HughBeaumont
HughBeaumont's JournalNo Longer the Land of Opportunity; Mitt gets it wrong yet again.
This was in the PD today . . . I used to find it hilarious that Romney continues to try and brand our moderate Republican president as a Euro Leftist (snicker). Now it's just starting to get tiresome to the point of pissing me off.
From the article: "The best way to measure a nation’s merit-based status is to look at its intergenerational economic mobility: Do children move up and down the ec...onomic ladder based on their own abilities, or does their economic standing simply replicate their parents’?" Or, to my point, get worse than their parents'?
Ask yourself honestly what class (and yes, Rick Santorum, America firmly has them) America favors and caters to. Ask yourself honestly what a CEO making 300 times the salary of their average worker has accomplished for American progress in three decades.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-longer-the-land-of-opportunity/2012/01/02/gIQAOJVDZP_story.html
(snip)
The secrets of social democracy’s successes are in plain view. In Scandinavia, government commitment to worker retraining and job relocation mean that there is no major political pressure to keep failing firms in business; it’s a policy that favors innovative start-ups. In Germany, management and unions cooperate to upgrade their products and their processes — partly because corporate boards consist of equal numbers of management and worker representatives. Germany’s surge in exports may be partly attributable to its union workers agreeing to hold their wages flat (at levels still well above those of their U.S. counterparts). But their workers’ willingness to sacrifice in order to stay competitive is surely increased by the fact that their CEOs on average make just 11 times as much as their workers. In the United States, chief executives make roughly 200 to 300 times (choose your survey) as much as their average employees’ salary.
Which brings us back to Romney’s characterization of our country as a merit-based society and his failure to notice the huge changes in economic rewards over the past three decades. During the 30 years after World War II, the average American family’s income doubled, while chief executives’ income was restrained, increasing by less than 1 percent annually, according to a 2010 paper by economists Carola Frydman and Raven Saks. Beginning around 1980, however, as unions were smashed, industry moved offshore and executive pay skyrocketed, the incomes of most Americans began to flatten or decline, while financiers and corporate leaders were able to claim more and more of the nation’s income for themselves.
Romney is the "Four F" candidate:
"Find 'em, Fleece 'em, Fire 'em, Foreclose 'em".
"If the future of America's in their hands, watch it roll over Niagara Falls".
Cinch.
Oh QUELLE SURPRISE, America! Published in my RW Rag today: "What's so Awful about the One Percent?"
. . . and it was written a month ago.
Get excited!!! THEY'RE NOT ALL BAD!!!
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/04/opinion/la-oe-schiller-who-is-the-one-percent-20111204
Oh bullshit. Jobs was no liberal. Apple makes their crap in Chinese sweatshops that work their slaves in punishing hours and conditions; some even killed themselves due to their intolerable plights. He also fired workers just for unintentionally rubbing him the wrong way.
Let's see, does he worry about where his next meal is going to come from? Does Howard Schultz pay the mortgage OR the electric bill this month? Does he go into work every day with a 500 pound figurative anvil strapped to his back that says "YOU could be NEXT, peon, so work harder!!!"?? Does Howard Schultz have to worry about paying a five-digit student loan debt or worry about getting thrown out of his house for the crime of getting sick??? Really? Are you that effing stupid, Bradley?
Uh, most of the people on that list enriched China, Indonesia, Malaysia and India in significant ways moreso than they have American workers. Especially Phil Knight. Some of the Forbes 400 are figureheads that had nothing to do with the origination of their product/service. And damn it, no one is entirely self made.
Oh, but let's not forget, folks . . . if THEY could do it with a little hard work and elbow grease. . . why . . . any of us can!!
These storied rises from "rags to riches" are what make America the unique and prosperous nation it is. Some critics would have us believe that the American dream is dead. But that's a view purveyed by those without the vision, the grit, the energy or the single-mined determination to build a better mousetrap. Starry-eyed inventors and entrepreneurs have no doubts about that dream. They know it exists and that they are going to achieve it. Maybe not on the first try, but eventually. That's the entrepreneurial spirit that drives competitive markets, that not only makes the American dream come true for some (the 1%) but also improves life for the many (the 99%).
Oh just SHUT it with the class warfare card, slappy. Horatio Alger is a lottery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger_myth
What can you say about hackneyed, deluded articles like this? What can you say about the state of education in this country where a person like this; one who cannot even look out of his own window but would rather form an opinion based on the teachings of the likes of Friedman (Milton AND Thomas) and Hayek, becomes a professor and author?? There needs to be more widespread progressive voices to counter this sort of idiocy.
OK, Explain This To Me Like I’m A Complete Idiot Part 9:
We’re now in a period where there are more college and trade-school-educated workers across the country than any time in history, with our nation’s “leaders” (both corporate and congressional) stressing more and more education as the tool needed for today’s individuals to “compete” for the jobs of the 21st Century.So why is it that, instead of a climate of growth, opportunity and entrepreneurship that should be ideally resulting from having a better-educated pool of workers, job creation has been extraordinarily weak since 9/11 and the ratio of available applicants per job is now anywhere from 5:1 to 300:1 (depending on the position)?
Workers who support predatory capitalists amaze me.
Romney thinks of firing a worker the same way he thinks of brushing his teeth or taking a piss. He doesn't see the human or economic cost because he simply does not care.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/04/12/173892/romney-job-killer/
– In 1992, the firm acquired American Pad & Paper. By 1999, the year Romney left Bain, two American plants were closed, 385 jobs had been cut and the company was $392 million in debt. The next year, Ampad was forced into bankruptcy.
– Bain Capital and Goldman Sachs bought Dade International for about $450 million in 1994. The firm quickly fired or relocated at least 900 workers. Over the next several years, it sunk increasingly into debt and laid off 1,000 workers. In 2002 — after Romney had left Bain — it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
– A 1997 buyout of LIVE Entertainment for $150 million resulted in 40 layoffs, roughly one in four of the company’s 166 workers. The job cuts affected all aspects of the company, from production and acquisition to legal and public relations.
– In 1997, Bain bought a stake in DDI Corp., a maker of electronic circuit boards. Three years later, Bain took the company public and collected a $36 million payout. But by August 2003, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, laying off more than 2,100 workers.
22 percent of the money Bain Capital raised from 1987 to 1995 was invested in five businesses — Stage Stores, American Pad & Paper, GS Indusries, Dade, and Details. These five made Bain $578 million in profit, even as all five eventually went bankrupt.
Oh, and his comments about the workers losing their jobs?
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/12/romney-if-you-dont-like-bain-layoffs-go-back-to-moscow.php?ref=skyboxes
“If someone thinks they can find a way that every enterprise that one invests in becomes… all are successful, why they’re not living in a free enterprise system, they’re living in a system like the old Soviet Union where the government insists that everybody adds employment every year and ultimately the economy suggests that the people become poorer,” Romney said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday. “I believe that free enterprise works and that the other models have been proven to be failures time and time again, and I was surprised to have Newt Gingrich pick up the story line that came from Barack Obama and the DNC and go on the attack against free enterprise.”
"Free Enterprise" Yeah. You want THIS predatory vampire CEO running America?
Gee. why is it that I call Yahoo "The Pigshit Hog Waller of the Internet"?
This is why (look at the comments and their recommendations . . . amazing.):
http://news.yahoo.com/50-strong-brawl-turns-melee-mall-america-132316826.html
The Villainous One Percent.
So, yeah . . . seen this article?
Modern scions of industry, retail, pharmaceuticals, etc., complete with nine-to-ten-digit net worths, their own planes, annual lottery salaries & perk packages and multiple homes strewn across America's most well-to-do areas of the country, are all in a huff. With their poor widdle feewings hurted by the mean #Occupy Wall Streeters and with the American public apparently not kissing their privileged asses enough for all of the extremely hard work they do for this country, they simply cannot understand why no one respects them.
Er, guys? Maybe it's because of what you've been saying?
Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, on #OWS: "Who gives a crap about some imbecile? Are you kidding me?"
Bernie Marcus, on fellow businessmen voting for Democrats and supporting EFCA: "If a retailer has not gotten involved with this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to Norm Coleman and these other guys," Mr. Marcus said, apparently referring to Republican senators facing tough re-election fights, then those retailers "should be shot; should be thrown out of their goddamn jobs."
Bernie Marcus, head of Job Creators Alliance (snicker) on Democrats:"Basically, what they're doing to small business is very similar in this case to what Debbie did to Dallas." (Ironic coming from the founder of HOME DEPOT, one of the worst steamrollers of small businesses their ever was)
Bernie Marcus, generous donor to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, on the Employee Free Choice Act: "may be one of the worst things I have ever seen in my life," (from a conference call of a meeting on how to prevent retail workers from organizing . . . conducted the same year Home Depot laid off 7,000 people)
Lee Scott, ex-WalMart CEO, on EFCA: "We like driving the car and we're not going to give the steering wheel to anybody but us."
Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman, on low-income families and taxing the rich: "You have to have skin in the game I'm not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system." (Funny, most poor people pay far more in overall tax than Schwarzman does with his cushy 15% rate on capital gains)
Rand Paul, with helpful advice to the unemployed: "As bad as it sounds, ultimately we do have to sometimes accept a wage that's less than we had at our previous job in order to get back to work and allow the economy to get started again."
Ken Langone, funder of Home Depot and others, on weighty issues: "I am a fat cat, I'm not ashamed," he said last week in a telephone interview from a dressing room in his Upper East Side home. "If you mean by fat cat that I've succeeded, yeah, then I'm a fat cat. I stand guilty of being a fat cat."
Tom Golisano, billionaire founder of payroll processer Paychex Inc., on motion sickness: "If I hear a politician use the term 'paying your fair share' one more time, I'm going to vomit"
Grover Norquist, The Most Important Yard Gnome in History: "We're going to crush labor as a political entity."
John A. Allison IV, a director of BB&T Corp, on labels: 'Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let's call it an attack on the very productive," Allison said. "This attack is destructive."
Jack Welch, retired CEO of GE, on the typical Gore voter: "someone who needs all these goddamned social programs because she's too goddamned dumb to keep her legs crossed and too goddamned lazy to get an abortion." Charming guy.
This is what they think about you.
I'd really like to understand what would compel someone who has more money than they could logically outspend per second, who has every advantage in life and goes out of their way to gain more advantage seemingly at the expense of everyone who works for them, to publicly and shamelessly embrace their role as a villain.
What would drive someone to not even remotely value the main entities that helped make them successful (employees and government resources), but instead hold both in such contempt that they would want to wage a not-so-unspoken war on them?
What would make supposedly well-educated people from varied backgrounds, proper upbringing, expensive colleges and decades of professional experience act and speak as if they were a pro-wrestler performing a scripted heel turn?
One could probably say they really do have all the makings of a classic sociopath: that love and hate do not really factor in with their modus operandi, but something far worse. It's that they simply don't care about us or our futures. In a phrase, the under-taxed and over-wealthy are sociopathic separatists, for the most part. They reciprocally scorch and burn our wages, employment and well-being while attaining greater and greater influence and wealth for themselves and write it off as "nothing personal . . . just business".
Others bring up another possibility, one that they fear greatly; that someone new might actually bridge their chasmic moats and join them despite every effort to block paths to that success while pumping Horatio Alger balloon juice up our collective asses. The last thing they want is for their hoi-polloi to be too educated; otherwise, they'd have an uprising on their hands that would seriously threaten their well being.
When you think about it, if "anyone can do it", how would that make the 1% special? How would their astronomic salaries be justified? Wouldn't more people at the top of the food chain be the LAST thing they want to happen?
I don't need to tell the members of this site such things; we've all known for about three decades and some change, through their actions and words, what contempt the upper crust holds for those that work for them.
I'm directing this to the lurkers, the low-information crowd; the workers who still believe in the American Dream, who place their trust in our corporate leaders and who firmly assert that they hold their best interests at heart.
Search yourselves.
You know what you're experiencing is wrong, yet you're blaming all of the wrong people for it.
The sociopathic wealthy that run this country have seen their incomes shoot to stratospheric heights while our wages haven't risen in real dollars since 1979. They've pillaged every worker right unions gave us, quashed almost all of the progress FDR and others brought forth, instituted a vampiric economic system that has seen poverty and homelessness become widespread and returned us to a cheapskate billionaire-driven Gilded Age where no one but the top 5% benefit from the massive largesse.
They are not going to stop until they see every last damned one of us FAIL, fight amongst each other for scraps and accept whatever lousy jobs they choose to give the lucky ones, all the while rewarding themselves with lotteryesque salaries, bonuses, perk and exit packages for the suppression.
It's not enough that they've taken our jobs, our homes, our schools, our pensions, our health care, our hopes of retiring and our chances of getting ahead.
Now they've become sneeringly smug cads about it.
"So say goodnight to the bad guy!"
Any time you hear someone say "The Media Leans Left" . . . .
. . . tell them to turn to Squawk Box on CNBC.
Right now, you have all three Home Depot bigwigs/founders: Arthur Blank, Ken Langone and Bernie Marcus. While Blank isn't as bad as the rest of them, Ken and Bernie are complete right-wing very powerful asshats and are being allowed an unfettered, unquestioned, uninterrupted 2 hour forum to talk about the greatness of deregulation, how public education's gone to pot, how we should embrace austerity ("we" meaning "not them" ) and how billionaires like them are so shackled . . . Gee, if only they had a Republican in the White House to make things all better for them!!
See, this is what pisses me off SO much about guys like this: they control damned near everything . . . all three branches of government, the private sector, entertainment, retail, media, etc. They sit on piles of cash in their companies, they pocket uncollected billions upon billions with their cushy tax rates vs their cost of living, yet they continue to play this "victim" bullshit. They insult people like me, they insult the OWS participants, they insult labor by insisting that "our anger is misdirected" "We don't know how the real world works" . . . GET the hell out of here with that SHIT.
I'm not sitting here and listening to a bunch of uncaring wealthmongers that think they can purchase their own president so he'll give them free economic reign (as if that's pretty much not happening now) and that will solve everything. Never mind that plan hasn't worked in 30 years, let's just keep on trying it. You just have to be patient; I mean, it's so easy to do when you haven't got any bills that were due yesterday, right??
Keep suppressing your labor's wages, watch demand drop even further and insist that it's taxes and regulation that's the problem. Keep on saying that we need charter schools because public education in this country's the problem, not you. Keep on believing that if you give Supply Side just another decade, eventually things will get better for the people. Keep on playing the victim role like a bunch of whining diapers.
You know who's buying into these arguments, guys? IDIOTS. And here's your huge problem . . . eventually, even your moderately functioning idiot is going to wake up and smell what you've been shoveling to us for decades: the stenchy rotted waste of Arthur Laffer, Milton Friedman, Martin Feldstein, the Chicago School and all other labor-hating educators and theorists is nothing but a bunch of BUNK.
"The Media leans left". THE MEDIA LEANS LEFT!! (Choirs sing) What a bunch of garbage. When they start talking about universal health care, call me. When they start talking maximum wage, call me. When they start putting actual progressives and let them speak without interruption or mocking derision, call me. When they start promoting candidates who will solve this country's problems rather than those the owners already paid for to continue "Business as Usual", call me.
Ken Langone. Bernie Marcus. Joe Kernen. Becky Quick . . . ALL either a bunch of regressive and useless bastards or lapdog enablers. Thanks for thinking about me, I'm alive and doing fine.
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Member since: Fri Aug 13, 2004, 03:12 PMNumber of posts: 24,461
