Welfare Talking Points #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?

Voting Machines vs Slot Machines

From the Washington Post

There IS a class war, and the rich are kicking our ass

Bob Herbert in the New York Times had this to say on the Class War : There is a Class War, and the Rich are KICKING OUR ASS!

He goes on, and you should really read the full article, but the part that resonated with me the most is the following paragraph:

"The rich may think that the public won’t ever turn against them. But to hold that belief, you have to ignore the turbulent history of the 1930s."

YES!

Which is why I've started the Kill & Eat the Rich Campaign. I don't know if it will take off or not. It all started with a t-shirt and a fable. I'm really hoping, that like that Green Revolution in Iran, it becomes a viral meme and take on a life all of it's own. Hey, I can dream, right?

Rep Todd Akin is either a fucking idiot, or lying

Because he's wrong. Incredibly, wildly, laughably wrong.
He's wrong in the same way that people saying that the moon is made of cheese are wrong.
He's wrong in the same way that people saying that the earth rests on the back of a giant space turtle are wrong.

But what sucks most of all is that it does not matter that he is wrong. It does not matter that he is either saying this because he thinks it's true- making him a complete fucking idiot and the product of horribly failed parenting-- or saying this knowing full well what bullshit it is (which, arguably, still makes him the product of horribly failed parenting.)




The reason that it doesn't matter, is because people on the right wing of our political spectrum in the USA ARE fucking idiots. They don't CARE if he's lying or not. What matters is that what he's saying SOUNDS GOOD TO THEM.

Just like they don't care that there were no WMD's in Iraq.
Just like they don't care that Saddam Hussien had nothing to do with 9-11.
Just like they don't care that removing regulations from the market is what triggered the economic collapse.
Just like they don't care that NAFTA and the WTO have created a vacuum that sucked all the jobs out of the USA.

They don't fucking care at all. In fact, they'll keep voting for people who spout bullshit like this, because they are INCREDIBLY FUCKING STUPID. I would not be surprised if when the GOP cuts all their social services (which poor white people are the biggest recipients of) to our collapsing banana republic, that they throw a big parade for the GOP.

It wouldn't be so bad that they were so incredibly stupid if it weren't for the fact that they're also wrong about everything. And thanks to low voter turnout in 2010, now the gov't represents the fucking stupids in the Tea Party who actually bothered to go out and vote. Great job cynical lefties. Way to "protest" by not voting. Thanks a bunch.

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?"

Quantitative Easing Dogs explain 'the TSA Groping'

The TSA wants to touch your boobs.
The TSA wants to touch your penis.

I cringe every time I hear the word "sheeple." But I still like most of this video.

If Bush were to go to Europe, he'd be Arrested for War Crimes

It's not hyperbole to call him a war criminal. It's a fact.


Boris Johnson, Tory (Conservative) Mayor of London:

" It is not yet clear whether George W Bush is planning to cross the Atlantic to flog us his memoirs, but if I were his PR people I would urge caution. As book tours go, this one would be an absolute corker. It is not just that every European capital would be brought to a standstill, as book-signings turned into anti-war riots. The real trouble — from the Bush point of view — is that he might never see Texas again.

One moment he might be holding forth to a great perspiring tent at Hay-on-Wye. The next moment, click, some embarrassed member of the Welsh constabulary could walk on stage, place some handcuffs on the former leader of the Free World, and take him away to be charged. Of course, we are told this scenario is unlikely. Dubya is the former leader of a friendly power, with whom this country is determined to have good relations. But that is what torture-authorising Augusto Pinochet thought. And unlike Pinochet, Mr Bush is making no bones about what he has done. ‘

Thank you again, Tom Tomorrow

I don't know if Tom Tomorrow gets paid by visits to his Salon.com column space or not. So click the cartoon just to be sure he gets the $0.05 he's due.

KILL & EAT THE RICH (your photos)

This one is from Rachel:


CLICK HERE TO GET YER OWN

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.

TSA: If you don't let us TOUCH YOUR PENIS, we'll have you arrested

PRE-SHIRT design. Will be a tri-color t-shirt.



For for those of you who don't know, John Tyner said to the TSA when about to be subjected to a full genital pat-down, "If you touch my junk, I'll have you arrested."

Because he, an American citizen with a shred of dignity left, declined to submit to groping or naked photos, the TSA responded, saying something along the lines of, "If you don't let us touch your penis-- or take a photo of it, we'll have you arrested."

That case is pending.

---

For the ladies:

Douglas Rushkoff on Monetary Policy

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Life, Inc speaks on the history of monetary policy. Very enlightening.

Quantitative Easing Explained

Thank you to whoever made this. Seems like a good reason to Kill and Eat the Rich:



GET YOUR SHIRT HERE

Kill And Eat The Rich Conversation

ZING!

If you're familiar with Etsy's conversation format, you'll notice that the first email should be on the BOTTOM, but it's at the top here.

I put it in photoshop and reordered it to read in the sequence of how the conversation transpired.

Also, if you want to buy this killer shirt, click here

I'm hoping that once people get them, they will post themselves wearing it as their facebook profile picture, sparking a movement like the Green after the Iranian Election.

Hey... I can dream.

Defending the Green Party

Monday, November 08, 2010

Defending the Green

From Eric Zorn's Chicago Tribune Column: Change of Subject
Political Science professor William P. Kreml of DePaul University writes to take issue with my view [Eric Zorn's] of the Green Party's performance in the recent election:

I believe I was the largest contributor to the Rich Whitney campaign. I contributed to, and raised money for, the MSNBC television ads that ran from September 20th through November 1st. I also appeared in the ads. Rich [Whitney for Governor] ran as a Green and Eric Zorn of the Tribune has seen fit to castigate the Greens as a party that has contributed little to the public well being. I differ.

A large number of Green Party members are former Democrats. We left for various reasons but I think I capture the core of them when I ask Mr. Zorn to look at the Federal Election Commission contribution reports of recent years and find that, increasingly, the Democratic and Republican Parties are receiving money from the same corporations. The Greens take no money from any corporation. We, like most of the rest of the world, believe that America’s banks, insurance companies, and Wall Street corporations caused the world wide recession.

Why would a political party not want to take money from the corporations? Please recall that our great country was founded as a middle class nation, thus following the admonitions of Aristotle in The Politics, that both political stability and economic justice was best secured within that large body of a population that did reasonably well and thus voluntarily legitimated the existing political order. That middle class ideal was realized in America in the early nineteenth century, and again in the early twentieth century, by having two political parties that differed along the various iterations of the original Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian Divide, balancing the public and the private sectors, as well as tempering the tendency towards exorbitant wealth and wrenching poverty.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the Industrial Revolution’s full flowering, and in the latter half, or least one-third, of the twentieth century, when the opposition of the principal parties became far more suspect, both instability and economic injustice reared its head. To return to the Democrats, I ask if there is not a correlation between the beginnings of deregulation under Jimmy Carter (remember the Civil Aeronautics Board?) and the ghastly Clintonian oxymoron of “self-regulation” with the year by year dispersions of income and wealth, along with the increase of both economic instability and governmental debt that have occurred under Republicans and Democrats since the mid-1970s. I think there is.

In short, I suggest there is a correlation between a) the former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan’s admission that “there was something missing in the model” (Greenspan having been reappointed by Clinton after his Reagan appointment) b) Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s “I never knew the private sector could go so haywire,” c) former Democratic National Party chair and chair of the Senate Finance Committee Chris Dodd’s VIP home loan with Angelo Mozilo and Countrywide Financial, and d) Senator Joe Lieberman’s quashing of Security and Exchange Commission chair Arthur Leavitt’s 1990s investigation into the insurance industry, and the mess we are in. As good conservatives properly teach, actions have consequences. There are reasons for why our country is enduring the most significant decline relative to other countries in our over two hundred year history.

I ask Mr. Zorn to examine three more things. First, a look at open source CIA Fact Book material reveals that virtually all of the nations of Europe, as well as democratic countries like Australia and Canada, have multi-party political systems. Even with smaller and in almost all cases more homogeneous populations, these countries feel a need for a broader range of political views than a country that has hindered third party entrance into the political arena with high ballot access percentage requirements. Illinois requires a 5% minimum, one of the highest percentages in the nation. A rigidly two party system is semi-democratic, at best; better than North Korea, Cuba, etc. for sure, but not as good as other democracies.

Secondly, I ask Mr. Zorn to examine the history of at least some of the third parties in America. Did not the Liberty Party lead to the Free Soil Party that became part of the Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln?

Did not the Populist Party merge with the Democrats and advance the progressive policies that righted some of the inequities of late nineteenth century America?

And, finally, Mr. Zorn, what of our region, the Upper Midwest, that imported the economic and political balances of Scandinavian, German, Czech, Slovak, and Alsatian peoples into the American mainstream, guaranteeing minimal economic protections to the citizenry? The Greens, the world’s largest political organization with ninety-two national parties, have a different history, and ideology, than that of Democrats like Rep. Melissa Bean. That is why 6.500 Americans voted for the Green candidate for Congress.

Perhaps the Democrats will learn something from this.

From Eric Zorn: My response: As I wrote before, there is precious little evidence that winning or losing candidates have ever taken much notice after the fact of the positions taken by single-digit opponents. But even if they did in this case, what would taking "notice" look like? What positions could Bean have taken that would have won those Green voters and yet not cost her with those who did vote for her?

As I've written before, I'm not opposed to third parties, independent candidacies, fresh ideas in politics or anything else that smacks of rigidity in political thought. But neither am I in favor of futility or symbolism when it comes time to vote in close elections.

I'm in favor of casting votes that stand to make an immediate difference.

I will ask here what I asked in a comment thread: If it were up to you and you alone and you could choose Melissa Bean, Joe Walsh or abstention, thus ceding the choice of U.S. Rep. for the 8th district to someone else, which would you choose?

This hypothetical turned out to be closer to real than we could have known, and those who voted Green for all practical purposes abstained.

A note to the Dissafected Non-Voters out there:

The reason our Government sucks, is because nobody participates.

To complain about not being "given" enough choices on the ballot reminds me of the Russian Folk Tale of the Little Red Hen:



Where she worked growing wheat, she could get no help from anyone.
She harvested it, and got no help from anyone.
She ground it to flour, and got no help.
She baked it into bread and got no help from anyone.
They all slept.

To make it a closer analog to our Democracy-- when the Democracy Bread was finally baked, everybody wanted a loaf of their own, and when the Little Red Hen said "no" they all bitched and whined that it wasn't fair. When she ate the bread herself, the Dog, the Cat, and the Mouse used this as an excuse to further justify their lack of participation. So they never got any bread, and were miserable.

The Mouse took up teaching linguistics at MIT, and wrote books about how the Little Red Hen was stupid for working to bake bread when the bread would likely go bad over time, or have small rocks in it from being ground at the miller, and how since the only REAL way to get bread is to plant seeds, nobody should participate in harvesting or grinding flour, and thusly the effort that goes into baking bread is a wasted effort.

The Cat went on to become an anarchist philosopher and would publish books decrying the Little Red Hen as a "slave of the system" and published books saying that bread would make itself all on it's own if we stopped participating in the making of bread.

The Dog muttered, "they're all crooks anyways" and went back to sleep.

The end.

I answer conservative talking point emails

On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 2:28 AM, John Doe wrote:

Note To Democrats

You lost. You lost because the country has seen the direction your party is headed and wants no part in it. You suffered your worst losses in Congress for 60 years. The Republicans won not because of their sparkling personalities or inspired policies, but simply because they're not Democrats.

If you're gloating because two or three of the Tea Party candidates didn't win, then at least you're easily pleased, something likely to stand you in good stead in 2012.

Also, you should probably look into cutting California adrift before it drags Nevada or Oregon down with it. Probably best to just tow the entire state out to sea and scuttle it.

---

A Progressive's Response to Republicans

Hi there Kregaaron. I don't know why you sent this to me.

First, I'm not a Democrat.

Second, the reason why Democrats lost is because the direction that the Democrats are headed in is the same exact direction as the Republicans, and has been since 2006. And the Democratic Party's progressive base finally woke up.

Nancy Pelosi said she was against the war, and when she had the power to end them, she didn't. In fact, she called special emergency sessions to approve additional funding to extend the wars and occupation for years to come-- all on the back of the taxpayer's grandchildren.

When Nancy Pelosi had the power to investigate the Bush Administration for approving torture, illegal wiretapping, black sites, and other nasty and illegal shit-- she chose not to.

When the American people were clamoring for Impeachment hearings against Bush for all the illegal nasty shit he and his administration were doing, she said firmly "NO!" ...along with the rest of the Democratic leadership. And she, like the rest of the Democrats and Republicans, continued to pass bills that gave Bush exactly what he wanted; Bills that gave the Federal Government more power to spy on us, to torture us, to deny is a trial by jury, to read our email, to monitor our purchases, to silence our peaceful protests. More power to lock us up for political reasons. More infringements on freedom and liberty.

Then Obama was elected. We were told by Demcoratic Leadership that this was the sort of change that we needed. We needed 60 votes in the senate, and the House, and the Presidency to get anything done. The American people gave them 60 votes in the senate, a majority in the house, and the presidency. And they did nothing. Mostly they blamed the Republicans for obstructionism, which is absurd.

Then they cowtowed to big business, blaming the Republicans. Then they started to lose seats in the Senate. And so they blamed the Republicans. The the President and his staff attacked his own progressive base, and called them "fucking retarded" for wanting single payer healthcare. They called them "Crazy" for wanting to end the illegal, immoral, and expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Demcoratic base was completely demoralized. The more power that we voted to give the Democrats-- the more they started to sound like Republicans.

And so now the Democrats in DC get exactly what they have always wanted-- to not be in power any more, so that they don't have to make up excuses for why they are cowtowing to big business, so that they can once again sit on the sidelines and promise things to their base that they have no intention of ever delivering on.

Peace,
The Punk Patriot

Boehner sure did promise a lot...

Boehner certainly promised a lot in his speech. "Cutting spending," eh? So that means we're ending the 3 trillion dollar wars, right?

"Changing how government works, to make it responsive to the people..."
So that means you're pushing to adopt Mike Gravel's proposed National Referendum, right?

"Shrinking the size of government" are you? "Getting the government off our backs" are you?
So no more roving wiretaps on US citizens? Closing Guantanamo bay? Cutting the Pentagon's budget?

"Putting small businesses back to work" are you? You're doing that? Wouldn't that mean the government would have to intervene? Starting things out by contradicting yourself within the same paragraph: What a great start to the next congress.

PS Did he sound like he was half-in-the-bag drunk to anybody else but me? --Maybe that's why he started crying for no goddamned reason?

Vlogging Outtakes

What if there was an episode of The Punk Patriot where all you saw was the stuff I edit out?

Rally to Restore Sanity: What Sanity? (The Stupid Win)

So much for peaceful discourse. Deep down inside of everybody is a stupid chimpanzee who hits things that they disagree with. Some of them wear suits.

Here's the Daily Show's executive Producer assaulting a 9-11 Truth person.
Regardless of what you think about 9-11 truth folks: they're righteous/annoying-- they don't deserve to be asssaulted.



The best way to deal with something you find annoying, is to just walk away and ignore it.
That would be the sane, rational thing to do.

But then, we aren't sane or rational here in the USA. We love to hit things we don't understand or don't like. Like Iraq, Arabs, CodePink, anti-war protesters, hippies, journalists, or poor people.



I look forward to more from Davis Fleetwood's time at the rally. You can subscribe to his channel here:

Davis Fleetwood's channel

Solidarity 2.0

If you want to live in a country where We The People govern ourselves, all you have to do is start acting like it.

Every two years, there’s some election of some sort. Every two years, the corporate owned media reports the election results as being split between somewhere around 50%.

That’s not true. Because each year, about 60% of the population DOESN’T VOTE.

Mathematically that means that the people who vote only make up around 40% of the population. And since that population of people who actually vote is split nearly 50/50 between two pro-war, pro-corporate parties who don’t give a fuck about you, we are being ruled by the electoral decisions of 21% of the population.

People on the blue side of the 40% of people who vote love to talk about Ralph Nader as being a ‘spoiler candidate.’

With a majority of people not voting, I think we need to start looking in the mirror for who’s REALLY spoiling our elections.

Mathematically, if everybody who didn’t vote in 2000 out of apathy or cynicism had voted for Ralph Nader, Ralph Nader would have been our 43rd president. Not Bush. Not Gore. It wouldn’t have mattered that over a million people were illegally barred from voting due to fictional criminal records. It wouldn’t have mattered that the supreme court decided the election in Bush’s favor when Gore had won the most votes.

The election would have been a landslide for the Green Party, with 60% voting Green, and only 20% voting Republican, and only 20% voting Democrat.

So why doesn’t this happen? We’re told all the time by the Droopy Dogs of left-wing, the cheerleaders for apathy and cyncism, people like Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges that we should try “not voting” as a way to protest, or that third parties don’t have a chance of winning because the corporate power over our lives is SO complete, blah blah blah, doom and gloom.

Here’s the truth-- we have the vote. We are the ones who are really in charge, but we either throw away our vote by supporting candidates that don’t support us, or we stay home in protest.

So what’s the real answer? This is my call to arms:

You need to get off the internet, and get into your community. You need to start working to build the third party movement into a force to be contended with. The Green Party is only 10 years old and at a national level is skeletal at best. We need people to organize in their communities, and build third parties like the Green Party up at the local and state level. Poland threw off Communist rule by organizing people all across the country in small local, decentralized groups. It was called the “Solidarity” movement.

We need a “Solidarity 2.0” here in the USA.

In truth, if you want a government where we the people govern ourselves, all you need to do is start acting like it.

VOTE.

Or, if you don’t mind being ruled by the will of 21% of the population, stay home.

KILL & EAT THE RICH (video)

Much thanks to Davis Fleetwood for making this video about my "Kill & Eat the Rich" campaign:

---

So I have this fable:

They told us when they took our jobs overseas, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"
They told us when they destroyed our 401ks through gambling with our money, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"
They told us when we fell behind on our mortgage and foreclosed on our house, kicking us to the street, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"
As more and more people were forced on welfare, the government's budget started to look grim. When they cut welfare spending entirely so that they could enjoy bigger tax cuts to "stimulate the economy," they told us, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"

Then the poor had nothing left to eat, and no place to go. So they had to kill and eat the rich.

They descended on Wall Street by the millions, stopping all traffic.

Their numbers were so large, the police couldn't do anything to stop the massive crowd of the disenfranchised. They flooded the buildings of Wall Street, the halls of DC, of the McMansions of Texas, and like a horde of zombies, they tore into the flesh of the horrified wealthy, who screamed and shat themselves, knowing that they were powerless to stop the oncoming mass of gnashing teeth and hungry mouths.

And as the poor picked the bones clean over the burning piles of money, the poor said to the bones:

"No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"

---

Now, I want to explain, I don't actually advocate killing and eating the rich. It's just that, like Obama and Hillary talking about nuking Iran-- I just think we should "keep all options on the table."

Speaking of which, I recently saw an old advert for Scott Paper Towels, asking "is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?"
Which went on to say how harsh paper towels and unsanitary bathroom conditions pissed workers off, and made them more likely to unionize and join the communist party, which one can only assume means that they're going to crash the gates and kill you and all the other board members.

Yes! Once upon a time, people were so scared of the poor that they were willing to do the most basic things to keep them happy.
Like keep the bathroom clean, and buy soft toilet paper.

Just think what the corporate elite would be willing to do for the betterment of humanity if they thought they had to prevent us from killing and eating them?

You can buy the t-shirt here:
http://www.etsy.com/listing/59971127/tshirt-kill-and-eat-the-rich

Wear it proud!

THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU AT ALL.

KILL & EAT THE RICH

They told us when they took our jobs overseas, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"
They told us when they destroyed our 401ks through gambling with our money, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"
They told us when we fell behind on our mortgage and foreclosed on our house, kicking us to the street, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"
As more and more people were forced on welfare, the government's budget started to look grim. When they cut welfare spending entirely so that they could enjoy bigger tax cuts to "stimulate the economy," they told us, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"

Then the poor had nothing left to eat, and no place to go.

So they had to kill and eat the rich.

They descended on Wall Street by the millions, stopping all traffic.

Their numbers were so large, the police couldn't do anything to stop the massive crowd of the disenfranchised. They flooded the buildings of Wall Street, the halls of DC, of the McMansions of Texas, and like a horde of zombies, they tore into the flesh of the horrified wealthy, who screamed and shat themselves, knowing that they were powerless to stop the oncoming mass of gnashing teeth and hungry mouths.

And as the poor picked the bones clean over the burning piles of money, the poor said to the bones:

"No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"

Available in sizes S-XL
$10 on etsy.com
If you buy in bulk, the price goes down. Email me for more details.

Rand Paul volunteer tries to give protester a curb-job

From TalkingPointsMemo:

So first, I want to say, contrary to the nature of the upcoming "Rally to Restore Sanity" that Conservativism should be viewed as a mental illness: Sociopathy.

Why? Because they stand for everything we were taught was bad behaviour in kindergarten, when we were taught constructive social skills.

We were taught that sharing was good, and hogging things was bad.
We were taught that you shouldn't be mean to somebody just because they're different from you.
We were taught that you DON'T HIT PEOPLE.

Let alone stomp their heads in.

Conservatives stand for hoarding things to yourself. The rich deserve to hoard everything, and use their wealth to buy even more wealth, which they should also be allowed hoard.
Conservatives stand for being bigoted towards gays, mexicans, the french, and anybody who isn't white (whatever "white" means. According to some conservatives, Arabs are "sand niggers.")
Conservatives also apparently believe that it's okay to give a curb job to somebody, if they're a female or a liberal.

Or both in the instance of Lauren Valle. From TalkingPointsMemo:

As the candidates arrived, a group of Paul supporters pulled a female MoveOn member to the ground and held her there as another Paul supporter stomped on the back of her head and neck.
[snip]
The victim suffered a concussion and multiple sprains in the assault, according to MoveOn's political director Ilyse Hogue.
[snip]
MoveOn has called on Rand Paul to explicitly condemn the attack, but so far he hasn't.
The man seen stomping the victim in the head has been identified as now-former Paul volunteer Tim Profitt.

This bearer of a very Capitalist sounding name, Tim Profitt, said to reporters that the camera angle makes the incident appear far worse than it really was."

Yeah... um, also the fact that Lauren Valle suffered several sprains to her neck and a fucking concussion also make it look worse than it really was too, huh?

Here's the video:

Green Party in California is getting TV airtime!

Other state Green Partys need to step up your game.

Huoratron: "$$ Troopers" by Lauri Warsta

Huoratron - $$ Troopers from Lauri Warsta on Vimeo.

Things like this remind me that I still have so much to learn about video, and/or synthesizing electronic music.

Footage of Laura Wells Arrest at the NBC hosted CA Gubernatorial Debates

To all of you who keep saying, "if voting changed things, they'd make it illegal."

Well, voting DOES change things, but instead of making voting illegal, they've just decided to make attending a debate while being a member of the Green Party illegal instead.

CA Gubernatorial Candidate arrested at NBC Debates

I've been here before. NBC excluded a candidate that I had worked for during the Democratic Party primaries in Nevada and New Hampshire, etc, even though he had met the requirements for entering the debate. A local court decided that Dennis Kucinich must be let into the debate, but then a federal appeals court decided that it was the "1st amendment rights of a corporate broadcasting entity to exclude or include whomever they wanted in the debates."

I can tell you this with utmost certainty-- the corporate media distorts elections, makes up the rules as they go, and the debates they host are a complete and total sham.

Just yesterday Green Party candidate for Governor, Laura Wells was arrested at a debate she was excluded from. According to my sources, Laura Wells was peacfully and quietly on her way to be seated in attendance of the debate when security arrested and escorted her off the premises for "tresspassing."



She had every right to be there- as she had tickets to attend the debate.
What was the real excuse for kicking her out? Laura Wells was arrested for "tresspassing on private property" a tactic used to kick Ralph Nader off the premises during his exclusion of the 2000 presidential debates-- despite the fact that he ALSO had a ticket. Not that he was there to debate- the Corporate Media didn't even let them WATCH the debate. As though their very presence would somehow taint their two-corporate-party lovefest.



NBC's story doesn't quite match up with what actually happened, excluding as many facts as they can to hide how bad they were and distort what actually happened. NBC reports she was arrested while protesting her exclusion, and makes sure to justify it by saying that "The Green Party is not a factor in this race, according to all polls."

Really? And yet the Green Party is also simultaneously such a threat that you have to arrest their Gubernatorial candidate simply for attending the debate- with a legitimate ticket, and a legitimate reason to be there? Make up your mind! Which is it?



Is the Green Party a factor or not?

Then as if to justify their exclusionary tactics, NBC follows up with this: "Polls show Brown, the current attorney general and former governor and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman in a dead heat."

Again-- Make up your mind! Which is it? Is the Green Party a factor or not? If they aren't a factor, they clearly would not have any bearing on the dead heat that this race is in, now would they? Unless they are a factor, in which case- LET THEM DEBATE.



Here's what actually happened:

Rally to Restore Sanity: What Sanity?

How can you tell if you are the least crazy person in the nuthouse?

You’re watching the Punk Patriot. You can subscribe to my channel by clicking here.

So I will not be at the Rally to Restore Sanity. I will be at work, in a factory repeating the same motions for hours on end, making things that you will one day use without thinking about the labor that went into it. My friend Davis Fleetwood however, he WILL be there. I’m interested to see what he comes away from it with as far as analysis and such. You can subscribe to his channel here.

I’m wondering how far this rally will go to restore sanity. First, you have to ask-- did we ever HAVE it? Sanity is an odd and elusive thing. When you are surrounded by a collective insanity, insanity seems sane, and it’s deviation from that insanity that seems insane. In conditions such as these, the craziest people in the nuthouse will point their fingers at the sane and berate them for their insane behaviour.

As you know, I covered a gathering of some of the most truely sane people in America, the Veterans For Peace National Convention. They’ve been at the front lines of our empire. They know what is going on outside of the iron gates of the nuthouse.

I came away from that convention with my head filled with their stories, and it dawned on me, there really should be a new field of psychology, not for diagnosing individuals, but for diagnosing societies. Because the Society of USA, at it’s core, is mentally ill.

It’s not like traditional mental illness, where it’s just something that happens to you. Oh no, this social mental illness is a contagion, like a virus. And we are pumped full of the viruses of this illness every day. It’s not anything deliberately done by anyone. It’s just a viral illness, like the common cold, Herpes, or HIV.

Television is the main culprit for spreading this disease. TV spends all day trying to convince us that the abnormal is normal, and the normal is abnormal.

In the breaks between shows, some celebrity is talking to you, in a deliberate and calm voice, like a sane person, about how they are so scared of being seen in public with skin blemishes that she avoids leaving her house. So much so that it interferes with her lifestyle. She can’t go grocery shopping anymore. She’s afraid of doing publicity to promote her TV shows. But she was able to cure this by using Proactive, and now she “loves it” and feels that “she can never be without it.”
I’m sorry but you don’t need a skin cleanser. You need therapy.

The History Channel has a running series of shows dedicated to glorifying the latest, most effective tools for killing on the market, as though they were toys, or lawnmowers, or refrigerators-- something that everybody should have. As if this fetish for killing was normal, rather than indicative of a cultural psychosis.

This same show parades “non lethal weapons” used on peaceful protesters here in the USA, but doesn’t talk about that fact. Instead they say that they are for nonviolent interventions in Foreign Wars. If that’s true, are we waging a war on Dissent and Freedom of Expression here in the USA? Because those ideas certainly seem foreign as of late.

“Fun Facts” are presented between commercial breaks for this weapons show, and include the factoid that “prolonged exposure to loud music has been used by the US military to ‘soften up prisoners for interrogation’” The playlist includes Eminem, Rage Against the Machine, and Barney the Dinosaur.

What they leave out is that this took place in Guantanamo, that the prisoners were chained in stress positions and exposed to volume levels capable of damaging hearing permanently, and is legally defined as TORTURE. But they don’t say this. They present it as though it were harmless fun. Something funny to laugh about at the water cooler. It’s no wonder, with this as our normal, that we’re raising a nation of psychotics, that our kids shoot and kill one another at school.

Take a good look at yourself America. You’ve completely lost your shit.

When you hit rock bottom you are going to hit so hard-- but on account of how your head is so wrapped up in the flag that you can’t see where you are going, you also can’t see the ground rushing up to meet your face, and you won’t shake off your denial that you are falling until all your teeth are broken, your lips shredded, and you pull your head up from the dirt, your mouth bleeding, your gums receding, your eyes no longer seeing stars and bars as you finally pull the flag away from your face, and you’ll come to learn that your body has been entirely eaten by cancer, America. You’ll have no legs to stand on any longer-- atrophied from the fact that you haven’t actually stood for anything for a long long time.

This is the Punk Patriot signing off. To Life, Liberty, and pursuit of a less fucked up Government.

After finding tracking device on his car, FBI agents raid man's apartment

Demanding that he return "Federal Property...

Reposted from Gizmodo.com:

A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the authorities would do.

It took just 24 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted their expensive device back, the student told Wired.com in an interview Wednesday.

The answer came when half-a-dozen FBI agents and police officers appeared at Yasir Afifi's apartment complex in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday demanding he return the device.

Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, cooperated willingly and said he'd done nothing to merit attention from authorities. Comments the agents made during their visit suggested he'd been under FBI surveillance for three to six months.

An FBI spokesman wouldn't acknowledge that the device belonged to the agency or that agents appeared at Afifi's house.

"I can't really tell you much about it, because it's still an ongoing investigation," said spokesman Pete Lee, who works in the agency's San Francisco headquarters.

Afifi, the son of an Islamic-American community leader who died a year ago in Egypt, is one of only a few people known to have found a government-tracking device on their vehicle.

His discovery comes in the wake of a recent ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saying it's legal for law enforcement to secretly place a tracking device on a suspect's car without getting a warrant, even if the car is parked in a private driveway.

Brian Alseth from the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington state contacted Afifi after seeing pictures of the tracking device posted online and told him the ACLU had been waiting for a case like this to challenge the ruling.

"This is the kind of thing we like to throw lawyers at," Afifi said Alseth told him.

"It seems very frightening that the FBI have placed a surveillance-tracking device on the car of a 20-year-old American citizen who has done nothing more than being half-Egyptian," Alseth told Wired.com

Afifi, a business marketing student at Mission College in Santa Clara, discovered the device last Sunday when he took his car to a local garage for an oil change. When a mechanic at Ali's Auto Care raised his Ford Lincoln LS on hydraulic lifts, Afifi saw a wire sticking out near the right rear wheel and exhaust.

Garage owner Mazher Khan confirmed for Wired.com that he also saw it. A closer inspection showed it connected to a battery pack and transmitter, which were attached to the car with a magnet. Khan asked Afifi if he wanted the device removed and when Afifi said yes, Khan pulled it easily from the car's chassis.

"I wouldn't have noticed it if there wasn't a wire sticking out," Afifi said.

On Monday, a friend of Afifi's named Khaled posted pictures of the device at Reddit asking if anyone knew what it was and if it mean the FBI "is after us." (Reddit is owned by CondeNast Digital, which also owns Wired.com).

"My plan was to just put the device on another car or in a lake," Khaled wrote, "but when you come home to 2 stoned off their asses people who are hearing things in the device and convinced its a bomb you just gotta be sure."

A reader quickly identified it as an Orion Guardian ST820 tracking device made by an electronics company called Cobham, which sells the device only to law enforcement.

No one was available at Cobham to answer Wired.com's questions, but a former FBI agent who looked at the pictures confirmed it was a tracking device.

The former agent, who asked not to be named, said the device was an older model of tracking equipment that had long ago been replaced by devices that don't require batteries. Batteries die and need to be replaced if surveillance is ongoing so newer devices are placed in the engine compartment and hardwired to the car's battery so they don't run out of juice. He was surprised this one was so easily found.

"It has to be able to be removed but also stay in place and not be seen," he said. "There's always the possibility that the car will end up at a body shop or auto mechanic, so it has to be hidden well. It's very rare when the guys find them."

He said he was certain that agents who installed it would have obtained a 30-day warrant for its use.

Afifi considered selling the device on Craigslist before the FBI showed up. He was in his apartment Tuesday afternoon when a roommate told him "two sneaky-looking people" were near his car. Afifi, already heading out for an appointment, encountered a man and woman looking his vehicle outside. The man asked if Afifi knew his registration tag was expired. When Afifi asked if it bothered him, the man just smiled. Afifi got into his car and headed for the parking lot exit when two SUVs pulled up with flashing lights carrying four police officers in bullet-proof vests.

The agent who initially spoke with Afifi identified himself then as Vincent and told Afifi, "We're here to recover the device you found on your vehicle. It's federal property. It's an expensive piece, and we need it right now."

Afifi asked, "Are you the guys that put it there?" and the agent replied, "Yeah, I put it there." He told Afifi, "We're going to make this much more difficult for you if you don't cooperate."

Afifi retrieved the device from his apartment and handed it over, at which point the agents asked a series of questions – did he know anyone who traveled to Yemen or was affiliated with overseas training? One of the agents produced a printout of a blog post that Afifi's friend Khaled allegedly wrote a couple of months ago. It had "something to do with a mall or a bomb," Afifi said. He hadn't seen it before and doesn't know the details of what it said. He found it hard to believe Khaled meant anything threatening by the post.

"He's a smart kid and is not affiliated with anything extreme and never says anything stupid like that," Afifi said. "I've known that guy my whole life. "

The agents told Afifi they had other agents outside Khaled's house.

"If you want us to call them off and not talk to him we can do that," Afifi said they told him. "That was weird. [...] I didn't really believe anything they were saying."

When he later asked Khaled about the post, his friend recalled "writing something stupid," but said he wasn't involved in any wrongdoing. Khaled declined to discuss the issue with Wired.com.

The female agent, who handed Afifi a card, identified herself as Jennifer Kanaan and said she was Lebanese. She spoke some Arabic to Afifi and through the course of her comments indicated she knew what restaurants he and his girlfriend frequented. She also congratulated him on his new job. Afifi got laid off from his job a couple of days ago, but on the same day was hired as an international sales manager of laptops and computers for Cal Micro in San Jose.

The agents also knew he was planning a short business trip to Dubai in a few weeks. Afifi said he often travels for business and has two teenage brothers in Egypt whom he supports financially. They live with an aunt. His U.S.-born mother, who divorced his father five years ago, lives in Arizona.

Afifi's father, Aladdin Afifi, was a U.S. citizen and former president of the Muslim Community Association here, before his family moved to Egypt in 2003. Afifi returned to the U.S. alone in 2008 to further his education he said. He knows he's on a federal watchlist and is regularly taken aside at airports for secondary screening.

Six months ago, a former roommate of his was visited by FBI agents who said they wanted to speak with Afifi. Afifi contacted one agent and was told the agency received an anonymous tip from someone saying he might be a threat to national security. Afifi told the agent he was willing to answer questions if his lawyer approved. But after Afifi's lawyer contacted the agency, he never heard from the feds again until he found their tracking device.

"I don't think they were surprised that I found it," he told Threat Level. "I'm sure they knew when I found it. [...] One of the first questions they asked me was if I was at a mechanics shop last Sunday. I said yes, that's where I found this stupid device under my car."

Afifi's attorney, who works for the civil liberties-focused Council on American Islamic Relations, said this kind of tracking is more egregious than the kind her office usually sees.

"The idea that it escalates to this level is unusual," said Zahra Billoo. "We take about one new case each week relating to FBI or law enforcement visits [to clients]. Generally they come to the individual's house or workplace, and there are issues that arise from that."

However, she said that after learning about Afifi's experience, other lawyers in her organization told her they knew of two people in Ohio who also recently discovered tracking devices on their vehicles.

Afifi's encounter with the FBI ended with the agents telling him not to worry.

"We have all the information we needed," they told him. "You don't need to call your lawyer. Don't worry, you're boring."

They shook his hand and left.

Glenn Beck finds new ways to be an a**hole, Fundraiser for Gene Cranick & Family

So, I made this shirt a while ago. It was meant to be a joke. I made it in response to Republicans accusing everything they didn’t like of being “socialism.”

I made a video about my reasoning behind it as well, which you can watch by clicking here.

The free-market worshipers insisted that I was wrong, that Fire Departments were never socialist, and that privatizing things ALWAYS fixed everything and made things run better.

Unlike those who find it convenient to ignore facts, I’ve studied history, and I know what happens when you start charging fees for essential public services. You get corrupt, immoral behaviour. Before NYC employed the socialist model, they once had private fire departments, that used to squabble over fees while houses burned down.

I thought that we had such ignorant barbarism only in our past. But that happened again, just a few days ago, in the USA. This time in Tennessee. Gene Cranick’s house burned to the ground while the Fire Dept watched, because of a squabble over a $75 dollar fee.

This is what you get when you attach a dollar sign to doing the right thing.

Glenn Beck sees nothing wrong with that. Reaching a new level of hypocritical fucktard, Glenn Beck mocked Gene Cranick on the air, complaining that “if you don’t pay your fee, you are sponging off your neighbor” totally oblivious to the poster of Benjamin Franklin behind him, with the word “Charity” on it. Go ahead and watch the clip for yourself

Now, an anti-christ, by definition, is somebody or something that claims to represent the teachings of Christ while simultaneously preaching the exact opposite of Christ taught. Glenn Beck does this on a daily basis. Food for thought.

The mocking aside, Glenn beck is absolutely right to say that “if you don’t pay the fee, your house burns down.” That is how a privatized fire department works.

Now you might think, “well I pay my taxes, I don’t have to pay any fee for the Fire Department.” You’re right. That’s because you are living in a socialist town, with a socialist government, taking taxes from everybody (mostly from those with the most wealth and most ability to pay) and then providing the protection of both fire rescue and police services to everybody in your municipality regardless of their ability to pay. That’s what compassionate, charitable, civilized human beings do.

I decided after seeing this clip that rather than being mocked on national broadcasting, that the Cranick Family actually needs is help.

To try and help out the Cranick Family, I’m doing a fundraiser.

$10 of every “Socialism” shirt purchase will go directly to the Cranick family. Please forward this message to your friends in email, tweet and retweet this, share it on your facebook wall, talk about it in person with people you know. Spread the word. This is important. If not to help the Cranicks, do it to piss off Glenn Beck.

I’ve in contact with WPSD, the local affiliate that covered the story originally, asking them if they have contact info for the Cranick family.

Now, since i just started, I haven’t raised any money yet, but when I do, I want to actually be able to give it to the Cranick family.

If you have any leads on how to get in touch with them, please send me an email at PunkPatriot411@gmail.com.

Now keep in mind, it might be kind of hard to get in touch with the Cranicks. Their house just burned down, and they lost everything they own-- including phones and computers.

Till then, this is the Punk Patriot, to life, liberty, and pursuit of a less f**ked up gov’t!

Heritage Foundation- insufferable douchebags who are wrong about trade policy

The Heritage Foundation put out a press release today saying that Media Distortions are trying to convince Americans that we don't need free trade any longer.

From their press release titled "Is the Media Reporting or Distorting?":

The media seem intent on convincing Americans that they no longer support free trade. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal, for example, begins “The American public, already skeptical of free trade, is becoming increasingly hostile to it.” The article goes on to report that the results of a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey show that as much as 90 percent of the U.S. public is concerned about outsourcing.

Really? I would think that it's not the MEDIA convincing us of anything. Keep in mind that the Media is owned huge conglomerates that have benefited from outsourcing our jobs to third world countries.

I think the massive unemployment, and the fact that all our manufacturing jobs are being shipped overseas is the MAIN factor that's convincing people. Maybe you assholes down in the Heritage Foundation's DC offices should take some time off from pontificating in the abstract, and take a visit to Detroit, or Cleveland, and listen to the folks on the ground that have been most hurt by your ignorant, faith-based, unscientific, bullshit trade policies. Douchebags.

Why Private Fire Departments DON'T WORK

From ThinkProgress:

there are currently two competing visions of governance in the United States. One, the conservative vision, believes in the on-your-own society, and informs a policy agenda that primarily serves the well off and privileged sectors of the country. The other vision, the progressive one, believes in an American Dream that works for all people, regardless of their racial, religious, or economic background.

This is the perverted version of America that Ron Paul, libertarians, and the Tea Party want to bring you:


From Huffington Post:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A smoldering rage may be all that remains after Gene Cranick's home burned to the ground last week in Obion County, Tennessee.

Firefighters are usually the bold "veni, vidi, vici" sort, but those from neighboring South Fulton could only say "veni, vidi." They came. They watched. That's it.

Cranick lives outside of the city limits and he admits that he forgot to pay a $75 annual service fee that would have provided him with fire protection. Firefighters wouldn't lift a finger, much less the hoses that might have saved the house.

The fire reportedly started in some barrels outside. As the flames crept closer to the home, Cranick says he offered to pay whatever it would take. The plea fell on deaf ears. Hours later, the home was gone.

So were three dogs and a cat.

"They coulda' been saved if they put water on it. But they didn't do it," Cranick told MSNBC.

The South Fulton firefighters did show up and managed to save a neighbor's field. The neighbor had paid the fee. But they would provide no heroics for the Cranicks. A local news report shows them climbing back on their trucks, flames still dancing over what was once the family's home.

Read the rest: click here

This shirt was originally meant as a joke, but it seems sadly apropos today:


Click the image to go to my Etsy Shop


I want to set up a fund so that proceeds from the sale of this shirt will be donated to Gene Cranick's family. (I still have to figure out how to get in contact with them-- if you know how, please contact me)

What do you think about this?

---

UPDATE: So I've decided to push ahead with it. I'll start trying to raise money now, and if I get anything, I'll figure out how to get it to them. I don't yet have any money raised to worry about right now, so I'll just cross that bridge when I come to it. I've been in contact with both MSNBC and WPSD. Any other leads would be appreciated.

I love Maine

Here in Maine, we keep our wits about us, and pay attention to things that matter.

Like keeping your house warm for the winter.

Virtual Zen Meditation Ad on Facebook

Irony upon irony.

"The world is all an illusion." --Buddha
Get lost in the virtual world of Second Life, where you can have your avatar meditate!

Meditating is so time consuming anyways. I'd rather have a computer program meditate for me while I watch TV.

Screenprinting shirts is a Time Paradox

Screenprinting shirts is a time paradox. The actual act of printing the shirt, putting the ink through the screen, only takes a few seconds.

Everything else though, takes up a lot of time.

Designing the shirt. Breaking down a multi-color design into separate layers can be a huge pain in the ass, and very tedious, but it's totally worth it in the end.

Prepping your transfers. On a mulicolor design, you have to make sure that every transfer is perfectly lined up, or your design will be all wonky, and your layers won't match up. Even if you aren't working on a multi-color design, you have to make sure your screen is lined up, or you will find yourself adjusting and readjusting your shirt underneath the screen to make sure it centers well. If you're doing a run of shirts, the screen gets covered with ink which blocks your view of the shirt underneath. If your design isn't centered on the screen, forget it.

Waiting for emulsion to dry. I find myself wasting the most time waiting for my emulsion to dry on the screen because I want to get right to printing shirts as soon as possible. So I keep checking my screens over and over to see if they are dry. If you are using photo emulsion, and you aren't working on an air-conditioned environment (which I am not), it can take as little as a couple hours and as much as two days for your emulsion to fully dry, depending on the humidity levels in the ambient air. If you jump the gun and do a photoburn on a screen whose emulsion has not fully dried, you will find yourself washing most of the emulsion right off the screen, leaving a big, ugly, patchy hole in your design. And since not ALL of the emulsion comes off, you still have to clean the screen, wasting emulsion remover and time in the process.

Waiting for Ink to dry I use an artist quality fabric ink, as I dont' have the facilities for a big professional operation with plastic inks or a flash burner to solidify my ink. So I have to wait for the ink to dry. Usually 24 hours for it to fully dry. Then, after it has dried, I have to heat seal the ink to the shirt. I use an iron. The idea is to iron the shirt until you see smoke coming up from the ink, but without burning it. Depending on how big the design is, that can take as little as 5 minutes, or as long as 30 minutes, doing the shirt in sections. The worst thing that could possibly happen is that I miss a spot, or I don't iron it for long enough, and the ink ends up washing right out of the shirt when my customer washes it.

Shipping It's about a 30 min ride to the post office and back.

And then, I'm done! Until I get my next order...

Etsy punkpatriot

Sometimes I make music

We Can Build Up a Village by PunkPatriot

We can build up a village
We can tear it apart
the singular difference
is what lays in your heart

Is Obama George Bush the 3rd?

My take on it:

Hey Average American-- You're fat, You eat too much meat, and it's killing you

I'm going to throw this out there-- I'm NOT a vegetarian. But I grew up eating lots of vegetarian and vegan meals without knowing it. It was just healthy, delicious food, and it was what we were having for dinner. I've maintained those healthy eating habits, and eat like a vegetarian most days out of the month.

The Average American has meat with EVERY meal. (Especially in Ohio, it seems)

That sort of diet drastically increases your chances of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, etc.

If you're in a family that has meat at every meal, try convincing your family to let you make a delicious, healthy, vegetarian dinner a few days out of the week. If you don't mention that it's vegetarian, you might even be able to trick them into eating a delicious, healthy meal without them even knowing or caring that it was meatless.

Stuck when trying to figure out vegetarian options for meals? Go ethnic!
Most people on this planet eat meals with no meat at all for the majority of their meals. And they get by just fine, with plenty of different options for every meal-- and never EVER buy expensive texturized vegetable protein meat-substitutes. Say sianora to tofu dogs, and say hello to a world of options:

Many Thai food options are either vegetarian or vegan.
There are a host of vegetarian meals from Northern India.
Authentic mexican food has plenty of vegetarian foods to choose from.
Arab foods are heavy on flavor, and more often than not, free of meat.
And much much much much much much more.

Explore the world's vegetarian options, and don't settle for boring food ever again!