freshwest
freshwest's JournalDon't forget what a great opportunity he saw in hurting millions of Americans:
By Dana Liebelson - Oct. 10, 2013
1. Social Security payments will be delayed, possibly cut. According to President Obama, in the event of a default the US government will have no choice but to delay Social Security checks. The government owes $12 billion in Social Security payments on October 23 and an additional $25 billion on November 1. At some point between October 22 and November 1, the BPC predicts that the US government will have exhausted its borrowing power and will either have to start severely delaying its bills or sort through the millions of different payments it makes each month—on everything from national parks to the FBI—to figure out which ones to stop paying. That's when Social Security could see sustained cuts.
2. Federal employees will be screwed…even more. Furloughed federal employees haven't been paid since the government shutdown began on October 1. Congress is unlikely to end the shutdown without raising the debt limit, meaning furloughed staffers would be unlikely to receive paychecks anytime soon.
3. Pay and benefits for military service members and veterans will be delayed, possibly cut. The US government owes $12 billion in pay to active and retired military service members on November 1. Those payments will be delayed if the government runs out of money before then, and potentially cut, depending on which bills the US decides to pay.
4. Medicare and Medicaid checks will be delayed, possibly cut. The US government owes $2 billion in Medicaid payments on October 30 and $18 billion in Medicare payments on November 1. Same deal: If the government runs out of cash before then, payments will be delayed, or put on the chopping block with everything else.
Kept within 4 paragraphs to match DU rules. Much more at the link, showing it will be impossible to recover from default, yet the GOP thinks this is a great idea. They want a civil war, and this is how they want to get one, but many won't survive this. It is a manufactured crisis, there is not country in the world that wants this.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/16-ways-not-raising-debt-ceiling-will-screw-americans
With thanks to Mira who posted the Mother Jones link in GD. You can go to enter that discussion, I added more information:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023834604
http://www.democraticunderground.com/110218177
Debt Ceiling: 'Chaotic' choices on 100 million payments
By Jeanne Sahadi - January 7, 2013
If Congress doesn't raise the debt ceiling soon, the Treasury Department will be forced to make drastic, no-win decisions on how to honor tens of millions of legally owed payments every month...
Prioritizing interest payments means Treasury must choose from more than 100 million monthly payments and would not be able to pay 40% of the dollars owed...
Much more at link:
http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/07/news/economy/debt-ceiling/index.html
Those expecting veteran benefits will lose those in November through shutdown or with default:
5 million will lose veterans' benefits next month if shutdown stretches to November
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=616482
Rand Paul says default can be 'framed as a reasonable idea' and Tom Coburn wants to default to face a 'managed catastrophe.'
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3820816
Why the people of the USA aren't in the offices of these gangsters protesting right now, proves the power of media.
They will blame Obama, the poor, the disabled, the elderly and any 'Others,' instead of the GOP.
We should never forget on a liberal, progressive website whose mission is to see more Democrats elected to office:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=termsofservice
We can see the F.U.D. for what it is. Rand Paul has voted for repealing the ACA that benefits people in his state, still pushes Right to Work laws, personhood attachments to bills, voted against the VAWA, is for privatizing police, fire departments, schools, social services or eliminating them along with Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps, is anti-environment... the list goes on.
His alleged virtues about warfare are con jobs when you see the warfare by inequality and racism he supports daily. He says what's happening in Ferguson isn't racial. But then, he doesn't see a lot of people as worthwhile human beings who should have a say in governing ourselves.
He's too wet to step on and too low to kick. ~ JustAnotherGen
If he was any more connected, he'd have a direct psychic link to billions of people...
It's the media that is disconnected from the needs of people as they sell their corrupted memes and disparage anyone not paying them.Sick of this bullshit. To hell with the lying media. Check this out right here:
TV News station edits video to "thuggify" a 4 year old African American boy
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025435229
Not good enough! They should air the full video and explain that he wanted a gun to stop criminals.
They still left the public with the impression that the kid was some kind of future criminal, when he is just the opposite! I hope social media gets all over this and the ones who did this!
No mealy mouthed apology will suffice for smearing a little boy like that. The real story is what they should air over and over again until it sinks in that he's a good kid:
Every day. Or yank their license. Until all media quits dehumanizing.
P. S. Not mad at you, but at them. This has to stop.
The disillusionment talk shows they didn't listen to him in 2007. I did. He made it clear that we
have a very long haul to undo whatever we can of the last thirty years and more of well orchestrated destruction.Everything most people took for granted has been stripped away by wars and low taxes on the grifters. He is trying to build a future and only has broken infrastructure and a brainwashed populace with no long term vision or critical thinking skills to work with. Even worse, a very sour and maliciously lazy mindset that is carefully constructed to make all he is working on fail.
He really was serious on the campaign trail about how many of us would not be getting what we used to have as we fight to recover. He presented the data of just how deep a hole we are in. And some acted like he was going to do it alone and they could sit back and watch.
I no longer have patience for this foolishness. It's not up to him, it's up to us and if he fails it was because of too much self absorption by the voters and arrogance by those who expect to be courted like brides for their votes.
It's our lives and country to save and people act like pointing the finger changes things. Maybe we deserve what the Koch brothers have planned. And most don't even know what the hell that agenda is and how close they are to getting it all through.
So they point at the guy working his ass off and blame him. Those who can't or won't do the work, sit on their duffs and criticize.
Turkey is in NATO, can't get away from that. They've been urging action since
last year because of the rockets crossing the border and killing their people. They wanted it stopped. Although they were not the intended target, their citizens still died.Turkey also said then that jihaists were coming across the border with the many refugees from Syria. An American general working closely with Obama says the plight of 20 million refugees displaced from Syria and Iraq must be addressed or there will be no peace.
ISIS wants to create a new state that will give those people a homeland and has larger ambitions. It's likely Turkey is also on ISIS's list of nations they intend to possess as they seek to expand their caliphate into Europe, as older caliphates and empires did.
Perhaps we need to post a disclaimer for what should be obvious, but somehow isn't:
*NOTE: PLEASE RE-READ THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY BEFORE GOING FURTHER. NOTICE, IT IS AIMED AT THE WHITE RIGHT. NOT ALL WHITE PEOPLE. ANYONE WHO THINKS THIS ESSAY IS “ANTI-WHITE PEOPLE,” AS OPPOSED TO THAT SEGMENT OF THE WHITE COMMUNITY THAT IS RIGHT WING, CANNOT READ PLAIN ENGLISH. PLEASE TRY AGAIN.*~ Tim Wise
http://www.timwise.org/2010/11/an-open-letter-to-the-white-right-on-the-occasion-of-your-recent-successful-temper-tantrum/
An Open Letter to the White Right, On the Occasion of Your Recent, Successful Temper Tantrum (2010)
*NOTE: PLEASE RE-READ THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY BEFORE GOING FURTHER. NOTICE, IT IS AIMED AT THE WHITE RIGHT. NOT ALL WHITE PEOPLE. ANYONE WHO THINKS THIS ESSAY IS “ANTI-WHITE PEOPLE,” AS OPPOSED TO THAT SEGMENT OF THE WHITE COMMUNITY THAT IS RIGHT WING, CANNOT READ PLAIN ENGLISH. PLEASE TRY AGAIN.*http://www.timwise.org/2010/11/an-open-letter-to-the-white-right-on-the-occasion-of-your-recent-successful-temper-tantrum/
An Open Letter to the White Right, On the Occasion of Your Recent, Successful Temper Tantrum
By Tim Wise - Nov 03, 2010 - Daily KOS
For all y’all rich folks, enjoy that champagne, or whatever fancy ass Scotch you drink.
And for y’all a bit lower on the economic scale, enjoy your Pabst Blue Ribbon, or whatever shitty ass beer you favor.
Whatever the case, and whatever your economic station, know this…
You need to drink up.
And quickly.
And heavily.
Because your time is limited.
Real damned limited.
So party while you can, but mind the increasingly loud clock ticking away in the corners of your consciousness.
The clock that reminds you how little time you and yours have left.
Not much more now.
Tick, tock.
Tick, tock.
Tick.
Tock.
I know, you think you’ve taken “your country back” with this election -- and of course you have always thought it was yours for the taking, cuz that’s what we white folks are bred to believe, that it’s ours, and how dare anyone else say otherwise -- but you are wrong.
You have won a small battle in a larger war the meaning of which you do not remotely understand.
‘Cuz there is nothing even slightly original about you.
There have always been those who wanted to take the country back.
There were those who, in past years, wanted to take the country back to a time of enslavement and indentured servitude.
But they lost.
There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when children could be made to work in mines and factories, when workers had no legal rights to speak of, when the skies in every major city were heavy with industrial soot that would gather on sidewalks and windowsills like volcanic ash.
But they lost.
There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when women could not vote, or attend any but a few colleges, or get loans in their own names, or start their own businesses.
But they lost.
There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when blacks “had no rights that the white man was bound to respect,” – this being the official opinion of the Supreme Court before those awful days of judicial activism, now decried by the likes of you – and when people of color could legally be kept from voting solely because of race, or holding certain jobs, or living in certain neighborhoods, or run out of other towns altogether when the sun would go down, or be strung up from trees.
But they lost.
And you will lose.
So make a note of it.
Tweet it to yourself.
Put it on your Facebook wall and leave it there so you’ll remember that I told you so.
It is coming, and soon.
This isn’t hubris. It isn’t ideology. It is not wishful thinking.
It is math.
Not even advanced math. Just simple, basic, like 3rd grade math.
The kind of math that proves how your kind -- mostly older white folks beholden to an absurd, inaccurate, nostalgic fantasy of what America used to be like -- are dying.
You’re like the bad guy in every horror movie ever made, who gets shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass -- even if it takes four sequels to make it happen -- but who in the meantime keeps coming back around, grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that you were finally dead this time.
Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie ends.
Our ankles survive.
You do not.
Michael Meyers, Freddie Kreuger, Jason, and that asshole husband in that movie with Julia Roberts who tracks her down after she runs away and changes her identity--they are all done. Even that crazy fucker in Saw is about to be finished off for good. Granted, he’s gonna be popping out in 3-D to scare the kiddies, so he isn’t going quietly. But he’s going, as all bad guys eventually do.
And in the pantheon of American history, conservative old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.
Fine, keep it up. It doesn't matter.
Because you’re on the endangered list.
And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving.
In forty years or so, maybe fewer, there won’t be any more white people around who actually remember that Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Opie-Taylor-Down-at-the-Fishing Hole cornpone bullshit that you hold so near and dear to your heart.
There won’t be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won’t be any more white folks around who actually remember them, and so therefore, we’ll be able to teach about them accurately and honestly, without hurting your precious feelings, or those of the so-called “greatest generation” -- a bunch whose white contingent was top-heavy with ethical miscreants who helped save the world from fascism only to return home and oppose the ending of it here, by doing nothing to lift a finger on behalf of the civil rights struggle.
It's OK. Because in about forty years, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it.
Nothing, Senõr Tancredo.
Nothing, Senõra Angle, or Senõra Brewer, or Senõr Beck...
And by then you will have gone all in as a white nationalist movement -- hell you’ve all but done that now -- thus guaranteeing that the folks of color, and even a decent size minority of us white folks will be able to crush you, election after election, from the Presidency on down to the 8th grade student council.
Like I said, this is math. And numbers don’t lie.
Bottom line, this too shall pass.
So enjoy your tax cuts a while longer.
Go buy whatever you people buy when your taxes get cut: a new car or two, a bigger house, an island. Whatever.
Go back to trading your derivatives, engaging in rampant financial speculation that produces nothing of value, that turns the whole world into your personal casino. Whatever.
Play your hand, and for the love of God play it big. Real big. As in, shoot for the moon big. As in, try to privatize Social Security, and health care, and everything else. Whatever.
At least that way everyone will be able to see what you're really about.
We’ve been trying to tell them, but nothing beats seeing it with your own eyes, so "Go big or go home," Bubba.
"Git ‘er Done."
"Cowboy up," or whatever other stupid catch phrase strikes your fancy.
Just promise you’ll do more than talk this time.
Please, or as one of your celluloid heroes might put it, “make my day.”
Do whatever you gotta do, but remember that those who are the victims of your greed and indifference take the long view.
They know, but you do not, that justice is not for the sprinters, but rather for the long distance runners who will be hitting their second wind, right about the time that you collapse from exhaustion.
They are like the tortoise to your hare.
They are like the San Francisco Giants, to your New York Yankees: a bunch that loses year after year after year, until they finally win.
You have had this confidence before, remember?
You thought you had secured your position permanently after the overthrow of reconstruction in the wake of the civil war, after the elimination of the New Deal, after the Reagan revolution, after the Republican electoral victory of 1994. And yet, those you thought you had cowed and defeated are still here.
Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims.
They have to study you, to pay careful attention, to adjust their body armor accordingly, and to memorize your sleep patterns.
You, on the other hand, need know nothing whatsoever about them. And this, will surely prove politically fatal to you in the end. For it means you will not know their resolve. Will not fear it, as you should.
It means you will take their greatest strength -- perseverance -- and make of it a weakness, called losing.
But what you forget, or more to the point never knew, is that those who lose know how to lose, which is to say they know how to lose with dignity.
And those who suffer know how to suffer, which is to say they know how to survive: a skill that is in short supply amid the likes of you.
You, who could not survive the thought of minimal health care reform, or financial regulation, or a marginal tax rate equal to that which you paid just 10 years earlier, perhaps are under the illusion that everyone is as weak as you, as soft as you, as akin to petulant children as you are, as unable to cope with the smallest setback, the slightest challenge to the way you think your country should look and feel, and operate.
But they are not.
And they know how to regroup, and plot, and plan, and they are planning even now -- we are -- your destruction.
And I do not mean by that your physical destruction. We don’t play those games. We’re not into the whole “Second Amendment remedies, militia, armed resistance” bullshit that your side fetishizes, cuz, see, we don’t have to be. We don't need guns.
We just have to be patient.
And wait for you to pass into that good night, first politically, and then, well...
Do you hear it?
The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently?
Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.
So know this.
If you thought this election was payback for 2008, remember…
Payback, thy name is…
Temporary.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/11/03/916577/-An-Open-Letter-to-the-White-Right-On-the-Occasion-of-Your-Recent-Successful-Temper-Tantrum
© Kos Media, LLC Site content may be used for any purpose without explicit permission unless otherwise specified.
My take on this:
The racist trolling in the comments at the end of the KOS article is epic. And the gang elected in 2010 have fulfilled all the creepy things Tim Wise suggested they would in the article.
I do take issue with the notion of some that it's purely generational and will die out as they are rearing their children to be separatists. They are getting more and more distinct as they distance themselves from others.
I've seen the cultural infantilism of the right through Tea Party cultists, who are into living in an alternate reality that did not fully exist even half a century ago. They retreat to that milieau, watching old movies or television series of their childhood where they felt safer. They consume Faux Newz around the clock like an addict with an IV drip to remove themselves from an unbearably not-quite-white world.
They felt safer when racial segregation was enforced, but won't dare say that. Indeed, they are the hands reaching from the grave for the ankles of those who are in motion, not stuck in the past. They embrace being zombies but can't see themselves from the outside, don't realize that they are committing suicide by leaving us.
Their former identities are in chaos, as they did not open their hearts to the change Democrats have embraced so they seek the most commercially hyped identity they can find to separate their lives from that of others. Like their pseudo-militarized culture, ready to kill, with all the fire power they can afford. With their Libertarian Island way of brushing aside those they consider unworthy to participate in their world.
Demographics always changes things. And even though the world is now demanding less war of the type we've become accustomed to having, it does not mean there will necessarily be peace. But decades of less than all out of even nuclear wars will occur to decide who is in power and it will take generations to work this out, unless we turn over the reins of power peacefully and with grace, as Prince Charles advised the west to do. To pass the ideals of the Enlightenment as the only worthwhile legacy of our empires.
If we have the time to work it out, that is, in a world of depleted natural resources the conflicts the coming era will bring. Embracing the days we have to live, not the dead past, is better.
Shut up 'pro-lifers.' More brazen hypocrisy. They do nothing for disabled people, after they're born
Except cut off Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, Meals on Wheels and attack the social safety net.
Can't stand clowns of any ilk messing with women they don't even know nor do they want to know.
This is all a hobby with them, they are sitting up above others and telling them what to do.
My favorite rebuttal, 'So you're pro-life? What about anchor babies?'
VAFFANCULO REPUBBLICANI !!!
~Tx4obama
DUers love the supernatural and never let a good meme go to waste (pic heavy):
http://www.whale.to/c/reptilian8.html
But if you deny it, you must be one. Shapeshifters are everywhere. The DLC will always return, like the Undead. We now return to our regularly scheduled program, Tales from the Darkside.
Profile Information
Member since: Fri Dec 10, 2010, 11:36 PMNumber of posts: 53,661
