Apparently, break the entire world economy = get a fat bailout from the Fed.

But be a poor single mom with a drug conviction and lie to get food stamps for your 2 little kids (cause bad druggies don’t get food stamps, fyi) and you get 3 years in jail. Oh and lose you kids.

A quick googling and minimal math skills tells me that the maximum amount of food stamps she could have gotten if she received them for an entire year is $6312 (The max allotment for a family of 3 is $526 multiplied by 12).

Here’s the thing- even if she received 10 times that amount, shit one hundred times that amount, and sold whatever she didn’t use, she still wouldn’t be fucking over anyone. Food stamps aren’t even cash. They are an imaginary currency unit created by the government to restrict the spending of the poorest of the poor to pay only for food. The fed makes money. The fed makes food stamps. But unlike when Wall Street banksters take fed money and pocket it, food stamps go right back into the economy. They pay for grocery stores (and the clerks that work in them) and farms and factories (and the laborers who pick, pack and process the food).

So you’ve gotta wonder, what exactly are the government’s priorities when they prosecute a poor person for surviving while bailing out a rich person who needs no help putting food on the table?

So Kid is on antibiotics. The dentist (w00t found one super close) won’t even root canal him till he’s got some of the infection under control. Kid is still feeling super shitty. He’s slept for the last 10 hours, waking up briefly because he’s either too hot or too cold or because I’ve poked him to make him wake up and take medicine or just because I am the mom and even when your baby is half a foot taller than you, you still make sure they are breathing when they sleep. Wow, I am the queen of the run on sentences.

The dentist’s verdict was the same as the dentist who told me a year ago that Kid needed a crown. The difference is that medicaid will pay for a root canal, but not for the crown that tops it. Insurance will pay for 80% for the root canal and 50% of the crown. I’ve been squirreling away little bits of money to pay for things like deductibles. I had hoped to get a bigger nest egg before I had to use it.

So last year, when the dentist told me it would be 600 bucks to fix the tooth, I cried, right there. And freaked out the kid a bit. He still hasn’t had that tooth fixed. He’s got a bunch of dental cement holding it together. That’s not the tooth that’s making him so sick now. (Yay! Genetics! Kid inherited my chalk like teeth and his dad’s weird too many teeth in the wrong places problem).

This year, well I’ve got the root canal portion paid for. And if I sign up for an FSA through work, I can have the whole

The Kid has another abscessed tooth. This is what 10 years of medicaid dental gets you. His face is swollen. He’s throwing up. He’s in mountains of pain. He’s cranky (and let me tell you, Kid is normally the chillest person in the room, cranky doesn’t happen with him unless things are extreme). I am a sympathetic puker, so in addition to the giant hot rock of guilt turning my stomach, I am nauseous to boot.

But we finally have dental. Real dental. Not the “only for extractions done by a one or two providers in a 500k population metro area” medicaid dental. Not the “sometimes kids die of toothaches because they are poor” medicaid dental. Real dental, with deductibles and co-insurance that doesn’t cover as much as it should but covers more than the nothing of medicaid. If I get up really early and start calling around, I may get lucky and find a dentist in our plan that can take him. If I clean out my tiny savings account, I might be able to pay for it. I was hoping we could make it to January 1 before using the dental, so I could skip this year’s deductible. Oops. And we won’t talk about how I am gonna have to call into work tomorrow. I’m going to push the fact that there were people let go last week out of my mind. I am going to cross my fingers and hope that taking a day off for a sick kid isn’t going to put me next on the list of expendable employees.

This is a kind of violence. Economic violence. A thing that causes actual, physical harm to an actual living being. Kids not being able to go to the dentist because they don’t have the right parents. That’s violent. Hell, anyone not being able to see a dentist because that shit is expensive is a kind of violence. Parents skipping meals to stretch out the food budget to maybe last to the end of the month is a kind of violence. Choosing between drugs that keep you alive or paying the heating bill in the dead of winter is a kind of violence. Slow, creeping, scarier than anything Hollywood could come up with violence.

So while you’re all throwing hissy fits about property damage, I’m gonna go deal with the inevitable outcomes of economic violence done to the poorest of us. Yeah broken windows suck. But I’d rather lose every single thing I own than have my kid suffer one more second of pain. Graffiti my door, piss on my sofa, steal my last dollar. That’s all just stuff. My door doesn’t feel pain. My sofa doesn’t feel pain. My wallet doesn’t feel pain. That’s property damage. And having literally lost every damn thing that I own in the not so distant past, I am familiar with what losing everything feels like. It sucks. But it didn’t end us.

And I just can’t be bothered to give a rat’s ass about property damage. Not when a real, live human being is sitting next to me in agony because he had the misfortune to be born to a poor woman in a time when things matter more than people.

I freely admit that spending family tv watching (well internet) time watching almost exclusively BBC stuff is probably warping the child’s brain. Probably. Since we’ve run through the only American shows he’ll watch with me (Eureka and Warehouse 13) and Doctor Who is over and we’ve watched Torchwood America: Now with more graphic but strangely less sexy gay sex. So we needed something.

That Mitchell and Webb Look seems to be filling the bill at the moment.

Let’s get one thing straight, shall we.

Vandalism is not equal to, the same as, or even remotely like, violence. One is damage to property, inanimate objects that have no feelings what so ever. One is damage to people.

Graffiti, which may be the oldest form of political expression being that it is at least 2000 years old, is just that, political expression. Even when it’s just some kid, who is probably not old enough to vote, leaving his or her tag on a wall somewhere. I love graffiti. Graffiti is not violence.

Window smashing, while scary and loud and full of breaky glass, is not violence. It is property damage.

Property is theft, and pardon me while I quote the Marquis de Sade: “Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation. However, theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft.“

In order to get the elites to release their stranglehold on the rest of humanity, the elites must scared. Yes, scared. That’s an ugly truth, but it is truth none the less. And to scare them without committing acts of violence means that they must be afraid of something else, loss of property. And they should be afraid of that. They should be shaking in their boots, unable to sleep at night, haunted by the ghost of Jacob Marley in the wee small hours telling them to repent.

We know what violence looks like at the Occupy sites. It looks like cops pepper spraying young women behind a barricade. It looks like war vets getting skulls crushed and spleens lacerated by “non-lethal” weapons. It looks like douchebags rapists who rape women in tents. Violence causes actual harm to the bodies of actual people and is generally performed by those with power over those with less.

Vandalism is acts of destruction done to pieces of property done by those with less to property owned by those with more.

These things are not the same, and should never, ever be uttered in the same breath as if they were.

It’s been said, many many times at this blog and in various and sundry places, that if you don’t deal with the racism and the sexism in the Occupy Movement, then it isn’t really a revolutionary movement at all. That is fucking obvious and elementary to those of us who’ve been victims of racism and sexism, it’s less obvious to the newbies, the shoulda been middle class white doods who are just now seeing what it feels like when the people we give power to just don’t give a flying fuck about you.

But capitalism is a system that requires an ever-growing population of people providing labor for free or for damn near free. It starts by devaluing the work done predominantly by women. That work, without which there would be no society because there would be no people, is the real work. It is the work of having children, maintaining a home, cooking dinner, doing laundry, caring for the sick and the old and the young. And in cases where you couldn’t get that work done for free, capitalism has devalued so that the people who are paid to do it don’t make a wage that provides for the basics. Think about any mom earning minimum wage. Her paycheck will to paying someone else minimum wage to look after her kids, effectively cancelling out her earnings.

Now if you have a system that requires half your population to provide labor at no cost, you have to have some mechanism for preventing that group from grabbing the nearest pitchfork. Fortunately, misogyny was old when capitalism was new, so there was already a system of violence and coercion in place.

So I am hanging up this way rad poster the T.O.E. sent me in the bathroom, while Kid is washing out a trash can that got rank in the bathtub. The poster is a French Feminist poster of a line drawing on the monds pubis and in French it reads (I think) “The Place of Pleasure”.

Me: Is it going to totally mortify you if I hang up this poster in the bathroom?

Kid: No

Me: It’s a drawing of naughty bits- that’s not going to embarrass you?

Kid: (makes familiar teenage groan of annoyance) You raised me. Do you really think that I would be mortified by that?

Me: True. I raised you. But you are at that age where the mere existence of parents is embarrassing and you live in the house too. You get to have a say in what goes in it.

Kid: That’s a good philosophy. I like that everyone who lives in a place gets a say in it.

Me: You know, there are people who think kids should not be allowed to have opinions at all. That whole “Children should be seen and not heard” shit.

And that is how it rolls in Casa de Elizabitchez. Also T.O.E should explain the significance of the poster because it’s rad.

Yeah, I am out of pithy titles. Wevs. Enjoy the fruits of my reading.

It’s different for brown kids.

It’s still different for brown kids

It’s different for WOC too

Well it’s different for anyone of color, really

But ain’t it always a woman’s fault?

But at least we can all agree, Goldman Sachs is the unwashed taint of the financial sector.

And everyone’s favorite new blog crush explains how Establishment Fauxgressives are trying to frame the Occupy movement as capitalism’s savior.

What else should I be reading?

Once upon a time people hit shuffle on their MP3 players on Fridays and posted the first 10 songs to pop up.

I lost all, well most, of my digital music in the last few years. So instead I am starting a new tradition. Post the last 3 songs to play on Pandora or whatever music thing you got. On Saturday. Cause we’re rebels like that.