The Saturnalia Wish List of 2012 That Even Mayans Would Like

Heya!  Once again, every reader from Japan, Russia and elsewhere linking to this site for the "funny Iran military" pictures on that Iran Day Six article, as part of our effort in the WAR ON BILL O'REILLY'S CHRISTMAS we here at this blog celebrate the life-affirming pagan holiday known as Saturnalia! The day where fully expect the Mayans to show up even though their calendar ends on 12/21.  Okay Mayans, you're bringing the homemade brew and you know it!

Anywho. As part of tradition, I'm posting my wishlist to The Roman Lord of Time (hi there!) in the mad hopes that the pagan gods will once again after thousands of years notice us tiny insignificant lifeforms, and smite our enemies and grant us boons.

So here's the wish list!

1) A freaking full-time job.

2) No, seriously, a full-time job.  It's been 4 years since I lost my job as a librarian, I've been looking for anything related to my skill sets, only just recently getting a part-time on-call job working desktop support, but it's been hard as hell to find anything thanks to a Congress that refuses to do any kind of Jobs Stimulus package to encourage more hiring and boosting of the economy.  It's not the deficits or the debt that's the problem, you Beltway morans, it's the LACK OF JOBS!  THE LACK OF WAGES TO PAY FOR SH-T LIKE COLLEGE LOANS AND MORTGAGES AND KIDS' SCHOOLING AND HEALTH CARE!  /rage

3) 50,000 people buying my ebooks!  If I can't have a job, at least a boost of income from ebook sales...

4) Grover Norquist forced to watch as dreaded TAXES GO UP, and the universe failing to implode, demonstrating once and for all THAT HE'S AN IDIOT.

5) A nice stocking stuffer would be this GravityLight thingee someone's trying to market.  For $5 a pop, you get a light source off of an LED light (the wave of the future) by using simple mechanics (pulley/gears) to charge up the light.  No batteries, no outlets, no burning of carbon fuels like oil or coal, just human energy lifting the weight up and viola!  We live in amazing times.

6) Yo, Obama!  If you need a reference librarian to shelve books in the West Wing, CALL ME...

7) That the civil war ends in Syria as soon as possible with as little loss of life than has already been lost; that Egyptian democracy endures on the streets as peaceful protests end the threat of dictatorship and Islamist extremism; that Iranian politics give way to moderate leadership more keen on economic and social well-being for their citizenry than on aggressive nuclear baiting against the U.S.,

8) That the traffic I got on this blog during October and November (2000 to 3000 views!) keeps up and I get some honest-to-Mithras comments for a change...

9) That voter suppression efforts that the GOP tried to inflict on people this election cycle get blocked, banned, and richly denied in order to ensure ALL voters have their rights protected for all time,

10) That the upcoming series of movies in 2013 - Star Trek Into Darkness, Man of Steel, Iron Man 3 - not suck.  Please o PLEASE SATURN LORD OF TIME, LET THESE MOVIES ROCK N ROLL...

There.  Oh, and again, make sure you forward any bills for your annual sacrificial bull get sent to Mr. O'Reilly care of Fox Not-News.  BWHAHAHAHAHA.

Enjoy the season!  ...and the countdown to the Mayan calendar continues...

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The Chart That Ought To Scare The Crap Out of Politicians... But Doesn't.

This was actually last week on Sullivan's blog, but there was a distraction or three going on...

This chart points to how long unemployed people are actually staying unemployed.
It shows that recently unemployed people have about double the chances of relocating a new job to get back into the grand economic circle of life.  But the second you get over that 27 weeks or more of unemployed... well, you're screwed.  That, by the by, is where the real problems of our current unemployment crisis is...

There's a couple of reasons for this:

• Those long-term unemployed are from sectors of the economy - construction, public works, finance, manufacturing - that have lost jobs that are NOT coming back any time soon.  The housing and foreclosure crisis has put a crimp on new housing and housing repairs, for example.  Manufacturing jobs are bleeding to overseas markets with cheaper non-union labor.  Public sector jobs - state and county and city - have been hit hard with massive deficits forcing spending cuts.  The quick rehiring of those out of work under 26 weeks involve industries that are fluctuating but not losing job openings that can be refilled.
• The other reason is psychological on the part of HR departments.  They seem reluctant to hire anyone who's been out of service for so long, as though there's a stench of failure all about a candidate who's been out of luck for 27 weeks or more.

The reason the long-term unemployed is a major problem for our government and our economy is that they will sooner rather than later become a burden on society in the worst way.  Sooner or later they drop out of the job-hunting and unemployment benefits system.  Unemployment really isn't at 9.8 percent: that's just the people still reporting for benefits.  REAL Unemployment, including the ones who've given up on benefits or no longer able to garner them (known as the 99ers for the ninty-nine weeks (and counting) they've been out of work), is actually past 10.4 percent (and might even be worse than that).  But what happens when the unemployment benefits end or the unemployed move on?  They move on over to Food Stamps, or some other form of welfare.  The burden merely shifts to another public sector that's facing cutbacks in the wake of statewide and national deficits.  Worse, they become a burden to family members or friends who may be employed (or retired living on benefits themselves) but who are incapable of paying for the needs of their out-of-work relative/friend.

Look.  Having one-tenth of your employable population out of work is NEVER good.  But there's little sign that the federal government is going to do anything about it, which sucks.  And the conservatives' solution - tax cuts that DON'T REALLY go to job creation or wage improvements - isn't going to work (all those tax cuts after 2001... and this is the shape of our job market today.  Buy a clue, Republicans: TAX CUTS DON'T WORK.  Grrrr.)

• We need laws in place to force HR departments to look at hiring the long-term unemployed first.  We're the ones at greater risk.
• We need laws in place to keep international corporations from shipping OUR jobs elsewhere.  You wanna get our tax breaks?  Give some breaks to the people who live here!
• We need a works program similar to the ones that FDR had back in the 1930s that helped us climb out of the Great Depression.  Nothing huge like the CCC, but at least something to get people back to work and stimulating the economy with their efforts and their spending.  I honestly don't get why there's this huge hate on for Keynesian policies of the 1930s that worked (nations like Japan that quickly adopted Keynesian economic models were the ones that survived the global economic meltdown).  I know that Keynesianism was choking on itself by the 1970s, but that was when our government and economy could operate without it... but today, dammit...

So an open call to all unemployed persons across the nation.  To all my fellow 99ers, this is pretty much the only solution left to us.  Run for office.  Run at the county level, state level, federal level, whatever it takes.  Go to your party if you've registered with one and sign up to run for any openings in the coming election cycle.  Trust me, you gotta start looking into the paperwork on that stuff before it gets too late... and the deadlines come up on the calendar faster than you realize.

Run for office, unemployed people.  We need more elected officials who have a damn good idea just how bad the job market is out here in the Real World.

Wartenberg in 2012.  I Need The Work.

(this has been edited for some grammar errors and to highlight additional thoughts)

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The Damage Done. The Damage To Come.

Well.  Elections 2010 is over.

The damage is done.  Republicans reclaimed a majority in the House.  More disastrous - for a reason - is that the Republicans gained control of a majority of state legislatures and governors' seats.  Worse of all, it's obviously emboldening the teabagger wingnut crowd into thinking the World is Theirs.  WORST of all: the state of Florida now has as our governor a well-established, well-known MEDICARE FRAUD CEO in Rick Scott, the one person in the state most likely to crash and burn a financial institution with massive acts of fraud and embezzling.  Nice job breaking the state, voters.  /fume

So.  What is the damage to come?

At the state level for Florida, tons of damage is coming.  Remember that "Kill Tenure" bill - SB 6 - the State Lege passed last April that Crist vetoed?  With the anti-teachers Republicans still in charge of the state legislature and with a new governor willing to sign such a bill into law, the fear that an even harsher version of SB 6 - which killed tenure and job protection, shortened teachers' contracts, eliminated salaries based on degrees or experience, rewrote evaluations based on standardized testing which by the way isn't helping our students learn, and was basically an attempt to break the teachers' unions - will pass the second everybody gets sworn in at Tallahassee.  How quickly it will wreck our already wobble educational system isn't certain, but given the horrified response from a majority of citizens (even Republicans) back in April suggest this isn't a way to go.

There's also the fact that voted back into power was a Republican majority in the state legislature that was led by crooks and pork-barrel spenders, a majority that had little true interest in balancing the budget outside of cutting social programs down to practically nothing.  Having a hard core social conservative like Scott with his own history of financial criminal misdeeds holding the veto pen as Governor (and most likely ignore using it to cut wasteful projects) is going to make our budget woes worse.  Considering the state of Florida has 1) massive unemployment and 2) massive underemployment, anything that threatens our social safety nets is NOT A GOOD THING.

Looking at the national level, with Congress divided with a GOP-held House and a smaller Democrat-controlled Senate, creates an even bigger headache.

On the national level, the Republicans were elected with one mandate: Get Rid of Obama.  Seriously.  There is nothing else the Republicans have planned.  Anything they've claimed about balancing the budget?  When confronted to give specifics - "which programs would you cut first?  by how much?" - the party leadership waffled.  The ones who DID give any specifics tended to threaten cuts for things like Social Security and Defense that are still Third Rail issues both inside the Beltway and outside it.

So what should we expect from the Republican-led House?  We already know Congressman Issa is going to press for hundreds if not thousands of subpoenas to investigate Obama's White House on any useless issue, any hairbrained "scandal" that does not really exist merely for the purposes of embarrassing Obama.  And that will be minor league stuff to what Issa and the House are apt to do: Impeach Obama for being born in Kenya Hawaii by going after his Long Form birth certificate.  Hell, the Republican Party and their media cohorts with Limbaugh and FOX Not-News have spent the last two years decrying Obama as "illegal" - an illegitimate fraud who doesn't qualify for the Presidency - and getting millions of their Far Right voters to buy into that bullshit.  And now that they've got a branch of government that can "investigate" (aka harass) Obama on that "issue", they are going to have to appease a voting base that's been convinced Obama is a Socialist Boy From Kenya threatening our freedoms.  The Republican leadership created this fake meme: now they have to live or die by it.

The other campaign "pledges" of the GOP was to balance the budget and reduce the deficit.  And guess what?  Even this week after their massive win it's showing that the Republicans realize it's going to be harder than their campaigning suggested it would be.  There's already a struggle over the issue of the debt ceiling - an artificial cap on the amount our government can officially borrow - and while the Republicans are making noises that they will use the issue to force a deal with the Democrats in the Senate and White House, there's solid evidence that the large number of incoming Republicans (with their Teabagger agenda of "Damn All Hazards") are going to rail against the debt ceiling no matter what.  There's a good possibility that the GOP leadership that wants the compromise knowing that hitting the debt ceiling is disastrous is already losing their newcomers who find themselves obligated to defy the "corrupt old ways of bipartisanship"... something the GOP already defied the last two years just to get here...

Not to mention the fact that the Republicans are still stuck in the ideological mode of "Kill All Social Programs", "Kill Social Security", "Kill All Furriners", et al, and you've got a hard two years coming up until the 2012 elections.

Wanna hear something scary?  The state of Texas is now so solidly Republican, that they got not only the Governorship but also 2/3s majority in both their state houses, that they could easily pass state amendments all over the place.  Get ready to see Texas turn into a Right Wing "Utopia" of anti-choice, anti-woman, anti-workers rights, anti-regulation, anti-human decency inside of 5 minutes... 4... 3... 2...

And you know what?  Considering that our electoral system has been industrialized and turned into a $4 billion cash cow, we're never going to see an end to campaigning and calls for fund raising and all that.  We've already got jokers lining themselves up (even on the Democratic side, damn them) for the 2012 Presidential primaries.  STOP POLLING FOR 2012, GALLUP!  We don't need that crap right now...

On second thought, odds are the way our economy's gonna be the next two years - crappy and painful - I might as well get in on that action.  I'm gonna go get myself signed up to run for Congress in 2012.  I already got my slogans.  "Vote for ME.  I Need The Work."  Plugging away...

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All I Want This Election Day Nov. 2 2010

I want everyone who's a registered voter to get up and vote.  I despair that the overall voter turnout is always so meager.  We're supposed to be a vibrant democracy but barely half the nation even bothers to register to vote...

I want my fellow Floridians to Vote FOR Charlie Crist for the U.S. Senate.  Of the three major choices, Crist is the one who's had the better, more honorable career.  Yes, he's changed his position on certain votes, but that was because a vast majority of Floridians begged him to do so.  Changing one's mind when it becomes clear that a political stance is wrong-headed DOES NOT make one a flip-flopper.  And getting driven out by the party with all those outside Far Right deep pockets is NOT being a traitor either.  A vote for Crist is a vote FOR Florida.  I seriously believe that.

I want my fellow Floridians to Vote AGAINST Rick Scott.  Scott is a goddamn crook with a history of Medicare Fraud.  There's now more evidence that his more recent health care endeavor, Solantic, has the same problem of Medicare overbilling that they had when Scott was CEO of Columbia/HCA.  The crook hasn't even stopped his bad habits!  What the hell do you think someone like that is gonna do in the Governor's office?  Here's a clue: he's gonna take all the money he can grift and make the rest of us suffer for it!  For the LOVE OF GOD, FLORIDA, DO NOT VOTE FOR HIM!  If you don't want to vote for Sink, fine, there's two other choices on the ballot.  Just... NO SCOTT.

I want my fellow Floridians to Vote FOR Amendments 5 and 6.  The Fair Districts ballots.  Of all the amendments on the ballot, these two are of major import to me: a serious and genuine attempt to stop the political gerrymandering that has favored one party over the rights of the voters, and has allowed incumbents to carve out safe districts to the detriment of honest representation.

I want my fellow Floridians... I want my fellow Americans across this nation to Vote FOR Democrats across the board.  All the Republicans will offer between now and 2012 are questionable impeachment investigations, a refusal to be serious with deficit reduction, and an upfront desire to shut down the federal government first chance and every chance they get.  I mean, the Republicans are the ones who blocked and obstructed and refused to compromise for the last two years... and THEY'RE the ones the voters want back in power?  Don't the voters have kids: any time their kids throw a tantrum and hold their breath and all, do these voters give their unruly kids more toys and candy?  Or do they send them to a corner for well-deserved Time Outs?  The collective GOP has acted like a spoiled 5-year-old brat... AND THEY ARE GETTING REWARDED FOR THEIR BAD BEHAVIOR.  What.  The.  Hell?!

I want to be able to go to bed Tuesday night in a good mood.  I want to be able to post here Wednesday morning that we're going to have responsible, sensible leadership in elected office between now and 2012 that might actually do something about our unemployment and our weak economy.

I want... I want... I want to... Put on my Sunday clothes...
There's lots of world out there
Get out the Brillantine and dime cigars
We're gonna find adventure in the evening air
Girls in white in a perfumed night
Where the lights are bright as the stars!
Put on your Sunday clothes, we're gonna ride through town
In one of those new horsedrawn open cars

We'll see the shows
At Delmonico's
And we'll close the town in a whirl
And we won't come home until we've kissed a girl!

...what?

Oh, right.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD VOTE FOR CRIST.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T VOTE FOR SCOTT.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD VOTE FOR AMENDMENTS 5 AND 6.

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Midterm crunchtime

We've got basically two weeks to slap sense into a majority of voters to stop them from voting Republican this 2010 Midterms.

Dear America:
The Republicans have nominated psychotics, ill-informed zombies, outright crooks, and stone-cold liars for high office across the land.

The Republicans carried out a massive and unprecedented program of obstruction and blocking at the federal level that has effectively shut down government at one of the worst times in our nation's economy.

The Republicans are bought and backed by deep-pocketed financial institutions and billionaires who have profited from our economic collapse of the last 3 years, and look to continue the same greedy economic policies that nearly wrecked the entire planet's economy in 2008.

For the LOVE OF GOD, AMERICA.  Don't.  Vote.  Republican!

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The March for Jobs

Someone in the Tampa Bay area finally made enough contacts with the groups organizing the One Nation Working Together's March for Jobs and has a bus scheduled for the trip to and from D.C. for the event.

Now comes the hard part: convincing my parents to babysit my kittehs while I go off to a ZOMG Socialist rally.  Dad, settle down!  Stop having a heart attack!  Yes, I know they're Socialists!  But Dad... DAD!  They're the only ones out there protesting for more jobs...!

Sigh.  And given my brother up in DC is openly Libertarian... this is gonna be a fun two weeks...

UPDATE: Well, I told my mom about the planned road trip.  Her primary concern is "watch out for trouble," and my reply is "I'm going Quaker," which is my code for "I'm going non-violent and will make sure my group goes that way too."  She seemed a bit upset that I was going, but I reminded her I do have this political bent and that I'm frustrated enough about my lack of success job-hunting to want to head up to DC to protest.  She taught history, so we debated a bit about FDR's New Deal with its four different Jobs programs which I argued helped reduce unemployment from 25 percent to 11 percent within 3 years (my math might be a little off, but that's how I remember it).  Mom, being fiscal conservative, argued that those programs increased the debt too much.  At least she and I agree on Marco Rubio being a crook and that the whole budgeting process is corrupt with lobbyists and hidden riders/bill attachments.
Good news is, they'll help watch over the kittehs and my car and help get me to the bus pick-up next Friday.  It better be next Friday.  Gotta call and make sure.

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At what point will the Middle Class wake up and realize the Rich are killing them?

Via Balloon-Juice, an article posted on Yahoo! Finance by Michael Snyder:

...The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.
So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.
Here are the statistics to prove it:
•    83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
•    61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
•    66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
•    36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
•    A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
•    24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
•    Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
•    Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
•    For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
•    In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
•    As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
•    The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
•    Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
•    In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector (NOTE: this tells me the private sector is worth dick when it comes to solving our nation's employment crisis).
•    The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
•    In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks (NOTE: I'm way over average at 82... maybe 85 weeks).
•    More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
•    For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
•    This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
•    Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
•    Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
•    The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.


...The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker 10 times more (plus benefits) to do the same job?...
...So corporations are moving operations out of the U.S. at breathtaking speed. Since the U.S. government does not penalize them for doing so, there really is no incentive for them to stay.What has developed is a situation where the people at the top are doing quite well, while most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make it. There are now about six unemployed Americans for every new job opening in the United States, and the number of "chronically unemployed" is absolutely soaring. There simply are not nearly enough jobs for everyone.
Many of those who are able to get jobs are finding that they are making less money than they used to. In fact, an increasingly large percentage of Americans are working at low wage retail and service jobs.  But you can't raise a family on what you make flipping burgers at McDonald's or on what you bring in from greeting customers down at the local Wal-Mart.
The truth is that the middle class in America is dying -- and once it is gone it will be incredibly difficult to rebuild.

Snyder only points out half the problem: that middle-class quality American jobs are leaving and never coming back.  The other half of the problem is the income inequality: barely 1 to 5 percent of the entire American population is seeing any wage improvements and boost to standards of living, with the lower 95 percent (!) of the population stuck in a growing pool of debt and inability to pay for the good things in life... good things like a family home, food on the table, a car with working headlights and only one flat tire, you know those sort of things.  And that is caused by the fact there are no caps on CEO wages and bonuses: every structure of management shifts the money upward with very little sign of the companies' profits getting spread out among all employees.  That jump of CEO earnings being 500 times more than their workers' average earnings?  That can't be entirely explained away by cheaper overseas labor: part of it is from those cushy Golden Parachute packages that CEOs get for getting hired by the board to come in and shred everything until the company goes bankrupt.  No incentive to perform well, every incentive to squeeze as much money out of the company as quick as possible to the very few at top who would benefit...

There's a lot of things wrong in our country: the jobless crisis and CEO greed are at the top of the list.  And sad to say, there's nothing Congress wants to do about any of it.

This is where I normally say "we're fucked."  But also Breitbart Delendus Est.  Just because his noise and bullshit are distracting all Americans from the Truth: it's NOT about race, it IS about poverty.

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Time To Rally The Unemployed

I'm sick of job-hunting and not finding anything.

I'm sick of placing my resume out there and getting only 2 bites in 2 years.

Above all, I'm sick of those bastard politicians in the Beltway who can't wrap their goddamn heads around the fact that THERE ARE NO GOOD JOBS OUT THERE, THAT NO ONES CREATING MORE JOBS TO FILL, AND WE NEED FINANCIAL AID TO KEEP FOOD ON THE TABLES AND A ROOF OVER OUR HEADS.

These politicians even want to punish the unemployed for being, you know, losers who can't find a job.  They think we're just lazy.  They think we're Welfare Queens.  They think we're preferring a $250 a week benefit payout over a $40,000 a year full-time job.

Time to organize.  Time to send all the unemployed to Washington DC and clog the streets.  Time to walk up to the White House with everyone in a line to drop off our resumes and remind Obama that GODDAMMIT WE NEED WORK!  Time to walk into Congress and... whadda ya mean, they're not gonna let us take the tour?!  Sigh.

Need to speak to NoJobSurvivor.com.  Or MoveOn.  Somebody to get something signed up for August or September.  Set a date, I swear to God we can get 27 million in the streets screaming for jobs.

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