Well…just a short one on a comment that ole Mitt made yesterday about his income from speakers fees that he made last year….when asked about the amount he replied “not much”…okay, Mitt, your not much was 374,000 dollars…374 K, which would put anyone else in the top 1% is just pocket change to ole Mitt…how can anyone who answers that 374K is “not much” ever understand what the 99% of us go through in our daily lives? This alone should disqualify Mitt form the presidency since the only people he can ever identify with are those of the silver spoon class; those that were born to wealth and have the delusion that they earned it…geez…
Okay, I’m going to add a little to this one about how out of touch many of our rich politician class is…if you remember, back in the 90’s when the elder George Bush walked into a grocery store and marveled at the price scanners that those of us that actually have to do our own grocery shopping had seen for many years…and, to be fair…there have been many of the patrician class of the dems that have done the same thing, I seem to remember one of the Kennedys who never carried money because they had people to do that for them…but the difference is that most of them really did care about the middle class and their legislative efforts showed it…none of the trickle-down nonsense that the repubs have pushed for the last 30 years…
Well…I hope you’ve been following the drama that has been going on in Wisconsin over the past year where the repub governor Scott Walker and his cronies have attacked the rights of the people and have tried to enact the Koch brothers radical view of the world that includes making the middle class go away. I was heartened yesterday when the first phase of ridding the world of this nonsense was completed by the people of Wisconsin filing over a million signatures to recall this troglodyte idiot and a few more of his extreme right wing minions. But, there is still an election to be won in phase two but you can see how concerned his owners are with Walker being in NYC to raise more money to try to lie his way into the rest of his term…there is something wrong with how the repubs do politics when the majority of the money Walker has used to get elected and to try to defeat the signature drive has come from big-money sources outside of Wisconsin…I stand with the people of Wisconsin while they take back their state from these radical outside interests…and I hope this puts the gov here on notice that the people don’t want the repubs radical nonsense….and that we remember the right of the people to freely associate and form unions is a human right that can’t be taken away by big money….nice job!
Well…another night and another Wings win in a shootout and Michigan even beat Michigan State in basketball so that was an okay night. It was a no cocktail night but I went to bed late and got up early so I don’t feel that much better…or as good as I should but that could be the calorie reduction…who knows? There were lots of dreams but I really don’t remember any of them so they must not have been that interesting….not much to do today….I’ve been waiting to do the grocery run until later in the week since I am doing a no cocktail week to rest the body….so, it will be cleaning and that’s about it…more later….
Well…it has been a prolific day for me and I wish I knew why so I could repeat it….this will be short one and probably should have been put in the musings one that I did previously…but I didn’t so here goes….the one reason that companies always give for sending jobs overseas is the huge difference in labor costs between the US and China, but a new study that has come out in the past couple of days is that the difference is only about 20% of the total product cost…so, for example, if you have a 200 dollar flat screen made in China….it could be made and sold here for 240 dollars and would put many of our neighbors back to work and start to restore the American dream. I, for one, would happily pay the extra 20% if that would mean one of the unemployed here in Michigan (maybe me) could get a good job. One of the things we all must remember is that, with the hollowing out of our manufacturing base, we have permanently lowered demand so much that we can’t grow our way out of the malaise the economy is in….geez…
Well…..I did get caught up today so I wasn’t too motivated to do another one but I think that boredom is starting to work backwards and make me want to do more…so, I’m going to just noodle around here for a few minutes and see where it goes. I wonder what the attraction is for people to want to know their heritage so much that they are willing to pay sites like Ancestry to find out that stuff….personally, I’ve never really cared where I came from…I’m more interested in where I’m going instead….what does it do for you to know who your great grandparents were? But, then again, there are lots of things I don’t understand so maybe I shouldn’t single this one out….I am a little depressed that the car is going to be a block of ice again in the morning with all of the rain and falling temps…I guess I haven’t started the dull, numbing, winter coping mechanism yet and I hope it starts soon…it is going to be almost 50 by Monday so I’m a little concerned that it is not going to work this year….okay, that’s about it for now…it’s going to be another no cocktail night tonight but there is a quite a lot of sports on that should keep me at least a little amused….
Well…if you were here a few days back, you heard me make the assertion that one of the reasons that ole Mitt wasn’t releasing his tax returns was that it was going to reveal a dirty little secret of those whose income is derived from investment; not from wages….that those who live off securities and investment income only pay about 15% of their income in taxes…and that is exactly what happened today when ole Mitt’s campaign revealed just that. Now, I don’t know about you, but I just don’t think it’s right or fair that the 1% can buy tax laws that allow them to avoid paying their fair share while the rest of us pay 25% or more..even in my case, where I am living on savings from my lifetime of work and I pay more than the multi-millionaire Mitt…c’mon Mitt…let’s see the pretzel you are going to twist yourself into trying to justify these facts….I hope you can now understand why the 99% is so pissed off…geez…
Well…a nice article by Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post this morning kind of crystallized something that has been rattling around in my head for quite a while and highlights something that I think has been downplayed in the whole Bain Capital/creative destruction argument that has been presented as justification for the destruction of companies and lives by the right. While the entire emphasis has been from the investor side and the rightful assertion that people should make money from their investments, what about the investments of the people that work at these companies? The investments of time, loyalty, and forgone opportunities that came from listening to the promises of management and choosing to contribute to the growth and success of those companies has largely been ignored in the calculus of how the rewards should be distributed. Why should the investor class walk away with 88 percent profits yearly on their investments (as happened in one 10 year span at Bain) while the workers whose companies were gutted and ransacked by Bain walked away with nothing to show for their decades of service? It is just the latest manifestation of the contempt that the right has for labor and anyone who is not in the 1 percent…geez…
Well…another day just like the rest yesterday but I did get to go out and have a couple with G so that made it a little palatable…and I had weird dreams about cooking and cleaning…but mostly cleaning last night…not sure what that was about but it was fun to have some again, finally. It was nice to have some of the snow melt yesterday and if we would get one more day like it, I might be able to get back on the bike later in the week…but we’re not getting it so I probably should just resign myself to waiting until spring…that means I should take it over to wash it but I’m not motivated to do that yet….not much to do today…I may go out to get some veggies for snacks…have been thinking about replacing a whole meal with veggies to counteract the lack of exercise but I’m not sure how to do that yet…looks like something to do anyway….more later…
Well…this one is going to kind of fit with the title but not all of it….so here goes…first, the only reasonable person dropped out of the repub race today when John Huntsman decided to quit…but I can understand why…the repub party is so far to the right now the John Birchers would be to their left and I never thought I’d see that. I do miss the reasonable repubs like Jerry Ford that got things done for the country, not just their party. But that was then, and this is now and I don’t think we’ll see the “big” politicians again…those whose only thought was to try to do the best for the country and it’s people no matter if they were dems or repubs. Oh, one of the things that I want to get straight is that I’m not really against business or capitalism per se…it is unbridled and unregulated capitalism that I can’t stand and rail against almost constantly as you know. There is nothing wrong with companies making money, but why do they have to squeeze every penny out of their workers and give it to those who don’t really need more? I think one of the questions that people that already have so much should ask themselves is “how much is enough?” Once you have millions, why do they have to continue to take when an extra 100 bucks week would mean a lot to one of their employees? Where were these people raised? And, who taught them that to care about others and fairness is a bad thing? I wasn’t brought up that way but I see the trend in a lot of younger folks today…I wonder why…and how can we fix it? Just thinking….
Well…another Sunday and it was nice to get out and see K for a few minutes…or to just get out of here for a while and do something different….didn’t sleep well or dream so that was quite a disappointment but I guess I’ll live through it…even the football games were kind of boring but there was the Michigan/Ohio State outdoor hockey game that Michigan won so that was something…Not much to do today…I do have to meet up with G later for a couple but that is about it…I’ll be back later to try to catch up…