I won But I Did Everything Right’s book giveaway and will shortly be the proud owner of Econned by Yvves Smith!

Perhaps it is not just Other cousin who has lucky boobs?

Lemme clear up a few myths for you.

1) I am not a Republican. I did not want the Republicans to win. If I had wanted the Republicans to win, I would have voted for the Republicans. But I didn’t.

2) I am not a racist. Well, everyone is a little bit racist, though i work really damn hard to overcome all that (not needing a cookie for that work, btw). I don’t dislike Obama because he is black. I dislike him because he’s a corporatist dillhole with a giant letter D after his name. As a matter of fact, the person that I did vote for looks just like this

If I had wanted to vote for a white person, I certainly had an option to do so. But I wanted to vote for the person and party that actually represented my values and issues best. It was giant bonus that she happens to be both female and black. (But actually those two oppression points may explain why her values are closer to mine than Obama’s are).

3) I know the I told you so’s are hard to take. Suck it up pooh bear.

4)If the only pressure we, as individual citizens, can exert on the system is with our vote, then why do you keep giving that vote to people who don’t believe in the same values that you do? I know, winning seems important, but what you’re really showing is that your vote has no value. You will give it to someone who will work against your best interests, against your beliefs, as long as sometimes your party can come out on the winning side.

Didn’t you ever watch an 80’s teen flick? Did you not get the often used message that staying on the assholes side just because he’s a winner never makes you cool?

One of the big reasons I have never finished college is money. My grants ran out with a quarter left before finishing my transfer degree, and without transferring to a university, I’m not eligible for more money. My college, for very good reason, cut out the student loan program over a decade ago. They found that access to student loans didn’t actually increase graduation rates, and instead just left already low-income students with a huge debt and no degree. They worked pretty hard at keeping tuition rates under the pell grant amounts instead.

I could have gone to another community college and gotten a student loan. And once I transfered I could have gotten more student loans to offset the huge economic cost of not being able to work full time and going to school. But I have a child who in 3 years will also need to go to college, and racking up a mountain of debt for college leaves me in a shit of a place. If I do that, I need to make sure that as soon as I get out of college I can get a job that pays well enough for me to both pay off my own student loans AND pay straight out for the Kid’s education because a job that pays well enough to pay off college debt will make the kid less eligible for financial aid and my having a degree makes him less eligible for financial aid (kids with parents without college degrees get more aid for being the first in their family to go to college, even if their parents went to college and didn’t finish). A BA in poly sci will not pay for those things. Without already being part of the power structure, a BA will only make me eligible to drive a cab. And there is no way I could even think about grad school until after the Kid is fully launched into the world. My plan instead is to 1) stay dirt poor 2) stay un(der)educated 3) get Kid into college the old fashioned way, with pell grants.

So no degree for me. Also, no college debt for me. Uhm, yay me!

But I know a gazillion people with college debt that is crushing them and have no job to show for it. The amounts that they owe for an education that is not serving them is staggering. It may be the single shittiest investment ever. Maybe worse than handing over money to Bernie Madoff. I’m not saying college isn’t good and useful and people shouldn’t go. I’m saying that the way we pay for it stupid.

A quick google tells me ( and since I am not sure of the sources, I am not linking) that the average student loan debt is about $20k (not including all the fat interest the students will pay over the lifetime of the loan) and that over 100 BILLION dollars worth of federally backed loans are made every year for college.

This is where the Costco analogy for taxes comes in pretty fucking handy. Did you go to college, do you want to go to college, do you have children that you want to go to college? Then perhaps instead of paying full retail price plus all that fucking loan interest, you’d like to join our bulk buyers’ club. It’s called Taxes Pay for Really Good Shit for Much Cheaper than Market Rate.

Here’s how it works. You pay a little bit of your income out over the course of your lifetime, like those membership fees you pay at Costco only instead of Costco you write out a check every year to the IRS and lucky you, you already have a membership card. It’s that weird blue and white paper card that you’re not supposed to laminate. Yeah, that one. Then when you need it, right next to the 8 thousand pill bottle of Advil, is OHHHH AHHHHHHH Super Cheap or Nearly Free College!

And here’s the even cooler thing, it’s still there if you’re middle class and your kids don’t qualify for pell grants. It’s still there if you’re super poor and pell grants won’t pay for everything. It’s still there if you’re a brown kid in my old neighborhood considering walking into the Army office because you know your momma don’t have no way to pay for you to go to college when she’s still got 2 other babies at home. Ohhhhhhh Ahhhhhhhhhhhh.

Now this might make those of you who are middle class a little uncomfortable. I know, you put yourself through college by eating ramen noodles and taking out giant loans and dammit those poor brown kids could do the same if they just opened a book instead of playing basketball with their friends all the time./snark.

Look, if you still need to feel superior to poor/brown people, I am sure colleges will be more than happy to assist you with that through their admissions requirements. But dude, I have a fucking 3.8 gpa. And I can’t finish college. So suck it.

Wouldn’t you rather feel superior without a gazzilion dollars in student loan debt than with it. It just makes way more sense, and I’m the un(der)educated one.

(This post was inspired the frequent bitter ramblings of the good peeps at But I Did Everything Right, who, from what I have read, do not feel the need to feel superior to brown people. They are lawyers. They are used to being made fun of. Even by people who like them)

Sylvie dropped this in comments on the My Old Neighborhood Post. (I love you Sylvie!)

I’m only about 20 minutes into it, but you should all go watch it.

My old neighborhood in Seattle, where the Kid went from tiny boy child to a young man. Where we knew all the grocery store clerks and the pharmacist and who to watch out for on the street. Where our neighbors looked out for us and we looked out for them. We traded flour and sugar and eggs and bus fare and cigarettes. Where we were just a 7 minute walk from my work or Kid’s school or the the grocery or drugstore and a bus ride to everywhere else. Where the spectacle had a hard time taking hold because we all knew the realities of the world and couldn’t afford the cushioning to hide ourselves from it.

Where sometimes (and more often than sometimes as the Kid grew big enough to be easy prey- people will stop a stranger from hurting a small child in public but teens and near teens don’t have that layer of protection) bad shit happened. Police raids with those big things they use to ram doors, multiple shootings, a domestic dispute where my neighbors beat each other’s cars with baseball bats till there wasn’t a window or light intact. I think domestic violence is more obvious in poor neighborhoods, where small apartments can’t hide the screaming and constant financial stress leaves everyone more angry.

That long intro was just so i could show you all a video. I am homesick tonight.

Blue Scholars: Back Home

Certain scenes from this video (the girl walking past the construction site, for example) were shot right across the street from our old apartment. The grocery store where all the clerks knew the Kid’s name was in the same shopping center as the recruiting offices for each fucking branch of the military. They were well placed. That shopping center was were all the neighborhood high school kids, the ones who weren’t white kids bussed in from fancy craftsman homes in the north of the city to go to the AP program, would congregate when the afternoon bell rang at Garfield high school (which is also in the video). The kids would get their afternoon sugar fix at the Red Apple store or the AMPM, or the lucky ones with more than a buck or two would get a Starbucks coffee. And the recruiters were there. Just waiting for those black and brown and “other” kids to realize there wasn’t much else for them. There’s no college scholarship. There’s no job. But if you sign up, oh that can all be changed and you can be all that you can be.

When we moved into the big fancy craftsman house with Ruth and Bernard in the north of the city for that last year, we lost all that. We lost the neighbors and the grocery clerks and the friendships and the sense of community. We also lost the high likelihood of violence aimed at the kid. (Though I still saw plenty of cops doing crappy shit to brown kids in the fancy neighborhood, that didn’t change).

And nowhere near the shopping center that housed the new grocery store (Whole Foods) and the drugstore and the super expensive kitchen gadget store, and the Dania furniture store, was a military recruiting office, even though the high school was right there.

The kids in that neighborhood were paler and richer. College was inevitable, though which one was the question. There wasn’t going to be a hard awakening for those kids about the realities of the world that would drive them into the Army recruiter’s storefront. These are kids for whom the afternoon Starbucks is a mandatory expense along with music lessons and sports teams and SAT tutoring. In my old neighborhood, coming up with the testing fees alone would have been a challenge. Tutoring was out of the question.

But the real issue is, for those poor kids whose reality doesn’t include SATs and college applications or even the possibility of a living wage job, is it really a choice when the only option left is military service. Is this kind of disparity it’s own sort of underhanded draft in order to, once again and as always, pull poor boys and girls into fighting with and the killing of and dying at the hands of other poor boys and girls, all while the strings are pulled by the parents of the kids who can always afford an after school Starbucks.

I get how hard it is to separate yourself from a political party you have been a member of for your entire life, cause I was a member of that same party since I was old enough to know that there were 2 choices.

But when that party no longer holds firm on any of the things that used to make up its core beliefs, when it betrays the people who have made up it’s base and shits on things that should be sacred, it’s time to give up the allegiance to the label, or change what your definition of Democrat is and embrace the neoliberal.

The right of a citizen not to be executed without a fair trial: unless you’re a muslim.

The fundamental right of women to control their own bodies: While some may say “this doesn’t fundamentally change anything” they are generally people without a uterus. And for me, being a woman, who has worked for the party SPECIFICALLY because it is the party of choice, this shows a move away from the moral highground. This is not “Safe, legal and rare”. This is “your body is a political football and those of us in power have decided to punt you”.

Being anti-torture: Here’s the thing, if you refuse to prosecute government agents who commit torture, it ain’t much different from just being pro-torture. If there is no enforcement of a law, then it isn’t really illegal.

The environment, including no offshore drilling and “clean” coal: it doesn’t matter that these projects won’t be finished and doing actual harm to the environment until after Obama leaves office. It matters that dems started the projects and that dems sold out the environment. We expect that from rethuglikans, that is what they are. But dems are supposed to be the crunchy granola, protect the spotted owl, Al Gore in fleece and flannel explaining global warming, good guys. But offshore drilling and clean coal are bad bad bad, no matter how many ways you try to frame it.

Social Security is the untouchable third rail, or not: Every time some new right wing bloviator would whinge on about how out of control Social Security spending is for the last 15 years or so, I’d remember that every time I saw a left leaning economist talk about it, they’d laugh at the stupidity. Social Security all ready pays for itself. There mechanisms to keep it paying for itself. Anyone who talks about “runaway entitlement spending” is 1) usually a rethuglikan and 2) usually dead wrong. So what does it say that the person who is going to bring about the death of Social Security is not someone with a George W. privatization scheme, but a Democrat.

Spying on citizens is for rethuglikans, except when it’s not:Do I even need to break this down for you all, or is it a matter of IOKIYAR has now become “It’s not really a fundamental breach of your rights if it’s done by a Democrat”. The same can be applied to that fucking Stupak executive order.

How about the Dems are the party of regulating bad boy industries: You know, under Clinton tobacco companies were sued and states got fat wads of money to cover the health problems created by smoking plus insuring children. Under Obama and his merry band of banksters, we get ………

it would create a system highly dependent on the wisdom and good intentions of government officials. And as the history of the last decade demonstrates, trusting in the quality of officials can be dangerous to the economy’s health.

Just to give you an idea of the quality of officials currently running the show, here’s a little story about Timmy Geithner and AIG.

i haven’t even gotten into things like health care (the bill passed was fine with rethuglikans like Mitt Romney and Bob Dole) and unemployment and foreclosures and tent cities and and and.

And I haven’t gotten into things like a Democratic commander in chief should not be the head of an army that kills pregnant women and teenagers and then covers it up.

If you want to keep calling yourself a Democrat, that’s fine. But please understand that I am now going to believe that your fundamental belief system is one that is anti-woman, anti-environment, pro-torture, pro-wiretapping, kill social security, love s big corrupt industries and approves of murder.

You can either be loyal to a party or you can have your ideals. But you can’t have both, not anymore.

Lemme do some advertising for you. Really.

Blue Lyon has a post up called Where to go from here? that is all about the great big sucking hole of depression that has set in for those of us realizing that there is no hope coming from traditional methods of change.

I’m familiar with that feeling. I get gloomy sometimes. But just for a little bit. Then it’s time to pick yourself up and jump back into the fight.

This is what I wrote to Blue Lyon

I am so familiar with that deep crushing sense of despair.
We keep doing what we are doing. We keep holding feet to the fire. We keep on keeping on.
What gives me a wee bit of hope (and I may just be kidding myself, but a girl’s gotta dream) is this: the parties we have now have not always existed, and they have not always been what they are (or claim to be). Republicans started out as radical anti-slavery progressives. Dems were the conservative party.
I think the republicans will eat themselves, because really they don’t have a purpose anymore. The democrats have taken over as the party of corporate interests and screw the little people.
So there is room for a new second party, and that room isn’t being made on the right, but on the left. I still like the Greens. There is nothing in their platform that I disagree with so far. I like their candidates (except for Nader, but that might be residual democratic sour grapes) . I like that they are already established and have a (fledgling) infrastructure. If I am going to put my work into politics, I will put it there.
Otherwise, I’m building a commune in Iceland (or Spain- pro women, pro gays, pro human rights, my favorite wines and nice weather).
Sorry for the long ramble. I’m wordy lately

Neither of the 2 main parties are serving the left in any way, manner, shape or form. I think the numbers of lefties who are disillusioned with the whole process is growing, quietly but fast. I think it’s a fan-fucking-tastic time for another party to step in.

Hello Greens!

So if I had some $ and some power and the Green Party was listening to me, I would start running commercials. I would focus on the things that Greens and Dems should (or used to) have in common. Talk about single payer health care, talk about finance reform and regulation, talk about opposition to off shore drilling and the environment, a women’s right to control her own body. Run a series of images. A child getting a checkup, a bankster going to jail, a gorgeous shoreline nature shot, a middle aged mom standing behind her 20 something daughter.

Then it ends with:

There is only one party that shares your beliefs and won’t compromise them

See what else you have in common with the Green Party by checking out gp.org

That’s it. That’s all you need to start with. You just have to remind disappointed lefties that there is another option, and by putting the commercials on you give the party more legitimacy (if they have the $ to run the commericals then they aren’t just a bunch of crusty hippies in someone’s basement).

PS- Blue Lyon, you have a Green candidate running for governor of your state. I bet he wouldn’t mind if you threw all that volunteering muscle you used to use for the Democratic party into his campaign.

Since you, so graciously gave me a bloody period cake for my birthday, it’s only fair that I return the favor.

Why yes darling, that is a wedding cake made out of tampons.

You have done some amazing shit this year and I am proud as punch to have you as my friend.

Big lip smacking smooches and many many sparkles.

PS- I tried really hard to make sure this posted at exactly midnight oon your actual birthday where you are- did it work?)

(cake is by Vadis Turner at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art)