HOW DARE poor people have refrigerators and air conditioners!

If you have not seen or read this, please do. I SCREAMED when I heard this crap coming out of these people's mouths. It is NOT OK for these people to think this.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/19/jon-stewart-rips-fox-news_n_931177.html


<snip>
On Thursday night's "Daily Show" Jon Stewart took a break from speculating about the GOP presidential race and did a lengthy segment on conservative pundits' contradictory views about the rich and the poor when it comes to deciding how to lower the deficit.

While the GOP wants to make low-level spending cuts to social, educational and other programs, President Obama and company suggest taxing the mega-rich. So it was pretty surprising this week when Warren Buffet wrote his op-ed saying he and his millionaire cohorts ought to be paying more taxes. Fox News called it "Class Warfare," with one pundit even calling Buffett a Socialist, which got a hilarious reaction from Stewart:

"You really have no f**king clue what Socialism is, do you?"


There is a two part video. If this has already been posted, sorry, but I thought it needed to be seen by as many people as possible!
Duckie

unfit for human habitation and bulldozed, that's why. If they have AC units, you can bet your ass they never turn them on, they can't afford it.

You can't compare poor folks in the US to poor folks in Bangladesh, it's apples to oranges and only a fucking Republican idiot would try it.

I had my husband play this for me on his computer and watch it with me so I didn't throw my laptop across the room. LOL I knew it was going to piss me off. Oh shit. I have a laptop. I guess I'm not poor. I wish I would have gotten the memo.
Duckie

I'm so tired of seeing the poor made out to be "The Enemy".

We're a necessary part of the machine that also screams at everyone that the machine is broken.

If there were no poor people, the Workers would ask for a bigger cut...

...But because there ARE poor people, obviously we aren't the "Land of Opportunity."

Solution? "The Poor are lazy and suck off the gov't teat."

Funny, because if you change one word: The Rich are lazy and suck off the gov't teat.

from Bangladesh

A cold empty box with a light in it is no improvement over an empty pot sitting over the remains of a dung fire. Both lead to empty bellies and those empty bellies hurt more than most of us believe anything can hurt.

I don't honestly think you can quantify poverty by what's around a person. Poverty is cold, hungry, and hopeless no matter where it is and what gadgets one is surrounded by.

We can't quantify poverty. It is a feeling that is hard to convey to anyone who hasn't experienced it. "Hopelessness" is a good word to define it. I also think of "fear", afraid each day that you might lose what little you have and become totally vulnerable, homeless, sick, and alone.

For those who survive poverty and move into a better way of life, it often seems that the specter of poverty hovers over them, as a constant threat. I don't think we ever completely escape from its grasp. The threat and possibility is always there.

and had a morbid fear of poverty her whole life. I've been poor most of my life and now that I inherited being middle class, I still have a lot of the same habits that saw me through poverty. Unlike my mother, I don't fear it. It's just like that unwelcome relative that moves in for a long stay whether you want him around or not. He's gone for the time being but I know he could reappear at any moment.

Living on mac & cheese and Top Ramen in college is not poverty because there is hope that the living wage will occur upon graduation. When you're really in poverty, there is no hope that things will improve. None.

Being frugal during times of temporary struggle is not the same as poverty. There is no pervasive fear because there is hope.

I often feel like I've moved past it, but it does pop in now and again, perhaps as a reminder that of where I've been. If nothing else, it helps me to maintain my empathy for others.

else posted prior to you, I didn't see it, so thank you!

...but it's just as well, you'd just be pissed off after you saw it. I don't know what to do, but we have to do SOMETHING to get this country out of the hands of THOSE PEOPLE!

Is that the part you watched?

I just want to knock the living fuck out of him, and I am not ordinarily a violent person. GOD that made me angry. What an arrogant, sanctimonious prick.

:grr: :grr: :grr:

good thing we extended those tax cuts.

:(

We have a refrigerator, but we sure as hell don't own it. Our landlord owns it, along with all of the other appliances in our house with the exception of our microwave--and the microwave is old and falling apart (the carousel inside stopped working a couple of years ago).

We have the USE of these appliances. But they aren't things that we paid for, and we couldn't go sell them if we needed cash for groceries or bills. This is incredibly common for poor families.

But they don't get that.
Moocher class. :wtf:

someone making $150k a year, which is not an unreasonable salary, has as much income in a month as a minimum wage worker has for a year.

edited to add: assuming the minimum wage worker can get 40 hours a week, some have to work 2 or 3 jobs to get that many hours.

Don't tell!

Um, they're not the luxury item that they were in the early 1990's. In may cases, especially in the case of the homeless, it's a person's only lifeline to loved ones, children's schools and to job prospects. How DARE poor people have a phone! :eyes:

items that say in 1970 people thought were luxury items but today are routine and more to the point there are countless used ones in second hand stores and Craigslist. The original list they are quoting from on the list showed most had TVs, but of course dramatically fewer had plasma TVs. The best part of the Daily Show clip to me was the taking 50 % of the poors money is same amount generates slight changing the marginal tax rate on the wealthy. I really blows your mind how poor 50 % of Americans are. That people successfully use the 50% don't pay income tax line, shows how out of touch Americans are to poverty within their own country.

It's called Safelink. You get a set number of minutes per month through Tracfone, and the phone is free.

:puke:

I can;t believe this bullshit is spewed 24/7...my dad listens to it (and he knows why his daughter is on welfare), but he still yells about the poor as if i wasn't listening... gah!

can the pres come out on this harder now that he's campaigning...fuck letting the bush cuts expire, end them now.
ya, and i also wish i'd see some troops brought home before the election too...wishful thinking i suppose

and was taking them to task for it. I hope you're not blaming him for that. He doesn't have to make anything up. Those morons make his job SOOO easy!!
Duckie

faux clips... :mad:

everyone knows that poor folks should only drink ditch-water

Foundation, Robert Rector, was complaining about the "poor" having amenities that others have...as if being poor should relegate people to absolute destitution.

Refrigerators, AC, an automobile and other such items were mentioned, but why should "poor" individuals not be permitted to have these things? Being poor is miserable enough, any small item that brings someone up is a good thing.

The "best" the Heritage Foundation can come up with is that some people "deserve" nothing, they are poor, and they deserve to die poor. What arrogance...I hope they lose gobs of cash in the stock market...and become poor...:D

Doesn't having a refrigerator actually save money actually save money in the long term? You can keep food for longer if you didn't have one.

from the Heritage Foundation on Washington Journal this morning, it is much worse that that! You see, most of the poor in the US are actually upper middle class with plasma TV sets and Xboxes!

Meanwhile, criminals on Wall Street cyphon all of the money out of society and then look upon the poverty they have wrought with contempt.

Fuck them. I say we tear down their walls.

Great job by TDS.

rooting through muddy ditches for garbage.

Remember the Greek riots a few months back? Yeah, that'll look like a baseball game compared to the revolution that is coming...

Right in the front row. :evilgrin:

It is indeed more important to the rich about what the rest of us DON'T have than what they DO.

They could be 1000x richer if they didn't sit on technology that would make our lives better, or crash the economy for Billions in profit every decade.

Their goal is our abject misery. They aim pretty high for being "The Intellectual Elite," don't they?

things being the way they are I can't refute it.

I didn't understand the mindset of the 1%ers until I matched Orwell's insight about their sadism with their obvious delight in being above the law.

My moment of cognitive dissonance was finding out how many clean energy projects are destroyed by big business. What if we had a kind of low cost, low impact energy? What if we put everyone to work and paid them well. What if they all worked to make the system better, and the rich were allowed their usual place at the top?

With that kind of happiness/productivity/capital flowing, the top 1% wouldn't have the 46 trillion they are sitting on. They'd have easily 5x that and a stable and clean society to boot.

So, when you look at it that way, I think Orwell nailed it. The 1% would be happy with middle class levels of wealth as long as everyone else was dirt poor and begging at their feet. In a world where they watch our every move, learning is forbidden, thoughtcrime is punishable by torture or death, and they are Gods.