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Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures….or… Let’s just say the Republicans are in POWER!

  • Posted on March 13, 2011 at 12:10 am

Here in Michigan we are that sleepy old state that no one is paying attention to while everything seems to be going on in Wisconsin.  However, it seems like a coordinated battle plan has been drawn by many of the Republican governors in some very key political states all at the same time.  I don’t think this is a coincidence.  The main battles are taking place in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Florida but of course there is also New Jersey as well as other states that I’m not watching as closely as my own.  http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/11/us-usa-unions-states-idUSTRE7295QI20110311

One of the things I find really interesting is how close these states have been in recent national political elections.  It seems that all of these governors are hell bent on destroying unions, teachers’ unions especially.  The NEA is the biggest of all.  It is the largest professional organization and labor union in the United States.  Republicans have criticized it for years as being a big supporter of the Democratic Party.  In Michigan the MEA has supported more Democrats but has also supported a few Republicans.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUpO1QFMDtM

Here is more showcasing the sneaky underhanded tactics being used by these governors to push through their ideology much like Wisconsin’s Governor Walker pushed through his plan in the dead of night.

http://www.freep.com/article/20110311/NEWS15/103110454/0/ENT04/-100-cost-shield-Gov-Rick-Snyder-s-tax-proposal-from-voters?odyssey=nav|head

The obvious goal is about taking away the financial support to the Democratic Party and to create an environment where business can have whatever they want.  A few years ago at our school everyone read a book entitled, Whatever It Takes.  Of course that book was about educating students.  These governors are using techniques that embody that spirit of whatever it takes to destroy the middle class.  John Edwards always said he wanted to be the voice for the voiceless.  Well, we know John has been permanently derailed because of the choices he made with Rielle Hunter and the fact that the Democratic Party, much like the Republicans, really don’t care about the poor and the voiceless.  However, I must mention here that Newt Gingrich can double down on being bad to his many wives and still gets respect from the Republican Party.  The reason I mention John here is no one is speaking for the voiceless, the poor and the disenfranchised.  President Obama is working as hard as the Republicans at thinking up new ways to screw the poor and the middle class.  Just keep this tidbit in your mind as you read on because no politician is really speaking for the disenfranchised today.  All we hear from politicians is how we have to have a “shared sacrifice”.  I don’t want to get too sidetracked from things but I wonder why these politicians in the following post aren’t sacrificing.  They want everyone else to sacrifice.   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/08/wisconsin-state-senate-republicans_n_833058.html

The first time I heard about farm subsidies is back in the seventies when I was young.  I was watching the Johnny Carson show.  Johnny had John Wayne on his show.  John Wayne was laughing about how the government pays him not to farm.  Now that’s class warfare!  The current Republican governors all seem to want to give massive tax breaks to corporations; you know those entities that the Supreme Court fully recognizes for their “corporate personhood”.  It seems to me that for years I’ve heard Republicans chastising Democrats for creating “class warfare”.  The Democrats are always pointing out the massive divide between the rich and the poor.  Unfortunately, this only seems to happen around election time, but it’s enough to get the Republicans crying for mercy.  However, truthfully the Republicans have declared a sort of war on the middle class and the poor in this country.  The class warfare of today is created through governmental policies that cater to the whims of the wealthy and big corporations while slashing everything from education to any assistance to the poor or disenfranchised.  I have always believed the one thing that can help to elevate a society is a good education.  It is getting harder and harder to obtain that education when policies are in place to ensure that it fails.  Budget cuts to education are designed really to keep the poor and middle class where they belong, dumb and uneducated.  If enough people were truly educated in this country, they might do something about the sorry state of our democracy.  We hear all about how education is broken but truthfully if you want a good education in this country you better fix poverty.  I know right now there will be some narrow minded person sitting here reading this and thinking how the poor will always be with us.  That’s uncreative, small minded thinking in my book.  The great leveler in society is education because it opens many doors that would be otherwise closed.

If you will remember back to when President Bush was in office you will remember that we had all of those color coded alerts about potential terrorism in our country.  We were constantly kept in a state of fear and panic at the thought that a terrorist might be living next door to us.  These terror alerts were manipulating us during the 2004 election.  Whenever John Kerry would go up in the polls, a new terror alert would be announced and like the sheep we are we would do whatever we were alerted to do.  Today the constant drumbeat has been about those lousy pubic unions and how they are screwing up our society.  Yes, it’s the lousy teachers that suck the blood and life from our society.  Even though some of them may give hope to the hopeless, they are the new enemy of the poor.  If it wasn’t for those greedy teachers, the poor would have money.  Sometimes you know the enemy of your enemy is your friend.  Those Republicans have called for a moratorium on spending for anything that will help you or me.  However, if there is some new subsidy or tax break they can give to corporations and the wealthy they’ll get right on it because they still pretend to believe in Reaganomics where that “trickle down” theory was invented.  Truthfully, our society is becoming one of the wealthy and everyone else that are left to “attend” to the wealthy.  I’ve never been able to figure out why enough isn’t enough for the wealthy.  How many billions do you need?  That trickle down theory just doesn’t work because the richer someone at the top gets, the richer they want to be.  They don’t let it trickle down and the only way you are going to get it to trickle down is through government policies that ensure that it does.  Our “desperate times” are created by policies designed to make the rich get richer and screw the poor.  Desperate times call for desperate measures.  Unfortunately, we don’t truly know how desperate we all are until we get a Republican governor to show us!  I’ll leave you with the desperate people in Wisconsin that have done everything they can to make our country wake up to what’s really going on.  This clip includes Michael Moore on the Rachel Maddow show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYrv65HufIs

Here’s part 2 of that show!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvqQ_olFJ2U&feature=related

Continue reading Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures….or… Let’s just say the Republicans are in POWER! »

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A Plan for America…..My Brother…and George Carlin

  • Posted on February 19, 2011 at 12:14 pm

Yesterday I got an email from my brother Jim.  Jim and I can agree on some things and disagree on others.  I found his email really interesting and I decided I would share it with you because it will make everyone “think” and we all know the mind is a terrible thing to waste.  Also, earlier in the week someone had posted a George Carlin video on the Confluence in a comment and it got me thinking.  All of this to me is tied together and this is my unique way of putting it together for people who might read my blog.  All I can say is “God Bless George” he was a brilliant comedian.  It’s amazing how he is gone but what he has said is still remarkably relevant today.  If you really can’t handle his “language” then don’t watch it, but really are you that sheltered?

This is my brother’s email in its entirety:

Katie

The Challenge for President Obama

President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech, stated “but to win the future, we’ll need to take on challenges that have been decades in the making”. The challenge that needs addressing is correcting our flawed financial system. We need a monetary system that works for all the American people.

Since the on-set of this very deep recession, the Federal Reserve has granted loans to the banks and associated financial institutions totaling over nine trillion dollars and purchased over two trillion dollars of toxic assets; and the Federal government has passed another seven hundred billion dollars directly to these entities with a similar amount to the states, much of which also has found its way to these institutions. And in the process of doing these things, the government has incurred an additional debt of five trillion dollars.

The President inferred in his speech last night that it was worth it as he now tells us this recession is over, in his words: “…broken the back of the recession”. But we now have an official unemployment number of near ten percent and possibly fifteen to twenty percent more under-employed or discouraged from actively seeking work. We also have during this time home foreclosures in the millions. These numbers are not so different from those at the depths of the Great Depression.

Had this debt increase of five trillion dollars been disbursed directly to the people, each would have received about Twenty two thousand five hundred dollars ($22,500). That would be Forty five thousand dollars ($45,000) for most every American family, much of which would have gone to buying down personal debt. This transfer of money directly to the people would have incurred no debt to the government, as the Federal government has the power to create its own money, as Abraham Lincoln did during our Civil War with the famous greenbacks.

But instead of passing this debt free money directly to the American people, this government Lincoln told us was of the people, by the people, and for the people, passed this money to the banks and received it back as debt. This surely will assure the people’s perpetual indebtedness to the banks and their associate elites, both in retiring personal debt and in paying higher taxes to meet the interest payments on the government’s debt.

As a people we could accept nothing stupider than to allow our government to assign this the most important part of our economic life: the control of our monetary system; to this privileged private group. But to talk about our government creating our money is verboten in the mainstream media. The reason seems rather obvious but until we correct this component of our economic life we will continue to digress with our way of life progressively worsening until we truly are a slave state.

And until we get help at least from some of the mainstream media, the greenbacks Lincoln used to free the slaves that have now been given fully to the banking system will continue to be used to enslave us all.

Jim

You are probably thinking about those Lincoln greenbacks, so here is a link.  From my perspective the politicians should be listening more to the American people and less to the corporations.

http://www.xat.org/xat/usury.html

There is more here on the Second Bank mentioned in that link under Andrew Jackson.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bank_of_the_United_States

If you are interested in more of what my brother has to say and his thoughts, here is a link to a book he has written.  http://www.aplanforamerica.org/

Some of you may be wondering why I haven’t posted on what is happening in Wisconsin.  I’m working on a post about that and hope to have it up in a day or two.  We have to do more than just play around with Facebook and social network websites.  We all need to do our due diligence to become better informed citizens of the world.  Otherwise, we will continue to get the type of corporate government we seem to have in power right now.

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Women, Power and True Liberation

  • Posted on July 28, 2010 at 4:03 pm

Woman of Liberty

It can be a great time to be a woman but all that has happened in both politics with Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, in the media with Mel Gibson and his wife, and in the entertainment business with the antics of women like Lady Gaga I have been questioning the direction and movement of women’s liberation.  I have concluded that while it may appear that women have come a long way, there is much more to do to secure true liberation.

When I was a young woman in the seventies I remember this “bacon” commercial for Enjoli.

It actually is pretty silly.  Women were supposed to have it all and be it all.  Women and men expected a lot from women.  This commercial says we can have it all and our man too, as long as we can still cook, clean, take care of him and still look and smell wonderful!  Women’s liberation was all the talk.  We knew we were going to pass the equal rights amendment.  It was our time, or was it?  Civil rights legislation had passed so it was our turn, right?  Between Roe vs. Wade and the sexual revolution the times had to be changing.  During the seventies Title IX was passed.

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance…

—United States Code Section 20

So of course the equal rights amendment would pass too.  To my surprise the equal rights amendment was never passed.  It needed 38 states to ratify it.  It fell short by three states.  http://www.equalrightsamendment.org/ Many are still hopeful that it can be passed!

In my opinion the seventies were a time of real growth for women through education and their own spiritual awakening.  I grew up in a large family of 14 children.  I had much more opportunity in the seventies than my two sisters that were ten and twelve years older than me had in the sixties.  I knew I was going to college.  That thought wasn’t as clear for my sisters.  Part of it was probably because I was the youngest of those 14 children.  My parents were teachers through much of my real formative years and part of it was that my parents were financially better off in the seventies as opposed to the sixties.  However, a big part of it was because of the expectations of young women in the early sixties were different than in the early seventies.  The seventies also was a time of absolute turmoil with the Watergate scandal and the oil embargo.  However, it was a time when I was able to discover art and who I am as a person.

I went to Michigan State University and I had more freedom than I had ever known as a small town girl growing up in Kingston, Cass City and Maple City.  I met many different people from very different cultures than my own and I learned about tolerance, acceptance and understanding.  These really are the backbone of what I believe as a person today.  We are not all the same and that is the beauty of the human race.  I learned to embrace other people and to try and keep my mind open to the possibility that I wasn’t always “right” about everything.  MSU was a Utopian society for me.  Even though it was actually going through a crime spree of rapes during some of the time I was there, I was kept blissfully dumb about most of what was going on with that type of stuff.  I was ever the optimist and thought this was what the real world is all about.  The Utopian society of college where everyone wants to learn and the mind is like a sponge was where I was at.  I felt like I was doing something big, something real.

The real world is not the utopian college world of the seventies.  In the real world women were still subjected to the same degradation with commercials and advertising and general life that has always been present.  Today it seems like a lot of women are working but not because they are seeking their life dream but out of necessity for the family good.  Unfortunately, women are still getting paid less than their male counterparts.

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/38281/20100726/wage-discrimination-by-gender.htm

http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/panelists/2010/07/pink-ghettos-fighting-for-equal-pay.html?hpid=talkbox1

For men this is also a problem because with the current economy it is cheaper to hire women than men!

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/breadwinner-role-for-one-woman-in-three-but-pay-gap-at-its-widest-1.1042404

I’m also perplexed by the modern woman image that is often portrayed in advertising, movies, etc.  The modern woman of today is still very much dependent on her visual appeal to a man.  The modern woman is beautiful, fit and oh so sculpted by surgery and botox treatments.

The modern woman is a poor sister to the seventies woman as the modern woman has grown up thinking that she is absolutely equal in the eyes of the law and everyone else when the truth has so many more deceptive layers.  The modern woman is still subject to the same forms of degradation that her ancestors faced.  http://www.mincava.umn.edu/documents/herstory/herstory.html

Women may think they have come a long way and perhaps in some ways they have but in the area of abuse, power and control I think “We have miles to go before we sleep.”  Women are still subject to the laws made by men.  In our country where women make up 50.7% of the population we are still far behind in our political representation.  http://contexts.org/socimages/2008/05/18/comparison-of-percentage-of-women-in-state-legislatures-2008/

Some may think I am being picky here but it is time for women to be given the same rights as men.  The only way this can really be accomplished is through political representation.  As long as men are writing the laws from a man’s perspective, some areas that pertain to women will always be overlooked.  Politics is powerful.  There has to be a reason that politicians will raise millions of dollars for a seat that pays much less than the cost of running for it.  As much as we hear about all of the altruistic reasons these politicians run for office, the truth is politics is powerful and it is a magnet for money and more power.  Men have known this for years.  Women haven’t given enough thought about running for office for a variety of reasons.  Maybe they’re too busy raising their children or maybe they don’t have the confidence to run for office but it is time for women to stand up and be counted in the political arena.

If we are ever going to have the first woman president, we must engage more women in the political process.  Otherwise, that glass ceiling will never truly be broken.  I learned a lot during the 2008 election.  Both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin were subjected to systematic abuse by the media and even other politicians.  I don’t know why men are afraid of these women but it was pretty evident throughout the election cycle.  Both Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson were afraid of a Hillary Clinton presidency.  I remember Tucker talking about crossing his legs in reference to Hillary.  I guess he thought she was one “castrating bitch”.  Chris wasn’t any better and of course he had such a fondness for Barack that he had a special “tingle” up his leg.  He also said on many occasions that Hillary wouldn’t be where she is today if it wasn’t for her husband.  He never once thought about the fact that Bill might not have been president if it wasn’t for Hillary.   Hillary was referred to being a “bitch” so many times that I have lost count and we all heard so much about her “cankles”.  Where Palin was concerned there was much emphasis on her looks and many sexual innuendos were made in regards to that.  She had her legs photographed sans her body.  I cannot imagine a man being photographed that way.  Men on the other hand can be bald, fat and ugly and still run for office and make it.

This is such a double standard that it is not hard to understand why many women may fear running for office.  However, I believe until we get that proper representation we will always still be second class citizens in many ways.  I hope there are women out there that are brave and willing to step up and run for office.  We must support these women as they run for office.  We must have true representation in our political system.  It cannot be a “good old boys” club that is unattainable by women.  In order for true equality we must win in politics as well as our own personal lives.  I encourage everyone to support women in politics.  They are your mothers, wives, sisters, friends but most of all they are your equal even if the law doesn’t fully recognize this.



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