Bloombergville Begins: Union Members Camp Outside City Hall in Protest

About 100 New York City union members and supporters have "occupied"  a space around City Hall to protest budget cuts instituted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  Doug Singsen, City College professor and one of the founders of New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, writes:

The first night of Bloombergville was great! After it stopped raining (and the cops started harassing us), we moved across the street and set up camp on Centre Street east of City Hall. There are around 100 of us here, the weather is perfect and it's been an exciting, inspiring night.

But we're not done! Some of us will be staying here during the day to maintain the encampment and we will be re-assembling in full force at 7 pm to have a speakout rally and another night of sleeping out and protesting the budget cuts. We need your help to make it even bigger and better! The Rude Mechanical Orchestra will be here and will provide some musical entertainment for us. Even if you can't sleep over, come down for the rally, tell your friends and help us build the struggle against budget cuts.

More background on the protests and occupation can be found here. 

Like other unions , District 37 members are facing massive layoffs and wage and benefit cuts under the austerity craze sweeping the nation.  Bloomberg's plans include firing 4100 city workers and closing a quarter of the city's fire houses. Protesters cite a union research report that claims the city could soften the blow by tapping more than $800 million in newly-identified potential revenue sources, including uncollected taxes.

New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts also point to the elimination of the state's so-called Millionaires' Tax on Wall Street as another main reason for the manufactured budget shortfall.  New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, recently polled as being more popular with Republicans than among members of his own party.  Even Carl Palladino, his GOP opponent, has praised the governor as being a true friend to fiscal conservatives and the Tea Party.

Cute Animal Websites Must Be Destroyed, Says Sheriff Joe Biden

The Democrats sure had a point when they complained that the shenanigans of Anthony Weiner were just a distraction from more important stuff.  What with Weinergate, and President Obama's campaign swing through the South, and his delegating the domestic jobs crisis to the CEO of a multinational corporation that pays no taxes, nobody is noticing the important work that Vice President Joe Biden is doing.

Everybody seemed to miss the vice president's big announcement yesterday that he is The New Sheriff in Town! He has his fiscal six shooters out to blast away all the terrible horrible government waste and fraud and abuse to balance the budget and save our country.  Because fiscal weapons of mass destruction and tightening our belts are the only ways we can navigate those bumps in the road and forge ahead through the headwinds and make multinational corporations feel confident enough to provide all those new jobs they are just itching to create if only they didn't feel so taxed and nervous!

In an email sent out Monday called, aptly, "There's a New Sheriff in Town" Biden announced his new gig as Anti-Waste Czar:

Did you know that the government spends millions to maintain buildings that have sat vacant for years? Or that your tax dollars pay to needlessly ship copies of the Federal Register to thousands of government offices across the country even though the same information is available online?

And I bet you didn't know that your tax dollars pay for a website dedicated to the Desert Tortoise. I'm sure it's a wonderful species, but we can't afford to have a standalone site devoted to every member of the animal kingdom. It's just one of hundreds of government websites that should be consolidated or eliminated.

This kind of waste is just unacceptable. Particularly at a time when we’re facing tough decisions about reducing our deficit, it's a no-brainer to stop spending taxpayer dollars on things that benefit nobody.

That’s why President Obama asked me to head up the Campaign to Cut Waste—a new effort to root out wasteful spending at every agency and department in The Federal Government.

No Joe, I sure didn't know there was a website devoted to the Desert Tortoise, so I decided to check it out before it disappears from cyberspace forever.  It is a wonderful website, but I agree that it must cost at least several dollars a year to maintain. It's got full-color graphics, a FAQ feature, and links to other nature sites.  What a disgusting waste.  Plus this turtle is kind of boring.  The only thing it apparently does besides breathing and taking up valuable geographical and cyber space is to pee copiously all over your hand if you pick one up.  Ecch.

Now let's see.... wherever could the idea of a money-hogging desert tortoise destroying our budget have come from?  It's a known fact that governors in western states have been mounting a big campaign to do away with the federal Endangered Species Act altogether.  Just this year, the Gray Wolf was removed from the list thanks to lobbying by Montana ranchers who want to shoot the wolves because they kill a sick old cow once in awhile.  But since the Desert Tortoise lives mainly in the harsh environment of the Mojave Desert, what's the beef there?

I mean, the Tortoise is a perfect metaphor for the slow pace of our economic recovery, so it should be protected forever and ever and its website preserved. "Slow and Steady Wins the Race to the Top" should really replace Winning the Future as the Obama campaign slogan.

Joe Biden says we can't afford to have a stand-alone website devoted to every member of the animal kingdom. But since he's so concerned about austerity (or pretends to be to appease the Republicans) why not take a look at all those Department of Defense websites while we're at it?  Take a look at the $1 million a year it takes to keep one soldier in Afghanistan, take a look at all the billions going to feed the Karzai drug cartel, to build roads and schools and maintain bases overseas -- and then talk to the American people about the deficit and our own crumbling infrastructure and exactly what it is that constitutes waste, fraud and abuse.

And how wasteful is it to have a vice president wasting his time writing harebrained emails that trash-talk tortoises? Maybe we should just trim the waste and get rid of the vice presidency altogether. And leave turtles and the Desert Tortoise website alone!

Say It Ain't So, Joe! (Can I Call You Joe?)

 



The Trashing of Debbie Wasserman Schultz

People complain that Democrats aren't forceful enough.  They accuse the party of being a bunch of capitulating, mealy-mouthed wusses and a lot of the time they would be right. But the new Chair of the DNC is taking hits from all sides for the very outspokenness which makes her such a refreshing change from the Democratic timidity we have to come to know and expect.


Politico has a particularly snide little attempt at a hit job running today, characterizing the blunt rhetoric of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as an outbreak of gaffe-itis and pettily dissecting each of her passionate remarks. The Republican War on Women?  No such thing, says Politico's Molly Ball -- everybody knows the GOP has not literally declared a war on women!  No metaphors allowed, apparently.  Particularly odious was Ball's false equivalence between the provocative weapon metaphors of Sarah Palin -- urging her followers to put Democrats in the crosshairs -- with Wasserman Schultz's withering critiques of the Social Darwinism of Republicans:

 "Wasserman Schultz’s sharpest rhetoric — such as insisting that Republicans’ move to defund Planned Parenthood and restrict abortion constitutes a “war on women” or that the Ryan plan would be a “death trap for some seniors” — may please her party’s base. But it doesn’t square with her role as a leading voice decrying that kind of over-the-top language in the wake of the January shooting in Tucson that injured her good friend, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords".


Over-the-top language, blunders, gaffes?  No way, Jose!  Wasserman Schultz is not only a breath of fresh air, she is a  tornado descending on the Democratic doldrums and blowing everybody else out of the water. She did walk back her characterization of states requiring voters to show ID at the polls as a return to the days of Jim Crow, but she really didn't have to. She was right about that.  She's also totally right about Paul Ryan's Medikill Plan being nothing more than a Medikill Plan. 


The only thing "rocky" about Wasserman Schultz's start is that she's not only throwing stones at the whining, mendacious conservative Social Darwinists -- she is heaving boulders at them and pulverizing them in the process. Bravissima!