Scenes from the class war (10.12)

“For $500, you can have a sterling silver cross associated with the first American papal voyage since 2008.”

“Increasing the Medicare retirement age will increase, not lower, the all-in (private + public) cost of health care.”

“How about if sheriff’s deputies research the law and enforce it properly, rather than act as free armed guards for millionaires?”

“More than 78,500 victims of domestic violence reached out to the country’s programs offering housing, legal help, and other services on a given day last year. But of those, 10,871 had to be turned away because the programs didn’t have the resources to help them.”

“The economic choices of the very poorest are seen as ripe for public dissection.”

“I cannot overemphasize the importance of this fundamental flaw in poverty policy, i.e., the assumption that there is an ample supply of perfectly good jobs out there that poor people could tap if they just wanted to do so.”

“Poor women need the ‘dignity of work,’ because raising children isn’t a dignified occupation — when you are poor.”

“Average monthly food stamp benefit per participant, United States: $133.07.”

“One in every four renting households spends at least 50 cents of every dollar they earn on rent.”

“Austrian police said of the 71 dead, 59 were men, eight women and four children, including a baby girl.”

“We want to be free to act like horrible people and to think of ourselves as charitable Good Samaritans.”

“Though there is growing pressure from Americans and other Western consumers for more accountability in seafood companies’ supply chains to ensure against illegal fishing and contaminated or counterfeit fish, virtually no attention has focused on the labor that supplies the seafood that people eat, much less the fish that is fed to animals.” (NYT link)

“The carve-out for free, forced labor by the imprisoned has ugly consequences, including prison jobs that pay 50 cents or less per hour – if they pay at all.”

“Walker proposed a state budget that would slash $300 million from the University of Wisconsin over two years and cut $127 million from public primary schools.”

“These are the decisions of humans and other choices can be made.”

“Too many people want to put assholes in charge. They think they’ll deliver a righteous asskicking to those who deserve a righteous asskicking (not them of course). It doesn’t usually work out that way.”