i'm glad you are around to make me laugh in times like this.

i'm sick to my stomach over the little girl the most.

alright guys, just a misunderstanding


anyway: viewtopic.php_t=11739

Wisely, Eric Cantor announced that all votes in the House will be postponed until next week so that congress can regroup and address any specific, related needs that come out of this event.

We wonder why government has become disengaged and distant. This is why we can't have nice things.

It's time for me to make a speech.

I get The Economist every week. I like to read it because I think it is an excellently written magazine, and because I want to keep a bead on the things that determine the totality of so much of our lives: finance, business, and economics. I understand he free market predilections of The Economist, and in some respects, I agree with them. I also understand that the editors of the publication are no friends to unions, and that means, sometimes, that they run articles with which I disagree strongly. But I think it is useful to see and know how the other guy thinks. That said, this week’s issue needs a response from me (and what better forum than here!?). It dedicates a lot of space to a dead-on assault of trade unions in the public sector. And frankly, I have had my fill of this.

I have to give capital a lot of credit, I must admit. They were able to parley successfully the stagflation of the 1970s into the election of two leaders – Thatcher and Reagan – who set a tone that permitted the wholesale evisceration of unions in the private sector during the 1980s and 1990s. Capital, of course, blamed the woes of the 1970s on shiftless labor – an oversimplification at best, and in many respects, patently false (the root causes were much more to do with a cyclical downturn in demand ca. 1968 followed by fuel crises that artificially and temporarily drove up the costs of production – this was used as a shield for making wholesale changes to the structure of labor). Laws were changed, workers illegally fired, manufacturing facilities moved overseas to places with labor “laws” that would make any decent person’s skin crawl or to states that were willing to trade away every gain made in wages and benefits for workers , etc., etc., etc. A great trick of capital's has been to increase the number of "management" positions - jobs that are therefore exempt from union protection. Mid-level "managers" are some of the most regularly abused people on the planet, over-worked and underpaid, with the label of "management" stuck on them to prevent them from ever doing a thing about it. Captial has killed itself on so many fronts - legislative, media, internal structuring, etc. - sniping at the heels of unions, so that now unions in the private sector have all but disappeared.

And capital has taken full advantage of the world they have created, particularly with respect to wages, working hours, and benefits. Real wages for middle class jobs have absolutely flat-lined since 1972. Meanwhile, the costs of food, housing, transportation, and especially health care have all increased in real terms. This has led to a further decrease in “real” take-home pay for middle class Americans. At the same time, a worker who was once expected to put in 40 hours of work to make his wage is now as often as not categorized as “exempt” from overtime rules. The all-too-predictable result, of course, is that an employer can demand a worker put in 50, 60, 70 hours of work a week – while still only paying the basis of a 40 hour work week. More, they can hand that worker a laptop or BlackBerry, and expect him to be on call to his job 24/7 – the same job that was a 40 hour a week job 40 years ago – without paying him even one dime extra. To make matters worse, vacation benefits have been reduced in most work places. And this is to say nothing of the dramatic cuts in coverage yet increases in costs imposed on most worker’s health care packages, or the conversion of defined-benefit pension programs to the stock market gambles that are IRAs.

The result? People are working longer hours for less pay and less benefits. In practical terms, a great too many people find themselves working 60 hours a more a week to pay for houses they don’t live in, cars they don’t drive anywhere except to work, and daycare and school tuition/supplies for children whom they never see. What is the point of the job anyway? People are frustrated, tired, and angry: frustrated, because they work so hard, but only seem to be able to keep their heads above water; tired, because they work too damn much; and angry, because they are increasingly questioning what they are getting for all that work they do. What have they gotten in return for all these concessions? Cable television, the internet, video on demand, blu ray, and HD: all cheaper than dirt, all meant to hypnotize that exhausted worker when he comes home, prevent him from asking that most critical of questions: is this the way things are supposed to be?

The problem is, people aren’t entirely hypnotized. Media technology may itself have “jumped the shark": what the hell is the difference between a DVD player hooked up to an HD television and a blu ray player hooked up to the same television anyway? We are rapidly approaching the moment where these things can’t be improved upon much, and, here, nearing the end of this particular road, people are noticing it still hasn’t made them feel any better about living their lives for their jobs, instead of their jobs funding the living of their lives. The latest financial crisis has brought the anger out, allowed it to bubble forth: people are mad as hell, and they aren’t going to take it anymore. Only they can’t afford to lose their jobs, not with the mortgage, the car payments, the cable, internet, and mobile phone bills they have to pay, and it’s been so long since anyone has really tried to organize against an employer, and most people have been so thoroughly convinced that unions and paid overtime are their enemies (!?!?!?!), that they don’t know what to do with the rage they are feeling.

Enter capital, again. It is now turning its neatest trick: it is directing all that anger and all that frustration against the last group of people who managed not to give away reasonable work hour limits, decent health care packages, and secure retirement plans: people working in public sector union jobs. Instead of having all these workers asking their employers, “How come my benefits have been cut, why do I have to work 70 hours a week for the same fuck-ing wages my father made for 40, and how come I can’t retire until I’m 70, and when I do, I’ll have to live much more meagerly than my parents did?”, they have them instead screaming, “If I have to work 70 hours a week for a crap wage and marginal health benefits, then you should too.” It’s the divide and conquer trick writ absurd: workers demanding other workers sink into the abyss they find themselves in, instead of demanding better wages, benefits, and working conditions from their own employers.

Think about this: as I read in The Economist awhile back, it was possible for a guy coming back from World War II to get a union job that required no college training and make a decent living that supported his wife and a couple of kids, buying them a home, putting clothes on everybody’s back, etc. If that same guy was careful with his money and scrimped and saved, after the kids were grown up, he could buy himself and the Mrs. a second home somewhere pleasant – a beach house, a lake house, etc. Indeed, many of the beach communities in New Jersey, for example, were filled with homes – homes with ocean views even! – that were owned by one guy making a basically middle class salary. The modest scale of the older shore homes, which you can still see in some areas of Wildwood, for example, reflect that.

Could one guy making $50,000 do that today? That guy would have trouble buying even one house to, you know, live in.

Since 1972, real wages for the middle class have not increased a single penny in real terms. Since 1972, union membership in the United States has dropped from nearly 50% of the workforce to 15%.

You say correlation. I say causation.

Workers of the world…

UNITE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, kinda.

Dog Day Afternoon

TV NEWSMAN
But I mean, why do you need to steal? Couldn't you get a job?

SONNY
Get a job doing what? You gotta be a member of a union, no union card - no job.
To join the union, you gotta get the job, but you don't get the job without the card.

TV NEWSMAN
What about, ah, non-union occupations?

SONNY
Like what? Bank teller? What do they get paid?
(looks over at girls who offer the information - $135.37)
They pay one hundred thirty- five dollars and thirty-seven cents to start.
I got a wife and kids. I can't live on that -- You want to live on that?

DeLay sentenced to three years in jail. What a joke.

I'll give $10.00 to the first person who actually reads Moz's post from beginning to end.

jerseyhoya wrote:DeLay sentenced to three years in jail. What a joke.

any chance a meaningful part of his downfall was enemies on his right? That is, a lack of support from his friends may have been as much a part of his problems as a heap of attack by his enemies? I don't know enough about it to know, but he seems like the kind of guy whose 'friends' would abandon him the second things started to smell bad for him.

every single congressman gets death threats. think about that.
Michael Bennett included:

Federal authorities have arrested a man accused of repeatedly making threats to Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet's staff.
The most recent threats allegedly came on Thursday, two days before a gunman in Arizona killed six people and wounded 14 others, including a congresswoman.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit, John Troy Davis called Bennet's Denver office Thursday upset over his social security benefits and during the call said he, "may go to terrorism." He also allegedly said, "To get your attention, I will go down there and set fire to the perimeter," according to the affidavit.
During a call several days earlier, Davis, who lives in the metro area, told another Bennet staffer, "I'm just going to come down there and shoot you all," while complaining about social security benefits, according to the affidavit.

VoxOrion wrote:I'll give $10.00 to the first person who actually reads Moz's post from beginning to end.

I thought at least kopphanatic would.

i read his entire post.

lol vox owes you 10 dollars!

mozartpc27 wrote:

VoxOrion wrote:I'll give $10.00 to the first person who actually reads Moz's post from beginning to end.

I thought at least kopphanatic would.

I'm making almost $2 per word!!

you may roll my take into the BSG kitty

thank me in-season

VoxOrion wrote:I'll give $10.00 to the first person who actually reads Moz's post from beginning to end.

What could be so hard about tha....

Oh.

mozartpc27 wrote:

VoxOrion wrote:I'll give $10.00 to the first person who actually reads Moz's post from beginning to end.

I thought at least kopphanatic would.

I skimmed it. Got the gist of your point. Wouldn't say I read every word.

VoxOrion wrote:I'll give $10.00 to the first person who actually reads Moz's post from beginning to end.

I did. I was bored at the time.

Well, if you all heard me DELIVER it, you'd all be captivated as fuck, let me tell you.

Apparently shit's gettin real in Lebanon (the country not the county).