Category: Deep political thought

Stick it out

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Independent Bernie Sanders is on a tear on the Senate floor, filibustering the prez’s tax-cut bargain old-school style — by speaking at length. And I do mean at length. He’s been at it since this morning, railing against the capitalists and for the working stiffs, and shows no signs of running down.

“It is a proposal which gives much too much to people who don’t need it,” he says, and more than once, too. “I think we can do a lot better.”

From your voice to God’s ears, Bernie. Let’s just hope He’s not hanging around with the Appliantologists down at Joe’s Garage.

• Late update: Aw, too bad — Bernie finally yielded the floor … after more than nine hours. Chapeau to the man from the great state of Vermont.

‘Look, they got jobs’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Who’s in the valley when the shit rolls downhill? Twenty-five thousand Coloradans. Another 21,000 folks in Kentucky. Some 454,000 Californians.

And that’s just the the tip of the turd-berg. All because the Republicans have no shame and the Democrats have no balls.

Where was all this hand-wringing over the deficit when the Elefinks were running two wars off the budget, flushing buckets of your grandbabies’ money down the loo of the Daffy-Fudd dream of global empire? That this murderous profligacy continues under a Donk administration is doubly abhorrent, but at least it’s in the budget where everyone can get a good, cold, hard look at the cost of being the world’s cop on the beat.

This is not about the deficit. It’s about power, and the little guy is on the short end of that very big stick.

Kentuckian Latoya Collins gets it exactly right. Waiting at the Jobs Center in Lexington, the 27-year-old — who hasn’t been without work since she was 15, until now — says maybe Congress doesn’t notice the working man.

“Look, they got jobs,” she told the Lexington Herald-Leader. More’s the pity. America is laying off all the wrong people.

Let them eat shit

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Boy, there sure isn’t a lot of ink about the more than 800,000 people whose unemployment checks will go poof next week because the Senate hasn’t got the stones to extend their benefits. At least Marie Antoinette is said to have mentioned something about cake.

You will recall what happened to her. This lesson is clearly lost on our current aristocracy.

I wonder how many of these empty suits has been laid off, stuck between gigs for more than 26 weeks, watching their savings shrink like a spider on a hotplate. I got laid off once, back in the Eighties, and those unemployment checks — plus the patience and generosity of friends and family — kept me from robbing liquor stores. (Hey, I already owned a gun and kept it loaded. Still do, and it still is.)

Finding another newspaper job was not easy. My résumé looked like a bus schedule, and it documented a few questionable career decisions that always make a managing editor go, “Mmm, hmm, one of those guys.” I came this close to getting a copy-desk job at the Ventura Star-Free Press, where a friend was already on staff, but you know what they say about close.

Finally, just as my unemployment was about to run out, I got lucky at The New Mexican. Some 24 weeks after being shown the door at a weekly chain in Denver, I was a taxpayer again, at a daily in Santa Fe. Definitely a trade up, for a while. I liked it so much I made it my last newspaper job.

Now, I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy some of my enforced vacation. I rode my bike a ton, and I didn’t have to write columns, draw cartoons, edit copy and photos for three papers, lay out pages and oversee (and sometimes take part in) the papers’ pasteup. And I never had to look at that fat-ass publisher again, though I would meet others.

But I was a 30-something single man with a dog, a paid-off pickup and few other encumbrances. No kids complaining about soup-kitchen Thanksgivings and toyless Christmases; no exasperated wife hunting loopholes in the marriage vows; no lenders repo’ing house, car and home-theater system (though I did get sideways with American Express over a late payment involving the purchase of proper job-hunting clothing).

Dude like that can couch-surf for quite a while unless he’s an outlandish asshole. Which I was, and am, but like I said, my people were patient and generous.

Somehow I think there are a few families among those 800,000 who will lose their benefits next week, and among the 1.2 million who will join them by the end of December. And these miserable pricks in DeeCee couldn’t give a rat’s ass about any of them, you, or me.

Hope? Yeah, right. Hope in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up faster.

The dump is closed for Thanksgiving

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Click for the lyrics and a whole passel of interesting links
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant (excepting Alice).

“And friends, somewhere in Washington, enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I’m singing you this song now is ’cause you may know somebody in a similar situation — or you may be in a similar situation — and if you’re in a situation like that there’s only one thing you can do.

“Walk into the shrink, wherever you are, just walk in and say, “Shrink, you can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.” And walk out.

“You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it — in harmony — they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them. And three people do it, three — can you imagine, three people walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out? They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine 50 people a day, I said 50 people a day walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out? And friends, they may think it’s a movement.

“And that’s just what it is — the Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement — and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar! With feeling.”

So sing it, y’all. I’ll be singing right along with you. See you after dinner.