Sunday, September 29, 2013

Cruz Control

Fact:: The majority of Americans voted for President Obama and his healthcare plan.
Fact: Republicans do not care if Americans have affordable health care. (I wonder why?)
It is really that simple.
There must be some reason that the GOTEA Party
 would rather shut down the government than to give the American people the chance to see what the Affordable Care Act could do for them.
There are parts of the Affordable Care Act that are already effect, like not being turned down by the health insurance INDUSTRY for pre-existing conditions, or being able to keep your kids on your policy until they are 26.
Americans that I know are very happy with these provisions of the ACA. So why is the GOTEA Party hellbent on sutting down the government in order to now, just put off the ACA for another year? Because it's like crack and Americans will just want more and more!


Lets tally the list of demands the GOTEA Party wants:
Outlaw abortion
No food stamps
No  EPA
Privatize Social Security (not sure if they want it at all)
No public schools.
For sure no gay people, PERIOD.
No Affordable Healthcare Act.
Willing to shut down the government to keep the ACA from being implemented.
 There is a simple solution for this situation.
How about Congress and the Senate go without healthcare for a year?
If they do not pass the budget then their salaries get cut first.
What are your ideas?




Sunday, September 22, 2013

Hostage Situation

He has healthcare.
43 million people don't have healthcare. I am one of them. When health insurance at my place of employment went up to $180 a week, I could no longer afford it. Not to mention the fact that the insurance plan hardly paid for anything. I am not sure what the healthcare exchanges will do for me. But I would like to at least have the option of finding out what the ACA could do for millions of Americans just like me.


Hatred of the ACA has become so great by many of the right wing GOP, that they are prepared to throw the people under the bus because of it. No matter what you think of what is termed 'Obamacare' it is legislation that has already been passed and agreed on. Now they want to shut the government down.

They are willing to gut the SNAP program as if getting food stamps is a luxury. The GOP hates the ACA so much that they are willing to let the military go unpaid, stop medical research and God knows what else, just to defund Obamacare. They have held the economy hostage for years causing people to lose jobs and make America look like a third world country. They have declared war on the poor, the middle class and any American that is struggling in an economy that is rigged against the average citizen.
Boehner is always saying he speaks for the American people. I don't know any American who thinks it's a good idea for people to go without healthcare, to go hungry or to go without employment for decent wages. So who could he be speaking for? Maybe rich people? Why is it that these "leaders" wait for a crises in order to do anything? Then, the only thing they are willing to do is let Americans in need go without. All these politicians do is the very least to get by and retain their jobs. It really makes me sick. So go ahead and shut it down. History will show what a failure this Speaker of The House is.
History will also show that President Obama will remembered for being the first President to get health care reform passed after nearly every President before him tried and failed. History will remember that he brought the country back from the brink of a 2nd Great Depression. My biggest problem with President Obama is that he didn't go far enough.
 When your own government is populated with terrorists holding the economy hostage and denying healthcare to millions while saying they "speak" for the American people, well I want to know who exactly they are speaking to? Certainly not the uninsured.
                                                                       Funny right?

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Is 8,241 Enough?

 It's just so predictable that there was yet another mass shooting. Despite prior arrests and all sorts of signs that the individual who shot 12 people in Washington DC was mentally unstable he had access to weapons and went on a rampage.
 Someone, some where, right now, is probably buying a gun and planning to kill a bunch of people even as I type. But no one knows what to do and there are no steps taken to stop this senseless killing of innocent people. Maybe the next one will be at a school again, that always seems popular. Whatever or whenever it happens don't change a thing! Just keep doing things the same way we have for 200 years! There will be a candlelight vigil. There will be a shrine created with flowers and stuffed teddy bears, but there will be no change about gun laws that allow crazy people to buy this:
It's alleged that the man who went on a shooting spree on Monday practiced with an AR-15 two days before the shooting. That's quite a gun, and there's no end to the kind of weaponry that a mentally ill person can buy here in America, the home of the well armed, home of the angry and armed to the teeth. Just sacrifice innocent people and bury them, leaving their families to grieve, but don't take our guns!
There are a lot of people who need support, mental health care, maybe even medication. Unfortunately it is way easier to buy a gun in this country than to get access to a good psychiatrist. the "Navy Shooter" "heard voices" probably had PTSD, he actually told the police that people were following him and "sending vibrations through his body." Seems like a red flag to me. If there was some kind of law in place that incidents like these were on a data base so individuals who have these kinds of problems do not have access to guns would be logical. People argue with me that he could still get a gun. In a country where guns out number people, it's probably true. Noone seems to think there's anything wrong with that equation.
Someday soon, I'll be pissed off again about someone shooting up another public space with innocent people dying  it seems clear that guns are more important than the human carnage they cause. 12 people are dead. Most of the reporting will be about the mentally deranged person who did this. Who is going to interview the bereaved people a year from now to see how their lives were impacted by this senseless violence? They will never be the same. It's the victims that are the real story here.  8,241 people have died from gun violence this year.
Think it's enough?
The Gun Report: September 17, 2013 - NYTimes.com

Sunday, September 15, 2013

It Might Have Been Worse....

Chart from Mother Jones
I don't know if anyone remembers Sept. of 2007, but I do. Being an artist requires you to document all kinds of things and I would tally the stock market drops almost daily. I had cable then so I actually watched the news on TV.
I heard Hank Paulson on NPR the other day, talking about his regret that the bailout he engineered was perceived as being for the banks and it headed off a catastrophe, a catastrophe that every. single. person. I know of had to deal with.
People lost their jobs, homes, their way of life. Hank never mentioned that. The dude on Marketplace didn't either. Normal everyday people who worked hard, bought homes, raised kids, watched their investment lose it's value. They basically own homes they are prisoners of.  Others I know have offered their homes up for short sale, if they weren't outright foreclosed on, driving down the "value" of everyone else's "real" estate.
 Heckuva a job there, Hank.
"this whole economic period we're living through. It's obviously the equivalent of the Great Depression."
This is what financial journalist Michael Lewis calls this "economic period"
 Like menstruation, it's painful, messy and it seems like it just won't end.
When I talk to my Dad about the Great Depression, he tells me that things were way worse than this. He said NO ONE had a job. My Dad's family were evicted from their home and had to live with my aunt Addie. She was the secretary for the president of the Chlorox company. Ahead of her time, she was a single working woman.
 My Dad hates Lima Beans to this day, because his family lived on a sack of dried Lima beans kept in the pantry. This is probably an ordinary example of what happened to everyday Americans during the Great Depression.
I don't know of anyone living on dried Lima beans now. I do see a lot of people paying for their groceries with the food stamp card. I am so grateful that we have that for people who can't find jobs or are working for Walmart. I see people doubled or tripled up in their homes. I see homeless people with all their belongings riding their bicycles or walking, being kept on the move or else they are arrested for loitering. I guess during the Great Depression they were called 'tramps" I remember dressing like them for Halloween and carrying a bandana stuffed with newspaper on a stick. I never saw a homeless person as a child. It doesn't mean they didn't exist, I see them everyday now.
I see empty houses foreclosed on by banks that made out like bandits during the Great Recession. Homeless people and peopless homes. It just makes no sense to me. Back in the good old day's when I was a kid, I never saw an empty house. I lived in ordinary middle class neighborhoods. No empty houses, no homeless people. Everyone who wanted a job had one.
The people who work for us in Washington D.C. act like this Great Recession never happened. They think it is something in the past, long gone, while millions still suffer with the painful after effects. At least when F.D.R. was elected he understood people were suffering and because of him we have social programs that keep my Dad and other Americans from starvation and worse. Politicians see these as "entitlements" from what I can see, it is the only thing they want to focus on so they can get rid of it and we can go back to the Victorian poorhouses and workhouses of the past.
The country I grew up in has vanished.
So now Larry Summers is being vetted for the position of chairman of the Fed, a man who's "disastrous or wrongheaded policies, from his big deregulatory moves as a Clinton administration apparatchik to his too-tepid response to the Great Recession as Obama's chief economic adviser." The Case Against Larry Summers - NationalJournal.com
It wouldn't surprise me if this Wall Street insider is handed this position. Because nothing surprises me anymore when it comes to a government that tells the American people that we can eat cake, cake we can't afford. "Things are getting better" I hear this all the time but I have seen no evidence of it. 
From January 2007 to December 2011 there were more than four million completed foreclosures and more than 8.2 million foreclosure starts*
more Americans are killing themselves today than during the Great Depression*.
 You can call it the "Great Recession" if you want. You can say you saved the banks because "it could have been worse."  As long as it wasn't worse for the banks or Larry Summers or any of the criminals that had a hand in this "Great Recession."
*More Americans Committing Suicide than During the Great Depression | Washington's Blog
* Home Foreclosure Rates are Comparable to the Great Depression | Washington's Blog

 

 

 

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

My 9/11

Today my friend at work asked me what my 9/11 story was.
This is what I told him.
9/11, started for me, on May 1, 2001. My husband died in a car accident on the Garden State Parkway, coming home from work. Hands down the worst experience of my life and that, as they say in the south, is puttin' it mighty mild.
 2 months later my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.
 Her birthday was 9/11.
I had dropped my 7 year old daughter off at school that day in September. I had taken a leave of absence from my job as a substitute teacher. If you can specialize when you're a sub, I did, I taught special ed.
My husband had died without a will, as I am sure, a lot of people who lost their lives on 9/11.
 I had to go to court to be named Executrix of his estate. It's an expensive proposition and time consuming, which is why I had taken time off from work.
I got a phone call on the morning of 9/11, from my best friend telling me to turn on the T.V. That was the moment when I saw the one tower burning and the 2nd hit, that I thought I had lost my sanity.
A few hours later I got a call from the school I subbed for, asking me to come in. One of the teachers I regularly subbed for, who had a class of mainly autistic kids, her father was in one of the towers.
Even though I wasn't sure I was ready to walk back into a classroom after my loss, it was something I had to do. She wasn't there when I went in. She had already left to go to go to her family.
They never found her father.

 Many times when I would have to inform someone of my widowed status after 9/11 (there are a lot of nosy people), people would ask if my husband died on 9/11. They would act like it was a big relief that he didn't die on that horrible day. I guess they were right. Didn't make it any less painful though.
 For me May 1, 2001, was my personal 9/11.
Unfortunately the journey I had already started, was going to be a journey, the teacher I subbed for and so many others, were just beginning. Only magnified in a way I can't even imagine. Death leaves a hole in your life that can never be filled. 12 years later I still feel it. Who can ever forget?

Sunday, September 8, 2013

Selling The War

Korea
Vietnam
Cuba
Cambodia
El Salvador
Libya
Nicaragua
Iraq
Afghanistan

When are we going to learn to let other countries take care of their own problems?
Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) may be onto something when he says “We have billions to spend on a war but no money to take care of the very pressing needs of the American people. That bothers me a lot.”  However, it doesn't bother most of our lawmakers. Did corporate lobbyists and military leaders want the President to just go into Syria willy-nilly and start bombing?  What is the real agenda here?
Tuesday night the President is going to give an address on why we should get into another war. Maybe it's the crappy economy  factor and war will boost our GDP? The point is that no one wants this Syrian strike, or whatever the President is planning. But the President wants to win the pissing contest, the red line has been crossed. Since we have no credibility anymore after Iraq, I'm not sure if we can get it back with Syria.
The American people don't want to interfere in Syria so it's going to be interesting to see which Senators and Congressmen will vote for this military action. Republicans won't go along with anything the President wants, except maybe John McCain.
Does anyone think it's wierd that Kerry went on and on about the dead Syrian kids, but kids in this country have been sequestered out of Head Start and other programs because we're broke? Certainly children are dying from neglect and poverty in this country and no one bats an eye at that.
The thing that we should be worried about are the unintended consequences from our actions in an extremely volatile part of the world that we have already failed miserably in.
Maybe I'm paranoid but it's like Obama and Kerry are spokesman for some larger organization that wants some kind of proxy war, with Russia and China on one side and the U.S. on the other. Another thing no one is mentioning? That would be oil. Syria's BFF is Iran and it goes without saying that there are plenty of people in the government that would love to bomb that country. It's a little too convenient to use an excuse to go after Syria and then oops! It spills over into Iran, or Iran gets pissed and decides to join in the fun. Iran is another example of where the U.S. doesn't have a very good track record. There is a lot of oil in Iran. Could it be that there is an agenda to draw Iran into this conflict as an excuse to go after them? I hope we don't find out. Then there is the whole muslim mash-up, I'm talking about the whole Sunni-Shia conflict that has been an ongoing battle in the Middle East. We are basically Saudi Arabia's bitch and they are Sunni. Our country buys a lot of Saudi oil, oil reserves are running low there though.
Another issue is this whole double talk about chemical weapons. Didn't we use Agent Orange in Vietnam? Didn't the police pepper spray protestors when the whole Occupy movement was going on? So it's ok if we use chemicals, as long as no one else does? It's going to be interesting to see what happens on Tuesday. I just wish our leaders would be a little more interested in solving some of our own problems.