...]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/19/breakdown-tanf-needy-families-states_n_1606242.html