May 2, 2010 archive

End Big Oil’s Billions in Government Subsidies NOW!

     In the face of HUGE profits made by Big Oil it is time to stop subsidizing them with taxpayer money NOW. The American people are suffering. The Big Oil firms and their extremely wealthy executives are not. With the deficits left over from the Bush/Cheney Administration still harming our nation, the easiest way to cut back wasteful government spending would be to stop subsidizing immensely profitable Big Oil Corporations.

     Americans are spending nearly $3 billion more on gasoline due to higher gasoline prices. And taxpayers are spending billions of dollars in tax subsidies to Big Oil. These subsidies will cost the U.S. government about $3 billion next year in lost revenue and nearly $20 billion over the next five years. The next dollars we spend should go to companies that provide genuinely clean and safe fuel. The costs are too high.

thinkprogress.org

    More below the fold

Cost

Anger and hate are very expensive.  Trust me, I know.  You will sit in your father’s house, the same father who wasn’t there for you, for 20 years, and listen to him say, I just don’t know how to live with a fag.

This is expensive.  It’s expensive for your ideal of yourself.  You want to think of yourself as more than a set of genitals, that wants genitals of the same type.

You will get angry.  You will remember telling your father, you have tunnel vision, and, in the end, dad, this will cost you.  Then, twenty or thirty years later, forgive — like flipping a switch.  Yet, remembering.

You will listen to your father tell you, 20 years later, he doesn’t remember using that word.  That word, that destroys everything you think of as yourself, as just another fag.  Not a son.

Twenty years later, you will tell your father, you welcome the chance to have a relationship with him, only now, his acknowledgement of you as his son must now be unequivocal.

Anger and hate are very expensive.  Sometimes, so expensive, you will and must at least be willing to sacrifice your only remaining parent on the alter of exigency.

Bloodless bigotry is also expensive.

It will cost you your college degree.  It will cost you your self respect.  It will cost you everything.

But, don’t be gay.  Don’t like people of the same plumbing as you, or it will cost you everything, and your dissatisfaction with that lack of self respect will cost you more.

You will stare into the blue eyes of your father, the eyes that are exactly the same as yours, who, twenty years ago, make it impossible for you to realize your dreams, and understand, it’s not about him.

In the end, it has to cost.  In the end, it will cost you fear, self loating, and self disrespect.

And then, it will still cost you more.

It will cost you understanding it wasn’t about him, or them, and nobody can make your choices for you, but you.  You will understand, that you have to hold the world up, not just for yourself but for everyone who comes in your place.

In the end, you will have to understand, nothing will change unless you make it hurt.  And, this hurting has to come without anger.  You will arrive in the place of the bloodless bigotry foisted upon you in the first place.  You will have to understand a life without mercy, that costs you everything, because your oppressors, although very diffenly minded, arrived at the very same place in a very different way, the way without cost, without blood, without loss, the way of callousness, the way of not understanding and not willing to live and let live.

Then, twenty years later, you will stare into the blue eyes of those who did unto you and hear them say, “I don’t remember.  I would never say that”.

This will cost, it will go on costing.  We will pay, and pay, and then pay some more.  And, you have to balance.  You have to listen to the blue eyes of the person who did this to you, and hear him say I don’t remember, I wouldn’t do this, I’m sorry you feel this.  You will have to own your anger.

And then you will have to find discipline.  You will have to learn to forgive, yet understand the cost.

In the end, you have to forgive, but you have to master fear.  The fear of that same loathing and lack of self respect that have been forced upon you for twenty years.  Your inner lion.

to Hell with the Middle Class

Based on the responses to my post last week “Organize the Unorganized?” it must have struck some nerves.  For better or worse.  I gave an extremely brief look at some of the history of organizing the unorganized, dynamics among craft workers, unskilled industrial workers, the unemployed and welfare recipients, successes and failures, problems of social leverage, etc.

Some announced, as though it were news, that organizing the unorganized was hard.  (Could that be why they’re unorganized?)

Others picked up on what I was saying and were eager to work in terms of class.

Then there were those who were offended at the words “organizing” and “poor” appearing in the same post.

… organizing “the poor” depends first and foremost upon becoming “the poor.”  Otherwise, it’s just one more case of salvationist liberals coming in as tourists, to tell the proles how to better live like liberals.

and

You can’t organize a group you aren’t already a member of. As a poor person, I am sick to death of meddling middling middles hand wringing about the poor only to blame us when shit hits the fan (think of all the moaning about undeserving people getting home loans). Unless you are one of us, then perhaps skipping the condescension and following the first rule of being an ally is best- shut up, listen, learn.

Pish Tosh

Photobucket

Punching through

fabrics of official

culture.

Snip snip

won’t do.

Reweaves too quick for that.

***

The incessant

Boo! Boo!

becomes annoying.

Lies lies

so thin.

It can’t get louder so it gets thin.

***

Cocksucker, or

some other

shocking society word.

Pish tosh

too slow.

Doesn’t begin to approach the foe.

D-D-Drill B-B-Baby D-D-Drill: BPs Black Money Tide

From Youtube user golefttv  –  April 30, 2010:

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is becoming worse by the day, with over 200,000 gallons of crude a day. Environmental Attorney Mike Papantonio appears on MSNBC’s The Ed Show to discuss the disaster and the legal ramifications of it.

Mike Papantonio is an American attorney and radio talk show host. A prominent trial lawyer, he co-hosts Ring of Fire Radio, a nationally-syndicated weekly radio program, with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Disaster looms as oil slick reaches US coast

by Erica Berenstein, AFP

Sat May 1, 8:56 am ET

VENICE, Louisiana (AFP) – Oil from a giant Gulf of Mexico slick washed onto Louisiana shores Saturday, threatening an environmental calamity, as two more neighboring states declared a state of emergency.

President Barack Obama, meanwhile, planned to visit the spill area over the weekend to assess the situation first hand, a White House official said.

With up to 200,000 gallons of oil a day spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from a ruptured well, the accident stemming from a sunken offshore rig may soon rival the Exxon Valdez disaster as the worst oil spill in US history.

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