Even in these difficult times, all Americans have cause for giving thanks.  Even our poor are rich when compared with the poor in many parts of the world. No living American has experienced war on their doorstep.  As dysfunctional as our government may be at the moment, our citizens are still able to occupy here and there without fear of torture or disappearing into the night.  Always remember, as bad as things may be, there is always someone who is worse off than you.

Give thanks today and think of those less fortunate no matter where they are.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Pass the gravy please.

A view from the left. Here is a brief excerpt from an article on the Center for American Progress website. The entire article can be read here.

Shrinking income mobility

Massive inequality might well be easier to bear if people felt higher incomes were within their reach, by dint of hard work and education. But the rising inequality fueling the social protests also comes at a time when it’s harder to move from one income class to another.

The American Dream story holds that this country’s greatness is grounded in the ability of its citizens to rise to the top. In fact, the United States now lags behind other developed countries such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden when it comes to economic mobility.

“There is no evidence that opportunity has increased in a way that might offset the slower and less broadly shared growth of income and wealth that families have experienced,” according to Brookings Institution scholar Isabel Sawhill. That’s the stuff of Middle Eastern despair, not American Dreams. Makes you want to take the streets and yell at somebody.

“No evidence that opportunity has increased?” Are they kidding? Has opportunity decreased? Opportunity is always there for those seeking it and who do not make self-destructive life decisions.

It costs money to run a winning congressional campaign: about $1.4 million on average for House races, and six times that for a Senate seat, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. While politicians like to boast about ordinary-folk armies of small donors sending in $5 checks, the truth is about three-quarters of all campaign cash comes from people who can afford to make large contributions and from political action committees backed mostly by corporations, business associations, and lobby groups.

Money buys access and the biggest special interest group by far behind all this cash is the combined financial services, insurance, and real estate industries. Through PACs and individual donors, they gave nearly 20 percent of political donations from 1990 through 2010. They also as a group spend more on lobbyists than any other industry.

Oops, seems they forgot organized labor that takes workers dues and uses the money to further the goals of union leaders regardless of the views of the individual members. Could it be this oversight is due to the fact unions donate almost exclusively to Democratic liberal politicians? Oh my, how cynical of me. They also forgot lawyers and law firms who at $15 million were the largest contributors in the last election cycle. Among the top ten PACs are the University of California, Stanford and Harvard University.

Clearly this Country needs a strong middle class and certainly segments of the middle class are hurting, but the cause is not Wall Street or insurance or real estate industries. The 99% would truly be in trouble were it not for the taxes paid by the 1%. Assail the guilty, not the successful.

The health care crisis, education crisis and the financial crisis have a number of similarities. At the root is a general consensus that the problems are caused by someone else with the frequent target being business of one type or the other. Rarely do we focus on the real causes because they make us uncomfortable and place responsibility where we don’t want it.

In health care and education we blame portions of the system, but are generally unable to temper our quest for the best with the realities of what actually constitutes the best. That is, more is better, high cost equals high quality. In education that goes from pre/school through college. We blame teachers and administrators and ignore the responsibility of the family. We accept growing costs for local education and for college without questioning the added value or the sources of those costs. The same is true for health care. Our judgement is clouded by our emotional inability to deal with illness in any context of cost and to some extent even quality. It is far easier to simply blame the insurance industry than to protest high infection rates in hospitals or to question the necessity of care. In both education and health care our solution is frequently to throw more money at the problem, yet we seem to be unable to recognize that when the bill comes due.

When it comes to finance, we have easy targets, big business and big banks and we gloss over the damage caused by politicians in their quest for fairness, control or simply their favoritism. Who caused the mortgage crisis, who put people into homes they could never afford, who wants to bail out those folks now?  Banks may have taken advantage of the environment, but it was created by politicians who per the norm, ignored the unintended consequences of their actions.

This all boils down to human nature.  Politicians play on that fact while at the same time are blind to the consequences of doing so (or more cynically, don’t care).

Related articles

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Okay, I’m flying from Newark to London and I am expecting a surcharge to be added to my ticket cost if we actually want to land, there will be an extra fee if you want to land near a gate that is reasonably close to your connecting flight. 

That will be $27.00 please.

One airline is planning on doing away with flight attendants and rather leave you to fight your way on the plane and find a good seat.  Another is offering a personal assistant fee in case you actually want some service as minuscule as it may be.  Hey, I made that up but who knows with the idiots running airlines these days.

Does marketing matter at all, are we  just so many sides of beef to be loaded and unloaded?  Here is a clue for someone who is smart, set up an all-inclusive fare, no extras for nuttin, just the price of the damn ticket.  Something like a resort with all-inclusive room rates.  Oh wait, that’s a retro concept isn’t it?

Remember those seats over the wing with extra room they used to give out at the last-minute, I just paid an extra $98.00 for one.  Why you ask, because I don’t want the moron in front of me to spring back his seat and cut off my breathing.  Fifty pounds of luggage you say, go over that by a pound on Continental/United and you get whacked for $200…no kidding.  Free drinks; long gone, they even charge for water on some flights.  International flights last year still gave you a glass of wine; no more.  They charge you to check a bag, limit it to 50 pounds and then allow 40 pounds in a carry on.  That makes a lot of sense, wasn’t is hard enough dealing with all the trunk size carry on people used to try to cram into the over head compartments before all this nonsense?  Compartments by the way that are getting smaller.  

I’m thinking this is a stimulus package in disguise.  All you will be able to bring with you is a set of underwear and a tooth-brush and then be forced to buy all your clothes at your arrival destination.  If you are going to China, that’s no problem, your clothes are there already.

Why do we put up with this, why oh why?  If there was ever a disregard for the customer, this is it and the airlines get away with it.

The opinion pages this past Labor Day were full of angst over the decline of labor and the rise of capital at the expense of the American worker; unemployment will forever remain high, real wages are stagnant or declining, manufacturing is dead, etc., etc.

Here is a clip from the Washington Post:

It’s not only the jobless who will be affected. No one has yet repealed the law of supply and demand. At last count, there were 4.5 unemployed workers for every job opening. Bargaining power has shifted from labor to capital. Sure, some workers will get promotions and seniority raises. Otherwise, gains will be slim. Since September 2008, annual wage and salary increases have averaged 1.6 percent, the slowest pace in 30 years, reports EPI’s Lawrence Mishel.

So, my question is, if all this doom and gloom is true and the American worker will be in a constant state of partial employment and low-income, who will be buying the products and services generated by capital? Doesn’t it seem reasonable that there must be a re balancing of all this or capital will not be able to pursue its goals or will be taxed into oblivion to support dependent labor?

Or, should we simply put Wal-Mart and Target out of business?

On the other hand in some cases labor’s bargaining power is the cause of job loss and high costs. Organized labor’s refusal to adjust to changing environments (along with managements complacency and incompetence) has contributed significantly to the problems faced by the auto industry, many states and now the postal service where labor is 80% of costs. This is not the fault of workers, (or capital) but their leaders and the politicians with whom they are aligned, however it is the workers who pay the price.

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On this date I was in my office across the river from lower Manhattan. Suddenly a fellow worker came running in telling me that a plane had struck the Trade Tower. I and the rest of the staff rushed to the windows and looked at the smoke coming from the tower. We thought it was a random air crash when suddenly we watched the second plane hit. Those SOBs I shouted, not knowing exactly who I was referring too. Then the rumors began to fly about additional attacks, none of us could move; we just stood there fixed on the scene we were witnessing. Shortly after I realized that I was in the Marriott Hotel at the base of the Towers just a week before and I keep thinking would I have taken the call to run seriously sitting in a nice comfortable hotel?

Today I was listening to a radio show about 9/11 and they were discussing teaching this event as history and noted that less than half of the states included 9/11 in their history classes despite the fact that virtually none of today’s current students remember the date first hand. The experts were asked why 9/11 should be taught as history and they all gave similar answers such as it was a momentous event, it changed the world, etc.

But they miss the point, 9/11 and all other major events in history should be taught because they allow us to understand the present. How can you possibly understand the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the TSA or getting on an airplane if you don’t know about 9/11 and other similar events preceding it?  How can you understand anything about Israel if you don’t know about the holocaust and World War II.  How can you fathom the Middle East Muslim mindset if you never studied the Crusades or colonialism or understand a black American’s point of view if you never read “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass?

Perhaps someday if we learn the lessons of history, we can avoid creating the conditions that allow the inhumanity within  us to manifest  itself over and over… someday…

Circa 2010

From every soundbite I have heard in the last twenty-four hours, the President will propose on Thursday spending more money on infrastructure and school buildings to stimulate the growth of jobs.  I am all for stimulating job growth, but perhaps we need some new ideas. 

I don’t know about you but traveling the highways and byways these days gives one plenty of evidence of stimulus.  There is construction everywhere, roads, bridges, sidewalks, you name it.   Many of them proudly display the signs from the last stimulus, I believe it was called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.    Guess what, the economy has not recovered and the level of unemployment has not come down. 

If we are going to create jobs, shouldn’t we be trying to do so in some way other than doing the same thing we did last year, but obviously did not work. . . oh wait, that was not supposed to create jobs, but rather save jobs.  Tell that to the twenty-million Americans with less than a full-time permanent job. 

There are some happy people though, all those folks who get to make the signs and install them should be fully employed…I just wish they would remember to take them down when they are done with them.

Isn’t one sign of insanity doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome?

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