Just so we’re clear, Tom Corbett and the rest of the newly-elected right wing governors care about re-election about as much as Mohammed Atta cared about landing planes. They are rooks and knights in a game of eleven dimensional chest.

Cutting welfare to work programs and homelessness prevention programs while refusing to close corporate tax loopholes that would generate enough revenue to keep these programs open, as Tom Corbett and the Republicans’ budget does, makes no sense at all, unless you are deliberately trying to sabotage your state’s economy. Same with Christie’s cuts to AIDS, seniors, and education, or Walker’s devastating attacks on unions. Why would you do this? For greater political gain that goes beyond your own immediate career.

The goal of each of these governors, many in swing states like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Wisconsin is twofold: to return to power by generating as much economic misery as possible in the hope that people will turn on the Democrats (useless and flabby as they may be); and barring that, to punish the people that didn’t reward them with a vote.

It is deeply cynical, totally evil, politics. But it is what it is: the sooner activists and reformers understand and act on the fact that these people do not give a shit, the better. We gotta not only fight back, but do so in every way possible, pulling no punches. They have to be tea partied, but from the left. Bring the press and a hungry child whose mom lost her food stamps to meet Tom Corbett… but spring it on him in a “gotcha”moment. Set up a tent city filled with homeless seniors outside of every Dominic Pileggi event, and when the cops move in to throw ‘em out, resist and get arrested (and hopefully beaten: no one likes seeing an elderly woman with a black eye). Make Chris Christie yell at a child with AIDS. Surprise Tom Corbett with a crying child. Ratfuck ‘em in every way until these conservative Republican assholes, and their Democratic allies if necessary, are as popular as gonorrhea, and then ratfuck ‘em again til even their own spouses won’t sleep in the same room as them. I’ll even go so far as to recommend Breitbart tactics if necessary. Corbett doesn’t care if he’s re-elected, but you can bet Dominic Pileggi does. You can bet Mike Stack does. Start hitting the churches in the burbs, bringing old ladies to testify about the pain, split ‘em from the churches. We gotta make people like Corbett so toxic, his own party won’t stand with him. And it’s gotta be explicit: you stop fucking with our people, we’ll stop fucking with you.

We gotta start playing our own 11-dimensional chess, and playing to win: otherwise, we and the people we try to help are nothing but pawns in someone else’s game.

Faced with growing budget deficits and restive taxpayers, elected officials from Maine to Alabama, Ohio to Arizona, are pushing new legislation to limit the power of labor unions, particularly those representing government workers, in collective bargaining and politics. [...]

But in some cases — mostly in states with Republican governors and Republican statehouse majorities — officials are seeking more far-reaching, structural changes that would weaken the bargaining power and political influence of unions, including private sector ones. [...]
“We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” Mr. Walker, a Republican, said in a speech. “The bottom line is that we are going to look at every legal means we have to try to put that balance more on the side of taxpayers.”

Many of the proposals may never become law. But those that do are likely to reduce union influence in election campaigns, with reverberations for both parties.

A working man Working men and women can’t get nowhere today… because they’ve been ripped off by the rich, who now want working people to pay for economic mistakes of the wealthy.

Merle says it best:

…as does Lucy Parsons. If there IS to be a class war, Lucy told the working class how to fight the rich: “Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination and without pity.”

You know, it’s funny. I’ve never understood why the wealthy, who already have so much, are determined to have it all at the expense of everyone else. It’s been a long time since 1917 and even longer since 1789, when the rich (perhaps) learned why it’s important to keep the proles well-fed, employed, and financially secure. It’s not rocket science: well-fed, employed, secure proles don’t rise up en masse and kill rich people.

I suspect that 2011 is going to be a very bad year for the United States, with more desperate people doing something stupid as they watch their lives circle the drain. It’s already happening:

My Testament: Some people (the government sponsored media) will say I was evil, a monster (V)… no… I was just born poor in a country where the Wealthy manipulate, use, abuse, and economically enslave 95% of the population. Rich Republicans, Rich Democrats… same-same… rich… they take turns fleecing us… our few dollars… pyramiding the wealth for themselves. The 95%… the us, in US of A, are the neo slaves of the Global South. Our Masters, the Wealthy, do, as they like to us…

Let’s be honest: there is no one standing up for the poor, for working people, and for the middle class. Not Republicans and not Democrats. In a time when “When money equals political speech those who do not have a majority of the money will never have a majority of the political speech.”. And so, as the Glorious Obama Tax Cut indicates that, yes “Citizens United has codified the absolute political power of a small, super wealthy Oligarchy”, I direct you, again, to the words of Lucy Parsons, who a previous oligarchy deemed “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.”

To Tramps
by Lucy E. Parsons
Alarm, October 4, 1884. Also printed and distributed as a leaflet by the International Working People’s Association.

TO TRAMPS,
The Unemployed, the Disinherited, and Miserable.

A word to the 35,000 now tramping the streets of this great city, with hands in pockets, gazing listlessly about you at the evidence of wealth and pleasure of which you own no part, not sufficient even to purchase yourself a bit of food with which to appease the pangs of hunger now knawing at your vitals. It is with you and the hundreds of thousands of others similarly situated in this great land of plenty, that I wish to have a word.

Have you not worked hard all your life, since you were old enough for your labor to be of use in the production of wealth? Have you not toiled long, hard and laboriously in producing wealth? And in all those years of drudgery do you not know you have produced thousand upon thousands of dollars’ worth of wealth, which you did not then, do not now, and unless you ACT, never will, own any part in? Do you not know that when you were harnessed to a machine and that machine harnessed to steam, and thus you toiled your 10, 12 and 16 hours in the 24, that during this time in all these years you received only enough of your labor product to furnish yourself the bare, coarse necessaries of life, and that when you wished to purchase anything for yourself and family it always had to be of the cheapest quality? If you wanted to go anywhere you had to wait until Sunday, so little did you receive for your unremitting toil that you dare not stop for a moment, as it were? And do you not know that with all your squeezing, pinching and economizing you never were enabled to keep but a few days ahead of the wolves of want? And that at last when the caprice of your employer saw fit to create an artificial famine by limiting production, that the fires in the furnace were extinguished, the iron horse to which you had been harnessed was stilled; the factory door locked up, you turned upon the highway a tramp, with hunger in your stomach and rags upon your back?

The days of tramps are back, by the way.

Yet your employer told you that it was overproduction which made him close up. Who cared for the bitter tears and heart-pangs of your loving wife and helpless children, when you bid them a loving “God bless you” and turned upon the tramper’s road to seek employment elsewhere? I say, who cared for those heartaches and pains? You were only a tramp now, to be execrated and denounced as a “worthless tramp and a vagrant” by that very class who had been engaged all those years in robbing you and yours. Then can you not see that the “good boss” or the “bad boss” cuts no figure whatever? that you are the common prey of both, and that their mission is simply robbery? Can you not see that it is the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM and not the “boss” which must be changed?

Now, when all these bright summer and autumn days are going by and you have no employment, and consequently can save up nothing, and when the winter’s blast sweeps down from the north and all the earth is wrapped in a shroud of ice, hearken not to the voice of the hyprocrite who will tell you that it was ordained of God that “the poor ye have always”; or to the arrogant robber who will say to you that you “drank up all your wages last summer when you had work, and that is the reason why you have nothing now, and the workhouse or the workyard is too good for you; that you ought to be shot.” And shoot you they will if you present your petitions in too emphatic a manner. So hearken not to them, but list! Next winter when the cold blasts are creeping through the rents in your seedy garments, when the frost is biting your feet through the holes in your worn-out shoes, and when all wretchedness seems to have centered in and upon you, when misery has marked you for her own and life has become a burden and existence a mockery, when you have walked the streets by day and slept upon hard boards by night, and at last determine by your own hand to take your life, – for you would rather go out into utter nothingness than to longer endure an existence which has become such a burden – so, perchance, you determine to dash yourself into the cold embrace of the lake rather than longer suffer thus. But halt, before you commit this last tragic act in the drama of your simple existence. Stop! Is there nothing you can do to insure those whom you are about to orphan, against a like fate? The waves will only dash over you in mockery of your rash act; but stroll you down the avenues of the rich and look through the magnificent plate windows into their voluptuous homes, and here you will discover the very identical robbers who have despoiled you and yours. Then let your tragedy be enacted here! Awaken them from their wanton sport at your expense! Send forth your petition and let them read it by the red glare of destruction. Thus when you cast “one long lingering look behind” you can be assured that you have spoken to these robbers in the only language which they have ever been able to understand, for they have never yet deigned to notice any petition from their slaves that they were not compelled to read by the red glare bursting from the cannon’s mouths, or that was not handed to them upon the point of the sword. You need no organization when you make up your mind to present this kind of petition. In fact, an organization would be a detriment to you; but each of you hungry tramps who read these lines, avail yourselves of those little methods of warfare which Science has placed in the hands of the poor man, and you will become a power in this or any other land.

Learn the use of explosives!

Dedicated to the tramps by Lucy E. Parsons.

Lucy also said, “Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or knife on the steps of the palace of the rich and stab or shoot their owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination and without pity.”

Dear Senator Casey,

I am aghast and disgusted that you voted for this destructive tax cut for the wealthiest Americans.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. With a net worth of more half a million dollars in 2008, you will clearly benefit personally from this cut. At the same time, you have caused taxes to RISE for low-income Pennsylvanians, including my brother (who i have cc-ed, so he knows what his senator is up to).

You have now helped open the door to social security cuts, raised the taxes of very low-income people like my brother, and given a massive gift to the wealthiest among us at a time when millions of Pennsylvanians are out of work. Your phone staff tell me that’s because you believe that the wealthy create jobs: ,a href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/01/AR2010010101196.html”>this is simply not true, and all one needs to do to see the proof is look at George W. Bush’s record.

I will quote it for you:

“There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.

Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999 — and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. The Aughts were the first decade of falling median incomes since figures were first compiled in the 1960s.”

And surprise, surprise: that growth ended when Bush passed tax cuts for the wealthiest. The rich don’t spend their money the way middle class and working class people do: in fact they tend to invest in in multinational corporations that send good American jobs to China. So unless you want staff to amend your statement to “the senator believes that the cut will produce jobs for people in other countries that are not the US”, I suggest you start coming up with a better excuse for this travesty of a vote.

Economists agree that this cut will not create jobs.

Tax cuts, as has been argued by almost every reputable economist, are the worst form of economic stimulus. You can read more here.

Senator Casey, I am asking myself why I bothered to vote at all. If all the Democrats stand for is tax cuts for the wealthy, they’re not really the party of working people. If the Democrats won’t protect Social Security, why should working people vote for them?

I am extremely angry with you today. I will not be supporting you when you run again. We already have a Senator who is hostile to the working class, bends over backwards to accommodate the wealthy, and who opposes reproductive rights. That Senator’s name is Pat Toomey, and I didn’t vote for him either.

I have copied this email to many of my friends and colleagues, and I encourage them to share it with their circle of friends as well. People should know what kind of representation they’re getting in DC (or in the case of Pennsylvania’s working class, middle class, and unemployed families, NOT getting).

This was a bad deal, and I suspect that you know it. Rest assured, working people will not forget this vote, especially when the economy fails to recover in 2011 and 2012. At that point, I expect someone with an actual economic vision for the state and the nation will primary you.

Sincerely,

Brendan Skwire

You can watch the whole thing here.

and call me a firebagger all you want: jane hamsher has passion and grit that you rarely see anywhere else.

I learned earlier this year that i may be eligible for income based repayment:

You may enter IBR if your federal student loan debt is high relative to your income and family size. While your lender will perform the calculation to determine your eligibility, you can use the Department’s IBR calculator to estimate if you would likely benefit from the IBR plan. It looks at your income, family size, and state of residence to calculate your IBR monthly payment amount. If that amount is lower than the monthly payment you would be required to pay on your eligible loans under a 10-year standard repayment plan, based on the greater of the amount you owed on your loans when they initially entered repayment, or the amount you owe at the time you request IBR, then you are eligible to repay your loans under IBR.

IBR is recommended for people who work in the non-profit field, or as teachers, cops, firefighters. And best of all, if i work in public service for ten years, i cna get the whole thing forgiven.

I wish I’d done this sooner. By September, i expect to be in school, which means my loans go into deferment (ie, interest doesn’t accrue). When I get done in 2013, I’ll be a teacher. Within ten years, that debt will be discharged. Halle-fucking-lujah.

The comments came after a much-anticipated meeting at the White House between Obama and GOP leaders, their first face-to-face encounter since Democrats suffered heavy losses on Election Day. No formal agreement was made, but the meeting marked a sharp departure from the practice of the past two years, when Obama dealt almost exclusively with Democrats – in part because Republicans were content to try to block his every move.

On Tuesday, according to people in the room, both sides engaged in the kind of cross-party dealmaking that seems to have faded away in today’s Washington. The participants emerged smiling and with a loose framework – though they did not outline it publicly – that could result in the temporary extension of all the tax cuts…

We all know that’s coming: someone ought to change that “could” in the last sentence to “will”.

Via NYCEve:

On August 4th in Washington D.C. the National Association of Free Clinics holds a Free Clinic at the Walter E Washington Convention Center in Washington DC.

An invitation from Nicole Lamoureux the executive director of the Free Clinic Association went to every member of Congress and the United States Senate. 535 in total. 435 Members of the House and 100 members of the U.S. Senate.

To date, Nicole has had one response, from Donna Edwards. Donna is coming on August 4th.

If you refuse to understand what this says about our government and our country, then with due respect, you’re being willfully blind.

Imagine that: in the millionaires club we call “the Senate”, not one single elected representative will come see the dire plight of their constituents. And of the House, only one person is coming.

I think that’s shameful (although perhaps that’s just a reflection of my “permanent outrage and relentless negativity fostered and fueled by the blogosphere.”). When millions of Americans don’t have healthcare or even access to it, when millions are out of work and have lost their insurance, with the cost of health care increasing for the next couple of years, and when the exchanges seem to me to be unaffordable,the refusal to attend seemd to me like sticking one’s head in the sand. Or, to channel Douglas Adams, it seemed like my senators and representativeswere emulating the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal”…

Known for its never-ending hunger and its mind boggling stupidity, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal is such a stupid animal that it thinks if you can’t see it, it can’t see you.

…so I called both of my senators and asked why they weren’t attending.

Specter’s office was absolutely useless: the woman who spoke to me told me she’s “not allowed” to give out the email for the soon-to-be-retired senator’s scheduler. Bob Casey’s office was fairly helpful, although the woman I spoke to couldn’t explain why he hadn’t signed up. She gave me the email address of his scheduler and urged me to send the information, which I did. I also edited the letter for outreach to Representatives Sestak, Fattah, Schwartz, and Brady

Dear Senator Casey:

It has come to my attention that you received, but did not respond to, an invitation to the August 4 2010 Free Clinic, to be held at the Walter E. Washington Convention center in washington DC. I am writing to inquire as to why you are not attending, and to exhort you to go. Here is the link for more information, with some choice quotes

Links don’t show up well in my blockquotes, so here it is for you, dearest reader. Continuing…

“An invitation from Nicole Lamoureux the executive director of the Free Clinic Association went to every member of Congress and the United States Senate. 535 in total. 435 Members of the House and 100 members of the U.S. Senate.

To date, Nicole has had one response, from Donna Edwards. Donna is coming on August 4th.”

Senator Casey, it’s truly shameful that you and the rest of the Senate have essentially refused to go to this clinic: with millions of people unemployed and millions more either without health care or access to health care, closing our eyes to the plight of the poor and the middle class is not an option. You need to see with your own eyes the condition of our families, especially given that health care costs are expected to RISE over the next couple of years.

Senator Casey, I appreciated your stand for a public option, and was gravely disappointed when the Senate passed the Finance Committee’s bill instead of your own. Go to this clinic: then you will be able to tell your colleagues that adding a public option is of utmost importance.

Yours,

Brendan Skwire

I sent similar letters to my Congresscritters as well. I hope that you’ll cus and paste and send similar harangues to whoever purports to represent you in DC too.

UPDATE: Schwartz ain’t going:

Brendan,

Thank you for your email. I do appreciate you following up with our office concerning the invitation for the Free Clinic on August 4, 2010 at the Walter Washington Convention Center here in Washington, DC. The Congresswoman will unfortunately not be able to attend the event because she will be back in her district as that will be the first full week of the Congressional Summer District Work Period. We regret that she will not be able to make an appearance, but please rest assured that she will continue to work and advocate on behalf of the millions of unemployed citizens in the 13th Congressional District, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and throughout the nation.

Best,

Carlton
Executive Assistant/Scheduler
U.S. Representative Allyson Y. Schwartz (PA-13)

This, for example, is what used to be called a “seagull”:

Now it looks like a floating piece of diarrhea. Thanks BP, you fucking ASSHOLES. How are those 760 safety violations treating you?

Here’s a brown pelican, still brown but not in the same way:

Poor thing is just coated in that shit: here’s a list of what the oil does to birds:

Oil that sticks to fur or feathers, usually crude and bunker fuels, can cause many problems. Some of these problems are:

* hypothermia in birds by reducing or destroying the insulation and waterproofing properties of their feathers;…
* birds become easy prey, as their feathers being matted by oil make them less able to fly away;…
* birds sink or drown because oiled feathers weigh more and their sticky feathers cannot trap enough air between them to keep them buoyant;…
* birds lose body weight as their metabolism tries to combat low body temperature;
* birds become dehydrated and can starve as they give up or reduce drinking, diving and swimming to look for food;
* damage to the insides of animals and birds bodies, for example by causing ulcers or bleeding in their stomachs if they ingest the oil by accident.

I edited out the stuff about seals, which is just as disturbing.

here’s another bird, this one probably the saddest picture of all:

I want every goddamn BP executive in prison, preferably on a death row in Texas, where they hand out trips to Ol’ Sparky like penny candy. And when they are executed, I want it to be aired on national TV during prime time. After they’re dead, the heads should be displayed on 20′ pikes in front of the New York Stock Exchange.

FUCK YOU BP, FUCK YOU TONY HAYWARD, YOU SHOULD ALL COMMIT SUICIDE FOR RUINING SO MANY HUMAN AND ANIMAL LIVES.