The Congressional Research Service continues to produce reports laden with information on major issues, analysis unlikely to be popular with one entire side of the political spectrum. For this, it deserves a pat on the back. Sadly, it would seem facts do have a liberal bias, to repeat a common saying some now find annoying.
“In 2011, 46.2 million people were counted as poor in the United States, the same number as in 2010 and the largest number of persons counted as poor in the measure’s 53-year recorded history,” reads the opening sentence in the report’s summary.
“The increase in poverty over the last four years reflects the effects of the economic recession that began in December 2007,” it continues. “Some analysts expect poverty to remain above pre-recessionary levels for as long as a decade, and perhaps longer …”
Excerpts from graphs in the CRS report, Poverty in the United States: 2011, illustrate the assertions.
The graphs show that poverty reached a low at the end of the Clinton administration, but began a slow rise during the presidency of George W. Bush, reaching a plateau in the middle of its eight years before abruptly beginning to soar in 2007, the onset of the economic collapse brought on by Wall Street.
The Obama administration inherited the Bush economy, one that was failing catastrophically in 2008, when the number of people falling into poverty increased at a chilling rate.
The graph excerpted above shows the millions of people in poverty from 2000 to 2012, the red line showing totals, the blue — the elderly, and the green line, the national average in terms of the percentage of the national population.
This second graph shows poverty statistics by age group, one in which children are shown as the most affected.
The above map shows the states with the highest increases in poverty. In a fair interpretation, although poverty has increased virtually everywhere in the country (except perhaps in a geographic ring around the capital marking the governing population and its support) the modern radical GOP control the majority of the economies of the states where things are the worst.
Over the course of the Obama administration, GOP politics in the House and Senate have made it largely impossible to do anything about the economy except practice austerity and maintenance of the status quo. It is therefore remarkable, that at least for the elderly, poverty — the CRS notes — has reached an historic low.
However, not all of the nation has done very badly in the last few years. And, for this, the Obama administration must shoulder responsibility.
At a time when so many Americans at home see their lives blighted by an economy of no opportunity, there is one place immune from the problems of being poor.
It is in arms manufacturing and sales, and the following chart — published originally at the New York Times, shows a stark moral dilemma faced by the United States.
In a nation as powerful and with as many resources as ours, it is unconscionable that such a divergence in conditions between the many, and a chosen few — in this case, the makers of the instruments of war, exists. It is pure immorality — in graphs.
Again, Poverty in the United States: 2011, at the Secrecy blog, is here.
Alert readers will have noted the number of people in poverty aligns closely with the number receiving food stamps — 46-47 million.
[Romney] went on, “The numbers on food stamps are really revealing. When the president took office, 32 million people were on food stamps. And now that number is 15 million higher, almost 50% higher. Now, 47 million people on food stamps. You’ve got Americans falling into poverty under this president.”
That’s a rhetorical one-two punch, first emphasizing the need for jobs — a message that resonates at every rung of the economic ladder — then cite data showing how things are getting worse, not better, under Obama.
Granted, the food-stamp issue could be problematic for Romney too. Republicans have proposed to cut billions of dollars from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by narrowing eligibility for benefits …
And part of this is certainly true. But as everything from the Romney secret video, it also shows a grotesque and twisted view of how things have transpired. The majority of those who qualified for food stamps during the Obama administration do so as a consequence of the economic collapse that came upon the nation in 2007, during the Bush administration. The data is quite clear.
It should also be noted, although it contains little solace, that the graphs from the CRS report show a stabilization of the percentage of those in poverty over the last two years.
I’m sorry to harp on it (well, no, not really) but Romney’s “47 percent pay no income tax” puts him in the role of the protagonist I satirized in “Rich Man’s Burden.”
It is a song for the Republican Party. And it trots out a line of thought very common, the world belief of a special kind of fucked-up white paranoid, one with a resentment for “others” who pay no taxes. And are on food stamps, to boot. And that would be everyone who votes for Democrats or Obama. Which apparently leaves a middle ground of unfocused pure white voters, salt of the earth working people, who can still be persuaded to vote Republican.
I’ve some collected quotes from the account of one of my local Pasadena friends on Facebook, a fellow who keeps in touch with old acquaintances from prep school in one of the tonier places of Connecticut.
And they chat on his wall, going on extended whines about taxes,
the unfairness of alleged cheaters who pay none, and the corruption and shame of a government that enables the lazy and untalented.
To them, this is one of the big things dragging the country down:
[The] 60 million who don’t actually file taxes (and should) is a huge problem.
There is an estate tax for estates valued at over $5 million dollars, but that pretty much excludes the middle class and the poor.
With an income tax, millions … get off not paying.
[Who] should get [the tax money]? The government? To waste or to feather the Pols nests or the people who were less successful, not as smart or maybe just lazy?
Call them part of the White Toffs Preservation Society. And this aggravated cant dominates their political discussions, dogged beliefs that shirkers are stabbing the ideals of old America in the back, taking the honest sweat of the white noble people and giving nothing back.
And so it has come about that the singularly libertarian Ayn Rand usage — moochers — dominated the news on Romney’s secret speech today.
Even though he did not use it, when he picked up Paul Ryan as VP and all the Atlas Shrugged baggage, the pump was primed, “moochers” and the regular denunciation of those not believed to pay taxes coming along for the ride.
And Romney’s chances are destroyed by this toxic meme rubbed in everyone’s face, one the party embraces, a thing that has rotted the extremist GOP from the inside out.
We may disagree about fiscal and tax policy, abortion and gun control.
And as important as those issues are, we do agree about something a lot more fundamental. We agree that democracy is the cornerstone of our nation.
Your party has been hijacked by reactionaries who have subverted democracy for the sake of power.
He’s a gentleman, too gentle. Civility was destroyed a long time ago. Fuck the GOP, left, right and center. As I’m from among the alleged moochers, I’m not for agreement on anything unless it means more mooching.
These videos are hard to watch. The first is the most soul-destroying collection of frightened, paranoid white bigots and heevahavas you’ve seen in your life.
The second is Mitt Romney, being taped surreptitiously, letting out his inner creep.
It’s his appeal to the wealthy and the pyschopaths in the first video, the Tea Party, the far right, one reliant on contempt for about half the country, explaining the only reason people vote for the president is because they are moochers with no personal responsibility, who pay no income tax and are on food stamps.
At 26 seconds — Interviewer: “You’ve just gone about how all the liberties in America, doors being beaten down for people using the wrong type of bow and arrow … you’re an accomplished writer.”
At 2:09 — Nugent: “[The] America haters hate me. That proves I’m doing God’s work because the devil is upset.”
Did you ever wonder what happened to old Saturday Night Live comic, Victoria Jackson? She has a web show. Here’s an episode.
It was sent through a mail server in China, perhaps one operating off the cn.com domain, to about 1000 recipients, using a variety of spoofed originating addresses.
Six of the book’s seven “5-star” reviews were placed before, during and just after the spam campaign.
This could indicate stimulus from the spam, or perhaps more likely, astro-turfed reviews placed to take take advantage of curious clicks by those who received the spam.
Fatima received a total of 122 reviews on Amazon. 111 were “1-stars,” the others all “5-star.” It is a distribution with no middle.
All of the “1-star” reviews came in the time frame of the book’s spam,
reacting to it, some so noting with imprecations to cease and desist. They indicate the reviewers had no interest in buying it although they may have seen enough from Amazon’s “search inside … ” option to get the gist.
Indeed, I’d find it remarkable if the book sold any copies. But some rotten game was afoot.
The book was originally published in 2009 and ignored. So why the renewed push?
Early yesterday morning VICE was anonymously furnished with documents that link a California man named Robert Brownell (aka Robert Brown) to the pre-production of Innocence of Muslims, the F-grade anti-Islamic film that has resulted in violent protests at and around US embassies in Sanaa, Yemen; Cairo; Tripoli; and Doha, Qatar. He is a man who has, as of yet, not been named in association with the film.
The documents clearly state that in 2009 and 2011 Robert Brownell purchased pre-production services related to Desert Warrior, which has been widely reported as the working title of the film that the world now knows as Innocence of Muslims.
The cause of the the lethal Libyan and Egyptian riots against the American embassies is now known as a promoted video, The Innocence of Muslims, made by someone named “Sam Bacile,” a pseudonym.
No links, as it’s now unavoidable.
However, reading of it today I had the uneasy feeling it was a bit familiar.
At the end of August, this blog — and many others around the web — was sent spam mail about a book called How Fatima Started Islam: Mohammad’s Daughter Tells It All by one Noor Barack, a pseudonym.
The spam blurb:
Did you know that Mohammad was a drunken, child molesting, cowardly pimp? The Ayatollahs and Terrorists do not want you to know the truth about Islam and promise to harm you if you tell anyone. Fight back and read this well written, totally funny, parody on the founding of the so-called religion …
See sample Chapters, the back cover showing Mohammad depicted after a 5 day bender (the terrorists hate this picture), read about the never sober Mohammad having sex with camels, pre-adolescent girls and boys, the terror, sneak attacks, killings, rapes, assassinations, mutilations, back stabbing and mental illness. No other book in the world is at all like this one. Strike a blow for American Freedom by reading it.
I looked at the Amazon page, noted it was a piece of hate literature and promptly forgot the thing.
But today the news about Sam Bacile and the alleged nature of “The
Innocence of Muslims” trailer hinted at something I’d seen recently. It had the same peculiar and hateful idiosyncrasies as the Fatima book.
How Fatima Stated Islam was published first in 2009. And it was in English, a vanity publication by “Camel Flea Press,” vended on Amazon.
Since it was in English one would not expect the insult of it, and
believe me, that’s what it’s loaded with, to have made any impression in
the Muslim world.
However, “The Innocence of Muslims” is visual and, according to the
news, was subtitled/translated in Arabic.
The new spam promotion for the Fatima book came at the end of August.
“The Innocence of Muslims” was made in 2011, allegedly shown once in Hollywood to a near empty theater, but was heavily promoted yesterday in a live Internet stream from hate-pastor Terry Jones’ church.
Are these two things from the same people? The push on them is similar, solely through the web, the only place where they could be marketed. And everyone, from mailers to authors, uses obvious pseudonyms. So maybe.
It’s worth looking into.
Like “The Innocence of Muslims,” it portrays Mohammed as a buffoon and a criminal. From front to back, it is a merciless parade of juvenile, odious slurs and fabrications, passed off as humor, on everything associated with Islam.
Excerpts (warning: very offensive), from How Fatima Started Islam: Mohammad’s Daughter Tells It All:
Fatima: So on the eve of my twelfth birthday, with little fanfare and very matter-of-factly, I was turned out as a whore … The local yokels and camel jockeys who were the bulk of the customers generally would screw one of [us] chippies anywhere and everywhere.
The four pillars of Islam, the founding supports that were needed in order that the religion could flourish and grow, and conquer, were the
essentials. The first three were the camel, alcoholism and prostitution. The fourth and last pillar, the final original building block needed to complete the quartet that enshrined Islam, was the pillar of mental illness.
I was very afraid of someone … seeing [the Prophet] wearing a linen with an obvious yellow-brown stain on the backside.
It’s worth noting the extremist American purveyors of such things want publicity in Islamic nations. Video of riots are vindication, getting them off.
The United States has its own riotous history connected to relatively recent religious offense.
Because it would be so unusual after a revolution and the total breakdown of the country for lots and lots of young men in Libya to have automatic weapons, rockets and grenades.
“The fact that some of the attackers were armed with rockets and grenades is one of the factors leading to that initial conclusion,” reads the piece.
Honestly, where do they come up with the people who anonymously tell reporters such things?
It’s OK to stop refilling the prescription of stupid pills, guys. You’ve had enough.
Remember, there’s always a self-serving ‘think tank’ you’ve never heard of, with right-wing counter-terror experts consisting of old refugees (in London, or Los Angeles, New York, or DC) from any country you care to name, ready to give the inside poop on what’s really happened.
Today is no exception, from CNN:
According to our own sources at Quilliam Foundation, the attack was the work of roughly 20 militants, prepared for a military assault. It is rare, for example, that an RPG7 — an anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade launcher — would be present at a civilian protest. The attack against the consulate had two waves. The first attack led to U.S. officials being evacuated from the consulate by Libyan security forces, only for the second wave to be launched against U.S. officials after they were kept at a secure location.
[A] former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a jihadist organization that fought against Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in the 1990s. After resigning from L.I.F.G. in 2002, he became a prominent critic of jihadist and Islamist violence.
Ten to twenty years ago. What’s a decade or two and an entire revolution out of the loop, huh?
Update: The al Qaeda’s behind it all theory, laughed out of town by spreading violence and closer-to-the-scene accounts.
Today’s young Americans have nothing in common with the counterculture generation of young Americans who marched, protested and brawled with Chicago’s finest at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 …
These intellectually shallow socialists think that by stripping the wealthy of their hard-earned wealth, somehow, maybe magically, fairness will spread across the land, more free stuff will appear, and the Age of Aquarius finally will be ushered in on a peaceful wave of socialism.
What dopes. These unsophisticated lambs are being led to the slaughter — not by the “nasty and greedy??? Wall Street bankers but by their hero, President Obama, and his gang of Cloward-Piven America-haters.
“Our wayward young socialists should be reminded that businessmen will create opportunities for today’s young people …” adds Nugent.
If there was any socialism on display when Barack Obama took the stage last night, I missed it. There was a big middle section in the speech, all boilerplate about mining for more fossil fuel, and a mention of “entrepreneurs” at least once. But perhaps I imagined the latter. (No, didn’t dream it.)
The Cloward-Piven America Haters. Sounds like a good name for an underground band.
John Sinclair, manager of the MC5, and one of the original “stinky hippies,” according to Nugent, describing the scene around the Grande Ballroom in Detroit in the Sixties:
JOHN SINCLAIR: That’s what it was like back then … everybody smoked, nobody snitched, everyone was cool — except for Ted Nugent. He was not cool, always an asshole, everybody hated him (laughs).
So desperate is Hank Williams Jr. to sell his new record, he’s resorted to appealing to the worst, incorporating into his set a nightly ritual of offense:
” ‘We’ve got a Muslim for a President who hates cowboys, hates cowgirls, hates fishing, hates farming, loves gays, and we hate him,’ Williams Jr. bellowed [at the Ft. Worth Stockyards in Texas.] The Dallas Sun reported — the crowd responded with a loud cheer.”
“The 63-year-old singer began his anti-gay commentary a few songs earlier, mocking ‘queer guitar pickers’ in the middle of ‘All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down’ before moving on to his next target: Liberal politicians, who he told to ‘move to Mexico’ …” writes the free-lance correspondent for the Texas newspaper.
As with Ted Nugent, it’s code. Hank, Jr., uses slurs that won’t quite get him thrown out of his big gigs like railing about the n—– in DC and faggots would.
Now that he’s gone down this road any friends he had at record companies in Nashville will deem him radioactive. He’ll be financing everything by himself.
It’s worth contrasting the bigots like Hank Jr., with the Dixie Chicks.
Natalie Manes delivered a mild putdown of GWB in Milton Keynes, England. The wrath of the country music establishment came down on the band and cost it a chart-topping career.
Hank Williams, Jr., hasn’t been a chart-topper for a long time. But country music won’t flay the hide off him like it did the women.
That there’s your hypocrisy, folks, a tacit admission through lack of action that those who package and deliver modern country know well the nature of the audience. The same as the Republican party — white, angry, loutish and frequently worse, masquerading as the upholders and preservers of American traditions and pieties.
Warmth, the pure milk of human kindness, hospitality, civility, empathy and tolerance.
Functionally, Hank Williams, Jr. has turned into a supersized, mainstreamed Johnny Rebel, a very minor 60’s country artist notable for his racist sentiments.
So long as the American justice system is held hostage by mindless do-gooders who wish to enforce their toxic, brain-dead legalized barbarism on the rest of us, our only recourse is to be vigilant and ready to protect ourselves and our loved ones from these psychotic monsters [like Jared Loughner]. Shoot them.
Over the weekend, Nugent also wrote the same column for Labor Day twice. Here, on the 29th, and here, on the 31st.
“The president and his masterful smoke-and-mirrors team scramble maniacally to spin the Saul Alinsky, Cloward-Piven narrative of how the economy is improving, unemployment is coming down and big-government policies actually work,” Nugent writes, in both. Two of the people in the sentence are dead. The third is an old woman on the faculty of the City University of New York who writes occasionally for a magazine virtually no one reads, The Nation.
There are slight differences in the two, perhaps to fool readers, but they consist of one column, published two times within the space of 48 hours. Somewhat oddly, Ted Nugent did not spend his usual Labor Day attacking labor and unions while acting as cheerleader for predatory coal barons this year. Maybe it has become apparent, even to him, that the Republican Party doesn’t need his talent for alienating any more people than it already has on a meaningless national holiday just prior to an election.
I can’t think of one instance where I’ve seen any pundit in newspaper-land, no matter how lousy or venal, double-dip like Nugent. In other words, he’s a cheater, as in his big love — hunting.
The criminally anti-American death tax and counterproductive capital gains tax need to be eliminated. Instead of having the highest corporate tax rate in the world, we need to have the lowest. That would eliminate unemployment.
“The president and his masterful smoke-and-mirrors team scramble maniacally to spin the Saul Alinsky, Cloward-Piven narrative …” writes Ted.
Yes, it’s all the result of conspiracies launched by old and mostly dead people you have never heard of. Unless you are a fan of Glenn Beck. Then the horror is very clear.
Ted Nugent is going to take two knee replacements. Next year, his summer tour will be hard. Sooner rather than later he won’t be able to do it at all, unless sitting in a chair.
It’s a shame music journalists haven’t taken Ted apart as thoroughly as DD blog. Their overwhelming sin of commission, at the daily newspaper level, is the passing off of a old decaying paranoid ninny as someone of intelligence, a practitioner of free speech, someone who bravely pushes the boundaries. Nugent is a perfect example of how not to grow old, how to render sour the meaning of a life in the thin ribbon of existence that is your time.
At the Morning Call years ago I tore holes in people much less famous but as equally reprehensible and stunted as Ted Nugent. And then they made phone calls to the editor, complaining bitterly, and everyone on the copy desk had a good laugh at how George had deservedly left them as burned grease stains.
When all is said and done the record will be here.
Out of character, Ted didn’t have the spine for his usual annual attack on unions for Labor Day this year.
Maybe the Coalstock thing preys on him. Maybe, deep down, he knows he’s a villain, not the hero of his 750-word odd and very poor man’s Ayn Rand virtue-of-selfishness plays.
Ted Nugent is a living scream of pain, a gaping hole — in print and on television, anyway — devoid of any obvious kindness, warmth or empathy.
And he is worthy of some pity because there is no medicine, human balm, or gentle reason in the world that can ease the agony or furnish what is missing.
