AUSTIN – The federal agency that oversees food stamps wants Texas to stop fingerprinting applicants as a way to save resources and speed up what the agency says is an unacceptably slow application system. But because Texas law requires the fingerprinting, the state’s Health and Human Services Commission finds itself caught between what the Legislature requires and what federal officials want.

“One of the things I think Texas needs to do is streamline their operations,” said William Ludwig, a regional administrator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service. “Finger imaging is very time-consuming.”

Texas is one of four states with such a requirement, which supporters – including Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst – say prevents people from collecting benefits under more than one name.

Critics have said it is invasive, a waste of money and seeks to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

The electronic fingerprinting costs $3 million a year: $1.6 million for Cogent Systems’ contract for the imaging and $1.4 million for state workers’ time. The state and federal governments split the cost.

Last year, the fingerprint program led to the state investigating four applicants for fraud. But state officials say it’s impossible to know how many people are deterred from applying multiple times because of the fingerprinting.

Ludwig told Texas officials last week in a letter that the state’s federal funds will be at risk if it doesn’t speed up its application processing. The federal government pays for all the food and splits administrative costs with the state.

Stephanie Goodman, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Commission, said officials will consider eliminating fingerprinting but because it is done relatively quickly, “we really don’t think it helps this particular problem very much.”

[reprinted from the Austin American-Statesman 2009-10-02]

Most of the people posting comments are, of course, Conservative Republicans (I am in Texas, after all). Most of the respondents are of the opinion that because some people (a very few) commit fraud to get benefits, or misuse benefits once they have received them, that the program should be gotten rid of completely. This viewpoint is extremely insensitive to fellow human beings and ignorant of economic realities. I will now explain why…

There are some people who commit fraud to get benefits, or who misuse benefits, but there are a great many more who legitimately need help (more every day), mostly due to inflation caused by the greed of those in power who control the wealth and over time charge more for everything but pay the same or less.

The previous times that I have visited my local Health and Human Services office (in McKinney), there were tables to fill out forms, and a few chairs around each, and a few dozen people (max) waiting to be seen. The last few times (in recent weeks), there are only chairs, and hundreds of people filling the room, hungry, and sick with the flu, and wrapped around the block waiting to get in. It’s not because a lot more people suddenly decided to quit their jobs and let you support them with your precious taxes; it’s because the people that supposedly represent them (local, state, and federal) and the people who employee(d) constantly want and take more for themselves, at the expense of the people whose labor makes them rich.

I’m a single parent (white male) who has worked hard all of my adult life, and due to work-related back injuries and trouble finding full time work with benefits, I have had to use public assistance several times, even while working 2 jobs up to 7 days a week, just to barely be able to feed myself and my son and pay rent and electricity.

Here is my message to the hateful who have no sympathy for those less fortunate than themselves:

Those of you who are privileged enough to sit in luxury in big homes and drive around in gas guzzling trucks and SUVs (polluting and promoting the need for war) and cast judgment should count yourselves lucky, but not superior. A few unfortunate events and/or a few little mistakes in life, and you too could need help. That’s a fact that conservatives (fiscal and social) like to ignore. You are brainwashed by your leaders to think that just because you are white and Christian and racist like they are, that you too will someday get promoted up the ladder, or make your small business a big corporation, or get elected to office, or make it big in some other way (as a football player or country music singer?), so you support their selfish, vicious, imperial capitalism either because you also benefit from it, or because you think that you eventually will.

Those of you who spew hate against food benefits and medicaid and health care reform, decrying them as the evil of “socialism” should keep in mind that public schools and libraries and police and fire departments and paramedics and parks and water districts and the US military are socialist, and not private corporate for-profit entities. Should we dissolve these services and make everything private? It appears we already are with the rise of private prisons, police, and mercenary armies. Those things don’t inspire patriotism for American for me.

Those of you who say that there should be no welfare or food stamp benefits of any kind should consider that as time goes on, and more people are unemployed or underemployed and uninsured or under insured and losing their cars and homes, you may be joining the ranks of those you see as slackers and leaches. If you someday get downsized, or ill or injured, lose your insurance, lose your jobs, and end up homeless and hungry in the pro-corporate anti-human system that you propose, perhaps only then will you understand how naive your hateful self-righteousness really is. Let’s see if you still support the same corrupt politicians who get millions in campaign contributions and lobbying and secret bribes from big companies to pass and support laws that benefit the rich when you too, are poor.

I sincerely hope that you either take a look at your ideas and realize how hateful and ignorant and arrogant you are, and realize that you are not immune to the conditions of those whom you detest, and stop discriminating against your brothers and sisters who aren’t as successful, or that bad fortune befalls you and teaches you firsthand what it’s like to be one of the have-nots. Only then will karma be served.

“…Congress can do much more to ensure that companies act more responsibly on executive compensation  by taking a simple, straightforward step: eliminating the tax break for irresponsibly high CEO pay…”

“…By eliminating the deduction for any compensation above $1 million, they can simplify the tax code, abolish the taxpayer subsidy for irresponsible compensation and restore bonuses and stock options to their original purpose of rewarding good performance rather than as a means to avoid paying taxes…”

READ MORE @ New York Daily News

I love that this was caught on film. It’s an excellent example of the attitude of our lawmakers. Having been paid off by the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and then making sure that only they are represented in the discussion of health care reform, citizens stand up and demand “their” representatives to represent their needs, and the response is that “we need more police” to shut them up. It’s Animal Farm. “All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”

YouTube – Protester Delays Senate Committee Opening

See also: Single Payer Action

TEA BAGGERS are SWALLOWING WHOLE the Fox News STAFF's SCHTICK

MSNBC’s David Schuster: If You’re Planning Tea Bagging Across The Country, ‘You’re Going To Need A Dick Armey’

This is pretty damned funny! He uses most, if not all, of the innuendo I’ve already heard floating around…

I took the liberty of transcribing it:

“For most Americans, Wednesday, April 15th will be Tax Day, but in our fourth story tonight it’s going to be TEA-BAGGING day for the right wing and they are going NUTS for it! Thousands of the WHIPPED OUT the festivities early this weekend and though the parties are officially TOOTHLESS, the protesters are FULL-THROATED about their goals. They wanna give President Obama strong TONGUE-LASHING and LICK government spending. Spending they did not oppose when they were under Presidents Bush and Reagan. They oppose Mr. Obama’s tax rates which will be lower for most of them, and they oppose the tax increases Mr. Obama is imposing on the rich, whose taxes will skyrocket to a rate that’s about 10% less than it was under Reagan. That’s TEA-BAGGING, in a NUTSHELL. Taking it’s inspiration from the Boston Tea Party when colonists tossed British tea into the sea because the tax on it had not been voted on by their duly elected representatives. That’s exactly the opposite, of course, of todays’ taxes, which is known in some quarters as ‘Taxation With Representation’. But as New York Times coumnist Paul Crudeman points out today, this time the TEA-BAGGING is not a SPONTANEOUS UPRISING, the people who came up with it are a familiar circle of Republicans, including former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, and former house majority leader Dick Armey, both of whom have FIRM support from right wing financiers and lobbyists, as well as Washington prostitute patron, Senator David Vitter who has issued statements in support of TEA-BAGGING, but is publicly type-left. Then, there was the media, specifically the Fox ‘News’ Channel, including Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. Both are looking forward to an UP CLOSE and PERSONAL TASTE of TEA-BAGGING, themselves at events this Wednesday. But most amusing of all is Neil Cavuto, a member of the network’s executive committee. Neil’s online bio says he joined the network in July 1996, three months before the Fox News channel went on the air. Cavuto, defending his network’s promotion of TEA-BAGGING, said, quote ‘We are going to be right in the middle of these [TEA-BAGGERS], because at Fox we do not pick and choose these rallies and protests. We were there for the Million Man March.’ Can we roll that footage, the footage of Fox News at the Million Man March, back in October of ‘95? Of course the Million Man March occurred, as NewsHounds.org points out, almost a year before Fox News was on the air. We can only speculate why widespread TEA-BAGGING made Cavuto think of the Million Man March… Unless, he got them confused with DICK ARM[E]Y. And in Cavuto’s defense, if you are planning SIMULTANEOUS TEA-BAGGING around the country, you’re going to need a DICK ARMY!”

What David Schuster failed to include in his brilliant report, and what makes me fear for my country, much as Glenn Beck does (or pretends to), is that many of the NUT-JOBS that host and attend these NUT-FESTS to express their opinions in a (hopefully) peaceful manner, and to have a BALL (or two) with some good friends or like-minded strangers are the same people that believe, as many TEA-PARTY websites and flyer’s propose, in a “revolution”, and the same people who are buying conservative t-shirts that say “vote from the rooftops” (with pictures of sniper rifles), inferring that they wish to assassinate President Obama. I saw one conservative t-shirt for sale online that said “R.I.P. The American Dream, 1776-2008″. I thought a black man becoming the president was a pretty clear indicator that the American dream is alive and well. Perhaps these revolutionary TEA-BAGGERS who believe in “voting from the rooftops” (with sniper rifles) are racially motivated? I guess their American dream doesn’t include people who aren’t white. Or maybe it’s just jealousy? They are openly into TEA-BAGGING, so perhaps they are jealous, as black men are popularly known for having larger TEA-SPOUTS than they do…

I’m afraid that many of the TEA-BAGGERS attending the TEA-PARTIES today are lost souls, searching for a new direction, possibly a violent one. As Anderson Cooper said on CNN when describing why it’ been HARD for the Republicans to find their voice after the election, “it’s hard to talk when you’re TEA-BAGGING“

I’ve got to say, whoever created and has promoted this movement really made quite a snafu by not researching the social connotations of their terminology, but, I guess there’s no such thing as bad press. I just hope for the Republicans sake that they don’t, as I saw one guy comment on Glenn Beck’s 9-12 Project website “make up places to protest flag burning and call the Old GLORY HOLES“.

Keith Olbermann also did a funny segment about TEA-BAGGING, including some more good innuendo, including:

“SPILLING into the streets, CHOKING off traffic … pushed their own vision of TEA-BAGGING DOWN THE THROATS of the TEA-BAGGERS … SEMINAL moment … ONE LUMP OR TWO?”

And, for the enjoyment of those who are just becoming familiar with the sexual slang used for decades, and for the enlightenment of those who still don’t get it, I’ve included the following links to some definitions on Urban Dictionary:

TEA-BAGGER TEA-BAG TEA-BAGGING TEA PARTY

I think if my children and grandchildren could grow up in a country where they could breathe, afford to go to college, find a job, and get insurance, that they would be glad to pay for that, versus growing up in a country which, as of now, looks as if it will have clouds of coal and oil fumes to blind and choke my children and grandchildren, who won’t be able find jobs, or afford college, health care, or possibly even food or gas.

I’ve been watching C-SPAN, and almost every Republican repeats this “it’s not fair for our children and grandchildren to have to pay for this” mantra, almost every time they speak. I know what they are really saying: it’s not fair for THEIR children and grandchildren to have to pay to fix the world that THEIR greed and selfishness and shortsightedness have created, even if it means a lower standard of living for MY/OUR children and grandchildren.

These guys weren’t arguing when Bush spent hundreds of billions on the Iraq war, or when the bailout for their rich embezzler banker buddies got hundreds of billions, but when it comes to hundreds of billions to make a better life for the core of America, the working class, the middle (and increasingly lower) class, “NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO SPEND A TRILLION DOLLARS!”

They didn’t seem to be worried about the National Debt before, BUT…

When they hear that it might be spent on solar, wind, and hydrodynamic energy to compete with the coal and oil guys who bribe them to make policies that benefit them, they stand up against spending. When they hear that the big business lobbyists might have to pay taxes to provide health care for the workers who make them rich and die from lack of insurance and retirement benefits (which were reduced over decades to increase the business owners already tidy profits) they stand up against spending.

When they hear that the taxes of the rich might help my poor son go to college to get a good job to not be poor someday, and to compete with their son who is put through the best schools because they profited from friendships with big business that I and my fellow Americans have worked so hard for for so little compensation, and that OUR children and grandchildren, if educated, might want jobs someday that their big business buddies plan on farming to third world countries to save money, they stand up against spending.

Well, I am glad for one that they are standing up! I wish they were standing in line at the unemployment or welfare office, so they would see the need to spend money on PEOPLE!

(You probably thought I was going to say I wish it was against a wall in front of a firing squad, or in a line at a guillotine, or underneath the nooses hanging from the gallows!)

I say, debt be damned!

If Obama wants to spend a trillion a year for 10 years, and it means we can get away from being the bend-over bitches of the middle eastern oil barons, create jobs for our record numbers of unemployed people, and ensure college and health care for at least some of our children and grandchildren, shouldn’t we do it?

These are the same guys who are probably always saying things like “you gotta spend money to make money”.

Well, guess what? Spending money in Iraq/Afghanistan/Iran is not going to make us any money.

It might make your defense contract buddies or your oil stock buddies or you money, but most of us are not seeing a dime.

OUR children and grandchildren need education, jobs, health care, and a clean environment, not more terrorists avenging their dead family members!

I don’t have much money, so I don’t pretend to know all the ins and outs of the American economy, but I think I know what one of our biggest problems is: the stock market.

I think we should abolish the stock market.

Speculating on, buying, selling, and trading stocks, commodities, futures, and whatever else is legalized gambling.

I have nothing against gambling, so long as it is done responsibly, meaning that the gambler bets only what they can afford to lose and doesn’t borrow or steal to place or pay their bets.

The problem is, Wall Street is like a Las Vegas that’s legitimized by our political system.

The Federal Reserve Bank is just a bullying casino boss that gets it’s way, pressuring the United States government and therefore it’s people, into doing whatever best profits them.

The average stock holding citizen, that perhaps does a little light trading on the side, is not so much the problem. I’m not blaming our economic crisis on working people who are making a few investments in the stock marker on the side, although I think it’s most prudent if someone is going to do so that they put most of their money into other investments that aren’t so much like a roulette wheel.

The problem is the big players, like financial analyst firms and lending firms and banks that play little games with the money that their investors have in their companies. I suppose this is the way it has always been done, as the return on investments made by the institutions allows them to pay the interest on their customers’ investments in them. What seems to be one of the roots of our present predicament is that, as always seems to happen, people who do know a lot about money and how to move it around, explain away discrepancies, try to get to fancy, and basically play games with money, dribbling it in and out between their legs and behinds their backs like the Harlem Globetrotters do with basketballs, all in an effort to maximize short term gains for those involved, at the expense of the stability of the economy, and it ends up affecting everybody, except maybe for those who are actually playing, since they are usually wise enough to know that the magical bubble they are blowing so big is eventually, inevitably going to pop, and therefore they hide away a few million or billion into foreign bank accounts for the rainy day they are helping to ensure in the future.

I think the stock market is the most obvious example of how wealthy people gamble not only with their own money, but with the money and jobs of the everyday worker, who is too busy toiling away in obscurity to realize that their life savings or their retirement or their home mortgage or their kids’ college tuitions is about to be lost at the craps table by some guy in a remote tower in a distant city.

Speculating and trading stocks, commodities, futures, and whatever other things they have on Wall Street nowadays is just a bunch of rich guys playing a giant card game trying to trick each other into giving up the good cards and whomever ends up with the best hand walks away the winner while the rest of us leave the table broke.

We don’t need stocks. Companies don’t need to be publicly held or traded. The only people who benefit from such nonsense in a major way is the people who usually end up screwing everything up with their greed and cheating and lies.

If everybody just kept working and making and buying things, we’d be alright without stocks.

Things would be worth as much tomorrow as they are today and as they were yesterday.

Maybe it’s not as glamorous or exciting, but it’d be a hell of a lot more stable.

I did a search for toys with lead paint on the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s website, and got a LOT of results. This is an ongoing problem, but so far, I haven’t heard about anybody doing anything to fix it. Why do we keep doing things this way? Because it’s more profitable for big toy companies and retailers like Wal-Mart to pay a few cents an hour for Chinese labor than to provide jobs to Americans at reasonable pay rates; it cuts into executive bonuses, secret off-shore embezzlement accounts, and political action committees’ lobbying funds, which help pave the way for further offenses against the people.

China also has no environmental protection agency, their energy use is spiraling out of control, and they are quickly on their way to becoming the worlds biggest polluter and the most polluted place on Earth. So, in addition to contributing to American unemployment and health hazards for consumers (especially users of products for babies and children), big American companies using Chinese labor to make their products also helping to pollute the world, speed up global warming, and melt the ice of Greenland, Siberia, the Arctic, and Antarctica, which places 60% of the world’s population in danger of being flooded as global sea levels rise over shorelines in the next few decades. Billions of people’s health and very lives are being endangered so that a few millionaires can become billionaires and a few billionaires can become trillionaires. It is time to say NO MORE!

Our government, who seems to have no problem spending trillions of dollars on wars to get oil, and hundreds of billions of dollars to bail-out corrupt and inefficient financial institutions (whom, after being bailed out aren’t even wanting to loan money anymore), should be willing to spend some billions on the people and infrastructure of this once (and hopefully again) great nation.

It seems to me that any economic stimulus package should take into account the jobs stolen from Americans by big business over the year, and start the process of bringing them back. Sure, it’ll piss of China, possibly ensuring future war with them, but hey, whatcha gonna do? The exporting of jobs to other countries by American companies should be taxed to the point where it is not profitable to take jobs away from Americans.

Take our unemployed masses, pay them to build clean, renewable energy power plants of solar arrays, wind farms, and hydrodynamic devices, and new manufacturing facilities run by this clean power, and then put them, and others to work making lead-free products for themselves and other American consumers.

My message to American corporations and politicians is basically this: It is grossly unethical to exploit the poverty of the people of other nations for cheap labor, and then exploit the people of your own country by charging many times more for items than the foreigners make to produce them, resulting in ever increasing  profit margins for yourselves, growing environmental damage from Chinese manufacturing processes, and ever decreasing job opportunities for the American people, who are your primary consumers, anyway. If we continue to lose all of our manufacturing (not to mention technical support and engineering) jobs to other countries and become a nation of part-time retail clerks and waitstaffers, who is going to be able to afford to buy all your cheap plastic toxic-lead-painted crap?

Sign My Petition: LINK ->

The following article contains offensive racial slurs, which I have heard from others and quoted to make a point about the stupidity of racism, and I neither condone, promote, or use these terms myself, as I find them very ignorant and hurtful.

I am a progressive, liberal, compassionate, and logical human being of mixed-race descent (Scotch-Irish and Cherokee) living in Dallas, Texas.

I am often embarrassed to be associated with white people from the southern United States of America. They are, in great part, racists who think that (I quote their offensive slurs, which I do not use myself) “Niggers”, “Spics”, “Chinks”, “Heebs”, and “Sand Niggers” are the reason that they are poor and unsuccessful, instead of blaming the old, rich, white men who claim to be “Christians” while accumulating ungodly sums of money by raising prices of goods and services, lowering wages, salaries, and benefits, and selling our country out from under us, with jobs, roads, and ports going to the highest bidder. If these poor caucasian saps would instead make friends and allies of the African-American AKA Black, Hispanic AKA Latino, Asian AKA Oriental, Jewish AKA Hebrew, and Muslim AKA Arab people living among them, then we could perhaps make some progress in taking back our country from the true terrorists: the Rich! (I use the “AKA”s above to illustrate that it’s hard to be politically correct and not offend anyone these days, because nobody can seem to decide what they want their group to be called from decade to decade.)

In a recent conversation, I expressed a sincere hope that the positive example set by Barack Obama as a person of color who has acheived much and promises to help his country become better might give pause to the more violent and racist elements of the African-American community and inspire some of them to move forward and let go of the past to forgive the whites of the present for the sins of the whites of the past. The person I was talking too said, and I quote, “They were niggers before he was elected, and they’re still niggers after…”  I was offended, and ended the conversation because not only did I think I would be able to change the person’s mind, but my 3 year old son was present, and I didn’t want him to hear another utterance of the word “nigger”, which, when said in a playful way as a term of endearment, I don’t find offensive whether it comes from a black or a white person, but when, used as an insult to dismiss an entire race of people as ignorant or inferior, infuriates me! I later thought of a comeback, which I wish I had responded with at the time: The people who elected Bush were rednecks before he was elected, and they are still rednecks after…

The Conservative media tells me every day that illegal immigrants from Mexico are taking my jobs, even though they are mostly doing  jobs that I don’t want, while the government gets paid by corporations to send the jobs I do want to China, India, The Phillipines, etc. where they can save a few bucks.

I also grow weary of trying to explain to close-minded, racist, hateful, fearful rednecks how not all Muslims are terrorists, just as not all Protestants and Catholics blow each other up in cafes like the Irish and English have done during their spats. For white suburban Texans to assume that all followers of Islam are suicide bombers is just unrealistic and fanatical, and primarily based on poor upbringing. The average John Doe Redneck is as brainwashed by his government, media, parents, friends and coworkers as the many Middle-Eastern Muslims who, after being told by their leaders at the point of a gun that the West is the “Great Devil”, think that all Christians are two-faced, greedy, empire-minded lunatics who go on crusades to convert the world to their faith, although it is true that many of the wealthy and powerful are.

I am complaining here mostly about racism by white people, which is what I have witnessed the most where I grew up and now live, but I am in no way trying to ignore racism by other cultures. It’s just not much of an issue for me. Even when I’ve been places like downtown Dallas, Oak Cliff, and Pleasant Grove, here in D/FW, and also in poor black neighborhoods in Jackson, MS and Los Angeles, CA, I have barely ever had a black person, even among groups of imposing looking young men, ever be rude to me. On the contrary, I have stopped and asked young black men comparing guns and cars for directions and had them call me brother. In contrast, I have had many unintelligent, undereducated, ignorant whites, especially in Mississippi, Lousiana, and Texas, who have started fights with me for no apparent reason. And I look white. Go figure… I guess they can smell intelligence and open-mindedness and it scares them. Babies, kids, elderly folks, and animals love me, so it’s the rednecks at fault here, not me!

I think the best preventative medicine against future racism is to talk to groups of young kids of various races in groups in school, and let them openly discuss how their parents talk about people of other races, and how it makes them feel, and then let the kids of other races tell them how it makes them feel. Then show the kids how much they have in common. I bet most of them will make friends. Kids learn faster than adults.

As for curative measures for people presently already infected with the deadly (in some cases) affliction of racism, I figure until we figure out how to re-program their brains or make a pill or injection to fix them, we should release all non-violent drug offenders from the prisons and put the racists in there instead.

Let them hate and fear and insult and fight and kill each other where the rest of us don’t have to deal with it anymore.

Maybe early on in evolution, racism helped a herd of tribe of people survive and protected them from other competing groups, but racist people are now as obsolete as fossil fuels. Too bad we are still having to put up with both of them.