Today we read about how President Obama traveled to West Virginia to attend the funeral of 9 miners who were killed recently in an accident that was entirely preventable, but which was at the same time inevitable due to the legal negligence of those who owned the mine.
This, ultimately, is what the “Tea Partiers” will end up accomplishing with their insane anti-government activism: a retreat into an America where workers had no rights whatsoever, where the barons of industry treated their employees like mere serfs, where the ‘owners’ left no recourse to workers but to submit to their shoddy, dangerous standards or be fired. An America without labor unions, (as indeed, it almost is already), without any worker rights. This is what Republicans are allowing to pass for a party line, a sop to the most uneducated, unenlightened sector of the population. With the overt racism at its core, this is grass roots at its dirtiest and most soiled.
And not only workers, of course, but immigrants are suffering draconian penalties for existing in a country whose être, up until the present age (which is paying the consequences of the Culture of Greed), has been to give immigrants a shot at a better life. Every white face in the United States is that of an immigrant, a brutal usurper at the country’s inception, and a self-serving overlord at its Goldman Sachs-level conclusion. But now, we have to endure, from a Congressman no less, an ignorant diatribe that is the typical parody of every Klan-loving Southerner in history:
Rep. Bilbray:”[Law Enforcement Officials] will look at the kind of dress you wear, there’s different type of attire, there’s different type of—right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes. But mostly by behavior it’s mostly behavior, just as the law enforcement people here in Washington, DC does it based on certain criminal activity there is behavior things that professionals are trained in across the board and this group shouldn’t be exempt from those observations as much as anybody else.”
SIC. That Bush-worthy final sentence tells you more than you’d like to know about the state of the police, who are now trained to jail as many people as possible from the jailable classes (ONE IN EVERY 32 ADULTS!) or Taser the insane or disabled (having lost sight of their job to serve and protect, and not to become judge and jury with lethal force, or to torture or humiliate, which is why laws protecting the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ have been established in the U.S. for generations. Or has the Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo Bay mentality become the standard even for domestic police?)
This is traditionally where the ACLU steps in, alongside all those Liberals in the United Nations, who use every legal means to protect our freedoms – not in the moronic sense of the word ‘freedoms’ so notoriously abused by the Teabaggers, but in the sense that citizens of « free » countries around the world are defended from the real abuses of tyranny, facism, and all the other specious titles ignorantly and irresponsibly thrown at the Obama Administration.
So basically, life in the United States – and the world – without liberalism would completely suck. Who doesn’t know that? The richest percentage of the population, which, thanks to the Bush Administration’s redistribution of wealth, controls most of the money in the U.S. This week, “financial legislation” is being voted on to stop the raping of the domestic and world economy by Goldman Sachs (currently under federal indictment for fraud) – and people are actually expecting it to fail, expecting that no one can possibly reign in the madness that is derivatives and the rest of their crooked industry. Now, the country of Greece, the “cradle of democracy”, has forfeited its sovereignty to foreign banks and authorities, and again we find Goldman Sachs at the black heart of the troubles. Will the new financial regulation be tough enough to bring down this “giant vampire squid”? Or will it be more like climate change denial, where the penalty for willful ignorance is death, yet the top few insist on pretending we’re getting away with something wonderful?
Seeing every inconvenient truth ignored, it’s no wonder the Gaia Theory is winning over more and more people each day: the human race may indeed be, as one scientist put it, ‘too stupid to survive’.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/us/26obama.html?hp
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/04/rep-brian-bilbray-says-he-can-spot-illegal-immigrants-based-on-their-shoes.php
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113000912.html
http://wonkette.com/415016/arizona-gov-jan-brewer-signs-everyones-favorite-arrest-the-browns-law
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100503/kaufmann_video
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock-climate-change
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-pettifor/does-greece-have-a-tea-pa_b_551313.html