Andre Bauer Speaks Of The Poor In South Carolina

This was to funny to not post for you.

LtGov of SC: "Don't feed the poor. They'll 'breed.'"
by goinsouth Sun Jan 24, 2010
Once in a while, one of the ruling elite is so overcome by hubris or stupidity that he lets slip out one of the truisms that the rich tell themselves to justify their never-ending rape and pillaging of their neighbors, their communities, their nation and the world.
A few days ago, it was Pat Robertson who let slip one of the old myths about Haiti. God had cursed it, Robertson claimed, because those black slaves had made a deal with devil to get rid of the French. Don't think that Robertson made that story up on the spot. He had picked it up somewhere: from his FFV family, as he studied for his Yale Law degree or sitting at the knee of his U. S. Senator father.
Now comes Andre Bauer, Lieutenant Governor (edited--thanks to comments) of South Carolina, with the following wisdom, also oft-repeated around the dinner tables of the wealthy:
Read the unbelievable things he said after the break:
"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed," Bauer said, according to the Greenville News. "You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better."
It might be easy to dismiss both Robertson and Bauer as Southern whites imbued in the racism of that region, but that would be wrong. Through the comment of a fellow Kossack, I came upon this Truthout article exposing the attitudes of a rich young Brazilian, scion of a wealthy family, who now worked for Goldman Sachs. What the Brazilian Master of the Universe spouted were the same, elaborate myths and pseudo-science all designed to justify his great wealth obtained and maintained by ruthless exploitation of his fellow human beings.
The next day, we were all sitting poolside at Pedro's plantation. I got up to go into the kitchen of the house 20 feet away to get a beer. Pedro said to me, "Oh, just ring the bell; they'll bring a beer." Thinking of what folks at home in Pittsburgh would do if they found out I had used a bell to call for a servant to bring a beer, I decided to get up and get my own damn beer.
The next day, as Pedro and his buddies, who were visiting the plantation that weekend, sat around at the pool, they sounded off against the popular Brazilian welfare program for single mothers - Bolsa Familia. Bolsa Familia helps single mothers living under the poverty line to send their children to school, which alleviates the pressure on poor families to send their children to work in violation of child labor laws. Bolsa Familia was cited by the United Nation for reducing poverty by 27 percent in Brazil.
The success of the program and its significance to progress in their country was apparently lost on the privileged, as Pedro and his friends lounged by the pool ringing bells for servants to bring them beers while they complained about how poor people should be rewarded to be lazy and unproductive.
In their country clubs, around their swimming pools, over their power lunches, these are the stories and attitudes that circulate. These tales are concocted to justify the sociopathic behavior of the rich, to quell the rare and faint stirrings of conscience complaining about their absurd wealth in the face of such massive world poverty. The thrust is that those whom they oppress with their financial schemes and wars are not truly human like them. They are "stray animals" who would just "breed" if they had ample access to the simple necessities of life.
It is the Robertsons and Bauers who are less than human, devoid of compassion, deluding themselves with their own silly fairy tales so they can pretend to believe that their savagery toward their own species is moral.

Those Messed Up Democrats!!

Why is it that Democrats always tend to turn stupid once they get into political office? President Obama is no exception to this rule, as he seems to have forgotten what he was placed into office for.

www.commondreams.org
Published on Thursday, January 21, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Massachusetts and the Populist Imperative
by Robert Weissman

It takes a special skill for a Democrat to lose a federal election in Massachusetts.
But whatever the failings of the candidacy and campaign of Martha Coakley, the Democratic senate candidate in Massachusetts, the Democrats' loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat held for almost half a century by Edward Kennedy, following the party's November loss of the New Jersey gubernatorial race, suggests the need to focus more on the broader context, and less on individual shortcomings.
The Democratic Party has squandered the enormous opportunity bequeathed to it by the election of 2008.
The party gained overwhelming control of both the legislature and executive in 2008. Yet party leaders somehow failed to recognize the political moment.
We live in populist times.
Wall Street has crashed the economy. According to the official figures -- which under-report unemployment -- one in six people in the country are out of work or unable to find full-time work.
People know who's to blame for the country's deep recession, and they want them held accountable.
And they want to see aggressive policies to put people back to work.
But we've seen neither populist politics nor policies from the Democrats.
Although President Obama on occasion has had harsh words for Wall Street, in general the administration has sought to blunt the public's anger against the banksters.
It supported and has continued the Bush administration's bailout plan, a kind of unconditional love for Wall Street. Sure, you could make the case the banks had to be saved in order to rescue the economy; but there is no defense for bailing out the richest of the rich with no strings attached.
The administration has put forward a financial regulatory plan with some very useful components. But it has refused to embrace the bold populist policies we need -- breaking up the banks, taxing financial speculation -- to rein in Wall Street. It has also failed to defend the good positions it has advocated with sufficient vigor and high-level involvement.
The gentle treatment of Wall Street from the outset of the administration has framed subsequent political developments.
To its credit, the administration pushed through a desperately needed economic stimulus plan. But in significant part because the size of the stimulus plan was similar to the amount spent on the Wall Street bailout, and because the administration had embraced both, the stimulus and bailout -- though totally distinct -- became entangled in people's minds.
Next came health care. The Democratic Congressional leadership developed a complicated and obtuse health care plan. There was the occasional bluster about how the insurance industry was seeking to undermine the plan, but in fact the insurance and pharmaceutical industries embraced the idea, and will profit enormously from it. Rather than identifying and campaigning against the corporate obstacles to providing affordable access to care for all, the White House cut deals with them.
Meanwhile, while the stimulus and Federal Reserve interventions prevented the recession from turning to depression, the unemployment and foreclosure situations grew dire. No post-stimulus jobs initiatives appeared until the end of 2009. And the Congress and White House failed to do anything consequential to keep people in their homes.
Along the way, populism did find a partial outlet: in the confused and contradictory tea party movement.
Going forward, who grabs the populist reins will significantly determine the 2010 election results.
The populist issue of the day is Wall Street's exorbitant bonus payments. Wall Street remains in business only because it has benefited, and continues to benefit, from trillions of dollars in public supports. The billions that Wall Street is now preparing to pay itself in bonuses come, in a very real sense, out of the pockets of We, The People.
Neither we nor our elected officials need to stand by and watch this happen. We can take our money back by imposing a windfall bonus tax, as Representative Dennis Kucinich has proposed.
You can click here to sign a Public Citizen petition supporting a tax on Wall Street's bonuses.
One clear lesson from the last year is that the people cannot count on political leaders to read the tea leaves and go populist -- even if it is in elected officials' narrow self interest. They have to demand it.

Robert Weissman is the president of Public Citizen.

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