December 20, 2013

Duck Boy - I'll Be Interetsed In Seeing If the Capitalist System...

the right wingers all praise, to the point of worship, ends up being the death of the "Dynasty". In other words, the fan base for this show loves and agrees with the idiocy this guy spouts, but will the show's advertisers be quite so willing to embrace something that has become controversial? Only time will tell. On a related note, here comes a rash prediction: This duck dynasty yahoo will announce that he is running for public office at some point in the next couple of months. How close did David Duke come to being elected Governor of Louisiana?

Butch

December 8, 2013

I Raised The Mimimum Wage to $10.80 Today!

Well it was only for one hour and it was only for 3 people, but ya gotta start somewhere

I had to do some running around in town today and thought I'd try this little experiment. I did this both out of personal curiosity and in the hopes that maybe if even just a few people get to talking...

For background, I live in what I think of as TPOT (Tea Party Occupied Territory), a small town in Arizona with a population of around 20,000. These are people that (for the most part) are proud that their representative in the state legislature (Brenda Barton) recently publicly compared President Obama to Hitler.

In every business that I went into today, I asked every worker that I had an interaction with if their pay was something "pretty close to minimum wage". They all answered that their pay was right around minimum wage ($7.80 an hour in Arizona). I then commented:

"You know there are a lot of people in this country that don't even believe your labor is worth even that much. There is a Republican Representative in Texas named Joe Barton (maybe he is Brenda's brother or something!) who has actually said he would support eliminating minimum wage completely and letting your employer pay you whatever they want to. But President Obama and I both believe the minimum wage should be somewhere between $10 and $11."

At which point I handed them $3.

Reactions were varied. Out of 4 people I had this exchange with, 3 of them took the money.

A. Young man in his late teens working in a fast food franchise: "Hey thanks man!"

B. Middle aged woman in a big box home improvement store: "Really I can't take it" I told her it wasn't a tip or a bribe or anything and that it was just my way of trying to do what I thought was fair in my interactions with other people. She took the money and thanked me, but I think it was more because she just wanted to get the weird guy to leave her register!

C. Young woman at a "Dollar" store: "You don't have to do that". I explained that I believed everyone deserves a decent wage and that the current minimum wage isn't even close to that. She thanked me for the money and said that what she really appreciated was knowing that someone out there actually understood how hard it is to make ends meet on minimum wage.

D. Young man in his early 20s at the same big box home improvement store who I had cut some 2x4's for me: He all but ran away as soon as I explained what I was doing and why I was doing it.

I understand that some of these places would probably fire someone for taking money from a customer, so I went to great lengths to make sure there were other employees who could witness that this was entirely my doing and that the employee was in no way responsible for my actions.

The larger point here... I don't know. Like I said, maybe if it just gets people talking. Maybe if it makes someone stop to consider that their labor is worth more than $7.80 an hour. Maybe if it makes someone realize that the we have people in positions of power in this country who actually believe there should be no minimum wage. I'm far from wealthy, more like lower middle class at best, but my inclination is to continue doing this. I can afford the few bucks it would cost me. I figure that here in TPOT this makes me a regular revolutionary - LOL.

And then there is always Alice's Restaurant:

And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said Fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and
Walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement. And that's what it is , the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement

Help me make up my mind here - Is this just misguided "do-gooderism" on my part, or is it practical small (very small!) level local activism?

Butch

December 7, 2013

I'm So Sick Of RWers Using The Patriotic/Veteran Meme To Prove Stupid Points!

Just ranting here about the latest annoying Facebook bumper sticker which was along the line of "What makes "burger flippers" think they're worth $15 an hour when our brave troops getting shot at in Afghanistan don't make that much". That is just stupid on so many levels!

A. If a guy is in combat he probably is at least an E-3 paygrade with at least a couple years time in the service (what with time spent in basic training, advanced training, etc) so his base pay is about $1,900 a month. If he has dependents back in the states they either live in base housing (no cost) or he is getting a housing allowance adjusted for the cost of living at his home station - a good rough average on that comes out to around $1,100 a month for his paygrade. He is also getting various special pay and allowances for being in a designated combat area. Lets say when the dust all settles his monthly compensation comes out to around $3,400 a month. Plus the soldier gets some serious income tax breaks that the "burger flipper" doesn't. Do the math RW morons - that is more than a month's pay on a 40 hour work week at $15 an hour!

B. O.K. let us say that military folks are worth at least as much as "burger flippers". The head "burger flipper" at McDonald's had a compensation package that last year was worth about $14,000,000, which is roughly 1,000 times the salary of the minimum wage guy working 40 hours per week. So, by that logic the Commander in Chief (the evil Obama) should be making 1,000 more than the lowliest E-1 Private in the Army which would put Obama's salary at about $18,000,000 a year. I don't see any RW types supporting that idea!

C. Interestingly enough, when you compare the base pay of an E-1 Private with a 4 star General... The General's base pay is about 10 times that of the Private's. How many of these RW types support legislating a 10 to 1 pay ratio between the highest paid and lowest paid workers in the private sector? None of them support that!

The really irony behind it all... The guy who posted the offending Facebook bumper sticker didn't even serve in the military, but he is sure willing to co-opt the meme to try and prove a stupid RW point.

I'll close with an appropriate quote from Kurt Vonnegut in the prologue to his book "Jailbird" where in describing his own life at the time says:

"I imagined that I was a socialist. I believed that socialism would be good for the common man. As a private first class in the infantry, I was surely a common man".

Thanks to all who tolerated the ranting and thanks to DU for providing a place to blow off steam!

Butch

December 5, 2013

If You Were King...

And could magically fix things in just one of these areas, which would you choose? I understand there is a lot of overlap between these choices. I also appreciate that most of these things are so interdependent that any survey results could be interpreted in a lot of different ways. Personally, I think of we could just fix the "Money" issue most of the other problems would tend to solve themselves, but I'm very curious to see what other folks think!

I'll apologize in advance for such a nebulous sort of poll, but I am seriously interested in other people's opinions about what the root causes of our country's problems really are

December 4, 2013

This Isn't 1972 - This Is A Good Time To Be A Liberal!

I keep coming across references to how being a liberal will equal death on election day with reminders of the presidential election in 1972 thrown in.

I remember 1972... The middle class was near the peak of it's historic earning power. Unemployment was low. Unions were still strong. Banking and finance laws had yet to be gutted like a fish on a riverbank. Job security was taken for granted and most people took faith in the belief that their children's future would be better than their own. Young people could take their High School education and a solid work ethic out into the marketplace and find employment that actually provided a living wage for themselves and a family. And 1972 was the year that George McGovern failed to carry any state but Massachusetts. In hindsight that doesn't surprise me much - McGovern was a voice for change at a time when most people weren't all that interested in changing things.

Today has a lot more in common with 1932 than it does 1972. Be it unemployment statistics, the Gini coefficient, or a lack of adequate social service safety nets, 2013 looks a hell of a lot more like 1932 than it does 1972. And in 1932 Democrats took 59 out of 96 Senate seats, 313 out of 435 House seats, and elected FDR.

Now I may just be guilty of looking for hope where there isn't any, but it seems to me ideas such as raising the minimum wage, staying out of pointless wars, same sex marriage, banking reform, progressive tax policies, and so on, are starting to find real traction in the popular imagination. Even the basic concepts behind the ACA (when it isn't tagged with the red flag label "Obamacare&quot garner a majority of popular support in the polls. Now I'm not so naive as to think for a second that you could ever successfully market a candidate by advertising them as a liberal - that label has been successfully demonized by the right. However, I do believe that the country is reaching a point where it is ready for many of the IDEAS behind liberalism. We need candidates that support those ideas.

Now I live in teabagger country so it is kind hard for me to be optimistic based on the people I talk to every day, but my broader sense of things is that the future is starting to look brighter for liberalism. I'm I being rational here, or am I just delusional?

November 24, 2013

I Can't Figure Out How Anyone In The 80% Could Be Right Wing

Is it a fear driven inability to acknowledge the precarious nature of their own security? "It will never happen to me" narcissism? Just plain old being dumb? I just can't get my mind around it!

I have an elderly (mid 70s) acquaintance who is constantly posting right wing themed bumper stickers on her facebook page (No Work, No Eat... that kind of crap) and I frequently have advised her to be careful what she wishes for. She has a daughter who because of health issues hasn't worked in years. Her daughter receives a disability check, food stamps, rent assistance, and has had Medicaid and state programs pay for what is easily over $1,000,000 in costs for medical needs over the last couple of years. When I remind her that her daughter would literally be dead if it weren't for these "welfare" programs she tells me "oh no I'm not talking about people like her"! I've tried and tried to explain that the people trying to reduce or eliminate all these programs are talking about people exactly like her daughter it falls on deaf ears. I ran into her a couple days ago and she was complaining about the fact her daughter's food stamp benefit was being reduced. Rather than say "I told you so" I once again tried to draw the causality between right wing viewpoints and her daughter's situation - which proved to be a waste of time.

I have a friend who is in his 60s who is on Medicare. He has had coronary by-pass surgery twice. He despises "Obamacare" with every breath he draws. He refuses to understand that the ACA isn't about "free" healthcare, it is insurance. I ask him what he would do if Medicare was reduced or eliminated. He says "I'd get back all the taxes I've paid and buy a private insurance policy"! I can not make him understand that, A: Without the ACA his pre-existing condition would guarantee no insurer would ever touch him with a 10 foot pole. And B: Without Medicare he would be up the creek because even if he could get insurance the policy would cost tens of thousands a month. His only response is to repeat the mantra of "the government is bad".

I have another friend who is in his 40s. He was raised in a single parent home by an alcoholic mother. Without "welfare" the family would have been living under a bridge somewhere. He has a daughter who is a single mother raising five children, without "welfare" they would be living under a bridge somewhere. He is employed in a very cyclic industry where periodic layoffs are a fact of life, so he himself has benefited from unemployment and food stamps. In spite of all this he is a total "Dittos Rush" right wind zealot. When I point out to him how many times "welfare: has saved 3 generations of his family all I hear back is the "I pay taxes I've earned those things". Being persistent, I actually start running the numbers... what he has paid in taxes vs what 3 generations of his family has received and demonstrate that from a accounting perspective he is way in the red to society as a whole. His response, "If I hadn't had to pay the taxes in the first place I could have invested the money and become a millionaire"!

The sad thing is these people I've described and the attitudes they have are not a minority amongst my acquaintances, they are a large majority (maybe I need to start hanging out with a better class of people!). As my wife described it the other day, "Their being Republicans would be like African-Americans joining a pro-slavery group".

So, back to the original question... Are they scared, narcissistic, or just plain dumb?

thanks for tolerating my rant!

Butch

November 20, 2013

An "Awwwww Isn't That Sweet" Moment Brought to You By JP Morgan Bank

Was just reading an article that discussed the various contingency plans of the major financial institutions in the event that last month's government shutdown had led to a default.

In October, officials at JPMorgan Chase & Co asked Chief Executive Jamie Dimon how to handle the government benefits that many of its customers receive monthly.

Some of the bank's retail customers depend on government programs like Social Security and food stamps to pay their bills, and Dimon decided the bank would pay the benefits out of its own pocket if it had to.

"We're going to fund them," he said, according to a person at the meeting. "It is the right thing to do."

Isn't this the same outfit that just got hit with a record breaking 13 billion dollar fine for breaking the law? Looks like very timely corporate spin and BS to me!

Butch