freshwest

freshwest's Journal

March 10, 2014

+1. They sold themselves too cheaply:

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

~ Barack Obama

March 10, 2014

Perfect. It should be an OP. n/t

March 10, 2014

The bankruptcy laws were gutted by the GOP. Then student loans were put in the category that must be

paid off - even if the person was disabled - they can garnish their freaking social security check! At least that was the latest outrage in place.

Warren is going at this the best she can, working on the for-profits that scammed a lot of students, training them for jobs that were not going to be there. Some universities did, too.

I had a bankuptcy many years ago from medical bills caused by an injury that was not my fault, before the GOP got into making sure their pals were paid - no matter how blood sucking the system got.

When I filed, I was humiliated, most people are. Despite having two forms of insurance, and still being able to work for less money, it was horrible and I had to file in federal court.

But my attorney handed me a lot of literature about how the bankruptcy courts were set up at or near the founding of the USA. To him, it was patriotic! Because it was America's answer to the British debtor's prison. A fresh start without shame.

The MSM and GOP political machine started smearing those who filed bankruptcy, just as they did those on public assistance. Most of it lies - the major cause for bankruptcy filings among individuals was for many years - and may still be - for medical bills.

A person should not be made to feel ashamed of an illness or an accident they had no control over, despite the image that media portrays, that many people have bought. We don't draw and quarter people, gouge out their eyes or cut their tongues out the way that old Europe did.

The Constitution forbids such cruel and unusual punishment, so why should we do it to those who get injured or ill, or student who find they were sold a bill of goods on what their career would be, to pay off student loan debt?

For that matter, why ruin the credit history and opportunity for employment and housing that comes from its loss for soldiers who got bonuses for enlisting, but were unable to finish their tour of duty and fulfill their contract, due to injury in war? And allow the creditors to hound them and their families, knowing they could not serve, could not work, making them homeless.

The GOP and their masters are CREATING poverty and cutting people down in their prime earning years to reduce those who have the best chance of making lives for themselves, to outliers and outcasts. Warren is doing what she can, Obama did get some Pell Grants for people, is continuing to fight for healthcare and education, but is anyone listening?

The MSM says nothing about these people. Let the students negotiate a deal, as businesses do when their company goes to pieces. Their creditors took a gamble on their ability to pay. The owners of the student loan debt, took a gamble too.

These loans should be written off for a tax break - it's what banks do all the time when their debtor can't pay such noncollateral loans like the student loans are. A loan that was secured with an asset is a different matter - these are not secured loans.

The bank or lender can get a tax break for the loss, and the debt is cleared off the debtor in a certain number of years. Or they negotiate a percentage to be paid, and I think it should be measured in the worth of what they got - a degree or certification for a career or job that doesn't exist in sufficient quantity for them to ever be able to pay it off.

Time to get back to reality again with a Demcratic House and Senate with the numbers to thumb their nose at the GOP. Until that is done, more youth will be disaffected and unable to make a difference in their lives except to be outliers - which is just what the Koch brothers, JBS and Libertarians wanted them to become!

March 10, 2014

Palin winks at Putin: Drill baby, drill! (okay, sorry about that. but she's into oil you know)

You posted that one. It is perfect. That the RWNJs love Putin, is a mark against him. Unless he's laughing at them as they cheer him, for being such ignoramuses.

March 9, 2014

Thanks. I was planning on posting an article on this... but wasn't sure where to put it.

Sore Losers: A Bill for the Horse Soring Crowd

March 5, 2014

by Michael Markarian, president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund

Momentum is growing in Congress to pass H.R. 1518/S. 1406, the Prevent All Soring Tactics (PAST) Act, legislation seeking to upgrade the four-decades-old federal Horse Protection Act (HPA) to stop rampant and intentional injuring of horses with caustic chemicals and other painful devices in the Tennessee Walking Horse show world in order to induce an exaggerated gait.

HSLF and HSUS are backing the bill, along with more than 100 horse industry and veterinary organizations and many others. Introduced by Reps. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., and Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., and Sens. Kelly Ayotte, N.H., and Mark Warner, D-Va., the legislation has the bipartisan support of 266 House cosponsors and 48 Senate cosponsors. Not many bills in Congress ever amass so many cosponsors – a solid majority of the Congress.

But rather than halt their criminal conduct within their industry and support efforts to strengthen the law so that it will serve as a meaningful deterrent to people who torment horses to win ribbons at shows, some in the horse soring community have worked with a handful of lawmakers to try to maintain the status quo. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., this week introduced “alternative” legislation to the PAST Act that can be described as nothing but a get-out-of-jail-free card to those who perpetrate the cruel practice of soring...

Blackburn’s bill completely fails to address the stacked shoes and chains, even though 93% of violations of the Horse Protection Act involve Big Lick horses who are subjected to these devices. The chains exacerbate the effects of chemical soring by striking and rubbing on sensitized pasterns, and stacks unnaturally alter the angle of the foot and can be used to conceal foreign objects—all to cause enough pain to create the desired high step. The American Veterinary Medical Association and the American Association of Equine Practitioners have called for the elimination of stacks and chains from the Big Lick show ring as a prerequisite to ending soring. The PAST Act bans them; this so-called alternative doesn’t even mention them...

http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2014/03/sore-losers-a-bill-for-the-horse-soring-crowd/

What pleasure can possibly be had by spectators, knowing that the horses are literally being tortured under their eyes as they perform these stupid acts in a ring?

Are they so bereft of the love of the majesty of a horse's natural movement, that they love to see it constrained to look cripppled, their beauty mocked by such stupidity?

I've never been able to watch these performances that used to be shown on cable for hours with some idiot droning on for hours, going around in circles. It's like the lunacy never ends with these people.

March 9, 2014

I'm so glad to see this, Sarah! I've been harping on that part you emboldened there:

The Republicans have a real stake in proving that government can't work. They need voters to be hostile to federal government. To see government as the enemy. Because that's the only way voters will support politics that actually give control of government back over to big money.

It takes asking what is the motive of what I'm being told? Who is paying for it to be told?
Why should one assume it is the solution? Who benefits?

It's fascist propaganda, used to create what FDR warned us of:

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group...

His VP Henry Wallace showed how they would do it to us:

The Danger of American Fascism

by Henry A. Wallace

An article in the New York Times, April 9, 1944.

From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.

1. On returning from my trip to the West in February, I received a request from The New York Times to write a piece answering the following questions:

1. What is a fascist?
2. How many fascists have we?
3. How dangerous are they?

2. A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

3. The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.

4. The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

5. If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

6. American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.

7. The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America. The effect of the war has been to raise the cost of living in most Latin American countries much faster than the wages of labor. The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives. Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States. Following this war, technology will have reached such a point that it will be possible for Germans, using South America as a base, to cause us much more difficulty in World War III than they did in World War II. The military and landowning cliques in many South American countries will find it attractive financially to work with German fascist concerns as well as expedient from the standpoint of temporary power politics.

8. Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

9. Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after "the present unpleasantness" ceases:

10. The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups. Likewise, many people whose patriotism is their proudest boast play Hitler's game by retailing distrust of our Allies and by giving currency to snide suspicions without foundation in fact.

11. The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

12. Several leaders of industry in this country who have gained a new vision of the meaning of opportunity through co-operation with government have warned the public openly that there are some selfish groups in industry who are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage. We all know the part that the cartels played in bringing Hitler to power, and the rule the giant German trusts have played in Nazi conquests. Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.

13. It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us. The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. It was Mussolini's vaunted claim that he "made the trains run on time." In the end, however, he brought to the Italian people impoverishment and defeat. It was Hitler's claim that he eliminated all unemployment in Germany. Neither is there unemployment in a prison camp.

14. Democracy to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity to "make the trains run on time." It must develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels. As long as scientific research and inventive ingenuity outran our ability to devise social mechanisms to raise the living standards of the people, we may expect the liberal potential of the United States to increase. If this liberal potential is properly channeled, we may expect the area of freedom of the United States to increase. The problem is to spend up our rate of social invention in the service of the welfare of all the people.

15. The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan. Democracy can win the peace only if it does two things:

1) Speeds up the rate of political and economic inventions so that both production and, especially, distribution can match in their power and practical effect on the daily life of the common man the immense and growing volume of scientific research, mechanical invention and management technique.

2) Vivifies with the greatest intensity the spiritual processes which are both the foundation and the very essence of democracy.

16. The moral and spiritual aspects of both personal and international relationships have a practical bearing which so-called practical men deny. This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy. Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum created by the power of modern inventions, we may expect the fascists to increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the world.

17. Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.

18. It should also be evident that exhibitions of the native brand of fascism are not confined to any single section, class or religion. Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or religion. It may be encountered in Wall Street, Main Street or Tobacco Road. Some even suspect that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac. It is an infectious disease, and we must all be on our guard against intolerance, bigotry and the pretension of invidious distinction. But if we put our trust in the common sense of common men and "with malice toward none and charity for all" go forward on the great adventure of making political, economic and social democracy a practical reality, we shall not fail.

http://newdeal.feri.org/wallace/haw23.htm

Is this not what has been done? Are we not meeting the same challenges, forgetting our roots, having been made to feel jaded about solutions put in place to defeat this?

It's all been done by the first methods that Wallace warns us about here:

4. The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

That this knowledge has not been screamed from the rooftops of this nation, that people's minds have been for taken in so decades now by the O'Reilly's and Rush's and the rest - it absolutely instills a sense of dread and terror for a person with an attention span longer that television trains people to have.

March 9, 2014