Bonus Pay or Unemployment - Let's flip us a coin:

This is well worth the read.
By the end of the article, the writer has chronicled how the people at a tent city near Los Angeles are made to wear plastic colored wrist bracelets.


To Pay or Not to Pay
By: Bernard Chazelle

People fail to appreciate how tough it is to run the government. Here are two questions Treasury officials and politicians will soon have to answer:

Should a Connecticut trader receive $100 million in executive pay from a bank that would be dead had it not received $45 billion in taxpayer money? Apparently, the guy's genius was to drive up the price of gas to $4 a gallon. Does he deserve 100 million bucks from you for that?
Should unemployment benefits be extended for 1.5 million jobless Americans who will otherwise run out of money by the end of the year and fall into destitution and, sometimes, homelessness?


Full story is at
www.tinyrevolution.com (Scroll to first story down)

Let me just turn this one up:



Thanks TD! :hi:

Maybe Obama could ship these people some nice cold Brewskis. They sure could use them.

But for the grace of Gods, etc, etc.

I especially felt for the lady who'd lost her motorhome. I've known a few people who avoided complete destitution by having a van or motorhome in which to live temporarily until they could find something else, hell, I've had to do it myself. You could sleep, keep basic cleanliness and get to work. There was always the danger of getting towed, broken into, or arrested for sleeping in one's 'car' any of which could wipe one out of pretty much all belongings since affording the mounting impound bills would be impossible even with a shitty job. The color-coded wristbands meting out 'deserving' and 'undeserving' status are just a little facsist icing on the shit cake.

It's essentially illegal to be homeless and jobless in our society. I hate the morality (spilled over at least from the dawn of the industrial world) that decrees that people who fall thru the cracks are 'lazy' and 'undeserving poor'. Not long ago I read an eye-opening book called 'Victorian Underworld' about poverty in the Victorian era. Our society's attitude has changed little in this time. We still break things down into the 'deserving' and 'undeserving', mobile camps with their own codes spring up and operate in the shadow of vacant housing that no-one can afford, and the rich keep getting richer off the ones who will accept poor pay and poorer treatment just to avoid the fate of their companions while landlords and merchants still bleed every imaginable spare penny left over. Except this time we get wristbands to signal our 'status' to the authorities.

It hasn't really changed in 150 years. I can't wait for industrial capitalism to go the way of the other 'peculiar institutions' of that era.