Well…a couple of thoughts on the suspension of Keith Olbermann from MSNBC for make unauthorized political contributions in the last election. First, if it’s in his contract that these donations have to be approved before they are made, then MSNBC has the right to do exactly what they did…in corporate owned America, even workers as well-known as Keith still have to honor the contracts they sign no matter how much they disagree with them. This kind of thing happens every day across the country and no one should be surprised at the flexing of the power of the modern corporation…and I might not be fair in castigating the parent company NBC for trying to protect the brand they have spent years creating; especially with the media’s false equivalency that MSNBC is just as biased as Fox….but there were no multi-million dollar donations to the Dems from NBC as Fox did for the repubs so that explodes that little myth.
One of the traps that I think Keith has fallen into is that he has gotten big and feels like the rules don’t apply to him…but, one other thought came to mind in my coffee fueled mind today…what if he did it on purpose? What if he did it to highlight the differences between his company and Fox…I certainly think he at least did NBC a favor..it gave their management the opportunity to put to rest the idea that MSNBC is the mirror of Fox on the left….and I feel that the old model where news was news and opinion was opinion is a better one than we have today…today’s news world makes it too hard to discern between the two and people don’t like to work that hard…making it easy for the demagogues to rule…geez…
Well…with the passing of Sparky Anderson this week, the title question came to my mind…”where have the nice guys gone?” When I was younger, there were nice guys in every avenue of life here in America; there were nice sports figures, politicians, and newsmen who did their jobs with an innate goodness that didn’t make them any less effective. What happened? Why are today’s versions of those people so nasty and brutish…why do we now have guys like Boehner and McConnell in politics who believe that the only way for them to win in politics is to demonize and crush their opponents? Then, to gloat about their wins and play to their troglodyte bases that they have created by making it acceptable to be an ass in public…making it a virtue to be unreasonable. And, we see this kind of behavior in sports where it is looked on as quaint to show sportsmanship; to let their play talk for them on the field…and this is compounded by the epidemic of inflated self-importance from guys that just play child’s games for a living.
I don’t know where this country went wrong…but I sure liked it better when guys like Sparky Anderson were in it…when politicians understood that compromise is the life blood of any democracy…and that we the people understood and supported people who could be reasonable….like Jerry Ford from our neck of the woods…geez…
Well…another day of feeling like crap yesterday but it’s much better today…at least for now but I do have the grocery shopping to do since there is only a bag of frozen peppers in the freezer and I don’t think it’s enough to get through the weekend. I did have HH with K last night and that was fun…I need to get out of here more but I don’t want to spend any cash right now…so, a conundrum…I just love that word…not much to do today, as always, but C may be coming into town to hang out so that may be something for later. And, of course, cleaning, but I’m not too motivated to do that..we’ll see. I do have some topics for later but I’m not sure what they are yet..you’ll have to come back to see…more later…
Well…this one is a change of pace from the normal stuff, but it is something I wanted to pass along..was watching “countdown” last week and there was a segment about a violinist who had just purchased a Stradivarius violin for $3.5 million dollars..but that is not the remarkable thing…because, how do you really value a treasure like that? It’s provenance? I really don’t care who owned it before…what I do care about is that majestic sound…that, even through the tiny little speakers on my tv, it was one of the most glorious things I have ever heard. Luckily, the segment is still available on the “Countdown” site and it is worth seeing…and I have added “hearing a Stradivarius in person” to my list….those of you who know me know that getting on my list is important…to me at least…
I know this one is a little different but I have to take time off to see and hear the beauty that still exists in the world and I have to remind myself that this Strad will still exist even if the repubs win the election…and Steely Dan won’t disappear, and Led Zeppelin won’t disappear….at least I hope they won’t…
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…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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….