Suburban Guerrilla

Here’s what the budget signed by Pennsylvania’s own Scott Walker just did to our state’s neediest and most vulnerable: Kicking sick and dying kids off Medicaid, and cutting general assistance. He considers himself a good Catholic. Personally, I think Jesus would be disgusted:

“On Sunday, nearly 70,000 Pennsylvanians with disabilities will lose their sole source of income overnight,” legal aid lawyer Michael Froehlich of Community Legal Services in Philadelphia told me yesterday.

The sudden elimination of the “safety net of last resort”—the General Assistance (GA) program—is especially troubling when one considers who is currently eligible for it: disabled or sick adults without children; domestic violence survivors, many of whom have just fled abusers (lifetime benefit capped at nine months); adults participating in alcohol and other drug treatment programs (also capped at nine months); adults caring for someone sick or disabled, or an unrelated child; and children living with an unrelated adult.

In all, over 90 percent of recipients are temporarily or permanently disabled. The 68,000 people in the program—or just about one in every 200 residents—receive approximately $205 per month. Those funds enable many people to rent a room, pay for transportation to needed appointments, cover co-pays, or escape abuse. DPW estimates that eliminating the GA program will save the state $150 million annually.

Enough money to give a huge tax break to an energy company, but not enough to help the neediest.

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Author and “zipless fuck” pioneer Erica Jong is seventy years old now, and her brand of feminism looks a bit naive in perspective, but it’s a pleasure to read that her priorities are still in order. Here she is calling out the greedy, ideological shapeshifter Arianna Huffington for refusing to pay all those writers who helped make her online publication such a lucrative venture:

“The idea that everybody’s writing for free is hurting writing as a profession. I wrote many articles for Arianna when she was establishing her aggregator blog and attracting all those eyeballs.

When she got $300m from the AOL acquisition, I said, ‘OK, Arianna, we all helped you get there so now you’re going to pay writers.’ She said, ‘No, I pay my editors.’ I’ve known Arianna for years…

More here.

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Sure they do!

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No cushion, no nothing. Welcome to our world:

 According to research released Monday by Bankrate.com, 28 percent of Americans have no emergency savings whatsoever, up from 24 percent last year. About half don’t have enough money saved to cover expenses for three months. “Incomes are largely stagnant, so it’s difficult for people to make significant headway on savings when household expenses are creeping higher but incomes are not,” said Bankrate senior financial analyst Greg McBride.

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The slave trade in this country has been dead for more than a century and a half, right? Tell it to “guestworkers,” and to millions of American citizens who can’t find jobs that pay a living wage:

For most people in Louisiana, cracking the shell off a crawfish, sucking the head, and swallowing the tail meat is a joyous part of what it means to call this place home. But peeling crawfish is not so fun for guestworkers from Mexico, who allege that they are facing slave-like conditions in a Louisiana plant.

Eight striking guestworkers, who say they are sometimes forced to peel and boil crawfish for up to 24 hours straight without overtime pay, outlined the alleged abuses in a rally outside of a Sam’s Club in Metairie on Wednesday, June 6th. That same day, they filed complaints with the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against their employer, C.J.’s Seafood of Breaux Bridge, La., on behalf of the forty guest workers employed there. C.J.’s Seafood sells an estimated 85% of its crawfish to Walmart, the largest retailer in the United States, and owner of Sam’s Club.

The workers cited abusive treatment from Michael Leblanc, the general manager of C.J.’s Seafood. Leblanc is also head of the Crawfish Processors Alliance, which is fighting the Department of Labor’s recent efforts to improve pay for H-2B guestworkers. Leblanc could not be reached for comment. NOLA.com reported that a Sam’s Club spokesperson said in an email that the company was investigating the allegations…

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Sen. Jeff Sessions is so reliably on the wrong side of the angels that you know when he pushes policy as a “moral issue,” it will be anything but.

What else would you call a $2 billion cut in food stamps during a depression? I can’t wait until he dies and he finds out Jesus hates him.

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From Guardian UK:

But since the outbreak of Greece’s runaway debt crisis, its moneyed class has been notable more by its absence than presence. Oligarchs, who made vast fortunes cornering the oil, gas, construction and banking industries, as well as the media, have been eerily silent – often going out of their way to be as low a profile as possible.

Greek shipowners, who have gained from their profits being tax-free and who control at least 15% of the world’s merchant freight, have also remained low-key. With their wealth offshore and highly secretive, the estimated 900 families who run the sector have the largest fleet in the world. As Athens’ biggest foreign currency earner after tourism, the industry remitted more than $175bn (£112bn) to the country in untaxed earnings over the past decade. Greece’s debt currently stands at €280bn.

As ordinary Greeks have been thrown into ever greater poverty by wage and pension cuts and a seemingly endless array of new and higher taxes, their wealthy compatriots have been busy either whisking their money out of Greece or snapping up prime real estate abroad…

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Good old Robert Reich apparently still thinks Americans are able and willing to learn the lessons of history:

The major reason this recovery has been so anemic is not Europe’s debt crisis. It’s not Japan’s tsumami. It’s not Wall Street’s continuing excesses. It’s not, as right-wing economists tell us, because taxes are too high on corporations and the rich, and safety nets are too generous to the needy. It’s not even, as some liberals contend, because the Obama administration hasn’t spent enough on a temporary Keynesian stimulus.

The answer is in front of our faces. It’s because American consumers, whose spending is 70 percent of economic activity, don’t have the dough to buy enough to boost the economy – and they can no longer borrow like they could before the crash of 2008…

…What to do? There’s no simple answer in the short term except to hope we stay in first gear and don’t slide backwards. Rarely in history has the cause of a major economic problem been so clear yet have so few been willing to see it.

Over the longer term the answer is to make sure the middle class gets far more of the gains from economic growth.

How? We might learn something from history. During the 1920s, income concentrated at the top. By 1928, the top 1 percent was raking in an astounding 23.94 percent of the total (close to the 23.5 percent the top 1 percent got in 2007) according to analyses of tax records by my colleague Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. At that point the bubble popped and we fell into the Great Depression.

But then came the Wagner Act, requiring employers to bargain in good faith with organized labor. Social Security and unemployment insurance. The Works Projects Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. A national minimum wage. And to contain Wall Street: The Securities Act and Glass-Steagall Act…

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Charles Pierce is on to something regarding the casino mentality that has slowly poisoned this country over the years since the first non-Nevada casinos in America opened:

…Consider: Most every state in the Union, including the Commonwealth (God save it!) here, would rather build 20 casinos than risk raising taxes a dime, as though gambling itself were not a brutal tax. (How do I know this? Because once, long ago, on the night Mark McGwire and his pharmacist went past Roger Maris and his bartender for the single-season home run record, I sat in a casino in Tunica, Mississippi, and watched a 300-pound woman with oxygen tubes up her nose feed quarters into a slot machine while wearing a T-shirt that said, “Jesus Is The Answer.” This was the same trip on which I saw a billboard outside Vicksburg that suggested, “Sell Your Car For Cash.”) The entire Republican economic plan is one long gamble on a bunch of economic theories that already have failed twice in my lifetime. Ask even earnest young liberals how you manage to get a middle class without a manufacturing base, an active government, and strong unions, and you get the same kind of shrug you get along the rail when you ask someone why they bet the 5-horse when the creature plainly has hooves the size of a country ham. Ask Willard Romney the same thing, and he makes even less sense…

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Alan Grayson in Huffington Post:

…Bush claimed (as right-wingers always do) that tax breaks for the rich would create jobs in the private sector. Well, they haven’t. There were 110 million private sector jobs in America in 2001. There are 110 million private sector jobs in America today. Despite a population increase of more than 25 million, there are no more private sector jobs today than when the Bush tax breaks for the rich became law.

In the past 11 years, the number of Americans living in poverty has increased from 33 million to 44 million. The number of Americans receiving food stamps has risen from 18 million to 46 million. “Trickle-down” has not even been a trickle…

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