The Linear Canvas

I am so glad that Ohio finally got rid of the Pay Day Loan racket. They were only in poorer areas and preyed on those that could least afford it. There was a time that loan sharking was illegal everywhere. I am not sure how all this got started, but I know these people are aggressive in recovering loans. I’m not sure anyone got their leg broken like a loan shark might do. But abuse and harassment take many forms.

Quite a few states still have legal Pay Day Loan businesses. Back in high school, I can remember speculating that we would have small privately held bank’s someday and they would be called something like…Bob’s Bank. Little did I know that someday there would be that type of bank, but I never anticipated they would be evil. Even more evil than corporate banks! That’s alot of evil.

I am sure that Pay Day Loan defenders would say the up to 400% interest that Pay Day Loan sharks are charging is because of the service they are providing to their customers. And that without that service how would these people get by?

It turns out, many that borrow money from a Pay Day Loan racketeer, enter a cycle of borrowing, paying back, and borrowing again, that some people may never pay off. Even when the debt is finally paid, it ends up costing many times the original loan amount. Is this how we should be treating our poor and needy? This type of service only enriches those that have, at the expense of those that have the least. If that isn’t a crime, it should be.

The video link is to a report done by Katie Couric on the The CBS Evening News about the Pay Day Loan racket in the U.S.

click above or here to watch this video

I am currently reading Richard A. Clarke’s book "Against All Enemies".  I highly recommend it. It is well written and mostly easy to follow. Mr. Clark is a former long time government employee who had worked in the consecutive administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. He routinely held positions that required the highest of security clearance. It would include being Chief Counter-Terrorism Adviser on the U.S. National Security Council. That made him a member of the executive branch on 9/11. Published in 2004, the book is about his involvement in helping to direct the counter-terrorism strategy for the United States, through his retirement in 2003.

I came across these two paragraphs in the book. The context was a discussion on how some theories about government conspiracies were true while others were fabrications or distortions:

Another conspiracy theory intrigued me because I could
never disprove it. The theory seemed unlikely on its face: Ramzi
Yousef or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had taught Terry Nichols how to
blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building. The problem was that, upon
investigation, we established that both Ramzi Yousef and Nichols had
been in the city of Cebu on the same days. I had been to Cebu years
earlier; it is on an island in the central Philippines. It was a town in
which word could have spread that a local girl was bringing her American
boyfriend home and that the American hated the U.S. government.

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I guess I should have known that the threats to withhold campaign contributions, and whatever other methods the corporate insurance elite have been using to get the current administration back in line would work eventually. Now there’s talk that President Obama will announce his surrender to them on the health care issues that I think would have the biggest impact, Single Payer and/or the Public Option. I sent an e-mail to the White House this morning and this is what I wrote:

President Obama,

I am a life long Democrat. I supported you through most of your campaign. I have never voted for a non-Democrat for president.

Now that you have decided (?) to surrender to the medical cartel, first on single payer and now on a public health care option, my only thought is that how “they” have won and “you (alone)” have failed. Do you think Fox News will ever let you live this down? Fox and their paymasters have beaten you and they know it. I, for one, am ashamed. I am ashamed that lies and money have finally gotten to you. Maybe I am the one that failed in believing that you were capable or willing to change anything.

This was your Waterloo and you did not win. You just managed to have an orderly surrender.

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Joe gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water because some liberal fought for minimum water quality standards. He takes his daily medication with his first swallow of coffee. His medications are safe to take because some liberal fought to insure their safety and work as advertised.

All but $10.00 of his medications are paid for by his employers medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance, now Joe gets it too. He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs this day. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

Joe takes his morning shower reaching for his shampoo; His bottle is properly labeled with every ingredient and the amount of its contents because some liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some tree hugging liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air. He walks to the subway station for his government subsidized ride to work; it saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees. You see, some liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

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Glenn Beck is so unhinged. Crying one minute and then screaming like a banshee the next.
Here’s a mashup song/video of "some" of his most outrageous moments, put to music.

Glenn Beck – Get Off My Phone (YouTube video)

Included in the stimulus package currently before congress is a provision to spend American tax dollars on products made in the US instead of sending the money to other countries. Critics (foreign investors) call this protectionism and claim that this will cause other countries to enact their own protectionist rules.

The question whether foreign countries will respond in kind if we enact the Buy American policy in the president’s stimulus bill, should be handled by decreasing or eliminating any foreign aid to a country that tries to “punish” the US for reviving manufacturing in our own country.

Detracters of the Buy American provision like the US Chamber of Commerce are heavily invested in foreign companies and countries and have an un-Patriotic financial interest in the loss of American jobs to third world contries and/or the elimination of labor unions so they can turn the US into a third world country, or a fascist/corporatist state. That is, more than they already have. Sometimes I wonder who these organizations real loyalty is to?

After the years of mismanagement, criminality, cronyism, and a general lack of competance, I am excited to get a new face and a different style in the governing of the United States. Maybe Barack Obama will only be an average president, but compared to W, any leader would look great in comparison.

Now if only we can get the Justice Department to look at the criminal acts that occurred, including 9/11, to determine what really happened in America for the last eight years instead of what the compliant corporate main stream media wanted us to believe. Had the “liberal” media been really “liberal” instead of willfully ignoring the wrongdoing going on in the White House, we no doubt would have had a different president many years ago.

For some time now I have been waiting for the Columbus Dispatch’s endorsement for president. Remembering that the paper had made endorsements in the last two elections for president that were self serving and as it turned out totally bone headed, I assumed that the Dispatch’s owners would again err on the side of personal profit, as opposed to the public good.

This past Sunday I found my waiting was over, and the endorsement was just as I expected. Again the Dispatch endorsed the candidate that will change little except the name on the door of the oval office.

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I remember on Sept 11, 2001, I was working all day in Cincinnati, Ohio. I lived in Toledo at the time, but I still loved to listen any time I could to WLW, which I could get most of the time even in Michigan. I was glued to WLW all day that day as was usual for me anyway. On Sept. 11, we were all patriots and had a common cause. 

Comedian Gary Burbank was the main reason I listened, and I even had a lot of respect for host Mike McConnell. I loved the Reds and had been listening to them on 700 since the late sixties. I grew up listening to Ruth Lyons 50-50 Club with my mother every afternoon.  

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There was a story in the news recently about Wal-Mart managers being told that the Democratic party taking over in the November 2008 election would be bad for all of them. They were advising them to vote Republican instead.

 

This is very typical of their behavior towards their employees. The reasons that I do not buy anything from Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club are because they have abused their employees so much in the past. Stories about locking up their employees in the store while they were working so they could not leave, forcing employees to work overtime for no pay, and passing over women and minorities for job advancement are just some of the reasons that I want nothing to do with them.

I won’t shop at Wal-Mart. I have gone into a Wal-Mart three times in the past four years, but did not buy anything once, bought a wallet in Kentucky, and bought some clothes for my great-niece, who loved Wal-Mart, the other time. Within the last six months, I almost gave in and joined Sam’s Club, just because there is one real close to me. But within a few days I read a news story about Wal-Mart once again abusing its employees in some manner. That put a stop to that.

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