Category Archives: Misc

Misc

I’m so depressed…

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Well…I was going to label this one “October 29th part two” but I thought better of it…because I’m going to explain a little bit why I feel so depressed about what is happening in politics today. I think part of it was the euphoria that came with the ending of the eight years of hell under ole GW and having possibilities for this country to go forward again, to have the fingers of business lifted from the scale of life, and to see that maybe, just maybe, we could have a government that governed for people like you and me. And now, for reasons that I cannot comprehend, we are poised to go right back to those bad old days…to a governmental philosophy that can be best described as by the republicans and for business; the rest of the country be damned.

I know, I learned a while ago to not let these things take so much out of me, to not get so invested in things that I can’t control, but this one feels different…it’s like this is it for the country and the resilience that we have shown over the years is coming to a end. I’ve lived through the cold war, the communist scares, mutually assured destruction, and Watergate and I have never felt that we couldn’t come back until now…this time the people have killed the idea of America….they have bought into the lies and made them the truth of their reality even when it’s not so….we are no longer in this together…and I’m so depressed…

Misc

If Ford can do it, why can’t the rest?

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Well…have been thinking about this since Ford reported it’s quarterly profits in the last week or so, making it almost 6.5 billion dollars in profit through the third quarter; eclipsing all of the other automakers combined. And, guess what? They did it with union organized plants that pay a wage that keeps their workers solidly in the middle class. Take that you right wing union bashers….you that have done your best to destroy organized labor here in the US….saying that the only reason the automakers can’t or haven’t made money is the overpaid, lazy union workforce. But the question that immediately comes to my mind is: if Ford can do it, why can’t the rest? Why is it necessary for GM and Chrysler to have a two tiered wage scale that pays new workers half of what their old ones make? What is different that they can’t do what Ford does, especially when they have come through bankruptcy with little of the debt that Ford carries? I don’t think there is a difference other than, with the bad economic times, GM and Chrysler are still hanging on to the adversarial labor relationship that existed before the downturn and their management just doesn’t get that their workers are not the problem. But, with the return of the know nothing repubs…that is all we have to look forward to….they are going to keep their feet on the necks of the middle class as long as America stays so damn stupid and keeps electing them….

One other observation that just popped into my head…why are police and firefighters unions okay, but teachers and industrial unions are constant targets of the repubs. I’ve never heard them say one word about the police unions in any of the big cities that have them…so, again, if unions are so bad, why are police and firefighters given a pass by the repubs? Just asking….

Misc

Gotta stop watching Keith…

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Well…this one is going to be written tomorrow too, and I do need to stop watching Keith…just like reading “Bushwhacked”, I am quickly losing my faith in this administration with their decision to fight the decision of one of the appeals courts to allow a lawsuit against John Ashcroft for unlawful detention and breaking a bunch of other laws…geez…

Well…the gist of my anger with Obama and his administration is their decisions to allow people to blatantly break the law and then do nothing to hold the perpetrators accountable..the latest one has to do with John Ashcroft, as I said above, but it is a pattern of political calculation that goes back to their decision to not prosecute anyone in the Bush administration for their outright admission that they authorized torture; in direct violation of international and American law. Just think if this mindset was in use when Watergate was going on…the same ideas and actions would have let John Mitchell walk free…along with everyone else that was involved. What has happened to us? Why have we stopped holding criminals accountable? This latest action puts me about an inch away from giving up on Obama and withdrawing from the political process. I thought this country was a country of laws, a country that everyone from the president on down was subject to these laws…but I guess politics now trumps the law…and we are so the worse for it…geez…

Misc

Let’s stop blaming the unions…

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Well…I hope the latest profit numbers from Ford will blow up the repubs tired old arguments that everything that is wrong with American industry can be traced back to the supposed greed of the union represented workers that are the backbone of the auto industry. 3.1 billion dollars in profit…yep, that’s right…so far this year Ford has made 3.1 billion dollars on it’s North American car business…a completely unionized manufacturing company with fairly paid workers sharing in the success but also giving back when the company was in trouble. How did they do it? I know, the repubs will point to the pay and benefits of the unions as the reason that GM and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy…but let’s look at it closer..it was just bad management from the top down at those companies….and a failure to look farther into the future than the next quarterly statement. Plus, they just made cars and trucks that no one wanted and were of lower quality than their competitors.

Unlike their competitors, the Ford family recognized that things were changing in the industry a few years before the bottom fell out and and also recognized that a different kind of management was needed for the coming downturn. But, they also recognized that new, better products were needed as well and embarked on programs to make better cars that the public wanted. Personally, I think the right moves were made, to a large part, because the family’s name was still on the side of the building, and there was pride that all of the workers, salaried and union shared. It’s that dynamic that the repubs don’t care about…that there can be successful companies where both labor and ownership are successful; and the Ford family recognizes that without their skilled and dedicated union workers, their success would not be assured if the only labor plan was to bash the unions and take all they can with no regard for their workers. But, the repubs only know that labor is their mortal enemy, to be crushed at all costs….geez…

Misc

Let’s end this tax cut nonsense…

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Well…have to clear a few things up this morning…you may have gotten the wrong idea from some of my previous posts that I’m just a run of the mill tax and spend liberal type…but that is not correct. I do believe that government has a role as referee between the people and the overwhelming force of the rich and business, but I don’t believe that the government is always right and always does the right thing. There have been many examples of pork on the right and left where politicians have used tax revenues as their own personal piggy bank and to reward the people and businesses in their districts. If these outlays are for the common good, then I can see where they are necessary but projects like the “bridge to nowhere” and increasing spending on the military industrial complex in the face of this deep recession is not something that should continue.

With that said, I need to get to the tax cut nonsense that is still being pushed by the right, in the face of all credible economic analysis telling us that these cuts did nothing to stimulate the economy in the years they were in place but cost us 700 billion dollars a year in revenue. One thing that the right will not tell you, or doesn’t want to emphasize in their attacks on the stimulus package is that a third of it was tax cuts…that’s over 250 billion dollars of tax cuts in the 860 billion package. In one breath they tell us that the stimulus failed and in the next they say that the only way to save jobs and grow the economy is more tax cuts that they just said don’t work. Is anyone else’s head about to explode with this blatant and cynical attempt to have if both ways? I know, I’ve talked about this before, but my ire was aroused by the new ads here in Michigan that keep repeating “the failed stimulus package” in attacks on the Dems here…while it is hard to prove prevention of the loss of jobs by the stimulus, it is not hard to look at the data and know that the rosiest projection of jobs created by tax cuts was under 1 million…over 8 years…compare that to the 22 million created when there was a sensible tax policy during the Clinton years.

Another tactic from the right that I want to deal with today is their method of calculating the cost of each job saved for the dollar outlay from the stimulus package; with those costs being estimated at wildly differing rates of 2 to 20 million dollars per job; but we know how bad the right is at math…they don’t believe in science so why should they believe in math? Well…that’s not quite fair, but lets look at the 3.7 trillion dollar total cost of the Bush tax cuts and compare it to the optimistic estimates of 1 million jobs added while the tax cuts were in force. Then, let’s compare that to the the 860 billion dollar cost and the generally agreed on number that there were 2.5 million jobs saved by the spending of the stimulus…don’t even have to be good at math to see that the tax cuts are a far more expensive way to create jobs…so, let’s end this nonsense once and for all…geez…

Misc

Neil Young’s “Le Noise”

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Well…picked up a copy of Neil Young’s new cd a couple of days ago and have been listening to it almost constantly since….I like it quite a bit but if you’re a casual fan or a Neil novice, I’d listen to a few tracks online before I’d buy it. Again, Neil defies convention with the way the album was recorded…most of us are used to artists recording solo with acoustic guitars, but Neil does something different here; using an electric guitar and no other instrument or players. It does start to grow on you after a while and the electric guitar gives Neil and the producer a broader sound palette to work with, and they use it to make a full sound that is somewhat unusual at times.

But one thing that has not changed is that Neil can still write; songs of failure, loss, love, and anger are all part of the world he creates and it makes me really happy that us old guys still have it…or he still has it…I’ve been looking for it and would love to have it at some point….

Misc

Those little monsters….

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I’ve been vacillating all morning about writing this one but I just have to say something….part of my humanity and heart died when I read about the suicide of the Rutgers student after his supposed friends streamed his intimacy with another man to the internet using a hidden webcam. Who are those little monsters who would do such a thing? In what world is this kind of behavior acceptable?

I can answer that, I think. the kind of world where gay people are routinely demonized by the right, the kind of world where politicians pander to the lowest of their base, the kind of world where gays are routinely told they are second class citizens with less rights to happiness than the rest of us. I indict all of the haters on the right for making it acceptable and easier to hate these people by their daily screeds but I also indict the selfish parents who raised children like the ones who bullied this young man. I indict the religious leaders that still spew hate for gays from the pulpit every Sunday and hide behind the selective reading of their holy books to justify this inhuman behavior. I also indict all of the rest of us for not standing up to these bigoted idiots….this is what we get when we stand silent in the face of hate…and I shed a tear for the parents of this young man…

Misc

The Center Awakes…

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Well…going to be working on this one all day so it may be in pieces as the ideas come to me…had it almost figured out on the bike ride but the other post and lunch kind of took the wind out of my sails. What I want to talk about is the early stirrings of the center of the political spectrum, with more and more articles (even from some of the conservative commentators) decrying the win at all costs mentality of the right and the lack of ideas for true governance that is coming from the shouters. As you know, I’ve called for the return to reasonableness in our political discourse…and yet, I’ve also been a little too strident in my attacks on the tea party and the rest of the right. In the last few days, I’ve had an epiphany of sorts and I now kind of understand where they are coming from…and I can’t blame them for believing the well-oiled propaganda machine that is Fox News. I know that some of them can see what America used to be and I get the power of that nostalgia; I find myself wallowing in the thoughts of my old life at times and wishing those days could come back. But, those days are gone, and to rail about their passing and trying to stop the tide of change is just a waste of energy and time that the US can’t afford.

I see the awakening of the political center in the rallies that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are holding in DC at the end of October, I see it in the One Nation March in DC this Saturday, I see it in the realization that we can’t continue to govern this country for the 10 percent on the fringes of the right and left or the top two percent of of wage earners.

But there is another part of this that we also need to have happen…we need to change the mantra of this country from “I’ve got mine” to “how can I help?” And this is not just aimed at the real flesh and blood citizens of this country but at business who have been granted citizenship by the Supreme court. As I’ve said before, with the granting of citizenship, comes the responsibility of a citizen…to look to the common good, to look past what is good for the next quarter, or the CEO, or the shareholder, to what is good for the society you live and make profit in….but that goes for everyone, every citizen has a responsibility to tamp down the anger, to stop excluding people because they are different from you, and to remember we are all in this together…none of us can be successful unless we all are….

I challenge everyone here in the US to do what I’ve done…I qualify for and have paid for food stamps and other aid through my taxes that I gladly pay, but because I can survive without them, I refuse to take them so the money will be there for the truly needy, I challenge the rich to stand up and stop complaining about the extra 3 percent in taxes that they may have to pay…and to recognize they have it pretty damn good as I do, I challenge American business to stop just taking all they can get, to ask themselves the question “how much profit is enough?” and to start acting like responsible citizens. And, I challenge both political parties to stop the slash and burn, win-at-all-costs, politics is war mentality that is ruining our wonderful country….

Misc

Art Prize….

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Well…we are into the second year of the local art competition here in Grand Rapids, and while I like the idea of doing more for downtown than just opening a new bar, a commentary I read in the GR Press this morning kind of got me thinking about what art is to me and if that judgment is valid. In the article, Ed Riojas, a local artist, states that he is uncomfortable with the path that the competition is taking; with the emphasis becoming more on process than creativity. But I guess that gets to the question that has been asked since the first art appeared in the caves of France 30,000 years ago: What is art? I really can’t answer that question…I know what I like and that includes the old masters I saw when I was in Las Vegas, the stunningly beautiful work of Picasso, Renoir, and Rembrandt took my breath away the first time I saw their paintings in person. I think we can agree that the works of Alexander Calder and his “La Grand Vitesse” that we have been so fortunate to have here in Grand Rapids these many years fit the conventional view of art, but does a giant penny made up of pennies?

I think this questioning of process over creativity reflects arguments that we’ve had over the years around the world….and there may be a component of these arguments that is just the old guard trying to protect it’s territory, as we saw in the 50′s with music when rock and roll was shattering the accepted style and form that fit into middle America at the time. But, I think we also have to understand that popular does not always mean quality…Jacqeuline Susanne sold millions of books but no one confused their popularity with being great literature. I think this process emphasis just relates to the general dumbing down of American society….I think we can appreciate the work that goes into some of these pieces, but let’s not confuse work with creativity and bringing something new to the conversation.

Misc

Okay, a little outrage…

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Well…there is this cloud of things that are in my head that I’m going to try to make sense of in a kind of stream-of-consciousness post that I really don’t know will work. It strikes me as stunning the complete abdication of a large part of our society to the cause of the know nothings who are still advocating “going by the gut” and ignoring the math of income inequality; preferring to continue the attack on the census that they believe is a political tool and as such, is not to be believed. This was not the case when they were in power in congress for the last census..at that time it was your civic duty to fill it out accurately and the data derived from it were important tools for governance, but the ignorance of the current leaders on the right and their concerted effort to make ignorance a political litmus test has resulted in a new generation that facts don’t mean anything to. This is a breathtaking cynicism whose only purpose is to regain political power on the backs of their followers who wear their ignorance and bigotry as a proud badge of “real Americans”.

What this allows the right to do is to discount any poll, study, or even peer-reviewed research that doesn’t agree with their ideology and is manifest in the “belief” that any and all scientific theory has an opposite belief system that has just as much validity. I blame a lot of this nonsense with the strange propensity of modern media give time and space to the opposition of settled science…it would be the same if the righties started to question gravity as a construct of the left and have the media treat these nuts the same as true scientists. When I was growing up, stupid ideas were painted as stupid ideas and were never given the validity they get today in the guise of “fairness”; back then, the cause of the truth was paramount and people died for it…today the truth has lost it’s value and we are the worse for it….geez…