Reaganomics Fucked Us Over

This graph should make you very angry:

The poorest half of us has been getting poorer. Where did it trickle down to?

Fuckers.

Crazy laws? Subversion of democracy? Look to ALEC

This is fucked. And wrong. From BusinessWeek: Pssst...Wanna Buy a Law?

The American Legislative Exchange Council, a nonprofit based in Washington, brings together state legislators, companies, and advocacy groups to shape “model legislation.” The legislators then take these models back to their own states. About 1,000 times a year, according to ALEC, a state legislator introduces a bill from its library of more than 800 models. About 200 times a year, one of them becomes law. The council, in essence, makes national policy, state by state.

ALEC’s online library contains model bills that tighten voter identification requirements, making it harder for students, the elderly, and the poor to vote. Such bills have shown up in 34 states. According to NPR, the Arizona bill that permits police to detain suspected illegal immigrants started as ALEC model legislation. Similar bills have passed in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, and Utah, and have been introduced in 17 other states. Legislators in Oregon, Washington, Montana, New Hampshire, and New Mexico have sponsored bills with identical ALEC language requiring states to withdraw from regional agreements on CO2 emissions. Sound a national trend among state legislators, and often you will find at the bottom of your plumb line a bill that looks like something that has passed through the American Legislative Exchange Council.

These are the assholes that brought you SB1070 in Arizona and the new anti-immigrant legislation in Alabama that resulted in millions of dollars of crops rotting in the fields because no one wanted to pick them. Classy fucks. Check out the whole BusinessWeek article for more depth.

NYPD: Sneaky Fucks

Clever. Clever, but a little bit dickish, too. NYPD tells drunks to camp out with OccupyWallstreet.

Justin Elliot at Salon:

The NYPD is reportedly telling drunks to hang out in Zuccotti Park, apparently as a way to undermine the credibility of Occupy Wall Street.

Harry Siegel reports:

But while officers may be in a no-win situation, at the mercy of orders carried on shifting political winds and locked into conflict with a so-far almost entirely non-violent protest movement eager to frame the force as a symbol of the oppressive system they’re fighting, the NYPD seems to have crossed a line in recent days, as the park has taken on a darker tone with unsteady and unstable types suddenly seeming to emerge from the woodwork. Two different drunks I spoke with last week told me they’d been encouraged to “take it to Zuccotti” by officers who’d found them drinking in other parks, and members of the community affairs working group related several similar stories they’d heard while talking with intoxicated or aggressive new arrivals.

…

“He’s got a right to express himself, you’ve got a right to express yourself,” I heard three cops repeat in recent days, using nearly identical language, when asked to intervene with troublemakers inside the park, including a clearly disturbed man screaming and singing wildly at 3 a.m. for the second straight night.

Dude. I knew Bloomberg & crew were assholes, but this boils down to a very sneaky attempt to paint the Occupiers as substance abusing indigents looking for handouts, which is NOT what OccupyWallstreet is about. The Occupiers are protesting economic injustice and the total ass-raping perpetuated by the 1% on the other 99% of us. Actually it does occur to me that there would be considerably fewer homeless folks in NY and elsewhere had our Galtian Overlords on Wallstreet not blown up the fucking economy in 2008.

The Dude Occupies Wall Street.

The Dude above is Jeff Dowd, actual radical dude from way back. And he points out that some new economic shit is coming to light.

From Slate (please do not consider this a retraction of my sentiments about Slate's awfulness posted below): Occupy Wall Street: What Would Lebowski Do?

The Masters of the Universe are Assholes.

Stay classy, fuckers.