2015 | The Bitchy Pundit - Part 3

American Poverty Is Awesome

May 12, 2015 by Bitchy

The right wing keeps saying that. Fox routinely points out that poor people in America have refrigerators, so they’re clearly not suffering enough to actually feel any kind of sympathy for. In a post earlier this month, I talked about lead paint in poor neighborhoods, and the neurological damage it does. I framed that piece around Baltimore, but it’s true of any poor neighborhood in the US.

Being poor in America really isn’t the leisurely life of strip clubs and lobster dinners republicans would have you believe it is. Our poor people aren’t actually the lucky ones compared to poor people around the world. Let’s take a look at some statistics for Baltimore, which has a diverse array of income levels and neighborhoods.

Roland Park is a wealthy Baltimore neighborhood. The life expectancy of residents of Roland Park is eighty-four years old. That would be five years above the national life expectancy of seventy-nine years. Three miles away from Roland Park is one of Baltimore’s poorest neighborhoods, downtown/ Seton Hall. The life expectancy of a resident there is sixty-four. That’s twenty years (or 31%) less life, just for being born poor. These gaps in life expectancy are not unique to Baltimore. They exist all over the US although twenty years is one of the biggest gaps. Here’s a little perspective on life expectancies around the world. Countries with a lower than sixty-four year life expectancy are largely in Africa, and all third world. Afghanistan has a life expectancy of sixty-one years. Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Namibia all have life expectancies of sixty-four years. Turkmenistan has a life expectancy of sixty-five, and India comes in at sixty-six. If you’re born in Pakistan, you can expect to live three years longer than someone born in a poor neighborhood in Baltimore. Iraqis can expect to live five years longer than poor people in Baltimore. If you’re born in Mexico, you can expect to live thirteen years longer than a poor person in Baltimore. I can go on, but you get the point.

Let me stop you before you get to thinking that higher crime and homicide rates are the primary drivers of the life expectancy gap. 70.1% of deaths in downtown/ Seton Hall are “avertable deaths”, meaning that if access to health care were the same as in the wealthy neighborhoods, they wouldn’t be happening. Here are the biggest causes of death in downtown/ Seton Hall:

We have approximately 15% of our population living at or under the poverty line. That 15% number represents 46.5 million Americans. The way the poverty line is defined in the US is basically at $16 per day, per person. Of that 46.5, 20.4 million live at less than half of poverty (so less than $8 per day per person). Mind you, that’s supposed to cover rent, utilities, food, and everything else you need.

You know how $2 a day is the global poverty number that’s usually used? Well, Brookings tried to figure out what the percentage of Americans living on $2 a day is. It turns out that this isn’t so easy to do. The income of extremely poor people in the US doesn’t remain fixed for long periods of time. In other words, they can average $2 a day for a month or two, but any tiny amount of income puts them at an average of $3, $4, or $6 a day. You should read the study for a more detailed explanation, but Brookings came up with a range of 0% – 5% of households in America who live in $2 a day. 0% doesn’t appear to me to make much sense, since the method used to get there is by using consumption surveys as opposed to income surveys, the way the World Bank counts poverty all around the world. The problem is that when graphing both consumption and income surveys, the correlation between the two diverges significantly in the US compared to third world countries. In other words, at an income of $2 a day, the consumption survey doesn’t diverge proportionally to the income survey compared to someone with an income of $20 a day. It’s complicated, but it basically doesn’t seem like a reliable measure. So 0% doesn’t seem accurate, but neither does 5%.

But that’s okay because the actual percentage isn’t as important as the trend. Let’s say for arguments sake that 2% of American households are living on $2 per day, per person. Since 1996, that $2 a day global poverty rate has been reduced by 1/3. In the US, it’s going in the opposite direction. The factor that keeps Americans above that $2 a day line are SNAP, welfare (which can only be collected for a total of five years over the course of a lifetime), social security, and medicare. First world programs. That’s the only thing keeping our “$2 a day” population under 5%.

Why is the extreme poverty class in the US growing, while it’s shrinking in the rest of the world? Republicans. They keep cutting life saving social programs in an effort to end all that high living that we all know is happening in slums all across the country. All of that welfare, food stamp, medicare, and medicaid fraud they can’t find must be stopped! By the way, any retail business would be fucking overjoyed with a loss rate of under 10%. Relative to the private sector, these loss (fraud is less than 4% in each program) numbers are a freaking miracle. But nonetheless, they need to stop the poor people from bleeding us all dry with their eating and such. Plus, if the don’t have food, they can sell those awesome refrigerators and air conditioners that came with their mold and lead riddled apartments, thereby enabling us to cut welfare even more because they would be living large on that pawned refrigerator money. It all makes perfect sense if you think about it.

Republicans are literally turning this country into the slums of Ibadan, where you can expect to live longer than you can if you grow up in Baltimore. That’s actually not true, and I must apologize for the hyperbole. Adolescents in Ibadan are actually more hopeful and healthy than adolescents in Baltimore so I apologize for the unfair comparison.

Poverty in the US is getting worse, and contrary to what the right wing is telling you, being poor in America isn’t awesome sauce. In fact, it won’t be long before people living in the slums of New Delhi aren’t professing their gratitude that they don’t live in the US.

The richest country in the world should not contain poor neighborhoods that are comparable to third world slums. That just shouldn’t fucking happen.

A Culture Of Police Brutality

May 7, 2015 by Bitchy

Since it’s a day that ends in “day”, we have another cop brutalizing another member of the community he’s supposed to be serving and protecting. This one is a slight variation on the theme we’ve grown completely accustomed to in that, the cop is a black male and the victim is a tiny white woman. This incident happened in Miami in 2013, but we just got the video and “justice” yesterday.

Let me start with what happened. In the early evening of June 26th 2013, the police get a call from the South Bay Club, who had a drunk woman (Megan Adamescu) who wouldn’t leave in their lobby. Enter officer Philippe Archer, who responded in plain clothes. He takes the woman outside and tried to get her to give him her ID. She was apparently too drunk to comprehend what was going on, so he took her purse and started looking for ID. That’s when fifty year old Andrew Mossberg happened to be walking by. He thought he was witnessing a mugging so he called the police. Here are his words from an article in the Miami New Times;

“I saw him grab her purse and pull things out of it. When she tried to grab the bag back, he punched her in the face. She fell down, got up, and tried to go for her purse again. He then kicked her legs from underneath her so she would fall down again.”

Mossberg……alleges Archer was not wearing a police badge or any other ID. So Mossberg called the Miami Beach Police nonemergency number and asked the dispatcher to send units over. “I yelled at him that the police are on their way,” Mossberg says. “That’s when he ran at me, kicked me once in the left side of the head, then kicked me again in the forehead, and punched me twice.”

Okay, so this a fifty year old man who is trying to do the right thing when he sees what he believes to be a crime being committed. Here’s the cop’s version of events (from the report he filed);

Adamescu yelled “fuck you nigger,” “became hostile and belligerent,” and that she “attempted to snatch her passport out of my hands.” Archer alleges he got distracted when Mossberg approached him. That’s when Adamescu “slapped me on the left side of the face, knowing that I was a law enforcement officer. I immediately countered with an open hand strike to [the] right side of her face causing her to fall to the ground and hit the back of her head,” Archer wrote.

That’s when Mossberg charged me, preparing to attack me. I conducted a front kick to his abdomen area, causing him to step back. [Mossberg] became enraged and came back at me. So Archer says he kicked Mossberg in the face. “During the violent and physical confrontation, [Mossberg] sustained a laceration to the right side of his head, a left swollen face cheek, and scratches about his arms,” Archer wrote.

As far as I can tell, the cops own original account doesn’t indicate that he identified himself as a police officer to Mossberg. I don’t know if he subsequently made that claim, but it doesn’t matter (you’ll see why later).

That report did leave out some punching and kicking that he did to both Adamescu and Mossberg (of course it did).

So Archer takes both Adamescu and Mossberg to the precinct, where this happens in the parking garage;

Before some of you say that she kicked him (and what a forceful kick it was), so he was justified in what he did, it’s picture time.

This is officer Philippe Archer:

This is Andrew Mossberg:

This is what Mossberg looked like after Philippe fended off the obvious threat to his life:

You could clearly see Megan Adamescu’s size relative to Archer’s in the video. Here’s what she looked like after he punched her:

So you decide if the cop was justified in his actions, given the threat level these two posed to him. He had another detective take a picture of himself with Amamescu in her bandaged state, where he’s grinning from ear to ear. That photo hasn’t been published anywhere, but doesn’t he sound charming?

Did I mention that Archer has been accused of police brutality at least three times prior to this? I couldn’t tell you how many times because, while cops have the ability to run your record in a few seconds to see everything you’ve ever been charged with, we don’t get to easily access their performance records. I do know that when this incident took place, but I do know that the good citizens if Miami had just paid out $60,000 to settle one claim against Archer who didn’t appear to have been punished at all.

There was an internal investigation that concluded that Archer was guilty of excessive use of force. Here’s what the Miami Herald said about the report;

“Your experience, knowledge of rules, policies and proper practice dictates that you knew you should have reported and documented the events at the police station, you knew that taking a photo with a prisoner was inappropriate, you knew you should have properly secured the prisoners, and you knew you used excessive force,” states the report. “Your lack of judgment and your poor decisions defy your tenure as a Miami Beach Police Officer of 19 years.”

The report continues: “You met this slight woman’s meager schoolyard kick with excessive, unnecessary, and unwarranted use of force.”

The good news is that Archer is facing swift and severe punishment for his brutal beating of two people who posed no threat whatsoever to him. That’s not true, he’s technically only been found guilty of punching Adamescu, since that’s all we have video evidence of. There’s no video of what he did to Mossberg. No video means nothing untoward happened, right? He’s being suspended for a month without pay. Harsh. I know, right? But don’t worry, he won’t have to lose that pay for a whole month in a row. He’s going to take several long weekends from May – July so that he’s only missing a few hundred dollars out of several paychecks, instead of getting no paycheck at all for a month. WHEW! My heart was starting to bleed for him, thinking about the hardship he was facing. It looks like the poor bastard may make it through after all.

Does any of this sound like it’s going to serve as a deterrent to the next cop with anger management issues? This asshole has kept his job through lord knows how many excessive force complaints, at least one settlement over his brutality and now this. This incident is going to settle for a much higher amount because he was found guilty of excessive force. That’s just going to help the plaintiffs in their civil suits. And to be clear, he didn’t get fired because he’s been on the force for nineteen years. Being fired means losing his pension, when he’s one year away from being eligible to retire. There was no way his union was going to let that happen. See, the longer a bad cop is serving on a force for, the harder the union is going to fight to get him to that retirement finish line. By year twelve or so, a shitty cop is almost entire unfireable.

There is a cultural problem with out police forces all across the country. There is no deterrent mechanism for violence and brutality. If I were a sociopath with sadistic tendencies , I would be signing up for the police academy. I’m not kidding. This is the place for me to act out my issues with impunity and no fear of punishment. Each time one of these cops gets away with these killings or beatings, they make very other cop confident in the knowledge that they can do whatever the fuck they want without fear of retribution.

None of those cops in the garage reported the punch that was recorded on the video. How many “good cops” does that leave us with? And why fucking bother? Seriously, why bother being a good cop? Obviously, you can’t report a fellow officer punching the shit out of a twig on two legs because that isn’t something cops do. Even if you did, that cop will suffer virtually no punishment, so why bother?

The abuse by cops is always doled out on members of society who they deem to be powerless. This is why it’s predominantly people of color who are getting killed and beaten. This doesn’t happen in Beverly Hills or the Upper East Side of Manhattan where people have power. We know about the affluenza sufferers in these neighborhoods, so it’s really not like there aren’t any miscreants to beat the fuck out of. It’s just that miscreants in Beverly Hills come with high priced attorneys. Beating the shit out of, or murdering them would be a career ender. But shooting Tamir Rice, that has no consequences. That motherfucker hasn’t faced a single charge yet because he chose his victim wisely.

People keep saying there are lots of good cops out there. I think that’s true. It’s just that all the “good cops” are patrolling affluent neighborhoods where the incentives don’t allow for beating and killing members of those neighborhoods. I’ve said this several times; I have a bias against cops. My bias comes from each new video I see of a cop behaving viciously toward someone who is unarmed (both physically and societally) and powerless to stop them.

There are no good cops in poor neighborhoods. There just aren’t. We’d see more news stories of cops being retaliated against for reporting their psychopathic co-workers if there were good cops in bad neighborhoods.

I’m forced to conclude that the only good cops in America work in upper middle class or affluent neighborhoods. Is that true? Perhaps not but I can’t tell, what with all the secrecy within the police departments. Is it fair? You’re goddamned right it is. Every single time this happens, it’s fair to conclude that cops are the problem.

I’ve said this before; I know where my bias comes from. Where does the bias on the other side come from?

Leaded Rioting

May 5, 2015 by Bitchy

Violent crime started dropping precipitously in the 90s, and has continued to drop for over twenty years. It started happening during Bill Clinton’s presidency. In 1994, he passed a crime bill that did several things including putting around 100,000 more cops on the streets by issuing $200 million in grants to local police forces to help them staff up. It also included a lot of other "tough on crime" legislation that put more people in prison for longer, but I’m not going to get into the specifics because they’re not relevant to this piece. The Clinton administration naturally took credit for the decrease in violent crime, which sounds reasonable until you realize that those crime rates started dropping in 1991 and never went up for a single year since then.

Governors all across the country also took credit since their crack downs were clearly the reason for the decreasing violent crime rates. Rudy Guiliani, the most obnoxious of all mayoral peacocks, still claims that his harassment of people of color approach (it’s called the broken windows policing) is why crime went down in New York City during his tenure as mayor. As I stated above, violent crime started declining three years before Rudy began his racially bias policing practices so no rational person would agree with his self aggrandizing assessment of his efforts.

The Freakonomics guys had an interesting theory that Roe v Wade was responsible for the decrease in violent crime. Their thinking is that legalizing abortion meant that would-be criminals weren’t being born because the mothers who weren’t equipped to raise children had access to safe and legal abortions. There seems to be a correlation in terms of the timeline. Roe was decided in 1973, about 18 years before the crime rate started dropping. Sounds pretty good, right? Not so fast. Just like the "tough on crime" thing, it doesn’t hold up to more scrutiny. This theory doesn’t work outside of the US. The UK legalized abortion in 1968. Their crime started dropping in 1995.

That was a nice try by Freakonomics. It sounded great, and relied on more data than criminologists turn to. I generally like theories from economists more than I do, those of criminologists. They don’t suffer from the curse of being a hammer, and therefore needing to turn everything else into a nail. Also, economists found the flaw in the economists’ theory. The criminologists are still clinging to their fallacies.

Criminologists have also theorized that crack was the culprit. See, the crack epidemic had increased violent crime so much, that when the crack epidemic burned itself out, crime dropped. But after crack there was meth. And during crack and meth, there’s always been heroin so that lame theory doesn’t hold up to 20 seconds of just thinking it through without having to Google anything. They also came up with the "when times are tough, crime gets worse" explanation. The problem with that is that the late 80s were a pretty good time to find a job. The much bigger problem is that crime didn’t increase from 2008 – 2012, when times were as tough as they’d been in sixty years.

So what is it? What explains the drop in violent crime. It’s looking very much like lead is the culprit. We have another economist with a theory that seems to be holding up all around the world, in a way that hasn’t yet been countered. In 1994, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (yes, the dreaded HUD) hired an economist named Rick Nevin to help them do a cost benefit analysis on removing lead paint from old homes. There had been a mountain of research at that point, demonstrating that exposure to lead can cause a laundry list of issues like lowered IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral issues, and learning disabilities. There was also a study that linked lead exposure to juvenile delinquency. This study got Nevin thinking about whether there could be a link between lead and violent crime. Remember, this was 1994 so violent crime had been decreasing for three years at that point.

Nevin found that the highest lead exposure wasn’t coming from paint, but from leaded gasoline.

Here’s a little history on the lead in the gas. In 1921, tetra-ethyl (known as TEL or ethyl) lead was developed for GM by Thomas Midgley, who discovered that adding the lead to the gas reduced the "knocking" in engines. In February, 1923, leaded gas was first sold commercially. Four months later, the US Public Health service was made aware of the leaded gas and requested safety tests (pesky big government!). By September of the same year, workers in the DuPont TEL plant were starting to die. The scene was described as, “sickening deaths and illnesses of hundreds of TEL workers… Gripped by violent bursts of insanity, the afflicted would imagine they were being persecuted by butterflies and other winged insects before expiring, their bodies having turned black and blue.” By April 1925, a Yale study (among others) concluded that "the greatest single question [whether leaded gasoline is safe] in the field of public health which has ever faced the American public.". In May 1925, the US Public Health Service held a conference to discuss both sides of the ethyl (as usual, the sides were science vs corporate profits) issue and appoint a blue ribbon committee to conduct an independent inquiry.

What followed was a now very familiar decades long period in which more and more studies around the world were sounding alarm bells about the dangers of lead, which naturally generated industry funded "studies" to counter the broader scientific community. This was the beginning of the allegations (by DuPont and GM) of "partisan science". Stop me when this starts to sound familiar to you. People are dying in the manufacturing plants, and everyone knew it was because of the "looney gas". By the late 60s, the government was starting to lay out timelines and regulations for the phasing out of lead. Here’s a fun quote from the VP of Ethyl Corp in 1971;

“The clincher by all prophets of doom is that someone started the rumor that lead was the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire… The legend always gets fuzzy — sometimes it is caused by lead-lined aqueducts, other times it is from their wine being drunk from lead-lined flasks.”

Again, just let me know when this is starting to sound familiar to you. The victimhood, the hyperbole, the fear tactics…these are all echoed by tobacco companies, the NRA, the entirety of the energy industry. Basically any corporation who needs for science not to be so sciency. And when it gets too sciency, it’s time to cook up just enough "science" to claim that there are unanswered questions. There were no unanswered questions about tobacco. There were no unanswered questions about lead. There are no unanswered questions about why our climate is changing, and there are no unanswered questions about how to reduce gun deaths and gun crime.

In 1972, the EPA mandated that gas stations would be required to sell unleaded gasoline to protect these new fangled "catalytic converters" that the government forced the automotive industry to develop (fucking big government, all up in our business again!) It wasn’t until 1986 that all leaded gasoline was eradicated in the US. That’s over sixty fucking years from when serious questions about lead emerged. No wonder this tactic is still being used.

Okay, back to Nevin. He’s published dozens of papers on the topic of lead and its correlation to violent crime. Here’s a link to the one paper I’m primarily using. I’m just going to give you some bite sized samples of what he’s found by sharing some of his graphs.

It’s impossible to imagine a more clear correlation.

You get the idea. He demonstrated a clear correlation between lead and IQ, behavioral issues and violence. All of it correlates as clearly as the graphs above.

Guess where lead paint still exists in the US? If you guessed that it exists in poor neighborhoods, you win a cookie. Wanna know where there’s likely still a decent amount of lead paint? Yep, Baltimore. Three years ago, they paid out a $3.7 million settlement to a public housing resident who suffered lead poisoning as a child in the 80s.

Maryland’s lead poisoning prevention law didn’t kick in until 1996. Nevin found a nearly precisely twenty year correlation between the elimination of lead and the reduction in crime. In other words, if Nevin is correct and all of Maryland took care of its lead paint problem (I know, I’m being hypothetical) in 1996, we should expect to see low IQ, behavioral issues, and violent tendencies until 2016.

There is an actual physiological factor at play in poor areas of America. All of the privileged people who get to say, "violence is unacceptable under any circumstances" have no idea what they’re talking about. Of course violence is unacceptable, and I’m fairly certain that a significant number of the people committing the violence would be able to agree, had they grown up in a different neighborhood. Being poor comes with innumerable hazards that don’t come with being middle class or rich. Don’t even get me started on the asthma situation.

My response to every single "this is unacceptable" comment was that this isn’t mine to judge. If you didn’t grow up under the circumstances that residents of Ferguson or Baltimore did, then you are not qualified to judge what the appropriate level of rage would be. Lead is just one of dozens of factors involved in these situations that most people aren’t aware of. Stay in your lane. Judging people in these neighborhoods is not your lane. And making an uninformed judgment says more about you than it does about the rioters. I’m just saying that realizing that you don’t know what you don’t know would be the wise thing to do sometimes.

Freddie Gray Was Mortally injured In The Van

May 1, 2015 by Bitchy

UPDATE: Freddie Gray’s death has been ruled a homicide and charges will be filed against the 6 arresting officers. This just came in at 10:55 (30 minutes after I wrote this piece), so that’s all the detail I have right now. And yes, I know that it contradicts something I said in the piece, but never let it be said that I can’t admit an error in my conclusions!

Last night, we got a bunch of new information about what happened on the day Freddie Gray was arrested. I have to say that I’m not loving how we’re getting the information, and I’m not sure how much of it will actually be in the "official" investigation, but I wanted to share it. I normally wait until something more concrete materializes, but this is important information so I will share it with minimal speculation (cause that’s how these things get dumb).

The source for all of this information is a local ABC news affiliate, who got it from an unnamed source who was briefed on the investigation. I’m generally uncomfortable with stories that are entirely unsourced, but there are a few pieces of information disclosed by this source. that I believe will prove to be accurate.

The first big piece of information that we have, is that;

"Gray’s catastrophic injury was caused when he slammed into the back of the police transport van, apparently breaking his neck; a head injury he sustained matches a bolt in the back of the van."

That’s verbatim from WJLA’s piece. Here’s another direct quote from the piece that’s important as it relates to the information above;

"An investigation into the death of Baltimore resident Freddie Gray has found no evidence that his fatal injuries were caused during his videotaped arrest and interaction with police officers, according to multiple law enforcement sources."

The source seems to be making it clear that the blame is focused on the van ride, and away from the arrest. Did you notice the qualifiers there?

Remember the absurd allegation that was floated a couple of days ago, when Freddie Gray “was intentionally trying to injure himself” according to another prisoner in the van? Well, they haven’t taken that heaping pile of bullshit off the table, although there didn’t seem any new advances in this fanciful story. The prisoner that was attributed to spoke up to dispute how his testimony is being portrayed. His name is Donta Allen, and here’s what he had to say (from the article);

Allen said he did not know a man was already in the van. Gray was on the right side and Allen was loaded on the left side with a divider separating them.

Allen described what he heard: "When I got in the van, I didn’t hear nothing. It was a smooth ride. We went straight to the police station. All I heard was a little banging for about four seconds. I just heard little banging, just little banging."

Asked whether he told police whether he heard Gray banging his head against the van, Allen said, "I told homicide that. I don’t work for the police. I did not tell the police nothing."

According to the autopsy on Gray, there is no evidence that Gray hit his head against anything on his own. His fatal neck and spinal injury was a kin to the type suffered in a car accident; it needed that amount of force and energy.

Sources have told the 11 News I-Team that by the time Allen was loaded into the van, Gray was unresponsive. Citiwatch camera video shows officers looking into the Gray’s side of the van with the doors fully open.

Medical experts said as Gray’s condition deteriorated after the injury occurred, he may have suffered seizures.

Allen told the 11 News I-Team what he heard when the van arrived at the Western District Police Station: "When we got to the police station, they said he didn’t have no pulse or nothing. They called his name, ‘Mr. Gray, Mr. Gray.’ And he wasn’t responsive."

So it’s clear that the "he did it to himself" turd isn’t going to float.

Here’s one of the big shockers we got last night; the van made another stop that we didn’t previously know anything about. As if that wasn’t sketchy enough, investigators learned about this previously undisclosed stop because it was caught on a privately owned camera. And here’s another shocker; the van driver has still not given a statement. This incident occurred nearly three weeks ago, and there’s no statement from the van driver? I believe that WTF? would be the only appropriate reaction to this. And then fate stepped in to further fuck up this situation. A security camera at a market on North Fremont Avenue and Mosher Street caught this unlogged stop on tape. Police copied that footage sometime (the owner guesses) on the week Gray died. The store owner’s copy of the footage was lost when the store was looted during the riots.

See what happens opportunistic looters? You may have just helped the police in crafting a more convenient story for themselves. Well played assholes, well played.

And here’s one more bombshell that we heard yesterday, independent of the source conveying what they heard in the briefing. A relative of one of the six officers involved in the arrest (before Gray was put in the van) believes that Gray was injured during the arrest. She wouldn’t go on record, so take her information in the context of a relative of one of the arresting officers, who doesn’t want to be known by name. She said, "Six officers did not injure this man. Six officers didn’t put him in the hospital. I’m worried that instead of them figuring out who did, that six officers are going to be punished behind something that maybe one or two or even three officers may have done to Freddie Gray." She also said that they didn’t buckle Gray in because he was being belligerent. "They didn’t want to reach over him. You were in a tight space in the paddy wagon. He’s already irate."

To which I say, if you figured out a way to catch him and get him in cuffs, you can figure out a way not to severely injure him the way you’ve already paralyzed at least two people by not buckling them in.

Isn’t perspective amazing? The only person in the country who would be concerned with cops being blamed for something they didn’t do, would have to be related to a cop. I mean seriously, the rest of us witness cops never being held accountable for what they did do, and this woman is worried about a mass incarceration of cops? Amazing.

And one last interesting piece of information. Five out of the six arresting officers have been interviewed by detectives. One invoked the right not to be questioned. Cops have a right not to be questioned? What the fuck is that horseshit? I’m pretty sure that the rest of us have no such right. We have a right to have an attorney present for questioning, but we aren’t afforded the privilege of skipping the interview process all together.

So this all seems to be getting more confusing with each passing day. It doesn’t look like we’re going to get anything official anytime soon. My guess is that since we haven’t heard anything official yet today, we’re not going to. I will be updating the situation as I get more information.

Toke Up, Johnny

April 29, 2015 by Bitchy

I don’t know how I missed this, but a study that I have to share just showed up in one of my social media feeds. It’s about medical marijuana, which isn’t really one of my top ten issues.

I’m for legalizing marijuana for any use under the sun. Recreational, medicinal, I don’t care. The war on drugs has only been good for the private prison industrial complex. Throwing people in jail and destroying their lives has turned into a profit center, and it’s not helping anyone in this country, other than a handful of utterly talentless people who can’t manage to make something people want to buy so they had to get into the incarceration business.

I probably missed this story because this isn’t one of my main issues, and I’m already on board with legalization so I rarely click on the pot stories. This one is really interesting, and may move people who are on the fence regarding this issue. In states where medical marijuana is legal, they are seeing a 25% decline in pharmaceutical opioid overdose deaths.

According to the study, these numbers started to change precipitously, and almost immediately after legalization happened in each of the 13 states that allow for legal medical marijuana use. If that isn’t a crazy good basis for legalization, I don’t know what is.

To be clear, the study doesn’t pinpoint how this is happening. Are chronic pain patients substituting some of their oxy with pot? Or are recreational Vicodin users just turning to pot because where medical marijuana is legal, marijuana is that much easier for everyone to get? We know that it’s impossible to overdose on pot, so is that the reason?

Who gives a damned. We can drill down to get details later. The pattern is clear; fewer people are dying from overdosing on pain killers. I say, let the nationwide legalization begin!

Sorry Purdue, but you rode that addiction gravy train for nearly 100 years. That’s right, oxycodone was first used in its current form to treat pain in 1916. Marijuana might finally take a bite out of Purdue’s outrageous abuse of the pharmaceutical patent system. It’s time for people to live, and for you to actually discover a cure to something in order to maintain your stock price.

Fuck Your Breath Is SOP

April 28, 2015 by Bitchy

Remember the "fuck your breath" incident in Tulsa? Remember, that was when Eric Harris was accidentally shot by Reserve Deputy Robert Bates? You know, Bates is the rich 73 year old insurance salesman who got to play cop because he donated enough to the Tulsa PD to earn himself a gun and a badge? And then Eric Harris was shot and laying on the ground bleeding, saying, "I’m losing my breath". Remember? Then that fine officer, Joe Byars compassionately replied, "fuck your breath"? You remember, that all happened 3 weeks ago.

It’s starting to feel like "fuck your breath" is standard operating procedure. We had another incident in Baltimore where a seriously injured (and subsequently dead) ward of the police didn’t get medical treatment when it was clear that he needed it. Details are really sketchy right now, even though the incident occurred 2 1/2 weeks ago, but let me tell you what we know. Freddie Gray was arrested on April 12th for no reason that we’re yet aware of. According to "the city", Gray made eye contact with a couple of cops near an apartment complex. Gray then ran, and since this isn’t illegal, cops naturally chased after him. We don’t know what happened immediately after they caught him, but we have video of the incident after he’s in handcuffs and being dragged into a police van.

He’s obviously badly hurt at this point. The police report states that Gray “was arrested without force or incident” so he wasn’t fighting to get away once they had caught him.

I’m going to backtrack for a second to address something I said earlier. Running from cops is not a crime. Cops chasing after someone who runs away from them is completely understandable. Arresting someone for running is not at all understandable. I would think that once they catch the runner, the next step would be to search him and run his name to see if he has any outstanding warrants. If there’s no reason to arrest the runner, the runner should not be arrested merely for running. We would most definitely have heard the reason for the arrest by now if there was one, because what better way to say that he deserved what he got, than to explain what he was arrested for? Police have said that he had a switchblade on him, but since we don’t know the exact size of the blade, it’s safe to say that there was nothing unlawful about his possession of it. We do know that Gray had been charged with crimes on eighteen different occasions before this incident, and we know that he’s spent time in jail.

But we have no idea why he was being taken to jail this time. It’s been 2 1/2 weeks since this happened, and a week and a half since he died, and we still don’t know.

Okay, back to the timeline of what happened. So he’s arrested, he’s screaming out in pain, and his legs aren’t moving. He’s thrown in the van at 8:42 am. According to the attorney representing the cops, Gray was not seat belted into the van. This is referred to by cops as "the nickel ride". I’ll get to that later. According to the police, the van was stopped at 8:46 because Gray was "acting irate". I guess this is considered unusual, since most people who are sitting in the back of that van are usually singing "Tomorrow" from Annie. So when they didn’t hear "Tomorrow", they felt they needed to stop? They say they stopped the van “so that paperwork can be completed, and at that point Mr. Gray is placed in leg irons and put back in the wagon.” At 8:59 something ambiguous happens. The van driver requests another unit to drive over and check on Gray. There is no description of that "check" in the police report. He’s handcuffed and is in leg irons, but you need for another unit to check on him? Huh. Sometime between 8:59 and 9:24, the can picks up another suspect who, as far as I know has not yet been identified. At 9:24, they’re at the police station and call for paramedics. The Baltimore Sun laid out a timeline and included a map to help sort out what happened.

So it was about 45 minutes from the time of the arrest and the time the paramedics were called. Did I mention that Gray, who is asthmatic asked for his inhaler at 8:42, but doesn’t appear to have ever gotten it? We don’t know if someone actually said the words "fuck your breath", but we know that their actions indicated that sentiment.

The preliminary autopsy shows no injuries to Gray, other than his 80% severed spinal cord. According to the attorney for Grey’s family, three of his vertebrae and his voice box were crushed. So there were no injuries to his legs and he wasn’t beaten up. His legs not moving in the video at the time of the arrest would be consistent with the spinal cord injury, but that’s entirely speculation on my part. I don’t know how severe the injury to his voice box was, and if he could still scream out after that injury happened, but we do know that he was screaming out in the video. Note that he wasn’t screaming out words like cussing out the cops. He seemed to be screaming out in pain.

We know that the injuries to Gray couldn’t have happened casually. In other words, they were a result of serious trauma. That’s according to medical experts The Baltimore Sun spoke with.

Now would be a good time for me to explain what a "nickel ride" is. This is a term used by police for when they throw a suspect in the back of a van without a seat belt and drive the van quickly, taking as many fast corners as they can so as to teach the suspect a lesson by throwing him around the van. You know, harmless fun.

Except for the fact that in 2005 Baltimore paid out $6 million to Jeffrey Alston, who was paralyzed from the neck down because he was taken in harmless nickel ride. He was originally awarded $39 million by a jury, but he ended up settling for $6 million because by 2004, he had been paralyzed for seven years. There’s also Dondi Johnson Sr, who became a paraplegic after his nickel ride in Baltimore in 2005. He received a $7.4 million settlement. His arrest was for public urination. His award was reduced to $219,000 because there’s a state law that caps such damages. Yeah, you read that right. I didn’t drop a zero. He got less that a quarter of a million dollars because the cops turned him into a paraplegic. I’m sure he won’t have a financial woe in the world now. There’s also Christine Abbott, who mercifully wasn’t paralyzed. She is in the process of suing because she was given a nickel ride in Baltimore in 2012. From the article in the Baltimore Sun;

"According to the suit, officers cuffed Abbott’s hands behind her back, threw her into a police van, left her unbuckled and "maniacally drove" her to the Northern District police station, "tossing [her] around the interior of the police van."

"They were braking really short so that I would slam against the wall, and they were taking really wide, fast turns," Abbott said in an interview that mirrored allegations in her lawsuit. "I couldn’t brace myself. I was terrified."

The lawsuit states she suffered unspecified injuries from the arrest and the ride.

"You feel like a piece of cargo," she added. "You don’t feel human."

The van’s driver stated in a deposition that Abbott was not buckled into her seat belt, but the officers have denied driving recklessly.

Those are just the cases I found in Baltimore. I don’t know what happened, but I know that the city of Baltimore isn’t explaining it. I know that a 25 year old man who was healthy enough to run, died a week after he was placed in the care of Baltimore PD of spinal cord injuries. I know that we have another black corpse, and four cops who are on (say it with me) paid administrative leave.

I don’t know exactly what happened, but it does seem like "fuck your breath" was the prevailing mindset for around 45 minutes, while Freddie Gray was in that van, as well as the minute or so before he was thrown in it. The city admitted that much anyway.

A Trans Republican?

April 26, 2015 by Bitchy

So all the jokes about Bruce Jenner’s deviant lifestyle choice in being a republican have been put out there. I made a few myself because it’s a inexplicable choice.

I’ve chosen to post articles about all of the anti-trans (specifically) legislation that republicans have put forth in various states. These bills really address no problem at all. They’re designed to humiliate, ostracize, and dehumanize members of the trans community. Some of these bills involve fines for peeing without producing ID. Others involve handcuffs. Some incentivize people to seek out and turn in a trans person peeing in the "wrong" bathroom by enticing them with $2500 in compensation for the emotional trauma they went through, what with peeing next to someone so icky and all.

These republicans claim that they’re goal is to "protect" the public by preventing the sexual assaults that have never materialized, but need preventing anyway. Republicans don’t see the trans community as human.

So Bruce Jenner really is inexplicably stupid and self destructive in his support of the republican party. Except that I think I can explain it, although I can’t make it less stupid. Bruce Jenner will never be fined for using the wrong bathroom. Bruce Jenner will never be jailed for using the wrong bathroom. Bruce Jenner will never have this done to him;

This is Veronica Bolina on two weeks ago. Cops in Brazil did this to her.

This is what she normally looks like.

That’s never going to happen to Bruce Jenner. Not by cops, and not by anyone else.

Bruce Jenner will never have to deal with being trapped in a body he knows he doesn’t belong in because he can’t afford the surgeries, medications, and therapy involved in getting where he knows he should be.

In short, Bruce Jenner’s primary concern is with keeping his money. Like most republicans in California, he gets to be a republican because democrats have created an environment where they have that luxury.

California spent money on all of the things that you need to spend money on to attract business and grow an economy. According to a study by Endeavor, entrepreneurs choose where they want to start their companies based on several factors.

Access to a skilled and educated talent pool. California had set up a great higher education system that was accessible to all until Reagan killed free tuition to state schools. Even though a great education isn’t available to as many people in CA, it’s still there.
Access to clients and suppliers. California invested in the kind of infrastructure that makes people want to live in a certain place over another. Local transportation, airports, and highways are all means of attracting people to a city or state.

Wanna know what these entrepreneurs didn’t cite as a factor in deciding where to start their companies? Low taxes. Only 5% of entrepreneurs included that on their list of factors.

California did the opposite of what (for example) Kentucky is doing. They’re sitting around and whining about being piss poor because the big, mean government won’t let business squeeze every last bit of natural resources out of the land and sets taxes too high for anyone to want to start a business there. California in the mean time, ran out of gold a long fucking time ago but since they invested in building infrastructure and universities like UCLA and Berkeley, they are now the world’s seventh largest economy.

California spent the money it needed to in order to create a climate for California republicans to prosper, and have no worries other than how not to pay to maintain the environment that enables their wealth.

Bruce Jenner gets to focus on his taxes because he doesn’t have the needs of a poor transgender person living in a red state. He doesn’t have to worry about being the victim of a hate crime because California is a much more open and accepting place than other states. Let’s keep it real, his wealth largely protects him, but living in an accepting culture doesn’t hurt.

Don’t misunderstand me, my intention is not to blame Jenner for his views or to diminish the positive impact I believe he’s going to have on trans acceptance in the US. I’m just trying to explain how someone in his position may have come to hold republican view. He’s completely sheltered from the destructiveness of conservatism. You can’t be responsible for now knowing what you don’t know. He’s living in a bubble (okay, it’s actually more like a circus tent) where he’s not exposed to these efforts by republicans to humiliate and denigrate him.

He’s lucky enough to spend time worrying on how to keep as much of his money as he can so that he can pass it down to his lovely family, who will undoubtedly create more jobs that Google, if only they get the chance to inherit all of his money without paying any taxes on it.

Pull Up Your Pants

April 24, 2015 by Bitchy

Or we’re going to electrocute you to death, sans the chair. That’s what happened to Ervin Leon Edwards in November 2013. He was taken to jail in Baton Rouge because (I’m not making this up) his pants were too saggy, and therefore didn’t comply with bright red Louisiana’s small government pant regulations.

I’m going to sidetrack for a moment to state something that should be fairly obvious. When you pass a law telling people how to wear their clothes, you cannot call yourself a "small government" republican. It appears there’s nothing small about a any government run by republicans. Over and over again, these red states have laws designed to regulate not business (that would be a bridge too far), but you and personal choices that you may want to make.

When you pass a law making saggy pants illegal, your only goal is to create anther reason to harass black people. Let’s not pretend this law was anything more than that.

Back to Ervin. Police were called to a gas station where he and his girlfriend were having a verbal fight. The fight was over by the time the cops got there but Ervin’s pants were past the legal sagging limit, so in the interest of protecting the public, he had to be taken to jail. Can you guess how this ends? If your guess was that it ends with the corpse of Ervin Leon Edwards, you would be correct.

Let’s start with that the cops said happened. According Officer Dustin McMullan, he tased Ervin for five seconds in order to subdue him when he (Ervin) got combative. Five seconds is one cycle for that particular taser. The cop claims that he holstered the taser after that five second burst because it had no effect on Ervin. After he put the taser away, the cop said that he helped other officers use “empty hand control techniques” to remove the restraints from Edwards’ ankles and hands before leaving the cell. They also said that a deputy went in to check on Ervin at some point and found him breathing and moving his arms.

So let’s watch the video that was finally released yesterday to see how much of that was actually true:

So you can see that there are six cops in the room. Seems to me like a six to one ratio of force would make the use of a taser completely unnecessary, but that’s just me. Maybe all six of these cops have very low testosterone levels and sperm counts. They need all the tools they can get their hands on in order to subdue anything bigger than a kitten, because they’re barely men at all.

Just to explain what you’re seeing in the video, Officer Dustin McTase A Lot is the cop directly under the really big one who’s standing up, so you can’t see everything he does. At the :32 mark in the video, you can see all of the cops (but especially the one closest to the door) jolt backward. That’s when the taser was first turned on Ervin. At :34 you can actually see it because the big cop steps back. That taser stays on Ervin’s body until :47 where the sadistic cop lifts it for a split second while he gets his balance so that he can really dig the thing into Ervin from a more steady angle. That motherfucker kept that taser in place until the 1:25 mark in the video. Everyone is leaving the room, Ervin isn’t moving at all, and that piece of fucking shit cop is still tasing the (at that point) body while the other cops are pulling the corpse’s pants off. Can you tell that I’m enraged? Three minutes later, you see someone looking into the room. I guess this is when they checked in on him and found him breathing and moving his arms? Two minutes after that, someone else looks into the room. Five minutes after that someone can finally be fucked to enter the room, with no seeming sense of urgency, and solely for the purpose of kicking the body’s foot. I guess this is some new fangled form of CPR that I haven’t yet heard of.

Remember how I told you that this happened in November, 2013? You must be wondering (as I was) why we’re just now seeing the video. The incident was investigated by internal affairs and lo and behold! They found no wrongdoing. Quelle surprise! We’re seeing the video because of a wrongful death civil suit filed by Ervin’s family.

Every article I’ve read on this says that the cops fucked up by not checking in on him and administering any CPR or making any effort to save his life (or make sure that he still had one). So that relentless tasing thing, that’s just swell. I guess that it falls within the parameters of this book we keep hearing that everything is being done by. If pumping 50,000 volts of electricity into a human for nearly a full minute isn’t considered totally shitting on the book, the book needs to be radically edited. So according to police procedure, the misconduct didn’t start until the moment the tasing ended and everyone left the room. By "according to police procedure", I mean not according to internal investigations, who found that everything was done by the book, and there’s nothing to see here.

Ervin’s cause of death is officially "undetermined", a result of “acute cocaine and phencyclidine (PCP) intoxication in association with restraint by law enforcement”. So naturally, we’re starting to get some of the same victim blaming bullshit we got with Eric Garner. He was a drug addled fatty who would be alive today if he’d put down the drugs and the donuts years ago. Or maybe he could have kept doing the drugs and eating the fried chicken, just as long as he kept his pants over the legal limit?

So now the DOJ and the FBI both have the files on this case, although there’s no confirmation that they’re investigating. If past if prologue, here’s how this is going to unfold. The family will receive a big settlement from the city. It won’t go to trial, they will just throw as much money at it as they have to, in order to avoid a trial. Think about it, how many police brutality trials do we hear about, relative to video of police brutality instances we see? The taxpayers of Baton Rouge will have to pay that money, as well as the salaries and pensions of every cop who was in that room, since none of them will ever face any consequences for what they did. The best case scenario is that he sadistic taser-happy piece of crap will be taken off the streets or (not likely) fired (with his full pension intact).

The incentive structure is not set up to produce good cops or promote good behavior by cops. There are seldom any consequences for bad behavior. If there aren’t going to be any consequences, why would these guys ever stop? That piece of shit that killed Eric Garner had three previous complaints of brutality or impropriety brought against him. Two of which had been settled before he killed Eric Garner. Every time he got away with humiliating or assaulting a black man, his sadist wings grew and he let his shitty cop freak flag fly until he finally murdered someone. And he still has his job.

So to recap;

Saggy pants = jail because that’s the only way to get the criminal element off the streets.

Murdering cop = no jail, keep your job, retire with a full pension because the criminal element on the streets is something the community should pay for and value, as long as it’s wearing a uniform.

I don’t see how we’re not encouraging more of this behavior when over and over again, we see communities paying to be brutalized by their police forces.

Your Estate Is Now Safe

April 22, 2015 by Bitchy

By "your", I don’t actually mean yours. I guess I do, but only if you own one of the top .2% of the biggest American estates who have been suffering under the onerous and tyrannical estate tax system. It’s tyrannical because the government actually claims that your heirs should have to pay taxes on money they inherit from you. You know, like they would have to pay on lottery money or unemployment benefits that they’ve been contributing to their whole working lives. If you ever need to take advantage of that unemployment insurance you’ve paid for, you have to pay federal taxes on that money. But dammit, taxing your heirs for receiving money they didn’t earn is a bridge too far!

I am a firm believer that if you had the forethought to be born into a filthy rich family, you shouldn’t be penalized for having better boot straps than the poor bastard who thought that being born to poor people was a good life plan. Why the fuck should you pay taxes on the money that you didn’t earn, but watched (when you weren’t at your tennis lesson) your parents earn. Or worse yet, weren’t around when your grandparents earned it, but are clearly bootstrapped to. I mean, being born to wealthy people is hard work. Why should a rich person have to pay taxes on money that drops out of the sky for them, the way you pay taxes on the money you spend 40 – 60 hours a week working for? I mean, it’s not the rich guy’s fault that you’re the kind of sucker who obtains money by working for it. Why are we punishing the innovation of being born rich?

We all know that the best way to stimulate the economy and create jobs is to let Paris Hilton have her grandfather’s money for free. She’s obviously going to spend it in a much smarter way than the government, who will probably squander it on a road or a republican war that even republicans don’t want to pay for.

Let me explain how the estate tax works for the 99.8% of you lazy moochers who aren’t familiar with it. In 2015, any inheritance you (again, I don’t mean you, you fucking loser) get is tax free for the first $5.43 million dollars. I’m sorry, when I said $5.43 million dollars, I mean per person. So if you’re inheriting from Mummy and Papaaa, you get $10.86 million dollars of free money. Just to give you a little context, the amount that was free in 2001 was $650k per person.

To recap, right before we launched two wars, heirs of large estates got $1.3 million dollars of free money from Mamaaa and Papaaa. Today, since we’re still paying for those wars, they get $10.86 million dollars of free money. That’s today, but don’t worry because republicans in the house just voted to make things more fair. They want to make the entire estate free for the heirs. They really are a party of the people. There are precisely 5,500 people whose estates will be affected by this bold move to fight the power and stand up for the middle class.

Obviously, the estate tax is an attempt to loot money from hard working children of billionaires, and it must not stand! Let’s review the origins of the estate tax. The estate tax was born in 1916, and it was proposed and passed under the auspices of fair taxation. Cordell Hull, who sponsored the legislation said,

"I have no disposition to tax wealth unnecessarily or unjustly, but I do believe that the wealth of the country should bear its just share of the burden of taxation and that it should not be permitted to shirk that duty."

Representative William Cox, who supported the estate tax said,

"It is the first successful attempt to make wealth bear its just and proportionate burden of taxation."

At its original implementation in 1916, the estate tax was set at 10% of all estates worth over $5 million dollars. It went up very quickly. For 1917, it was 15% on all estates worth over $5 million dollars. But in 1917, it was raised again to 15% of net estate in excess of $5 million plus war estate tax 10% of net estate tax in excess of $10 million. Huh. So because we were at war, the legislators at the time thought that raising taxes would be the prudent and fiscally responsible thing to do. Oh, but we’re just getting started on the increases. By 1932, the estate tax was 45% of net estate in excess of $50 million. And then here a’come FDR to raise it to 60% of net estate in excess of $50 million in 1934, but that didn’t last long. By 1935, he increased it to 70% of net estate in excess of $50 million. And then came 1940, where there was another war to pay for. He increased the estate tax to 70% of excess of net estate over $10 million plus a defense tax of 10% of the total tax computed under the basic and additional estate taxes (in effect, maximum tax was 77%). From 1941 until 1977, they decided not to fuck around with all that language and just set the estate tax at 77% of excess of net estate over $10 million. Can someone remind me when the golden era of economic expansion in the US was again? Jimmy Carter came in and changed the tax to 70% of excess over $5 million. And then Ronny, patron saint of the wealthy, set it at 65% of excess over $4 million for 1982, 60% of excess over $3.5 million for 1983 , and 55% of excess over $3 million for 1984 – 1988. For 1987 – 1998, the rate was set at 55% of excess over $3 million (effectively 60% for estates in excess of $10 million but less than $21,040,000 because of a surtax to phase out benefits of the graduated rates and unified credit). That was as low as Ronald Reagan could conceive of dropping it. But fear not, Buckley v Valeo was starting to being in dividends. For 1998 – 2001, Bill Clinton set the rate at 55% of excess over $3 million (effectively 60% for estates in excess of $10 million but less than $17,184,000 because of a surtax to phase out benefits of the graduated rate).

To be clear, the intention behind an estate tax was twofold. It was the best way to pay for things because what better time to tax someone, than when it’s on money they didn’t break their backs earning? The second purpose was to prevent oligarchy. FDR correctly said,

"Great accumulations of wealth cannot be justified on the basis of personal and family security. In the last analysis such accumulations amount to the perpetuation of great and undesirable concentration of control in a relatively few individuals over the employment and welfare of many, many others."

I don’t care if you like that or not. FDR was right, and there’s nothing you can say to change that empirical fact.

Huh. As soon as we lowered the Paris Hilton tax, wealth started to become mega-concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of people. Today. 400 people own the same wealth as 50% of Americans. That is not a fucking accident. Taxation is always a redistribution of wealth. It always had been, and it always will be. First worlds have never been built in any way other than through an involuntary taxation system. The question is, do we want to redistribute across, or up?

During the time when the top estate tax was set at 77%, the top corporate and income tax rate was higher (at 91%). This forced reinvestment in companies and the country. There was no incentive to loot money from your company or your country because you were just going to pay it all out in taxes. That’s what created the greatest economic expansion in the history of our country. Again, I don’t care if you don’t like it. It is what it is and all of your theorizing and quantum physics, parallel universe nonsense isn’t going to change the empirical facts of what happened.

So let me share some estate tax fun facts so that you can really see (in case you’ve been confused for fifty years) who republicans champion.

In 2013, among estates that paid any tax at all, the effective tax rate was 16.6%. To put that into perspective, if you make 40k per year, your federal tax rate is 25%.
In 2013, a total of one hundred and twenty (that is the largest nonpartisan number I could find) small businesses and small farms paid any estate tax at all.
The largest estates are comprised of 55% in unrealized capital gains. This is money that has never been taxed. Not once. Capital gains become "realized" when you sell them. That’s when you pay taxes on them. If you’ve never sold stocks, that your parents bought for you when you were born, taxes have never been collected on that wealth. So a billionaire would have a very large amount stashed in unrealized capitalized gains, since they’re never really having to face a situation where they have to sell the stock they’ve been sitting on for generations, so that they can buy a sandwich.
Repealing the estate tax entirely, as republicans want to do, will cost $269 billion dollars over the next ten years.

So you decide: is the GOP the party of the people? Are you the person they’re fighting for? Let’s be clear, someone is going to have to pay that missing $269 billion dollars. Just like someone has been paying for every top tax rate cut. That unicorn republicans keep referring to, where spending less is an option has never happened. Remember, they never paid for their last two wars. Wars that will cost us money until their invention ISIS, and every other terrorist group that forms as a result of destroying Iraq are completely eradicated. And bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bombing Iran isn’t free either. So if you’re opposed to negotiating with Iran, you’d better get ready to pony up your share of that war plus the $269 billion dollars you want Paris Hilton and the Walton miscreants to have.

Someone has to pay. Who do you want that someone to be?

The Anecdotal Obamacare Story That Matters

April 20, 2015 by Bitchy

If you’re even casually familiar with me, you know that I have almost no use for anecdotal "evidence". Anecdotes are not evidence of anything other than what one person believes they’ve seen at one specific moment in time. Obamacare has brought a glut of anecdotal Obamacare horror stories to my various social media pages. Statistically speaking, every single American who got screwed by this law has ended up finding me on social media. No seriously, the numbers simply don’t support these claims of devastation and woe. One guy claimed that his insurance premiums increased by 250%! Holy shit! Surely Fox News would have found him if this were true, right? I mean, they paraded a bunch of Obamacare "victims" whose stories all turned out to be 100% bullshit. Fox was really in need of a legitimately fucked over insurance consumer. Why didn’t this guy take this opportunity to possibly become a right wing hero a la Cliven Bundy? Why? Because he told me he was in Arizona. I looked up the stats for his state. Turns out that in Arizona, rates went down by ten percent for 2015. Oopsie! I never heard back from him after I shared that data with him. I guess he died at home alone, of a stubbed toe that got infected because he couldn’t afford the one million dollar copay that came with his wretched Obamacare plan. Poor bastard.

And then there was the vet who insisted that the VA was the worst health insurance in the world, and that Obamacare was going to destroy the previously awesome private insurance market. When I pointed out that the VA has always had a higher satisfaction rating than private insurance, he got huffy and played the "I’m a vet and you’re not" card. I let him know that I would be happy to ignore his attempts at acting intellectually superior with actually being intellectually superior if he could find me a single year in which the VA’s approval rating was lower than that of private insurance. He didn’t even bother to do that, instead opting to insist that he knew better because of his first hand experience. I assured him that the curmudgeon contingent was included in those approval ratings. He was unmoved by reason, logic, or anything that might not fit with what he "knew".

These are just a couple of anecdotal examples of why I have no use for anecdotal "evidence" (see what I did there?) Wanna know where I’m going next? Yep, I’m going to share an anecdotal Obamacare story. This is the story of James Webb, a fifty one year old self proclaimed teabagger and veteran. He hates commies and Obama. He does love guns though. He really, really loves guns. He loves to make videos of himself shooting guns. Lots and lots of ‘pew, pew, pew, pew, pew’ videos on his youtube channel. He hates the fact that the gays have ruined The Walking Dead for him. He refers to the Ferguson protestors as the "cesspool of America", who come from "generations and generations, and generations of living off the government". He’s been posting videos on youtube for seven years now so if after reading this, you decide that he was a plant, let me assure you that he isn’t.

Anyway, James posted a video last week that will double the one million views mark he crossed last month (congrats James), in a matter of days. James posted a video explaining why he might vote for Hillary Clinton. See, James retired last year because Obamacare set him free from having to work for health insurance. He’s not interested in losing the awesome and affordable coverage he has. Before I get to the latest video about who he’s going to vote for next year, let’s watch a video he put up seven months ago, explaining how Obamacare allowed him to retire at the age of fifty.

Notice how he starts off by saying that, "In the Obama administration, the least [sic] you work, the more you get. Now I know it used to be you worked hard, you saved hard and you retired, but not anymore". But as he kept talking he says, "I’ve been pulling that wagon for thirty-one years. It’s my turn to ride in it, and I’m going to ride. I’m going to ride in that wagon, and I deserve it." This is a guy whose right wing programming is at odds with what he’s seen and lived.

To republicans, if you don’t work until you die, you’re lazy. I know I’m skipping ahead but let’s get into some of the replies he got to the video he posted last week. Some republicans weren’t happy with his considering voting his own self interest in 2016. One woman said, "Heaven fucking forbid you have to go back to work. Since when is retiring at age fifty acceptable?…..Get off your fat ass and go back to work…..You are what’s wrong with this country." This is my favorite part of the stupid twat’s email to him, "People who vote based on what’s best for them are fucked up people. You need to be thinking about what’s best for society as a whole and future generations, and our planet, and humanity as a whole." Yeah, she said that to justify voting republican. WOW! That just redefined the parameters of cognitive dissonance. Another guy writes James to call him a troll. He demands that James explain himself and the affliction that justifies his early retirement.

These people aren’t morally outraged that James is retired at the age of fifty. They’re enraged that they can’t. And the reason why they can’t, is because they’ve bought the whole line of right wing bullshit that keeps them slaves to the billionaires who bought their party. They have Stockholm Syndrome and they can’t allow anyone to suffer less than they expect to have to suffer. These are the same dumb dumbs who insist that welfare recipients should be subjected to drug testing. I post statistic after statistic about state after state, where testing welfare recipients has unearthed very little drug use while costing taxpayers a lot of money. I always get replies to those statistics, proclaiming that "if you’re on welfare, you should be drug tested". But I just showed you that doing that wasted a whole bunch of your taxpayer dollars for no good reason at all. But NO! People on welfare must be punished, and reason, logic, and fiscal responsibility are irrelevant! These people are not rational. They’re probably not even hateful by nature. But their struggles make it necessary to punch down at people who they need to be on the rung below them. Because if there’s nobody suffering beneath you, what does that make you in the grand scheme of society?

I always ask myself, as part of deciding where I land on an issue, "who are you advocating for?" If you want to humiliate poor people, even though it’s going to cost you money to do it, who are you advocating for? If you’re insisting that James’ lazy ass need to get a job right now, who are you advocating for? We see James himself do it at the beginning of the video I posted above, when he said that under Obama, people no longer need to work hard. He can’t even hear his own contradiction when he goes on to say that he’s put in thirty-one years of work, and deserves to enjoy his life. Here’s the difference between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives believe that they’re the worthy exception to the rule. Whether it’s taking food stamps, collecting unemployment insurance because of a layoff, or signing up for Obamacare; they earned it but everyone else is a moocher. Liberals believe that everyone who needs help should have it. The exceptions are the teenie, tiny ( I can post dozens of examples) few who abuse the system.

Here’s a couple of other things about James that I noticed. He went from the military, straight into a government job where he became eligible to retire at the age of fifty. That dreaded big government he and his ilk hate, is who he worked for. And that dreaded government he worked for provided him with the pension that Ronald Reagan and the republican party don’t want anyone to have. That’s why they invented 401k’s. They weren’t funneling enough money to Wall Street, or enough company profits up to the top with pension plans so they concocted 401ks to steal (I urge you to watch that video) more from you. Everything that James has gotten for his hard work, is something that he’s voted against having. He says that he’s voted republican for thirty-two years.

And by the way, that finish line at age sixty-five wouldn’t exist at all, were it not for democrats. Republicans never wanted, and still don’t want you to have medicare or social security. They also don’t want for you to earn a living wage in exchange for working hard. Is anyone under the impression that cleaning office buildings is work for lazy people? Are they too lazy to work and too lazy to bootstrap themselves into college with that $7.25 an hour they wouldn’t even be earning if republicans had their way? Their whole fucking system is designed to keep you a lifelong wage slave. The only way you get anything in republican paradise, is to be born into it. If you’re not born into a family that can send you to college, you’re literally shit out of luck. You’re worse than shit out of luck, because they will treat you like a lazy piece of crap for not being able to get yourself to college on the crap wages they insist you should earn. I showed you in a post last week, that if you’re born poor in America, 70% of you will stay poor. Republicans like it that way. And poor republicans have been programmed to like it that way. That’s why they avail themselves of the opportunity to shit on someone else, every time they get a chance.

This post is already longer than I intended, so I’m going to wrap it up soon. The reason why James’ anecdotal Obamacare story matters, is because it runs contrary to his ideology. What he realized isn’t what he expected to realize. That just makes him more credible. Here’s the video where he talks about his struggle with his 2016 vote;

And here’s a follow up he posted yesterday;

Notice how the second video lacked explanation? I wonder if that’s because it’s just an inexplicable decision? I believe that James will ultimately vote his own self interest because once the thinking starts, the programming really can’t reassert itself. I don’t know who the nominees are going to be, but I’m pretty sure that James won’t be voting republican.