Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Bend over America, you are all now on Welfare......
Run to your mail boxes you poor pathetic sheep. The Power structure of the country, The Republocrats are going to send you $600. You cannot keep it, you have to take it down to WalMart and Starbucks, two very large supporters of our Israeli foreign policy of Continuous War, and spend it. The following is Greg Palast, a Non-Murdoch journalist in England, who will school you on what your government is actually giving you. Bend over!
Send Greg's foundation some money to keep his voice heard, I did.
by Greg Palast
Here's your question, class:
In his State of the Union, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.
Here's your second question. The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3 trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires. And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. OK class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That's right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.
Mr. Bush said, "In neighborhoods across our country, there are boys and girls with dreams. And a decent education is their only hope of achieving them."
So how much educational dreaming will $20 buy?
-George Bush's alma mater, Phillips Andover Academy, tells us their annual tuition is $37,200. The $20 "Pell Grant for Kids," as the White House calls it, will buy a poor kid about 35 minutes of this educational dream. So they'll have to wake up quickly.
-$20 won't cover the cost of the final book in the Harry Potter series.
If you can't buy a book nor pay tuition with a sawbuck, what exactly can a poor kid buy with $20 in urban America? The Palast Investigative Team donned baseball caps and big pants and discovered we could obtain what local citizens call a "rock" of crack cocaine. For $20, we were guaranteed we could fulfill any kid's dream for at least 15 minutes.
Now we could see the incontrovertible logic in what appeared to be quixotic ravings by the President about free trade with Colombia, Pell Grant for Kids and the surge in Iraq. In Iraq, General Petraeus tells us we must continue to feed in troops for another ten years. There is no way the military can recruit these freedom fighters unless our lower income youth are high, hooked and desperate. Don't say, 'crack vials,' they're, 'Democracy Rocks'!
The plan would have been clearer if Mr. Bush had kept in his speech the line from his original draft which read, "I have ordered 30,000 additional troops to Iraq this year – and I am proud to say my military-age kids are not among them."
Of course, there's an effective alternative to Mr. Bush's plan – which won't cost a penny more. Simply turn it upside down. Let's give each millionaire in America a $20 bill, and every poor child $287,000.
And, there's an added benefit to this alternative. Had we turned Mr. Bush and his plan upside down, he could have spoken to Congress from his heart.
-For more on Bush and education read "No Child's Behind Left" in Armed Madhouse excerpted here.
-Also read Palast's take on the 2007 State of the Union here.
*************
Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-sellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. View Palast's investigative reports for BBC Television on our YouTube Channel.
Join our social networking sites on Facebook on MySpace and on Google's Orkut. Sign up for RSS updates of our site and for our podcasts.
Support our work by donating to the Palast Investigative Fund(a 501c3 educational foundation).
Send Greg's foundation some money to keep his voice heard, I did.
by Greg Palast
Here's your question, class:
In his State of the Union, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.
Here's your second question. The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3 trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires. And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. OK class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That's right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.
Mr. Bush said, "In neighborhoods across our country, there are boys and girls with dreams. And a decent education is their only hope of achieving them."
So how much educational dreaming will $20 buy?
-George Bush's alma mater, Phillips Andover Academy, tells us their annual tuition is $37,200. The $20 "Pell Grant for Kids," as the White House calls it, will buy a poor kid about 35 minutes of this educational dream. So they'll have to wake up quickly.
-$20 won't cover the cost of the final book in the Harry Potter series.
If you can't buy a book nor pay tuition with a sawbuck, what exactly can a poor kid buy with $20 in urban America? The Palast Investigative Team donned baseball caps and big pants and discovered we could obtain what local citizens call a "rock" of crack cocaine. For $20, we were guaranteed we could fulfill any kid's dream for at least 15 minutes.
Now we could see the incontrovertible logic in what appeared to be quixotic ravings by the President about free trade with Colombia, Pell Grant for Kids and the surge in Iraq. In Iraq, General Petraeus tells us we must continue to feed in troops for another ten years. There is no way the military can recruit these freedom fighters unless our lower income youth are high, hooked and desperate. Don't say, 'crack vials,' they're, 'Democracy Rocks'!
The plan would have been clearer if Mr. Bush had kept in his speech the line from his original draft which read, "I have ordered 30,000 additional troops to Iraq this year – and I am proud to say my military-age kids are not among them."
Of course, there's an effective alternative to Mr. Bush's plan – which won't cost a penny more. Simply turn it upside down. Let's give each millionaire in America a $20 bill, and every poor child $287,000.
And, there's an added benefit to this alternative. Had we turned Mr. Bush and his plan upside down, he could have spoken to Congress from his heart.
-For more on Bush and education read "No Child's Behind Left" in Armed Madhouse excerpted here.
-Also read Palast's take on the 2007 State of the Union here.
*************
Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-sellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. View Palast's investigative reports for BBC Television on our YouTube Channel.
Join our social networking sites on Facebook on MySpace and on Google's Orkut. Sign up for RSS updates of our site and for our podcasts.
Support our work by donating to the Palast Investigative Fund(a 501c3 educational foundation).
Welcome to our endless War, 1984 came late.....
Thanks to Lori for keeping us informed.
Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens For Legitimate Government
29 Jan 2008
http://www.legitgov.org/
All items are here:
http://www.legitgov.org/breaking_news
'Every word of Bush's last State of the Union Address actually signified its antonym.' Happy Birthday, Thomas Paine! --The Rec Report By Michael Rectenwald 29 Jan 2008 It is fitting that Thomas Paine's birthday should fall on the day after the last State of the Union Address given by Bush... This year, his birthday should be celebrated as well. Today, we begin our own countdown to liberation from the political, mental, economic, ideological and rhetorical tyranny of the Bush regime. This is particularly fitting as today we begin to shake off the shackles of mental and political bondage imposed on us for seven long years. [A must read!]
New analysis 'confirms' 1 million+ Iraq casualties --Further survey work undertaken by ORB, in association with its research partner IIACSS, confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003. 28 Jan 2008 Following responses to ORB's earlier work, which was based on survey work undertaken in primarily urban locations, we have conducted almost 600 additional interviews in rural communities. By and large the results are in line with the 'urban results' and we now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000.
Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens For Legitimate Government
29 Jan 2008
http://www.legitgov.org/
All items are here:
http://www.legitgov.org/breaking_news
'Every word of Bush's last State of the Union Address actually signified its antonym.' Happy Birthday, Thomas Paine! --The Rec Report By Michael Rectenwald 29 Jan 2008 It is fitting that Thomas Paine's birthday should fall on the day after the last State of the Union Address given by Bush... This year, his birthday should be celebrated as well. Today, we begin our own countdown to liberation from the political, mental, economic, ideological and rhetorical tyranny of the Bush regime. This is particularly fitting as today we begin to shake off the shackles of mental and political bondage imposed on us for seven long years. [A must read!]
New analysis 'confirms' 1 million+ Iraq casualties --Further survey work undertaken by ORB, in association with its research partner IIACSS, confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003. 28 Jan 2008 Following responses to ORB's earlier work, which was based on survey work undertaken in primarily urban locations, we have conducted almost 600 additional interviews in rural communities. By and large the results are in line with the 'urban results' and we now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000.
Monday, January 07, 2008
America getting sheared again, Baaaa Baaaa Baaa
Dont you love it from behind America.......?
Here we go again. You thought Johnson could pull the wool over our eyes with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, now we have the disasterpresident pulling our hair from behind. Wasn't the attack on New York phony enough for you America. Now you will be forced into more sheep pens and sheared of what little cash you have in reserve to fight a War for the people in the world with vast wealth and corporations. These are your sheperds along with the disasterpresident and his trickledown economic contingent. You know what they say about sheperds and sheep...........
Thanks to CarolAnn from Myspace for passing this along.
Here we go again. You thought Johnson could pull the wool over our eyes with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, now we have the disasterpresident pulling our hair from behind. Wasn't the attack on New York phony enough for you America. Now you will be forced into more sheep pens and sheared of what little cash you have in reserve to fight a War for the people in the world with vast wealth and corporations. These are your sheperds along with the disasterpresident and his trickledown economic contingent. You know what they say about sheperds and sheep...........
Thanks to CarolAnn from Myspace for passing this along.
