Category Archives: Politics

Why Are These Criminals Not In Jail?

Most of you have probably forgotten about the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 oil workers.  If you haven’t forgotten about it, you likely think that it’s a thing of the past.  The oil was cleaned up.  People were paid for their hardship.  The ecosystem has recovered.  Wipe off your hands, pat yourself on the back, get back to business.

Yeah, not so much.

Would it surprise you to know that BP executives lied to Congress about how much oil was spilled from the disaster?  Would it surprise you to know that BP plead guilty to lying to Congress?  Would it surprise you to learn that BP was warned that the dispersants used to hide the oil spill from the public was known to cause serious health issues in humans and BP ignored and hid those warnings?  Would it surprise you to learn that hundreds, if not thousands, of humans who helped in the clean up now suffer major health complications likely caused by the use of the dispersants?

Would it surprise you to learn that no one has gone to jail for these crimes?  Me either.

Get A Job You F@#$ Slop Is All He Replied

There has been much gnashing of teeth over the recent NPR stories about disability insurance.  It is well worth the read.  This is an issue that I’m both glad people are starting to pay attention to and scared because people are starting to pay attention to it.

Here is how it goes for those of you just tuning in.  The economy of the United States has been progressively changing for 30 years now.  Manufacturing jobs are leaving and only partially being replaced by lower paying service jobs.  There are no jobs for these people.  They are poorly educated and, often, too old to get trained for a new economy job.  They got their unemployment checks for as long as they could and then went on welfare.

All of this was happening at a time when Republicans decided that people on welfare were a pox on the society that their wealthy masters helped create.  So, with the help of Bill Clinton, they passed a massive welfare reform law that was incredibly successful at reducing the number of people on welfare.  It’s main driver was forcing the states to carry a larger burden of the welfare pot.  Before, the federal government would pick up most of the tab.  Now, not so much.  The only problem is it didn’t reduce the welfare roles the way everyone thinks it did.  It was supposed to be a “back to work” bill, but many of the people on welfare were completely unemployable in the new economy.

States had an easy choice to make.  They could either continue to pay money for welfare or they could funnel as many people as possible onto disability insurance.  Disability insurance is 100% covered by the federal government.  Can you guess which one they chose?  Congratulations, you have basic reasoning skills.

So, millions of Americans lost their jobs, couldn’t find new ones, went on unemployment, went on welfare, and are now on permanent disability.  Many of these people have disabilities that most of us would laugh at.  The most common being chronic back pain.  Millions of other Americans work every day of their life with back pain, why don’t they get disability too?  Well, mostly because they can find a job that allows them to sit down.  There’s not much call for an employee with little education who needs to sit behind a desk all day.  There’s not much an employee with little education can do sitting behind a desk all day.  So onto disability they go.

Welcome to the new Invisible America.

As you can imagine, this system has all sorts of perverse outcomes.  Families now depend on that disability income in order to survive and it pays about minimum wage.  If you were given the choice between working a full time minimum wage job where you were constantly in pain or collecting disability, which would you choose?  It turns out that millions of Americans were more than willing to work through a good deal of pain working at a job that put them well into the middle class, but not so much when doing so puts you into the lower class.  Can you blame them?

Of course the $260,000,000,000 (that’s how much disability costs the government each year now) question is what to do with these people.  And this is where my trepidation begins.  I fear that calling attention to this issue will make it more likely to be welfare reform all over again.  Only this time, there will be no fallback.  The result being millions of unemployable people with no lifeline relegated to the streets.

At the same time, though, keeping so many people on disability is untenable.  The disability pot is currently scheduled to run out of money in 2016, right when Obama is leaving office.  Obviously, something needs to be done well before that.  But what?

I wish I had answers.  I don’t know enough about the needs of these Americans to comment intelligently.  That, of course, won’t stop me from commenting anyway.

This sounds like a great opportunity to start a massive retraining effort.  Instead of sending these people back to vocational training, though, we should really just send them back to regular school and pay them what they’re getting right now to go.  As long as they put in the effort to go to school, they get the money.  They could do this for the rest of their lives if they so choose.  Hopefully, though, they would progress to such a point that they could then get jobs that pay more than they are being given by the government.

Yes, this is very pie-in-the-sky.  But it’s something.  If we had come up with something along the lines of this instead of “welfare reform”, we’d likely be in a much better position than we find ourselves now.

Ken Cuccinelli Is A Very Bad Man

For those of you who don’t know who Ken Cuccinelli is, he is the current Attorney General of the state of Virginia.  He is also currently running for Governor of said state.  You will not find a more laughably socially retrograde individual running for a major state office that actually has a chance of winning.

How socially retrograde is Ken Cuccinelli?  He is fighting to keep Virginia’s anti-sodomy laws on the books.  Anti-sodomy laws were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas ruling.  Despite that, Ken “lick a penis, go to jail” Cuccinelli fights on.

Anti-sodomy laws are notoriously just anti-gay laws or anti-prostitution laws.  Sure, in theory, they apply to both sexes, but in practice, they have rarely been used to prosecute married couples.  Because almost every married couple would be in jail otherwise.  Except, I’m sure, Ken Cuccinelli.  (Who, by the way, and I am totally not making this up goes by the nickname the Cooch.  Thought I’m sure he’d spell it different.)

Ken “only one God sanctioned hole for that to go” Cuccinelli’s anti-sodomy stance is just the tip of the crazy iceberg, though.  He’s also gone on a crusade against climate scientist Michael Mann and many others at the University of Virginia, demanding all of their e-mails in an obvious attempt to dig up dirt on the scientists.  All this despite the fact that Michael Mann’s data and conclusions had already been proven multiple times to have been honestly come by.

On top of that, he’s pretty boilerplate far Right Republican.  Life begins at conception.  Abstinence-only sex education.  Immigrants bad.  Homosexuality bad.  Taxes bad.  Guns good.  He even flirted with birtherism for a while.  And, proving that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, he’s very anti-eminent domain when government takes property and then gives it over to private businesses.

The beautiful (or horrible, depending on how things turn out) thing about Ken Cuccinelli’s run for governor is that it’s going to be the only real race that anyone’s going to be watching in this off year election.  That means all the Cuccinelli crazy will be front and center for the whole country to see.  He will be the man that Republicans put front and center at a time when they’re desperately trying to change their image.  Good luck with that.

Fanatical Religious Nutjob Of The Day

The lunatics are in control of the asylum over in North Carolina.  Two Republican lawmakers are pushing a resolution declaring that the state/county/city has the authority to establish an official religion and write religious laws.  Clearly, these two are crypto-islamo-fascist Muslims hoping to stealthily bring Sharia Law to North Carolina.  They must be stopped!

Their laughable claim is that the U.S. Constitution only prevents the establishment of a national religion.  Smaller municipalities are free to do as they please in this regard.  I guess that means states can restrict speech as much as they want as well.  And your county can restrict who you choose to associate with.  And your city can prevent you from petitioning the government.

This whole affair stems from a lawsuit filed against a county that starts their commissioners meeting with a prayer.  They filed the resolution to show their solidarity with the commissioners.  There are many of these lawsuits being filed across the country.  The basic argument is that saying a Christian prayer at the beginning of a governmental meeting is establishing a religion and goes against the First Amendment.  Most of the lawsuits are fought against vigorously by the local governmental body being sued.

Thanks to these two bumbling lawmakers, though, this is the first one that has hit the national spotlight.  And it really gets to the heart of why the prayers are illegal and that fighting the lawsuits is a colossal waste of taxpayer money.  They are all but admitting that the prayer is similar to establishing a religion.  And there is plenty of precedent showing that the establishment of a religion is illegal no matter how far down the governmental ladder you go.  Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, North Carolina.

Slacktivists Unite!

Slactivism – The act of doing something for a cause that has zero impact for said cause and only serves to make the individual performing the action feel good about themselves.

Examples of slactivism include: politicians wearing a flag pin to show their patriotism, people putting yellow ribbon magnets on their car to show they support our troops, people putting flags on their car to show their patriotism, people putting ANYTHING on their car to show they support ANYTHING, and people changing their Facebook profile picture to a pink equal sign to show they support gay marriage.

I will admit, I was a little bit in awe of the sheer amount of people who changed their Facebook profile picture to the now ubiquitous pink equal sign on a red background and it’s various permutations (my favorite being a kissing Lady Liberty and Lady Justice superimposed on the image).  It was inspiring, on some level, to see so many friends and strangers announce that they believe gay marriage should be legal.  But back in the real world, gay marriage is still illegal in a vast majority of the country and your changing of your profile picture has changed none of that.  In the end, it’s just a big circle-jerk amongst a bunch of like-minded individuals.

It doesn’t have to be like that, though.  You can effect real change by spending very little of your time.  Call your U.S. Representative, call your U.S. Senators, call your State Representative, call your State Senator.  Tell them that you would like gay marriage to be legal.  You probably don’t believe it, but politicians listen very carefully to the phone calls that they receive.  It is the most effective method for an individual to enact change with their politicians and it is much more efficient than waiting for someone else to get elected.  Make it so.

Large Corporations Are Evil

If there is one thing that the current financial crisis should have taught us it’s that large corporations are evil.  They become entities that care about one thing and one thing only; profit.  Many times, just short term profit.  The banking crisis was all about short term profit.  Don’t believe for a moment that no one could have seen it coming.  The big banks ALL saw it coming.  They saw an opportunity to rake money in hand over fist and distribute huge bonuses to a select few and they took it.  All with the realization that they would very likely not be held responsible for their grossly immoral actions.

Here is another ploy that large corporations often pull.  Peabody Coal spun off a company called Patriot Coal.  When they did so, they filled Patriot Coal with as much of their debt burden as possible.  They threw as many retiree pension obligations as possible in with Patriot.  Why would they do this, you ask?  Well, because that way Patriot can go bankrupt and remove the pension and healthcare obligations that Peabody once agreed to give their employees.

20,000 people are going to have their pensions stripped and their healthcare taken away.  Just like that.  Peabody could have afforded these benefits if they kept everyone in the parent company, but they chose not to.  Why?  All for the almighty dollar.

And there’s nothing the workers can do about it.  Now that the National Labor Relations Board has been rendered toothless by the courts, companies have free reign to do whatever they want with their employees and retirees.  They are safe in the knowledge that they have at least a decade before anything will be able to be done against their actions today.

Notice that the new company that was spun off and designed to fail is called Patriot Coal.  That’s how sick these people are.  This, to them, is patriotism.  They take the best years of thousands of people and work them hard in one of the most dangerous jobs which is known to cause a myriad of health problems.  For this, they promise them retirement benefits and healthcare.  Then, at the first political opportunity, they throw all the retirees into a spinoff company they never worked for with the obvious intention of letting that company fail.  Never a thought made to the individuals affected by it.

Patriot Coal.  It makes the blood boil.  This is evil on an epic scale.  Yet no one will hear of it.  And it happens every day.

We Need Unions

Why?  Because of things like this.  Chrysler fired Alex Wassell,  a man with 20 years of experience, because he was “engaging in, participating in, aiding or approving conduct constituting or appearing to constitute a conflict with the interests of the Company.”  a.k.a. fighting for better conditions for employees.

Talk about Orwellian language.  Anything a worker does could constitute a conflict with the interests of the Company.  Heck, they could fire you for asking for a raise with that language.  The National Labor Relations Board has found such language discriminatory in the past, but the NLRB doesn’t really exist right now because a court found Obama’s recess appointments to the Board to be unconstitutional.

This creates a lovely dynamic.  Republicans block NLRB appointments.  Obama makes recess appointments which allows the NLRB to do their job.  Republican judge rules appointments unconstitutional.  NLRB ceases to function and all NLRB cases that had been decided have to be reheard once the appointments are approved by the Senate.  Alex Wassell is looking at a year before his case is heard.  It’s a win-win situation.  Companies win and Republicans win.  Workers lose.  This is how Republicans want the government to work.

Companies have all of the power over an individual employee.  Unions do what they can to level that balance of power.  Yes, there are abuses.  They pale in comparison to the history of abuses that companies have inflicted on their employees.

Is It Hot In Here Or Is It Just Me?

Or…It’s getting hot in here so take off all your clothes.

The Earth is getting warmer.  The Earth is getting warmer faster than ever before.  Much faster.  The line of increase has a slope much closer to infinity than it does to zero.  In a rational world, this information would be devastating.  We don’t live in a rational world and we definitely don’t live in a rational country.  Our country is stuck with people who sit on our science committees and think the Earth is 6,000 years old and evolution is “controversial” and climate change is unproven and seem to think that science is a scam like homeopathy.

If we don’t do something soon we are doomed.  And by “we” I mean people living on the coasts mostly.  But there can’t be more than a billion of them so I’m sure it won’t be that big of a deal.  People away from the coasts will just have to deal with alternating torrential rains and droughts and various other weather anomalies.  Again, no big deal.

Voter Fraud: It’s Real And It’s Rampant

Oh, wait, no it’s not.  Hamilton County in Ohio filed charges of voter fraud against three people who voted illegally in this past election.  Three.  Out of 800,000 residents.  Two filled out absentee ballots for recently departed acquaintances (one was actually a nun!) and the third was a poll worker who voted on behalf of relatives.  There are an undisclosed  handful of others that have yet to be charged.

Please note: Exactly zero of these nefarious individuals would have been caught by voter ID laws.  I find it transcendentally funny that the same people who argue for a smaller government are usually the ones that scream for laws to be enacted for a problem that there is no proof actually exists.

The Great Migration And The Voting Rights Act

During oral arguments for the case conservatives hope will overturn key enforcement sections of the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice John Roberts asked if the South was more racist than the North.  This, along with Scalia’s racial entitlement idiocy, shows how completely out of touch a bunch of elite old white men can be.

The South still has a much bigger problem with racism than the North.  That things are infinitely better in the South than they were in the mid 1900s there can be no doubt.  But to think that all the problems that the Voting Rights Act was enacted to prevent have been solved takes a willful disregard to both history and the human condition.

The Great Migration was a mass exodus of blacks from the South to places North and West.  The reasons for it are many and varied, but it can be boiled down to institutional racism.  It happened in fits and starts from the 1910s to the 1970s.  When it was over, around 11 million blacks had left the South.

Think about that.  The Great Migration didn’t end until the early 1970s.  Jim Crow laws were passed as late as 1965.  Lynchings occurred as late as 1964.

This all ended just before I was born.  Many of the people who are responsible for the conditions that caused institutional racism are still alive.  Their children, who were fed that hate on a daily basis are still in power.  Every single person on the bench of the Supreme Court is old enough to remember schools being desegregated.  All of this history is their history.

How quickly history can be forgotten.