Well….it has struck me, thinking over the last couple of weeks, that the only thing the repubs are good at is taking away peoples rights or preventing classes they don’t like in gaining the rights that the rest of us enjoy. I know I’ve talked about this before, but this same old silliness has taken over the repubs like never before….let’s take away the rights of people to bargain, let’s take away the rights of people to be let alone (i.e. the Patriot Act), and let’s prevent gays from having the rights they deserve. My larger question here is what does this nonsense have to do with creating jobs and helping repair the middle class that has been destroyed over the past 30 years? The quick answer is nothing…but that’s what the repubs do, talk, promise, and lie, then give more to the rich. Their latest trick to silence their critics? They are now using the Freedom of Information Act to go on fishing expeditions to try to find innocuous e-mails that can be twisted in their latest smear campaign…and are they asking for those of the right-leaners…of course not…I’ve told you before these folks are just a bunch of thugs and this is just another example that they will stop at nothing to destroy anyone that does not agree with them.
Okay…are you getting tired of me bitching about this? Yeah, I am too…but you can see how difficult this is to keep fresh….I am going to keep trying, and trying, and trying….
Well…to hear the repubs talk, the reason there are no jobs being created here in the US is the “fact” that corporate taxes are too high and this taxation is driving companies overseas. Really? they are still saying this after the news that came out about G.E. yesterday? In case you didn’t hear, one of our largest corporations, General Electric, paid no taxes last year…yep, you’ve got it, the company that is being held up as the shining example of success here figured out a way to not pay any taxes…but more than that they figured out how to steal 3.2 billion dollars of your and my money in the form of a tax refund…and that figures to a negative 60% tax rate. Where is your overtaxation now repubs? The second fact that these tax cutters don’t want you to know is that over 60% of American corporations paid little or no taxes last year. When was the last time you or I paid little or no taxes? These guys should be ashamed of taking advantage of the infrastructure that you and I pay for to make obscene profits and then twisting the knife by taking food out of the mouths of our poor. How many people could be fed with the 3.2 billion dollars that G.E. didn’t deserve? Geez….
Well…this is going to be a shorty since it is just a short thought on my part…it came from a quote from our gov Rick Snyder that I read in the papers a couple of days ago, when asked if he is concerned that his approval ratings and the polling on his agenda is moving steadily downward, this moron (or republican…today the terms are pretty much interchangeable) said that the only thing that counted was the result of the election that put he and his repub co-conspirators into office….he just doesn’t care that 66 percent of the people of Michigan do not like or want the direction he has taken with raising taxes on individuals and giving more tax breaks to business, along with the undemocratic laws that have been passed by his legislature that will allow him to remove elected officials and replace them with his cronies. I think the people are finally waking up to the shenanigans of this new crop of repubs and their anti middle class agenda once it was revealed for what it is…stealing more from the working class to give to the richest…governor, you are supposed to govern for all of the people of Michigan…not just your country club buddies…geez…
Well…I know I’m late, and I also know that most of you read this after you get back from lunch…and I’ve tried to write to the statistics of my site and make sure there is one here for you then…today has just been crazy with too many things happening for me to keep the schedule…I did get the car back already and I hope thy have fixed it…they better have for 300 bucks.
Now to get to the topic….I’ve been seeing really heartening developments when I look at the recent polls on what the repubs have been doing in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states, including my own great state of Michigan….the only way these guys got elected was to lie and conceal what they were truly going to do and now that it has been revealed, all of the independents that voted for them are gone…and even some of the repubs are bailing on these idiots because some repubs still have a sense of fairness and I say to them, come on over, the waters fine on the thinking side…can’t wait for 2012….
Well….this one just popped into my head a few minutes ago and I wasn’t even thinking about it….to preface this one, you just have to remember how the repubs have been screeching and screaming about how public employees are overpaid leeches sucking the life out of our state and something must be done to cut their pay and benefits. But then, in comes the new governor and pays his top aides significantly more than the outgoing administration, saying that you have to pay more to get people to take government jobs. You see the inconsistency, don’t you? It’s okay to pay the top people (like the ceo’s and vice presidents) whatever they want, but the regular workers that take public jobs are not top, qualified, people but are just lazy, greedy folks that don’t really want to work. Just more of the same class warfare crap where the people at the top take as much as they can…where’s the “shared sacrifice” governor Snyder? Geez….
Well…I am getting to the point that I am ashamed to be a resident of this great state of Michigan with what out legislators have just done…we’re now the first state to cut off unemployment benefits to help ease the tax burdens of corporations who are wallowing in the highest profits on the history of the world. Yep, you heard it right, we are going to cut off the unemployed here just to make sure that business can keep their tax rate lower than it’s been in 30 years. I am getting tired of pointing out the immorality of balancing our budget here on the backs of the poor, retired, and unemployed when a small tax increase across the board would wipe out the deficit and give us some breathing room until the economy recovers. If this is gov Snyder’s idea of “shared sacrifice”, then I am being forced to recant my support for raising my own taxes to help….these guys have been exposed for what they are…just the same old repubs dancing to the tune of their corporate masters who will not be happy until all of the wealth of this country is in the hands of the top 1%.
The second thing I want to talk about is the downright idiocy that is passing for fiscal policy here in the US. If you’ve been following the european economy, and Ireland and England in particular, you see that they have implemented exactly the same austerity measures that are being proposed here; cutting spending and lowering taxes. But what the right here doesn’t want you to know is that these measures are not working in any economy where they’ve been tried…in fact, the deficit reduction that is being championed here as a job growth measure has resulted in a loss of jobs and tax revenue which will make the deficit worse over the long run, not better. When did we become so stupid that proven economic theory (deficit spending in the midst of a recession) has been replaced by fear that deficits will cause the mythical “bond fairies” to stop buying our debt? Now, I’m all for reining in government spending in good times, but not in a recession where these cuts will create a permanent underclass of the unemployed. Geez….
Well….it was an interesting article this morning by Manny Lopez where he goes on to bitch about getting hate mail responses to his columns and tries to tar the entire progressive/ liberal part of the political spectrum by these outliers. One of the false analogies this moron makes is that because people are protesting the inequality of the ‘shared sacrifice” that is being foist on the people of Michigan, they must be far left liberals and he decries their usage of violent imagery as being hypocritical. Who says that people that are protesting unfairness have to be liberals? But, that fits into his biases that says that all repubs and right leaners must just love what Snyder is doing and it is just the professional left that hates this new budget. Sorry Manny, but many of us on the left (or those of us that think) agree that tax increases need to be a part of trying to balance the budget, but we just want fairness; don’t expect us to like taking money out of our pockets and transferring it to a bunch of ceo’s.
He goes on to relate that he has gotten e-mails questioning his citizenship by his Hispanic last name, what he conveniently forgets is that he has questioned whether Obama is a citizen and makes the leap immediately that this questioning is racist. I think he is so eager to play the discrimination card that he completely missed what the commenter was saying….that if the birthers can question Obama, than his readers can question him. Fair game to me….
I know, Manny is such an easy target that I should do more work and find better ones….at least I’m not writing about sister Sarah….geez…
Well…I am continually amazed at the governor of this state who espouses limited government and local control and then does what he did yesterday. In an interview in GR yesterday, this idiot tried to explain away his power grab that will take money away from local government unless they do exactly what he says…using blackmail and justifying it with this statement: “the goal here isn’t to punish people,it is to reward the success and crate a new culture based on best practices”…and whose best practices are those and who says they are the best? This, coming from a faith-based party that only believes the numbers they pull out of a hat? This, coming from a former ceo whose only claim to fame was to make hundreds of millions of dollars shipping the entire company of Gateway computers to China? This is his idea of “best practices”? Why aren’t the businesses that he is showering 1.8 billion dollars in tax cuts on being held to this bogus claim of “best practices”? No, they don’t have to do anything to get this transfer of wealth except exist and continue to give money to his and other repub’s campaign.
This is nothing more than a naked power grab that is based upon bludgeoning his enemies with his control of the purse strings and if the localities don’t agree, guess what? He will use the recently passed emergency manager law to remove elected officials and install more of his cronies that will then. without debate, drive their right-wing agenda down our throats. Where are the tea partiers who say they despise the “takeover” by centralized government? What’s next? Rick Snyder becoming the only government that Michigan has, and his pronouncements will become law no matter how misguided they are….we need to rise up and throw these idiots out in the next election before our democracy is gone forever…geez…
Well…don’t know if you’ve been following the saga of the Detroit Public Schools, but that district is in danger of failing from flight, falling property values, and mismanagement. The solution that is being sold to Michigan and the people of Detroit is to convert fully half of these schools to privately run charter schools following the repub mantra that the private sector always does thing better than government, but the numbers don’t back that up….that’s never a problem to the repubs anyway….their faith-based system of governance does not rely on numbers or statistics just belief. While some of the charters in Michigan do excel at educating children, on a whole, they perform well below the average in graduation rates, adequate yearly progress, and standardized tests. I will concede that some of the charters take in kids that have failed in other places which will skew the statistics somewhat, but this is small subset of the kids that go to charters both here and across the country. So, what can we divine from these numbers? I don’t want to sound like there is no nuance to this comparison, but one of the biggest reasons that the repubs want charters is that their teachers are overwhelmingly non-union….they care very little about achievement or educating our children…just about scoring political points and furthering their extreme agenda here in Michigan…geez…
Well…out the bike, I had an idea that ended up being way too depressing…the title was going to be “what happens when your dreams are gone?” but that’s way too depressing even for me..so let’s go another direction. You know I’ve been severely critical of our gov Snyder and his plans to raise taxes on everyone but corporations….and I may have been a little too strident but that reaction comes from my long experience following politics and the fact that since Reagan, there has been a notable bias by the repubs against the middle class. Can a leopard change it’s spots? So, I think I’ll take it easy for a couple of days and try to regain my perspective…and I’ve always said that I don’t mind paying taxes since it is one of the responsibilities of any society; I just don’t like it when corporations get to freeload on the infrastructure you and I pay for. It would be nice to have an I-94 that didn’t destroy you car when you use it and schools that aren’t crumbling. That brings me to the one last thing…when did teachers become the devil? The way the right is foaming at the mouth about them, you would think they stole the candy from the mouths of babies and kicked puppies. I for one, have always looked up to good teachers and I don’t I don’t understand whey they are always considered overpaid when a ceo or hedge fund manager makes a thousand times more than their average. Just a question…don’t expect an answer…