Still waiting for that day

Every morning, I open up my web browser wondering if today is going to be the day I don’t say “What the fuck?” about something that His Fraudulency Donald the Trump or one of his lizard people officials said or did. Today, once again, was not that day. Because a) the Orange Racist Pussy Grabber released his proposed budget for next year, a budget that predominantly eliminates programs that help Trump voters such as Meals for Wheels and the Appalachian Regional Commission (and what kind of heartless sociopath could ever advocate zeroing out the budget for Meals for Wheels and Sesame Street, for crying out loud!), but he also proposed spending $4.1 billion on his wall next year. Because people might die due to eliminating the Chemical Safety Board, but by god it won’t be done by one of them Messicans!

Talking about which, the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court has demanded that ICE stop stalking California courts, claiming that ICE is intimidating Hispanic witnesses in ongoing criminal trials and causing a public safety hazard. ICE of course says basically “up yours, Ms. Judge, you’re not the boss of me!”. Just as Customs and Border Protection says to they don’t have to obey the NAFTA treaty that says registered nurses qualify for a TN visa and thus can keep out much-needed Canadian nurses because, well, they can. Even though NAFTA is still the law until officially repealed or renegotiated. But God-Emperor Donald the Trump’s administration doesn’t care about no steenkin’ law, it’s all defiant juvenile “you’re not the boss of me! I don’t have to follow your rules!”. Because Cheeto Mussolini says they can. So they do it.

Then there is the ongoing Nazi saga of Sebastian Gorka, who has been dodging allegations that he is a Nazi for weeks now. Well, today a Jewish news magazine published what they purport is evidence that he really is a genuine bona fide Nazi, forcing him to explicitly deny that he’s a Nazi. Except that if he was ever a member of that Hungarian Nazi Party, he is ineligible for immigration to the United States, and could be stripped of his citizenship and deported, just like that sad sack Nazi who’s about to be deported to Poland. Oops!

And on to the Russia front. No wonder Michael Flynn resigned — he was up to his ears in Russian dough.

Finally, I think we’ve found Donald Trump’s next Peace Corps head — a Mormon missionary who beat the crap out of two people who tried to hold him up in Brazil. Because Trump is defunding the Institute for Peace while giving the military more money because the only peace he believes in is the peace of the grave, and this is exactly the right man to enforce that peace.

And that’s this day’s dispatch from the Imperial States of America, where God-Emperor Donald the Trump’s regime of lawlessness and incompetence continues as it has for the past 56 days.

– Badtux the News Penguin

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What do liberals resist, anyhow?

High Resistance, Medium Tolerance

That was the question asked by a right-winger who then went on to list all the good things that President Trump has supposedly done — some of which are things that liberals resist. But I figure I’ll answer his question, since it’s something we need to keep in mind:

We resist:

1. The replacement of science with faith in our schools and in our government.
2. The destruction of our public schools in favor of Bible schools.
3. Removal of protections for endangered wildlife and attempts to exterminate gray wolves via removing them from the endangered species list.
4. Removal of EPA funding for restoring endangered waterway like San Francisco Bay, the Great Lakes, and Cheseapeake Bay
5. Attacks on women’s health and reproductive rights, such as removing funding from Planned Parenthood.
6. Attacks on voting rights, especially attacks that target minorities, the elderly, and the poor such as voter ID laws that are proven to suppress the votes in those constituencies.
7. Attacks on free speech rights by those who wish to outlaw protest and dissent.
8. Attacks on Jews and Muslims such as the recent burnings of Muslim community centers and bomb threats against Jewish community centers.
9. Removal of health care from millions of Americans including essentially ending Medicaid over time by capping how much money can be spent on it.
10. We resist tax cuts for the rich and tax hikes for the poor.
11. We resist increases in corporate welfare for defense companies at the same time as decreasing funding for food for the working poor including, well, a lot of those same soldiers that Trump says he cares about.
12. We resist attempts to outlaw many contracts between worker-owned labor cooperatives (“unions”) and corporations via so-called “right to work” laws.
13. We resist attempts by fucking Nazis to hijack the public discourse. And possibly worse, if we don’t stop them.
14. And so on and so forth.

In short: Wherever there is a proposal by the Trump administration that hurts the poor, hurts working people, hurts the environment, hurts women’s rights, hurts the rights of minorities, hurts the rights of people of the rainbow (sorry, I don’t know all the letters in the latest acronym for all those of alternate sexualities), that furthers hate and bigotry against entire classes of people, we resist it. The above is just the first 6 weeks of what we’ve resisted. It looks like we have close to four more years of this shit. SIGH.

– Badtux the Resistance Penguin

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So poverty is down. Sort of.

I guess we’re supposed to feel good that poverty is finally declining after steadily rising since the start of the George W. Bush Administration. Ignore the fact that the poverty rate is still much higher than it was in 2000 in the last year of the Clinton Administration. Ignore the fact that poverty is still higher than it was in 1993 when Bill Clinton took office. We’re supposed to feel good, good I say.

What this mostly says, to me, is that the welfare reform law of 1996 has proven to be an abysmal failure. Moving people off of welfare rolls into even more dire poverty with little hope of escape isn’t reform. It’s simply being mean to poor people for the sake of being mean. Even *with* the “decline” in the poverty rate, the absolute number of people in poverty is still at a high that has never been seen in recent history, higher, even, than when JFK and LBJ famously declared a war on poverty. Oddly enough, their war on poverty worked — during their administrations, both poverty rates and the number of people in poverty declined precipitously. Since then, Republican president and Republican legislators have reversed much of that progress. Republicans must love poor people. They sure seem to make more of them.

– Badtux the Once-poor Penguin

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People don’t voluntarily starve to death

So the Republicans in Congress, as part of their 20 year War on the Poor, have managed to mostly accomplish their goal. The value of food stamps has been greatly decreased, cash welfare is pretty much at an end, and now teens are turning to selling their bodies to older men for food. Because they’re hungry. This isn’t like 30 years ago when a kid who was selling his or her body on the street likely was getting money for drugs. These kids are getting money for food.

Of course, to the perverts of the Grand Old Pervert party, this just makes their little soldier hard about all these hard working kids who are making a life for themselves yada yada… sigh.

– Badtux the “We are a disgusting nation” Penguin

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Dead in the U S of A

So, two days ago, a black man named Alton Sterling was killed for selling CD’s outside a convenience store. And yesterday, a black man by the name of Philando Castile was killed for having a tail light that was out. And today, at least two snipers shot eleven police officers in Dallas, Texas, including four who were killed.

We’ve built the police state we always wanted here in the United States, one that says about poor people and people of color, pull the trigger, exterminate the brutes, and either the press or the department’s internal inquiry will figure out how they were asking for it later. This is the police state that the affluent and middle class called for, the police state that treats people of color and the poor as threats to be neutralized, not as fellow citizens of the United States of America. And now we’re seeing the repercussions of that. On all sides.

– Badtux the Saddened Penguin

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The most hilarious thing to happen this election season is…

… is billionaire-owned Forbes Magazine, whose average reader has a household income of over $200K per year, lecturing Bernie Sanders about “what poverty really is”.

O really? Let me guess, poverty is only being able to afford one Rolls Royce instead of two? SNRK!

I’m sorry, but whenever I hear billionaires lecturing liberals about “what poverty really is”…

Like two slime slugs having sex is fascinating. In a sort of slimy, disgusting sort of way.

– Badtux the “Oh really?” Penguin

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Lifespans are crashing for working poor white women in America

The saddest story that I’ve read since the one about homeless kids.

Being poor in America today is like balancing on a tightrope between hunger and disaster. It wears you down. It wears you down, year after year, decade after decade, until there’s nothing left, just the knowledge that this nightmare is your life, forever, and nothing you do will ever make your life anything else. And then the drugs and alcohol take you.

At the very least we need to raise the minimum wage until the minimum wage is a living wage again, a wage that is sufficient for people to live on without being on the edge of disaster all the time. That requires no welfare rosters or benefits counsellors or Big Government programs, just a law, and the already-existing wage enforcement agencies. Right now we’re literally working our working poor into an early grave, year after year of juggling two or three jobs to try to scrape together enough money to make it another month, year after year of deprivation and desperation and suffering, until they just give out and die. There’s no reason to do that when the amount of money that Wall Street gave out as bonuses to a few hundred executives last year would have been enough to raise the wages of every single minimum wage worker in America to $15/hour…. no reason other than the sick desire of our sociopathic wealthy lizard people to see working poor people suffer, it, like, makes their reptilian li’l soldiers salute, y’know…

– Badtux the Angry Penguin

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Who is society supposed to work for, anyway?

So was watching the buses this morning. A sleek double-decker Google bus was to my left, and a low-slung VTA bus was in front of me, one of the new long articulated blue ones that they’re using for “Express” service. The double-decker will actually carry about 20 more people, so why did VTA go with the articulated bus rather than the double-decker bus? Then it hit me: Google doesn’t have to worry about the ADA (American with Disabilities Act). They don’t care that 2/3rds of the seat on the bus requires climbing stairs and thus is not accessible to the mobility-impaired and elderly, because virtually all their employees are twenty-something bubbly googly kids with no mobility issues. All they care is that they can hire cheaper drivers (need an additional endorsement for the articulated bus) and the buses are cheaper, roughly $650,000 for a new double-decker bus versus $900,000 for a new articulated bus.

That’s the problem with saying things like “the Google buses prove we don’t need public transit because private enterprise will fund bus service to carry their employees to and from work.” Yes, they will, but their workforce is not representative of much of the clientele of public transit buses. There aren’t many old people or pre-driving-age teens on those Google buses and I have never (ever) seen a disabled person exit one of those Google buses. I guess if you’re rich and white, that’s not a problem. But society is supposed to work for more than just rich white people. Just sayin’.

And, uhm, *why* is society supposed to work for more than just rich white people? Well, that’s simple. If society only works for rich white people, you have Mexico — a third world hellhole where the government isn’t in control of wide swathes of its territory because when society doesn’t work for the vast majority of people, they choose other ways of making things work for them, like, say, creating a drug cartel, or accepting bribes from a drug cartel to look the other way. Societies that don’t work for the vast majority of their people are full of violence and unrest and there is little innovation or progress done that. They become backwards and impoverished.

The reality is that the United States no longer works for the majority of its people. When over half of our children are being raised in poverty, when Mexicans are actually leaving the United States faster than they arrive because because our ruling classes and the remaining middle class sycophants who suck up to them like a right wing militia member blowing a shofar have declared jihad on the working poor (and most of the poor *do* work, cash welfare is basically a thing of the previous century), well. There’s a reason why the United States has more people in prison, both as a percentage of population and as a whole, than any other country. It’s because this is a nation on the verge of spinning to pieces into 3rd world status, and the only thing keeping a lid on it is a police state. For now. Because this police state is unsustainable, in the end, once things start breaking down.

– Badtux the Social Penguin

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The only solution to a crazy man with a gun…

… is a good guy with a gun. Alas.

Relatives of Nicholas Robertson are upset that cops killed Mr. Robertson as he was pointing his gun towards innocent civilians. There is video footage and other photographic evidence of him doing so — even after the police had shot him down to the point where he was crawling he was still holding the gun and pointing it towards civilians. So the relatives are wailing “they should have tasered him or something!” and whine that the gun wasn’t pointing at the cops so they had no call to shoot him down. I’m sorry, people. When someone is holding a gun and has fired it and is refusing to drop it, the time for tasering has long departed. There is only one solution to a man with a gun who refuses to drop it when ordered to do so by the police, and that’s a good guy with a gun doing what’s necessary to eliminate the threat to the public. Regardless of whether the gun is pointed at the cops or not.

I’m not an apologist for bad cops, as should be obvious from past, but this was not bad cops, this was cops doing their job, which was to protect the public from a crazy man with a gun who was shooting it in a way that could harm the public. In that case the safety of the public comes first, the safety of the cops comes second, and the safety of the crazy man with a gun comes last and least. These cops had their priorities right and did the job they were hired to do.

I’m sure we’ll find that Mr. Robertson had mental health issues. He probably could have been saved if he’d received proper treatment for his mental illness rather than being subject to the current US mental health system, which is a buncha handwringing about how nothing can be done unless the mentally ill are voluntarily coming in for treatment, which is kinda hard to do if you’re mentally ill and thus can’t think straight enough to realize you need treatment (doh!). There’s other countries where he would have been assigned an intervention counsellor who would have insured that he received treatment and make sure he got time in an institution if he quit taking his meds, etc. But we don’t do any of that here in the USA because Freedom(tm) as well as the fact that we just plain don’t want to spend the money on medical treatment for the poor (crazy people generally *are* poor, if they weren’t poor to begin with they got poor when they got fired because they were acting crazy). And then we make it ridiculously easy to get guns, and they do, and so.

But all of that is just background that the cops absolutely know, but it doesn’t change their responsibility, which is to protect the general public by whatever means necessary. When you have a crazy guy off his meds waving a gun around, and he absolutely refuses to drop the gun and is pointing it all over including in the direction of innocent civilians, you do what you have to do if you’re a police officer. Because that’s what a police officer’s job is — to protect the lives of the uninvolved innocents first and foremost, themselves second, and the life of the man with the gun last and least. That’s why we pay them — to protect us, the innocent general public. And that’s what they did.

– Badtux the Reality-based Penguin

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The median male American worker makes less today than in 1973

Brookings does the research to tell us what we already knew. They blame income inequality. They’re right, in that with the decline in male US worker income, the lower classes have become even more unequal. If your Presidential candidate isn’t talking about how things have gotten worse for ordinary Americans, if he doesn’t talk about plans for solving this, your Presidential candidate is part of the problem, not part of the solution. There are only two candidates who have mentioned those words “Income inequality”, and neither has an “R” after their name.

But why are the incomes declining anyhow?

There appears to be two things that have caused the decline:

1. The decline in unionized manufacturing jobs. These jobs paid good wages to working people whose education didn’t qualify them for white collar or creative work.
2. The decline in unionized trades jobs. Believe it or not, only a few short decades ago if you were a contractor looking for framers or drywallers or concrete workers you went down to the union hall and held up how many people you needed, and the union jobmaster would find them for you and you paid union scale to them. The union provided benefits like health insurance too in exchange for the union dues that the workers paid. But now you call a “labor contractor” who goes down to the local Home Depot and holds up that many fingers and illegal Mexicans fight each other for the privilege of jumping into the labor contractor’s pickup truck, and then you pay the labor contractor and he may or may not pay the workers, that’s not your problem.

The manufacturing jobs went to Asia and Mexico. The trades jobs went to Mexicans. The people formerly doing those jobs went to low-wage service jobs that require speaking credible English, and are boiler room sales or debt collection workers or asking “do you want fries with that order?” or driving around in old beat up pickup trucks with hand-drawn signs that say “Handy Man Work” and a phone number on the side, or otherwise scrabbling for whatever leavings they can find that have dripped off the 1%’s table.

In short, it appears to have been a concerted effort to bust the unions by either exporting their jobs or by importing non-union workers that caused wages for male workers to decline. This has been coordinated at the highest levels of government via creation of “Right To Work For Less” laws in half the states, imposition of low-or-no-tariff policies such as NAFTA which reward manufacturers for exporting manufacturing jobs to foreign countries, and via not enforcing citizenship rules at job sites. Add in the hostility of multiple recent Republican administrations towards enforcing the labor rights guaranteed under labor law, and it’s been a perfect storm, with male workers’ wages being what’s sunk.

In short: It’s not necessary to hypothesize a conspiracy when the evidence of one is right there in front of your eyes. Who should I believe, the people who shout “conspiracy theory!” or what I can see with my own two eyes? Just sayin’.

So anyhow: Bernie talks about these kinds of things. Hillary sorta talks about them, in a sort of pro forma kind of way. None (zero) of the Republicans talk about them, with the exception of Trump and his hatred of Mexicans. So if you’re an ordinary male American and you’re upset that you’re making less money in real terms than your daddy did at your age… well. Who are you going to vote for?

Sadly, we know the answer to that. Said ordinary male American is going to vote for a Republican. ‘Cause Republicans have done a great job of convincing said ordinary male American that his wages are going down because of “those” people, not because the Republican Party has orchestrated an effective destruction of unions and worker’s rights. Yay, ‘Murrica…

– Badtux the Inequality Penguin

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