(Source: wearethe99percent)
MORNING CONSTITUTIONAL 08/17/11
Well the local Tea Party finally got their way. The final act of our town’s Public Works department (before it was dissolved completely itself) was to dismantle the town’s four municipal children’s playgrounds.
All the equipment was ripped out and the sand was sprinkled with ground up glass shards to discourage any kids from returning. All of this follows the recent city council’s resolution to imprison all the volunteer crossing guards and do away with most of the town’s stop signs. “No limits on liberty” is the rallying cry and part of the reason so many of my neighbor have begun acquiring pit bulls and walking around topless.
Anyway, all the playground equipment, gnarled and bent and broken as it is, had to go somewhere. So, of course, it was dumped in a heap in my driveway. I can make out Monkey Bars and Slides and the wrong ends of some Swing Sets. The rest of it looks like a horrible puddle from my nightmares about giant tidal waves of scrap metal.
My fear is a bunch of crows taking up residence under the pile. I guess I’ll put a tarp over it until spring but I’m going to have to find some kind of robot farm to donate it to eventually.
(Source: humandog.tv)
Raise Taxes on the Wealthy
I fully support increasing income taxes on the wealthy.
START HERE:
Any personal income above $3 Million should be taxed at a rate of 90%.
Go on to address other types of income.
If the richest assholes in our land want to live like kings off defense contracts and other parasitic endeavors they’re going to have to pay for it.
Do not touch Social Security or Medicare.
RESUME YOUR SATURDAY ACTIVITY.
This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it.
The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military. Liberals, whose children are more often to be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base. They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two years later and stood by as our banks were turned over to Wall Street speculators. They signed on, by supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the corporate rape carried out in the name of globalization and endless war, and they ignored the plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families.
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Chris Hedges posted on TruthDig.com This is the idea that leaves me and millions of others in impotent, confusing, political limbo. |
Transmogrified by industrial materialism, we have become what we own. More specifically, what we are observed by the rest of our society as owning.
In the commodified society of industrial materialism, owning is being. So much so, that politicians bandy the term “ownership society” about, not only without causing the public to gag, but to cheer. Even liberals who claim to dislike the term don’t want to be in a “We don’t own shit society.”
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| — | Joe Bageant |
The answer to the problem: eliminate all these distinct pools and replace them with one, big nationwide pool, with everybody in and nobody out, as would be provided by a single-payer system. Multiple pools, multiple insurance carriers, multiple marketing systems, and all the other redundant layers of bureaucracy required in the for-profit insurance scheme simply add unnecessary cost – and no value – to the delivery of health care.
Of course this Sunbelt political culture has tentacles and outposts all over the USA, wherever a few generations of laboring folk enjoyed debt-fueled parabolic rises in living standards during the cheap oil decades, and now find themselves in foreclosure hell, indentured to the very WalMarts that they welcomed with open arms (and allowed to destroy their local businesses) — and, of course, it’s yet another paradox that these are the same folk who will still defend the big box masters to their deaths. The America they stand for is a weird contradictory mish-mash of Confederate nostalgia, hyper-individualism that really owes allegiance to nothing, racial enmity, religious paranoia, and potemkin patriotism — especially involving anything in the constitution that allows them to wriggle out of obligations to the public interest at the same time that they get to push other groups of people around.
