The Semantics of Welfare

For those of you who are a little bit confused now trying to wrap your brains around Bush and the Republican semantic exercise of differentiating between "welfare" and "bailout," here's a few examples to clear it up for you:


From the Independent comes an article about the Republican's version of welfare, i.e. bailout:

"Up to 10,000 staff at the New York office of the bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers will share a bonus pool set aside for them that is worth $2.5bn (£1.4bn), Barclays Bank, which is buying the business, confirmed last night." read more


And from the Progressive comes this version of those who are not worthy of the same safety net:

"Things can't get much worse than the House Republicans' welfare plan. In the "Personal Responsibility Act," the new House leaders declare that no one--no matter how desperate--is legally entitled to aid from the Government." read more

And then of course there's that overlying stench that has permeated anything coming from this administration for the last eight years: cronyism:

"What is important to note about the S&L scandal is that it was the largest theft in the history of the world and US tax payers are who was robbed.

The problems occurred in the Savings and Loan industry as they relate to theft because the industry was deregulated under the Reagan/Bush administration and restrictions were eased on the industry so much that abuse and misuse of funds became easy, rampant, and went unchecked." read more

And what do you know? Here's another Bush associated with the recent white collar thievery:

"Lehman Brothers(LEH Quote - Cramer on LEH - Stock Picks) has nabbed George H. Walker, the CEO of Goldman Sachs(GS Quote - Cramer on GS - Stock Picks) Hedge Fund Strategies, to be the global head of its $188 billion Investment Management Division, Lehman Brothers announced today.

Walker has already resigned from Goldman Sachs and could not be reached for comment. A spokesman at Goldman Sachs did not return a call.

Walker, who is President George W. Bush's second cousin, had joined the merger and acquisition group of Goldman Sachs in 1991 and became a partner in 1998. He soon grew to be one of the principal architects of Goldman Sachs' investment management strategy and was
overseeing a $70 billion group of alternative investments, including hedge funds of funds and private equity investments." read more

Get it now? They stole and stole and stole until there was nothing left to steal. So they stole from each other. And now we get to pay for it. Again.

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bailout, savings and loan scandal, neil bush, lehman brothers, goldman sachs, cronyism, corporate welfare

The Semantics of Welfare

Neocon Fascists sucking up some Corporate Welfare

Fascism

"A philosophy or system of government that is marked by stringent social and economic control, a strong, centralized government usually headed by a dictator, and often a policy of belligerent nationalism." (From The American Heritage Dictionary)

Applying these principles to the government bailouts:

NPR's Adam Davidson writes:

"The Treasury Secretary can buy broadly defined assets, on any terms he wants, he can hire anyone he wants to do it and can appoint private sector companies as financial deputies of the US government. And he can write whatever regulation he thinks are needed."

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In an excellent diary from Daily Kos we learn who some of the Right-Wing Billionaires/Fascists are who are calling the shots this time around:

"Here are a few of the right-wing billionaires who have profited from gaming the global financial market and U.S. housing market, and are trying to get McCain elected. They are funding Newt Gingrich's "American Solutions for Winning the Future" (ASWF), the hard-right propaganda group behind the "Drill Here, Drill Now" campaign."

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If you have any doubts that Neocon=Neofascist, then do read one the early stories that laid it all out:

"WASHINGTON - An influential foreign-policy neo-conservative with long-standing ties to top hawks in the administration of President George W Bush has laid out what he calls ''a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term.''

The list, which begins with the destruction of Fallujah in Iraq and ends with the development of ''appropriate strategies'' for dealing with threats posed by China, Russia and ''the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America,'' also calls for ''regime change'' in Iran and North Korea."

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In the next few days as these unethical and immoral losers begin their final push to get their moronic Bush replacements in the White House, it might be a good idea to do some reading on exactly what Fascism is:

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It might even be amusing to make a drinking game out of it every time you hear the following phrases:

*Islamic fascists, as in OTHER countries who want to try shove a theocratic state on its population.

*End Times. Bonus points if the words come out of Sarah Palin's mouth in an effort to get her followers to join her on the mountain to wait for the space ship.

*Free Market, as in free to loot it until nothing remains but an empty husk for the tax payers to bail out. Bonus points for any and all Bush relatives either employed by or running one of the bailed out entities who have ties to the old S&L Bailout.

*Anything praising the concept of Capitalism while carefully dancing around its new BFF, Corporate Welfare.

*Moonies...oh sorry, those ARE Neocon Fascists...but you get bonus points if you can find any Neocon, any Conservative, any Bush League moron who is not associated with the Reverend Moon, his disciples, or his church. read more

*Appeasement. Bonus points if a Neocon Fascist uses that term in relation to why someone who believes that Armageddon is inevitable should still have her finger on the Nuclear trigger. Hello, Sarah Palin? Do you still have your Y2K bunker stocked?

*Liberals, as in anyone who disagrees with them or dares to challenge their appalling lack of facts to back up their half-witted ideology. In ancient times, used to be several racist and ethnic slurs. Now combined into one handy catch-all phrase.

necocon, fascism, corporate welfare, government bailouts,

Neocon Fascists sucking up some Corporate Welfare

Bush Cronyism, the shameful legacy

Many years from now when historians look back on the Bush years, one of the issues thoroughly analyzed and discussed will be the nepotism, cronyism, and lobbyist dollars that permeated all levels of his administration and defined its policies.

The major topic will be the path of lies and deception two Texas oilmen paved with greed and bigotry in order to take the country to war for oil. They had help from old friends like Ken Lay and Enron:

"Curtis Hébert Jr., Washington's top electricity regulator, said he had barely settled into his new job this year when he had an unsettling telephone conversation with Kenneth L. Lay, the head of the nation's largest electricity trader, the Enron Corporation.

Mr. Hébert, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said that Mr. Lay, a close friend of President Bush's, offered him a deal: If he changed his views on electricity deregulation, Enron would continue to support him in his new job." read more

Historians will describe how Bush and his Texas Mafia buddies used the prejudices of the dumbest and most poorly educated Americans to support their personal enrichment program. One of the ways was using cold war tactics of fear and bigotry to polarize the country. And to further insult the poor stooges who lined up to choke down those free hot dogs at pro-war rallies, they borrowed these tactics from the Russians.

"During the 1990s, Russian energy companies were notorious for cooking their books, defrauding their shareholders — and using political connections to cover shadowy deals. So, readers of Russian newspapers were not at all surprised over recent stories about an energy giant that was misbehaving in this manner. What was unusual was that the company in question was Enron — as quintessentially American as the Texan heartland where it is based." read more

But the story will also be about the dangers of allowing greedy asshats to define public policy based on their own self-interests . It will be about the incompetence of people owed favors and put in charge of agencies they knew nothing about. It will be about the lack of compassion that comes with a job that one considers payback and not a responsibility to uphold. The examples of this are endless and the words Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, Enron will forever stain the Bush presidency. Here's an interesting list of Bush Mafia appointees: Bush Cronyism

But the victims of these cruel policies based on nepotism and greed will not receive the same attention because they are powerless to object loud enough to be heard. They will join the list of sad statistics buried under the weight of so much evil that history measures it by the group instead of by the individual.

And if there's one thing the Bush Mafia excels at, it is beating down the victims of its policies. They do this in many ways, but mostly by turning away and ignoring problems they create but don't care enough about to feel any guilt whatsoever. When Barbara Bush, the matriarch who birthed this cruel and incompetent litter of psychopaths, commented that she didn't want to pollute her beautiful mind with thoughts of all the dead killed by her sadistic son, she spoke for all of them, for their policies, for their incompetence and cruelty.

from her Wikipedia page:

"On March 18, 2003, two days before the beginning of the war on Iraq, ABC's Good Morning America asked her about her family's television viewing habits; she replied:

I watch none. He [former President Bush] sits and listens and I read books, because I know perfectly well that, don't take offense, that 90 percent of what I hear on television is supposition, when we're talking about the news. And he's not, not as understanding of my pettiness about that. But why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or that or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that, and watch him suffer.^[8]

While visiting a Houston relief center for people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, Bush told the radio program "Marketplace,

"Almost everyone I've talked to says, 'We're gonna move to Houston.' What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas... Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality, and so many of the people in the arenas here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. This is working very well for them".^[9][10]

In 2006, it was revealed that Barbara Bush donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund on the condition the charity do business with an educational software company owned by her son Neil Bush.^[11]"

Hurricane Katrina will be remembered as the first American city lost by a sitting President, and also for how FEMA came to define the type of inept payback cronyism the Texas Mafia brought to the White House. This first link, The Truth About FEMA is a blog post by a woman on one of the mailing lists I'm on, Child-Free By Choice. It describes her attempt to get help from FEMA after flooding destroyed her home. She's still waiting.

As I was reading it I found myself wondering if FEMA personnel were just incompetent, or if they simply didn't care enough about people to hold positions helping disaster victims. This blog entry, FEMA sucks major butt, by someone who went through the certification process, shows it may be a combination of the two: they're incompetent and they don't care, which is why they were chosen for the job in the first place.

Then there's the kind of cronyism that demands only payback for political contributions and favors without regard for the effects such incompetence will have on real human beings. For example, FEMA knew the trailers they bought from some well-connected crony were harmful. But holding someone accountable meant taking back an owed political favor, so people had to get sick instead.

"The Federal Emergency Management Agency since early 2006 has suppressed warnings from its own field workers about health problems experienced by hurricane victims living in government-provided trailers with levels of a toxic chemical 75 times the recommended maximum for U.S. workers, congressional lawmakers said yesterday." read more

This kind of cruelty and incompetence is what happens when political favors determine appointments. It removes the objectivity of political appointees in favor of paying back lobbyists, large donors, and friends of the family who may hold twisted and pathological ideals that have to be ignored, like Barbara's disdain for body bags.

For example, what kind of fascist mentality created this situation where victims of a natural disaster are treated like inmates in a prison camp?

"I'm extremely depressed to report that things seem to only be getting sadder concerning the people so devastatingly affected by Katrina last week. Two car loads of us headed over to Falls Creek, a youth camp for Southern Baptist churches in Oklahoma that agreed to have its facilities used to house Louisiana refugees. I'm afraid the camp is not going to be used as the kind people of the churches who own the cabins believe it was going to be used.

Jesse Jackson was right when he said "refugees" was not the appropriate word for the poor souls dislocated due to Katrina. But he was wrong about why it is not appropriate. It's not appropriate because they are detainees, not refugees. " read more


Or forced to live in situations that if they occurred in a third world county, the paid media propagandists would be all over it decrying the inhumanity of it all.

"Dozens of families evacuated from a FEMA trailer park that had been plagued by sewage leaks and power outages were in temporary homes Monday, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it had requested work permits to dismantle the site this week." read more

Situations like this will only get worse with the rapid privatization of government services. Few people realize that once you privatize something, the oversight and rules are weakened and discarded. Here's an example of what happened with the privatization of the food stamp program.

"Area residents used to waiting up to one hour to talk to someone at a call center to receive Medicaid or food stamps, had to wait 90 minutes before addressing a legislative commission Thursday in Kokomo.


The legislative study commission conducted the first state hearing on problems since the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration signed a contract with a private company to handle eligibility for the two programs." read more

And of course, once these privatized crony companies realize the profit that can be made without actually helping people, it only spreads.

"A move in Congress to limit the role of private firms in doling out food stamps is dead for now, allowing Texas to move forward with its privatization plans.

U.S. House and Senate negotiators voted late last week against including a privatization ban in a $300 billion farm bill that lawmakers hope to finish this week. The ban would have prevented states from allowing employees of private companies to interact with people who are applying for food stamps or to decide someone's eligibility for the program." read more

Whenever you combine money, politics, and favors, what gets lost is compassion, caring, and an insight into the bigger picture that is America.

"Over 7.5 Million People Denied Medical Care by Health Plans Since Bush Took Office." read more

And the cruelty begins to take on absurd proportions when laws are passed to avoid helping the victims of these policies, such as the cities who are voting "do not feed the homeless" laws.

"Las Vegas criminalized giving food to even a single transient in any city park.

In August, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit challenging the Las Vegas ban, saying it violated constitutional protections of free speech, right to assembly and right to practice one's religion. A federal court in Nevada has prohibited the city from enforcing the ordinance until a final ruling is issued.

Advocates for the homeless feared it wouldn't be long before other cities passed similar laws.

Already, the cities of Dallas, Fort Myers, Fla., Gainesville, Fla., Wilmington, N.C., and Atlanta have laws restricting or outright prohibiting the feeding of the homeless. In Fairfax County, Va., homemade meals and meals made in church kitchens may not be distributed to the homeless unless first approved by the county. " read more

Excuse me, but hungry people are not creatures in a zoo you fucking morons!

And if you think you're immune from these kind of policies based on paying back political favors, all I can say to you is don't get too attached to water because it's the next thing on the greedy bastard's auction block.

"If adequate water for drinking and sanitation is essential for life, shouldn't we consider water a human right? Not everyone thinks so. In February, the United Nations Human Rights Council missed a critical opportunity to recognize a human right to water. As a result of lobbying by the United States and Canada, the council derailed a European-backed declaration, accepting instead a weaker resolution that actually protects a corporation's right to sell water." read more

And for the most ideologically motivated of Bush appointees who think it's okay to spy on it's own citizens, I have this message for you:

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Bush Cronyism, the shameful legacy