Ethics? Not Here!

House leader Eric Cantor just said we could solve the USA deficit problem if only we could cut those icky "entitlement programs."  You know, like Social Security and Medicaid, which are "unfunded liabilities" leaving a burden on "this generation and the next." Screw public entitlement (which used to be called social support and benefits, by the way), we need to save that money for more important things, like corporate wealthcare!

MyMy asks a good question; "what is government for except for 'promoting the general welfare' rather than protecting blind and stupid private interests?"

Well, besides ensuring the rich stay rich, it's also important to have government around to keep the trouble makers down.  Like these two woman in Texas, who desperately needed to be assaulted by two cops (for littering) and have dirty rubber gloves shoved inside their private orifices.

We might as well be ruled by Cthulhu...


“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.”
--Franklin D. Roosevelt

On female authors

Sci-fi author Maureen Johnson tells us why more books written by women have "girly covers":

"A man and a woman can write books about the same subject matter, at the same level of quality, and that woman is simply more likely to get the soft-sell cover with the warm glow and the feeling of smooth jazz blowing off of it. This idea that there are ‘girl books’ and ‘boy books’… gives credit to absolutely no one, especially not the boys who will happily read stories by women, about women. As a lover of books and someone who supports readers and writers of both sexes, I would love a world in which books are freed from some of these constraints.”

See her Cover Challenge: more popular novels with the covers given this "girly cover" treatment: @the Mary Sue.

Poverty is the New Black

Poverty is now so popular, everyone's doing it:

- 4 in 5 Americans live near the poverty level

- less than half of American adults have a full time job

- America makes top 5 poorest developed countries worldwide

Spies & Socialists

Spies and Socialists-- all the fun things that start with S!  Read up on the latest:

1. USA wiretapping and internet spying by the NSA will not end anytime soon.  Because big surprise, the same people who made this law, just voted to keep it going full force.

2. Did you know the USA has a Socialist Workers party? Apparently no one else, did either.  The Federal Election Commission says the Socialist Workers Party doesn't need regulation like other political parties because they're "largely irrelevant."

Why so irrelevant?  Perhaps it's like the New York Times said, "it [already] succeeded, even in the United States. Socialism meant the emancipation of the working class and its transformation into the middle class; it championed social justice and a progressive tax system, and in that sense has largely done its job."

Yep...because the working class in the USA is doing just fine, and the middle class is secure and stable!  It's not like we have an increased income gap for the last 20 years, or sharply declining taxes on our wealthy.

3. Meanwhile, France is winning all the socialism, because last year they elected the first Socialist Party President since 1988.  François Hollande's catchphrase is  "I want to put the magic back in the French dream," and he plans to do this by enacting a 75% tax on France's most wealthy!  But don't tell his PR team, he got in trouble for making that comment last year! He just didn't know any better, because he's never held a national government office before.

Ecuador more Democratic than USA

Ecuador's capital city has built a sustainable, eco-friendly city that puts most USA cities to shame:

Most taxis and many of the buses in Quito are operated by cooperatives, part of the booming solidarity sector made up of tens of thousands of community banks and credit unions and worker owned enterprises in the manufacturing, housing, agriculture and transport industries. It's important to note that this sector has grown along side, rather than instead of the traditional private and public sectors which have also seen healthy expansion.

People often ride the shared bikes provided by the city, use of which is available for a tiny yearly fee. Every Sunday a north south route through the city, including Avenue Amazonas, one of the city's main arteries, is given over entirely to cyclists and pedestrians, who come out in the thousands. The old airport, having been engulfed by urban expansion and replaced earlier this year, has also been turned over to the public as a park, and is already in use. 

Of course, everything is not perfect outside the city (violence, crime and poverty abound), but Ecuador is still moving in the right direction, expanding opportunities and safe, healthy, affordable living spaces for it's citizens rather than crying "austerity! cut everything!" like most "first world" democracies today:

Almost all this progress has occurred under the leadership of President Rafael Correa, a former economics professor who was made finance minister in 2005 during one of Ecuador's recurrent economic crises, running for the presidency the following year, assuming the office in 2007, and quickly bringing an era of unprecedented stability and prosperity. By the end of of 2012, unemployment had fallen to 4.1 percent, its lowest level on record and the poverty rate to 27.3 percent - that's 27 percent below what it was when Correa took power.

So, USA, care to take some notes?