Reflexive (knee-jerk)

Greetings good citizen,

It seems like only yesterday the ‘great communicator’ (who was hard pressed to stay awake during cabinet meetings) was telling us, after 220 years, that we had finally arrived at ‘Morning in America’ (we should dig the bastard up and hang him, just on general principles!)

Do you know what the last election proved? The people who bought the ‘Morning in America’ horseshit (the so-called ‘Reagan Democrats’) are all DEAD!

And by today’s conservo-whacko standards, St. Ronnie would be a flaming liberal!

Which brings us to the shortest day ever and where we are now, something akin to ‘Midnight in the garden of supreme evil…’

Our utter lawlessness at the top has reached crisis proportions, thus do the ‘fiscally responsible’ (read self-interested thieves) propose we:

1. “Fix” means cut: When they say “fix” Social Security, they mean cut Social Security. Fixers want to convince the public that a well-managed, hugely popular program that does not add to the deficit (it’s self-funded) is somehow in crisis and requires intervention in the form of various cutting schemes.

2. “Reform” means rob. When the say “reform” the tax code, they mean “make taxes even lower for the rich.” The wealthy do not pay their fair share of taxes in the United States, which is a major reason there is a large deficit in the first place.

3.“Bipartisan” means all of the rich. Fix the Debt is a pro-business ideological movement pretending to be a bipartisan group of concerned citizens. But the group is really just a coalition for the greedy, unpatriotic rich.

4. “Concern” means covet. There was a time, a couple of generations ago, when business leaders would not dare to go public with their desire to increase income inequality and stick it to hard-working Americans

5. “Fiscal conservative” means economically confused. Longtime Wall Street executive Steve Rattner, one of Obama’s auto bailout czars, has been using his influence to attract tycoons from the financial industry to the Fix the Debt movement.

6. "Strip-mining is not leadership." Fixers present themselves as magnanimous, responsible leaders doing what they believe is best for the country. But that’s a tough sell when you’re advocating policies that mainly benefit…yourself.

No irony should be lost on the fact that our failure to prosecute the criminals responsible for the first global depression 80 years ago has led to the criminal looting of our civilization today, unfortunately labeled as ‘bank bailouts’.

Well good citizen, we’ve been 'bailing out the banks' for the past five years (while basically gutting the global economy) and we’re still not done.

When do you suppose it will be time to shut down the banking industry and institute a more responsible system?

Will that be never (because nobody is ‘smart enough’ to figure out a different way? Or so the criminally rich would have you believe.)

Step one, before we shut down the banks is we have to lock all of the criminals up, starting with the ones in charge of our so called ‘justice system’.

In a bizarre juxtaposition, possessing a law degree will bar you from ‘practicing law’, actually ‘practicing’ what you have been taught will become an ‘exile offense.’ (Because the law is the people’s domain and NO ONE shall claim to speak for all of the people! Which is a direct violation of the human anti-exploitation law.

Understand that ‘lawyering’ is something most politicians do and as a profession is almost universally loathed.

Again, while some make a good living for themselves, most rue the day they decided studying law was a good idea.

All they have to show for that decision is a mountain of student debt.

(Which collides ‘face first’ with the notion that ‘more education’ is the solution to our massive unemployment problem and desperately unbalanced economy.)

Just because you study to become something doesn’t mean there will be a (good paying) job available after you graduate (and wasn’t that the whole point of going to college in the first place?)

Your ‘hard won’ degree will likely get you a job…as a barrista at Starbucks…where the tips (like the coffee) suck.

So it will be a doubly bitter pill to slave your life away, scraping and saving to keep a roof over your head and food in your stomach (forget marriage, neither of you can afford it) only to reach retirement age to find that the cupboard is empty.

Yup, after they ‘reduce the deficit’ (not by raising taxes or cutting the trillions they are spending on drone warfare…no!) by shredding social security and pauperizing those who have spent their whole lives paying into the system.

What do you suppose they will do with the ‘savings’?

They’ll pocket them of course!

And they’ll flip you the bird if you say anything about it!

(Are we testing these motherfuckers yet?)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Bait & Switch

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while you encounter ‘direct evidence’ regarding the current state of what passes for ‘civilization’. tonight’s offering provides us with an opportunity to explore an issue that has cost Lou Dobbs his spot as an anchor for CNN.

Maine Town Is Riven by Housing Dispute

By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Published: November 14, 2009

MILBRIDGE, Me. — Down a rural road where wood smoke spirals from chimneys in the settling twilight, a five-acre lot thick with spruce trees is the unlikely site of a dream deferred.

This is the intended spot for a small apartment complex for farmworkers, a few hundred of whom are Hispanics living year-round in this remote corner of Down East Maine. They harvest blueberries, process seafood and assemble holiday wreaths, and most live in trailers near the fields and factories where they work.

A local nonprofit group won a $1 million federal grant last year to build the six-unit complex, a first step toward expanding housing options for the immigrant laborers, most of whom come from Mexico and Honduras.

But then ugly words were uttered, a petition was circulated, and voters in this town of 1,300 approved a moratorium on multifamily housing in June, blocking the project. [First thing to ask yourself good citizen is why? Why are Federal funds being used to construct housing for so-called ‘migrant’ workers? Don’t the jobs these ‘migrant workers’ came all the way here from Honduras to perform pay them enough to live on?]

Now the group, Mano en Mano — Spanish for Hand in Hand — has filed a federal lawsuit alleging discrimination under the Fair Housing Act and the equal protection clause of the Constitution. And Milbridge, which once won acclaim for its efforts to welcome and integrate immigrants, is smarting from accusations of racism. [Missing from this picture is the fact these people ARE NOT citizens of the US. So why should taxpayer funds be used to provide these non-citizens with subsidized housing? More curious is whether or not the immigrant’s EMPLOYER isn’t behind this ‘non-profit’ group.]

“We have always been very open and receptive and accommodating,” said Lewis Pinkham, the town manager, police chief and code enforcement officer. “In my personal opinion, this got blown out of proportion.” [What do you suppose the odds are that big chief ‘Many Hats’ had a gun held to his worthless head by the fucking CHEAPSKATE employer? The bigger question is how these ‘immigrant’s’ came to be 5,000 miles away from where they started?]

According to the lawsuit and local newspaper accounts, some residents opposed the project on grounds that farmworkers’ children overburdened the schools; others predicted it would be a drug haven. The petition, signed by 48 residents, said jobs should be saved for local lobstermen, whose industry is suffering, and not “given out to minorities that may move into these units.” [But that ‘sentiment’ also totally misses the point that these jobs don’t pay enough for the immigrants to survive on. If the immigrants were being paid a reasonable wage, there would be no need to use federal funds to construct housing, the ‘private sector’ would make the housing happen.]

Hispanics are a rare sight in Maine; more than 96 percent of the population is white, tying it with Vermont as the least diverse state. And while most immigrant groups here have clustered in cities — Somalis in Lewiston, for example, and Sudanese in Portland — Hispanics tend to scatter through smaller communities, making their ranks feel even thinner. [FOUL! It’s dirty pool to emphasize the ‘whiteness’ of the region as the ‘cause’ of the so-called dispute. It’s more than a little ‘counter-intuitive’ that Hondurans would travel 5,000 miles, clear across the entire United States to the coast of Maine for jobs that don’t pay them enough to live on…]

Not so in Milbridge, though, where Anais Tomezsko, director of Mano en Mano, said Hispanics made up perhaps 10 percent of the population or more. Washington County, which produces most of the nation’s wild blueberries, draws thousands of them every summer to help with the harvest. And when a sea cucumber processing plant opened here in 1995, offering year-round jobs, some began to stay. [Listen to the BULLSHIT fly! Picking fucking BLUEBERRIES for three or four weeks out of a year doesn’t pay enough to justify travelling 10,000 miles at your own expense. Hell, they can’t live in Maine on what they make ‘helping’ with the harvest. Which is at the base of the argument here!]

“It felt very isolated,” said Edith Flores, 30, who came with her parents a decade ago to work at the sea cucumber plant. “But it was sort of like the town where I come from in Mexico, where everyone knows each other. It was calm, peaceful.”

Beth Russet, a nurse practitioner and founding member of Mano en Mano, said their presence has shored up the town as the population of rural Maine has aged and dwindled. [Did I mention that Maine was in an ‘economic desert’? It’s true…Real Estate is still reasonable there for the exact same reason it is reasonable in the Rustbelt…if you choose to live there you have to bring your job with you because there aren’t any there. Living less than an hour away from the Maine border I know what I’m talking about. It was my sales territory twice and it redefined the term ‘Slim Pickens’.]

“It’s great that there are young families excited to stay here,” she said. [Um, what Beth doesn’t realize is there’d be a lot more of them if the fucking cheapskates paid a damn living wage…but it is apparently more ‘productive’ to discuss how ‘prejudice’ the ‘crackers’ up Maine are!]

But housing has been a constant challenge, Ms. Tomezsko said. The region’s only subsidized apartment complex has a long waiting list, she said, and the few rental homes in Milbridge are usually too expensive for farmworkers — about $500 a month for a one-bedroom. “We have two or three people coming in every week asking about housing,” she said, “and we’re usually at a loss.” [Understand good citizen that $500 a month is ‘dirt cheap’ for New England…you can’t rent a broom-closet around Boston for less than three times that amount. I add that for those of you unfamiliar with real estate prices in the area. Oh, to make matters worse, the price to heat a one bedroom apartment in Maine runs pretty close to the cost of rent…and the ‘heating season’ is 9 months long…]

Ms. Russet said the town initially embraced year-round immigrants, even holding potluck suppers to help them fit in. Mano en Mano gave Spanish lessons — to bank employees who were struggling to communicate with Hispanic customers, among others — and the town won a grant to tutor immigrants.

But the constant drain of jobs has made native residents less receptive, others said, even though most shun the low-paying farm and factory work that immigrants do. [Here’s where the ‘poor immigrant’ argument breaks down…why do you suppose the locals ‘shun’ these jobs that only people unfamiliar with the area are willing to take? And what is the ‘point’ of this article again…isn’t it about building ‘subsidized housing’ for people that aren’t being paid enough to rent decent accommodations? What about people that have lived in Maine their entire lives who can’t afford to stay there so the must leave the state?]

The county’s unemployment rate is 10.4 percent, and 20 percent of its population lives in poverty. In a letter to a local newspaper, one resident pointed out that many native Mainers, not just immigrants, live in tumbledown trailers.

“When there is very little work,” the letter said, “bringing more people in does not solve the problem.” [Bringing in people willing to work for less CERTAINLY does nothing to help the circumstances of the native population…all it does is boost profits for the (absentee) owners of these operations!]

In another letter, the resident, B. J. Seymour, wrote that multifamily housing complexes “are popular as halfway homes for recovering addicts, transients, sex offenders, seasonal workers, parolees and those with limited mental abilities.”

The building moratorium was scheduled to expire last month, but at a town meeting in September, residents voted to extend it. They also voted down a proposal to exempt the Mano en Mano project from the moratorium and let it move forward. [Yeah, let’s have everybody accuse the residents of a small Maine community of being ‘prejudice’ and exclusionary while ignoring the real problem…living wages!]

Tenants at Mano en Mano’s housing project — the first of its kind in Maine — would have to be American citizens or permanent residents who made a certain percentage of their income from agriculture or aquaculture under the terms of the federal grant, from the Department of Agriculture. They could be of any race. [Race isn’t the issue here, although the article is trying real hard to make it the issue! No, the real issue here is using tax dollars to construct (subsidized) accommodations for people a particular employer (group of employers) does not pay (or desire to pay) a living wage to, for the area.]

But Mr. Pinkham said residents were more irked by the fact that Mano en Mano, as a nonprofit group, would be exempt from paying property taxes. [Methinks old Pinky, himself drawing three paychecks from local public coffers, ‘misstates’ the situation.]

“Everybody feels that everybody should pay their own fair way,” he said, estimating that the complex would pay $10,000 a year in property taxes if privately owned. “That’s what I’ve heard the most complaints about.”

As for the charges of racism, Mr. Pinkham said the town “can’t gag people.” “No matter where you go,” he added, “you can have one or two people stand up in a crowd and say some comments that aren’t the sentiment of the entire town.”

Mr. Pinkham said the town imposed the building moratorium not to block Mano en Mano’s project but to revise its land-use laws.

Residents will vote Monday on a zoning ordinance that would likely allow the project to move forward, he said.

Ms. Flores said that during a recent town meeting about the project, the hostility toward it — and toward Hispanics, she said — made her feel like “a cat surrounded by dogs.”

“I’m brown, dark hair, and it doesn’t matter if I’m a citizen of the U.S.,” she said. “Just like everyone else in the Latino community, I’m looked at as a newcomer who’s taking away jobs or asking for more than what we should have.”

Geez Louise, pay the people a living wage and this problem dries up and blows away…but NO, instead we have to build ‘subsidized housing’ so we can keep a segment of the local workforce repressed.

And don’t you think for a minute that the people responsible for bringing these people up to Maine from Honduras won’t point at the fact they live in subsidized housing (that won’t be maintained) when ‘review time’ rolls around.

Um, unlike Mr. Dobbs , we will leave the ‘legality’ issue aside and instead focus on what causes an individual to pack up their family and travel roughly 5,000 miles to perform a job that doesn’t pay him enough to support his family on…

Naturally, if it were just one family, the discussion may turn almost immediately to ‘mental competency’ but no, we’re talking 130 (not necessarily illegal) immigrants who have traveled across the entire US to take jobs in ‘New England’s own economic desert’, the great state of Maine!

Um, key to this particular instance is we have the ‘assertion’ that the immigrants have come (again, around 5,000 miles) to perform jobs that the ‘locals’ shun…

Perhaps more telling is how the ‘dispute’ itself centers on FEDERAL FUNDING for PUBLIC HOUSING to provide these (not necessarily) ‘migrant laborers’ with suitable lodging.

The little community that currently ‘hosts’ these migrant workers has altered their zoning laws in a way that prevents these units from being constructed.

The article, er, ‘emphasizes’ the fact that these people are Spanish speakers…thereby masking the true issue here and it’s the same issue we encounter EVERYTIME immigrants are lured to work sites the local labor force shuns.

Why don’t the locals take up these jobs? Apparently the people who write these articles think you’re too stupid to understand that the problem is these jobs don’t pay enough to live on (Which is why they are using ‘FEDERAL FUNDS’ to build these people a place to stay! Worse, the apartments will be ‘subsidized’ so whoever gets to be the ‘lucky landlord’ will be collecting the difference between what the migrants pay and what the apartments would attract from ‘fair market’ renters, from local taxpayers!

It REALLY pisses me off to see this kind of swindle defended as having ‘sympathy’ for the disadvantaged South American workers who are simply trying to build a better life for their families, here in the ‘land of opportunity’ (for the freaking capitalist!)

Sometimes it’s worse to get a look at something up and personal like this because it illustrates all of the other scams and schemes that conservative oligarchs cook up to bash their political opponents with.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Jealous of what?

Greetings good citizen,

I’m just trying to wrap my head around the notion that ‘conservative leaning’ people tend to be hung up on the issue of whether or not the ‘objectors’ to capitalism are ‘successful’ or not…

Well, since there is no such thing as a ‘harmless’ form of capitalism, how the hell are these idiots defining ‘success’?

CG has been accused repeatedly of being a ‘jealous failure’ that couldn’t ‘make it’ in the ‘real world’. If he just had the sack to be an asshole to everyone he had contact with, he’d see just how ‘wonderful’ capitalism really is! Yes siree Bob, everybody ‘gets what they deserve’ under capitalism, that’s what makes it so ‘wonderful’!

Well good citizen, tonight’s offering is another sterling example of Capitalism at its finest, where the ignorance of the customer is exploited and the consequences of a broken eco-system becomes the problem of the community, not the profit chasing prick that created the hazard!

So, what are we supposedly ‘jealous’ of again?

[Hat tip: Cryptogon]

China’s ‘Cancer Villages’ Bear Witness to Economic Boom
September 19th, 2009

Becky runs a food-buying co-op. Both of the “organic” product wholesalers she deals with only sell products like beans, sunflower seeds and peanuts from China. The non-Chinese rice costs 3x to 4x more than the Chinese rice. Obviously, we consume no food from China, regardless of the fact that it’s certified organic.

Now, if this is what we’re dealing with, as batshit insane, lunatic fringe food extremists, what is the average person eating??? The New Zealand government’s lack of a country-of-origin requirement on products (especially food products) is a national disgrace. That the vast majority of people don’t care about this is a different matter. For the tiny fraction of kiwis who do, assume that “Packaged in Auckland” means “Product of China.”

Just be aware of the fact that A LOT of companies are using food products from China, including companies that purport to sell organic food. When buying food, we attempt to buy only whole, unprocessed foods and we don’t buy anything that doesn’t state the country of origin.

Via: Reuters:

One needs to look no further then the river that runs through Shangba to understand the extent of the heavy metals pollution that experts say has turned the hamlets in this region of southern China into cancer villages.

The river’s flow ranges from murky white to a bright shade of orange and the waters are so viscous that they barely ripple in the breeze. In Shangba, the river brings death, not sustenance.

“All the fish died, even chickens and ducks that drank from the river died. If you put your leg in the water, you’ll get rashes and a terrible itch,” said He Shuncai, a 34-year-old rice farmer who has lived in Shangba all his life.

“Last year alone, six people in our village died from cancer and they were in their 30s and 40s.”

Cancer casts a shadow over the villages in this region of China in southern Guangdong province, nestled among farmland contaminated by heavy metals used to make batteries, computer parts and other electronics devices.

Every year, an estimated 460,000 people die prematurely in China due to exposure to air and water pollution, according to a 2007 World Bank study.

Yun Yaoshun’s two granddaughters died at the ages of 12 and 18, succumbing to kidney and stomach cancer even though these types of cancers rarely affect children. The World Health Organization has suggested that the high rate of such digestive cancers are due to the ingestion of polluted water.

“It’s because of Daboshan and the dirty water,” said the 82-year-old grandmother. “The girls were always playing in the river, even our well water is contaminated,” Yun told Reuters during a visit to the village.

The river where the children played stretches from the bottom of the Daboshan mine, owned by state-owned Guangdong Dabaoshan Mining Co Ltd, past the ramshackle family home. Its waters are contaminated by cadmium, lead, indium and zinc and other metals. [Ah, notice how it is the ‘dirty commies’ that pollute the water at will, we can leave the issue of ‘chasing profits’ out of it (even though they are)]

The villagers use well water in Shangba for drinking but tests published by BioMed Central in July show that it contains excessive amounts of cadmium, a heavy metal that is a known carcinogen, as well as zinc which in large quantities can damage the liver and lead to cancer.

“China has many ‘cancer villages’ and it is very likely that these increased cases of cancer are due to water pollution,” said Edward Chan, an official with Greenpeace in southern China. [It’s not just ‘cheaper wages’ that drove US companies (and their peers) to Communist (Ha!) China.]

But it’s not just water, the carcinogenic heavy metals are also entering the food chain.

Mounds of tailings from mineral mining are discarded alongside paddy fields throughout the region.

“If you test this rice, it will be toxic but we eat it too, otherwise, we will starve,” said He, the farmer, as he shoveled freshly milled rice into a sack. “Yes, we sell this rice too.”

Now I want to ask my capitalist readers if this is just a case of Commies being Commies…why aren’t the capitalists being held responsible? Worse is the fact that you don’t need to travel to China to find such blatant violations of the health codes, you can find ‘em right here too!

Why can you find them here? For the EXACT SAME reason they occur there, it’s more ‘profitable’ than doing the ‘right thing/way’.

A pig is a pig and when it comes to profits the labels of communist and capitalist no longer apply. The only thing that matters is being high enough on the food chain to get away with such shameless stunts.

So, how are the idiot conservatives ‘measuring’ success? Naturally, their yardstick measures dollars and not the body bags that are connected to those dollars.

You know, there’s only one way to stop the rape/despoiling of the planet and that way is to remove the profit from it.

We literally have to stop paying dick head for wrecking the place but to do this we need to gain control over the money supply.

Regardless of what happens, we have to wrest the money supply away from the thieves, who are paying themselves for nothing because they can…

Anyway, thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner