Oliver Twist Asks for ‘More’

Tea Party Candidate Says Move The Poor To Prison

From The Raw Story and the AP

via Beaver County Blue

[ Note from John Leonard: When I was growing up for many years, Pleasant Drive in Potter Twp. Beaver Co.  Pa was  called Poorhouse Run Road because the Poorhouse was located on what is now the property of Horse Head Industries.   Looks like some Republicans want to resurrect some bad parts of history.  Their families should be the first to enter into the new ideas they seek. ]

If elected governor of New York, Tea Party Republican Carl Paladino wouldn’t criminalize being poor, per se.  That would be unconstitional.  He’d just rather see them “voluntarily” move into state prisons where they could work on improving, among other things, their “personal hygiene”.

Paladino is competing for the Republican nomination with former U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio.  The primary is Sept. 14th and Paladino has campaigned hard to the right of Lazio.  He’s routinely argued that New York’s social services encourage illegal immigrants and the poor to come to live in New York. 

According to Paladino his poor-to-prison plan is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal program that paid young unemployed men during the Great Depression to plant trees, build roads and develop parks.  Paladino’s program would be open to long-term welfare recipients and to people who had lost their jobs during the recession. 
Paladino is proposing to consolidate prison facilities and using the vacant ones into dormitory style housing where they could work for the state in some military or public works capacity in exchange for a receipt of benefits.

Continue reading Unemployment Problem Solved Dept: Tea Party Candidate Wants to Bring Back ‘The Poor House’ and Expand Prison Jobs →

Defeat the Right Wing in Three Minutes With

Truth in Labeling and the ‘Cheap Labor’ Frame

By Conceptual Guerilla

Have you got three minutes. Because that’s all you need to learn how to defeat the Republican Right. Just read through this handy guide and you’ll have everything you need to successfully debunk right-wing propaganda.

It’s really that simple. First, you have to beat their ideology, which really isn’t that difficult. At bottom, conservatives believe in a social hierarchy of “haves” and “have nots” that I call “corporate feudalism“. They have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a “respectable” sounding ideology. That ideology is pure hogwash, and you can prove it.

But you have to do more than defeat the ideology. You have to defeat the “drum beat”. You have to defeat the “propaganda machine”, that brainwashes people with their slogans and catch-phrases. You’ve heard those slogans.”Less government“, “personal responsibility” and lots of flag waving. They are “shorthand” for an entire worldview, and the right has been pounding their slogans out into the public domain for getting on forty years.

So you need a really good slogan – a “counter-slogan” really, to “deprogram” the brainwashed. You need a “magic bullet” that quickly and efficiently destroys the effectiveness of their “drum beat”. You need your own “drum beat” that sums up the right’s position. Only your “drum beat” exposes the ugly reality of right-wing philosophy – the reality their slogans are meant to hide. Our slogan contains the governing concept that explains the entire right-wing agenda. That’s why it works. You can see it in every policy, and virtually all of Republican rhetoric. And it’s so easy to remember, and captures the essence of the Republican Right so well, we can pin it on them like a “scarlet letter”.

Continue reading ‘Cheap Labor Conservatives’ – A Proper Label for Blue Dogs, the GOP and the Tea Party →