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New York, 9:41 PM
Tue Dec 1
50 posts in the last 24 hours
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04:49 PM
Second: every time I glance in the direction of my diploma, then glance at the stack of loan bills which just replaced the "$0.00 due," with real numbers I get angry at myself for having a really foreign name/not becoming an engineer. Curse you, prestigious university for not living up to your end of the deal!
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The experts did caution, however, that this is poor advice for those wishing to become NBA power forwards and/or gangsta rappers.
04:05 PM
Very Mad TV.
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04:39 PM
Or some such thing.
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11/30/09
The details historically came under various provisions of the Farm Bill of the moment. Not so much to do with welfare.
11/30/09
So I went down to the office and applied. The look on the woman's face was bad enough, until she said, "Honey, you're white. White girls in college don't go on food stamps. You call your daddy and just have him take you to Albertson's once a week. You'll be fine."
And then she turned back to her coworker to gossip.
I left, ashamed. Didn't even try arguing with her. I ended up surviving on a two-pronged method: prodding my mom to take me to Costco, where I would buy bulk-sized boxes of Bisquick, which would keep me fed through the week, until I'd go out on a date over the weekend and chow down on the dude's dime. It was the only way I survived until I moved in with my boyfriend-now-husband.
Which is what I think about during my monthly donation trips to the pantry. Nobody should have to be that hungry and that desperate.
11/29/09
It isn't logical and it doesn't reflect the reality of poverty in this country, but I'm sure it makes people feel better on some level. Too bad it also means they feel like they can turn their backs on their fellow human beings (while feeling superior, no less).
11/30/09
11/30/09
And the idea that it's some kind of family planning issue...even assuming that is true, the idea that some child should have to starve or otherwise suffer because of his/her parent's own stupidity is ridiculous. No doubt many of the people chiding the parents in that situation are also staunchly pro-life.
11/29/09
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11/29/09
That's the shame the people who spoke to the reporter felt. Some of these parents were only desperate to feed their kids. While both parents were working. And they felt ashamed at this assistance.
The fact is : the working class has been utterly destroyed, decimated, brought to its knees by thirty years of Reaganism, Republican ideology in the US. And the culture makes the victims feel shame for it. As if it's their own fault.
The tens of millions of working-class people who've lost their jobs due to outsourcing, factory closings, pay cuts, concessions and disappearing blue-collar work are told it's their own fault. If only you went to the right school, did the right thing, pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. Tens of millions of workers all thinking it's their own personal failure that they lost their good job when the factory closed.
This is unbelievably cruel. In America, everyone thinks they're middle class. It's impolite to speak of it. But I am appalled and disgusted that our national media scarcely sees fit to look closely at the destruction- the working class, the backbone of American prosperity and industriousness, has been wiped out. Is starved. Is left to blame themselves that they aren't CEO's or highly paid television commentators.
Instead, let's criticize how Obama gave his polite bow to the Emperor of Japan, whether he should have , and next up we'll have a right wing retard make the reasonable case that Obama should have punched the guy out in revengefor Pearl Harbor, by some inordinately respected right-wing warmonger.
In the meantime, the Republican party's long war on the good people of America continues. We have no money for health care but we'll spend ten times that on foreign wars. Sign your son up! We've eradicated your jobs and lives, it's cheaper to enslave overseas. But stop your whining. Not our fault you didn't go to Harvard. Your kids are hungry? Here's your foodstamps, loser. Til we get rid of that too.
11/29/09
11/29/09
Call what I ask next some form of stupid optimism: how do we de-Reaganize the country?
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11/29/09
if it's policy you're interested in - (again, as small as it may seem) send your congressmen a letter/call them/fax them. even once. (six times works too, btw) :D
optimism is never stupid. non-action when you feel an emotional reaction to a problem is, perhaps, defeatism.
11/29/09
The trickle-down economy is the biggest scam in American history. It's completely nuts that people even bought into it. Considering that wealthy people tend to SAVE far more money, percentage wise, than they spend compared to the middle and lower class (who need to spend that larger percentage of money on food and shelter), it makes no sense just from a numerical standpoint. But even further, it's not like these wealthy people are waltzing into a mom and pop shop to buy their stuff - they buy their consumer goods from huge chains just like everyone else, putting their money into the pockets of other wealthy people, with only 7-10 dollars an hour "trickling down" to the average worker. Then, all these people with their infinite wealth get policy power by either befriending politicians (lobbying) or becoming politicians (Bloomberg, Bush, et al billionaire politicians). Also, the wonders of globalization have made loyalty of American company's to American interests pretty much non-existent, so no company or executive will stick their necks out to help everyone if it even marginally affects their own bottom line, and instead uses tax-deductible charity donations to make it seem like they're helping the people, when they're just cutting back their government expenses. Oh, and let's not forget the wonders of high-priced accounting practices, which cut down the taxes paid by the wealthy and huge corporations back to a tiny percent, whereas the average joe has no access to this and has to pay a monstrous chunk of his income each year.
Shit, that's pretty much a manifesto I just wrote - long and unfocused. I'll probably have the FBI at my house in ten minutes.
11/29/09
All jesting aside, and with sincere apologies to Dylan Thomas, I think it's essential that you continue to "rage, rage against the lying of the right."
I'd like to believe, as Dr. King did, that the arc of history will eventually bend towards justice.
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11/30/09
That's definitely not something you need to work on.
Keep shining!
11/30/09
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11/29/09
[www.informationclearinghouse.info]
Cross of Iron Speech
Address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower "The Chance for Peace" delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms in not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
...
If we strive but fail and the world remains armed against itself, it at least need be divided no longer in its clear knowledge of who has condemned humankind to this fate
11/29/09
I imagine Eisenhower would be hanging out with Dennis Kucinich on the 'believes in fairies, tree gnomes, social justice and world peace' modern political scale.
Didn't his granddaughter work for Obama's campaign?
11/29/09
Ike would be tried for treason by Beck, Limbaugh and Palin -- the idiot three musketeers that are leading the red state, hate blinded, low IQ masses down the garden path. The smarter richer people who support that agenda are at least working in their own short term interests. The misled masses are just ignorant and hateful. Of course it won't be good for the riches when things here become like in Latin America, where it's all walled compounds and armed bodyguards because the poors have been so completely dispossessed of everything that they really don't give a shit anymore.
11/29/09
Julie Nixon Eisenhower actually married Ike's son and supported Obama:
[thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com]
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11/30/09
These rich, pontificating assholes and their policy think tanks and all their grandiose words? They have no idea at all.
11/30/09
11/29/09
This fucking country.
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11/29/09
Uh, make that the Old Dixie. I live in Utah and, along with Nevada and Idaho, we yield to NO ONE in our redness, but are among the lowest food stamp recipients.
Fortunately, we have lots of roadkill.
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