Why do we let them get away with it?

Why do we let our elected officials cut student loan programs, Medicaid, Medicare and other programs for America's families so they can continue to give more tax breaks to the top 5% of earners? This strategy has been proven to do nothing for the economy. It didn't work when Reagan tried it and it's not working now.

What does work is to give tax breaks and other incentives to the working poor. If you want people to spend money, thus improving business and manufacturing, you give money to people who will go out and spend it as soon as they get it to meet basic needs for food, shelter, school clothes for the children, a car repair, a broken water heater, a long-deferred vacation, and so forth. You don't give it to wealthy people who are already parking their income in offshore tax havens and fancy cattle ranches.

Not only does giving breaks to those who need them most boost the cycling of money through the economy; it is also the right thing to do, morally and socially. Improving the lot of the less well off results in safer streets, better education, a more cohesive society, more community and national pride and a host of other benefits that distinguish an egalitarian democratic society from a third-world failed state.

Which we are in danger of becoming, as we slip far behind Europe and Asia in wireless technology and alternative energy, and our education system, once the pride of the world, makes do with second-rate teachers because we refuse to pay them more than office assistants. (See Thomas Friedman's latest column, courtesy of The Era. The guy is hardly a liberal whiner.)

Why do we put up with this? What are we, stupid? Somebody tell me, please.

(Photo courtesy of DemocraticUnderground.com)

Yeah, but he's protecting us from terrorism...

Or is he?

Radioactive Materials Smuggled Into U.S., Investigators Say

Tabling for Clean Money on Cesar Chavez day

Today I spent 2 hours getting signatures for Clean Money at a March and rally honoring Cesar Chavez. I arrived with my ironing board and petitions just as the march was arriving at Courthouse Square in Santa Rosa, amid joshing: "Que vas a planchar?" (What are you going to iron?)

After setting up next to the one other tabler present, I stood and wondered why I'd come. Aztec dancers commanded the middle of the square with their drummer, and the thickening crowd created a wall of humanity with their backs to my display. No one was speaking English, and my Spanish was far from elegant. My innate shyness makes it hard to reach out to people who are just like me, let alone people from another language and culture. What did these people care about political reform? They were struggling to survive. But there was no way to escape, because the crowd was too thick to negotiate with an ironing board.

So I started passing out quarter-page information cards. Some shrugged, grabbed them and moved on. Others peered at the writing and looked puzzled. Some came back for more information. When I assured them that they didn't need to be registered to vote to sign, and explained in my rough and ready Spanish that the legislation was to help make it possible for candidates to do what the voters wanted rather than the big companies who now contribute to political campaigns, they seemed eager to sign.

Soon I had a hispanic lady helping with the explanations. More and more people signed. Soon they were lining up to sign. Few had email addresses, our preferred, economical means of communicating news and alerts about the current Clean Money legislation in California. I signed up two women who circled "Maybe" in the Volunteer category, and asked them if they would call the new signers and tell them--in Spanish--why it was important to show up in Sacramento on April 19 and support AB 583--the Clean Money bill--in a Senate hearing. They assured me they would.

I filled up all of my petition sheets and passed out nearly all of my handouts--far more than I had expected. At the end of the rally, one of the organizers came over and personally thanked me and the other tabler for showing up. When has that ever happened before?

The cost of produce

When I was a teenager in the 1960s, my step-brother was in a summer program that recruited teens to work in the fields alongside Mexican and Chinese laborers. Every day he came home smelling delightfully of strawberries and complaining mightily about how hard the work was. I considered him a whiner. What could be more pleasant than a summer day picking strawberries? Perhaps eating a few too, and making money to boot--a dollar a crate! (There was a recession on and I was trying to earn money for college.) I tagged along with him a couple of times. Two days was all my body could handle.

By the end of the first hour in the field I had discovered there was no way to pick strawberries and put them into a wooden crate that didn't hurt after 15 minutes. You could squat down and sidle along the rows until your feet went to sleep and your thighs ached miserably. You could stoop from a standing position each time you picked--the preferred choice among the experienced workers--until your back cried out in pain. You could kneel between the cramped rows until your knees froze up and refused to do your bidding.

Because the rows are picked every day, there weren't that many ripe ones on the plants. This meant more stooping or sidling per berry. You'd get docked if you turned in a crate with too many unripe or overripe berries.

In that long day in the sun I made $4. The fastest picker in the field that day made $24, a pretty good day's wages in 1964. If she could have picked strawberries year round at that rate, she could have made $6,048 in a year. Of course, strawberries are seasonal and one of the more lucrative crops to pick.

The next time I went out, we were topping onions. Cutting the tops off of onions is pretty easy--if you do it once. Doing it for hours is brutally hard on your hands, even with gloves on. It's known as one of the tougher field jobs. I made $1 that day.

At the end of the summer, my step-brother vowed he would never eat another strawberry in his life.

Friday night news

All the news they didn't want you to notice....

Such as Privileged Conversations Said Not Excluded From Spying

On the same subject, what part of "illegal wiretapping" doesn't our Congress understand? I reiterate: would you want, say, President Hillary Clinton, to have this power?

Yes, there still is a possibility that a Democrat could be elected president someday, in spite of the inroads of Diebold (we'll "deliver the state [Ohio] to Bush") and other non-verifiable systems into our precious electoral process.

Wait, there's more! This just in:
In Bills' Small Print, Critics See a Threat to Immigration

We'll solve the immigration problem by forcing all cases to go to one court that has no experience in immigration law, thus clogging up the process for years. Doesn't matter whether you're an illegal wetback sponging off the American system by doing stoop labor in vegetable fields for less than minimum wage, or a refugee from a government that practices torture and murder. You'll have to wait for justice either way.

Need a reason to vote Democratic?

In order to balance the budget without compromising tax cuts to the rich and the bloated defense budget, they'd like to go far beyond even Bush's draconian cuts, says NY Times.

Senior aides say the conservatives' plan would wring about $350 billion from Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs and save $300 billion partly through a major reorganization of the Education, Commerce and Energy Departments.

(Don't subscribe to NY Times online? Don't like giving them your personal information? Go to BugMeNot to get an anonymous password.)

Priorities

Taxpayers in California will pay $40.6 billion for the cost of war in Iraq.* For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided:

606,014 Port Container Inspectors

(National Priorities Project Database)

*That's $467 million in my county alone.