electricland: (Kirsty)
The marvellous Kirsty MacColl singing the prophetic "Free World". This is the video, so you get "wag" instead of "shag". But the rage comes through loud and clear.



I wouldn't tell you if I didn't care
electricland: (Audrey 2)
Wait! I'm not done yet!

In Bailout Furor, Wall Street Pay Becomes a Target

No kidding. Check the nifty graph that goes with it.
But Wall Street, its lobbyists and trade groups are waging a feverish lobbying campaign to try to fight compensation curbs. Pay restrictions, they say, would sap incentives to hard work and innovation, and hurt the financial sector and the American economy.

Wait, you mean, like the hard work and innovation that have been so good for the financial sector and the American economy this past year? I just... I... I cannot get my head around the sheer unmitigated gall of everyone involved in this mess.
electricland: (Canadian)
Apparently John McCain is suspending his political campaign to work on the financial crisis. That's big of him, considering he helped create it in the first place. Because deregulation is always the answer! The market knows all! The market will take care of things! until the big investors look like losing their shirts and go crying to the government to kiss it better with taxpayers' money, anyway.

This seems like an excellent time to revisit an old favourite!

The Subprime Mortgage Crisis, Explained by Stick Figures

I'll shut up now.
electricland: (Alien)
"This is corporate welfare at its most blatant and most odious."

Here, have a prescient post from a year ago Thursday. (Except, as it turns out, the half-trillion figure is a little low.) I can't believe this subprime mortgage mess has been going on for a year.

I get why it's important to keep the financial system operating. I do, really. But it should never, ever have been allowed to get into this state in the first place.

(See also: The Liberal Media Hasten the Red Revolution.)

(Oooh, and also Glenn Greenwald. Who is angry. With reason.
Put another way, this authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.
Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] archaica for the link.)
electricland: (Alien)
Some links:

Via [livejournal.com profile] makinglight's comments section, also [livejournal.com profile] shetterly:

Cecilia Fire Thunder, Oglala Sioux Tribal President, is kind of annoyed at South Dakota's recent unpleasantness. So she's hoping to establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which is of course sovereign territory and no subject to South Dakota law (in this case and many others). Planned Parenthood clinics are, of course, good for much more than just abortions.

Ways to donate, in case you want to help with this.
Next, Salon has more on a disturbing story:

[T]he anti-birth-control movement's efforts are making a significant political impact: Supporters have pressured insurance companies to refuse coverage of contraception, lobbied for "conscience clause" laws to protect pharmacists from having to dispense birth control, and are redefining the very meaning of pregnancy to classify certain contraceptive methods as abortion. In increasing numbers, women and men opposed to contraception are marshaling health facts and figures to bolster their convictions that sex for anything but procreation is morally wrong and potentially deadly. Although its medical arguments are really just thinly veiled moral and religious arguments, using findings that are biased and unfounded, the rising anti-contraception movement, echoed by the Catholic Church, is making significant inroads. Leaders of the pro-choice movement know it, are worried about it, and realize they can't take it lightly, as they mount their own strategies to battle it.

"It is very hard to awaken people to the threat," says Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood, "because who can believe that something so accessible can be at risk? But that's what [people] said when they started attacking Roe, and now look at how close we are to losing Roe."
And Dan Savage notes:

Straight Rights Update: Earlier this month Republicans in South Dakota successfully banned abortion in that state. Last week the GOP-controlled state house of representatives in Missouri voted to ban state-funded family planning clinics from dispensing birth control. "If you hand out contraception to single women," one Republican state rep told the Kansas City Star, "we're saying promiscuity is okay." On the federal level, Republicans are blocking the over-the-counter sale of emergency contraception and keeping a 100 percent effective HPV vaccine—a vaccine that will save the lives of thousands of women every year—from being made available.

The GOP's message to straight Americans: If you have sex, we want it to fuck up your lives as much as possible. No birth control, no emergency contraception, no abortion services, no life-saving vaccines. If you get pregnant, tough shit. You're going to have those babies, ladies, and you're going to make those child-support payments, gentlemen. And if you get HPV and it leads to cervical cancer, well, that's too bad. Have a nice funeral, slut.

What's it going to take to get a straight-rights movement off the ground? The GOP in Kansas is seeking to criminalize hetero heavy petting, for God's sake! Wake up and smell the freaking Holy War, breeders! The religious right hates heterosexuality just as much as it hates homosexuality. Fight back!
Finally, because it's never too late to keep those hits coming and this seems like an excellent post for it: Bill Napoli.

napoli (not to be confused with the proper noun, which indicates the Italian city)
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): napolied
Pronunciation: nA’poli

1. To brutalize and rape, sodomize as bad as you can possibly make it, a young, religious virgin woman who was saving herself for marriage. 2. To hella rape somebody.

Etymology: From State Senator Bill Napoli’s (R-SD) words on an acceptable description of rape that would merit an exemption from South Dakota’s abortion ban.

[Edited to add stuff. I knew I had more than I originally put in...]

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