If This Be Treason

The Perpetuation of Poverty

By Joshua Kricker on September 1, 2013

Traffic stop in North Carolina — A traffic stop in Durham, North Carolina
Photo by Ildar Sagdejev

Anyone who has occasion to sit in the County District Courts of North Carolina, the state where I reside, can’t help but see and hear the endless parade of defendants appearing before the judge on routine traffic infractions resulting in the imposition of court costs and sometimes fines.

The court costs are generally $189.00. If someone is unable to pay, a late fee of $70.00 is tacked on and the privilege to operate a vehicle is revoked. If caught operating a vehicle while the privilege is revoked, that person could, until very recently, be subject to up to 120 days incarceration, even though the sole reason for the revocation was inability to pay a fine. The legislature, not long ago, amended the statute to repeal incarceration as a penalty, provided the reason for the revocation was neither Driving Under the Influence nor Reckless Driving.

Mandrake the Congressman

By Christine Hall on July 12, 2013

These days American government is all just a magician’s show, nothing but slight of hand and misdirection.

That’s only to be expected. For years Congress, the Presidency, Wall Street and about everyone else who holds the real keys to ownership in this country has been maintaining the illusion that you and I, who have nothing but a borrowed pot to piss in, are actually the owners of this great land and that the government works for us.

The Bigotry Quotient

By Christine Hall on July 11, 2013

Never fear, this isn’t about Paula Deen. She’s just some kind of weird canary in a coal mine. It’s the coal mine that should bother us.

You see, what I find so freaking not understandable in the second decade of the 21st century, nearly fifty years after the civil rights law and the beginning of desegregation in the South, is how anyone could think a “plantation party” would be a good idea. She said she wanted to dress-up “little” black people, I guess to pretend she was back in some idealized version of the Olde South in all it’s glory as depicted in the first half of the first half of Gone With the Wind–you know, before Atlanta burned and Miss Scarlet was reduced to (gasp!) eating a carrot dug out of the ground with her own two hands because there were no darkies to dig it out for her.

Wal-Mart to DC–We’ll Take Our Ball and Go Home

Wal-Mart to DC–We’ll Take Our Ball and Go Home

By Christine Hall on July 10, 2013

If we want to get rid of feudal lords in America, as I wrote about yesterday, we should start with Wal-Mart. Believe me, this won’t be an easy task. The smiles that Wal-Mart features in their advertisements are a facade, hiding pure ruthlessness and greed.

If Wal-Mart was forced to pay their employees an actual living wage, they would undoubtedly have to raise their “everyday low prices.” Their low priced business model is based on the assumption of unrequited servitude by their employees, ergo paying decent wages means they lose their competitive edge which they’ve demonstrated time and again they will do anything to retain.

The Tea Party’s Feudal Lord

By Christine Hall on July 9, 2013

It boggles my mind how the tea baggers can get it so wrong.

I think most Tea Party folks probably trace their ancestry back to Europe. Most probably they imagine they originally hail from England, since once upon a time Merry Olde was considered to be our “mother country.”

The Hate Mongers

By Christine Hall on July 8, 2013

Hate.

It occurs to me more and more that hate is at the root of the problems we’re having with our politics. And it’s not only the other guy who’s sowing hate. We’re doing it too.

Left or right, our politics are all based on hate. This would seem to indicate that whatever afflicts us isn’t going to be solved with left/right politics. First we must apply the antidote to hate throughout our society before we can even think about moving forward. Indeed, that would be the first step of our forward motion.

Fear and Loathing at the ‘Jamestown News’

By Christine Hall on July 7, 2013

You can’t fire Ogi Overman. What’re ya, nuts?

If you’ve got a community driven newspaper anywhere in the Triad, especially in Jamestown or anywhere else in Guilford County, firing Ogi makes about as much sense as having Disneyland in your portfolio and firing Mickey. Or owning NBC and firing the Peacock. Or being England and giving the Queen her walking papers.

What Happened On Wall Street Today

By Christine Hall on June 20, 2013

There was a major sell-off on Wall Street today, with the market losing 2.3%, more than it’s lost on a single day since 2011. Why? Evidently the investment crowd is panicking because Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke indicated that soon, if the economy continues to improve, the Fed will quit printing new money willy-nilly for them to use to buy bonds in order to continue to stimulate the economy. In other words, they’re threatening to quit feeding the trolls.

Let me translate this for the hard-of-thinking.

This Isn’t Your Mother’s Phone Call

By Christine Hall on June 6, 2013

Don’t look in the mirror. You won’t like what you see.

To my generation, nobody ever wanted to grow up to be like mom and dad. Indeed, many of my girlfriends were majorly traumatized when they realized they’d grown up to be “just like Mother.” It appears this is what’s happening to us now as a nation. We’ve grown up to be the countries we were warned against. We’re starting to bear a strange resemblance to countries led by people with names like Stalin or Franco.

What Our Government Won’t Do For Monsanto

By ITBT on May 27, 2013

Editor’s note: We just found this write-up linking to this video on Facebook. This doesn’t surprise us, of course. Monsanto seems to own our government now. That’s the only thing that would explain how our government employees seem to work for Monsanto. Those of us who lived through the 1960s understand clearly that our government was never ours. Now, our government isn’t even pretending to be.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqXCboEL-7k

An Illinois beekeeper who spent the last 15 years researching the effects of Monsanto’s Roundup on bees, and compiling extensive evidence documenting that Roundup kills bees, came home one afternoon to find that someone had stolen the queen bee and hive he’d been using to conduct his research.