Fact-esque

They Said It Couldn't Happen Here. They Lied

“No one could have told me that in a million years: I’d wake up in a homeless shelter,” she said. “I had a house for homeless people. Now, I’m homeless.”

Growing numbers of Americans who have lost houses to foreclosure are landing in homeless shelters, according to social service groups and a recent report by a coalition of housing advocates.

Only three years ago, foreclosure was rarely a factor in how people became homeless. But among the homeless people that social service agencies have helped over the last year, an average of 10 percent lost homes to foreclosure, according to “Foreclosure to Homelessness 2009,” a survey produced by the National Coalition for the Homeless and six other advocacy groups.

In the Midwest, foreclosure played a role for 15 percent of newly homeless people, according to the survey, reflecting soaring rates of unemployment — Ohio’s reached 10.8 percent in August — and aggressive lending to people with damaged credit.

This is what happens when a govt is focused on saving the rich and lets the middle and lower classes go pound sand: the other class gets slammed by the defenestration of the economy and voila! they're suddenly on the streets.

Foreign Co's Do What US Co's Can't...And in the US

OK. Here's the deal: US corpo's consistently claim they can't make money in the US unless they can underpay workers, strip their benefits, and kill their unions, and that that's why they have to outsource, globalize, and hire illegals. Americans, they say archly, don't want to work any more, don't have a work ethic, and spend more time worrying about their vacations than their jobs.

They say this despite the 1000 applications for every 25 jobs that show up, the 60+ hrs/wk Americans put in, the vacations they don't get and the holidays the corpo's ignore. They say this despite loading up many employees with the responsibilities that used to be handled by 5 people at the same time they cut salaries and benefits, which they call "a rise in productivity" and then brag about as if their management skills were the reason for it.

So if we're such schmucks and so useless, why do foreign companies want to hire us? And how come they can make money where their American counterparts can't?

Friday Palin on Saturday: Oops! Ratings Drop!

Thanks to a Gallup poll this week, it has suddenly occurred to the corporate media to think John Edwards and Sarah Palin are somehow fraternal twins. Why Gallup came up with this odd pairing is a mystery but as a result there have been several articles recently comparing them. UPI thinks that Edwards' career is over while Palin's is just beginning even though the Gallup numbers show Sarahcuda's favorable rating has fallen significantly.

Edwards' favorable ratings dropped 27 points between July 2004 and January 2008. The decline was the steepest in consecutive polls since Gallup began using its favorable/unfavorable format in 1992, the Gallup Poll said Friday.

***

Despite a decline in Palin's ratings, however, Gallup said her ability to stay in the news – particularly since her surprise resignation as Alaska's governor -- may allow her to move from being a vice presidential candidate in one election to being a presidential candidate in the next.

Palin went from a 53 percent rating right after her nomination as Arizona Sen. John McCain's running mate at the Republican National Convention to 42 percent at the time of the ticket's defeat at the polls in November. Her ratings have dropped an additional two percent since then, the poll indicted.

I mean, I suppose it's possible that this isn't a blatant attempt to shore up Cuda's otherwise-15-mins-of-fame and pretend it isn't, like, fading as fast as Rush's drug dealer but it isn't easy to come up another reason that passes the giggle test.

American Corporatism: The More Incomes Need to Rise, the More the Company Cuts

The Obama Admin sent the message loud and clear and Corporate America got it: workers don't matter. Only the corporations get to be saved. They are the focus.

The result is pretty much what you'd expect: even though economists agree that putting money into the hands of people who will spend it is the only way to get out of the morass Bush and the Chicago School created, the corpo's are laying off more workers and cutting the paychecks of those who remain while loading them up with even more work and calling it "a rise in productivity".

White Collar Unions

Writing a couple of years ago in The Democratic Strategist, ex-labor organizer and current union PR consultant Jim Grossfeld summarizes the results of a survey he and his partners conducted into modern attitudes about unions at the request of the Center for American Progress. The results aren’t so much surprising as they are cohesive. It’s not that, as David Kusnet points out in his reply in the same magazine, any of what Grossfeld says is all that new; but it’s knowledge that’s been scattered all over the place. Joining it all together helps bring the problems of labor organizing in the new millenium into sharper focus.

Friday Palin: Rogue Elephant Even Scares Other Elephants

TBogg notes that on Sunday's MTP all the Pub panelists (that's pretty much all MTP has any more) were wetting their collective panties over the possibility that Sarahcuda could actually end up being the 2012 nominee. Steve Schmidt, McCain's campaign manager (and presumably the brains behind the Palin pick in the first place) called it "a catastrophic election result". GOP strategist Mike Murphy said it would be "a disaster".

But it was David Brooks (with an assist from Murphy) who was so terrified of her potential that he threw away his most fundamental knowledge (and it's pretty fundamental; Brooks has never been known for a) subtlety or b) his ability to understand anything more complicated than a plastic bowl) of political realities and replaced it with this fantastic cosmic cartoon:

"She will not be, because people just don't like that style of politics," Brooks said. He explained that primary voters -- Democrats and Republicans -- don't go for harsh politics, or what he called "a margin on the edge."

(emphasis added)

Um, they don't? Since when? Has there been a sea-change in the makeup of the Republican base in the past 24 hrs? Are they suddenly sane? I don't think so. I think Sarah is just the beef the red meat base would prefer to feed on, and since it is that red meat/fundie/whacko base that comes out for primaries and iac runs the party, that puts her in a very good position to sail home to victory, sliding in on the blood and guts of her disemboweled opponents (which, I'm sure, is just how Sarah Moose-Killer would like to win it).

Now the Truth Can Be Told Dept: Why Obama Backed Lieberman

Somebody once said that if you could just stay in the same place on the bank of a river long enough, eventually the answers would all float by you. (Though not, presumably, in sequence.) Well, for all those of us who have been sitting by the river waiting to find out why on earth Obama kissed Joe Lieberman's ass even after the SOB campaigned against him, the Lieberman Amendmend just floated by.

The American Propsect's Adam Serwer notes that, yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman successfully inserted into the Homeland Security appropriations bill an amendment -- supported by the Obama White House -- to provide an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act's mandates by authorizing the Defense Secretary to suppress long-concealed photographs of detainee abuse.  Two courts had ruled -- unanimously -- that the American people have the right to see these photographs under FOIA, a 40-year-old law championed by the Democrats in the LBJ era and long considered a crowning jewel in their legislative achievements.  But this Lieberman amendment, which is now likely to pass, undermines all of that and -- as EBay founder Pierre Omidyar put it today -- its central purpose is to "legalize suppression" of evidence of American war crimes.

What BO has got himself here is a shameless Pub-Democrat who's perfectly willingnto take on the nasty job of fucking over the Democratic base with tricky, barely legal parliamentary maneuvers that keep Bushism alive and open for business despite our overwhelming repudiation of it while Obama can play the presidential game of "staying above the fray" and wave his clean hands around so we can see em. "It wasn't me, folks. I just work here."

And so on.

Norwood Nurses Join SEIU: Michelle Malkin Falls Down Backwards and Foams at the Mouth

Well, not yet. Maybe tomorrow when she finally hears about it.

Nearly 600 workers at Norwood Hospital, ranging from respiratory therapists to housekeepers, will join the Service Employees International Union as the result of an election yesterday.

***

Norwood became the third hospital in the Caritas Christi Health Care system, based in Boston, to unionize this year. More than 800 employees at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, the flagship of the six-hospital Catholic chain, in April affiliated with the same labor union, Local 1199 of the SEIU United Healthcare Workers East.

Malkin hates that. In fact, she hates unions, apparently because they promise better working conditions and pay to workers. Well, that's what she said. Calling SEIU's organization of home health care workers a "home invasion" - a term which used to be applied to criminals who broke into your house and robbed you with AK-47s or whatever but which Malkin now feels free to apply to people who ask you to let them help you live better - here's what she thought was so terrible:

Over the last month, home-based providers started have been receiving unexpected visits from out-of-state union lackeys trying to recruit them with the promise of health care benefits and more money.

(emphasis added)

Monstrous! Oh, and she doesn't like any of that voting business, either.

Say What? Dept: Jonah's Whale & Teh Stoopid

You know, if it wasn't just a minority of pants-wetting, nose-picking, pearl-clutching, batshit-insane, Beckian conservatives, I'd think maybe there was something in the water or swirling around in the air that's eating people's brains. What does one do with, oh, say, something like this?

There is, of course, an important principle here, and if all of Montana's residents were black, it would be easier for everyone to see it. Montanans' votes don't count as much as Rhode Islanders' -- in fact, a Montanan's vote only counts for nearly three-fifths of a Rhode Islander's. That America's slave population was counted by the same ratio under the original Constitution is usually cited, rightly, as one of the document's greatest sins. A lawsuit filed in federal court in Mississippi last month hopes to force Congress to remedy the status quo's assault on the one-person, one-vote principle by increasing Congress to as many as a paltry 1,761 members.

Beyond principle, there are practical reasons to expand Congress. For decades, presidential candidates have promised to change the "way Washington works." But once elected, they're soon captured by their own congressional parties, which are in turn beholden to the "old bulls" and constituencies rooted in interests outside their districts.

A Congress of, say, 5,000 citizen-legislators would change that overnight. Would it cost more money? Yes. But today's huge staffs could be cut, and perks and pork might even be curtailed by using the old chewing gum rule: If there's not enough for everyone, nobody can have any.

(emphasis added)

That, b's & g's, is Jonah Goldberg in today's LAT. Bear in Mind that they fired Richard Scheer to make room for Jonah's considerable...um...non-intilekshual bulk.

Modern American Capitalism: Shoot the Ducks and Grab the Bucks (Updated)

As Marx predicted, so it has come to pass. Unrestricted capitalism is the snake that eventually eats itself after it has finished off everything else. Don't believe it? Here's an example:

For years - decades - now we have all bewailed the notion that "America doesn't make anything any more". There's a reason for that. Besides their conscienceless globalization that mercilessly exploits the poor in low wage, low tax countries, American Big Business has made its money not by building companies but by tearing them down for huge if short-term profits.