Talking Points on Welfare: parts 1-4

Part 1

So after my last video on How to Fix the USA’s Economy, I saw a lot of ignorant comments in the comments section about WELFARE.

They weren’t NEW ignorant comments, they were the SAME ignorant comments that you hear over and over. Apparently nobody out there is challenging people on their declarations, and allowing the virus of ignorance to spread.

So I wanted to make a list of facts and talking points for progressives when confronted with these conservative... well, let’s call them what they are-- they’re LIES, and stop the spread of ignorance in it’s tracks.

So let’s go down the list, and tackle them one by one, shall we?

1) Welfare spending is the reason our government is in debt.
FALSE.

If you had the choice between giving somebody a dollar and getting back either $1.50 or $0.80, which would you choose? Hold that thought.

According to USGovernmentspending.com The Federal Government is committed by law to spending 557 billion on welfare in the year 2010. Which seems like “Oh my! That’s a lot of money!” Which, for one person, yeah it is. But for our federal government, not so much.

Especially when you compare that to the $895 billion we’re committed to spend, by law on Defense spending. Which doesn’t account for the $711 billion in our discretionary spending on stuff like the War in Iraq and Afghanistan, and useless cold war-era weapons that we don’t even use, and never will.

Next you have to take into account what we get for those dollars spent.
Most economists agree on the following figures, including conservative ones:
Welfare spending has a fiscal multiplier of about 1.5-- while military spending has a fiscal multiplier of 0.8.

To which you might say, “wow, you just said some numbers, but what the hell does that mean? It means that for every dollar our gov’t spends on welfare, we get one dollar and fifty cents back in the form of GDP. With military spending, for every dollar we spend, we get back $0.80.

That seems really stupid. And that’s because it is. Which is why politicians frame their arguments about or disgustingly wasteful military spending as being “patriotic” or “supporting the troops.”
How much support actually goes to our troops? You, know, like after they come back from getting shot at and having their legs blown off?

According to the White House’s own figures, we’re slated to spend $125 billion on veterans affairs. And we all know about staffing shortages and underfunding that goes on in our VA system. So clearly this isn’t about supporting our troops.
For those who don’t care about human lives, and only the hard economics, I want to ask you again: If you had the choice between giving somebody a dollar and getting back either $1.50 or $0.80, which would you choose?
Now for the humanitarians out there, if you had to choose between giving somebody a dollar to feed their family, knowing you’d get back $1.50, or give somebody $1 knowing that your next door neighbor would have his legs blown off and you’ll only get back $0.80, which would you choose?

---

Part 2

Talking Points and facts on Welfare part 2:
"I was denied welfare because I’m white."

The largest population of welfare recipients, by race, is white. So that’s clearly false.

You were denied welfare because conservatives like you threw a hissy fit back in the 1990s, because you thought it was too easy to get on welfare, and that too many people were getting on it. Now that you’ve applied for it, you’ve seen hard to get on it, and rather than admit to your own mistake, now you’re playing the race card.
Typical...

---

Part 3

People on welfare are mostly black teenage mothers:

FALSE: This is a fiction created by assholes like Newt Gingrich to get poor white people to get angry at poor black people, so that poor people in general would spend our time fighting against one another, instead of coming together and fighting against rich assholes like Newt Gingrich.
According to our gov’ts figures, white people receive the largest amount of welfare by race, making up nearly 40% of the welfare recipient population. 43% of welfare recipients with children have only one child, 30% have two, 15% have three, and there’s a real sharp drop-off after that.
Of those who are on welfare, and are mothers, 47% are between the ages 20-29. 32% are between the ages of 30-39. Only 7% of welfare recipients who have children are teenagers.

So sorry. The most common welfare recipient is white, between 20-40 years old, and has two kids or less.

Part 4

"Taxation is theft, why should I have my pay stolen to pay for a free ride for other people?"

This one is going to take a while to unpack. It requires some knowlege of recent economic history, which is going to mean explaining. I hope I don't bore you.

In 1960, the average household worked half as many hours. Adjusted for inflation, the Cost of Living was a third of what it is today. Yet, the average household income for a person in the lower 85% of income brackets, in terms of real dollars, has remained stagnant for the past 40 years.

That’s right, 85% of the population has seen their cost of living triple, has had to double their hours they spend working, and as a reward for working twice as much have LESS expendable income than we did 40 years ago.
To recap really quickly- [drawings] the dollar cost of living has tripled, but the actual stuff we’re getting for that cost isn’t three times better. We’re still buying pretty much the same houses and the same wonderbread and the same Jif peanut butter as we did 40 years ago.
So we’re paying three times as much today for the same things we had in the 1960s.
The Average American household had one income earner working 40 hrs a week in 1960, and that was enough to maintain a comfortable standard of living.
For twice as much labor today, 85% of Americans still have an income gap of a third. That money has to come from somewhere. Some households have two adults working 80 hours a week, and still struggle to make ends meet.
For 85% of Americans, we’ve been slowly eased into a starvation diet over the past 40 years.
That income gap, for many people, who thought that going on welfare was irresponsible, had to borrow their wages. Where did they borrow their wages from? From the wealth they already had. We’ve borrowed against our houses, and we’ve used credit cards to fill our income gap. We were told that this was the responsible thing to do. The fiscal reality of it, is that we’ve been cannibalizing ourselves.
If you look at this through another lense, by indexing things to the value of labor-- the value of the labor you produce has been devalued by two thirds. You have essentially been getting paid a third of what your labor is actually worth. That income gap of a third should rightfully be paid by our employers. And where has all that money gone?
Check Wall Street. While the value of our labor has been cut to a third of what it was, the value of labor of the average CEO has skyrocketed, from just 30 times the lowest paid employee at their company to 300 times the lowest paid employee.
So while the 85% of Americans who work our asses off just to get by, we’ve seen the value of our labor be devalued, fraudulently, by 300%. We’ve seen the value of labor of CEOs increase, fraudulently, by 1000%. What are they doing differently that they need to be compensated at 1000% more than they were back in the 1960s? Well, there’s a short answer and a long answer:
The short answer: Nothing.
The Long answer: Absolutely NOTHING whatsoever, at all.
Now, who has been deciding what everybody’s labor is worth? The invisible hand of the market? Bullshit. It’s been those CEOs. Of course they are going to give themselves raises and reduce the value of our labor by 2/3rds. They’re greedy, shortsighted people. You would probably do the same. Right? No, actually you probably wouldn’t, because that would be THEFT, and THEFT is wrong.

So let’s get back to our initial conservative talking point: Why should you allow somebody else to get a free ride from your labor? You shouldn’t. Which is why we need a maximum wage.
Is taxation really theft? Well, if you’re taxing that top 15% of people who have increased the value of their own labor and decreased the value of everybody else’s labor, we’re not stealing from them by taxing them to pay for welfare. The lower 85% earned that income, but were not paid that income.
The *real* problem is that those richest 15% aren’t PAYING what the 85% is earning by their labor leaving an income gap. How the hell are people supposed to fill that gap through working more if their labor just keeps getting further and further devalued?
With welfare. Welfare is just the lower 85% of people getting what their labor earned them.
If we don’t reverse this trend of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer, eventually there will be no way for the lower 85% of Americans to feed themselves by our own labor.
At which point, we will be forced to kill the top 15% and eat THEM.



One source: http://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-productivity-vacation/

Another one I didn't specifically use, but has a lot of the same info as a presentation given at the Commenwealth Club of California two years ago, by an economist whose name I can't remember:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

Tommy Douglas: Mouseland

What self respecting mouse would elect a cat?

Cheri Honkala: "It will be the Green Party that Stopped Foreclosures in the USA."

Cheri Honkala of The Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign is running for Sheriff of Philadelphia with the Green Party!

Donate to her campaign by clicking here!

We must build the Non-Partisan Progressive Movement

Taking Progressives For Granted

Why allowing the Democratic Party to take your vote for granted gives them impunity to act like GOP douche-bags.

Originally from Nader.org

Article by Ralph Nader

When liberals and progressives have nowhere to go, New York’s new Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo can move toward the corporatist-right of the political spectrum with impunity. Brandishing an inherited $10 billion state deficit, Cuomo has earned the following description in the April 7th edition of The New York Times:

“He has clashed with unions, who he believes have helped drive the state toward bankruptcy. He has been praised by prominent conservatives like Sarah Palin and Rudolph W. Giuliani. And he has taken thousands of dollars in campaign money from the New York billionaire David H. Koch, who with his family has helped finance the Tea Party movement….

“The man who began public life advocating for homeless people won passage of a state budget that makes steep cuts to schools, health care and social services. In a year when Wall Street posted record profits, Mr. Cuomo finally rejected a politically popular income tax surcharge on the wealthy.”

Praised by the Wall Street Journal and the republican raptor, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who calls Andrew Cuomo “my soul mate,” the son of moral vision orator, former Governor Mario Cuomo, is on a roll unchallenged by his fellow Democrats and the media. Using the deficit—which is far less per capita than Connecticut’s deficit—he revels in being “Cuomo the cutter”: “I am a realist… Forget the philosophy. Here are the numbers.”

Mr. Cuomo picks his numbers so that the cuts fall on the lower economic classes, the powerless along with the reviled public employee unions. Granted, there is waste fraud or ineffectiveness in many social service programs, but Governor Cuomo is cutting the programs indiscriminately without cutting them by squeezing out the waste and eliminating ineffective programs directly.

What results is that the wasteful practitioners know how to fight to preserve their programs better than the efficient ones do. The former have allies like well-connected corporate vendors with their procurement contracts.

But there is a more blatant misfocus by Cuomo. It is his fear of Wall Street whose crooks, speculators and self-enrichment pros collapsed the economy, looting or draining savings and pensions in 2008-2009 leading to much unemployment and many closed businesses that, through the loss of tax revenue, expanded the state deficit. He refuses even to speak about holding these spoiled, back-to-business-as-usual financial giants responsible.

On the contrary he is rejecting an extension of the tax surcharge on New Yorkers and residing foreigners who make over $200,000 dollars in income a year, which expires this December. It is so much easier to tax the faceless masses. Already, lower income New Yorkers pay a slightly higher percentage of their income in all taxes imposed than do the wealthy. Regressive!

It gets worse. During his campaign for Governor, Mr. Cuomo refused to even contemplate keeping the $14 billion (some estimate higher amounts) a year that the state collects from a century-old stock transfer tax, but instantly rebates, what is really a sales tax, back to the stock brokers. New York used to keep this tax revenue until the early Eighties, when Wall Street pressure finally prevailed. Green Party candidate for Governor, Howie Hawkins, during a public debate argued that keeping these revenues would eliminate the deficit and prevent the reduction of necessary programs. On that stage, Mr. Cuomo refused to engage. Mum’s the word on Wall Street’s fair share.

Cuomo calls himself “a progressive Democrat who’s broke.” A progressive Democrat would push for sacrifice at the wealthy top and work down if necessary. Many of the wealthy derived their billions and millions from many favored policies like tax leniency and other privileges and immunities including violation of the law (some of whom Cuomo pursued as Attorney General.)

After all corporate lobbyists work hard to produce many layers of favoritism, including selling products and services to the state government, that are as profitable as they are often wasteful. Consider, for example, the immense gouging in the outsourcing of CityTime—a large ongoing contract to computerize the New York City payroll (http://www.nyc.gov/html/opa/html/about/city_time.shtml).

The costs of health care reflect big time fraud in billing practices. Should a Governor just cut benefits across the board—stranding indigent patients to suffer or die—or should he crack down on the cheating and stealing that too many vendors have refined to perfection?

To be sure it is quicker to slice arbitrarily, but there is no indication that key cost-beneficial law enforcement budgets against business crime are going to increase on Governor Cuomo’s watch.

Mr. Cuomo did relent on one budget provision, which would have enriched the hospital and insurance lobbies placing a lifetime $250,000 cap on serious baby injuries from malpractice. That was too much to defend by this “progressive Democrat” in Albany. Credit the Center for Justice and Democracy for urging that good deed (www.centerjd.org).

How far will elected Democrats from the White House on down go in capitulating to the insatiable corporate dominators if their liberal/progressive base continues to signal that they politically have nowhere to go? These voters seem to have few visible breaking points on the dark horizon of over-reaching corporatism.

Obama 2012: ARE YOU IN?

via Progressive Review ( @prorev ):

Punk Patriot video Remix

By OilWellian.

This is twenty times better than what I'd done on my own. BRAVO!

What about all the liberal rednecks?

They exist. Why aren't progressives talking to them?

Backstory: So I'm reading the book "No More Prisons" by League Of Pissed Off Voters (aka League of Indy Voters, aka League of Young Voters) founder William Upski Wimsatt.

It's all about hip-hop activism, inner city organizing, etc. And I think that's largely been the model that the league has followed. Which is great- If you live in a city.

I had an epiphany today, which is tied back to my training at the 1st annual Smackdown (aka organizer training session) in Columbus, Ohio back in 2004. After hearing story after story of how hard it is to be poor in a city like New York, I began to feel like, "well damn, I thought I was poor, but I've had it pretty good." But then after talking with the same people, I discovered that they had all sorts of opportunities that I never had, like specialty public schools for the arts, after school programs, they were cultivated for leadership by these like... community unions which served as like a parallel government.

Anyways, I'm not saying that living in a city doesn't suck-- like I said, I heard horror stories too, but I realized when talking with these kids, that rural folks like myself grew up in a different kind of poverty that sucked in different ways. I ate gov't cheese and gov't bologna growing up. Sometimes that and mustard was all we had to eat. My middle school almost folded because our property tax base wasn't enough to support it.
Arts program? Phht. Music program? HA! We barely had a gym program. Hell, we barely had a school.
What would the solution be? Bus us to another school? Where exactly might that school be at? We consolidated already to cut costs...

In the Boy Scouts, parents brought venison they'd hunted, killed, and cleaned themselves, for barbecues. They talked obliquely about factory farms and pollution, and how hunting connects us to the land. Hunters and fishermen are ready and available allies on environmental issues, but we dismiss them as rednecks. To our own peril.

Anyways, the long and the short of it is this:

The next breakthrough that progressives are going to have to make before we can effectively take our country back, is getting a foothold in areas of rural poverty.

The question we need to be asking is, "What about all the liberal rednecks?"

The Punk Patirot Fixes the USA Economy

With quantitative easing, people are worried about inflation!
If we don’t do anything, the Fed is worried about deflation!
By blaming our shitty economy on people who receive welfare checks, we’re having a big problem with CONFLATION!

I’m the Punk Patriot, and I’m going to fuckin’ fix the economy for you.

I was watching the news the other day, they were doing “man on the street” interviews, and I saw this one person give his thoughts on the economy: “I think thar’s too much people gittin on welfur, and too much of our jobs is bein’ sent overseas.”

Well, you got half of that right. Thanks to NAFTA, CAFTA, and the WTO, our manufacturing jobs have almost all left the country. Manufacturing is important, because it’s a job that takes a low-cost raw material and transforms it into a high-value consumable good. This happens through the MAGIC OF LABOR!

Because people are working on transforming low value materials into high value goods, the product that they create using their skilled labor has more use and therefore more value, than the stuff that they started with. Which means that they are creating wealth. Factories are not just places to create goods, they are places that create wealth. And right now, all our wealth is being created in other countries. Thats why the economy fucking sucks so bad.

I work in a boot factory. I make boots. I transform leather and rubber, both of which are relatively low cost, low value materials, into a high-value, higher-function good-- a boot.
You can’t keep your feet dry and warm with scrap leather and rubber alone. You need it to be crafted into a fucking boot. That takes skilled labor. You’re welcome.

Your retail jobs don’t do this. They simply move a product from one place to another. You will never grow an economy on retail sales, because the margins are slim, and no wealth is created by moving a product from one point to another. An economy based entirely on retail sales-- which is what we’ve pretty much had for the past 30 years, will eat itself alive- which is pretty much what we’re seeing right now.

Now, the address the conflation of “Too much people gettin on welfar”...

For whatever reason, it’s a common misconception that people receiving welfare is bad for the economy. People getting on welfare isn’t the reason you don’t have a job. The reason you don’t have a job is because nobody fucking MAKES anything anymore. Which means that all our wealth has left the country. Which means that nobody has any money to fucking buy anything anymore. Which means that the retail jobs are having to lay people off. Which means that more people have less money to buy things with. Which means that more layoffs are in the works. Which means that more people have less money to spend.

Welfare spending actually reverses this trend. If a person receives welfare spending, what do they spend it on? (DRUGS!) No! Actually they spend it on food and rent. If more people have more money to spend on food and rent, then the grocery stores can hire more people, and the superintendents are better able to afford repairs. Which means that construction and repair workers can stay employed and grocery stores can hire more people, which means that they can buy other things like cars. Which means that more people can get paid to make cars. Or whatever. Money flows in one direction-- from the bottom, up. This is a fundamental truth of capitalism. Fixing the interest rates for all the rich fucks on Wall Street can start doing more derivatives trading again doesn’t do ANYTHING to fix the economy.

Which is why Quantitative Easing is doomed to fail. Capitalism is fundamentally flawed, and supply-side economics, which apparently even Obama has drunk the kool-aid on, is even more so.

You’re not going to fix fundamental flaws by fucking around with interest rates. The problem isn’t our monetary policy, it’s our monetary system, which is biased towards savings, wall street mathematical gymnastics, and scarcity. It’s the fundamental flaws in our entire economy-- that we do NOT RECOGNIZE that the poorest people amongst us are actually the ones who create all wealth in society by providing consumer demand. If it wasn’t for consumer demand, all the pioneers of industry would be wasting their money and time. Which with the economy in recession, it looks like they’re doing.

Rich people don’t create jobs. They don’t create a single fucking job. If labor hadn’t worked their asses off striking and protesting and doing work-slowdowns, and sit-down strikes, and taking police billy clubs to the head, and being shot and killed, so that we could have all the labor laws we take for granted, things like overtime pay, minimum wage, the right to organize, a half hour lunch, 15 minute breaks, OSHA safety requirements, etc etc etc-- we’d be no different than those third world countries that all our jobs have gone to.

If we didn’t have these labor protections mandated by law, we’d be working our fingers off- literally right off our hands, getting them caught in unsafe machinery, or permanently damaged due to repetitive motion injury.
Now Randian regressives who would prefer we live in a pre-Great Depression laissez-faire, free-market system, would have us believe that we should be willing to make ourselves POORER-- by taking cuts in benefits and wages, to make ourselves richer, by having more jobs. We aren’t going to make ourselves richer by making ourselves poorer. That’s so fucking illogical I don’t even know where to begin with debunking that...

You want to fix the fucking economy? I’ll fix it for you.
First thing we need, is a trade policy where we stop importing goods from whoever is fucking over their workers the most, just because it’s cheaper to do so. We can harness the greed and consumption of America to do good work for the rest of the world. Pure free-market economics is like a child with an overactive ID and no superego telling them what’s right and wrong.

What we need is to put in a safeguard to protect us from our own greed and stupidity. If we implement a trade policy in which we only trade with countries who have labor laws and environmental protection laws at least as good as our own, then we force third world countries to give their lower class more protection by their governments, and increase their standards of living, by giving them more labor protections, and higher wages, and more protection from getting poisoned by lazy fucks that we call the “captains of industry”, who pollute because it’s cheap and easy to do so.

Second, we need to implement a MAXIMUM WAGE law. Now there’s been talk about this for a while. Some think we should just cap it arbitrarily. I think that’s wrong. I think that would stifle the GOOD things about capitalism and greed-- the incentive to make the best fucking product you can for the lowest amount of money to the consumer, so that you can make the most money you can. Capitalism works really well for creating amazing consumer goods. Like cellphones and computers. People really wanted to be able to watch YouTube videos and so now you can do it on your fucking PHONE. In fact, some of you are probably watching this on a phone. A FUCKING PHONE! That’s crazy! That couldn’t happen without capitalism responding to consumer demand.

But there’s a problem-- the Average CEO makes 10million dollars a year.
The average worker makes 40,000 a year or less. The average worker spends the majority of their income on meeting their basic needs-- which is all shit that actually makes our economy function.
The average CEO keeps it. This is called “dead money.” That money sits in the bank, or goes to wall street where it does mathematic gymnastics, but doesn’t create a single fucking job.

So what’s the solution? The maximum wage needs to be indexed to the lowest paid employee at any company. Let’s set it at say, 20 times what your lowest paid employee makes-- which is roughly the same ratio that we saw in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when the USA was far more properous. Back in the 1960s, indexed for inflation, we worked half as many hours, got paid the same amount, but the cost of living was a third of what it is now.

Today, CEOs make roughly 300 times as much as their lowest paid employees. That’s fucking absurd. If a company is doing really well, it’s because of EVERYBODY at that fucking company working their ass off, least of which is the CEO. If they have enough money laying around to give themselves bonuses, they have enough money to let everybody share in the wealth. After all, all those poor fucks are the ones who put their labor into making that company successful.. They should share in that wealth. So if a company does well, and the executive board wants to give themselves raises as a pat on the back-- go ahead. But you have to a raise that is proportional to your income-- to everybody else in your company. If you want to give yourself a raise, you have to give EVERYBODY in your company a raise.

This forces more of the wealth downwards into the lowest classes, where it belongs. Because it’s all going to end up back in the pockets of the CEOs anyways. Fixing the economy to work better for the rich and the traders on wall street, is like fixing a tree to work better for a fungal parasite. You’re going to end up killing the tree.

This is the punk patriot, to life, liberty, and pursuit of a less fucked up government.

What if capitalism wasn't evil? --The Entrepreneur Challenge!

What if Capitalism wasn't so evil? Let's play a little game and find out.

Today I'm launching my Entrepreneur Challange. I'm going to be attempting to prove that capitalism can be good for all parties involved. And dare I say it-- even fun?

Sounds crazy right? Well maybe it is.

What sparked all this? Well a long while ago, a certain progressive radio show asked its audience (half jokingly) to create a certain tshirt design, which they described rather abstractly. I said to myself, "self- you make t-shirts! You should be all over this!"

And I took that abstract jibber-jabber and turned it into reality. And because in my mind, I was thinking that I would help promote their radio show, I included a link to the web address for the show. Through certain means, I was able to make sure that the hosts of the show saw a photo of this shirt that I had created. --Which was displayed publicly, online. The hosts lauded my work. Soon, other fans of the show started commenting that they wanted to purchase a copy of this shirt. So I created a listing on Etsy.com to make that shirt available to sell.

Shortly after I'd created that listing, these supposedly progressive, supposedly anti-capitalist, supposedly DIY-punk, supposed activists, came down on me with fury; accusing me in a series of emails of violating their intellectual property rights. And they asked me to immediately take down my listing. At the time, I was still a huge fan, and I tried to salvage the situation, and so I complied.

Later, they communicated to me that they would be interested in splitting any profits that I made, selling a shirt that I designed, that I meticulously hand-cut stencils for [I didn't have silkscreening equipment yet], that I hand printed, that I purchased the materials for, and that I would end up paying the shipping for.

They wanted a cut of the money that I would earn from MY labor-- labor I spent trying to help THEIR fans to promote THEIR show to their friends-- in true DIY style.

I thought that their proposal was complete and utter bulls***, and I told them as much. Ironically, these supposedly progressive, DIY, pro-union folks now run their merchandise through zazzle or cafe press or something.

Ever since that event, I've been inspired to create an entrepreneur challenge, to you, my viewers.
But it's sat on the back burner until recently, when out of the blue, some jerk threatened me with a lawsuit for "ripping off" some drawing that I'd never seen before in my life.

What these two incidents have in common is people acting like a**holes over intellectual property rights.

Back in early 2003, I went to an anti-war protest in Washington DC. I took with me a banner that read, "Who Would Jesus Bomb?"



It was a turn of phrase that I myself had coined, having recently moved from Texas [where WWJD bracelets and t-shirts were all the rage]. Me and my friends marched around the mall with this banner, and people loved it. A few months later, I saw WWJB bumper stickers and t-shirts for sale through various progressive outlets on the internet.

Now, I could have been a dick about it, complaining that they were making money with something that I came up with. I, however, see it as a victory. I was able to create something that affected the nations consciousness. And isn't that the point? Shouldn't that ultimately be our goal?

I don't do this show, [or this blog] to make money. I do this to make just enough money that I can afford to keep on doing this. By the way, the donations are extremely appreciated. Thank you. And a preemptive thank you to those who will be donating today. (hint hint)

Well, I'm going to start this challege off by making the Punk Patriot an open source brand. There are a few rules however:

Rule #1: It's got to promote the show. So link back somehow.
Rule #2: You are allowed to keep whatever money to make selling this item.
Rule #3: Don't rip people off. That's lame.
Rule #4: It's gotta be designed by you. I have a strong preference that it also be hand crafted by you.
Rule #5: No zazzle, and no cafe press.

I've already had people approach me about making punk patriot merchandise, about reprinting the scripts to my videos in self-published zines (I post the scripts to my videos over at my blog [punkpatriot.blogspot.com]), and reselling my shirts in store-fronts by people who order in bulk.

Well now you have my permission. Nay! Encouragement!

To life, liberty, and pursuit of a less f***ed up government.

The Punk Patriot interviews Sam Smith, author of the Progressive Review

August 10th interview with Sam Smith, author of the Progressive Review, and several books, including, "Why Bother?" and "Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual."

ProRev.com

We talk about the WTC mosque, Press Sec Gibbs nasty comments towards progressives, apathy, and why it's important to focus on local politics.

STRATEGY

Help keep this show going.

We lost Habeas Corpus again... or did we ever get it back?

A Horrendous Decision on Habeas Corpus

From The Progressive

...the D.C. Circuit Court undercut that “meaningful opportunity” by ruling ruled that a detainee has to show by a “preponderance of evidence” that he is being wrongly held, instead of the usual “reasonable doubt.”

To put that in plain English, you're guilty until proven innocent. Read the rest of the article here.