The only value the GOP has is money

As a father I can’t fathom how the GOP has gotten away with branding themselves as the party of ‘family values.’ What values? Paid leave? No. Affordable childcare? No. Investing in education? No. Ending child poverty? No. Fighting child cancer? No. Protecting kids from guns? No. End this charade.

— Rio Tazewell (@riotazewell.bsky.social) December 21, 2024 at 8:21 PM

Fuck Donald Trump

Peace,

emaycee

 

Biden's great first year, part one

Congratulations Joe 🇺🇲
-Added 6.4 million jobs
-Historic GDP growth
-Unempoyment down to 4.2%
-Stock Market all-time highs
-Passed American Rescue Plan
-Cut child poverty
-Largest vaccine rollout in history
-Ended our longest war
-$1.2 T infrastructure
-Reunited 100 families pic.twitter.com/SHJDXpVlGH

— Critter (@asclepiasyriaca) January 14, 2022

Republican = Racist

Peace,

emaycee

 

What's the matter here?

So far, Democrats have cut child poverty in half, added 5.3 million jobs, managed the most ambitious vaccine rollout in the nation’s history, and passed a $1.2 trillion investment in the water, roads, bridges and broadband.

Trump gave $2 trillion to the rich and tweeted a lot.

— Mikel Jollett (@Mikel_Jollett) November 6, 2021

Republican = Racist

Peace,

emaycee

 

About damn time

Files this under better late than never....

Turns out that thirty-plus years of conservative dogma (see also the Reagan Devolution) for our economy hasn't had such a great outcome--feeding the rich while starving the poor has only led to the United States falling farther and farther behind other industrialized countries in infant mortality rates, people incarcerated, life expectancy for women, children in poverty, and teenage pregnancies.  Even worse, the social safety net that republicans spend so much time bitching about isn't all that safe--it's got gaping holes in it that far too many Americans in need are falling through.

And while we're beating a very dead horse, for all the right's claims to concern for the unborn and flogging of European socialism, it sure is funny how Europe absolutely cleans our clocks on infant mortality rates.  Who'd have guessed that, unlike our republican party and its minions, those socialists actually give a shit about children?

And therein lies the legacy of the modern republican party:  all talk and plenty of failed action for ordinary Americans.

Peace,
emaycee

The kids aren't alright

For all the news you may have read and seen this week, you sure as hell didn't see any of this:

• The four nations with the highest child poverty rates?  Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and the good old U.S. of A.
• One-half of the kids in American public schools are eligible for lunch assistance.
• One-half of African-American children under the age of six in America live in poverty.
• Out of every 100 American children, twenty are currently on food stamps.
• On any given night, 138,000 children in America are homeless.

And these numbers come from the richest nation in the history of human civilization.

But you know, if only those four and five-year-olds would pull themselves up by their bootstraps I'm sure they could find a couple of dented soup cans in some dumpster and a bigger cardboard box to spend the night inside.

Peace,
emaycee

'Tis the season

Oh, the places you won't go if you're poor or homeless in America:

• Just for shits and giggles (hard to see any other reason for it) schools across America are denying children--children--lunches because their parents are too far in debt on their lunch tabs (in some cases as little as $20).  Hungry, Hungry Hippos takes on real life meaning.
• Fort Lauderdale, FL (their city motto:  "We're Fucking Heartless"), home of a law which prohibits the feeding of the homeless, last month arrested a ninety year old man for feeding the homeless.  You cannot make this shit up.
• Just to prove they really are fucking heartless, Fort Lauderdale officials last month also arrested a homeless man for speaking out against their policies during a ceremony to honor, of all things, National Homeless Week.  Proving mightily once again the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction.
• Even though it's been an abysmal failure in Tennessee, Utah, and Florida both in terms of its cost and its ability to find much of any poor people using drugs, numbnuts Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wants to drug test everyone in his state who collects unemployment or receives food stamps...just so Wisconsin can join the list the failures, too, and  he can appeal to the haters among the republican party faithful in his quest to not be America's next President.  Not bad enough that Wisconsin's poor have to put up with the worst fucking haircut in American politics, they also have to pee in a cup to assuage his Presidential ambitions.
• The city of Manteca, CA recently passed an ordinance (joining a long list of other American cities trying to make being homeless a crime) making it illegal for the homeless to sleep outside.  Hello--homeless=no place to live=no place to sleep other than outside.  The city's police chief noted that if the homeless wanted to leave, it would be their choice.  No it isn't--sleeping isn't a choice, it's a necessity.

The lone bright spot I've been able to find over the past few weeks is that the city of Dallas decided to stop trying to prohibit those feeding the homeless in public and agreed to pay $250,000 in settlement to those charities.

In the movie It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Potter at one point calls helping the least among us "sentimental hogwash."  At the time, his character's lack of empathy was considered villainous.

Now it's public policy.

Peace,

emaycee

Living large on the minimum wage

If, by some miracle, Democrats are able to get a minimum wage increase to $10.10 through Congress (right about the moment my lottery numbers finally come in), it would mean that, for those lucky few who can actually find a forty hour a week job, they would make just a hair over $21,000 a year.

Let me repeat that:  $21,000 a year.

Now I know that republicans think that people making that kind of money, after a day of flipping burgers or stocking shelves with green beans, drive home in their Rolls to eat filet mignon and lobster tails while they watch Hawaii Five-O on their 75" TV screen, but you'd think members of the party that actually fights for a living wage for working class men and women would know better.

Not so, Senators Mary Landrieu and Mark Pryor.  Nope, they think that maybe raising it to such great heights is bad for...oh, I don't know, the Walton family and Olive Garden shareholders, and that perhaps we should not raise it quite so much.  Because, you know, $17,500 a year is still a quite the cache of cash.

And those folks can just learn to do without the lobster tails.

Peace,
emaycee

An obscenity

"Hunger is not a problem.  It is an obscenity."--Anne Frank

The excerpt in this post by Digby shows the best and worst that is America.  The hungry mother forgoing eating so that her children could have more, her son saying he was full so that his mother could have some of the food that was on his plate--these are the best.  The worst...well when one in five Americans has been food insecure in the past year in the richest nation on the face of the earth, when we read of a family going hungry...it is an abomination.

While it's correct to point a finger at the callousness of republicans, many of whom couldn't care less that Americans are going hungry or think it's their own damn fault (never mind the utter void of moral leadership in corporate America or the Pyramind Scheme that is Wall Street), the Democrats share the blame.  Scenes of hungry families like those noted above are what Bill Clinton's disastrous welfare reform has wrought; the ninety dollars a month that 850,000 American familes won't have for food thanks to Debbie Stabenow's Farm Bill; the President's bowing to the Gods of Austerity rather than looking out for the best interests of the working class men and women on whose backs this country is carried.

Anne Frank was a teenager.  It's quite amazing how much better she understood the scourge that is hunger than do our so-called leaders in our nation's capital.

Peace,
emaycee

Thanks for caring, Senator

While the Farm Bill of 2014 was being prepped for its final vote in the Senate, I sent my Senator, Debbie Stabenow, Chairman of the Agriculture Committee, a letter though The Daily Kos asking for the final bill to not contain $8 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.  After its passage, Senator Stabenow sent me a decidedly lame response in which she invoked the three people in America who have won lotteries who are scamming the system and claimed how much she wanted to help people who were in need of food.

She did not mention the 850,000 families who would lose $90 a month in benefits, nor the roughly one million children who would have even less food to eat thanks to her half-assed bill.

Rather incensed, I sent her a personal response, in which I asked why she was not honest about the 850,000 families who, thanks to her, were going to have even less food to eat each month while Agri-Business and the Koch Brothers (through Georgia Pacific) would receive millions in corporate welfare.  And that frankly, a handful of goofballs scamming the system was red meat for her conservative constituents, but that as a fellow Democrat, her claim was, well, rather unenlightened.

I received a response today from the Senator's office, and it was the exact same letter she had sent before. Apparently, in addition to becoming the first Democrat to ever oversee cuts to the food stamps program, she is also adept at hiring people who can't even bother to take the time to read letters from her very own constituents.

By the way, Senator, the next time you send me an e-mail asking for campaign contributions...the check's in the mail.

Peace,
emaycee

Misanthropy 101, Part II

Apparently hating on the poor kids is a big meme of conservatives this week.  Michael Bloomberg, outgoing (thank God) Mayor of New York City (calling yourself an Independent because you disagree with republicans on gays and guns while marching lockstep with them on everything else doesn't make you a Liberal) said this week when asked about 11-year-old Dasani, the subject of a New York Times series on the poor:

"The kid was dealt a bad hand.  I don't know why.  That's just the way God works.  Sometimes some of us are lucky and some of us are not."

You know, it takes a special breed of chickenshit to blame God for the harm your policies (see at the first link) have caused your fellow human beings.

Peace,
emaycee

And know they love you

What a wonderful world...

Seventy-five percent of teachers (up from sixty percent just a year ago) report that they have children in their classrooms who regularly come to school hungry.  One supposes with the republican push to cut $40 billion from SNAP benefits they're shooting for an A+ and hoping to get that number to 100% of teachers.

Speaking of teachers, did you know that American teachers spend an average of $37 every month to feed their students?

What a bunch of overpaid assholes those teachers are....

Peace,
emaycee

How do you spell hope?

Once a month in his "Open thread for night owls," Meteor Blades features an excerpt from the always interesting Harper's Index. From the current month's--these two factoids:

• The percentage change since 1996 of the number of children living in poverty in America is plus 12%.
• Likewise, the change in those receiving cash aid from our government is minus 60%.

Not surprisingly, the suicide rate in the U.S. has increased 23% over the last decade.  And a recent study shows that--again, surprise, surprise--the republican austerity agenda is to blame.  The study notes that when the wealth and wages of the working class falls, suicide rises--and that when the government provides proper stimulus during economic downturns, it stays flat.

At a time in America when the republican party controls one-third of our federal system, too many of our state legislatures, and flat doesn't give a shit about anyone not in the moneyed elite, when corporate America runs roughshod over its workers and owns our system of justice, and when the wealthy think they deserve every privilege that comes their way but think the rest of us should earn them, the only way any of us can spell hope is G-O-V-E-R-N-M-E-N-T.  As shown above, people's lives depend on it.

Our government may be incompetent at times and overmatched at others, but it is not intrinsically evil.  Those noted in the preceding paragraph are.

Peace,
emaycee

Channeling their inner psychopaths

According to Andy Kessler, the numbnuts founder of a billion dollar hedge fund (and why anyone would want to listen to any of the investor class when it comes to economics after they caused the epic collapse of our economy is beyond a mere mortal like me), I, emaycee, am personally responsible for poverty in America.

Well fuck me.

See, if I wasn't helping the non-profit I work for make money to give a few pennies to help the poor with their rent, or to get food for their kids, or decent clothing for their job interview, or a dental clinic to help with their tooth ache, and instead was out making a billion dollars, that money (all evidence to the contrary) would trickle down, and good jobs would magically appear and help America's poor.

I used to believe that it was possible to be a stupid millionaire (how much intelligence does it take to buy a lottery ticket?), but that there were no stupid billionaires.  Mr. Kessler has single-handedly changed my mind.  Setting aside the fact that poverty has existed pretty much since civilization began and much longer than the shell game that is investing on Wall Street, and wealth hasn't seemed to do much in all that time to end it, Mr. Kessler seems not to realize that if all of us could make billions investing, we fucking would be.  Kessler also seems to be ignorant about America's recent economic history (surprise!):  frankly, if you aren't born into money, your odds of being rich in America are just slightly less (and I do mean slightly) than your chances of winning tonight's Powerball drawing.

As if all of the above wasn't bad enough, Kessler also rips his own kid (no Father of the Year Awards are forthcoming, I suspect) in his piece in The Wall Street Journal for volunteering at a homeless shelter.  You have to be some kind of serious psychopath to humiliate your own child in the pages of a national newspaper.

I know that when it comes to integrity The Wall Street Journal is pretty much on par with say, AOL News, but even at that I'm pretty sure they wouldn't run an op-ed by Charles Manson, and they shouldn't be running one by a man who is as equally heartless when it comes to his fellow human beings.

Peace,
emaycee

We're #34!

Thank God for Romania.

Recent rankings from Unicef put the United States 34th out of 35 developed nations for relative childhood poverty rates.  With over 20 million of our children living below the poverty line (and considerably farther below the poverty line than those children in the other 33 nations), my question would be:  where's the fucking outrage?

I know those numbers are a good day at the office for republicans, who figure it's the kids faults for not being born to parents who were trust fund babies.  But what about Democrats?  Where's the Democratic politician, who, like FDR and the New Deal, LBJ and the Great Society, says these numbers are an embarrassment and are antithetical to everything this nation stands for?  Who says we can do much better than that and actually make it a priority?

Where?

Peace,
emaycee

Token numbers

For the first time since Pew began polling the question, less than half of all Americans believe in the superiority of our culture.  Most Americans now believe America is not just in a slump, but on the downside of permanent decline.  I have no idea if these opinions are correct--if history is any judge, America's decline will eventually happen.  The sliver of optimism that makes me a Liberal tells me it is years away still, but I wouldn't place any wagers on it.

I would, however, place wagers on some of the reasons why:

• Child poverty continues to increase in America--one in five American--that's right, fucking American--children are poor.
• 45.8 million Americans are seeking food stamps.  That's 15% of the population of the richest nation on earth--that means as you're walking down a city street, strolling through a busy mall, or sitting at the stadium watching the game that one and a half of every ten people you meet are in need of help to fucking eat.
• For the last two years, over 40% of the unemployed are long-term jobless--a figure unheard of before.  Doesn't stop republicans from trying to suck blood from a turnip in return for Democrats trying to help those long-term unemployed.
• We have fewer jobs--of any sort, let alone ones that make for a decent living.  Pay increased by 20% for the top 1%, but median pay for Americans fell to $26k a year--about $507 a week.  Try buying a home and putting kids through college on that pay.  Hell, funding an apartment and feeding a family would be hard on that shit pay.

I know it's an uncomfortable topic for the 1% and their enablers, but a return to the days of the robber barons will only hasten America's decline.  When a decent home, affordable transportation, a vacation once in a while, basic medical care, and simple sustenance become out of reach for more and more Americans while the richest of the rich continue to be grossly overpaid, it's going to get harder and harder for the poor majority to pick up weapons to defend them, harder and harder to maintain infrastructure for them, harder and harder to run their cash registers, fix their cars, take their blood pressure, and teach their children.

Where economic pessismism reigns for the majority, the death of a nation can't be far behind.

Peace,
emaycee