Tag Archives: welfare

Racism in the Republican Party? That’s mind blowing!

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Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski posted a photo entitled: Man At Romney Rally Wears Mindblowingly Offensive Shirt: “The Getty Images photo was taken at a Romney/Ryan campaign event in Lancaster, Ohio on Friday. A Romney spokesperson commented that the shirt was “reprehensible and has no place in this election.””


(Getty)

Are their “minds blown” because the guy wore an offensive shirt or because he wore a shirt that loudly proclaims the racism that they’ve all participated in but agreed to not be so blatant about? It’s okay for Mitt to joke that “no one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate” (and to use Donald Trump and his flagrant birtherism for campaign cash), to run ads claiming President Obama is cutting welfare requirements to “shore up his base,” and to speak to a room full of wealthy people, like him, about how 47 percent of Americans won’t take personal responsibility for their own lives and that’s why they’ll vote for Obama.

That’s all supposedly quieter, just some harmless dog-whistling. But according to Team Romney, this shirt is “reprehensible and has no place in this election.” Uh huh — it has no place in this election NOW, four weeks from Election Day, when they’re trying to appeal to potential voters outside their circle of extremists.

But guess whose minds aren’t “blown” by this shirt? Everyone who’s been paying attention to the Republican Tea Party since 2008.

Class warfare, Romney-style

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David Corn says this is the most damning line of Romney’s remarks in the hidden camera video:

“I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” 

“Here was Romney sharing his view that Americans who don’t make enough money to pay income taxes and his fellow citizens who rely on Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, or other government programs are lesser people than he and the millionaires before him. These people, Romney was saying, are not adults; they do not, and will not, fend for themselves or do what they must to feed, clothe, shelter, educate, and care for themselves and their family members. It was an arrogant insult spoken with true detachment. This was 100-percent 1-percent.”

Sorry, Willard. You and your mega-rich friends don’t get to judge anyone.


image: destroythegop 

Mitt Romney’s Oedipal conflicts

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Mitt Romney’s lovely mother, Lenore LaFount Romney, talking about how his father George was on welfare relief as a child, after he came to America as a refugee from Mexico.

[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Mitt Romney isn’t just detached from half of America, he’s detached from his own heritage. George and Lenore might have been better served if they’d loaded that silver spoon they placed in li’l Willard’s mouth (as most parents who can, will do) with some grace, empathy, and appreciation.

For their troubles, they received a kid who felt entitled, who spent his childhood bullying others: a blind teacher, an unpopular gay classmate, or pranking friends and strangers while dressed like a police officer.  A son who spent his young adulthood living in a mansion in France, avoiding the Vietnam draft, and then felt that selling some stock to live on while attending Harvard was the true measure of suffering. A man who went on to become the “King of Bain,” the real-life basis of Hollywood’s Gordon Gekko character, leveraging businesses for personal profit, wiping out American jobs that once paid living wages with benefits, shuttering factories and halting manufacturing across the land. A man who took the fortune he made in all that destruction, and put it in bank accounts all over the world — ensuring the United States government would never see a penny of tax. A man who then decided he had so much, he also deserved to be President. A man who refuses to reveal his tax returns to voters — completely contrary to what his own father practiced and believed.

  
  
  
  

source: sandandglass

OR Mitt Romney would consider his own father’s family to be among ‘those people’ who it’s his job not to worry about — those people who are “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them… people who pay no income tax.” 

Romney pollster: We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

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If you appreciated the ideas in Orwell’s 1984, you’re going to love the Romney campaign. Facts are merely historical items to be rewritten by the Mitt-istry of Truth, to send through the pneumatic tubes of conservative propaganda, for immediate and repetitive distribution by Fox News and other rightwing media outlets. That’s what works for Romney.

Robert Reich: “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” says Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster.

A half dozen fact-checking organizations and websites have refuted Romney’s claims that Obama removed the work requirement from the welfare law and will cut Medicare benefits by $216 billion.

Last Sunday’s New York Times even reported on its front page that Romney has been “falsely charging” President Obama with removing the work requirement. Those are strong words from the venerable Times. Yet Romney is still making the false charge. Ads containing it continue to be aired.

Presumably the Romney campaign continues its false claims because they’re effective. But this raises a more basic question: How can they remain effective when they’ve been so overwhelmingly discredited by the media?

The answer is the Republican Party has developed three means of bypassing the mainstream media and its fact-checkers…

The Obama-Welfare ads are complete fabrications? Outright lies? Doesn’t matter — the Romney campaign admits those are their “most effective” ads. Romney will lie to win because it’s effective: 

Mitt Romney’s aides explained with unusual political bluntness today why they are spending heavily — and ignoring media criticism — to air an add accusing President Barack Obama of “gutting” the work requirement for welfare, a marginal political issue since the mid-1990s that Romney pushed back to center stage. ”Our most effective ad is our welfare ad,” a top television advertising strategist for Romney.

Slippery Mitt’s belly flop of the day: “President Obama’s soft on welfare”

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President Obama is hardly the candidate who’s anywhere near “soft” on welfare. Did you know the Boston Herald used to call Governor Romney’s welfare program in Massachusetts “Welfare Wheels“? Joe Klein has the details:

The theme of the day for the Romney campaign was, as Alex Rogers notes below, that Obama’s Soft on Welfare. It sort of flopped. The factoid planted at the microscopic center of the non-story is that the Obama campaign allegedly granted states the right to request waivers from the current welfare work requirements…which is true, except for the following things:

1. The waivers would be granted only if states came up with alternative ideas to create jobs for people on welfare.

2. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney himself asked for such a waiver in 2005.

And, this third bit is just too good…

3. As governor, Romney offered welfare recipients free auto insurance, registration, inspections and memberships in AAA.

Mitt lies and withholds information like this EVERY SINGLE DAY just to convince the feeble minded Fox / Rush fans to vote for him. I can only imagine what those tax returns he’s hiding would really tell us.

source image: paxamericana

The Walton’s wealth equals the bottom 40% of Americans: how the rich amass fortunes

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According to Pat Garofalo at Think Progress, Walmart heirs have a combined wealth equal to the bottom 40% of Americans combined:

“Last year, Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, found that as of 2007, the Walton family — heirs to the Walmart fortune — had a net worth equal to that of the bottom 30 percent of Americans. And due to the effects of the Great Recession that ratio has gotten substantially worse. New Federal Reserve data analyzed by both Allegretto and Josn Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute shows that the Waltons now hold as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined.”

So? Didn’t they ‘earn’ their wealth — should we punish the Walton family for being this wildly successful? As Garofalo points out, the federal government (i.e. the Republican Party / tax laws) have helped to redistribute money towards the Walton fortune as much as anything:

“At the same time that the Waltons have amassed an ever larger fortune, Congress decided to cut the estate tax, a policy for which the Waltons have been pushingfor years. And now that the estate tax cut is in place, conservatives are doing everything they can to ensure it doesn’t go away, allowing the Waltons to amass even larger amounts of wealth.”

And as president, Mitt Romney would like to redistribute even more money to the Waltons by implementing further tax cuts for those in the elite one percent class (himself included).

Further, let’s not forget that the Walton family fortune has been built on the backs of their low-wage employees:

“[Walmart] employees on average take home pay of under $250 a week. The salary for full-time employees (called “associates”) is $6 to $7.50 an hour for 28-40 hours a week, which is typical in the discount retail industry. This pay scale places employees with families below the poverty line, with the majority of employees’ children qualifying for free lunch at school. When closely examined, this amounts to a form of corporate welfare, as the taxpayer subsidizes the low salaries. One-third are part-time employees – limited to less than 28 hours of work per week – and are not eligible for benefits.”

So every taxpayer, in any community where a Walmart is located, has helped to subsidize the Walton family’s employees — and by extension, the Walton family fortune.  Instead of expecting them to pay their workers a living wage and provide affordable benefits (remember labor unions?), taxpayers have helped the Waltons pocket a selfishly unequal amount of their profits. Profits, by the way, which are created by selling goods from other countries, like China:

“Despite a well-publicized “Made in the U.S.A.” campaign, 85 percent of the stores’ items are made overseas, often in Third World sweatshops. In fact, only after Wal-Mart’s “Buy American” ad campaign was in full swing did the company become the country’s largest importer of Chinese goods in any industry. By taking its orders abroad, Wal-Mart has forced many U.S. manufacturers out of business.”

The Walton family is a basic story of how many in the elite one percent acquire their fortunes (ingenuity and hard work or by cheating with a lot of help from others including all levels of government). It’s this kind of information, ultimately, that people like Mitt Romney would like to withhold from public scrutiny. One doesn’t willingly reveal how one’s fortune was made, where it came from, who was sacrificed, and how it’s being used now by turning over one’s tax returns to the rabble. That could turn out to be rather distasteful.

Walmart costs taxpayers $1,557,000,000: the Conservative Circle of Life

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image: questionall

WAL-MART Costs Taxpayers $1,557,000,000,00 to Support its Employees

  • “The Democratic Staff of the Committee on Education and the Workforce estimates that one 200-person Wal-Mart store may result in a cost to federal taxpayers of $420,750 per year – about $2,103 per employee. Specifically, the low wages result in the following additional public costs being passed along to taxpayers:
    • $36,000 a year for free and reduced lunches for just 50 qualifying Wal-Mart families.
    • $42,000 a year for Section 8 housing assistance, assuming 3 percent of the store employees qualify for such assistance, at $6,700 per family.
    • $125,000 a year for federal tax credits and deductions for low-income families, assuming 50 employees are heads of household with a child and 50 are married with two children.
    • $100,000 a year for the additional Title I expenses, assuming 50 Wal-Mart families qualify with an average of 2 children.
    • $108,000 a year for the additional federal health care costs of moving into state children’s health insurance programs (S-CHIP), assuming 30 employees with an average of two children qualify.
    • $9,750 a year for the additional costs for low income energy assistance.”
  • The total figure is based on the average $420,750 per-store figure, multiplied by 3700 (the approximate number of stores currently in the United States).
  • Source: Rep. George Miller / Democratic Staff of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, “Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart”, February 16, 2004.

Also, too: Rob Walton, Chairman, Walmart — How the 1% Exploits America:

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When confronted with facts like these, how do you suppose the majority of Teabagistan would react? If you suppose that they’d defend Walmart’s cost to the American taxpayer as Freedom Loving Capitalism and Rob Walton’s wealth as rightfully earned through his own “hard work” and “God-fearing American Patriotism,” you’d probably be right. And it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to note that these self-loathing toads would also likely dismiss this information immediately by saying the need for health care reform is a Socialist / Fascist / Communist Kenyan Plot.

With the Republican Party and their presidential candidates at war with labor unions and working and middle class Americans, one day a job at Walmart is going to be the best any of us can hope for.

If the GOP wins, the difference will be that none of the benefits today’s Walmart employees have to rely on to simply live will be available for tomorrow’s Walmart employees. Still, when that day comes, Walmart and Rob Walton will have great tax rates and loopholes because of the Republican party — and they’ll be celebrated as job creators to boot. That’s called the Conservative Circle of Life.

Dog whistling past the facts (of food stamps)

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From Five Things You Probably Don’t Know About Food Stamps | Off The Charts Blog from CBPP.org:

  1. A large and growing share of SNAP households are working households (see chart). In 2010, more than three times as many SNAP households worked as relied solely on welfare benefits for their income.The share of SNAP households with earnings has continued growing in the past few years — albeit at a slower pace — despite the large increase in unemployment.One reason why SNAP is serving more working families is that, for a growing share of the nation’s workers, having a job has not been enough to keep them out of poverty.

SNAP Working Households Have Risen

Read all…

Recall that Rick Santorum said this on Jan. 2:

“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families.”

Before he, very bravely, claimed to have said ‘blah’ people instead of ‘black’ people. THEN! came this gem from Professor Gingrich on Jan. 5:

Newt Gingrich said at a Plymouth, NH town hall that he plans to “go to the NAACP convention and tell the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps.”

Turns out, according to reality, more people are choosing BOTH to survive.  But facts and reality don’t play well in places like South Carolina.

And as far as telling blah people or the NAACP, specifically, that they should choose a paycheck over foods stamps? See the demographics of ‘food stamps’ after the cut:  Continue reading →

Gingrich and Santorum might be trying to steal all the racist voters from Ron Paul

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Can Newt and Santorum just get their facts straight and quit dog-whistling to the most racist, disgusting segments of their unsavory voting base?

Today in New Hampshire:

[According to a tweet from Slate writer Dave Weigel, Newt Gingrich said at a Plymouth, NH town hall] that he plans to “go to the NAACP convention and tell the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps.”

Yeah, okay. Go for it, tough guy.

The old ‘black people are takin’ all the hard werkin’ peeples monies!’ argument. Except that if you’re going to go by facts, such as those provided by the socialist US Census Bureau, over 15% of the U.S. population is currently living in poverty — AND HALF OF THOSE IN POVERTY ARE WHITE. From Wikipedia:

Poverty and race — The US Census declared that in 2010 15.1% of the general population lived in poverty:[29]

    • 9.9% of all non-Hispanic white persons
    • 12.1% of all Asian persons
    • 26.6% of all Hispanic persons (of any nationality)
    • 27.4% of all black persons.

About half of those living in poverty are non-Hispanic white (19.6 million in 2010),[29] but poverty rates are much higher for blacks and Hispanics. Non-Hispanic white children comprised 57% of all poor rural children.[30]

Here’s something else completely weird that happened today: Santorum says that on Monday, when he said this:

“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families.”

…he claims he didn’t say “black people.” He said “BLAH people.” Blah people. He doesn’t want to give blah people other people’s money.

I. Shit. You. Not.

I’m sure Santorum doesn’t include the wealthy and corporations in those blah people taking other people’s money though — more tax cuts for them.

Related:

Iowans collect more federal benefits than they pay in federal taxes

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Hey Iowa conservatives: be sure to get your free Hoverounds and all the other federal assistance you can, before you vote for a smaller government for the rest of us!!

Iowans Collected More Federal Benefits Than They Paid In Federal Taxes

On average, every New Hampshire resident received $4,850 in direct assistance from federal programs in 2010 — that’s everything from the Medicare prescription drug benefit to Pell grants. According to a 2011 Census Bureau report, federal money also accounted for 30 cents of every dollar of New Hampshire state revenue in fiscal 2009, the most recent year for which comprehensive data are available. Federal money helps states pay for building roads and fixing bridges, among numerous other kinds of projects. [...]

Iowa received more federal money than New Hampshire in 2009. Thirty-three percent ($5.4 billion) of state revenue came from federal sources in that year…In addition to the billions of federal dollars that helped finance the state’s government, Iowa residents received substantial direct federal assistance. On average in 2010, residents of the state each received $5,400 from all federal programs. Iowans paid on average $5,175 in federal taxes that year — that includes income taxes as well as excise and other kinds of taxes, but excludes corporate incomes taxes. On balance, that means Iowans collected more federal benefits than they paid in federal taxes.

Read more

So Iowans received more federal money from all federal programs than they paid into the treasury? Who’s footing that bill do you suppose — Mitt Romney? Corporations? Jesus? No, it’s THE REST OF US.

So shouldn’t Santorum say this?

“I don’t want to make black people’s Iowans’ lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families.” — Rick Santorum 

The Santorum Surge: just one word

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@DavidCornDC

Related:

 

The GOP is against welfare for people, unless by ‘people’ you mean ‘corporations’

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“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families.” — Rick Santorum 

Why did Santorum single out black people (or for that matter, people?) The truth is:

[T]he people who benefit most from welfare programs are white people.

Among the poorest of the poor—single mothers, living below the poverty line with minor children to support 39.7 percent of AFDC clients are Black single mothers and 38.1 percent are White women with children. Food stamp recipients are 37.2 percent Black and 46.2 percent White. Medicaid benefits are paid to 27.5 percent Black recipients compared to 48.5 percent White clients. source

And which “people” (according to Mitt Romney) benefit from government welfare most of all?

Thirty corporations paid less than nothing in aggregate federal income taxes over the entire 2008-10 period.

In fact, in the last three years, 78 corporations had at least one year where they paid no federal income tax at all, while 30 corporations paid not a dime over the entire three years. Those 30 corporations paid nothing, even though they made $160 billion in profits over that period:

[...] These companies, whose pretax U.S. profits totaled $160 billion over the three years, included: Pepco Holdings (–57.6% tax rate), General Electric (–45.3%), DuPont (–3.4%), Verizon (–2.9%), Boeing (–1.8%), Wells Fargo (–1.4%) and Honeywell (–0.7%).

Instead of giving corporations “other people’s money” in the form of more tax cuts, loopholes and federal subsidies, shouldn’t we think about “giving them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families“?

More tax cuts for the wealthy paid for with austerity for the rest of us. Go GOP!

The Republicans candidates’ economic agenda for the 1 percent.

(Video) Bill Maher: The word for Republicans these days is PROMISCUOUS

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Maher [to the GOP base]: For a Republican candidate to not disappoint you, he would have to be Jesus of Nazareth. And even Jesus would be toast after a few news cycles, because “feed the hungry?” Sounds suspiciously like welfare. And “heal the sick… FOR FREE?” That is definitely Obamacare. And “turn the other cheek” …heh. Maybe you didn’t hear, Jesus, but this is the party that cheers executions.

 

Many anti-government people are not exactly brain surgeons

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Half of Americans Getting Government Aid Swear They’ve Never Used Government Programs

Half of people getting federal student loans don’t think they’ve ever used a government social program. Forty percent of Medicare recipients have no idea their health insurance is funded by the state. And 25 percent of the people receiving that emblem of All That Is Bad About Big Government, welfare, don’t connect that paycheck to the “enemy.” Given the fact that one in six Americans use anti-poverty programs alone, there’s a hell of a lot of people who are deluded about how much the government helps them out.

via: azspot