Supreme Court Justices Say Gun Rights Apply Locally

The Supreme Court opens the way for every man, woman and child to pack.

Well little Pilgrim, I'm feelin' Safer already. 

Shucks, if every Dude and Dudess packs, we will all be safer.  Like having all them nukes aimed at each other. 

Besides, think of the "Reality" shows we can produce when a stumble down drunk fires his cannon into a crowded bar and everybody starts blasting away. 

It won't happen you say?  What do you base that idea on, all the Peace and Love programs shoved down our throats via the TV?  Or maybe all the video games that promote caring for the down trodden? 

Besides, what good is packing a rod if you can't use it?  Remember , it's not the gun that kills.  It's the bullets. 

 

Curious Carl

 

no more tavern in town

 

When I was a boy most small towns had two or three taverns to every church or grocery store.  The store owners ran credit and lived in a fallen down house in town.  The preacher took whatever he could and lived in the fallen down parsonage next to the broken down church. 

But the tavern owners only took cash and always seemed to have a full house.  And speaking of houses, they lived on the top of the hill in the fancy brick home. 

So it was some bit of a shock to move to quiet little Quilcene, a logging village on the shore of Hood Canal, and find only one tavern in town. 

The Whistling Oyster.  A tavern with a great regional reputation.  Best fish and chips in the county and hamburgers as big as dinner plates and almost as tall as those served over at Fat Smitty's. 

You can imagine my surprise then, when one day we tooled into town and saw the big, "For Sale" sign above the tavern door.  All lights were off and no cars in the parking lot.  It seems that even unemployed loggers can't afford beer and burgers anymore.  Several months ago we lost our only gas station for 20 miles in any direction.  No gas, no beer.  What's the world coming to? 

 

Curious Carl

 

Poor God

Poor God.  I am so glad He has the job and not me.  Just think of having to listen to Sarah Palin every night at bed time. 

Curious Carl

doing wonderfully well...

Worse even than getting the answer in the middle of the night is lying awake still trying to figure out the forgotten word or name.  "Hmm...let's see, it doesn't start with any letter in the alphabet". 

I took an oath that I'd never become one of those people who couldn't finish a conversation because they kept forgetting words.  "We went to...ah...what was that place we went to?  Well, anyway we ran into...that fellow...the one you used to work with...or was he your neighbor...the fat guy with the bad comb over." 

I also was never going to grunt when I stood up.  Ha! 

They used to say of me, "My, you do so wonderfully well...for a blind man." 

Nowadays they say, "My, you do wonderfully well...for an old guy." 

Such is life. 

 

Curious Carl

 PS. I'd rather still be doing wonderfully well for a blind guy. 

 

is Braille dying?

 Not to be picky(pick, pick, pick), but if Braille is not dying, then why would we need to talk about revitalizing it? 

But revitalizing it is exactly what we need to do.  How do we do this?  School districts are crying the budget woes.  Special Education teachers are not receiving training in Braille.  Parents are frightened of Braille.  And the percentage of Braille users is shrinking.  How do we turn the corner?  I have known a number of blind Braille users who are so concerned about passing the skill along that they spend Saturdays and evenings volunteering their time to young students.  Can more of us spare the time?  How many of us show up at school board meetings to express our concerns?  Do we write our legislators?  Do we organize Braille clubs?  Do we go to our local neighborhood library and offer to teach Braille to anyone interested?  Blind or sighted?  Do we go to our local schools and offer to do speaking engagements to demonstrate the many uses of Braille? 

In short, Braille will surely die if we are not willing to find ways and spend time to promote it. 

 

Curious Carl

are we waging a Holy War?

There is a long standing fear among White European Judeo/Christian People that Islam is attempting to take over the world and must be stopped at all cost. 

We talk about our need to protect our supply of oil and of our quest to force democracy and peace down the throats of other nations, but underneath it all is the fact that we are waging a Holy War. 

I understood it when it was George Bush waving his Bible and urging us toward Armageddon, but to see the banner taken up by a Black man?  That's odd. 

 

Curious Carl

Brain Washed? Or just conditioned?

Brain wash.  None of us like to think that we've been brain washed. 

So let's call it a life time of mental conditioning.  I am 75 years old.  From my earliest memories I have been overwhelmed with propaganda telling me how great my country is, how fortunate I am to be free, how awful life would be under Communism or Socialism, how kind and caring the rich are toward me, how welfare recipients are a dredge on society and should be forced to work for their meager stipend, how Capitalism is the best system ever invented, how God looks over us and keeps us on the right road.  

I have been taught not to question my country, to pledge allegiance   to the Flag and sing God Bless America.  I have learned that if I work hard I can become president.  I can become a millionaire, the goal of every right thinking boy.  I can believe in a God who will guide my life, but I can use "business ethics" in my daily life. 

Shall I go on? 

We have been so brain washed that even many of us who understand that we live in a corrupt, decadent system, find ourselves supporting it.  I voted for Barak Obama, knowing that he is just another pretty face of Capitalism. 

We keep getting all bent out of shape because our people and our causes are totally disregarded or trashed by the Corporate Media.  We need to get over it.  Accept that this is our cross to bear.  We are not going to turn around generations of brain washing by the Empire Builders.  That's like spitting into a hurricane.  What we must do is to patiently build our facts and point out to anyone who will listen just what is going on. 

Our day will come, and we need to be prepared to step up to the line.  But the current corrupt bosses are not going to go gently into the night.  Hard times are ahead.  Nonetheless, the Monster will stub his toe and crash and burn.  I think it's written in the Bible. 

 

Curious Carl

silly lap dogs and the prince of peace

As he was firing General MacStupid, the Prince of Peace restated to the world exactly what he'd meant during his campaign for the presidency.  What he really intended to say was, to paraphrase him,  was a suggestion that we might be sort of looking at maybe beginning to think about bringing some troops home and perhaps discussing plans for some day changing the name of "War on Terror" to maybe, "Hands On, Loving Care". 

Speaking straight to us, straight from the pages of Orwell's 1984, the Prince of Peace performs some amazing verbal acrobatics to proclaim that his aggressive, warlike behavior is actually bringing an end to this mockery.  And us silly lap dogs lap it all up.  "Why, just look at what he has accomplished that those McCain people wouldn't have done for us" we babble.  "Health reform, for example".  Isn't that sort of how we go about "reforming" our prisoners.  Take something really bad and mess it all up and send it back out as "improved". 

You know, I swear that we're sounding and behaving just like the House Slaves back in the "Good Old Days" of early America.  Happy to grovel for a few crumbs from Massa's table.  Believing that we're so much better off than those dumb field hands, while failing to understand that we are still slaves and Massa can beat us whenever he chooses.  Or maybe it's because we subconsciously do know it. 

But as long as we go along believing that this Prince of Peace has our best interests at heart, while he continues to escalate and endorse the killing of innocent people in this illegal war of ours, and as long as he steals our hard earned dollars to finance his illegal war, and as long as we see our American Way of Life being shredded, we can only expect more of the same. 

Remember, Massa never lets up until the slaves rebel and take over the plantation. 

 

Curious Carl

America: The Grim Truth"

 

There is great food for thought and discussion in this article. 

Curious Carl

************

America: The Grim Truth

BY LANCE FREEMAN

( Associate Professor at Columbia University)

Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world - by a wide
margin.

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe , Australia
, New Zealand , Canada and many parts of Asia , you'd be rioting in the
streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or
Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the
typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call
home.

I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and
there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United
States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.

Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a
single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe , Japan , Canada ,
Australia , Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get
sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick,
you have to battle two things at once: your illness and the fear of
financial ruin. Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical
bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or
insufficient insurance. And don't believe for a second that rot about
America having the world's best medical care or the shortest waiting lists:
I've been to hospitals in Australia , New Zealand , Europe, Singapore , and
Thailand , and every one was better than the "good" hospital I used to go to
back home. The waits were shorter, the facilities more comfortable, and the
doctors just as good.

This is ironic, because you need a good health system more than anyone else
in the world. Why? Because your lifestyle is almost designed to make you
sick.

Let's start with your diet: Much of the beef you eat has been exposed to
fecal matter in processing. Your chicken is contaminated with salmonella.
Your stock animals and poultry are pumped full of growth hormones and
antibiotics. In most other countries, the government would act to protect
consumers from this sort of thing; in the United States , the government is
bought off by industry to prevent any effective regulations or inspections.
In a few years, the majority of all the produce for sale in the United
States will be from genetically modified crops, thanks to the cozy
relationship between Monsanto Corporation and the United States government.
Worse still, due to the vast quantities of high-fructose corn syrup
Americans consume, fully one-third of children born in the United States
today will be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives.

Of course, it's not just the food that's killing you, it's the drugs. If you
show any sign of life when you're young, they'll put you on Ritalin. Then,
when you get old enough to take a good look around, you'll get depressed, so
they'll give you Prozac. If you're a man, this will render you chemically
impotent, so you'll need Viagra to get it up. Meanwhile, your steady diet of
trans-fat-laden food is guaranteed to give you high cholesterol, so you'll
get a prescription for Lipitor. Finally, at the end of the day, you'll lay
awake at night worrying about losing your health plan, so you'll need
Lunesta to go to sleep.

With a diet guaranteed to make you sick and a health system designed to make
sure you stay that way, what you really need is a long vacation somewhere.
Unfortunately, you probably can't take one. I'll let you in on little
secret: if you go to the beaches of Thailand, the mountains of Nepal, or the
coral reefs of Australia, you'll probably be the only American in sight. And
you'll be surrounded crowds of happy Germans, French, Italians, Israelis,
Scandinavians and wealthy Asians. Why? Because they're paid well enough to
afford to visit these places AND they can take vacations long enough to do
so. Even if you could scrape together enough money to go to one of these
incredible places, by the time you recovered from your jetlag, it would time
to get on a plane and rush back to your job.

If you think I'm making this up, check the stats on average annual vacation
days by country:

Finland : 44
Italy : 42
France : 39
Germany : 35
UK : 25
Japan : 18
USA : 12

The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States . This should come
as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat
shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed. Unless
you happen to be a member of the ownership class, your options are pretty
much limited to barely surviving on service-sector wages or playing musical
chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next
week anyway). The very best you can hope for is to get a professional degree
and then milk the system for a slice of the middle-class pie. And even those
who claw their way into the middle class are but one illness or job loss
away from poverty. Your jobs aren't secure. Your company has no loyalty to
you. They'll play you off against your coworkers for as long as it suits
them, then they'll get rid of you.

Of course, you don't have any choice in the matter: the system is designed
this way. In most countries in the developed world, higher education is
either free or heavily subsidized; in the United States , a university
degree can set you back over US$100,000. Thus, you enter the working world
with a crushing debt. Forget about taking a year off to travel the world and
find yourself - you've got to start working or watch your credit rating
plummet.

If you're "lucky," you might even land a job good enough to qualify you for
a home loan. And then you'll spend half your working life just paying the
interest on the loan - welcome to the world of American debt slavery.
America has the illusion of great wealth because there's a lot of "stuff"
around, but who really owns it? In real terms, the average American is
poorer than the poorest ghetto dweller in Manila , because at least they
have no debts. If they want to pack up and leave, they can; if you want to
leave, you can't, because you've got debts to pay.

All this begs the question: Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any
American and you'll get the same answer: because America is the freest
country on earth. If you believe this, I've got some more bad news for you:
America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is
tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are
gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing
on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.

And that's just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You
don't even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical
bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you've never
lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.

But it goes much deeper than mere surveillance and anxiety. The fact is, you
are not free because your country has been taken over and occupied by
another government. Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and
the Pentagon is the real government of the United States . You are required
under pain of death to pay taxes to this occupying government. If you're
from the less fortunate classes, you are also required to serve and die in
their endless wars, or send your sons and daughters to do so. You have no
choice in the matter: there is a socio-economic draft system in the United
States that provides a steady stream of cannon fdder for the military.

If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the
service of a government you didn't elect "freedom," then you and I have a
very different idea of what that word means.

If there was some chance that the country could be changed, there might be
reason for hope. But can you honestly look around and conclude that anything
is going to change? Where would the change come from? The people? Take a
good look at your compatriots: the working class in the United States has
been brutally propagandized by jackals like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and
Sean Hannity. Members of the working class have been taught to lick the
boots of their masters and then bend over for another kick in the ass.
They've got these people so well trained that they'll take up arms against
the other half of the working class as soon as their masters give the word.

If the people cannot make a change, how about the media? Not a chance. From
Fox News to the New York Times, the mass media in the United States is
nothing but the public relations wing of the corporatocracy, primarily the
military industrial complex. At least the citizens of the former Soviet
Union knew that their news was bullshit. In America , you grow up thinking
you've got a free media, which makes the propaganda doubly effective. If you
don't think American media is mere corporate propaganda, ask yourself the
following question: have you ever heard a major American news outlet suggest
that the country could fund a single-payer health system by cutting military
spending?

If change can't come from the people or the media, the only other potential
source of change would be the politicians. Unfortunately, the American
political process is among the most corrupt in the world. In every country
on earth, one expects politicians to take bribes from the rich. But this
generally happens in secret, behind the closed doors of their elite clubs.
In the United States , this sort of political corruption is done in broad
daylight, as part of legal, accepted, standard operating procedure. In the
United States , they merely call these bribes campaign donations, political
action committees and lobbyists. One can no more expect the politicians to
change this system than one can expect a man to take an axe and chop his own
legs out from underneath him.

No, the United States of America is not going to change for the better. The
only change will be for the worse. And when I say worse, I mean much worse.
As we speak, the economic system that sustained the country during the
post-war years is collapsing. The United States maxed out its "credit card"
sometime in 2008 and now its lenders, starting with China , are in the
process of laying the foundations for a new monetary system to replace the
Anglo-American "petro-dollar" system. As soon as there is a viable
alternative to the US dollar, the greenback will sink like a stone.

While the United States was running up crushing levels of debt, it was also
busy shipping its manufacturing jobs and white-collar jobs overseas, and
letting its infrastructure fall to pieces. Meanwhile, Asian and European
countries were investing in education, infrastructure and raw materials.
Even if the United States tried to rebuild a real economy (as opposed to a
service/financial economy) do think American workers would ever be able to
compete with the workers of China or Europe ? Have you ever seen a Japanese
or German factory? Have you ever met a Singaporean or Chinese worker?

There are only two possible futures facing the United States , and neither
one is pretty. The best case is a slow but orderly decline - essentially a
continuation of what's been happening for the last two decades. Wages will
drop, unemployment will rise, Medicare and Social Security benefits will be
slashed, the currency will decline in value, and the disparity of wealth
will spiral out of control until the United States starts to resemble Mexico
or the Philippines - tiny islands of wealth surrounded by great poverty (the
country is already halfway there).

Equally likely is a sudden collapse, perhaps brought about by a rapid flight
from the US dollar by creditor nations like China , Japan , Korea and the
OPEC nations. A related possibility would be a default by the United States
government on its vast debt. One look at the financial balance sheet of the
US government should convince you how likely this is: governmental spending
is skyrocketing and tax receipts are plummeting - something has to give. If
either of these scenarios plays out, the resulting depression will make the
present recession look like a walk in the park.

Whether the collapse is gradual or gut-wrenchingly sudden, the results will
be chaos, civil strife and fascism. Let's face it: the United States is like
the former Yugoslavia - a collection of mutually antagonistic cultures
united in name only. You've got your own version of the Taliban: right-wing
Christian fundamentalists who actively loathe the idea of secular
Constitutional government. You've got a vast intellectual underclass that
has spent the last few decades soaking up Fox News and talk radio
propaganda, eager to blame the collapse on Democrats, gays and immigrants.
You've got a ruthless ownership class that will use all the means at its
disposal to protect its wealth from the starving masses.

On top of all that you've got vast factory farms, sprawling suburbs and a
truck-based shipping system, all of it entirely dependent on oil that is
about to become completely unaffordable. And you've got guns. Lots of guns.
In short: the United States is about to become a very unwholesome place to
be.

Right now, the government is building fences and walls along its northern
and southern borders. Right now, the government is working on a national ID
system (soon to be fitted with biometric features). Right now, the
government is building a surveillance state so extensive that they will be
able to follow your every move, online, in the street and across borders. If
you think this is just to protect you from "terrorists," then you're sadly
mistaken. Once the shit really hits the fan, do you really think you'll just
be able to jump into the old station wagon, drive across the Canadian border
and spend the rest of your days fishing and drinking Molson? No, the
government is going to lock the place down. They don't want their tax base
escaping. They don't want their "recruits" escaping. They don't want YOU
escaping.

I am not writing this to scare you. I write this to you as a friend. If you
are able to read and understand what I've written here, then you are a
member of a small minority in the United States . You are a minority in a
country that has no place for you.

So what should you do?

You should leave the United States of America .

If you're young, you've got plenty of choices: you can teach English in the
Middle East, Asia or Europe . Or you can go to university or graduate school
abroad and start building skills that will qualify you for a work visa. If
you've already got some real work skills, you can apply to emigrate to any
number of countries as a skilled immigrant. If you are older and you've got
some savings, you can retire to a place like Costa Rica or the Philippines .
If you can't qualify for a work, student or retirement visa, don't let that
stop you - travel on a tourist visa to a country that appeals to you and
talk to the expats you meet there. Whatever you do, go speak to an
immigration lawyer as soon as you can. Find out exactly how to get on a path
that will lead to permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the
country of your choice.

You will not be alone. There are millions of Americans just like me living
outside the United States . Living lives much more fulfilling, peaceful,
free and abundant than we ever could have attained back home. Some of us
happened upon these lives by accident - we tried a year abroad and found
that we liked it - others made a conscious decision to pack up and leave for
good. You'll find us in Canada , all over Europe, in many parts of Asia, in
Australia and New Zealand , and in most other countries of the globe. Do we
miss our friends and family? Yes. Do we occasionally miss aspects of our
former country? Yes. Do we plan on ever living again in the United States ?
Never. And those of us with permanent residence or citizenship can sponsor
family members from back home for long-term visas in our adopted countries.

In closing, I want to remind you of something: unless you are an American
Indian or a descendant of slaves, at some point your ancestors chose to
leave their homeland in search of a better life. They weren't traitors and
they weren't bad people, they just wanted a better life for themselves and
their families. Isn't it time that you continue their journey?

are there really 20 million undocumented people living in America?

A message from Michael, a blind lister on the ACB list.  Followed by my response. 

Curious Carl

**********
What if 20 Million Illegal Aliens Vacated America? (Note: ILLEGAL - here
without papers)



I, Tina Griego, journalist for the Denver Rocky Mountain News wrote a

column titled, 'Mexican Visitor's Lament' -- 10/25/07.



I interviewed Mexican journalist Evangelina Hernandez while visiting

Denver last week.

Hernandez said, 'They (illegal aliens) pay rent, buy groceries, buy
clothes.

.What Happens to your country's economy if 20 million people go away?'
Hummm

I thought, what would happen, so I did my due diligence, buried my nose as

a reporter into the FACTS I found below.



It's a good question - it deserves an honest answer. Over 80% of Americans

demand secured borders and illegal migration stopped. But what would happen
if all 20 million or more vacated America?



The answers I found may surprise you!



In California, if 3.5 million illegal aliens moved back to Mexico,

it would leave an extra $10.2 billion to spend on overloaded school
systems,

bankrupt hospitals and overrun prisons. It would leave highways cleaner,

safer and less congested. Everyone could understand one another as English

became the dominant language again.



In Colorado, 500,000 illegal migrants, plus their 300,000 kids and

Grand-kids - would move back 'home', mostly to Mexico. That would save

Coloradans an estimated $2 billion (other experts say $7 billion) annually

in taxes that pay for schooling, medical, social-services and incarceration

costs.



It means 12,000 gang members would vanish out of Denver alone.



Colorado would save more than $20 million in prison costs, and the

Terror that those 7,300 alien criminals set upon local citizens. Denver

Officer Don Young and hundreds of Colorado victims would not have suffered

death, accidents, rapes and other crimes by illegal's.



Denver Public Schools would not suffer a 67 percent

Drop-out/flunk-out rate because of thousands of illegal alien students

speaking 41 different languages. At least 200,000 vehicles would vanish
from

our gridlocked cities in Colorado. Denver's 4% unemployment rate would

vanish as our working poor would gain jobs at a living wage.





In Florida, 1.5 million illegal's would return the Sunshine State

back to America, the rule of law, and English.



In Chicago, Illinois, 2.1 million illegal's would free up hospitals

schools, prisons and highways for a safer, cleaner and more crime-free

experience.



If 20 million illegal aliens returned 'home' --



If 20 million illegal aliens returned 'home', the U.S. Economy would

return to the rule of law. Employers would hire legal American citizens at
a

living wage. Everyone would pay their fair share of taxes because they

wouldn't be working off the books. That would result in an additional $401

Billion in IRS income taxes collected annually, and an equal amount for

local, state and city coffers.



No more push '1' for Spanish or '2' for English. No more confusion in

American schools that now must contend with over 100 languages that degrade

the educational system for American kids. Our over-crowded schools would

lose more than two million illegal alien kids at a cost of billions in ESL
and free breakfasts and lunches.



We would lose 500,000 illegal criminal alien inmates at a cost of

more than $1.6 billion annually. That includes 15,000 MS-13 gang members
who

distribute $130 billion in drugs annually would vacate our country.



In cities like L.A., 20,000 members of the ' 18th Street Gang'

would vanish from our nation. No more Mexican forgery gangs for ID theft

from Americans! No more foreign rapists and child molesters!



Losing more than 20 million people would clear up our crowded

highways and gridlock. Cleaner air and less drinking and driving American

deaths by illegal aliens!

America's economy is drained. Taxpayers are harmed!. Employers get rich.
Over $80 billion annually wouldn't return to the aliens' home countries by
cash transfers. Illegal migrants earned half that money untaxed which
further drains America's economy - which currently suffers an $8.7 trillion
debt.



At least 400,000 anchor babies would not be born in our country,

costing us $109 billion per year per cycle. At least 86 hospitals in

California, Georgia and Florida would still be operating instead of being

bankrupt out of existence because illegal's pay nothing via the EMTOLA Act.



Americans wouldn't suffer thousands of TB and hepatitis cases rampant

in our country-brought in by illegal's unscreened at our borders.



Our cities would see 20 million less people driving, polluting and

grid locking our cities. It would also put the 'progressives' on the horns

of a dilemma; illegal aliens and their families cause 11 percent of our

greenhouse gases.



Over one million of Mexico's poorest citizens now live inside and

Along our border from Brownsville, Texas to San Diego, California in

what the New York Times called, 'colonias' or new neighborhoods. Trouble
is,

those living areas resemble Bombay and Calcutta where grinding poverty,

filth, diseases, drugs, crimes, no sanitation and worse. They live without

sewage, clean water, streets, electricity, roads or any kind of sanitation.



The New York Times reported them to be America's new Third World ' inside
our own country. Within 20 years, at their current growth rate, they expect

20 million residents of those colonias.



(I've seen them personally in Texas and Arizona; it's sickening beyond

anything you can imagine.)



By enforcing our laws, we could repatriate them back to Mexico. We should

invite 20 million aliens to go home, fix their own countries and/or make a

better life in Mexico. We already invite a million

people into our country legally more than all other countries combined
annually. W e cannot and must not allow anarchy at our borders, more
anarchy

within our borders and growing lawlessness at every level in our nation. It

s time to stand up for our country, our culture, our civilization and our
way of life.



Interesting Statistics!



Here are 14 reasons illegal aliens should vacate America, and I hope they

are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that
the

reader gets sick of reading them:



1. $14 billion to $22 billion dollars are spent each year on welfare

to illegal aliens.



(that's Billion with a 'B') - http://tinyurl.com/zob77



2... $2.2 billion dollars are spent each year on food assistance

programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal

aliens. - http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html



3. $7.5 billion dollars are spent each year on Medicaid for illegal

Aliens. http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html



4. $12 billion dollars are spent each year on primary and secondary

school education for children here illegally and they still cannot speak a

word of English! http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html



5. $27 billion dollars are spent each year for education for the

American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies. -

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html



6. $3 Million Dollars 'PER DAY' i! s spent to incarcerate illegal

aliens. That's $1.2 Billion a year. http://transcripts.cnn/

com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html



7. 28% percent of all federal prison inmates are illegal aliens.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html



8. $190 billion dollars are spent each year on illegal aliens for

welfare & social services by the American taxpayers. - http://transcripts/

cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html



9. $200 billion dollars per year in suppressed American wages are

caused by the illegal aliens.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html



10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's

two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their

children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US. -

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html



11. During the year 2005, there were 8 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens

that crossed our southern border with as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from

other terrorist countries. Over 10,000 of those were middle-eastern

terrorists. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroine, crack,
Guns

and marijuana crossed into the U.S. from the southern border. -

http://tinyurl.com/t9sht

12... The National Policy Institute, estimates that the total cost of

mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion, or an average cost

of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.& nbsp; -

http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute...org/publications.php?b=deportation





13. In 2006, illegal aliens sent home $65 BILLION in remittances back

to their countries of origin, to their families & friends.
http://www.rense/

com/general75/niht.htm



14. The dark side of illegal immigration: Nearly one million sex

crimes are committed by illegal immigrants in the United States!' -

http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml



Total cost a whopping $538.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR!!!

**************

 

Michael,

 

If you are an undocumented person(Illegal), where do you go to register so that the government can get an accurate count?  Is there a toll-free confidential telephone number somewhere, posted in places where undocumented folks hang out? 

But beyond that, these figures are so bogus that they are meaningless.  It's like our figure of 70% unemployment among blind people.  Just numbers that have been around for such a long time that they take on a life of their own.  But anyway, numbers give us a sense that we have a handle on the problem.  In reality numbers block us from seeing the problem.  What does it matter if we are 70% or 50% or 30% unemployed as blind people?  What we should be focused on is that blind people have been disenfranchised.  It's a far deeper problem than merely 70% unemployment.  It is our entire access into "mainstream" America. 

And so it is with all the figures quoted in your article.  Even if they were close to true, and many of them are so convoluted that they reflect nothing, but even if true they do not get at the problem or suggest even the beginning of a solution. 

Your numbers are laid out for one purpose, and one purpose alone, to excite anger and to divide the American people. 

But let's assume that there really are 20 million undocumented people creeping around our land, sucking up all of our resources.  Are they really bringing this nation to its knees?  What about the trillions we are handing over to the military and to the Wall Street crooks and the Captains of Industry?  What about the billions of our tax dollars that they are shoveling off into hidden off-shore banks, as they pack up their factories and put them in such democratic nations as China.  And the sort of jobs we blind folks might have had a shot at, jobs like the customer service type of work, are being out sourced to the more deserving folks in India and the Philippines. 

Remember the slight-of-hand artist who could move the three shells around and you could never point out the one with the pea under it?  Of course we learned the hard way that the pea was not under any of them.  The fellow palmed it and slipped it back under our very eyes.  And so it is with our own Wizards of Oz, those First Class Corporate American Citizens.  They move the shells about, pointing to those horrid welfare Moms, those wicked socialists, the illiterate Blacks, the illegal's, the Muslims and on and on and on.  They are our Pied Pipers, leading us merrily down the path to self destruction. 

So Michael, Mister Messenger, do you believe this message of yours?  I don't. 

 

Curious Carl

check out my blog
www.curiouscarlscorner.blogspot.com

Greed will devour itself. But will it be too late?

Subject: Re: Republicans Propose to Eliminate Medicare and gut Social Security

Remember.  Them what's got, gits.  In other words, "The rich get rich and the poor get poorer". 

How can we have forgotten these simple truths so soon?  There was a time when we understood that Greed was a cancer eating away at the heart of democracy.  We organized into Unions and Community Town Meetings and established some boundaries and controls over Greed.  But bit by bit Greed has been gnawing at the edges of our controls and boundaries.  Now it is gaining a death grip on democracy, the likes of which we have never seen before. 

But what has become of our champions, our freedom fighters?  They have been relegated to the outer edges.  They are seldom seen or heard in the Main Stream Media(Empire Builders Press). 

Without them one thing is for sure.  Greed will not back off.  Greed will keep devouring all in sight until it even devours itself.  But by then it will be far too late. 

Curious Carl

Does God love the undocumented as much as He loves the rich?

My reaction to the report of A Fatal Ending for a Family Forced Apart by Immigration Law just tears me up inside.  A family has been destroyed, lives crushed.  But somewhere in a mansion high on a gated hill sits another family.  Blessed with generations of accumulated wealth and unconcerned with the tragedies on the Plains below them. 

Yet both families turn to God and ask His Blessings on their lives.  Both families believe that God watches over them and guides them.  Neither family sees a contridiction in the way that their God cares for their needs. 

I profess to be Agnostic, neither able to prove God's existence or to prove God does not exist.  The universe is far too complex and my life is too fleeting to even begin to understand it all. 

But if I were to abandon my rational side and say that God does exist, then I would have to say that He has forsaken Earth to the Devil. 

No Just, Fair, Loving God would sit by and merely observe the suffering and carnage all around Him.  It is the world of Satan.  His loyal servants are living like Kings and Lords while the God Fearing masses suffer and cry for the return of their Savior. 

and even as the Devil's agents bask in the warm sun in garden-like estates, the masses huddle shoulder deep in muck and poverty and pain and wars and floods and earthquakes and on and on, while they sing praises to a God who has obviously turned His face from them. 

Okay.  I guess I'd better go to bed now. 

 

Curious Carl

Why Is Braille Dying?

 

Back in 1965, as a newly blind man, my VR counselor told me not to worry about Braille.  "The tape recorder will make Braille unnecessary", he said.  He was also totally blind and a Braille user. 

I was born with cataracts and at 4 years of age they cut holes through the lens' and put bifocals on my nose. 

I never thought of myself as visually limited.  I tried to do all the things other children did, play baseball, tennis, hand ball, etc.  I grew up believing that I was just a clumsy kid. 

When I lost the sight in my left eye at 17 years of age, a blind man came from the White Cane Club in Seattle and offered to teach me typing while I was recovering.  He read to me from a book filled with Braille words.  The story of George Bailey is a whole separate story.  But one thing he mentioned to me was the fact that I could probably attend the school for the blind.  I was mortified.  Me?  go to a blind school?  Just the word Blind scared me.  And then George told me that I could probably receive a full college education, free.  I remember telling him in no uncertain terms that my family did not accept charity.  We worked for what we got. 

At that place in my life I would never have allowed myself to learn Braille.  Even though I had to get very close to the black boards and reading standard print was extremely fatiguing. 

It is a real challenge to overcome the social stigma surrounding blindness.  Not only the children, but parents will do anything to keep from accepting the fact that they're blind.  Teach them Braille?  Not on your life.  far too often people turn to the new-age technology believing that it is the answer, without considering the impact on our written language.  I suspect that Braille is in a fight for its life. 

 

Curious Carl

 

did we get "couped"?

America is so cool!  And civilized, too!  Most governments over thrown by a military coup go through a messy, chaotic time when folks run around shouting and shooting, killing hundreds and hauling off many others to prison.  Not us, man.  We got "couped" without ever knowing it.  I wonder just how long Barak Obama sat in his presidential chair before someone whispered the news in his presidential ear.  "Mister President, the Boss Man wants a word with you." 

 

Curious Carl

check out my blog
www.curiouscarlscorner.blogspot.com

a better way to run a prison?

We need to stop treating our prisoners the way we treat our ghetto dwellers. 

Curious Carl

 

"Ten years and 1.5 billion Norwegian kroner ($252 million) in the making, Halden is spread over 75 acres (30 hectares) of gently sloping forest in southeastern Norway. The facility boasts amenities like a sound studio, jogging trails and a freestanding two-bedroom house where inmates can host their families during overnight visits. Unlike many American prisons, the air isn't tinged with the smell of sweat and urine. Instead, the scent of orange sorbet emanates from the "kitchen laboratory" where inmates take cooking courses. "In the Norwegian prison system, there's a focus on human rights and respect," says Are Hoidal, the prison's governor. "We don't see any of this as unusual."

 

"Halden, Norway's second largest prison, with a capacity of 252 inmates, opened on April 8. It embodies the guiding principles of the country's penal system: that repressive prisons do not work and that treating prisoners humanely boosts their chances of reintegrating into society. "When they arrive, many of them are in bad shape," Hoidal says, noting that Halden houses drug dealers, murderers and rapists, among others. "We want to build them up, give them confidence through education and work and have them leave as better people." Countries track recidivism rates differently, but even an imperfect comparison suggests the Norwegian model works. Within two years of their release, 20% of Norway's prisoners end up back in jail. In the U.K. and the U.S., the figure hovers between 50% and 60%. Of course, a low level of criminality gives Norway a massive advantage. Its prison roll lists a mere 3,300, or 69 per 100,000 people, compared with 2.3 million in the U.S., or 753 per 100,000 — the highest rate in the world."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00.html#ixzz0rPnRUIRg

 

 

check out my blog
www.curiouscarlscorner.blogspot.com

Friday the thirteenth of never

 

I swear that today is Friday the Thirteenth of Never! 

It began when we stepped into the garage to hop into the truck and head down the road.  Cathy peered out and asked, "What's that on the ground?"  A long wire had been laid down by the telephone repair guys yesterday afternoon.  It snaked around the hillside and at one end it snaked around the corner of the house and down to the lower level while the other end curled behind the propane tank and generator, across the trail to the water tank and disappeared down the left hand side of our road.  It appears that instead of repairing the existing line, the repairmen just hooked up new service.  Easy for them, bad for us who will have to have it buried.  We found that it hooks into a connection halfway out to the county road, about 1,000 feet altogether. 

At least this event gave us something to chew on as we headed along highway 101 toward Shelton.  It's about an hour and twenty minute drive.  We pass through Quilcene, Brennon, Elton, Lilliwaup and Hoods Port, and some of the most spectacular scenery in the world.  Hood Canal on the left and the rugged Olympics on the right.  On a good day we pass deer, elk, coyotes, black bear and mobs of little bunnies and birds.  Not to mention the Kamikaze bugs. 

Still, it's a long drive but I was focused on reaching Dan's Broiler and the state's most delicious Monte Christo sandwich.  It is made with ham, Turkey, cheese and stuff.  It is then dipped in egg batter and deep fried and served with a bowl of black berry jam and piles of fresh fruit.  It is so tasty that it has to be good for the body. 

The second sign that this was a cursed day came when Cathy announced, "The Monte Christo isn't on the menu.  The blood drained out of my entire body.  "Not what?"  I bleated.  "Please", I begged the young waitress, "Tell me it ain't so!"  She tried, really tried to get the cook to create just one final Master piece.  But he had no egg batter, nor anyway to deep fry it.  I wept shamelessly and settled on some really fine fish and chips.  Still...not the same. 

Then came the crowning blow.  We arrived at our client's apartment only to find that she had already received all the services she needed from Seattle.  She had just moved to Shelton from Seattle about two months ago.  The agency in Seattle had provided her with all the gadgets, gizmos and tips that we normally provide.  Given the fact that her vision loss is fairly recent, she has a reasonably positive attitude.  At 92 she is doing fine.  Her hearing isn't what it might be and her legs don't want to hold her up for any length of time, and her memory keeps losing proper names, but all in all we could not find anything to do for her.  It turned out that she wants to walk to her doctor's office several blocks away.  She uses a walker and thought we might have some sort of brightly colored jacket with the words "Blind" on it.  We suggested that she confine her walking to the paved walkway around the outside of her building.  The roads in the area have no sidewalks and she would need to hug the edge of some very busy streets. 

Her other problem was turning on her DVD player.  The folks in Seattle had written out the directions in large block letters.  Several problems.  First, she has Macular Degeneration and as a result she is missing letters when she attempts to read.  So she must go back and forth to get the entire sense of the sentence.  By the time she figures out what to do, she has to start all over again.  But even if she did access the DVD player she would need to work with an on-screen menu. 

Well, to make a short story really long, we had to agree that we could not provide her any useful services.  That's okay for her but not so okay for us since we can't claim reimbursement for services we did not provide. 

Other than that, it's been a fine day.  Oh yes, it's raining again. 

 

Curious Carl

 

check out my blog
www.curiouscarlscorner.blogspot.com

Fw: A

 

I swear that today is Friday the Thirteenth of Never! 

It began when we stepped into the garage to hop into the truck and head down the road.  Cathy peered out and asked, "What's that on the ground?"  A long wire had been laid down by the telephone repair guys yesterday afternoon.  It snaked around the hillside and at one end it snaked around the corner of the house and down to the lower level while the other end curled behind the propane tank and generator, across the trail to the water tank and disappeared down the left hand side of our road.  It appears that instead of repairing the existing line, the repairmen just hooked up new service.  Easy for them, bad for us who will have to have it buried.  We found that it hooks into a connection halfway out to the county road, about 1,000 feet altogether. 

At least this event gave us something to chew on as we headed along highway 101 toward Shelton.  It's about an hour and twenty minute drive.  We pass through Quilcene, Brennon, Elton, Lilliwaup and Hoods Port, and some of the most spectacular scenery in the world.  Hood Canal on the left and the rugged Olympics on the right.  On a good day we pass deer, elk, coyotes, black bear and mobs of little bunnies and birds.  Not to mention the Kamikaze bugs. 

Still, it's a long drive but I was focused on reaching Dan's Broiler and the state's most delicious Monte Christo sandwich.  It is made with ham, Turkey, cheese and stuff.  It is then dipped in egg batter and deep fried and served with a bowl of black berry jam and piles of fresh fruit.  It is so tasty that it has to be good for the body. 

The second sign that this was a cursed day came when Cathy announced, "The Monte Christo isn't on the menu.  The blood drained out of my entire body.  "Not what?"  I bleated.  "Please", I begged the young waitress, "Tell me it ain't so!"  She tried, really tried to get the cook to create just one final Master piece.  But he had no egg batter, nor anyway to deep fry it.  I wept shamelessly and settled on some really fine fish and chips.  Still...not the same. 

Then came the crowning blow.  We arrived at our client's apartment only to find that she had already received all the services she needed from Seattle.  She had just moved to Shelton from Seattle about two months ago.  The agency in Seattle had provided her with all the gadgets, gizmos and tips that we normally provide.  Given the fact that her vision loss is fairly recent, she has a reasonably positive attitude.  At 92 she is doing fine.  Her hearing isn't what it might be and her legs don't want to hold her up for any length of time, and her memory keeps losing proper names, but all in all we could not find anything to do for her.  It turned out that she wants to walk to her doctor's office several blocks away.  She uses a walker and thought we might have some sort of brightly colored jacket with the words "Blind" on it.  We suggested that she confine her walking to the paved walkway around the outside of her building.  The roads in the area have no sidewalks and she would need to hug the edge of some very busy streets. 

Her other problem was turning on her DVD player.  The folks in Seattle had written out the directions in large block letters.  Several problems.  First, she has Macular Degeneration and as a result she is missing letters when she attempts to read.  So she must go back and forth to get the entire sense of the sentence.  By the time she figures out what to do, she has to start all over again.  But even if she did access the DVD player she would need to work with an on-screen menu. 

Well, to make a short story really long, we had to agree that we could not provide her any useful services.  That's okay for her but not so okay for us since we can't claim reimbursement for services we did not provide. 

Other than that, it's been a fine day.  Oh yes, it's raining again. 

 

Curious Carl

 

dazzled or baffled?

 

 Steve Fraser has put together an excellent comparison between Roosevelt and Obama. 

I have always leaned toward the philosophy that the times make the man.  Here is a very compelling argument for that position.  As unrest mounted in the 30's, it was the socialists, communists and labor unions that influenced the President.  Today it is the noisy ultra conservatives and the corporate citizens  along with the white supremacist who are pulling Obama toward the Right. 

Roosevelt came to understand that by putting the labor force to work and pumping money in at the bottom, working men would be happy and the money would float back to the top.  Obama seems to be a Hoovarian, be        lieving that bailing out the banks and Wall street that the money will trickle down.  Coming from where he did, Obama has to know better, which makes him look all the more foolish. 

Some many years ago I had the displeasure of working with a pompous self-centered ass who enjoyed smirking and repeating over and over, "If I can't dazzle them with my brilliance, I'll baffle them with my bull shit". 

Well Mister President, you really did dazzle us.  But lately when I hear you speak I'm just plain baffled. 

 

Curious Carl

********

 

Subject: Is Obama Trying to Dismantle Roosevelt's New Deal?

Is Obama Trying to Dismantle Roosevelt's New Deal?
By Steve Fraser, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on February 11, 2010, Printed on February 11, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145641/

On March 4, 1933, the day he took office, Franklin Roosevelt excoriated the
"money changers" who "have fled from their high seats in the temples of our
civilization [because...] they know only the rules of a generation of
self-seekers.  They have no vision and where there is no vision, the people
perish."

Rhetoric, however, is only rhetoric.  According to one skeptical
congressional observer of FDR's first inaugural address, "The President
drove the money-changers out of the Capitol on March 4th -- and they were
all back on the 9th."

That was essentially true.  It was what happened after that, in the midst of
the Great Depression, which set the New Deal on a course that is the mirror
image of the direction in which the Obama administration seems headed.

Buoyed by great expectations when he assumed office, Barack Obama has so far
revealed himself to be an unfolding disappointment.  On arrival,
expectations were far lower for FDR, who was not considered extraordinary at
all -- until he actually did something extraordinary.

The great expectations of 2009 are, only a year later, beginning to smell
like a pile of dead fish with new rhetoric -- including populist-style
attacks on villainous bankers that sound fake (or cynically pandering) when
uttered by Obama's brainiacs -- layered on top of the pile like deodorant.
Meanwhile, the country is suffering through a recovery that isn't a recovery
unless you happen to be a banker, and the administration stands by, too
politically or intellectually inhibited or incapacitated to do much of
anything about it.  A year into "change we can believe in" and the new
regime, once so flush with power and the promise of big doings, seems
exhausted, vulnerable, and afraid.  A year into the New Deal -- indeed a
mere 100 days into Roosevelt's era -- change, whether you believed in it or
not, clearly had the wind at its back.

A Tale of Two Presidencies

If, a few days after Roosevelt pronounced them ex-communicant, the
"money-changers" were back inside the temple -- "temple," by the way, was
how the Federal Reserve used to be known before its recent fall from
grace -- no one was too surprised.  He, like Obama, was initially worried
about alienating big business and high finance.  He arrived in the Oval
Office, in fact, still a prisoner of his own past and the country's.  He
believed, for example, in the then-orthodox wisdom of balancing the budget
and would never entirely abandon that faith.

Not long before he assumed office, his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, vetoed a
bill calling for the accelerated payment of bonuses to World War I veterans.
Many of them had only recently gathered in makeshift tents on Anacostia
Flats in Washington D.C., an army of the destitute, to plead their case.
Hoover, to his lasting dishonor, ordered Army Chief of Staff General Douglas
McArthur to have their tents set on fire and drive them away at bayonet
point.  Not long after FDR took the oath of office, he vetoed the same bill.
He shared, as well, in a broad cultural repugnance for what was then called
"the dole," and today is known as "welfare."

The legendary first 100 days of the Roosevelt administration, memorable for
a raft of reform and recovery legislation, also prominently featured an
Economy Act designed to reduce government expenditures.  Fearing the
possibility of a break with the commercial elite, the president tried
forging a partnership with them, much as Hoover had.  As a matter of fact,
the first two pieces of recovery legislation his administration submitted to
Congress -- the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural
Adjustment Act -- were formulated and implemented in a way that would seem
familiar today.  They gave the country's major corporations and largest
agricultural interests the principal authority for re-starting the country's
stalled economic engines.

However, even as the administration tried to maintain its ties to powerful
business interests and a traditional fiscal conservatism, it broke them -- 
and it severed those connections in ways, and for reasons, that are
instructive today.

*The Glass-Steagall Act: This emergency banking legislation passed during
those extraordinary first 100 days separated commercial from investment
banking.  It was meant to prevent the misuse of commercial bank deposits
(other people's money like yours and mine) in dangerous forms of
speculation, which many at the time believed had helped cause the Great Wall
Street Crash of 1929, prelude to the Great Depression.  Today, ever more
people wish Glass-Steagall had never been repealed (as it was in 1999), as
its absence helped open the door to the financial misadventures that brought
us the Great Crash of '08.

The bill infuriated what was called, in those days, "the Money Trust,"
especially the once omnipotent house of Morgan, the dominant member of an
elite group of Wall Street firms that had run the financial system since the
turn of the century when J.P. Morgan, America's most famous banker, was
revered and feared around the world.  (Jack, the patriarch's son, was so
incensed by New Deal financial reform that he banned all pictures of the
President from the bank's premises.)  Glass-Steagall, as well as the two
Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 which created the Securities and Exchange
Commission and left the doyens of the New York Stock Exchange apoplectic,
represented real reform, and so were different in kind from TARP and all the
other contraptions designed by the Bush and Obama Treasury Departments
simply to bail out the financial sector.

*The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA): Offspring also of those first 100
days, the TVA uplifted a vast, underdeveloped, and impoverished rural region
of the country by bringing it electric power, irrigation, soil conservation,
and flood control.  It introduced the then-alien (and once again alien) idea
of government-directed economic planning and development.  It left the
private utility industry irate at the prospect of having to compete with
effective, publicly owned electrical-power-generating facilities.
Fast-forward to today when, on the contrary, the private health insurance
and pharmaceutical industries, conniving behind closed doors with Obama's
people, proved triumphant in a similar confrontation, leaving government
competition in the dust.

*Jobs: And then there was, as there is again, the question of jobs and how
to create them.  In 1933, American politicians still took the notion of
balancing the budget each year with deadly seriousness.  In our present era,
every president from Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to George W. Bush and
now, apparently, Barack Obama talks the talk without any intention of
walking the walk.  What made the Roosevelt moment remarkable was this:
balanced-budget orthodoxy notwithstanding, the new administration soon
forged ahead with a set of jobs programs that not only implied deficit
spending but an even more radical departure from business as usual.

Initially, the Public Works Administration (PWA), created as part of the
National Industrial Recovery Act, relied on large-scale infrastructure
projects farmed out to private enterprise.  Undertaking such projects
inevitably entailed government borrowing and deficits.  Partly for that
reason, the PWA proceeded at a glacial pace, put few to work right away,
and -- in the way it looked to the private sector to take the lead -- 
resembled the latest thinking of the Obama administration whose newest tepid
suggestions for creating jobs depend almost solely on funneling tax relief
to business.

Simultaneously, however, the New Deal pursued a more daring alternative.
FDR diverted a third of the PWA's budget to the Civil Works Administration
(CWA), out of which was born the legendary Civilian Conservation Corps, an
agency that deployed hundreds of thousands of unemployed young men to
restore the country's forests and parklands.  The CWA skipped the private
sector entirely and simply put people to work: four million people in the
summer and fall of 1933.  (That would be the equivalent, today, of ten
million Americans back on the job.)

During the first nine months of the Roosevelt administration manual
laborers, clerks, architects, book-binders, teachers, actors, white and blue
collar workers alike became Federal employees.  They laid millions of feet
of sewer pipe, improved hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, and built
thousands of schools, playgrounds, and airports. Harry Hopkins, who ran the
CWA, was authorized to seize tools, equipment, and materials from Army
warehouses to get the new system up and running.  (The Works Progress
Administration, a subsequent incarnation of the CWA, would later create
eight million jobs on the same principle of public employment.)

This isn't even within hailing distance of where the current Administration
is now as it frets about the deficit and pledges to freeze domestic spending
(and implies, without having the courage to say so, that Medicare, Medicaid,
and Social Security had better watch out).  Coming from a regnant Democratic
Party this is change we can't or don't want to believe in.

Heading Backwards

Like Obama, Roosevelt was denounced by his enemies in the Republican Party
and the business community as a closet socialist (not to mention a cripple,
a Jew, and a homosexual).  While the administration would sometimes trim its
sails considerably to weather the right wing storm, its general reaction to
Republican opposition was the opposite of Obama's.  Even during that first
year, and at an accelerating pace afterwards, the momentum of the New Deal
carried it irresistibly to the left.

This was true, in fact, of the whole Democratic Party.  The Congress elected
in the off-year of 1934 was not only more overwhelmingly Democratic, but the
Democrats who won were considerably more progressive-minded.  They were far
readier to jettison the shibboleths of the old order and press a still
cautious President in their direction.  By 1936, the essentials of the
social welfare and regulatory state were in place, an insurgent labor
movement had won the elementary right to organize (while becoming the New
Deal's most muscular constituency), and the president was denouncing
"economic royalists" and "tories of industry" whose "hatred" for him he
"welcomed."

Today the Obama administration and the Democratic Party are visibly moving
in the opposite direction.  They read the lesson of humiliating defeat in
Massachusetts and the voluble hostility of the populist right as an advisory
to move further to the right.  Tacking rightward, tailoring policy to match
the tastes of business and finance, cautioning Americans that they'll need
to tighten their belts (as if they hadn't already been doing so), adopting
the parsimonious sanctimony of the balanced budget, slimming down their
great expectations until what little is left mocks the hopes of so many who
elected them -- all of this is seen as smart politics.

Smart like a chicken.  This is the same cleverness that, beginning with
Ronald Reagan's triumph, turned the Democratic Party into Republican-lite.
Shrewdness like this helps explain, in part, why Obama's inner circle and
Democratic leaders took the early, fateful steps that were bound to land
them where they find themselves today.

Would the Republican right and its tea-party populists -- marginal, mockable
political freaks less than a year ago -- have enjoyed their current growth
spasm if the administration hadn't been committed to bailing out the very
institutions most people considered the villains responsible for running
this country into a ditch?  Would the Democratic Party have been in imminent
danger of losing its faltering grip on Congress had it found the will to
pursue serious health-care reform and environmental legislation, or wrestled
the financial oligarchy to the mat as Roosevelt did?  A long generation
spent cowering in the shadows of the conservative ascendancy has left the
newly empowered Democrats congenitally incapable of seizing their own
historic moment.

After a year of feinting to the left without meaning it, how seriously is
anyone going to take the administration's latest call to tax the banks or
break their addiction to reckless speculation?  Even if Obama now means to
push ahead with some sort of health-care reform or put some teeth into new
financial regulations, he has spent so much political capital moving in the
opposite direction and seeking partners where there never were any that his
quest, even if genuine, may now be purely quixotic.  As for the surge in
Afghanistan and the endless war that goes with it, by election time 2010,
it's an even bet that it will have further undermined any hopes of a
late-inning Democratic Party revival.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, off-year elections do not always favor
the minority party.  Indeed, 1934 may be the best example of the opposite
effect.  Exactly because the New Deal showed itself ever readier to junk the
ancien régime, break with economic orthodoxy, and above all say goodbye to
its erstwhile corporate friends, it was rewarded handsomely at the polls.
None of that apparently will be repeated in 2010, given an administration
that seems to be running a New Deal in reverse.


Steve Fraser is the co-editor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order and
author, most recently, of Wall Street: America's Dream Palace.  He is
Research Associate at the Joseph Murphy Center for Labor and Community
Studies at the Graduate Center of the City of New York. (To catch him in an
exclusive TomDispatch audio interview discussing why Obama has ignored the
public-works job model Franklin D. Roosevelt pioneered, click here.)

© 2010 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145641/

dazzled or baffled?

 

 Steve Fraser has put together an excellent comparison between Roosevelt and Obama. 

I have always leaned toward the philosophy that the times make the man.  Here is a very compelling argument for that position.  As unrest mounted in the 30's, it was the socialists, communists and labor unions that influenced the President.  Today it is the noisy ultra conservatives and the corporate citizens  along with the white supremacist who are pulling Obama toward the Right. 

Roosevelt came to understand that by putting the labor force to work and pumping money in at the bottom, working men would be happy and the money would float back to the top.  Obama seems to be a Hoovarian, be        lieving that bailing out the banks and Wall street that the money will trickle down.  Coming from where he did, Obama has to know better, which makes him look all the more foolish. 

Some many years ago I had the displeasure of working with a pompous self-centered ass who enjoyed smirking and repeating over and over, "If I can't dazzle them with my brilliance, I'll baffle them with my bull shit". 

Well Mister President, you really did dazzle us.  But lately when I hear you speak I'm just plain baffled. 

 

Curious Carl

********

 

Subject: Is Obama Trying to Dismantle Roosevelt's New Deal?

Is Obama Trying to Dismantle Roosevelt's New Deal?
By Steve Fraser, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on February 11, 2010, Printed on February 11, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145641/

On March 4, 1933, the day he took office, Franklin Roosevelt excoriated the
"money changers" who "have fled from their high seats in the temples of our
civilization [because...] they know only the rules of a generation of
self-seekers.  They have no vision and where there is no vision, the people
perish."

Rhetoric, however, is only rhetoric.  According to one skeptical
congressional observer of FDR's first inaugural address, "The President
drove the money-changers out of the Capitol on March 4th -- and they were
all back on the 9th."

That was essentially true.  It was what happened after that, in the midst of
the Great Depression, which set the New Deal on a course that is the mirror
image of the direction in which the Obama administration seems headed.

Buoyed by great expectations when he assumed office, Barack Obama has so far
revealed himself to be an unfolding disappointment.  On arrival,
expectations were far lower for FDR, who was not considered extraordinary at
all -- until he actually did something extraordinary.

The great expectations of 2009 are, only a year later, beginning to smell
like a pile of dead fish with new rhetoric -- including populist-style
attacks on villainous bankers that sound fake (or cynically pandering) when
uttered by Obama's brainiacs -- layered on top of the pile like deodorant.
Meanwhile, the country is suffering through a recovery that isn't a recovery
unless you happen to be a banker, and the administration stands by, too
politically or intellectually inhibited or incapacitated to do much of
anything about it.  A year into "change we can believe in" and the new
regime, once so flush with power and the promise of big doings, seems
exhausted, vulnerable, and afraid.  A year into the New Deal -- indeed a
mere 100 days into Roosevelt's era -- change, whether you believed in it or
not, clearly had the wind at its back.

A Tale of Two Presidencies

If, a few days after Roosevelt pronounced them ex-communicant, the
"money-changers" were back inside the temple -- "temple," by the way, was
how the Federal Reserve used to be known before its recent fall from
grace -- no one was too surprised.  He, like Obama, was initially worried
about alienating big business and high finance.  He arrived in the Oval
Office, in fact, still a prisoner of his own past and the country's.  He
believed, for example, in the then-orthodox wisdom of balancing the budget
and would never entirely abandon that faith.

Not long before he assumed office, his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, vetoed a
bill calling for the accelerated payment of bonuses to World War I veterans.
Many of them had only recently gathered in makeshift tents on Anacostia
Flats in Washington D.C., an army of the destitute, to plead their case.
Hoover, to his lasting dishonor, ordered Army Chief of Staff General Douglas
McArthur to have their tents set on fire and drive them away at bayonet
point.  Not long after FDR took the oath of office, he vetoed the same bill.
He shared, as well, in a broad cultural repugnance for what was then called
"the dole," and today is known as "welfare."

The legendary first 100 days of the Roosevelt administration, memorable for
a raft of reform and recovery legislation, also prominently featured an
Economy Act designed to reduce government expenditures.  Fearing the
possibility of a break with the commercial elite, the president tried
forging a partnership with them, much as Hoover had.  As a matter of fact,
the first two pieces of recovery legislation his administration submitted to
Congress -- the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural
Adjustment Act -- were formulated and implemented in a way that would seem
familiar today.  They gave the country's major corporations and largest
agricultural interests the principal authority for re-starting the country's
stalled economic engines.

However, even as the administration tried to maintain its ties to powerful
business interests and a traditional fiscal conservatism, it broke them -- 
and it severed those connections in ways, and for reasons, that are
instructive today.

*The Glass-Steagall Act: This emergency banking legislation passed during
those extraordinary first 100 days separated commercial from investment
banking.  It was meant to prevent the misuse of commercial bank deposits
(other people's money like yours and mine) in dangerous forms of
speculation, which many at the time believed had helped cause the Great Wall
Street Crash of 1929, prelude to the Great Depression.  Today, ever more
people wish Glass-Steagall had never been repealed (as it was in 1999), as
its absence helped open the door to the financial misadventures that brought
us the Great Crash of '08.

The bill infuriated what was called, in those days, "the Money Trust,"
especially the once omnipotent house of Morgan, the dominant member of an
elite group of Wall Street firms that had run the financial system since the
turn of the century when J.P. Morgan, America's most famous banker, was
revered and feared around the world.  (Jack, the patriarch's son, was so
incensed by New Deal financial reform that he banned all pictures of the
President from the bank's premises.)  Glass-Steagall, as well as the two
Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 which created the Securities and Exchange
Commission and left the doyens of the New York Stock Exchange apoplectic,
represented real reform, and so were different in kind from TARP and all the
other contraptions designed by the Bush and Obama Treasury Departments
simply to bail out the financial sector.

*The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA): Offspring also of those first 100
days, the TVA uplifted a vast, underdeveloped, and impoverished rural region
of the country by bringing it electric power, irrigation, soil conservation,
and flood control.  It introduced the then-alien (and once again alien) idea
of government-directed economic planning and development.  It left the
private utility industry irate at the prospect of having to compete with
effective, publicly owned electrical-power-generating facilities.
Fast-forward to today when, on the contrary, the private health insurance
and pharmaceutical industries, conniving behind closed doors with Obama's
people, proved triumphant in a similar confrontation, leaving government
competition in the dust.

*Jobs: And then there was, as there is again, the question of jobs and how
to create them.  In 1933, American politicians still took the notion of
balancing the budget each year with deadly seriousness.  In our present era,
every president from Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to George W. Bush and
now, apparently, Barack Obama talks the talk without any intention of
walking the walk.  What made the Roosevelt moment remarkable was this:
balanced-budget orthodoxy notwithstanding, the new administration soon
forged ahead with a set of jobs programs that not only implied deficit
spending but an even more radical departure from business as usual.

Initially, the Public Works Administration (PWA), created as part of the
National Industrial Recovery Act, relied on large-scale infrastructure
projects farmed out to private enterprise.  Undertaking such projects
inevitably entailed government borrowing and deficits.  Partly for that
reason, the PWA proceeded at a glacial pace, put few to work right away,
and -- in the way it looked to the private sector to take the lead -- 
resembled the latest thinking of the Obama administration whose newest tepid
suggestions for creating jobs depend almost solely on funneling tax relief
to business.

Simultaneously, however, the New Deal pursued a more daring alternative.
FDR diverted a third of the PWA's budget to the Civil Works Administration
(CWA), out of which was born the legendary Civilian Conservation Corps, an
agency that deployed hundreds of thousands of unemployed young men to
restore the country's forests and parklands.  The CWA skipped the private
sector entirely and simply put people to work: four million people in the
summer and fall of 1933.  (That would be the equivalent, today, of ten
million Americans back on the job.)

During the first nine months of the Roosevelt administration manual
laborers, clerks, architects, book-binders, teachers, actors, white and blue
collar workers alike became Federal employees.  They laid millions of feet
of sewer pipe, improved hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, and built
thousands of schools, playgrounds, and airports. Harry Hopkins, who ran the
CWA, was authorized to seize tools, equipment, and materials from Army
warehouses to get the new system up and running.  (The Works Progress
Administration, a subsequent incarnation of the CWA, would later create
eight million jobs on the same principle of public employment.)

This isn't even within hailing distance of where the current Administration
is now as it frets about the deficit and pledges to freeze domestic spending
(and implies, without having the courage to say so, that Medicare, Medicaid,
and Social Security had better watch out).  Coming from a regnant Democratic
Party this is change we can't or don't want to believe in.

Heading Backwards

Like Obama, Roosevelt was denounced by his enemies in the Republican Party
and the business community as a closet socialist (not to mention a cripple,
a Jew, and a homosexual).  While the administration would sometimes trim its
sails considerably to weather the right wing storm, its general reaction to
Republican opposition was the opposite of Obama's.  Even during that first
year, and at an accelerating pace afterwards, the momentum of the New Deal
carried it irresistibly to the left.

This was true, in fact, of the whole Democratic Party.  The Congress elected
in the off-year of 1934 was not only more overwhelmingly Democratic, but the
Democrats who won were considerably more progressive-minded.  They were far
readier to jettison the shibboleths of the old order and press a still
cautious President in their direction.  By 1936, the essentials of the
social welfare and regulatory state were in place, an insurgent labor
movement had won the elementary right to organize (while becoming the New
Deal's most muscular constituency), and the president was denouncing
"economic royalists" and "tories of industry" whose "hatred" for him he
"welcomed."

Today the Obama administration and the Democratic Party are visibly moving
in the opposite direction.  They read the lesson of humiliating defeat in
Massachusetts and the voluble hostility of the populist right as an advisory
to move further to the right.  Tacking rightward, tailoring policy to match
the tastes of business and finance, cautioning Americans that they'll need
to tighten their belts (as if they hadn't already been doing so), adopting
the parsimonious sanctimony of the balanced budget, slimming down their
great expectations until what little is left mocks the hopes of so many who
elected them -- all of this is seen as smart politics.

Smart like a chicken.  This is the same cleverness that, beginning with
Ronald Reagan's triumph, turned the Democratic Party into Republican-lite.
Shrewdness like this helps explain, in part, why Obama's inner circle and
Democratic leaders took the early, fateful steps that were bound to land
them where they find themselves today.

Would the Republican right and its tea-party populists -- marginal, mockable
political freaks less than a year ago -- have enjoyed their current growth
spasm if the administration hadn't been committed to bailing out the very
institutions most people considered the villains responsible for running
this country into a ditch?  Would the Democratic Party have been in imminent
danger of losing its faltering grip on Congress had it found the will to
pursue serious health-care reform and environmental legislation, or wrestled
the financial oligarchy to the mat as Roosevelt did?  A long generation
spent cowering in the shadows of the conservative ascendancy has left the
newly empowered Democrats congenitally incapable of seizing their own
historic moment.

After a year of feinting to the left without meaning it, how seriously is
anyone going to take the administration's latest call to tax the banks or
break their addiction to reckless speculation?  Even if Obama now means to
push ahead with some sort of health-care reform or put some teeth into new
financial regulations, he has spent so much political capital moving in the
opposite direction and seeking partners where there never were any that his
quest, even if genuine, may now be purely quixotic.  As for the surge in
Afghanistan and the endless war that goes with it, by election time 2010,
it's an even bet that it will have further undermined any hopes of a
late-inning Democratic Party revival.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, off-year elections do not always favor
the minority party.  Indeed, 1934 may be the best example of the opposite
effect.  Exactly because the New Deal showed itself ever readier to junk the
ancien régime, break with economic orthodoxy, and above all say goodbye to
its erstwhile corporate friends, it was rewarded handsomely at the polls.
None of that apparently will be repeated in 2010, given an administration
that seems to be running a New Deal in reverse.


Steve Fraser is the co-editor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order and
author, most recently, of Wall Street: America's Dream Palace.  He is
Research Associate at the Joseph Murphy Center for Labor and Community
Studies at the Graduate Center of the City of New York. (To catch him in an
exclusive TomDispatch audio interview discussing why Obama has ignored the
public-works job model Franklin D. Roosevelt pioneered, click here.)

© 2010 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145641/

call 'em the way we sees 'em

 

Trillions for defense.  Defense of what?  A crumbling Democracy.  We can't even seem to take care of our warriors who defended this sagging nation.  And Cathy and I think anyone cares about the elderly blind?  It's time we took off the gloves.  Stop calling these corporate conglomerates and Wall Street mega millionaires thieves and crooks and start calling them what they are, Terrorists.  Systematically destroying everything the middle/working class fought to put in place.  All that has made us a great nation is being sucked out of our bones.  Terrorists think nothing of sending you and me and our children off to trudge through the sands of dangerous lands while they sit behind their gated mansions sipping their fancy drinks and being waited upon hand and foot.  It's time the Terrorists in America paid their dues. 

 

Curious Carl

 

check out my blog
www.curiouscarlscorner.blogspot.com