Barbara Boxer Bullshits Again

To:-- Sen. Barbara Boxer

Your reply did not respond to the issue I raised with your assistant. The question I asked was:

-> Why haven't you introduced tax-legislation so as to make *all* medical expenses tax deductible from AGI without having to reach a 7% threshold and regardless of whether one itemizes other deductions.

1. The current medical expense deduction is a fraud. By the time medical expenses reach 7% of AGI the taxpayer is broke anyways, on the verge of "bankruptcy" so that the IRS is only giving up on what it couldn't grasp and claw for anyway.

2. Given the fact that you have been unable to control medical costs, to provide universal health care (or even coverage) or EVEN to allow us ordinary worthless folk to participate in the same government sponsored pool you and your millionaire cronies in the Senate enjoy, you should at least allow for full deduction of our self-paid health care costs.

3. This deduction should not be tied to Sch A itemization and should be over and above the standard deduction because people who need it most (those who don't "own" mortgage interest and those who have paid off their mortgage and are on fixed incomes) usually dont itemize anyway.

This measure (among others) would be a concrete --rather than junk PR -- step toward building some true equity and progressivity into a tax structure that is a vicious and cruel game of "benefit-the-bank".

AS FOR THE BANK BAILOUT -- I remain opposed to it for the reasons called into your office before both votes. The bullshit "amendments" "pork rinds" and other bells and whistles you guys added are as irrelevant as they are insulting to our intelligence. I am not going to repeat except to say that the ONLY two people in the Senate who showed any integrity and intelligence in this matter were FEINGOLD and SANDERS. I refer you to SANDERS web page where you can read what he said about the bill and about what needs to be done. You could learn from him. I suggest you go sit at his feet for a while.

Now... answer my question about tax deductibility of medical expenses. Are you going to do some real work for non-corporate persons or are you going to try to get by with PR BS?

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Explaining the Bailout

Jim- banks make money by making loans. they get the loan back plus interest (profit). businesses make money by getting loans. they use the money to buy or make stuff which they then "mark up" to pay off the loan and make a profit too. This is what makes our merry capitalist carousel go round.

2. On a bank's books a loan is treated like an asset. It's out there, but the bank is going to get paid back plus. In addition, where home-loans are concerned, the loan (mortgage) is backed up by the value of the house. So the more loans a bank has on its books the "richer" it is.

3. But what happens when the loan goes or is bad? In that case, the "asset" turns into a liability and the bank is poorer. Oh well... they can always foreclose on the house, resell it and get their money back. But what happens when the price of the house was a bubble-price anyway and it turns out that the resale value of the house was way under the amount of the loan. Oh shit....

4. Banks can only lend money in proportion to their assets. (12:1 currently I think). Because the whole system is an intricate game of musical chairs or of robbing peter to pay paul, banks can lend out more than they actually have on the calculation that not everything comes due at once and they can always spin around fast enough. But when we reach the "Oh shit" point, banks can't lend because they're aint going to be enough in-flow to cover the outflow. This is what is called "insufficient reserves".

5. Now it's a little more complicated than that because a lot of these loans were repackaged and resold to 3rd, 4th, 5th buyers down the line. The whole thing is the financial equivalent of melamine in the baby's milk.

6. The "bailout" is very simply a program of "cash for trash" Our cash to buy up all these "toxic" (i.e. no good) loans. The idea is that if we give the banks good dollars for lousy mortagages, they will then turn around and make loans again. Of course, we'll be stuck with the trash, but the merry go round will at least start to spin.

7. But nothing in the bill requires them to make loans. Nothing stops these swine from taking the money and buying US or German treasuries, or investing in a Nigerian gold mine. It's basically just a giveaway

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Vote No On Bailout

To:--Members of Congress

Re:--Bailout

Congress has no right to give the White House and its Secretary of the Treasury the power to transfer the people's money to the richest bankers in the country. Vote No to the Bailout legislation. The Bailout legislation is being rammed through Congress in a matter of days.

This is an illegal power grab by the White House and their richest friends on Wall Street. The Legislation allows the Treasury Department to appoint the same bankers who created the crisis to administer and dictate the use of trillions of our tax dollars. It is also one of the biggest transfers of wealth from working families to the ultra-rich in the history of the United States.

Instead of being whores and pimps to BANKSTERS (FDR's term) you should:

1) help families stay in their homes. Wealthy executives should be forced to disgorge their obscene profits, fees and bonuses that made them ultra-rich while they ran the economy into the ground.

2) provide universal health CARE (not health "insurance") to all Americans and force these obscenly fat dollar hogs to pay into the kitty

3) REPEAL the so-called "bankruptcy reform" act that keeps hard working people in perpetual debt slavery AFTER they have lost their homes...

4) provide free universal merit based college education so that young adults do not have to start off life as debt slaves in hock for 50, 70, 100,000 dollars.

START WORKING FOR THE PEOPLE OF THIS COUNTRY INSTEAD KISSING ASS TO BUSH-PAULSON BANKING SCUM

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Dribbling Shit & Dripping Blood

To:--Members of Congress

Re:--Legislative Achievments - 2008

Let’s see here....

$75 billion to prop up insurance giant AIG, but not one penny for universal health care?

$100 billion to prop up Fannie & Freddie but not a dime of effective relief for struggling homeowners?

$200 billion several times over for death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan but not a dollar for free merit-based higher education so our young men and women can begin life uncrushed by hopeless debt?

And now...

$700 billion to bail out gambling fat cats and fraudsters but not not a red cent of bankruptcy relief for families forced onto the streets or bankrupted by illness?

The English language does not have words harsh and vile enough to describe how repulsive and loathsome the whole damn lot of you are.

Your mouths dribble shit and your hands drip with blood.

You are beyond disgusting, but God does arise to trample out the vintage.

Your own children will sit in the rubble you have prepared for them and curse your name.

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The Passing Thrill of Bullfights

To:-- The Prospect Magazine

Re:--"A Noble Death?" a commentary by Tom Chatfield on bullfighting.

Some comments seems to have overlooked that Fiske-Harrison confesses to being ambivalent. He is not setting forth a "justification" as much as attempting a more balanced account. In this vein I think his draft needs to explain more completely the physiology of the banderillas and lance as well as review "fact or fiction" accounts as to whether the bull is goaded and enraged (i.e. "tortured") before the fight, and so on. I think this is critical because it makes for the difference between a "torture spectacle" and a "death spectacle".

As far as I am concerned, our industrial animal food production is nothing but systematized torture that is 1000 times more cruel than any arena. There is no excuse for "raising" meat that way and even less for eating it. Anyway one sincerely concerned with animal welfare will save his "outrage" at bullfights for the last.

Those not blessed with Iberian blood tend to have a hard time fathoming the thrill of the torreo. More than the thrill of vicarious danger, it is anexistential thrill that reverberates on a taught line drawn between courage and intelligence, life and death before resolving into a kind of sadness and sympathy. To say as much is simply to talk. I think that appreciation of the torreo involves openness to a certain primal depth of feeling that spooks many people.

I confess to having been thrilled by a good "bullfight". I also confess that as I have gotten older I would just as soon pet deer and talk to birds.

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Another Full Report Omitting Key Facts

To:-- BBC News

Re:-- The Crisis in Georgia, in which the BBC map fails to demark the the gas and oil pipelines in the region.

Your map of Georgia accompanying today's reportage on Russia's pullout, is highly inaccurate and misleading IN THAT it fails to show the route of the Halliburton built TRANS-CASPIAN pipeline.

BBC can hardly be taken seriously when such a key and critical fact is omitted from a map which supposedly seeks to provide information in graphic form.

Whether or not you write about the role of the pipeline in the story, you must at least show the pipe line's route so that readers could make informed inferences.

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Arnold's Republican Social Agenda

To:-- Los Angeles Times

Re:-- Arnold's Republican Social Agenda

When Oh Lord, when will people wake up to what the Republican Party is about?

The Republican Party exists to promote and protect large corporate interests and those of the the top five percent of the population. As anyone who has ever cut a pie knows, this can only be done at the expense of everyone else. More for the top means less for the bottom. All the rest is razzle dazzle, pogey bait and plain ol' BS (usually salted with race baiting of one sort or another)

Arnold has shown the true uncaring face of republicanism. Arnold -- the Blue Cross Girlie Boy, doesn't care if you can't get medical insurance and medical care. Now he shows that he doesn't care if hard working Californians get tossed from their homes and starve in the streets.

Wake up America! Wake up.

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