Randi Rhodes: Oakland's Shame

Riot police have attacked the Occupy Wall Street protestors in Oakland, CA with rubber bullets, tear gas and grenades. The protestors weren’t rioting. Why send in the riot police? I guess they don’t have a squad called the “peaceful demonstration police.”

HOUR ONE GUEST: Joshua Holland of AlterNet–a witness to what went down yesterday in Oakland.

President Obama is busy trying to ease our economic problems without the help of Congress, or to be more accurate, with the active opposition of Congress. Now Obama has a new initiative to find jobs for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. You know if John McCain was president, that wouldn’t be necessary—because they’d all still be staying in Iraq and Afghanistan. This plan is to have community health centers around the country hire some 8,000 veterans. The GOP-dominated Congress doesn’t care about veterans… and it sure as hell doesn’t care about community health centers. For Republicans, hiring veterans to work at community health centers is hiring people they don’t care about to do work they don’t want to see done. President Obama tried working with Congress. Now his only chance is to work around Congress. In addition, the President is taking steps to ease the loan burden on people with student loans. The only plan that Republicans have to ease the burden on those with student loans is to deny them student loans.

The Republicans want Obama to fail, or to be more accurate, the Republicans want America to fail, in the hope that will reflect badly on Obama. It would be one thing if they were just wishing that Obama will fail, but they’re actively blocking anything that would help America. It’s worse than having a “do-nothing” Congress, it’s a “do-something-bad” Congress.

Finally, the Republicans in Congress are pushing a bunch of talking points about what they call their “Forgotten Fifteen” bills to increase jobs. They’re handing out pocket cards to their members listing the “Forgotten Fifteen.” They are so dead-set against actually creating jobs that I wouldn’t be surprised if the pocket cards were made in China.

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