tax dollars

Support Tomorrow’s WalkOuts To Raise Wages

Photo by  Steve Rhodes Flickr/creative commons

Photo by
Steve Rhodes
Flickr/creative commons

Home healthcare workers are joining fast food workers, tomorrow, for walkouts in over 100 cities across America. You can help by coming out to support these actions against mega corporations such as McDonalds and Walmart who enslave workers with poverty wages and stolen wages.

Fast-food workers often have to rely on food stamps to feed their families. This means that the corporations they work for freely rely on your tax dollars to pick up the slack.

These companies also notoriously steal workers’ wages by such practices as making workers wait around before starting their shifts to maintain efficiency ratios and/or routinely requiring extra unpaid hours by workers to clean at the conclusion of their shift.

Conservatives argue that the market should determine wages based on productivity but fail to understand that if that were so the minimum wage would actually be $22/hour in 2014.

Income inequality hurts both the rich and the poor and it is time for everyone to pay more attention to these issues.

Join a walkout tomorrow. You will be glad you did.

 

Billion$ Wasted by Right-Wingnuts

“Republicans have squandered money on hubristic, base-rousing engagements and re-investigations, and forfeited money available for a wholly legitimate and beneficial expansion of health coverage for low-income families. Sadly, it’s not them who are left counting the costs.” (via The Daily Kos)

VenusPlusX has already defined in several posts what we mean by right-wingnuts: sexually-repressed, fear-motivated, white, theocratic oligarchs, as dangerous to the future of civilization as any gun-wielding terrorist. The phrase, right-wingnuts, has popped up elsewhere, to rightly label these knuckleheads for what they really are —  radical conservatives strangling us towards extinction, one way or another. They need stop or be stopped.

Image by Patrick Hoesly Flickr/creative commons

Image by
Patrick Hoesly
Flickr/creative commons

The Daily Kos has provided us with an accounting of how many of your tax dollars has been misspent by these slithering haters.

The grand total of this misanthropic laundry list is over $25 billion, not including the more than $35 billion net loss of Federal medicaid expansion funds rejected by right-wing state governors!

More than even this, consider that there is not one trending catastrophe, from the Middle East to Immigration to Feguson, Missouri, that doesn’t not rest at the feet of these theocrats who worship no other agency besides their own comfort.

As activists, we can identify the issue, the power-holders to be targeted, and the strategies to bring about positive change. What call to action with radicalize you enough to get up and do something about it? Find a cause, any cause you believe in, and then bring your power and personhood to bear, be present.

For example, in the US, if we just focused solely on enfranchising those in poverty, especially people of color, we can bring about substantive and sustainable change in this country within the next two months just by casting our vote. By claiming our power, our votes flip the script, where those enslaved by the system rid themselves of politicians, governments, religious hierarchies, and corporations who repress them in every way possible.

White men who feel so threatened by a brown America need to be sent in for something Frank Zappa once called re-grooving, a powerful reality check of epic proportions.

Let us know what you are doing to heal our world.

 

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Stay Informed. Stay Active.

Light Brigading Flickr/creative commons

Light Brigading
Flickr/creative commons

We speculate that unlike the consciousness raising on gun control following the Newtown Massacre, which petered out along partisan lines since the National Rifle Association owns most of the U.S. Congress, this singular event in Ferguson will succeed in merging the message with the messenger at just the right moment. It has brought about a laser-focus on the rotten mass of shameful, bankrupt, coercive, and inhumane systems, forcing elected officials, conservative and liberal alike, to say, wait a damn minute.

 “The eyes of the nation and the world are watching Ferguson right now. The world is watching because the issues raised by the shooting of Michael Brown predate this incident. This is something that has a history to it and the history simmers beneath the surface in more communities than just Ferguson.” — Attorney General Eric Holder

Politicians can ignore these issues now, at their peril, but we will continue to pose the epic questions:

How will we end this country’s war on brown and black men, especially young men?

How will we demilitarize our police forces?

How will interfere with the scourge of mass incarceration?

How will we end our outsourcing to for-profit prison industry and the for-profit probation system?

We have to keep reminding ourselves that ALL of this is connected to greed and the money (including your tax dollars) that elites accumulate from the pain of others. The War on Drugs later upstepped by the War on Terror placed immense pressure for more arrests. Brown and black men have been the primary targets and the easiest targets. We pay for your senators, congressmen, and prosecutors to entertain for-profit prison industry lobbyists pushing for longer and stiffer sentences to increase their corporate bottom line. We penalize debtors further by putting them into for-profit probation programs at once increasing the original debt on a weekly basis and the likelihood of jail time for things like an overdue water bill.

More Americans have become aware that their hard earned tax dollars finance the military-style firepower we’ve seen on display in Ferguson. Add to that the local police’s sad rendition of how trained military personnel actually behave with these arms and equipment that has put all public safety at risk.

People united have all the power to stop all of this.

[Regarding a similar shooting in 1943 . . . ] The shooting, the funeral and the riot, taking place so close together, led Baldwin to realize that we must always hold in our minds two opposite ideas. The first is that “injustice is commonplace” in our world. But the second is that we cannot be complacent. We “must never … accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all [our] strength. This fight begins … in the heart.” (via Laila Lalami’s ‘This Fight Begins In The Heart’: Reading James Baldwin As Ferguson Seethes)

Stay informed. Stay active.

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