Blatant Tax Cheats of WNC

Why are these churches still getting a total tax break?? These are not "non-political" nonprofits - these are active political organizations, and they are openly funding and promoting political agendas. Almost every fundamentalist church in this area is displaying these signs. I'm snapping pics of them, and will be sending them to the IRS along with a demand that these churches lose their tax-free status.

 The fundies are determined to impose their fanatical and bigoted religious beliefs on the public, and have succeeded in many states. In fact, NC has been the only southern state that hasn't passed a "constitutional" amendment declaring that legal marriages can only exist between a male and a female. But now they finally got their Prop 1 on the ballot, and hope to make the state codify legal discrimination. How can something be part of a state constitution that is inherently unconstitutional federally?

 I've noticed that none of these dogmatic fanatics can answer this question: How does the marriage of same-gender couples negatively impact your personal relationship? How does it in any way affect the quality of your marriages? Here's a suggestion for you holier-than-thou loonies who are just itching to bring on the rigid, authoritarian, fundamentalist theocracy of your warped little dreams: Mind Your Own Business!!!

 You are not entitled to decide what other individuals do in and with their relationships. Just like you are not entitled to decide whether or not I get to use contraception. BUTT. OUT. In the words of your holy book - and good advice, I might add - take care of the log in your own eye before fussing about the speck in your brother's. In other words, morons, stop worrying about the perceived sins of others and worry about making sure your own life is sinless. Last I heard, you folks were committing TONS of them.

Workplace Modification Friday...

Whew! TGIF.....

WT....?!!

"Interestingly," writes Jason Ditz at Anti-war.com, "with the ink now drying on the document and the US officially committed to the occupation of Afghanistan for another decade, officials are continuing to tout 2014 as the “end” of the war. This speaks to how the 2024 date, though openly discussed by the Karzai government in Afghanistan and privately acknowledged as part of the secret pact, has not been publicly presented to the American public. When they will officially spring it on us remains unclear."....

From: Obama's Midnight' Deal Will Stretch Afghan War to 2024
  -Common Dreams

As usual, the reality is markedly different from the msm spin. I heard a local network affiliate today promoting an upcoming broadcast, and one of the featured topics was something like "Will soldiers have enough to do with no war"? With no war? Dear gawd. Do they really imagine us to be that stupid? (Wait, don't answer that!) There are 761 US Military Bases across the planet, according to Wiki, not to mention scores of active "conflicts" and covert ops our gubmint is involved in. We're Warfare Tools-R-Us! That is our main industry.

And aside from the fact that clearly military operations will NOT be over in 2014, does anyone doubt for a second that Gov-Corp will create a major "crisis" before 2014 even arrives?

It's May Day.

Do you know where your paycheck is? Personally,  I wonder what the hell happened to mine! (Aside from my impending layoff, that is). My wages were actually slightly lower this year, while the cost of everything from groceries to gas sky-rocketed. Like many Americans, I'm not keeping up.  Look at the graph below:

As Think Progress notes, the productivity of American workers is high, but wages are stagnant. We do more work, yet our wages don't change.

The Politics of Sight

 By David Sirota

Would Americans eat less meat, and would animals be treated more humanely, if slaughterhouses were made with glass walls and we all could see the monstrous killing apparatus at work? This is the query at the heart of Timothy Pachirat’s new book “Every Twelve Seconds”—the title a reference to the typical slaughterhouse’s cattle-killing rate. Before you think this is a column merely about food, recognize that Pachirat’s question isn’t (only) about the immorality of the cheeseburger you had for lunch. It’s about the larger phenomenon whereby modern society has reconstructed itself to hide so many horrific consequences from view.

Calling this the “politics of sight,” Pachirat’s blood-soaked experience inside a slaughterhouse spotlights only the most illustrative example of how we’ve divorced ourselves from the means of producing violence—and how, in doing so, we have made it psychologically easier to support such brutality. Sadly, billions of factory-farmed animals dying barbaric deaths are just one subset of casualties in that larger process.

 Today, for example, free trade policies that promote offshoring allow Americans to enjoy consumer goods at ultra-low prices without having to see that those low prices represent companies taking advantage of the developing world’s poverty wages, environmental destruction and human rights abuses. A veritable slave may have assembled the iPad you are reading these words on, but thanks to the supply chain’s geography and Apple’s lack of transparency, you can easily avoid dealing with the ethical implications of that reality.

Another example: Many Americans drive gas-guzzling SUVs, proudly slapping patriotic declarations on their bumpers. This seems perfectly reasonable, but only because many either don’t live near polluted oil-drilling sites or don’t have to personally experience the ramifications of our petroleum-focused military policies. Ultimately, by separating the consequences of gas consumption from the driver, we’ve created the psychological conditions for fossil fuel consumption to seem like an honorable statement of strength rather than an endorsement of environmental degradation and war.

Speaking of war, the politics of sight sculpt our martial policies. We ended conscription, separating most of our fellow citizens from the consequences of military action; we conduct combat via unmanned aerial vehicles that remove the pilot-shooters from the populations being bombed; and both the military establishment and the media themselves suppress photographs of coffins or battlefield viscera that might show us what war really looks like.

Some of this, of course, is an inadvertent byproduct of larger trends like globalization that stretch supply chains across the planet. Some of it comes from a culture narcissism that teaches us to consider only our immediate surroundings and nothing else.

Much of it, though, is a deliberate effort to hide the truth. From the Pentagon’s photo policy to agribusiness now championing so-called “ag gag” laws to punish activists who expose factory farm atrocities, vested interests are exploiting the fact that “out of sight, out of mind” is a default setting in the human mind. More here.

Quotes of the Week

"In the past three decades, America's healthcare system has radically metamorphosed from a public service network (largely run by independent physicians and nonprofit hospitals) into a corporate profit machine--one that Dr. Arnold Relman, the renowned former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, calls the Medical-Industrial Complex. Drugmakers have been among the most ambitious, in-your-face pushers of this transmutation of medicine into just another commodity to be sold by hook or crook. In this system, the concept of "care" has been reduced to "caveat emptor," with the shareholders' interest in monetary gain overriding all other interests." 

(Entire piece by Jim Hightower here)



  "When you look at America, you have to concede that we have failed. Most Americans today are worse off than they were fifteen years ago. A full-time worker in the US is worse off today than he or she was 44 years ago. That is astounding – half a century of stagnation. The economic system is not delivering. It does not matter whether a few people at the top benefitted tremendously – when the majority of citizens are not better off, the economic system is not working."

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, on the fallacy of austerity dogma.

Friday's Workplace Posting

Happy Friday!

This is Definitely a Huge Problem!

And we're not hearing anything about these developments from the MSM. Check out this piece by Christina Consolo who is a former researcher with the NIH:

"Thirteen months have passed since the Fukushima reactors exploded, and a U.S. Senator finally got off his ass and went to Japan to see what is going on over there.

What he saw was horrific.

And now he is saying that we are in big trouble.

See the letter he sent to U.S. Ambassador to Japan Ichiro Fujisaki, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and NRC’s Chairman Gregory Jaczko here.

But what is so ironic about this is that we have been in this heap of trouble since March of 2011. March 17^th, to be exact, when the plume of radioactive materials began bombarding the west coast of California.
And Oregon. And Washington. And British Columbia. And later Maine, Europe, and everywhere in between. Independent researchers, nuke experts, and scientists, from oceanography to entomology and everywhere in between, having been trying to sound the alarm ever since.

The scientists most upset are those who have studied the effects of radiation on health. I’ll say it again, so its really clear: we are in big trouble.

The most preliminary reports of soil contamination are starting to come in from the USGS, who has seemed reluctant to share this information. Los Angeles, California, Portland, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado, so far have the highest radioactive particle contamination out of the entire US.

That being said, every single city tested across the country showed contamination from Fukushima. What is even more alarming, however, about the numbers coming in, is that they are from samples taken April 5^th, of last year.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, has only recently confirmed that there were three meltdowns, and they have been ongoing, unabated, for thirteen months, and no effort has been made to contain them...."   More here.

Earth Day Every Day

Watch live streaming video from earthday2012 at livestream.com

Happy 4/20!!

From the DPA:

 Today is 4/20 -- a symbolic day for the drug policy reform movement. For many, it’s a day for celebration, but it’s also a day to speak out and show legislators your support for marijuana legalization.

4/20 is a reflection of the fact that marijuana is a mainstream cultural and political issue that is gaining ground across the country. Whether you love, hate, or don’t care about marijuana, we all agree that marijuana prohibition does more harm than good -- yet the war on marijuana rages on.

We've been working on a groundbreaking bill that would end federal marijuana prohibition by allowing states to decide their own marijuana laws. Speak out and urge your representatives to cosponsor this bill today!

Workplace Note(s) of the Week

Wow.

Wanna see in graphic detail what happened to our government? Check out these Venn Diagrams!

Then, if you aren't thoroughly nauseated, read the story of a Georgia six year-old who was arrested and handcuffed for having a temper tantrum at school. This is a new low in the stepped-up trend of criminalizing children for being children.

Nationwide, police are called to school, and end up arresting (or even tasering) children for the smallest infractions. Annette Montano of Albuquerque said that her 13-year-old child was arrested just last year for the absurd crime of burping in gym class. More here.

Have you noticed that the Police State has been expanding steadily? Here's part of what we can expect as this expansion continues unabated. And continue it will, since we have a Supreme Court that is unwilling to accurately interpret and support the basic constitutional rights of citizens. Only corporations have rights now.

Here We Go Again!

It never ends, this determination to strip U.S. citizens of the last few shreds of privacy and basic civil rights. Remember SOPA, in which Congress would bar access to web content that's protected under the First Amendment?

Now they've trotted out CISPA — the Cybersecurity Information and Sharing Protection Act, and according to the ACLU, this legislation does something even scarier.

The ACLU states that "It's an attempt to give the government and military agencies unprecedented power to snoop through people's personal information. This includes medical records, private emails, financial information — and the government can do it without a warrant, proper oversight or limits."

Essentially this bill gives the NSA the ability to collect the internet and other information of people regardless of whether they are doing anything wrong or not. A person doesn't have to be in any way suspicious, or engaging in suspicious online activity for the government to help itself to pretty much ALL of your private information.

Clearly our wingnut-controlled Congress believes they are entitled to legislate away our constitutional rights and protections. There is apparently no intrusion, no trespass too extreme for the goose-stepping minions of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex when it comes to national "security". Of course, there is absolutely zero evidence that these dictatorial measures would provide ANY measure of crime prevention, but then that's not what laws like this are really about, are they?

This is essentially the same con that Gov-Corp has run on the public since 9/11: We have to dismantle the constitutional rights of the citizenry in order to "protect the homeland." It's just another excuse to continue the systematic removal of individual rights, so that by the time the PTB are done, we have none. And folks, it doesn't get any more Third Reich than that.

Please send a letter to your loathesome legislators here, and if you're feeling especially ambitious, see if you can light a fire under your comatose friends and relatives.

The War on Whistleblowers

From BrassCheckTV:



Whistleblowing, or exposing government misconduct, is the at very
heart of the First Amendment. As John F. Kennedy said, "The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society."

During his 2008 Presidential campaign Obama expressed the need to
enact better whistleblower protections and even claimed that he was
preparing a federal law to protect those who disclose suspect
practices.

That's not what we got. Instead, we got a war on whistleblowers, and a war on journalists.

Friday's Workplace Posting of the Week

First, They Came for my Junk....

This cartoon by Ted Rall hits the nail on the head. Is anyone paying attention outside of the progressive and civil rights communities? This Supreme Court will go down in history as the enormously destructive and fascist entity that it is. And undoubtedly the full damage it has wrought will only be seen in its totality by future historians. Assuming there is a future with intelligent beings capable of reflection!

(click on image to enlarge)
















The U.S. Supreme Court rules that strip-searches and body cavity searches of everyone arrested in the United States for any reason, including for minor traffic offenses, are perfectly legal.