Random Thoughts

A Letter From A Tea Party Leader, And My Response

2011-11-02T10:52:00.001-05:00

A recent letter to the Editor appeared in my local newspaper from a tea party leader, Amanda Norris. Her letter, and my reply:

Similarities are few between tea party, OWS

I keep hearing that the tea party and Occupy Wall Street have a lot in common. There are two key issues where we share frustration: the bank bailouts and crony capitalism.

Both groups are adamantly opposed to both issues, but that’s where the commonalities begin and end. Tea partiers believe those problems should be fixed by a return to constitutionally limited government – return government to its original scope, and you eliminate the ability of special interests to receive special benefits.
The overwhelming majority of OWS protesters would rather destroy capitalism and replace it with ... what? Not too many of them will say, but I’m guessing it will involve taking from some to give to others. Many ignore the hypocrisy of criticizing bank bailouts while demanding their own bailout through mortgage or school loan forgiveness.

Those folks have a right to protest, but they have no right to litter, vandalize, attack police or disrupt private businesses.How many tea partiers have been arrested at our rallies? Zero. How many OWS protesters? Thousands. There are small groups in communities like ours who respect private property and the law, but standing in solidarity with those who do not sends the wrong message. Wall Street isn’t the lone culprit in this crisis, and vilifying capitalism fixes nothing.

Tea partiers love this nation, want to peacefully restore it, and ensure it remains the bastion of liberty and opportunity it’s been since its inception. OWS occupiers want to create chaos and to replace everything this country stands for with a system that’s failed time and again.
For those tempted to support Occupy Wall Street, be careful who you stand with. If you value this nation, our Constitution, and the rule of law, stand up for them, fight to restore them – don’t stand with those who would violently dismantle them.

My reply:

A Reply To Amanda Norris' Letter

Dear Editor,

To paint people with a broad brush like they are all the same foregoes any possibility of discussion. Too bad that Amanda Norris has chosen to take this tactic to paint the OWS movement. She says the overwhelming majority of us want to destroy capitalism and replace it with something else, but we don’t know what. The group that protests Friday at Grandon Civic Center is hardly that. They do want a well regulated capitalism to make a fairer playing field. Theodore Roosevelt understood the dangers of business getting too big way back at the turn of the 20^th century. It was a wise train of thought then, and it is a wise train of thought now.

Ms. Norris says no tea party people have been arrested, that they respect private property and the Constitution, that they love this country. There have been no arrests at any local protests, private property has been respected, and to infer that because OWS protesters do not agree with tea party philosophy that they somehow cherish the Constitution or this country less than they do, is a cheap shot.

Instead of slinging mud based on assumptions, try and open an avenue of communication. Would that even be possible? There are no doubt issues of agreement between the two groups if the hubris of being correct at the expense of the other side being wrong is overcome. Or will it be more of the old tactic, keep the peasants fighting among themselves to maintain the status quo? And remember, there are always those who wait in the wings, ready to grasp control from a movement and use it to gain power for themselves. And when that happens, we all lose. Don’t say it can’t happen to either movement. History proves you wrong.

Random Thoughts On The Prophet Amos

2011-06-01T20:07:00.000-05:00

For a long time I’ve been reading the book of the prophet Amos in the OT . Amos is my favorite prophet, probably because his message of justice resonates so deeply within me. The language of Amos not only tells it like it was in ancient Israel and Judah, but for our times too. Sometimes the best way for me to really ‘get’ something is to go ‘whole hog’. Read it, reflect on it, read other commentary about it. So that’s what I’m doing this summer with Amos. And here’s a tidbit of commentary that ‘lifted the veil’ from my eyes, so to speak. The commentary refers to Amos 6:12-14 and I quote from The New Interpreter’s Bible:

“At the center of this passage lies the issue of wishful thinking. Amos speaks of people who put their trust in a strong military force, thinking prosperity (for themselves) is assured as long as their borderers are secure. As long as the enemy can be located outside their borders, the remedy is simple: Keep the army strong, and enjoy life at home. The sickness within can be ignored as long as the parties can continue. But for Amos, the measure of the health, the continuing viability of a nation, is justice, and he has seen it turned to poison. There is no “quick fix” for the internal problems of a society that has turned against itself, but in every generation wishful thinking turns to force as its quick fix. The realism of Amos recognized that force will not solve the problems created by the failure to maintain justice for all, but are there not still more wishful thinkers than realists in the world? In the past, extremely severe penalties for stealing did not stop the hungry from stealing when they saw no other way to stay alive. In the present, more police on the streets and mandatory or longer sentences may seem to be a quick and straightforward way to make communities safer, and indeed, they may have some useful effect. If people in those communities are hungry and hopeless however, there will still be no peace in the land.”

And so it goes, in the time of Amos and in our time. Without justice for all, there will never be peace in the land. Peace and security cannot be brought about by force, only by justice. That so many people are concerned for their own personal ‘justice’ at the expense of others underlines the greed, the self-serving, the exclusivity of the Teaparty and other ultra-conservative political advocates as well as the holier than thou religious. And as for some of the so-called liberals, is it possible that they are doing more harm than good? Is it possible that some of the so-called peace advocates are also doing more harm than good? If justice is not served equally for all, despite economic, social or racial status, how will the world ever find peace? How can The United States presume to be the leader of the free world when questions of national security and blood redemption lead to the invasion of a foreign sovereign nation and the assassination of a ‘foe’? Is that justice, and is that how we as a nation want to serve justice? I wonder, when will the ‘Babylonian Captivity’ of America happen? Or has it already begun?

Random Thoughts On Change

2010-05-11T09:39:00.001-05:00

We were all bombarded with the promise of change for this country in the last presidential election, but the radical change we hoped for isn't going to happen overnight, if ever. Not with Obama, not with anyone else elected within our system of big money politics.

But how many people are really ready for the type of change that may be necessary, I wonder? I once did some in-house training for the steel mill I worked at before it shut down. I was asked to develop the training and present it. I learned more than the people taking the class,as was often the case whenever I did any training. I learned that many people, I daresay the majority of people are set in their ways. Habit is a strange thing, for even the most inefficient action if performed often enough can become a habit. Once it is a habit, humans can get a sense of comfort by repeating it, no matter how wrong-headed it may be. And bad habits seem much easier to acquire than good ones. So it went with the people that were in the class. I trained classes of union employees, lower, middle and upper management employees, and it was pretty much the same. most thought that what they were doing personally was good, hence they didn't need to change. It was those OTHER people that needed to change.

There is a saying that goes, "If you continue to do what you've always done, you'll continue to get what you've always got." If you're getting what you need, then it makes sense to continue on the same course. If you aren't getting what you need, you need to change your course of action. But the false comfort of habit overrules the necessity of changing time and time again. That goes in varying degrees and with differing people with politics, personal relationships, money, religion, you name it. There are a ton of people in this country it seems that ignore what is in their best interest for the sake of maintaining the status quo, doing what they've always done, holding with tradition, creatures of habit, right or wrong. It is the fettering of human creativity and inventiveness caused by the rigid adherence of tradition and habit that may be one of the root causes of some of the reactionary responses to change.

I am not without some of the same feelings of comfort that can be derived from habit and tradition. But I have learned that whenever a major life-change has happened to me, it is an opportunity for growth, not fear. For hope, not despair. The older I get, it seems that for every door that closes, more than one door also opens. I do not like all the changes that have happened in my life, but after so many I've learned to go with them instead of against them.

I don't embrace change for the sake of change, but change for the sake of improving humankind. My life has forced me to be the opposite of reactionary. There are some things to be sure that still work and are viable. But there are sure as hell many things that aren't. Those are the things that need to change. Change is far from the dirty word some make it out to be. Change is necessary, or there is no progress. Without progress, the inequities, injustice, taking of life through unnecessary war, and all the negatives that plague our modern world will never cease.

We need change in our government. In the system, in those that are elected to lead us, in those that elect them, in the population in general. A mindset that embraces change that makes the lives of human beings better is a positive, not a negative. Putting such a high value on the profit motive does not make the lives of the majority of human beings better. Not in this country, or the world.

Random Thoughts On Tax Cuts

2008-10-25T21:24:00.005-05:00

With a few days left before the election, the issue seems to be the economy. With a national debt growing like a weed, with a $700 billion bail out bill already passed and who knows how many more government bail outs around the corner, with the occupation of Iraq still in full swing and costing how many billion a month, and hundreds of billions of other dollars being spent on who all knows what. But the candidates have laid out their plans for recovery. And what do both of them want to do? Cut taxes.

John McCain wants to cut capital gains tax, cut corporate taxes, because this will stimulate the economy by helping to create jobs. The premise being that if businesses, investors and capital gains earners get a break, they will invest more money into growing existing businesses and starting new business ventures.

First off, there's very few business persons that will start a business or expand a business with only their own money. Some don't have enough to do it, others that have the money already have the money invested and making money for them. Credit is the key factor here. The amount of money a person has determines how much credit they can get. Credit can be a funny thing, as the people who prove they don't need it because of their assets are the most likely to get it. So if a person has money earning more in a percent of return than he can borrow at, why would they spend their own money? Remember that the prime interest rate is only given to those that have the best credit, the ones that really don't need the loan in other words.

And on top of it, give them a capital gains tax rate cut. Why? Are not capital gains income? Because if we allow the wealthy to have more money via a lower capital gains rate, it will help all the rest of us? I really don't have anything against the wealthy. There have always been and will continue to be folks that out of ambition, hard work, skulduggery, inheritance or a combination thereof, will have more than most. But they sure don't need to be given any more advantage than they already have.

Barack Obama is advocating a tax cut for those making less than $250,000, and a tax hike for those that make more than that. There's even a tax cut calculator on Obama's website that will tall you how much you'll get in tax cuts (as long as you don't go over the magic $250,000 figure). My tax cut is around $1,000. Now I can buy into that more than a tax cut for the rich, which tells you how much I make a year. But this is pandering for votes just as sure as McCain's plan is. It's just pandering to a different base. While I'd sure take the tax cut, will it make my life demonstrably better?

So, history will show that the turning point in this election was when the economy tanked. At least when it tanked bad enough that it hurt more than just the ones towards the bottom of the economic ladder. And right in the middle of it, both candidates tried to buy votes by offering lower taxes for certain people. In essence, both candidates tried to buy votes with whose money? The very same people who pay them in the first place. As for me, I'd rather see some old-time electioneering, and have the candidates buy me a ham sandwich and a beer on election day.

And where have the other issues gone? Buried under an avalanche of lipstick on a pig, $150,000 wardrobe spending, guilt by association allegations, not experienced for the job a bad thing (Obama) , not experienced for the job (Palin) a good thing, and so many other non-issues. And all the while, things that have a direct affect on the state of the economy are not even glossed over. They're not even mentioned. The occupation of Iraq, the grand plan of how to pound sand down a rat hole at the most cost possible still goes on. What's really sad is that life is still being lost there and in Afghanistan, without much being said about it.

But the people have to be shown what's in it for them. Historically, it has been a chicken in every pot, or a full dinner pail. Now tax cuts are offered. Both candidates must think that a lot of voters are in this game for the money. I'll be damned, it looks like they're right. But if the economy doesn't turn around, if this country continues to have over 300 military bases around the world and spend more in 'defense' spending than the rest of the world combined, will tax cuts really do anyone any good?

The Inspired, The Confused, The Angry

2008-04-01T22:23:00.002-05:00

Senator Barack Obama continues his quest for the Democratic nomination for president with an eloquence that inspires some, confuses others, and angers and scares far too many.

I understand the ones that are inspired. Obama from the first has had the gift of connecting to his audience. You really don't know how powerful a speaker he is until you hear and see him in person. Being skeptical by nature, Obama's charisma has made him suspect in my book. I don't look at any candidate through rose colored glasses, no matter how eloquent they may talk. And the few rabid Obamaites that have put him on a pedestal are setting themselves up to be disappointed. He is human after all. But I do believe, among the candidates still in the running, he is hands down the best one for the job. At least I am willing to give him the chance to try and walk the walk that he's talking.

I understand the ones that are confused. Obama's message is inclusive to a degree that has not been heard in recent memory. The past 12 years has been the ultimate in partisan politics. I'll not lay blame on one party over the other. While it is true that Republicans controlled congress and the White house for 6 years, the Democrats have done little to change things since their winning a majority in both houses, in my opinion. Those that have grown accustomed to one-party control no doubt can't fathom how anything would get done without partisan politics. Obama's message is one of working together, across party lines, a time when the majority party has a loyal opposition party to help keep them honest. Obama's talk of inclusiveness has lead to much criticism from both sides of the aisle. Conservatives don't want to compromise their values to a liberal, and vice versa. Whenever both sides of the aisle do not like or do not agree with what someone is saying, it should give pause for reflection on the likelihood that the opinion in question may be the correct course of action.

Lastly, the ones that are full of anger and fear. Running the gamut from racism to contempt of anything less than a conservative political philosophy. Might as well throw hatred into the mix along with anger and fear, for all three emotions are connected and feed off each other. What Obama has done with his speech about race is to try and open the door to a dialogue about race relations in this nation. A dialogue that has been needed for a long time. But as long as fear, hatred and anger rule the hearts of some, all of the hope Obama represents will not bear fruit. That some fan the flames of hatred is obvious to me. To get power, to keep power, for money, whatever the rationalization. That certain members of society, the media, and political leaders benefit (or think they benefit) from fanning these flames is despicable. In these times of the monied and powerful (same thing) elite in this country, that is not to be condoned but expected. But for those that fall outside of the monied elite and powerful that harbor so much hatred and fear, it is an example of the degree of ignorance that some folks are infected with.

Obama is but the catalyst. It is up to us to spread the word, reframe the discussion, peacefully engage people in discussion, be willing and able to maintain our composure when we are inevitably confronted with naked prejudice and hatred. From all races, from all sides. This is the hope that Obama represents to me. Not pie-in-the-sky daydreams, but the beginnings of making the right steps towards bettering race relations in this country. To my mind, Senator Obama has shown much courage in speaking out the way he has. Regrettably, race relations are in such a state that he has left himself wide open to political and physical danger. Sometimes ya gotta go with the best that you've got. Obama's courage has shown me that he is the best that we've got. To hell with my skepticism. Now it is up to me to give support. Not just with donations, but by engaging in the type of dialogue he is advocating. By doing such, I am supporting much more than a politician running for the presidency. I am supporting the possibility that things just may be going to get better. With eyes wide open, it is the least I can do.

Presidential Experience?

2008-03-13T11:57:00.004-05:00

The debate about which Democratic Presidential candidate has the experience to be president rages on. Clinton insists that eight years of being First lady adds to her resume of qualifications and presidential experience. The fact of the matter is, as far as national political experience gained by being elected to a position in either house of congress, Clinton has two years experience on Obama in the Senate. That's it. As far as total elected office experience, Obama was in the Illinois State legislature from 1997 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004.

Of all things to make a campaign issue, this is one of the most ridiculous. The argument as to most experience for either candidate is basically the same. Neither of them has been president before, combine all of the years of experience in elected office of both of them in Washington and it comes to about 10 years. Being a community organizer and member of the Illinois legislature for 8 years does not make Obama experienced, and being First Lady of Arkansas and The United States doesn't either. Period.

The Internet Can Be A Spooky Place

2008-01-11T11:31:00.000-06:00

This post is not about any current event. It is about a strange occurrence happening right here, right on this blog, right at the top of the page above the title.

Take a look. Notice the 'Ads By Google' box? Funny, I never put it there. I used to have google ads on this blog, but I inserted that code myself. This 'other' google ad box just appeared one day. I removed the google ad code I had inserted, just to see if somehow the two were connected. No dice. The box at the top remains. Where did this nefarious Google Ad Box From Hell come from?

Why is it nefarious? Read on:

It is obvious to anyone that's read my blog very much that I am mostly politically liberal.
It is also obvious to anyone that has read my blog that I am pro labor union.
To those who do not know about Google Adsense, the entire premise is to get website and blog owners to install the code on their sites to help promote the advertisers that pay for google advertising. When someone clicks on the ad and visits the promoted site, a small sum is paid to the owner of the blog or site that hosted the Google Ad. Google has set this up so that most ads that show up on your site will be relevant to the content of your site.

Now that I've explained (or confused you), my question is: Why do the ads that appear in this Google Ad Box From Hell advertise Mike Huckabee's website, and an anti-labor union website? Not always. Sometimes there is an ad for Genuine Maytag Parts, which could be because of a few posts concerning the shutting down of the Maytag plant in Newton Iowa. But most of the time adds appear that are promoting things I am not in favor of. In fact, they are 180 degrees from what I agree with.

Relevancy as concerning the internet can be very broad. But I fail to understand how a an anti-union website is relevant to my blog, or how Mike Huckabee's website is relevant. And why is this Google Ad box even on this blog, when I never put it where it's at, or installed the code? I have no idea where the code is. I'm not very good at the code stuff, so it could be right in front of me and I don't know it. But I've looked.

So I can't remove the Google Ad Box From Hell. I've attempted to find out some info on Google's help page. No luck. Logged in to my Google Adsense account. More options for questions and help that boggle the mind, but I could not find out any information about which websites I've got Adsense on, just a total I've earned so far (65 cents). Looked and looked for someone to contact about my question. Forget it. The only option is the Google Adsense Forum. Uh, no thanks. I've already spent enough time on this.

Perhaps it's just me, but Google seems to not be very 'user friendly' about this specific problem. As this blog costs me nothing, I probably should not complain. I've thought about just closing down this blog altogether, or moving to another blog provider. But I nixed that whole idea. Ego aside, there's no great shakes about just leaving the damn blog up and running, no matter the ads at the top of it. But The Google Ad Box From Hell is still quite annoying. If anyone out there in the vast expanse of cyberspace has a clue about all this, let me know. I'd appreciate it.

Random Thoughts On The Iowa Caucuses

2008-01-04T17:28:00.000-06:00

After spending the previous evening watching the beginning of Campaign '08, I'm going to be a real wet blanket and ask "What the hell's the big whoopin' deal?"

First, the Iowa Caucus system itself. Perhaps we need a politician to be resurrected from the 19th century to explain it, because that's the kind of system it appears to be. Just a few tidbits about this caucus-come-fiasco:

* How in hell does an Iowan become a caucus participant? Register? Beg? Steal? Visit The Great Ear Of Corn in the Holy of Holies Corn Field to be anointed? All I've heard is that to become a caucus participant (caucuser?) ain't easy. 'Natch.

* People have to travel to the their caucus location.

* There are actually two caucuses (is the plural for caucus like the plural for cactus? Cacti, Cauci?) one for Democrats and one for Republicans. Each one is run differently than the other, just for the fun of it.

* A candidate needs 15% of the total votes for their votes to 'count'.

* If the candidate does not get 15%, they can 'give' their votes to someone else. Wait a minute, if that's the case, their votes do count. Just not for them. Sorry for the confusion.

* There are people standing in the corner of the room, trying to 'lure' people to their choice of candidate. What do they use for bait? Booze? Drugs? Money? A night on the town? A lollipop?

* Delegates that are elected (I think (?) there are delegates elected) are not obligated or bound to their candidate.

* There are Super Delegates. What makes them Super? Damned if I know.

* The population of the state of Iowa is right around 3 million people, with about 2.1 million registered to vote. There was an incredible amount of hooplah about how many caucus participants there were. About 210,000, last I heard. So all of the fireworks from politicians and the media because 10% of the citizens of Iowa participated? In a system that is not easy to participate in. In an antiquated system that gets a lot of publicity for being the 'first' caucus or primary, but in reality is mostly a revenue producer for the state of Iowa.

Iowa, like most of the rest of the states in this country is in pretty bad economic shape. If politicians want to go there and blow millions on a campaign, I'll not begrudge Iowa reaping a little monetary gain. But give me a break. You'd think the results were astounding, revelatory, incredible, or whatever other inane superlative the media mouth-jockeys said last night.

To be sure, the results are interesting, and I'm still thinking about all of them. But an earth-shaking thunder clap calling for change? Hardly. More like a fart from a tired old mouse in the corner. Nothing personal, my friends in Iowa, but I think your caucus system needs overhauled.

Random Thoughts On Presidential Candidate Debates

2007-11-28T22:56:00.000-06:00

There's nearly a year left until the actual presidential election in 2008. How many debates have there already been, Republican and Democrat? Damned if I know, I've lost count.

This is such a long, drawn out process. I can't see how there is anyone not tired of it by now, outside of hopeless political junkies or paid pundit/analysts. Perhaps that's the real reason behind all the debates and long campaign season. There's a lot of folks making a ton of money off of it. Books, articles, television shows (and they are for the most part just that, shows with little substance. The Simpson's has more meat on its bones.) And that is to be expected in an age where the most successful political campaign all too often is the one that rakes in the most contribution dollars.

But of what real value are they? Do the debates afford the voter an opportunity to discover the positions of the candidates, or is it like a three ring circus, more entertainment value than anything else? I've already seen more waffling than at a Jaycee's Breakfast, more crawdadding than at a Cajun Crawfish festival, more mud-slinging than at a Mud Wrestling Championship. So what does it all prove? Who can change their mind, cover their ass, and point the finger at the other candidate the best?

Here is what the debates sound like to me. Pick a party, pick an issue. Doesn't matter. One candidate speaks, another answers:

Yes you did, no I didn't. Yes you are, no I'm not. I actually did before I didn't, no you didn't before you did. I'm strong on defense, no you're not. I'll protect America from terrorists, the terrorists contribute to your campaign fund. I'm against gay marriage, you've got a 'wide' stance. I'm against illegal immigration, your gardener's name is Julio, all ten of his kids are on welfare, his wife is pregnant and he doesn't speak English.

On and on, ad nauseum. If they were my kids, I'd make them stand in the corner for such behavior. I' m seriously wondering that if anyone that wants to be president so bad that they would stoop to such money-sucking, lying and backstabbing tactics is really fit for the job.

Am I confused, disgruntled, and weary of it all? I admit to all three maladies, but it's my own fault. I was under the impression debates were an opportunity for a candidate to express their positions on the issues. I was looking forward to some substance instead of show-boating. But show-boating is what I got, along with the ubiquitous political analyst Pat Buchanan. I confess, I expected more. I should know better by now.

Mea culpa, mea culpa. No I'm not, yes you are...

A Letter To The Editor, And My Reply

2007-10-09T12:07:00.000-05:00

The letter published in our local newspaper:

Editor:
Cal Thomas, in the Sauk Vally Sunday paper on Sept. 16^th quotes bin Laden thus : “Conversion to Islam, he says, would mean no taxes, just a low single-digit ‘alms’ requirement.”

This is only a small part of what life under Muslim rule would mean. Under Islamic Sharia law, non-Muslims must pay a (ransom) tax to avoid being killed (K9:29). Under Sharia law, there is no personal freedom, no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, no freedom of religion, no individual rights, no right to property, no capitalism, no equality under the law.

Non-Muslims are second-class citizens (dhimmis) under Sharia law. Women are third-class citizens, slaves of their husbands and male relatives. Anyone who criticizes Islam or ‘offends’ Muslims is marked for death (K9:73-74). A Muslim who renounces Islam faces the death penalty (K4:89).

Philosophy is prohibited. Causality is denied.

Sharia law was developed a thousand years ago and ‘cannot’ be changed. I t is based on the supposed word of ‘Allah’ (K5:49) as revealed to the ‘prophet’ (war lord) Mohammed, interpreted by clergyman. As Cal Thomas put it, Islamic rule guarantees that we will live in “dirt and serfdom.” That is, if the don’t kill us as directed in the Koran (K2:193, 8:40).

If you don’t believe this, take a look in the authoritative Muslim-approved guide to Sharia law ‘Reliance of the Traveller’, by Al-Misri, who died in 1368 (Amazon .com, about $20). It is the classic manual of Islamic ‘sacred’ law.

According to ‘Reliance’, non-believers other than Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians are to be killed (ROTT 09.9, 11.2)

Christians and Jews who pay the ransom taxes must live by Islamic law 9ROTT 0 11.3a) and by special laws for dhimmis. For instance, no churches may be built (ROTT 0 11.5, 7) or repaired. Nothing ‘impermissible’ may be said about ‘Allah’, the ‘prophet’, Mohammed, or Islam. The penalty for breaking Islamic law is death or slavery, at the pleasure of the Caliph (ROTT 0 11.9).

Muslim rule would not be a no-tax paradise, as bin Laden claims. It would be a brutal tyranny, in which the theocratic ‘government’ claimed the ‘divine’ right to kill or enslave you at its whim.

If you value your life and freedom, you should recognize that Islam is the enemy.

Paul Stout

My reply:

Editor:
This is in response to the letter ‘Islamic rule is a threat to freedom’ by Paul Stout

The last sentence in Mr. Stout’s letter says, “If you value your life and freedom, you should recognize that Islam is the enemy.” He then offers up quotations out of the Koran as proof.

Lifting out specific verses from any holy scripture, whether it is Christian, Muslim, Judaic, is in a great sense taking the verse out of context. A Muslim could open the Bible or the Torah and do the same towards Christians and Jews. There is much in the Bible that is violent. There is much in the Koran, and the Torah that is violent. Does that make every person that is an adherent to the faith of each scripture violent? Or are these violent stories more an example of the spiritual history of a faith?

To be sure, there are people of the Islamic faith that mean to do people of other faiths harm. Why that is so is as much cultural and political as religious. Judaism and Christianity have these types of people in their religions also. So is it reasonable to believe that all the millions of Muslims in the world intend to do us harm? That they want to overrun us, force us to convert to Islam, take away our freedoms? Does the statement ‘Islam is the enemy’ make every local Muslim an enemy too?

In a world that has so many new ways to keep people connected, we seem to be growing farther apart. We are in danger of increasing the fear of things we do not know, or things we think we know but really don’t. Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, can result in much good, and exclusivity of truth in any of the three can cause much pain and death. It is in how we perceive each other. If we do not take the time to know one another instead of using words and scriptural quotations to justify our fears, the world will remain in the situation that it is.

I cannot agree with the statement ‘Islam is the enemy’. It is the doctrine of fear and hate, no matter where it comes from, that is the enemy.

Alan Beggerow

Why Hard Work Doesn't Pay

2007-09-27T12:26:00.000-05:00

The average worker gets a raise every year but has less money to spend. Why? Inflation and health insurance costs gobble up the raise -- and more.

By Scott Burns

I'd like to say a few words about the futility of work.

I'm serious.

Take a look around. Today, we're all 24/7, strutting with BlackBerrys and Bluetooths, miles from the long-lost desk and office, not to mention home. At the risk of being rude, I'm wondering if all this frenzied effort pays off.

We know it does for some.

If it didn't, Starbucks and Whole Foods would not exist. There wouldn't be enough people who can afford $3 for a cup of coffee or $2.69 a pound for free-range organic chicken.

But the operative word here is "some." It's time for Joseph Vineyard, the trendy guy who eats free-range chicken, to meet Joe Six-Pack.

If you look at the averages, the statistics give a simple message: Hard work does not equate to economic progress. It hasn't for decades. We may need hard work to keep body and soul together -- not to mention pay the Visa bill -- but average-worker paychecks clearly show that inflation continues to trump wage gains for most American workers.

Losing ground to retirees

This is not a recent problem. Twenty years ago I wrote a column titled "The coming war between generations." It showed that the average worker had lost ground to inflation from 1970 to 1987. The same worker was also losing ground to retirees because the average retiree Social Security benefit was also rising faster than workers' wages.

Since workers pay the bills for Social Security recipients, that's not a healthy situation.

The situation got worse over the next nine years. Workers' wages grew slower than inflation in all but one of the nine years from 1988 through 1996, sometimes by a lot. In 1990, for instance, workers' wages rose 3.3%, but the rate of inflation was 5.4%.

And, again, the average retiree's Social Security check grew faster than the average worker's paycheck in seven of the same nine years. (Workers did better than retirees in two years, 1994 and 1996.)

Surely the past 10 years have been better, right?

Yes, but only slightly. The percentage of increase in the average worker's wages has been larger than the percentage of increase in the average retiree's benefit check in all but two of the past 10 years, 2004 and 2005.

When it comes to the battle against inflation, the score isn't quite so good. Inflation has trumped wage gains in four of the last 10 years -- 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2005.

Unfortunately, that isn't the end of the story.

Health-care crunch

Both workers and retirees have the cost of health insurance deducted from their paychecks. Medicare premiums are subtracted from the paychecks of retirees. Medicare part B premiums rose more than 100% from 1997 to 2006, soaring from $43.80 a month to $88.50. (Today, they range from $93.50 to $162.10, depending on household income.)

Workers had a similar experience with private insurance. In 1997 the average worker earned $431.86 a week. By June 2007 the average worker's paycheck was $589.52 a week, an increase of 36.5%. Over the same period inflation took 33.7% of all wage gains.

That leaves a real gain of about 1.8%, or $10.61 a week. How much do you want to bet that all of that gain, and then some, has gone to higher health-insurance premiums and higher co-pays? I'm confident that the after-health-insurance income of workers and retirees has declined over the last 10 years. Indeed, it probably hasn't improved in a generation.

That's a long time to push a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down.

That's why Joseph Vineyard needs to start thinking about Joe Six-Pack. So far, Joe has coped quite well. If old enough, he has retired and enjoyed a tax-free check that rises faster than his old paycheck most of the time. That's a lot better than working, and it tells us a lot about why people retire at 62.

If younger, he has refinanced his house to provide the spending power he couldn't find in his paycheck, no matter how hard he worked.

But the easy borrowed money just ended for everyone.

What does it all mean?

Simple. We face two fundamental issues: health-care costs and average paychecks. Until one goes down and the other goes up, we've got a problem.

A Midwesterners Lament

2007-09-08T21:07:00.000-05:00

The recent article in the New York Times about the closing of the Maytag plant in Newton Iowa 'Is There (Middle Class) Life After Maytag?' wasn’t easy to read. A story about the plight of yet another group of industrial workers that are victims of the modern economic reality. Change the details, and this story would fit so many other similar situations across the country, especially in the rust belt, the Midwest.

But I fear all of this is falling either on deaf ears, or ears that will spin it into something it isn’t. I can hear some saying as they read about the Winchells,

“$24 an hour and $19 dollars an hour? And they wonder why the company shut the plant down? What makes them think they are worth that much?”

What is so remarkable is that it is not only the well-to-do that say such things, but people who make $7-9 an hour say it too. Every higher-paying job that is eliminated lowers the pay of other jobs in the area. I have seen it happen where I live.

The article states that 54 million people occupy the ‘nether region’ of incomes well above the poverty line, but well short of the middle class. Another phenomenon I’ve seen first-hand in the area I live. Despite that, some maintain the middle class is actually growing. My own personal experience and view is that the middle class is NOT growing, but has been shrinking for the past few years. At least in my corner of the world, and the Midwest in general. What is happening in other areas of the country, I don’t know. But I find it hard to believe that the middle class is growing at all anywhere. Perhaps maintaining in some areas, but not growing.

I’ve done a lot of arm-chair research on the ‘net about a lot of things. There’s a wealth of information to be sure, but far too much of it is presented with a bias I find disturbing. Information about labor and the economy especially. Of course, the process of turning data into information can be influenced by the bias of the people doing it. That’s just human nature, and something that should be kept in mind for all of us. No one has ever written anything that has been 100% objective. But the blatant disregard for objectivity, or even an honest attempt at objectivity, is distressing. It is getting harder and harder to get really solid information. Even going to the source of the information, the data, needs to be looked at with a jaundiced eye. It seems many have an agenda they are willing to push at the expense of objectivity and the truth.

There has been no change in the way unemployment figures are calculated. The ones who have drawn the maximum benefit without finding a job have dropped off the edge, are no longer counted. The new jobs information only counts the number of 'new' jobs, but does not say anything about the pay of those jobs, or the number of jobs that have been lost. Is there an actual positive overall gain with these new jobs, or compared with the number of jobs lost within the last six years are new jobs merely replacing the lost ones, or not equaling the number of jobs already lost? How can a true determination of the labor situation be made by gathering only a portion of the data? The answer to that is, it can't. There is no incentive politically or economically for changing economic and labor data collecting. What it all amounts to, in my opinion, is data and information manipulation.

The steel mill I worked in for thirty years closed six years ago. The repercussions of that are still being felt by the community I live in. The mill accounted for 1,400 jobs, plus many other jobs held by support suppliers. It is never just one isolated group of workers affected by a plant closure. The mill I worked at closed ostensibly because of foreign imports. That's the 'official' line the news release said, and what the local paper printed. The truth is much more complex than that, but I'll leave that for another time.

After two years of sitting idle, the electric furnaces and rod mill were sold to a company for practically dimes on the dollar. Leggett and Platt bought these portions of the old mill, the electric furnaces,caster and rod mill, for a couple million dollars. The electric furnace alone cost over $11 million two years previous. The same CEO that shut down the old mill was hired by the new owners to run the reopened portion of the mill, along with many other management personnel.

The new mill is running, and has around 200 hand-picked employees. When the old mill shut down, health insurance was immediately lost, and the pension plan had to be taken up by the PBGC, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Many of the former employees had their pension reduced, and some got nothing but a small vested pension that cannot be collected until the age of 65.

The plant in Newton, Iowa is being closed with the work that used to be done there being shipped to Mexico, and Maytag's non-union plant in Ohio. The workers in Newton will be cast off, like the workers in the old Northwestern Steel and Wire Company of Sterling Illinois were. These are but two examples. The Midwest is indeed the rust belt. And outside of a few reporters and some other folks who are asking questions, no one else seems to mind or care that the Midwest is rusting away. Just a result in the changing world economy, some say. Oh, things will even out in the long run, say others. The middle class is actually growing anyway, didn't you know? But all of that palaver does nothing to help the here and now. The role the United States is playing in this vast world market is being played out in part on the rusting-out backs of an economically strapped Midwest. At least for the moment.

But this will not stop in the Midwest. Whatever areas of the country that are booming now will suffer the same fate eventually. The scenario is self-perpetuating. World trade, 'free' trade (which so often is not really free because it costs this country way too much) is fueling this scenario. It will not restrict itself to blue-collar labor. It has already begun to play out the same in more and more white-collar jobs. The further erosion of the backbone of this country, the middle class, will result. An ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots.

What will stop it? A re-examination of our role in the world economy, with the focus shifting to 'fair' trade instead of 'free' trade would help. Perhaps. Or is it already too late?

The Decline of American Labor Continues

2007-09-08T19:46:00.000-05:00

NEW YORK TIMES
August 26th, 2007

Is There (Middle Class) Life After Maytag?
By LOUIS UCHITELLE

NEWTON, Iowa

The last of the Maytag factories that lifted so many people into the middle class here will close on Oct. 26. Guy Winchell and his wife, Lisa, will lose their jobs that day. Their combined income of $43 an hour will disappear and, soon after, so will their health insurance. Most of the pensions they would have received will also be gone.

The Winchells are still in their 40s. They can retrain or start a business, choices promoted by city leaders in a campaign to ''reinvent'' Newton without its biggest employer. But as they ponder their futures, the Winchells are uncertain about how to deal with a lower standard of living. ''I'm not wanting to go waitress,'' said Mrs. Winchell, who, at 41, drives a forklift and earns $19 an hour, ''but I can do what I have to to make money.''

Mr. Winchell, 46, having earned $24 an hour as a skilled electrician, seems paralyzed by the disappearance of his employer. He imagines that there is work for electricians in central Iowa but he hasn't looked. ''Lisa is always on me because I'm so angry,'' he said. ''She says, 'What would your mom have said?' My mom would have said, 'Worrying is not going to help.'''

Newton's last day as a manufacturing mecca comes a century after Fred L. Maytag built his first mechanical washing machine here. Over time he also located his headquarters, research center and most production in Newton, changing it from a rural county seat into a prosperous city of 16,000. Absent Maytag's high pay, overall hourly earnings last year for other workers in the county would have been $3 an hour less, according to Iowa Workforce Development, a state agency.

And then the Whirlpool Corporation bought Maytag in the spring of 2006 and began shutting down its operations here, eliminating jobs and depressing wages. Those caught in this process around the country are gradually swelling what Katherine S. Newman, a Princeton sociologist, describes as ''The Missing Class,'' the title of a soon-to-be-published book (Beacon Press), of which she is co-author.

Ms. Newman calculates that 54 million adults and children occupy a ''nether region'' of family incomes well above the poverty line -- but well short of the middle class. Either they fall out of the middle class, as the Winchells are in danger of doing, or they have never earned enough at one job to get a family of four into the middle class.

''We are caught in a never-ending cycle of de-industrialization in which the best jobs disappear,'' Ms. Newman said. ''It is amazing to me how much we have come to accept that there is nothing to be done about this loss of income.''

HERE in Newton, Maytag's fortress-like headquarters building, its beige-colored bulk looming over the downtown, has been emptied of 1,200 white-collar workers. Of nearly 900 unionized blue-collar workers still left last December in the sprawling factory, 400 were laid off and the rest got a reprieve, including the Winchells.

But theirs is a dead-end task: keeping retailers supplied until Whirlpool can start production of redesigned Maytag models built on the chassis of Whirlpool machines at the company's existing factories in Monterrey, Mexico, and Clyde, Ohio. In Clyde, top pay for nearly all of the 3,700 non-union blue-collar workers is $17 an hour, several dollars less than Maytag paid in Newton. But as Bill Townsend, the plant manager, put it, ''whenever we advertise for employment, it is not difficult finding folks.''

Nor is it difficult to recruit workers in Newton anymore. Absent Maytag, a good wage in central Iowa is $12 or $13 an hour. The trick is to get that much as well as health insurance -- and if not the wage, then at least the health insurance, even if that means commuting 40 to 50 miles, as more than a few ex-Maytag workers are now doing.

The downshift is reflected in the Labor Department's national data. Median family income has risen at an average annual rate of only six-tenths of a percent, adjusted for inflation, since the mid-1970s -- in sharp contrast to the 2.8 percent growth rate in the preceding 26 years.

Hardship, however, is initially postponed in Newton. Local 997 of the United Automobile Workers, representing Maytag's blue-collar staff, negotiated a severance package with Whirlpool last fall that extends each departing worker's health insurance for five or six months and pays at least $850 for each year worked, up to 30 years.

For the Winchells, who have five children, all but one from previous marriages -- their smiling faces on display in oval-shaped photographs grouped together on a living-room wall -- the severance packages translate into more than 20 weeks of pay for the couple. The delayed impact helps to explain, as Mr. Winchell put it, why he and his wife won't be forced until early next spring to face the inevitable distress of shrunken incomes and uncertain health care.

''I'll find work,'' he declared, ''but I really don't know what I am going to do. I've thought about applying to hospitals because they have health insurance. One of us will have to take a job with health insurance.''

Whatever the damage to living standards, from Whirlpool's point of view, its strategy in acquiring Maytag was impeccable. Make the same number of washing machines in two plants -- Clyde and Monterrey -- instead of three, achieving economies of scale. Add 1,000 workers in Clyde to accommodate the increased output, but non-union workers earning less, with fewer benefits, than the unionized work force in Newton.

The State of Iowa offered numerous incentives to Whirlpool to stay in Newton. Gov. Tom Vilsack suggested publicly that he would build for Whirlpool ''the most energy-efficient plant in the world.'' As a lure, the city said it would give full college scholarships to children who went through the public schools. ''It was part of a retention strategy; here's the benefit we can provide if you stay,'' said Kim Didier, executive director of the Newton Development Corporation.

But for Jeff M. Fettig, Whirlpool's chairman, leaving Newton was, in the end, a no-brainer. Staying, he said in an interview, was ''not economically viable.'' He explained: ''It was two companies doing the same thing that you needed one company doing very well.''

Given such realities, Steve Schober, an industrial designer at Maytag for 25 years, with a fistful of patents to his credit, applied to Whirlpool's research department in Benton Harbor, Mich., and was turned down, partly because he acknowledged in a job interview that he was unhappy about moving his family from Newton.

So, at 52, with six months of severance as a cushion, he went out on his own last year, starting Schober Design and working from his home -- a large, handsome Tudor-style with a sloping front lawn in an elegant neighborhood, a few blocks from the brick mansion where Fred Maytag once lived. As a freelancer, however, Mr. Schober's annual income plunged in the first year from the low six figures he had earned at Maytag to $25,000.

Half now goes to pay for health insurance for himself and his children, Katie, 18, and Ben, 16. His wife, Sarah, 51, a special education teacher earning $30,000 a year, has coverage for herself from the public school system. Adding the family would cost $800 a month, slightly less than Mr. Schober now pays, so the couple will probably drop his coverage for hers.

"Health insurance was one of those invisible benefits of working for a corporation,'' he said. ''You didn't have to think about it.''

He and his wife invited a reporter to their homeon a summer afternoon, offering refreshments and describing their situation matter-of-factly, as if talking of a less fortunate family's situation, not their own. Their children were present at first, but soon Katie, who will be a college freshman in the fall, partly on scholarship, drifted out of the living room, and then Ben, a strapping high school athlete, abruptly excused himself, departing to meet his friends, his parents explained.

''I have three options,'' Mr. Schober said. ''I could get a job in a different field that doesn't approach what I made at Maytag, but has a benefits package. I've thought about working for the post office. Or I could send out my résumé to design studios. One of the issues in doing this is my age, which works against me. Or I can continue to do what I am doing, building a client base from Newton.''

He is embarked on the third option. While the pay is still sparse, the work is interesting, he said, citing as an example a contract with a winery to design small utensils to open wine bottles. But each month to cover expenses, including a $1,000 mortgage payment, the family cuts into its savings. ''We never did that before,'' Mrs. Schober said.

The Schobers think differently now about money. They shop more cautiously. As a family, they organized a garage sale, taking in $580 by selling castoffs that would have accumulated in the basement. And the couple have taken part-time weekend jobs.

They work at Newton's recently opened auto speedway. On race weekends, Mrs. Schober is at an information booth, answering questions, and he shuttles handicapped patrons in a six-passenger golf cart. Each job pays $10 an hour.

''It helps the cash flow,'' Mrs. Schober said.

Tim and Rhonda Saunders, in their mid-40s, have taken a different route. He went back to school, while she took a full-time job.

While Mr. Saunders put in 20 years at Maytag, mostly shaping sheet metal into cabinets and doors, she raised their two children and worked part-time as a bookkeeper. His layoff last December forced her into the full-time job, at $12 an hour in the accounts-payable department of a small manufacturer, so the family could have health insurance. She took the new job without giving up the part-time work and the $220 a week it brings in. That work is now done at home on evenings and weekends.

''We have to pay more for her health insurance than I did at Maytag: $300 a month versus $50,'' Mr. Saunders said. ''And the coverage is not quite as good. But without it, I could not have gone back to school.''

What pushed him into school was the job market. He found that he could not replace, or even approach, his $23-an-hour Maytag wage, not with only a high school diploma. A cousin steered him toward computer programming as a good source of future income, and he enrolled at the Des Moines Area Community College, attending classes full-time on the Newton campus. He turned out to be an A student.

More than 450 other ex-Maytag employees are also enrolled in full-time schooling, their expenses paid by the federal government as part of its Trade Adjustment Assistance program.

Maytag first qualified in 2003. The company was faltering then, losing market share to imports and whittling down its blue-collar staff from a high of 2,500 in 2000. The Labor Department ruled that the import competition qualified the laid-off workers for up to $15,000 each in tuition, along with book and transportation subsidies, and unemployment insurance for two years.

The extended unemployment pay has been a lure. For a number of ex-Maytag workers, it comes to about $360 a week, or $9 an hour -- not much below what many jobs pay in Iowa. In his own initial effort to land work, Mr. Saunders found that the best he could do was $11 an hour.
So he went to school, and the family tightened its belt. He listed the economies he and his wife have imposed: no more weekend camping trips, cooking hamburgers instead of steaks on the grill, paying less of the college tuition for their children, who are turning more to student loans.

But then he inadvertently mentioned a planned excursion to New York with their daughter, and acknowledged that the $3,000 trip was hardly belt-tightening.

''My son always wanted a used racing car,'' he explained. ''And when he turned 18 a couple of years ago, we gave him one, knowing then that my daughter would want to go to New York when she was 18 and see a couple of shows. So we saved the money and it was put away before this ever happened. It was something I wanted to do for her. She was so easy to raise and she worked so hard in school.''

Tootie Samson, a 47-year-old mother of three, and a grandmother, is also going back to school with federal aid, but with a different goal in mind. Having already earned a two-year degree in interior design on her own, she'll now go for a bachelor's and maybe open her own shop.

Ms. Samson joined Maytag on the assembly line in 1997 after working 20 years as a bookkeeper at less than $10 an hour. She came for the wage, $20 an hour today, and to qualify for a pension, lost now in the buyout. She was laid off in 2003, allowing her time to study interior design. Then, to her surprise, she was called back last March. Whirlpool had underestimated how many workers it would need to keep the plant running through October.

''For me, it is fortunate to be back at Maytag as it closes,'' she said. ''You need that closure. It's done. It's over. You always think that maybe you'll get called back and now you know it is over and you can move on with your life.''

With Maytag gone, the Newton Development Corporation scrambled to find buyers for the headquarters building and the factory -- the great concern being that once shuttered, these buildings would become giant eyesores. Iowa Telecom finally bought the headquarters building, and the Industrial Realty Group of Los Angeles, the factory, with Whirlpool subsidizing both purchases as a goodwill gesture.

BUT Maytag fulfilled one function that can't be finessed. As the biggest employer paying the best wages, it put upward pressure on the pay of other employers, who sought to prevent their best workers from jumping to Maytag. Now that pressure is gone. The loss is seen in the development corporation's effort to persuade a fiberglass company to put a plant here employing 700 people at $12 to $13 an hour, and health insurance.

Ms. Didier, an ex-Maytag employee earning less herself as the development corporation's executive director, put the best face on it she could. ''With Maytag,'' she said, ''it was difficult for companies to get good people at a lower wage, and now they can.''

Random Thoughts About A Cruel 'Sport'

2007-07-25T15:52:00.000-05:00

If Michael Vick(quarterback for the NFL Atlanta Falcons) is tried and found guilty of engaging in and promoting dog fighting, he is just as much a criminal as anyone else convicted of doing the same. Whether he is a star football player in the NFL or a just a common Joe that lives down the street should make no difference either way.

There has been much in the media about this, even to the extent of giving the other side of the issue equal time, as in ESPN's website article "Source: 'Vick's One Of The Heavyweights' In Dogfighting."This 'source', a person involved in dog fighting and that has admitted to training over 2,000 fighting pit bulls, says that events such as The Ultimate Fighting Championship (an event that humans participate in) are just as bad as dog fighting, yet those events are legal and people flock to them. He also says that people shouldn't get so upset about dog fighting, especially if they've never been to one. That the dogs were bred to fight, and that the dogs are only doing what comes naturally.

All of that is a very lame defense for a cruel sport. To compare dog fighting with any kind of event that humans participate in is a false comparison. I'm not saying that the bloodletting and violence of these human events is a good thing. I personally do not care for these kinds of events, and do not watch them or support them. But participation is voluntary, and if two or more people want to beat hell out of each other in front of an audience, and if people want to pay to see it,it's their business. But fighting dogs do not have the choice. To say that these dogs are bred to fight is true, but only as a far as it goes. There are also pit bulls that are not bred to fight, that have had the killing instinct bred out of them. So the bred-to-fight defense doesn't hold much water, for if there were no dog fight proponents, the continued breeding for the killer instinct would cease.

Another aspect of this that needs to be brought to light is the animal cruelty/human violence connection. There is ample evidence reported on The Humane Society Of The United States website to suggest that those who feel no hesitancy to be cruel to animals are more likely to commit acts of violence against humans. Eliminating animal cruelty isn't only the correct thing to do. It is vital to help curb the growing tendency to violence in our culture. Turning a blind eye to activities that result in the injury or death of animals can only lead to more animal abuse, and gives the silent nod of approval for violence against humans.

There can be no defense for this 'sport'. It is a form of animal cruelty that exists mainly because of the monetary gain derived from it. Forty eight out of fifty states consider dog fighting to be criminal behavior. Those that engage in this illegal activity are not only advocating and participating in animal cruelty, but are helping to increase violence in our culture and in our nation. Anyone found guilty of this crime needs to experience the full punishment the law provides. No matter who they are.

The Lose/Lose Situation Of Iraq

2007-07-09T17:35:00.000-05:00

The idiocy of invading Iraq outdoes anything this country did in Vietnam. But what do we do now? No doubt there will be an all-out civil war if we leave. There's civil war already. The question is, can our continued presence prevent an all-out civil war, stop the current civil war, and give some stability to the country?

Pulling out will create just as big of a power vacuum as when we invaded and toppled Hussein. Many will die. If we stay, we're trying to stop a pressure cooker from exploding by sitting on the lid. Many will die, but not as many at one time. Unless the pressure cooker blows up. Then death will run rampant, on all sides, for all concerned. And what about Turkey, Iran, and any other nation that wants a piece of the pie, or the whole thing? It's possible that civil war would be the least of Iraq's problems if other nations get involved.

Our nation is facing some very difficult questions. As much as I have been and remain against the Iraq fiasco, I also think that we owe the Iraqi people more than just destroying their country and then leaving them to the wolves. But I really doubt if this administration and this congress will ever do anything about it. Their main considerations are personal and party politics. Point the finger at each other, discredit the other, take power away from the other, get the hammer and then sit back on their asses and do nothing.

Will it finally come down to choosing between the Iraqi people and our troops? Is there any other criterion that needs to be considered? It will be irresponsible if we pull out. It could be just as irresponsible if we stay. The invasion from the very beginning was irresponsible. But most DC politicos don't seem to have a real sense of responsibility anyway.

Is there another alternative? As there are now more military contractor personnel in Iraq than U.S Military personnel, pull out all regular military and let the mercenaries fight. Let Erik Prince's boys, the ones that pledge to uphold the constitution, the American Way, Apple Pie and God, do the fighting and dying. Won't do a thing to help the world view of the U.S., but this administration doesn't give a damn about that anyway. At least our government service folks would be home. The problem with that is I believe that it would delight this administration. No problem with civilian interference, the lid could be kept on, kick out all the journalists, just have the taxpayer pony up the money to pay the Bear Claw boys. And with this option, many will still die. Perhaps more than the other options. With no accountability for killing, anyone suspected of being 'the enemy' would indeed be the enemy, and be shot. Not to mention it would free up our troops to be re-deployed heaven only knows where.

All the choices are ugly. All the choices will not stop the dying, and some may increase it. Shall the choice be made by not how we can stop the killing, but which choice will result in the least amount of death?

Random Thoughts On Health Care

2007-07-05T12:21:00.000-05:00

Is there a health care crisis in this country? According to an article written in The Washington Post in February of 2005, there most certainly is. A few items from the article titled Sick And Broke:

75% of medical bankruptcies are filed by people with health insurance.
1 million people financially ruined in 2004 by illness and medical bills.
Most of the medically bankrupt were middle class home owners.

This was reported in February 0f 2005. I'd be willing to wager dollars against tongue depressors that the situation hasn't gotten any better, and most likely has gotten worse. Not only the poor, but the people that have health insurance can't afford health care either. So why do people bother? If we are all (except a very small minority) but one major illness away from financial ruin, why bother with the expense of paying good money to insurance companies who cover less and less? Why should people pay for the privilege of going bankrupt due to illness?

The only alternative is universal health care. No matter how much people are against it, no matter the reasoning against it, the present broken health care system in this country is forcing the issue. I've heard the 'Health Care Savings Plan' or whatever the title of it is, and it is an idea that is obsolete. The economy itself does not afford many people to save much, and it is a savings plan that will do what? Buy health insurance! Another example of paying for the privilege of going bankrupt if you have a major illness.

Some say that health care needs to be reformed by the process of the free market. Free market? For health care? Our lives and health should be regulated by profit, the prime mover of any free market? Seems to me that's part of the reason for the present health care mess. And it isn't right for health care to be determined by who can afford it and who can't, who is worthy and who is not. It isn't right to do that with poor folks, and it isn't right to do it for the neuvo poor, the dwindling middle class.

Like many problems in our country, many recognize the problem, but we can't seem to get anywhere doing anything about it. The reason? There is big money to be made in the present system. As long as big money and big profits are associated with the present system, it will not change. The handful of politicians that want to change it are not the ones that have the backing of the ones that make the large profits. It is a major hurdle.

Some have said that universal health care will be unmanageable, will be costly, will be inefficient. We can look at the present Medicare and Medicaid systems to know how true that can be. It is not a reflection on the original purpose of these programs, but how they can go wrong if not properly managed. Which do we want to do? Discount good programs purely on the basis that it will turn inefficient, or embrace the ideals of the program knowing full well that it must be managed to ensure that it doesn't turn sour?

For those who are against universal health care, what is the alternative? Shall we continue the present system that is getting more and more inefficient, more and more costly, and that serves the majority of people less and less? A system that forces those without insurance to either go to free clinics that are crowded and understaffed, or to emergency rooms that were not meant for primary care that drive the health care costs even higher, or to file bankruptcy after paying high premiums for insurance that doesn't cover the bills?

All of us are already paying through the nose for health care. Taxpayers already finance much of health care in this country. If anyone doubts that, who pays for those people that can't afford health insurance? Who pays for government grants to pharmaceutical companies, grants for hospitals, clinics, etc.? Who pays for Medicare and Medicaid? It seems to me that if we are paying for all of that, we should at least expect and receive affordable, basic health care. The way to do that is to remove health care from the control of insurance companies and corporate health care profiteers. Health care is already too much like big business. That needs to change. There are plenty of models around the world for us to study and learn from. It is a large undertaking, but the alternatives demand we do something. The longer we wait, the larger the problem becomes, and the more people suffer.

How Silly Of Me...The Problem Is Government!

2007-06-21T22:23:00.000-05:00

How often does a politician say something like this quote from (of all people Tom DeLay) about Newt Gingrich:

In fact, DeLay speaks of Gingrich with undisguised contempt. “He’s got this new shtick now—‘solutions,’ he calls it, like government is the new solution. Government isn’t the solution; it’s the problem.” DeLay smiled.

I just heard Republican presidential candidate Milt (or Mitt, or whatever the hell he's calling himself these days) Romney say the same thing.

What do those words mean? Do people that say this really believe government, especially what they call BIG government, is the problem? Big government is by its nature corrupt, inept, inefficient, and unfair, and there's nothing anyone can do about it? How many have noticed that the ones who say this loudest and most often are politicians?

If the government is rife with corruption, pandering, special interests and ineptitude (it surely is, and more so), who should be held accountable for that? The people, to a certain extent. But who are the ones that pull the strings, have the hand under the table, have the lobbiests paying their bills and providing trips with luxury accomodations? Sure as hell isn't the people, for if it is someone's been hogging my share.

So if government is vile, perhaps we need different people in the government. Get rid of them. Especially the ones that crow about the evils of government while they ride on the cash cow that it provides. But wait...we've done that. Time and time again. And the same thing happens. Ah, the problem of government again! So the blowhards would say, and point out how this makes their case. It's nonsense. It's pandering to folks who've had a belly-full of government, by politicians that have no intention of changing it. And why should they? It's working out pretty damn good for most of them.

It is not government in and of itself that is the problem, contrary to what the paragon of virtue Mr. DeLay has to say. It is the ones that have leadership roles in government that are a lot of the problem. It is the virtual monopoly of that leadership (forget the lies about a two party system) on elections, cash flow, influence, pork barrel pandering, and out and out lying that create most of the 'government evil' they so crow about.

This has been going on for a long time. Power at first was given to these pseudo-leaders by the people in good faith, and that good faith has been rewarded by the stealing of most of the rest of it. It is not government that is the problem. It is corrupt government. The ones that are the most accusatory are the greatest corrupters. For them to say it is not possible to have a more efficient, more honest, more equitable government is a lie. If that were true, there would be no cause to have any hope for our country and this world at all.

Humans for sure cause many of the problems in this world. But if there was no hope that humans can also solve many of those problems, what would be the use of even trying? The trick in making things better through positive change is to finally learn how to live together, to realize that if one of us goes hungry or is subject to injustice, we all can fall to the same fate. Doesn't make it any easier when the same professional liars keep throwing up walls and ravines to divide us.

Here's the quote from DeLay that I started with:

In fact, DeLay speaks of Gingrich with undisguised contempt. “He’s got this new shtick now—‘solutions,’ he calls it, like government is the new solution. Government isn’t the solution; it’s the problem.” DeLay smiled.

Notice the 'DeLay smiled' at the end? Of course he's smiling. He's been run out of Congress on a rail, endicted for lord knows how much wrong-doing, and is still part of the Washington good ol' boys club. Why not smile? Playing the anti-big government card while you've helped create it, and are still reaping the rewards from it, is quite a trick if you can pull it off. But that's what happens with big government, you know.

Random Thoughts While In Church

2007-05-02T14:58:00.000-05:00

Last Sunday in church was Shepherd/Sheep day. Most of us know the story and the analogy. Christ is the Shepherd, and we are the sheep. I've heard it countless times myself. But for some reason this time around, the story and the analogy struck me as being very odd.

Not that I've paid much attention to the analogy over the years. I think it is a gross simplification as to what a person's relationship should be with their deity. But on this day it was as if I was hearing it with different ears.

The preacher started a detailed comparison between 'human' sheep, and the 'sheep' sheep. The biggest point she seemed to want to make was how dumb sheep are. How many times have I heard this kind of species bias? Like us humans are so far above animals that we have the right to judge them?

Fact of the matter is, a sheep in the wild is just as smart as a sheep needs to be. Most all they have to know is where to find food and water, and how to make baby sheep. Some skill in climbing rocks and mountains would come in handy too. For this they have been abundantly endowed by the Creator.

But are domesticated sheep dumber than wild sheep, or are the things that sheep raisers demand of them contrary to their natural behavior? And after so many centuries of selective breeding and domestication, perhaps there has been an intentional sheep dumbing down. No doubt the sheep that displayed the traits that man was looking for (a fine coat, good looking legs for leg of lamb roast, size, easily managed) are the ones that got the opportunity to roll in the hay, as it were. The ones that didn't have the desired physical attributes ended up in the stew pot with no chance to breed. These ancestral sheep just may have been the smart ones, but lost out because they couldn't cut the mustard otherwise. After all, if you were a shepherd and had your choice of a dumb sheep with good looking gams and a fine coat, or one that was smart and more difficult to contorl, which would you choose?

Then the clincher of the sermon. Humans are as DUMB as sheep! At least in this religious context. Sheep go astray, so do humans. Sheep need to be guided by the shepherd's crook, (maybe even whacked with it once in awhile) so do humans. If sheep stray too far, they run the risk of death by predation. So it goes with humans too (watch our for that devil!) The good shepherd tends the flock, provides and protects them. And so it goes with humans.

The 'domestication' of humans has been going on longer than the domestication of sheep. How much 'dumb' stuff do humans do because they are being forced into situations and environments that are not natural? How many doctrines and 'essentials' are demanded of people in religion that are against our nature? Are not some religions trying to do the same thing with people that the shepherds of long ago did with sheep? Trying to domesticate all the brains out, (makes sheep easier to control), giving preferred treatment to the brainless to reproduce (Think about it. The restrictions against marrying outside your faith attempts to do that.) Not to say that all domestication is bad. Society does require a certain amount of it for people to get along together. But domestication can be taken to extremes beyond the need for people to get along.

So is the shepherd/sheep analogy valid? If the shepherd had a more direct way of communicating to the sheep, perhaps. But as it is now, the only idea we have of what the Shepherd wants is given to us second-hand, at least for us poor mortals that have no hot line to God. And many of these 'shepherd go-betweens' seem to relish brandishing the shepherd's crook in a very punitive way against the 'unsheep.' Get out of line, and you're apt to get whacked alongside the head with the crook of the shepherd, or even something worse.

Am I so bold to think that I'm NOT a sheep and that I DON'T need a shepherd? Well, yes. I think the shepherd /sheep analogy , when taken to extremes can be abused tremendously. I prefer to go my own way, discover things out for myself. Now I'm not saying a mentor wouldn't come in handy. Someone I could go to when I really get confused and need guidance. So something more like a facilitator/mentor is what I'd like. Not someone to guide my every movement, and to whack my knuckles with a dogmatic ruler whenever I do wrong. But I do admit, having a facilitator/mentor instead of a shepherd would sure mess up the poetry; The Lord is my facilitator/mentor, I shall not want...

An Irritating Email

2007-04-26T14:06:00.000-05:00

Below is one of those forwarded emails that I get on a regular basis. It's like these things have a mind, a life of their own. Also, it is amazing how so many folks seem to have the time to forward so much garbage, but don't have the time to go to their elected Representative's website and give their opinion, or get off their butts and at least register to vote.But I digress. The email:

CELL PHONE vs. BIBLE
I wonder what would happen if we treated our Bible like we treat our cell phone?
What if we carried it around in our purses or pockets?
What if we flipped through it several times a day?
What if we turned back to go get it if we forgot it?
What if we used it to receive messages from the text?
What if we treated it like we couldn't live without it?
What if we gave it to Kids as gifts?
What if we used it when we traveled?
What if we used it in case of emergency
This is something to make you go....hmm...where is my Bible?
Oh, and one more thing. Unlike our cell phone, we don't have to worry about our Bible being disconnected because Jesus already paid the bill.
Makes you stop and think "where are my priorities?"
And no dropped calls!

This email has me irritated and flummoxed. I've got my own ideas about all this bible stuff (don't we all, at least I think we should), and I try to live and let live as best I can with others and their beliefs. But this particular forward has set me off.

Perhaps I've reached the saturation point with this kind of thing. So many hold the bible sacred, but I've found that there's not a whole lot of people know much what's in it, let alone have actually read it. I'm no authority on comparative religions, and knowing what little I know about human nature it's probably true across the board, but it sure seems like so many Christians base their belief on hearsay evidence. That is, they don't know much about the history of their faith, what is contained in their holy scriptures, so they swallow what someone else tells them about it.

It doesn't help matters that I vaguely know the guy that sent me this email. Does his knowledge of his holy book amount to a handful of parsed-out platitudes that he pulls out with incredible timing at the most appropriate moments? Or does he truly know the book. Does he also know that the Qu'ran is the epitome of evil because he's heard a few verses from it that promote 'death against the infidels'. Perhaps, but you can't expect someone to know any more about a different religion than they do about their own. And what I've said above pretty much reveals what I know about the sender. It's not the first time this type of email has come my way, courtesy of him.

So I guess it's a combination of the things mentioned above, and the incredible amount of the Internet that is taken up with pure unadulterated BS, and the amount of susceptibility all of us have to that BS. Not that everything I do on the 'net is of earth-shattering importance. But c'mon, gimme a break. Is it necessary to have the most up-to-date computer system and broadband Internet service to do what our ancestors used to do across the fence post; talk, swap gossip, and spread BS?

To imply that just having a bible in your pocket like a cell phone makes you a better person is rubbish. If you do not know what is in it, if you do not ponder and discuss with others in a non-condemning way its meaning, what's the point? The bible is God's story book, man's thoughts about God (the definition of theology). It is full of myth, wonder, violence, love, and wisdom. Truly a book for the ages.

I am not a bible scholar, not even a mainline christian, but I have read it enough to know that much of what right-wing fundamentalists believe is not even in the bible, but basically comes from a fire and brimstone preacher from the 19th century named Darby. And even his preaching has been distorted somewhat to fit the beliefs of the modern fundamentalist.

So I guess that's my beef. A book in your pocket is just a book in your pocket. If you have no clue what is in it, and you take someone elses word for it without question, you're just as well off keeping the cell phone in your pocket and your bible on the shelf. You'll do less harm with the cell phone, and you'll know more about it.

Random Thoughts On Lent And Easter

2007-03-16T21:18:00.000-05:00

Such a wonderful time of year for Christians, Lent and Easter.

We get the holy sign of the cross made on our forehead with ashes on a Wednesday. We get to wave palm leafs around in church on Palm Sunday, and shout HOSANNA. We get to go to church on Thursday, (Maunday Thursday to be exact) and hear glorious stories, and partake of the communal cannibalistic ritual otherwise known as Communion (or The Eucharist, according to the religion).

We get to hear all over again the beautiful story of how a man (well, God actually) was brutally beaten and horribly executed, and all because WE ARE SINNERS! We get to hear covert accusations (and sometimes not so covert) how it was THE JEWS that killed our man-god. And the equally beautiful story of how our man-god rose on the third day (not spiritually, but LITERALLY) and PROVED IT ALL! And if I need more graphic proof, I can always watch the movie by that fine Christian Mel Gibson. I bet there's even some movie theatres that will 'resurrect' the film to show to us Christians. No doubt, seeing it all on the big screen. larger than life , in Surround Sound and living color, it would make a more profound impact.

I dread Lent and Easter more and more each year. Perhaps it is time that I excommunicate myself totally from a religion that is in some ways as much of a cult of death as the Nazis. I still go to church most Sundays, for there are folks there I have known all my life. And I try to support the good things that the church does in the community and around the world. To be sure, Christianity is not all evil.

But look at what traditional Christians believe in. The inherited evilness and wickedness that we are born into, all because two mythical 'first humans' that were overtaken by the curiosity that their God gave them, and did what that same God told them not to. The preordained horrible death of the literal son of God to atone for our sins. The absolute necessity for the 'Prince of Peace' to die a painful death, all because of OUR SIN! For that is what some of the message is, that the death of Christ was OUR FAULT. So we are burdened from birth (and perhaps even from conception?) with guilt, sin and wickedness. Is there any chance for peace among Christians, let alone with any other beliefs in the world, as long as these things are the cornerstone of Christianity?

I look out over the congregation in church and am curious. If there was a way I could peel back all the layers and get to the pure truth of what people believe, how many actually believe this crap? Or do most just mouth the words out of tradition, habit, or fear?

I think of the quote by Mark Twain (not verbatim, but close enough) "Religion is somethin' you say you believe in, that you know ain't so." So on this coming Easter, perhaps instead of going to sunrise service, I'll stay in bed. But then again, they do serve a hell of a breakfast at church after service on Easter Sunday! So much for my belief, I guess. I'm a part of the problem of Christianity myself.

A Response To An Article By Jim Wallis

2007-02-17T17:26:00.000-06:00

I have read an article by Jim Wallis with the title 'The Religious Right's Era Is Over'. My comments:

Well, I don't see much to celebrate so far. I've read Jim Wallis' book God's Politics after many people recommended it. There are good things in it, but the thing that really stands out in all of this is that Jim Wallis and other progressive evangelicals oppose not only the religious right.

When he says that the Left is starting to get it, does that mean that he isn't 'left', and that the 'left' is just as much a problem as the 'right'? In his book he comes across as having a lot of answers, and a definite vision of the way things ought to be. I for one don't see where a religious left would be any better than a religious right if they were in power. Either one, in the long run, would discount those that do not fall under the umbrella term of 'believer'.

What is being done here, to my eyes, is increasing the size of the tent and allowing more people to stand under it. But there is still a requirement. This tent is a tent of believers of an historical, traditional God. Islam, Christianity, Judiasm, and what he calls the 'spriritual but not religious'. Is there also to be room for Wiccans, Agnostics, Athiests, Pagans, and the myriad other 'religions', or not?

Whenever I read something by the self-proclaimed progressive christian evangelicals, I get the feeling that, in their own way, they would be just as controlling, just as intolerant, as the fundamentalists they oppose.

Perhaps it is my distrust of organized religious institutions, my agnosticism, my cynicism, coming into play. One of the basic dogmas of christianity, that says Jesus died for our sins, is still strong. I do not believe in redemptive violence that most christianity believes. I believe that the redemptive violence taught by the church contains the seeds of redemptive violence for all of humankind towards one another. It glorifies the horrible death of a fellow human that was brought about because of politrical reasons, and turns it into a condemnation against all humankind. For if Jesus died for our sins, we are to blame.

Does not the bible also teach that Jesus was a champion of the under dog, that the powers that be of the Temple were the ones that oppressed the poor and down-trodden? That all humans are of equal value, and that the religion of his day had become corrupt, and actually caused much of the afflictions of the poor and down-trodden? So then why, with the death of this man that believed in the equality of all, were things spun into a blanket condemnation of human life itself as being sinful?

So is the religious right's era over? No. Perhaps it's influence will be lessened, but it will come back sooner or later as strong as ever. Conservative thought tends to glorify the past, and eventually the longing of return to a 'better time' that never was, will happen. So will the religious left's era be better? Not better, only different. Jim Wallis and the progressive evangelicals are changing the outlook of religion, make no mistake. But it's still organized religion. It still has its dogma that dictates what is 'proper' and what is 'improper' to believe. That perhaps is the problem, and as long as it is, doesn't matter which side is in charge. The results will be the same.

A Poster, A Video, My Reply

2007-02-15T15:22:00.000-06:00

A video was posted on a message board I frequent. The video can be viewed here, and my response to the one that posted it follows:

The reasons for the war in Iraq are many. Was there faulty intelligence about WMD? If there was, an awful lot of people believed it, on both sides of the aisle. I agree that Democrats are just as responsible for the beginning of the war as anyone else. But of what use is all this now? It is history, and as such it will most likely take years for everything to come to light.

Was Hussein deposed? Yes. Was the Iraqi military neutralized? Yes. Is there peace and democracy in Iraq? No. Has the occupation of Iraq stopped terrorism? No, but it has shifted the focus to Iraq, where acts of terrorism against Iraqis and the American military are an everyday occurrence. So why keep belaboring the point about Democratic hypocrisy? There are plenty of examples of hypocrisy from the other side also.

What do we do now is the question. Historians will debate on the particulars of the beginning of the war on Iraq. All of that is irrelevant to the here and now. The Republicans don't have a clue, and neither do the Democrats. Perhaps, just perhaps if the partisan finger-pointing would cease, they could work together and decide where we go from here.

But as many of your previous posts have shown, you are not in favor of bipartisanship. You want the ultra-conservative war-mongering agenda followed to the letter. Any deviation from that is suspect for you, is feared by you, and needs to be ridiculed and dismissed as hypocritical, unpatriotic, patronizing, appeasing to terrorists.

So of what value is a video on youTube produced by the Republican National Committee that calls Democrats hypocrites? As much value as if the Democrats made a similar video about the Republicans. Both would be totally worthless, both would be partisan bullshit. To stubbornly keep bringing this kind of crap to the fore adds nothing to any possible solution. It only increases the division in the country. It is a sick political game you play, while people are dying. I hope you're having fun.

A Reply From One Of My Senators, Dick Durbin

2007-02-03T20:32:00.000-06:00

I recently wrote a letter to one of my Senators Dick Durbin in regards to the continued funding of the Iraq occupation. His reply is in bold, my reply is in italics:

Thank you for contacting me with your concerns about funding the war in Iraq.

Senator, the war in Iraq ended a long time ago. Bush himself declared a victory from the deck of an aircraft carrier. Saddam Hussien was deposed, a new government has been formed. Our continued presence in Iraq is no longer a war, but an occupation. Perhaps if this situation were aknowledged as such, there could be a more timely resolution agreed upon to end our involvement.

I understand your concerns about our nation's involvement in Iraq. I voted against the resolution authorizing this war, and far too many of our men and women in uniform have died there. With our involvement now in its fourth year, more than 3,000 American soldiers have been killed and more than 22,000 have been wounded. In addition to the loss of life, this war is costing us $2 billion each week. Add to this the escalating sectarian violence, and the unknown number of innocent Iraqi civilians who have perished as a result, and it is clear that the current "stay the course" approach is not working and that the Bush Administration lacks a coherent strategy to stabilize Iraq and achieve victory.

I am well aware of your voting record. With all due respect, that's history, Senator. What concerns me more than history is the future. The immediate future. You have quoted the sad numbers of our dead, and of the Iraqi dead. You have rightfully put the blame for this upon the Bush adminstration's failed policy. But let me ask, do you really think there can be a victory in Iraq? If so, just what would that victory be? The stabilization of Iraq will not come about by our continued presence there. Some say a civil war will erupt if we leave, some say that war has already started. Again I say to you, if we are to maintain a presence there, whose side shall we take? Can we remain neutral while occupying a country with so many warring factions jockeying for power and control?

It is time for us to end our open-ended commitment in Iraq, and for American troops to start coming home. At the end of 2005, I worked with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to enact legislation declaring that 2006 must be a year of significant transition toward full Iraqi sovereignty and the ultimate withdrawal of U.S. troops. This measure passed 79 to 19 with strong bipartisan support, reflecting the widespread frustration that many Americans feel toward President Bush's handling of Iraq. The Administration has not demonstrated the same sense of urgency regarding this transition, and the President has instead called for a major escalation adding more than 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq.

If this measure passed, why was Bush not made to adhere to it? Is there any kind of congressional control over a president at all? Are all these 'measures' and 'resolutions' even worth the paper they're printed on?

I am working to secure Senate passage of a measure opposing President Bush's plan to increase the number of troops in Iraq and calling for a strategy that would charge the Iraqi government with the primary mission of combating sectarian violence and fostering reconciliation. I also support the conclusions of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which would allow most U.S. combat forces to redeploy from Iraq by the first quarter of 2008.

As you have already stated the numbers of dead and injured since we've been involved in Iraq, how many more would be killed or wounded over a year-long redeployment plan? Perhaps I am naive, but why spread it out so long? Get our troops out of there in a more timely manner, and there will be less death, less injury. And also, is there any reason to believe that this new measure you are working towards has any more teeth in it than the measure passed with bipartisan support in 2005?

I have strongly disagreed with the Bush Administration's policies toward Iraq, and I have not hesitated to express my objections. However, with more than 150,000 U.S. military personnel deployed in harm's way in Iraq and Afghanistan, I could not in good conscience vote against funds to support our men and women in uniform who are already deployed and to ensure that they have the best equipment and protection we can provide.

Your good conscience prevents you from voting against any more funding for a 'war' you have repeatedly said you are against? Do you have the courage to vote against funding this continued occupation or not? I cannot believe that if funding were cut for this occupation that our troops would be in any more danger than they are right now. Fund their immediate withdrawal, not the continued occupation. Get them out in as orderly and timely a fashion as possible, but get them out! Are Democrats that afraid of being called non-supportive of the troops, that they will continue to vote hundreds of billions of dollars to continue the killing? Do Democrats have enough courage to frame this in the proper language, instead of letting the pro-war people frame the issue in their own terms?

At the same time, we owe it to our troops and their families to hold our government accountable and continue to press for a new direction. Our troops have done everything we have asked of them. The test of a successful plan for Iraq is that it allows the tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers there to start coming home to their families, while Iraqis take the responsibility to govern their nation, engage in an effective reconciliation process, and establish and maintain peace with the help of a trained and fully functioning Iraqi security force. I will continue to do all I can in support of efforts to achieve this goal.

You cannot have it both ways, Senator. Either congress has the ability to stop this occupation, or it does not. And if indeed congress does have the ability but not the will, because of political reasons? Then shame on all of you. There is blood upon your hands as much as the ones that got us involved in the first place. It is time to do what has to be done to stop this. Not next year, but now. The election of 2006 has shown that the American people have had enough of this occupation. I live in Whiteside county, one of the counties that had a non-binding referendum on the ballot that read:

"Shall the United States Government immediately begin an orderly and rapid withdrawal of all its military personnel from Iraq, beginning with the National Guard and Reserves?"

Whiteside county is hardly a liberal county, but the results of this referendum? 59% voted YES. Not a year-long withdrawal, but an immediate withdrawal. That is the opinion of many in Illinois, and across the nation. I truly believe the majority of people want out now. Senator, have the courage to do what needs to be done. You have the backing of the people. If you haven't the courage, perhaps the people will find someone else in 2008 that does.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact me. Please feel free to stay in touch.

Thank you for responding. Rest assured, I will stay in touch. You have had my support in the past, and I hope I can continue to give you my support in the future. Take the firm stand on the Iraq situation that I believe your conscience is really telling you to do. There is much more at stake here than your political future or anyone else's. Human lives are at stake. Our valued soldiers as well as many others.

The End, Or Just The Beginning?

2007-01-09T13:14:00.000-06:00

The recent execution of Saddam Hussein has been condemned and celebrated in equal measure. While I question the value of executing anyone, I shed no tears for a man that was a despot and committed atrocities against his own people.

History has been full of such people. Our own country has had its share, despite the pretense of life, liberty and equal rights for all. On an objective level, the atrocities Saddam conmmitted are by no means the worst in history, but they were most assuredly bad enough. Did his actions warrant his death? That is for others to decide.

What I question is the rapidity of it, the value of it. Was it for revenge? Was it to silence him? Was it to give the Iraqi people a sense of closure? Did the execution really do anything to help the situation, or will it end up making the situation worse? Was this an example for all who wish to pursue a life of power and abuse?

There have been many examples of such people like Saddam meeting their fate, and I don't see where those examples have stopped anyone so inclined from doing the same type of things. I do believe in what goes around comes around. Even if an evil person is never brought to formal justice, their fate is the same as anyone else. No matter how much power a person has gotten, evil or good they have done, fortune or fame or anonymity they have, none of us is getting out of this life business alive.

Depite so many years of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, I don't think we even begin to understand the differences between our culture and theirs. Like a rock skipping over a pond, our collective knowledge of Islam and the many cultures that comprise the Middle East are superficial at best. I do not understand how we as a nation can be so involved, and expect to do any positive things, without a deeper understanding of the region.

But there is one thing for sure: Saddam is dead. Whatever lessons, if indeed there were any, he could teach us by being alive are now gone. He was a despot that was once an ally, and then became an enemy of this country. He was given aid and weapons to assist his fight against our 'enemy' Iran, and no doubt used some of those weapons and technology against us. So there are still lessons to learn from people like Saddam, but I doubt that we will learn them.

With the relative speed of Saddam's trial and execution, I can't help but feel that we have lost some further insight. In the political expediancy of silencing a former ally that could have been an embarrasement, (and make no mistake, the U.S. had a lot of influence on the court and the decision) history perhaps has not been well served. But in the long run, it probably doesn't matter. We have proven over and over again that whatever history can teach us, as a nation we choose not to learn.

Surge, Thy Real Name Is Escalation

2007-01-09T12:43:00.000-06:00

Once again, the language patrol for this adminstration is out in force. A new plan to merely 'stay the course' is being touted as a necessary action in the continued occupation of Iraq.

For security reasons, President Bush is proposing a 'surge' of anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 more troops to be deployed to Iraq. The language control can spin this any way they choose, can call it anything they wish. What it amounts to is an escalation in the number of troops that are to be put in harm's way in an area of a country that is in a civil war.

The word 'surge' implies a temporary action. Like a temporary increase in electricity, an all-out linebacker blitz in football, an increase in consumer spending during the holidays, a temporary circumstance. But how long will this 'surge' in troop levels last? What is the definite goal of doing it? And why now?

These are questions that more trusting citizens do not ask. The administration knows more about the situation. If it says more troops are needed, it must be so. I am not one of those trusting citizens, and the recent elections show that I am not alone. As long as the tragedy of Iraq continues, no other pressing problems within our country will be addressed. The last thing, the absolute LAST thing that needs to be done is to escalate that tragedy.

Whatever words are used doesn't matter. This is a blatant attempt to not only continue but increase the gross mistake of Iraq. And what is with this quote from Senator Joe Biden?

"There is nothing a United States Senate can do to stop a president from conducting his war," Biden said. "The only thing that is going to change the president's mind, if he continues on a course that is counterproductive, is having his supporters walk away from his position."

Does this president have carte blanche to do whatever he wants? Is the Senate truly powerless to stop it? Is that why the American people voted Democrats into office, gave more control of congress to them, just for a top-ranking Senator to declare there is nothing that the Senate can do? Or does this mean there is nothing the Senate WILL do?

No surge. No escalation. It's time to see Iraq for what it was and continues to be. A mistake.

The War Against Christmas...BAH HUMBUG!

2006-12-18T13:17:00.000-06:00

The things associated with the holidays such as Christmas trees, lights, decorations, gifts, has been added to. Every year the 'War Against Christmas' crowd comes forth. I get emails like the following:

Dear Family & Friends,

This is a reminder that it is time to send those Christmas cards (NOT "season's greetings" or "happy holidays" but a Christmas card!) to the ACLU. Maybe this will remind them that this country was founded on Christain (sic) principles by Christain (sic) people, and that the silent majority is speaking out regarding OUR RIGHTS. It won't take long or cost very much, and who knows? It might get someone's attention!

ACLU
Broad Street
18th Floor
New York, NY 10004

So my random thoughts about the War On Christmas:

The ACLU has also defended the rights of Christians. Some examples can be read here, and the Internet has many more. While I do not agree with every case the ACLU takes on, for me it is a sign that our country is healthy that such an organization exists. The 'War Against The ACLU' is prompted by those who do not know the full story about what the ACLU stands for.

Protesting the ACLU in this manner is another indication that in this country, we all have the right to peacefully protest. But it seems to me that the spirit of the holiday, which some Christians feel is so in jeopardy, might be better served by sending Christmas cards to others that may not get any. Shut-ins, folks in nursing homes, hospitals. At the very least for every card sent to the ACLU there could be a card sent to someone all alone for the holidays.

For those who insist that this country was founded on Christian principles, I ask whose Christian principles? Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc.? With countless denominations and non-denominations that profess that they are Christian, there is a multitude of differences in belief. Perhaps a slightly better case could be made that the founding fathers believed in God, but even that is tenuous. I offer no examples. Those that wish to investigate can do so through many avenues, but I have a feeling those that are promoting the myth that this country is based on Christian values won't bother.

There is no one actively engaged in denying a Christian their right to express their beliefs. There is always much ado made over the displaying of nativity scenes on public and government property, for example. Whether this is truly a case of separation of church and state can be argued, and has been argued on both sides. But at least where I live, most of the decorations I see in people's yards and on their houses do not reflect any religious part of the holiday. If a person is so adamant about a nativity scene being rightly displayed at city hall, I would think there would be one in their yard also. The 'right' that many seem to think is being denied them is actually their preference for what they want.

There is no one denying a Christian's personal right to say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays. If a business makes the decision to use 'Happy Holidays' instead of 'Merry Christmas', it is a decision made by the ones in charge. By all means a Christian can protest those decisions, but that decision has nothing to do with any perceived 'War On Christmas', and the Christian has the right to respond with a 'Merry Christmas' to whomever and wherever they want. Also, if an employee in a business is ordered to say 'Happy Holidays', is it a violation of their rights, or a condition of employment like any other company policy?

The term 'silent majority' is a misnomer. The evidence that Christmas is just as much a secular holiday as a religious one is obvious. Whether a person sees it as secular or religious is a matter of their own choice.

Some Christians lament the lack of observance for the 'reason for the season'. Of course that is their right. But I offer the Christmas season of 2005 up for an example. Christmas day fell on Sunday. Some churches, including fundamentalists where I live offered up no services that morning. It's a time for family, opening gifts, very few would attend services, the excuses were many. Christmas and Easter are the two most important Christian holidays, and it is incredible that because the 'birthday' of the one that the entire church is built on happens to fall on a Sunday, that services would be cancelled.

And a word for the extremists that want to eliminate any influence of religion on society: Ain't gonna happen. Religion, like it or not, in one form or another will always be a part of society. We can make sure that a certain religious belief does not become a weapon against ones that do not believe the same. To my mind, that is the purpose of the separation of church and state.

This is purely nit-picking, but I could not resist. Whomever wrote the email sent to me, if their objective is to promote the rights of Christians, really should learn how to spell CHRISTIAN.

So the War On Christmas is but another myth put forth by ones that wish us all to believe as they do, to toe the line. People like Bill O'Reilly, the king of the no-spin zone. Christmas has become a secular as well as a religious holiday. Whether someone wishes me Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Ramadan, whatever, they are wishing me well. I am not about to scold them for not saying specifically what I wish to hear. Honestly wishing someone well is becoming a rare thing. Far be it from me to complain when it happens to me.

A New Year Letter To Congress

2006-12-16T12:47:00.000-06:00

I await the New Year and the meeting of the new congress with great interest. Now that the playing field has been leveled somewhat, with Democrats having a slight majority, expectations from myself and the country in general are high.

In my opinion, the number one priority is Iraq. In addition to the horrendous loss of life and destruction, there has been billions and billions of dollars spent on Iraq. The recent documentary ‘Iraq For Sale’ shows where much of that money has gone. So many actions done in Iraq are not done by our military, but ‘defense contractors’. For reasons I will never understand, the outsourcing of traditionally military obligations to defense contractors are looked upon as being more efficient and less costly. The monies spent in Iraq show the fallacy of that belief.

With contractors such as Halliburton and Blackwater, to name but a few, the U.S. Government is in essence supporting mercenary forces. Not forces under direct control of civilian authority as our military, but forces that are controlled solely by business executives whose primary concern is profit. Profit motive, when applied to armed conflict does not serve the best interest of our country. Blackwater alone has seen an increase in profit of 600% from 2002. Indeed, approximately 30 miles from where I live in Mt. Carroll there is being built Blackwater North. A facility that, despite what Blackwater’s website says, is a private army military training base.

I urge the new congress to re-open the investigations of war profiteering. With so much money being squandered in Iraq, there is no way that anything can be done regarding affordable health care for all, assured funding of Social Security, education, and the other issues that need addressing. The war in Iraq and the subsequent occupation is bleeding this nation white. The revelation that defense contractors are making huge profits at the cost of human life and the welfare of citizens is absolutely criminal.

I agree with Gov. Howard Dean when he says that the recent election results are not a mandate, but a temporary giving of power. Rest assured, if the new congress does not perform any better than the preceding one, that loan of power will indeed be temporary, and short.

The issues that need addressing are varied and wide. With so many years of neo-conservative control, I fear it will take some time to correct the damage that has been done. But in the two years before another major national election, the Democrats need to show that they not only recognize what needs to be done, but put forth legislation to actually address those issues. If this is not done, it will not bode well for the Democratic Party. But more importantly, it will not bode well for the nation.

Iraq For Sale...A Most Disturbing Documentary

2006-12-08T14:32:00.001-06:00

To wage a war, whether in antiquity or the modern world, takes money. Money to equip and pay troops, for the weapons of war, and for many other things. There are those that profit politically and economically from war. The documentary Iraq For Sale lays the current war profiteers bare for all to see. The video can be found here, for viewing online or downloading.

Some of the things featured on the video:

Much of the actual diplomatic security in Iraq is done by outside contractors, not the U.S. military.

There are many military personnel that do not re-enlist because they can work for one of the contractors at a greater rate of pay. What a soldier makes in one month is surpassed by what he can make as a contracted employee in a week. There are representatives from these contracting firms that actually are in Iraq and actively 'recruit' soldiers out of the military and into their company. A contractor can make more money in a week, doing the same job, as a soldier makes in a month.

Civilian contract workers are routinely put into harm's way unnecessarily. There are interviews with former contract employees that desribe this in gruesome detail.

Contractors are in charge of doing military personnel laundry. They use small net bags that laundry is put into and washed. The fee for this service? $99 a bag. There is an interview with an Army Seargent where he says that his clothes don't get clean in the washers, so he washed his own in a sink. He was reprimanded and given an order that he was not to do this. All clothes must be washed by the contractor.

Most mess halls are run by contractors. These contractors keep strict schedules oftimes for meals. The insurgents have figured out when these times are, and take advantage of the long lines of soldiers to attack. When this was pointed out to the contractors and a request was made by the military to stagger the meal times to avoid this, the contractors refused, as that would be less cost-effective.

Contractors provide many vehicles, such as tanker trucks. The cost of these is around $75,000. When a truck needs repair, or even gets a flat tire, there are no spare parts. The vehicle is subsequently of no use, and is burned to avoid theft by the insurgents. It is then replaced by a new vehicle.

And that's just a few instances. Every American, regardless of their position on the issue of Iraq, should see this documentary. This is what much of the taxpayer's money is really going towards: The gaining of obscene economic benefit by war profiteering corporations, with the cooperation of our government, at the cost of human lives. Support the troops? Indeed!

Random Thoughts On The Aftermath Of Election '06

2006-11-08T14:45:00.000-06:00

With Democrats having a majority now in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, the American electorate has spoken. It tends to happen that congress switches controlling parties, many times congress switches to the opposite party of the sitting adminstration. This in itself can be looked upon as evidence that the American electorate prefers a division of power between the parties. And is most evident in this current election result after six years of one party controlling two branches of government.

So now the question is, what does this mean? After one of the greatest do-nothing congresses in American history, does the shift of power mean that finally some much-needed legislation will be forthcoming from the new congress? Being a born-again skeptic, the best I can be is cautiously optimistic. Some reasons for that optimism:

The 'resignation' (more like a boot out the door) of Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld in my opinion, along with Vice-President Cheney is one of the torch-bearers of neoconservatism. In one move, President Bush has removed one torch-bearer, and gone against the influence of another. Perhaps for the first time in his presidency, Bush made a decision that is counter to an ideology that was taking this country down the road to fascism. Some analysts have taken this to be the death-knell of neoconservatism. Time will tell if that is a fact. If it indeed is a fact, everyone in this country, including conservatives, should celebrate. Neoconservatism has been the wolf in sheep's clothing, for there is nothing 'neo' (meaning new) or 'conservative' about it. It is but a reclothing of undue corporate influence in government, erosion of freedom, militarism, and power-mongering.

The President's jab at Karl Rove. Asked about an apparent 'book reading contest' between Bush and Rove, Bush replied that since he was busy campaigning, Rove had more time to read. This may not look like much, but as Rove is also a torch-bearer of neoconservatism, it was significant, and it implied that Rove didn't 'come through' this time. Rove's predictions of Republican victory in the election did not hold true. Has Bush finally seen the writing on the wall?

The President's agreement that comprehensive immigration legislation will be easier to accomplish with a Democratic congress. For a Republican president to say any legislation would be easier to arrive at with the opposition party in power is huge.

Bush's 'We took a thumpin' statement. Actually, what he said was a 'collective thumpin'. Admitting that many of the races were close, collectively it was a thumpin'. Perhaps Bush realizes that he has to work with the opposition? Time will tell.

Absence of much of Bush's previous swagger and arrogance. Have the neoconservative ideologues' failure to 'bring home the bacon' in this election caused the President to feel a loss of power? Again, perhaps. Again, time will tell.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that I am now a full supporter of Bush. He has been the President after all, and has either gone along with the neoconservatives out of personal conviction or convenience. Either way, Bush still has much to atone for in my book. And this one press conference could have been an anomoly for an otherwise arrogant President. But with power comes arrogance, and without control of congress perhaps that arrogance will be stifled.

The liberal/progressive community has had a long dry spell. The Republican-controlled congress and executive branch have accomplished very little, if anything, constructive for the country as a whole. The dry spell is over. The Democrats now are in a position to lead instead of being led. Hope springs eternal.

I sincerely hope that the Democrats use their power for the constructive solving of issues, that they leave room for compromise where there is an opportunity for compromise. And let's not go off on the use of the word 'compromise'. Compromising can only be done when there is room for compromise. I am not suggesting that Democrats need to kow-tow to anyone or sacrifice basic liberal/progressive beliefs. Not every issue is compromisable to be sure.

I would hope that the Democrats will offer a hand to the opposition, realize that a loyal opposition is vital to the working of our government, work towards changing the incredible nastiness that the Republican majority have injected into politics. It may be a tall order, after so many years of being in the minority, to not lapse into the same rut of power politics and vindictiveness. We have seen how the opposite side of the political fence operates, and it was not good for anyone. It will not be good for anyone if the Democrats do the same.

I'm A Bradult Too?

2006-11-02T01:01:00.000-06:00

A blogger with some definite opinions about your truly. The original post can be found here. I include the original post in plain text, my reply is in italics:

No one in America should feel more blessed by the Warhol syndrome – our 15 minutes of undeserved fame – than Alan Beggerow. You might remember Mr. Beggerow from his front page appearance in the July 31, 2006 edition of the New York Times (Times Select subscription required). The article’s title is, “Men Not Working, And Not Wanting Just Any Job.”

Blessed? Do you think I agreed to the Times interview to promote myself, or out of some sense of ego? No, I was approached to do the interview and I have some definite feelings about the changed workplace. That was my motivation. 15 minutes of fame, or a lifetime of anonymity are all the same to me.

The Times, attempting to portray a growing underclass of unemployed workers victimized by compassionless big business, made Beggerow its poster boy. Having worked for 30 years as a union steelworker, Mr. Beggerow found himself, at age 53, unemployed, his mill closed. But instead of finding another job, any job, to put food on his table, Beggerow used his layoff as an excuse to retire to a life of unproductive leisure.

Are you certain that my life is full of ‘unproductive leisure’? You seem to know a lot of my daily activities by reading a short article and a short TV interview.

While one’s initial reaction to Beggerow might be sympathy, what is revealed in the NYT article is a level of personal immaturity best described as self-determined emotional adolescence. Listen to his adolescent-like irresponsibility as he defends his refusal to pursue a mature course in life.

So, after 30 years of working 10-12 hrs a day, swing shift, in a steel mill in NW Illinois, I am now considered immature and irresponsible because I have chosen to live on a shoestring and accept retirement because of the present situation within the workplace? As for sympathy, I have no need of yours or anyone elses. There’s a lot of folks in worse shape than me.

''I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,'' he said. To make ends meet, he has tapped the equity in his home through a $30,000 second mortgage, and he is drawing down the family's savings, at the rate of $7,500 a year. About $60,000 is left. His wife's income helps them scrape by. ''If things really get tight,'' Mr. Beggerow said, ''I might have to take a low-wage job, but I don't want to do that.''

In an accompanying audio interview on the NYT web site, Beggerow says he saw a want ad for a full-time graphic designer at a local newspaper and it interested him. He even said he was qualified. But then he confessed that the job wouldn’t afford him the creative free time to which he had become addicted. So he chose not to pursue the job opportunity.

My free time is very valuable to me. What is so heinous about saying that? It makes no difference any more how valuable my time is to anyone else. I have spent 30 years working very hard. I exchanged those years for wages and benefits. I now choose to make my way differently.

Last Friday ABC-TV’s 20/20 gave Mr. Beggerow an extension on his 15 minutes of fame, featuring him on a segment about laziness. Again, as he did with the NYT, Beggerow proclaimed himself the renaissance man who has made the mature decision to pursue quality of life instead of materialism brought by earned income. For this we are supposed to applaud him. Reality? Alan Beggerow is a bradult; an adult brat. At age 53 he embodies all the classic signs of an adolescent.

Keep your applause for ones you deem worthy of it. I have no use for it. As for your accusation on adolescent behavior and your term bradult, you are entitled to your opinion on that. This quote from your profile “The lessons about human nature that Ron learned from these youth provide him with the principles he shares with corporations worldwide. His expertise is on the role that employee behavior plays in work team dynamics, particularly people interaction.” Makes me wonder how much about adult human nature you are aware of. I worked as a problem solving team facilitator and coordinator the last 3 years in the mill, worked directly with over 50 teams. While I have no degree or diploma,I had a world of experience in those three years, and 27 years in the plant, to know that most people that have spent most of their lives working for a living are not adolescents. Perhaps if you had the actual work experience I have, you would see things differently.

Sociologists define adolescence as the pursuit of two questions: “Who am I?,” and, “Who will I be?” Men like Mr. Beggerow beg that a third question be added: “When will I be?” Clearly, he has not grown past emotional adolescence because he’s still seeking answers to the fundamental questions asked by them.

Again, because I have chosen a different path because of workplace changes I do not agree with, I am immature? I have not answered the essential questions as defined by you? Actually, I have answered those questions, but I doubt you would understand or agree.

The immaturity of adolescents is characterized, among other things, by unrealistic expectations of what is due them, postponement of long term good for temporal fulfillment, and irrational thinking designed to excuse the pursuit of responsible behavior.

I worked 30 years in a steel mill, so my pension is an unrealistic expectation? I saved what money I could, and these funds are assisting my chosen lifestyle. Is that an unrealistic expectation? I paid into SS for over 30 years, and when I reach the qualifying age, is it an unreasonable expectation to think I should receive the benefit?

Welcome to the world of Mr. Beggerow, adult adolescent. He should be ashamed. One day, perhaps soon, when his financial resources run out and he finds it too late to get a job, he will become a burden to society. The 15 minutes of fame he now proudly possesses will turn into a till death load to the taxpayer.

I have no need to feel any shame for what I have done, what I have worked for, and what I think I am entitled to. My wife and I live very frugally to preserve our funds as long as possible. It is already too late for me to get many jobs due to my age, previous union affiliation, and various physical problems I have. If you really understood the plight of worn out laborers of my age, you might understand that. So go ahead and pat yourself on the back for being ‘productive’, and label me a burden to society. Make your remarks about 15 minutes of fame that is inconsequential, and worry about the poor taxpayers that will have to take care of me til death. You have no understanding of the situation, you have but extended the myths that the NY Times article was investigating, and you are perpetuating the ‘Great American Work Ethic’ of a bygone era. For many, that work ethic no longer applies because of globalisation, poor economy, etc.

If you’re interested in actually learning about me further, here is a link to a post on my blog:Random Thoughts. I invite you to explore other things I have written there that may give you further insight. That is, if you’re interested. If you’ve already made up your mind about me, by all means don’t bother.

The Bradult,

Alan Beggerow

Some Random Thoughts About Internet Message Boards

2006-10-25T16:25:00.000-05:00

I will be specific. I'm talking about message boards that espouse liberal/progressive views. I have posted on the following five boards within the past three years:

Randi Rhodes Message Board.
Mike Malloy Message Board.
Liberal Posters Union Message Board.
Air America Radio Message Baord.
Unfiltered News Network Message Board.

Being boards of the progressive/liberal persuasion, it would be a reasonable assumption that these boards would promote open and honest discussion, opinions stated with passion and conviction, acceptance of differing views, and a minimum of personal attack. But the reality is quite to the contrary, to my mind. So much for a reasonable assumption.

The common thread with these five boards has been what is called in internet language 'board meltdowns'. The inevitable conflict that arises between human beings, instead of being managed by posters, moderators and administrators with compassion and calmness, has been allowed to run rampant. And it is the doings of a group of people, a relatively small group of people, that migrate from board to board like a band of vandals. Their only concern is with being right, having the last word, and the verbal abuse of others. So many times when a good discussion is in progress, these vandals invade the topic with their own special 'style' of harrasment, intimidation, spin, closed mindedness, and intolerance.

If these vandals were only topic invaders spouting nasty comments, it would be one thing. But it usually is reduced to personal nastiness. Humans being what they are, often times the drama slops over to otherwise decent posters that have a need to defend the ones being ganged up on, or they just plain get tired of the verbal abuse. Some observations:

These vandals are board-hoppers. Not all board-hoppers are vandals to be sure, but every vandal I've noticed has been one. After creating so much chaos, either the vandals are banned outright and can no longer post, or the drama dies down to a level where they no longer are having their 'fun'. On all five message boards mentioned, these vandals have participated. They sow their seeds of destruction, and then move on.

These vandals tend to endlessly quote previous messages, sometimes creating a long line of quotes, only to have their actual response being a short, one-line personal jab at someone. The really good ones sometimes have one word responses.

These vandals also tend to have tremendously high post counts. Not all high post count people are vandals, but vandals usually do. Their objective must be quantity of responses instead of quality, for seldom does the vandal bother with a post of substance. (See previous bullet point).

These vandals are not stupid. On the contrary, many are very intelligent. They also instinctively know which buttons to push. Some take it as a personal challenge to try and push the buttons of an otherwise decent poster. It takes a great deal of willpower to not be suckered in by them, for they are very good at what they do.

The vandals are also really good at creating other vandals. Posters go over to the dark side of vandal behavior for many reasons, with self-defense as the most common reason. But for those that go over to the dark side far enough to agree with a vandal, don't be fooled. You can only agree wtih a vandal for a very limited amount of time. Then they will turn on you. A true vandal is a lone parasite that doesn't desire anyone on their side. And the truth be known, they can't have anyone on their side. Each individual vandal already knows it all, and is the one that is always right. There can't be TWO people that know it all.

And what if a 'normal' poster calls a vandal on their behavior? You will see righteous indignation like you've never seen before. You will see a spin job that would make Bill O'Reilly green with envy. All of a sudden the vandal becomes the persecuted. The vandal accuses the normal poster of all the things that the vandal does themselves. A classic case of 'NOW who's the vandal?' The vandal's remarks are so hypocritical, fantastically fabricated, so completely over the top, that it can boggle the mind. And that is their purpose. There's nothing anyone can say to a vandal that will convince them of anything pertaining to their behavoir. They lack the ability of self-awareness, thus also lack empathy for anyone else.

Not all those who believe in free speech are vandals, but most vandals are. But it is a specific form of free speech. That is, free speech without any responsibility for what is being said. Free speech to a vandal means the right to call anyone anything they so choose. If the person takes offense, then the vandal counters that the offended is a wimp, or that the offended wants to deny them their right of free speech.

I am going out on a limb here to make a value judgement: Vandals are in essence cowards. They hide behind the cloak of internet anonymity to spout their malicious words. How would a vandal react in a face to face conversation? Would they be nearly as nasty? Interesting to think about.

Why do vandals act as they do? At the risk of sounding like an outhouse psychologist, perhaps it is an indication of low self-esteem that drives them to prop up their own fragile egos by trying to bring others down. But I do know that the very tactics and actions that the progressive/liberal vandal uses mirror those of their avowed opposition: The ultra-conservatives. And those actions time and time again force the administrators of message boards to act in ways that no one in the progressive/liberal community agrees with.

So whatever motivates a vandal to act as they do, the end results are high levels of conflict, in-house fighting, civil discourse being ground to a halt. Among the boards mentioned, there's only one where there is any kind of 'push' to deal with the vandals besides outright banishment. That is the Unfiltered News Network board. There are enough posters that have seen the vandals in action that want to do something about it. The discussion is happening right now. Of course, the vandals are obstructing this 'push' with their usual tactics. But enough posters have had a belly-full of such behavior that as a community they demand that something be done. What that 'something' is, is not exactly known. But decisions will be made. The dynamic of the board, the true dynamic of progressive/liberal thought and action, in my opinion will at least make an honest attempt at making the message board a place for civil, and yes sometimes quite impassioned, discussion. The parasitic vandals will be shaken off of the 'host'. Where they end ujp is strictly up to them. Enough folks realize that to continue to tolerate the parasites will bring about the ruination of the board itself, and enough folks do not want that to happen.

Gee, sounds like the progressive/liberal struggle against the current ultra-conservative war mongers, doesn't it?

Fascism Doesn't Apply To Our Current Enemies

2006-10-20T11:13:00.000-05:00

A great letter in the local newspaper that debunks the term 'Islamo-fascist".

Editor:

In recent weeks, the cheerleaders who would like us to believe that the occupation of Iraq is part of the greater war on terror have been inaccurately referring to our Islamic fundamentalist enemies as 'Islamo-fascists', a new word in our lexicon.

While it is all too true that we are fighting fanatical Islamic fundamentalists in this 'war on terror', fascism is not really the term that would best apply. Benito Mussolini, the founder of Italy's Fascist Party, defined fascism as "Corporatism, for it is the marriage of government and corporations." We should consider Mussolini an expert on the subject.

Unless al-Qaida has started taking money from Exxon, Nike and McDonald's, fascism would not, therefore, appear to apply to our current enemies.

Maybe we should stick to the old word that referred to religious nuts - theocrats. Personally, I didn't have a problem referring to our foes as Islamic fundamentalists.

We can only assume that those who chose to re-cast our enemies into the shape of yesterdays' enemies are either ignorant of what fascism is, or are purposefully using the word as a distraction -- "we can't be the fascists if they are the fascists."

You see, besides fanaticism, some of the hallmarks of fascism are torture, pre-emptive and perpetual war, and domestic spying -- and of course, a cozy relationship between government and corporations.

That would best describe our current government.

Del Wasso
Freeport, IL

Appearing On National Television? Big Deal!

2006-10-13T15:40:00.001-05:00

I was at the local gas station the day after I appeared on ABC 20/20. I go down there most every day, buy a soda pop and shoot the breeze for awhile with folks. A man walked in, looked at me and did a double take. He got what he came in for, and as he checked out he looked at me again and said, "Hey, didn't I see you last night on TV?"
"You got a rotten tomato in your hand?" I replied.
He got a funny look on his face and said, "Well...no."
"Then yeah, I'm the guy you saw on TV last night."
He didn't seem to get my attempt at humor. "Wow, that was really something, seeing someone from Rock Falls on national TV," he said. He seemed to be genuinely impressed.
"What did you think of the show?" I asked.
"Oh hell, I was sitting in my chair half asleep when I heard 'Rock Falls'. I woke right up," he said. "I've never seen anyone from Rock Falls on TV before."
"But what did you think of the show?" I asked again.
"Damn, I don't even remember what it was about. Soon as your part was done, I fell back asleep," he said as he chuckled. "But man, I never saw anyone on TV from Rock Falls before. Can I have your autograph?"
I laughed and said, "You must be joking...aren't you?"
The look on his face assured me he was not. "No, I'm serious," he said as he fumbled in his pocket for a piece of paper and a pen.
"Well, I gotta tell you, since I don't know you and I'm such a celebrity, it'll cost ya five bucks. But that's just for my signature. If you want a personal greeting too, it'll be two bucks extra," I said with my tongue planted firmly in cheek.
"Man, everybody's out to make a buck!" he said as he walked out the door. "To hell with that!"

Since then I've had a few more people recognize me, and believe it or not, a couple more requests for my autograph. Granted, most of those requests were from folks that I know. But two were from folks I never saw before. I offered the same deal to all of them that I did to the fellow in the gas station, but to date I have not had anyone accept my offer. So much for fame AND fortune.

I've been on local TV a couple of times, in the Chicago Tribune newspaper, on the Tucker show, and now ABC 20/20. All of these appearances have been about working people in one way or another. It is an issue that I lived through as a steelworker for 30 years, and an issue that is still very close to my heart. The workforce in this country continues to take it on the chin, and if there is anything I can do to bring this before the public, I'll do it. I do it not out of an over-inflated sense of ego, but to attempt to tell the other side. A side that is being ignored and swept under the rug by this administration and the main stream media.

It's seldom that an ordinary citizen like myself gets an opportunity to state their opinion. And like I tell folks, I'm not stuck up, I'll talk to anybody. So when people ask me why I do it, I answer 'why not?' Too bad that others don't speak out about this issue and so many others in this country. I understand to a certain extent why they do not. But without the voice of the public being heard, nothing will change. Not to be too hifalutin about it, but I do consider it a responsibility and duty to be vocal.

So it isn't about me. It is about the issues that need to be talked about. I write letters to the editor of the local newspaper, and I've found out how many folks read them. And my purpose with all of that is to not to try and change anyone's mind, but to perhaps give them a different viewpoint, help them to think the issue through so they can make up their own minds.

So being on television may be a momentary ego booster, but it never lasts with me. I'll never get used to seeing my big old punkin head on television anyway. It is the message that matters, and my two experiences with the main stream media has shown that the message can be edited to suit whoever for whatever purpose. So being on TV? No big deal. I am not impressed.

A Powerful Essay by Charles Sullivan

2006-10-13T13:13:00.000-05:00

The Assassins of Truth
By Charles Sullivan
10/12/06

It is evident to me that the United States government believes that any individual or group of people that works to prevent it from implementing its agenda are terrorists. Furthermore, I contend that the government's plan is not the people's agenda; but some of us will be required to sacrifice our lives in order to help them execute their ill, and all of us will be
required to sacrifice our freedoms.

I also contend that the government overwhelmingly represents the interests of wealth and power; that its strength is derived from corporate bribes, rather than from grass roots populist support; that it exists to execute a Plutocratic agenda of world domination, while neglecting the needs of the overwhelming majority of the people.

I charge that the government is engaged in immoral and criminal conduct on a global scale. That it does not conform to the norms of civil society; that it is sociopathic, and flagrantly violates domestic and international law. The form of government that we have does not serve the citizenry -- it preys upon them. It is not a government of the people, for the people. It is
government of the corporations, for the corporations, by the corporations -- a corporate Plutocracy.

The sole purpose of Plutocratic government is to spread the gospel of free market economics and privatized wealth, and to extend the hegemony of capitalism to every corner of the earth. Its god is the almighty dollar. Championed by right wing extremists, it is equally endorsed by cowering neo-liberals in Congress. Its funding is derived from corporate sources and extorted tax contributions from the citizenry.

I contend that the government routinely breaches the Constitution and the
Bill of Rights that it was sworn to uphold; and that it circumvents domestic
law through the frequent use of presidential signing statements that
effectively render civil law null and void. The recent passage of the
Military Commissions Acts that resulted in the suspension of habeas corpus,
passed into law with the aide of fourteen Democrats, is beyond onerous -- it
is morally vacuous and criminal.

The executive branch of the government, in particular, has run amok; it disdains the daily struggles of ordinary citizens, and is engaged in class warfare against its own, and the world's working people. It conducts terrorist attacks on its own citizens, and against civilians abroad.

It is widely known abroad that the U.S. government is practicing extraordinary rendition in order to torture, maim, and kill its suspected enemies; it imprisons innocent people all over the world indefinitely, without due process and without charging them with any crime.

We bear witness to the crimes of a rogue government that invades sovereign nations, bombs their cities into piles of rubble, murders with impunity, imposes harsh economic sanctions, denies women and children life saving medical treatment, and steals their oil and mineral wealth. Hypocritically, it calls those who resist occupation, terrorists.

I further contend that the government is engaged in a campaign of unlawfully monitoring the communications of its citizens, including the infiltration of Quaker religious orders that preach doctrines of peace over those of war, and is increasingly stifling free speech and the right of peaceful assembly. Our hard won civil liberties are giving way to an emerging police state. The
prying eyes of paranoid government are everywhere.

Thus we are left with an illicit government that routinely commits crimes against humanity under the pretense of executing a war on terror. To its eternal shame, it has unleashed the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon upon its own citizens without just cause. These agencies are monitoring our
computers, tapping our phones, and tracking our movements not to protect America from terrorists, but to protect the Plutocracy from those who would expose it.

What does it say about a government when those who uphold the Constitution and the rule of law are targeted as enemies of the state or as terrorists? Is this what Thomas Jefferson and the framers of the constitution intended?

The assassins of truth have the audacity to feign faith in god while daily committing unholy acts of terror against peace loving people at home and abroad. With the deftness of a public relations firm, they are using religion as a weapon against a guileless flock that blithely follows its every command, even as it leads them to the slaughter of an Armageddon of its own creation.

By these acts and worse, the U.S. government defines Democracy. It has been empowered to do so by Republicans and Democrats alike.

I hereby assert that the hidden purpose of the U.S. government is not to serve the needs of the people or to make the world free and democratic, as it so boldly claims; it is to accrue ever more wealth to the obscenely rich, the global elite. Its intent is to do to the U.S. what it has done to Iraq; to revoke the Constitution and the rule of law; to bankrupt the federaltreasury and to privatize everything that is publicly owned. Ultimately, its objective is to pursue the religion of unregulated free market capitalism, and to establish global corporate rule.

It seems to me that any government that does not serve the people and treats those who uphold the Constitution as terrorists is not a Democracy; and we should refrain from calling it by that name. Governmental power that is not derived from, and subservient to the people, is illegitimate -- a form of authoritarian dictatorship as vile as Communism.

When an institution that was purportedly created to serve the needs of the people is no longer accountable to the people, and operates in secrecy, we can be sure that sinister powers are in motion. Those responsible are not only obscuring truth and revising history; they are knowingly and willfully assassinating truth, and mocking the very idea of Democracy.

Government that is controlled by capital, rather than a moral imperative to serve the public good, is a danger to the world. Such government is not only misguided and inherently unjust; it is hostile to Democracy and opposed to peace.

A government of the people would have a very different agenda than a Plutocratic regime. It would provide no cost health care to its citizens, free higher education to anyone who wants it; and it would not squander the federal treasury on unprovoked war that will not end in our lifetimes. Such a government would not overthrow democratically elected governments abroad.
Nor would it throw its support behind terrorist states like Israel, and it would not finance brutal dictatorships like Saddam Hussein and Augusto Pinochet, as has been the history of the American government.

Democracies do not betray its citizens by outsourcing jobs to sweat shops in other parts of the world in order to maximize corporate profits and to drive down wages. They do not wage war on sovereign nations based upon lies and innuendo; they do not occupy other countries, and they do not plan additional wars and occupations at the behest of corporate lobbyists against
nations that pose no threat to them.

Democracies do not sentence their youth to fight and die under false pretenses in order to open sovereign nations to corporate plunder and capitalism.

Plutocracy, I contend, is the outgrowth of the capitalist system that values private profits above all else. Under this sickly paradigm people are dehumanized; reduced to mere commodities on a par with a lump of coal or a pool of oil. It is a system that knows the price of everything but the value of nothing; and it is driven by insatiable greed.

Democracies derive their power from the people, all people being equal, and the distribution of wealth being equal. Plutocracies derive their power from the private ownership of immense wealth and property that represents a small percentage of the aggregate population. In the capitalist system, only those with wealth and property have legal standing and representation in
government. All others are second-class citizens with second-class rights and subservient to the Plutocracy. It is about time that we learn the difference.

Charles Sullivan is a photographer, freelance writer, and social activist residing in the hinterland of West Virginia.

Sloth?

2006-10-11T10:07:00.000-05:00

The broadcast of ABC's 20/20 on October 6th was part of an ongoing series on the 7 deadly sins. The theme of this program was 'Sloth'.

I was a part of that program. A 4-man camera crew, a producer and an interviewer were at my house for 6 hours. They interviewed me for 2 hours, my wife for 1 hour, took extensive footage of various activities we do. The result? There was none of my wife's interview used, and about 2 minutes of my interview used which was interspersed with a story about a 12-year college student whooping it up. As far as the 12-year college student? We all have our lives to live as we see fit, the 'American Work Ethic' be damned. Most of the segment about him focused on his 'good time Charlie' attitude, with but a very short section that told how he plays guitar in a band for money, and that he has a hollywood agent. The implication was of course that he's a bum. Seems to me he's paying his own way, so who cares if he has a life filled with good times?

I was misled as to the premise of the show itself. As the interview took place two weeks before broadcast, the premise of the show was already set. If I knew that the show was to be about 'Sloth', I would not have agreed to the interview. My understanding was that the interview was to be used to inform people that I have chosen retirement over the current workplace, and what has forced me to make that decision. When the interview questioned me as to why I don't 'flip burgers' at a fast-food restaurant, the only footage used was my comment "I don't want to flip burgers". Whomever edited the footage decided not to use what I said prior to that comment. That because of age discrimination and the fact that I am a former union member, the chances I would be hired are practically nil.

It is not out of ego or any sense of being-on-television-euphoria that I complain. I don't care about any notoriety. It is that I was mis-led, that the program did nothing but reinforce an 'American Work Ethic' that on the surface means that you must work hard, work long hours, live the American dream. But dig into this ethic a little deeper. Here is what I see:

If you are of the working class, you must work. Whether the work you find pays your bills or suits your needs doesn't matter. To avoid the 'sin' of sloth, you MUST work.

If you are of the working class, realize that you owe the wealthy a debt of gratitude for giving you the opportunity to work. Without them, you are even less than you already are.

If you are of the working class and want to improve your lot in life, there will be many barriers. And rightly so. There's nothing more disgusting than someone that does not 'know their place'. It can be done, but it's mighty difficult to improve your lot in life when most of your time is taken up by working at jobs that only provide you with a subsistance existence. But don't complain. Remember, you are the burden of the wealthy, and be grateful.

If you are of the working class and lose your job, understand that it is your fault. Entirely. You did not work hard enough, weren't loyal enough.

If you are of the working class and can't find a decent paying job, that's your fault too. You aren't smart enough, ambitious enough, worthy enough. Your labor is just another market commodity, and if the market deems your labor not worthy of a decent wage, it must be true. And if you used to work in a decent paying union job, forget it. The unions were the cause of plant closings because they were too powerful and demanded wages and benefits beyond the true value of labor.

If you are of the working class and don't work? There is a special place for you in hell. You will be thrown into a pit of snakes, so sayeth the Lord.

The 20/20 interview was an interesting experience. The technical crew was very professional and courteous. They worked non-stop the entire time, and transformed my front porch and most of the house into a television studio. The producer and interviewer were also courteous, but less than honest in their intentions. The bottom line is that whenever you deal with a show such as 20/20, you are at the mercy of the executives of the show, the editors of the footage, and of the actual premise of the show that is not honestly discussed beforehand.

I will give them credit for teaching me some things about the sloth (the animal) that I didn't know. But the rest of the show was a waste of time. As for the plight of labor in this country, ABC 20/20 has shown that all they are interested in is the perpetuation of the 'American Work Ethic' in a futile attempt at improving their ratings. If the show broadcast on October 6th is any indication, their ratings will continue to go in the tank. And deservedly so.

The Old Work Ethic, The New Reality

2006-09-30T18:10:00.000-05:00

If you work hard, are loyal to your employer, budget your money wisely, and save all the money you can, you will be able to retire and live out your senior years in relative comfort.

In a nutshell, that is the work ethic that was taught to me and most others in my generation. It is a good work ethic, one that I followed for 30 years of labor in a steel mill. It was applicable during the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, and started unraveling in the 1980's, approximately. The unraveling continues. The Old Work Ethic no longer applies to many.

The economy has changed due to globalisation and many other factors. Loyalty to an employer is still stressed by some, but there is no loyalty returned from the empoyer to the employee. There are more and more people that have to budget money drastically just to lead a subsistent life. There is no spare money for most people to save. Many never get the opportunity to work at a job with decent pay. The plight of blue collar labor and more and more white collar labor is either to be forced to work until you physically can't work any more, or if you do happen to lose a well paying job, it must be your fault and thus you are not a very good prospect to be rehired. In either case, the workplace casts you out like a worn-out machine, and your life gets even worse.

But the Old Work Ethic continues, and is even quite vigorously supported. Sometimes by the very folks that are affected the most by its inapplicability. I have seen the result of the New Reality. Not only in an economic sense, but in a psychological sense. For the Old Ethic implied that if you did not work, you were not a productive member of society. If you worked at a low paying job, you weren't hard-working enough, or smart enough, or ambitious enough to better yourself. And that if you lost a job, it was your fault. Despite the continuing promulgation of these ethics, I do not believe this holds true for all of the millions of people out of work or working at low paying jobs with no benefits.

Until the people affected the most by this Old Work Ethic realize that it no longer applies, it will indeed continue. It needs to be examined, discussed, debated. It is my belief that until these things happen, and that awareness of the issue is increased, labor will continue to falter, politicians will continue to create legislation that benefits the already wealthy minority, employers will treat employees worse than a machine. In the long haul, the very core of what makes The United States great will continue to lose ground. The demise of this country will not come about militarily. It will come about economically. The beginning of that demise has already begun with the minimization of the value of labor in real and intrinsic terms.

A Letter To The Editor, And My Reply

2006-09-30T00:55:00.000-05:00

The area where I live has a large Hispanic community, and for longer than I can remember there has been a Mexican Fiesta Day celebration and parade every September. The community supports these festivities, and a large crowd always gathers for the parade. The local peace group has had a float in the parade for the past five years. Following is a letter written to the local newspaper by a Sergeant in the Army after witnessing the parade, and my reply:

Saddended By The Crowd's Cheers For Anti-War Parade Marchers

Editor:

On Sept. 16th, I had the misfortune of being offended as both soldier and an American at the Fiesta Parade.

As the Color Guard passed, those who stood in support of the American flag could be counted on one hand. I consoled myself that perhaps my fellow citizens were simply ignorant of this centuries-old act of respect for Old Glory. But when the crowd rose to its feet in celebratory glee for the anti-war protesters, I felt a wave of shame and the sting of insult to myself and all that have served in the Armed Forces.

I wonder whether this was the protesters' first march in favor of fascism because, make no mistake, to march against the war is a public statement of "I wish we had never toppled the regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban." It is a public affirmation - indeed, a public longing for - state sponsored rape rooms for political prisoners, mass genocide, "honor' killings, and the illegality of women in schools, at work or out of stifling burkas.

With dogmatic insistency, protesters evoke the reliable standby, "I oppose the war, but support the troops." I wonder, then, why I never see or hear of these protesters marching in pro-troop rallies? Why can they never be spotted at airports welcoming home soldiers back from the third world hell that we are trying to free?

Those at the Fiesta Parade and around the nation who stood in support of homocidal Islamofascism can be called ignorant, little more than the frenzied throngs of Orwell's 1984 shouting their "minute of hate' - but those who actively marched are guilty of inciting that hate, not for the evil that plagues the world, but for the men and women of the military who fight evil.

B. R. Tompkins, First Sergeant, United States Army

My reply to First Sgt. Tompkins:

Editor:

The peace group’s float represented opposition to the foreign policies of this administration, not to those who faithfully carry out orders. I have seen no disrespect shown for anyone in the military, nor would it be tolerated within the group.

The word fascist is used far too often by one group that does not agree with another group. This goes for pro-war, anti-war, liberal, conservative. It is an attempt to demonize the opposition at the expense of any kind of dialogue.

The local peace group as a group has donated items for our soldiers in Iraq. Most have also done so as individuals. We have worked towards trying to reverse the cuts in veteran’s benefits. We recognize the immense debt this country owes to our military, and believe that if they are asked to fight in a war, regardless of whether we agree or disagree with administrative policy, they should be duly compensated and cared for. There is much more to showing concern for our troops than having a yellow ribbon magnet attached to your car.

I agree it is a sad state of affairs when a color guard receives less accolades than a peace float, but I do not look upon it as disrespect so much as disenchantment with foreign policy. It would be wise for this administration to take these opinions in consideration.

You have every right to call the promoters of peace anything you wish. But there are veterans within the local peace group, and people with family members serving in Iraq that are members also. There are an increasing number of retired and active military people that oppose current foreign policy. Are all of these people that have first-hand military experience to be accused of such things also?

I hope that the things I have mentioned have given you food for thought. In any case, the fact that you could freely express your opinion shows the freedom we all have to do the same. The advocates of peace are no different. I accord you the honor you deserve, and bid you peace.

Alan Beggerow

An Interview With Warren Buffet

2006-09-26T11:55:00.000-05:00

An Exerpt From An Interview By Lou Dobbs With Warren Buffet

DOBBS: In point of fact, the Congressional Budget Office, which is considered to be the bipartisan objective standard of such things, has research that suggests that the deficit in Social Security would be only 0.4 percent of our GDP over 75 years as compared to the other large deficits percentages that associated with trade in the budget deficit. Do you have, we're talking about fixing the fixes we're in, a quick answer for Social Security?

BUFFETT: I personally would increase the taxable base above the present $90,000. I pay very little in the way of Social Security taxes because I make a lot more than $90,000. And the people in my office pay the full tax. We're already edging up the retirement age a bit. And I would means test ... I get a check for $1,700 or $1,900 or something every month. I'm 74. And I cash it. But I'll eat without it.

DOBBS: You will eat without it. So will literally more than a million other Americans, as well. Means testing, the idea of raising taxes, the payroll tax. In 1983, Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman, he had a very simple idea: raise taxes. That's what you're saying here.

BUFFETT: Sure. But I wouldn't raise the 12-point and a fraction payroll tax, I would raise the taxable base to above $90,000.

DOBBS: That's a progressive idea. In other words, the rich people would pay more?

BUFFETT: Yeah. The rich people are doing so well in this country. I mean, we never had it so good.

DOBBS: What a radical idea.

BUFFETT: It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be.

DOBBS: Exactly. Your class, as you put it, is winning on estate taxes, which I know you are opposed to. I don't know how your son Howard feels about that. I know you are opposed to it.

At the same week the House passed the estate tax, Congress passed the bankruptcy legislation, which they had the temerity to call bankruptcy reform, Democrats and Republicans passing this legislation, which is onerous to the middle class. Half of the bankruptcies in this country take place, because people fall ill, serious illnesses result in bankruptcy. Nearly half of the people involved. How do you -- you have watched a lot of politics. What is going on in this country?

BUFFETT: The rich are winning. Just take the estate tax, less than 2 percent of all estates pay any tax. A couple million people die every year, 40,000 or so estates get taxed.

We raise, what, $30 billion from the estate tax. And, you know, I would like to hear the congressman say where they are going to get the $30 billion from if they don't get it from the estate tax. It's nice to say, you know, wipe out this tax, but we're running a huge deficit, so who does the $30 billion come from?

DOBBS: And it is, it's $300 billion in lost tax revenue over the course of the next decade if the estate tax goes through.

You say the rich are winning. The rich are winning in some cases, because they are cheating. The corporate corruption scandals, which burst full upon the country at the end of 2001, Sarbanes-Oxley, new regulations, new efforts to achieve transparency. Has enough been done? Or does more need to be done?

BUFFETT: I think the climate has been changed on that for the better, Lou. Mae West said, "I was Snow White but I drifted." Well, I think corporate America drifted some. But I literally think what has happened has changed the culture somewhat, and for the better. I think that's probably more important than the laws.

DOBBS: Yet we hear the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whining that it's so onerous, so difficult to obey the law and to meet these regulations. What's your reaction?

BUFFETT: Well, right now corporate profits as a percentage of GDP in this country are right at the high. Corporate taxes as a percentage of total taxes raised are very close to the low.

DOBBS: Historically we're talking about.

BUFFETT: Historically. So, you know, corporate America is not suffering, I'll put it that way.

DOBBS: Corporate America is not suffering. In point of fact, those same organizations that I just mentioned, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable representing some of the largest companies are saying "You tax us, you are taxing our consumers, our customers." Do you think corporations in this country should be paying more? Taking some of that burden?

BUFFETT: I think that ... you have seen companies be able to repatriate earnings with a very small tax that were taxed at very low rates abroad. Corporations are doing better in the total tax picture than the people I'm going to walk by on the street when I leave here.

DOBBS: And some of the people you are going to meet are going to say, perhaps this evening and otherwise in business circles, are going to say, Warren, what are you talking about, raise our taxes.

BUFFETT: They are still friends of mine, Lou.

An Article And My Rebuttal

2006-09-17T00:18:00.000-05:00

From Townhall.com

An article by Thomas Sowell (in bold) and my rebuttal (in italics)

Pacifists Versus Peace

One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality. They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas, derive their implications and test those implications against hard facts.

I agree totally. Critical thinking, the ability to analyze an issue from more than one perspective needs to be taught and practiced as a part of education. In the representative form of democracy that this nation has, it is absolutely critical for the population at large to be able to see through the rhetoric of politicians and the government. To allow yourself to be blindly led, to invest total confidence and trust in our leaders is folly. Power that is derived from the people demands that the people themselves need to be informed and aware, otherwise we get the kind of government that tells us what to do instead of the opposite.

"Peace" movements are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities. Few people even seem interested in the actual track record of so-called "peace" movements -- that is, whether such movements actually produce peace or war.

Every type of movement and organization takes advantage of this. The government, special interest groups, politicians, religions, salesmen, businesses, individuals. So of course peace movements take advantage of people’s ignorance, but no more than any other entity. It is this ignorance that is the problem that allows the ‘widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities’. That goes for peace movements, pro-war authors, and manufacturers of toothpaste.

Take the Middle East. People are calling for a cease-fire in the interests of peace. But there have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than anywhere else. If cease-fires actually promoted peace, the Middle East would be the most peaceful region on the face of the earth instead of the most violent.

A cease-fire in and of itself does not cause peace. But for any kind of negotiations to take place, the killing must stop. Regrettably, the intensely complex situation in the Middle East has deteriorated to the extent that perhaps constructive negotiations can’t happen. The most opportune time to work towards peace is not while a war is being waged, but before conflict boils over into war.

But then what is the alternative? History shows that war itself does not bring peace. The aftermath of any war always contains the seed of another struggle. So is the only way to have peace is by fighting an eternal war? And as a cease-fire is not an option unless a war of some sort is being waged, can the converse be true? There have been more wars in the Middle East than anywhere else. If wars actually promoted peace, the Middle East would be the most peaceful place on earth.

Was World War II ended by cease-fires or by annihilating much of Germany and Japan? Make no mistake about it, innocent civilians died in the process. Indeed, American prisoners of war died when we bombed Germany. There is a reason why General Sherman said "war is hell" more than a century ago. But he helped end the Civil War with his devastating march through Georgia -- not by cease fires or bowing to "world opinion" and there were no corrupt busybodies like the United Nations to demand replacing military force with diplomacy.

The United Nations has failed primarily because the nations that comprise it never really bought into the idea. Instead of using the UN to explore the differences and search for possible solutions, nations have used it to push forth their own interests, regardless of the consequences.

There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less attack, a nation with much stronger military power because one of the dangers to the attacker would be the prospect of being annihilated. "World opinion," the U.N. and "peace movements" have eliminated that deterrent. An aggressor today knows that if his aggression fails, he will still be protected from the full retaliatory power and fury of those he attacked because there will be hand-wringers demanding a cease fire, negotiations and concessions.

History proves you wrong. There have been many instances of a ‘weaker’ nation challenging a ‘powerful’ nation, and winning. Our own Revolutionary War is but one example. This was way before the UN, and during a historically different world opinion.

That has been a formula for never-ending attacks on Israel in the Middle East. The disastrous track record of that approach extends to other times and places -- but who looks at track records? Remember the Falkland Islands war, when Argentina sent troops into the Falklands to capture this little British colony in the South Atlantic? Argentina had been claiming to be the rightful owner of those islands for more than a century. Why didn't it attack these little islands before? At no time did the British have enough troops there to defend them. Before there were "peace" movements and the U.N., sending troops into those islands could easily have meant finding British troops or bombs in Buenos Aires. Now "world opinion" condemned the British just for sending armed forces into the South Atlantic to take back their islands. Shamefully, our own government was one of those that opposed the British use of force. But fortunately British prime minister Margaret Thatcher ignored "world opinion" and took back the Falklands.

This is an example of blatant militarism for the sake of empire.. What makes the Falkland islands the property of Great Britain? Are the Falkland Islands that important in a political, military, or economic sense? Or was this a vain attempt by Thatcher to hold on to a miniscule remnant of a ‘great’ British empire? Was maintaining control of the islands worth an all-out bombing and destruction of Buenos Aries? And while the ‘official’ opposition of the Reagan government was the case, how much covert support was given to Britain? By the way, isn’t the Monroe Doctrine still a matter of foreign policy for the U.S.? If indeed it is, then should not the U.S. condemned what the British were doing?

The most catastrophic result of "peace" movements was World War II. While Hitler was arming Germany to the teeth, "peace" movements in Britain were advocating that their own country disarm "as an example to others." British Labor Party Members of Parliament voted consistently against military spending and British college students publicly pledged never to fight for their country. If "peace" movements brought peace, there would never have been World War II. Not only did that war lead to tens of millions of deaths, it came dangerously close to a crushing victory for the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese empire in Asia. And we now know that the United States was on Hitler's timetable after that. For the first two years of that war, the Western democracies lost virtually every battle, all over the world, because pre-war "peace" movements had left them with inadequate military equipment and much of it obsolete. The Nazis and the Japanese knew that. That is why they launched the war.

To blame World War II on pacifism is to neglect the fact that there were totalitarian governments at the time that were hell-bent on war. Which started the war, pacifism or totalitarian governments? Each played a part, along with world economics and myriad other causes. One of the greatest causes of World War II was World War I, in fact.
Whenever an ‘enemy’ is defeated, it causes a vacuum of power. Did the end of WW II bring peace to the world? It brought about a very sinister type of war, the ‘cold’ war, which with the revelation of historical documents of the time show was more ‘hot’ than most remember. The war in Iraq is over, and the vacuum of power is still in effect after two years. So the total defeat of an enemy is never total, unless of course the ‘enemy’ is obliterated. But that only stops that specific enemy, and may indeed inspire others.

"Peace" movements don't bring peace but war.

This is a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. Without war, what would be the need for peace movements in the first place? The author has focused on all possible negative aspects of the peace movement, and has defined the peace movement as consisting only of people who oppose war and want to appease an enemy.

To be sure, there are some negative aspects about demanding negotiations and cease-fires in certain cases. No doubt some of my fellow peace workers would argue to the contrary. But for me there remains the fact that no matter how we may try, there will always be people who wish to do us harm. Sometimes war, defensive war, is the only alternative. But those instances are very few and far between. If people could somehow come to terms with the issues and policies that may cause others to wish us harm, it would be better than blindly following a foreign policy with no regard for unintended consequences.

So what is the peace movement? Is it only about the protesting of war, any war, and a demand for it to stop, at any cost? No. You cannot ‘wage’ peace like you ‘wage’ war. You ‘live’ peace. You practice it with your family, your friends, your enemies, (when possible). Peace is a way of life that entails every aspect of your life. The peaceful resolution of inevitable human conflict in all its forms is the goal. Is this attainable? In an absolute sense, probably not. But it is a way of dealing with conflict without resorting to violence that will make the world a more just and safe place. This I truly believe. It isn’t whether the lofty goal itself can ever be reached, but how much the human condition can be improved in the process of working towards the goal, that is important.

We have had war as long as there has been more than one human on earth. That doesn’t mean we can’t rise above our animal instincts and work for the common good. Indeed, isn’t that what society and civilization are all about? War itself causes peace movements.

The Economy's Good, Unless You're The Lazy Semi-Rich

2006-09-12T12:59:00.000-05:00

From The Sundries Shack

Am I supposed to feel sorry for this man or what?

ROCK FALLS, Ill. — Alan Beggerow has stopped looking for work. Laid off as a steelworker at 48, he taught math for a while at a community college. But when that ended, he could not find a job that, in his view, was neither demeaning nor underpaid. So instead of heading to work, Mr. Beggerow, now 53, fills his days with diversions: playing the piano, reading histories and biographies, writing unpublished Western potboilers in the Louis L’Amour style — all activities once relegated to spare time. He often stays up late and sleeps until 11 a.m.

Back in the day, this man’s neighbors, who had been helping him in the lean times when he wasn’t working, would have stopped their help and pointedly hinted that it was high time he acted like a man and took whatever job he could find to provide for his family.

But that’s a day long gone. Now, he can just borrow some money without much worry about paying it back, leach off the income of his wife, maybe snag some money from you and me courtesy of the government, and look down his nose at the jobs that are available.

Again, back in the day (well, further back in the day and on another continent), the people carried pitchforks and torches against the elites who acted like this. Anyone remember Marie Antoinette?

Today, it’s the people who can more or less afford to act like this and, since their sense of shame seems to have evaporated like spit in the noonday sun, they’ve decided that pitchfork and torch-carrying are jobs that are beneath them.

Just call it another job that Americans won’t do.

UPDATE: Ezra Klein also wrote about this article and made a couple assertions that seem to me ridiculous. I’ll let you judge.

First, he writes:

But on another level, this is related to the decline of unions, the breakdown of the manufacturing sector, and the shift to a service economy. Where once blue collar jobs offered the sort of benefits and salaries that allowed for a sense of dignity and purpose, a greeter at Wal-Mart is low-skill labor that refuses to masquerade as anything else. That, of course, was the primary use of unions: to force employers to treat even lowly employees as valued labor deserving of respect and all that goes with it. But in a stagnating market where most of the blue collar growth lies in non-unionized sectors, many men simply can’t bear to follow their lost job by letting go of the dignity it afforded them.

His conclusion may be accurate, though I don’t believe it is, but the route he took, through labor unions, isn’t even close to the mark. Labor unions never existed to make sure that your boss or mine as to say “please” to you and to make sure they never make you feel like pond scum. They exited to make sure that your boss and mine didn’t work us to death when we were 14 years old for a buck a day. There’s a wide gulf between the actual reason labor unions have existed and what Klein thinks they should be doing today and it skews his thinking badly.

Because if you believe that a vital component of a job is to give you a warm fuzzy, then you have to believe that the men in the article are tragic figures deserving of our sympathy and perhaps a big government program instead of spoiled people who would much rather put their families’ financial security in jeopardy than go find a job with less dignity than they feel they deserve.

Which leads us to Kleins wrap up:

And try to do so without judgment — these men are making terrible financial decisions in order to forestall worse personal admissions. If the left still possessed a labor consciousness, we wouldn’t rest until the service economy offered the dignity and compensation to ensure that the scores of workers who will migrate to its industries in the coming years could do so without grievous psychic damage.

Grievous psychic damage? What on Earth is Klein talking about. Who among us hasn’t taken a “joe job” for a little while to pay the bills until they could find a better one? Who among us hasn’t had to occasionally step back in our careers in order to move forward again? I sure as heck have and, while I didn’t like doing it, I don’t wake up with gas station booth flashbacks and I don’t weep uncontrollably every time I drive past a QuikShop.

I think that Klein coddles these men far too much, but that’s a vital difference still etween left and right. One believes that the only life worth living is one that never knows a moment outside the warm bath of self-regard and the other knows that sometimes life involves hard and unfulfilling work.

Pity The Poor American Male

2006-09-12T00:22:00.000-05:00

The Stranger / Seattle Slog

According to the New York Times , 15 percent of American men between 30 and 55 are not working despite being employable and in their prime. Instead, the Times reports, they are “turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified.” That’s up from 5 percent in the 1960s, a difference the Times says “represents 4 million men who would be working today if the employment rate had remained where it was in the 1950’s and 60’s,” when women started moving into the work force.

So let’s see if I’ve got this straight: The unemployment rate for men was once much lower. Then women came along and took jobs that would have gone to men. As women get more educated, the jobs that are available to them improve. As a result, men in the newly competitive marketplace have trouble finding work that isn’t… ummm… “beneath them.”

The Times goes on:

Many of these men could find work if they had to, but with lower pay and fewer benefits they once earned, and they have decided they prefer the alternative. It is a significant cultural shift from three decades ago, when men almost invariably went back into the work force after losing a job and were more often able to find a new one that met their needs. … Even as more men are dropping out of the work force, more women are entering it. This change has occurred partly because employment has shrunk in industries where men predominated, like manufacturing, while fields where women are far more common, like teaching, health care and retailing, have grown. Today, about 73 percent of women between 30 and 54 have a job, compared with 45 percent in the mid-1960’s, according to an analysis of Census data by researchers at Queens College.

So it’s not that the men can’t get jobs. It’s that the jobs that are available are women’s work, and thus “beneath” men’s dignity.

But at least that frees men up to take care of housework and child care, right?

Wrong:

Many women without jobs are raising children at home, while men who are out of a job tend to be doing neither family work nor paid work.

So what are they doing? Reading, sitting around, and sleeping, the Times suggests:

[Former steelworker Alan Beggerow)] has not worked regularly in the five years since the steel mill that employed him for three decades closed. He and his wife, Cathleen, 47, cannot really afford to live without his paycheck. Yet with her sometimes reluctant blessing, Mr. Beggerow persists in constructing a way of life that he finds as satisfying as the work he did only in the last three years of his 30-year career at the mill. The trappings of this new life surround Mr. Beggerow in the cluttered living room of his one-story bungalow-style home in this half-rural, half-industrial prairie town west of Chicago. A bookcase covers an entire wall, and the books that Mr. Beggerow is reading are stacked on a glass coffee table in front of a comfortable sofa where he reads late into the night — consuming two or three books a week — many more than in his working years. He also gets more sleep, regularly more than nine hours, a characteristic of men without work.

Meanwhile, while Mr. Beggerow sleeps, lounges, re-mortgages his family’s house and declines to look for work, his wife has taken on three part-time jobs, all traditional women’s work, and is looking for another:

She is taking in work as a seamstress, baking pastries for parties and selling merchandise for others on eBay, collecting a fee. Still, she says, she hopes to land a part-time clerical job. “The comfort of a paycheck every week would take a load off my mind,” she said.

So it seems the real story here isn’t so much that men aren’t working, but that men are piling onto their wives (in addition to the housework and childcare that remain American women’s primary responsibilities) one additional burden: Earning a paycheck, often at a crappy job, while they lounge around, remortgage the house, and burn through their family’s remaining savings.

Comments

Sounds like Mr. Beggerow and his peers need to start getting their nine hours of sleep out at the curb. This is so ridiculous it almost smells like a setup. Mental health issues? There's SOMETHING wrong with him, and her for putting up with it.

So am I supposed to read this and think: "Gee, we need a government-sponsored social-engineering campaign to re-educate men to behave differently"? Because all I am thinking is: "Gee, that guy's wife needs to leave him."

The layabouts described notwithstanding (and this is surely not a new phenomenon--look at Joe Gould!) couldn't some of this increase be ascribed to a greater number of men participating in the "alternative economy," i.e. the drug trade?

Allowing these "women" into the workforce is taking away jobs from our middle-class white men, and depressing the wages they should expect to earn. This administration needs to wake up, smell the coffee, and deport all of the working women right now.

White men are lazy pigs. Their wives should leave them. Women are smarter, better educated, and deserve more money. If we had a woman as president and more women running industries and government there would be no global warming or wars.

what horse shit. i've got a father (white male, 56, all white hair) who lost his job working a white collar type deal. He ended up losing several jobs opptorunities to people who were either 1) a woman or 2) younger. is that the fault of women? No. But do you know what he ended up doing for almost two years until he was able to find a similar job? he sold fucking cars.my uncle, white male, late fifites, lost his job for volvo working in their printed materials division (manuals, etc.). lost his job, and know what he did for several years until he found a "real" job? he drove a fucking school bus. do you have any idea how hard it is for someone to do that? honestly? to be basically admitting to themselves and their family they are supposed to be looking out for that they are like some kind of failure? i think its entirely reasonable to think that anyone would not want to take a job that is "beneath" them because it strikes right at their own identity. its not a fucking "vacation" and all fun. It sucks. Neither my dad or uncle quit "trying" to find a job. For those several years they were sending out resumes and interviewing and the whole nine. While you may be able find examples like the dude above, the implication of this whole post is that this is what all "white men" are like. Thats sexist bullshit. Seriously. Fuck that. You'd sleep 9 hours a day and read books if you couldn't find a job for several years, too. What the fuck else are you going to do?

The laundry?

I read the entire article this morning. Granted the headline and the first men featured could get the blood boiling (at least they could do some housework). However the rest of the story explains that the vast majority of non-working working-age men fall in one or more of the following categories: a)were already trapped in the economic underclass of our country and lost a minimum wage job b)too old or disabled to take a physically demanding job c)have a prison record that disqualifies them from most positions d)are African American and continue to face discrimination based on their race. The article further details how they are often estranged from families(no wife paying the bills), struggle to keep their disability checks, and take under-the-table work to keep more money for basic food and shelter. Too bad that 3/4 of the article will be overlooked, because of the headline and first paragraphs.

Uhm, yeah. Demeaned by having to do under-paid or "women's" work. Good thing I'm a woman, 'cause being over-qualified and under-compensated in the workplace isn't an issue for us anymore.

What do they think is going to happen while they're not even looking for a job? That the perfect job is going to look for them?

Back when men did all the paid work, it only took one paycheck to raise a family. Now it takes two working full time - so who's around to take care of the kids? Don't blame American men, - blame American corporations. Now they get two for the price of one.

Umm... to pick a nit... Mr. Beggerow had a 30 year industry job. Sounds like Mr. Beggerow is enjoying a union (maybe even a "forced") retirement check. The wife of a retired union worker making money on the side by sewing in the sewing room, putting junk from the garage on ebay for sale, and baking cakes for parties is not exactly the same thing as working in a tailor shop, holding down a few shifts at Value Village, then working grave-yard at the Hostess cupcake factory. There is nothing sexist with either part of the "married" husband/wife, husband/husband, wife/wife union earning more money then the other half. Maybe "anti-feminist" is the correct word dynamic. There is nothing sexist if a married couple chooses that one half of the union earns or labors at a labor less then equal halfs. As long as both people are cool with it, happy with it, then all is good. That's what an LTR is about, compromise between the people involved. I find the point of this article to be very old fashioned, and out-of-date as far as to prove a point about how "married" couples should act.

assuming that that wives three jobs are less valuable and somehow less legitimate because they are done at home is very old-fashioned and sexist. Work at home is still work and shouldn't be considered less legitimate. Just because someones sewing is done at home does not alleviate the strain of the work. The problem here is that the inherent work of the household tradionally womens work is not being considered into this marriage equation. Its fine for one member of a union to earn more or work more than another but not to the extent where they find themselves with three jobs, especially when the other member has supposed skills and capability.

According the story, the majority of the non-working men are blue collar and live alone, so I'm not sure how the real story could be that they're living off their wives/families. Men tend to get their sense of social status from their employment -- that might mean they think some kinds of work are beneath them, but it also means that not working at all has a terrible impact on their self-esteem. (And "beneath them" as a catch-all is likely to include jobs that don't pay enough to keep up with bills, jobs they feel they aren't qualified for, or entry-level jobs that represent starting over at 53 years of age.) For these guys to have given up looking says something trenchant about our "booming" economy and the importance of what kind of collar you wear to work. In short, you don't want it to be blue.

A real reporter would have taken the original story, read the entire thing to despin it, and then done a search on one of the science paper sites to read the original study and read the original conclusions, instead of trusting the Bush-inspired snippet headline. Luckily, we just figure you had a really really good weekend at the block party, and know you're a really good reporter 99.9 percent of the time ...

Hey, if $14-16/hour office jobs are 'beneath' working class men, I'll be more than glad to take those jobs in your stead.

It's one thing to not want to take a job that is "beneath you." It's another to not take that job. When I was between jobs, I had no qualms about looking for minimum wage work to help support me while I lived off my savings. I feel sorry for people who can't find jobs. I feel sorry for people who can't find a job that is nothing like what they deserve. I don't one bit sorry for someone who can find a job and refuses to accept it because s/he thinks his/her pride is more important than personal responsibility. I think there could be more to the issue than what is reported here, and so there could be a legitimate financial (or other responsible) reason for turning down work, but that's not discussed.

Why can't these guys help around the house while they are between jobs? Why can't they volunteer in their community or take a blah job until they can find the right thing? I understand that job-hunting SUCKS and it's horrible to take a lame job when you used to do something that was much more meaningful. But one has to to survive. That's what the women are doing and the men need to step up. It's called pulling your weight.

White males are lazy and dumb. Most of them couldn't hold a job if it wasn't handed to them and then don't work that hard if they do get a job. Women are finally taking over the workplace and you're going to see this country get better, and better. If you compare how good things are in last decade to what it was like in the 1950's you can see where we're headed. We have women in the military, in industry, and in government and soon we'll have a woman president. When that happens there'll be no more war, or global warming.

This is really sexist! This is crushing my theory that women are smarter than men. They don't call it HIStory for nothing, let's not repeat it!

Some questions for the judgers out there? Why can't you all stop judging a guy you don't know anything about? Why can't you all stop treating Ms. Beggerow as if she is a child and can't voice her needs to her husband? Why don't you all butt out and stop drawing false conclusions from an anecdote? Why is genrealized sloppy thinking tolerated in the press? Oh yeah, I know, becuase media that makes us feel superior sells more than the media that reports the news.

Also, women fail themselves when they stick with deadbeat men.

Man-hating is not true feminism. It is petty and impractical, at best.

"If we had a woman as president and more women running industries and government there would be no global warming or wars." Listening, Condi?

I hate to break it to everyone, but 53 year old man who lost his manufacturing job doesn't really have the option of getting a job at Starbucks, Chili's or Barnes and Noble that most 20-30 somethings enjoy. Getting any job is difficult. Now that obviously doesn't excuse the fact that he isn't helping out around the house.

It's stories like these that make me glad I am a lesbian. Sorry my straight sister's.

Let me get this straight... white men are lazy bums because a fraction of 15% of them seem to be disenchanted with work? Some after having been kicked around at crappy jobs for 30 years? Ok you can nail us for genocide and slavery and war and economic depressions and polution and pro wrestling and yadda yadda, but we did not accomplish all that mayhem by being lazy. sheesh.

More power to these guys. If their spouses aren't on them about it, and they're not mooching off the government, then let 'em do whatever the hell they want. And do I detect a hint of hypocrisy here? When women do this, it falls under far less scrutiny than when a man makes a conscious decision to work less or leave the workforce short or long term. These men have recognized that corporations and employers are screwing workers now more than ever, forcing them to accept more more concessions on wages on benefit while CEO pay skyrockets. They've chosen to rebel and live off the grid- more power to 'em.

Some Men Don't Want To Work - What's Going On?

2006-09-12T00:06:00.000-05:00

Total Trust

In today’s New York Times, there is an article about men who have lost their jobs, and who are no longer looking for work. However, these men (and not the ones who are also profiled who are convicted felons) do not seem to fit my typical stereotype of the “discouraged worker.” Rather they have given up looking for a job because some jobs are beneath them, or they’d rather live off their home equity than take a job that is not as good as their former job.

Well I was raised to be productive, regardless of the “opportunities,” and worked at several jobs in high school and college that were certainly “beneath me” in terms of my education, but nevertheless provided much-needed money, and at a minimum, reinforced in me a work ethic that I had initially developed in my school work.

The article provides a disturbing portrait of one couple in which the wife is unwilling to challenge her unemployed husband to get back to work, even though she supported him until she had to go on disability following an automobile accident.

Somehow we must find ways to bring back these men into society’s fold, so that they can become productive citizens again.

From 'Brilliant At Breakfast'.

2006-09-11T23:56:00.000-05:00

These guys had better wake up and realize this is the economy they voted for

I wonder how many of these guys voted for George W. Bush!

Accumulated savings can make dropping out more affordable at the upper end than it is for Mr. Beggerow, but the dynamic is often the same — the loss of a career and of a sense that one’s work is valued.

Maybe that's because politicians have decided that the work Americans do is NOT valued, and that's why they've made it so easy to outsource jobs to low-wage countries, essentially turning high-paid jobs here into sweatshop jobs overseas.

I'm not solely blaming the Bush Administration; the exodus of high-paying jobs began with the sainted Bill Clinton, who triangulated his way into NAFTA and really got the ball rolling. But it has been Republican rule over the last six years that has accelerated the trend towards less opportunity, less pay, and fewer benefits.

But there's an issue of culture shock here too, for it seems women -- the very same women that Republicans and their Christofascist minions would like to see out of the work force -- have a better sense of Doing What Has To Be Done. For all of the residue of Reagan's "welfare queen" speeches during the 1980's, it's women who are out there working menial jobs, sometimes more than one, in order to feed the kids and keep a roof over their heads:

Even as more men are dropping out of the work force, more women are entering it. This change has occurred partly because employment has shrunk in industries where men predominated, like manufacturing, while fields where women are far more common, like teaching, health care and retailing, have grown. Today, about 73 percent of women between 30 and 54 have a job, compared with 45 percent in the mid-1960’s, according to an analysis of Census data by researchers at Queens College. Many women without jobs are raising children at home, while men who are out of a job tend to be doing neither family work nor paid work.

And while Bush loves to crow about the low unemployment rate, the numbers do not take these guys into account:

Despite their great numbers, many of the men not working are missing from the nation’s best-known statistic on unemployment. The jobless rate is now a low 4.6 percent, yet that number excludes most of the missing men, because they have stopped looking for work and are therefore not considered officially unemployed. That makes the unemployment rate a far less useful measure of the country’s well-being than it once was. Indeed, a larger share of working-age men are not working today than at almost any point in the last half-century, which raises the question of how they will get by as they age. They may be forced back to work after years of absence, they may fall into poverty, or they may be rescued by the government. This same trend is evident in other industrialized countries. In the European Union, 14 percent of men between 25 and 54 were not working last year, up from 7 percent in 1975, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Over the same period in Japan, the proportion of such men rose to 8 percent from 4 percent.

Of course, we are also living in a country where businesses largely put their workers out to pasture around age 50, so where the jobs for these guys are is an open question.

Perhaps it's because men have always defined themselves by what they do for a living, and have devalued hobbies and other nonpaid pursuits. I'm not sure that's changed all that much over the years. So perhaps being out of work, and not being able to find work, frees these guys to do things they've never felt free to do before. The problem is that our society is more unforgiving than every of those who can't pay their bills, as evidenced by the punitive bankruptcy legislation passed by Congress last year and signed into law as a means of protecting the credit card industry against just the kind of contracting job market we're seeing now.

Here in New Jersey, we've seen some job growth, but it is modest, it's expected to remain that way through the end of the decade, and the growth that does occur is expected in low-wage industries, such as education, health, hospitality and restaurants, and other leisure activities -- which means that an ever-growing sector of working poor will be providing the leisure fun for the wealthy.

Men like the one that opens this article may be able to get away with tapping home equity for a while, but with a falling real estate market, these guys may find themselves tapped out for more than their houses are worth:

the number of unsold homes is at the highest level ever. Housing starts are starting to fall, but remain at a high level by historical standards. If sales do not pick up this summer, when sales are usually seasonally strong, it could be a sign that prices are going to come under pressure and lead to a much larger decline in housing starts.

The accompanying charts show year-over-year changes in sales of existing single-family homes and apartments, using six-month moving averages to smooth out monthly fluctuations. The latest figures show sales of single-family homes down 4.4 percent, the largest dip since 1995, and apartment sales off 6.6 percent. Statistics on apartment sales are only available back to 1999, but that is the worst showing in that period.

Meanwhile, the number of existing single-family homes on the market is up 33 percent year-over-year, measured the same way. Figures from the National Association of Realtors, going back to 1983, show no comparable increase in homes for sale. The number of condominiums and cooperative apartments for sale is up 61 percent. The picture is consistent with demand for homes suddenly drying up, while sellers are reluctant to cut prices.

If men continue to shun jobs that aren't "good enough" for them, while their wives swallow their pride and become grocery cashiers, fast food service workers, and other menial workers, there's going to be a poverty problem among the elderly in about 20 years that's going to be monstrous.

Perhaps this is why the president wants to revive privatization of Social Security.

titusonenine Comments About The NY Times Article

2006-09-11T23:41:00.000-05:00

titusonenine
from Canon Kendall Harmon

Thank you for posting this. I have noticed this trend, but have yet to read it so “succinctly put.” It appears that no one reported on here in this story is actively seeking God’s will for their lives; either that or the reporter neglected to print mentions of God knowing all, being in control, providing recommendations for life and living and taking responsibility for such in the Bible, etc. I wonder how the children being raised with such an approach to employment will approach employment when they are able.

We don’t know that none of the people interviewed are seeking God’s will for their lives. We only know that that question either wasn’t asked or wasn’t reported. And even if they are seeking God’s will, God doesn’t generally reveal that will by means of flashing neon signs, emails or telephone calls. Most people are doing the best they can with what they’ve got, but the bills keep coming in while you’re waiting for God to reveal his will. I’m not an economist, but I do have a lot of pastoral experience, and my experience is that in this economy, people with advanced degrees are competing for low-wage hourly jobs–if they can even get those. The clerk at the local convenience store has a doctorate and makes $7 an hour. The swing manager at McDonald’s has a master’s and makes $6.15. And that person beat out other candidates with masters’ degrees. Most people will do what they have to to survive, including applying for assistance, but it’s galling for people who once had good jobs, and the attendant satisfaction and sense of self-worth that goes with them, to be reduced to jobs that they’re overeducated for, overqualified for, and which society looks down upon. It’s true that pride won’t feed you, but a person’s dignity isn’t something to be treated lightly. You do what you can to pay your bills and take care of your family. If this guy has thousands of dollars in savings or equity to live on, good for him. I wish everyone were so fortunate.

As one who has been jobless several times over the course of my career, I think this guy is making a big mistake. No honest work is demeaning. He will be mentally much healthier working at a low-paying job, than sitting around loafing. Eventually his wife is going to tire of supporting a selfish, overgrown teen-ager, and give him the boot.

And now for my rant: These kinds of stories just irritate the daylights out of me. It’s not really the story but the people they highlight. IMHO the attitude of the men highlighted in this piece is wholly selfish. The quotes, “I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,” and “If things really get tight, I might have to take a low-wage job, but I don’t want to do that,” point to this selfish attitude. When the piece stated, “he could not find a job that, in his view, was neither demeaning nor underpaid,” is when my blood started to boil. Demeaning? Like what, washing floors or cleaning toilets? Why would it be demeaning (someone has to do it)? Is it demeaning only for someone who has a degree, or is used to making big money? Grow up, Gentlemen. You do what you have to do to put food on the table and a roof over your head. Maybe even working two low wage jobs if that is what becomes necessary to eat. Living off the government dole is wrong unless one is truly (TRULY) physically or mentally handicapped to the point where one can not work. Thirteen and a half years ago, I left a low level management job in a telecommunications company to take the best unpaid (monetarily speaking) job in the world: stay-at-home-dad. As my kids transitioned into elementary school, and our household budget needed an infusion of cash, I took on a job. I was able to find jobs paying $10.00 per hour, and on a part time basis to boot. I don’t have a degree. I am a high school graduate, and I don’t find working at any job for low pay demeaning. Why? Because my self-worth doesn’t come from my job, my paycheck, my kids, my wife or my societal status, my self-worth and dignity comes from my knowledge in who I am in Christ. Through Christ Jesus, I am a child of the Most High God. Is there any better realization than this for one’s self-worth? If any of these men are Christians, maybe a little reading of St. Paul (Colossians 3:23-24, or better yet, 2-Thessalonians 3:6-13) or some reflection on Brother Lawrence’s life would open an eye or two when it comes to working. And if they aren’t Christians, they need someone to lead them to our Lord Jesus Christ. End of rant

Seeking a fulfilling job is not sinful at all. It would be a very bad idea to ask a foot be an eye.

There is nothing too small, if given in Jesus name, that is not worth working for. To sit idle while a good work could be done is a sin. Mar 9:41 For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward. Jam 4:17 Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth [it] not, to him it is sin. I honor those who mow lawns or clean toilets if it is done in charity. I scorn those who have strength and talent and yet refuse to do some small thing for someone who needs help. I had a christian employer (many years ago) who told me to always do the $20.00 per hour work first and when you finish that work do the $15 per hour work and when you finish that…………. and he conluded with, “…and if you can’t find anything more valuable to do then sort screws.” The sum of the message is, if our god is the almighty Dollar then we can hold out for the most money, if our God is also the One who created us, then we will will fill our lives with that which is most valuable - however humble that might be.

Who told these guys that work must always be fulfilling? It’s just another idol set up by secular culture… a job well done can always be satisfying, no matter what it is, and even the job that I love (in my case, teaching) isn’t always fulfilling. But it puts food on the table and a roof over our heads and otherwise provides for my family, and that’s what’s really asked of it. As your mother told you, life ain’t always fair.

I agree with every comment about how no honest work is truly demeaning. But I think that “truly” is the key word. It’s a process–and a sometimes painful one–to re-align one’s identity (even if that identity is found primarily in Christ), because what one does for a living is a major part of that identity. PhD’s and CEO’s are not worth more in God’s eyes–only in the culture’s. But we still have to live in the culture.

I’m thinking his wife is probably not totally ecstatic with his decisions.

The posts talk about “those with doctorates” earing $7.00 an hour at the local convenience store, or “someone with a Master’s” having to compete with others with Master’s degrees for low-paying jobs. The job market is tough. But there is one other thing that needs to be acknowledged here that I havent’s seen anyone address so far. And that is - - some folks have doctorates and master;s degrees who wasted their time getting them. They were able to perform the academics, they were able to absorb the theory, but they aren’t worth a darn translating all that stuff into solid skills in creating product, problem solving, supervising other people with both compassion and good direction, etc. Where did we ever get the idea that “I have a degree” is somehow a guarantee of anything, except that we will probably have to buy a frame to hold it? I have a couple of degrees, but still had to start on the floor of the plant, forty years ago, had to learn to weld from a guy who had no degree but, man, could he weld - - and I was able to “work up” to my current job. And somedays, no kidding, I wish I could remember how to weld!!

You want to eat? You gotta work. And I write that not as a greedy capitalist, but as a graduate student who produces next to nothing and lives off the good will of the state (below the poverty level). Should I not be able to get a “worthy” job when my doctorate is earned, I will indeed flip burgers if necessary (particularly if I have dependents). This is the life I have chosen. Risks are always present. That’s life. Hopefully we still have a government that seeks to make opportunities for the working poor. And, more importantly, Christ is still with us, nonetheless.

But I don’t see either our society or our political system making opportunities for the working poor. It’s the largest growing segment of the population in the US. People who have skills and training are unable to make a living wage. For many people, it doesn’t matter how hard you work, you can’t make it. These aren’t people looking for any sort of luxury; they just want to get by. The middle class is shrinking, and most of those people are sliding into that class where hard work seems like nothing but running on a treadmill. Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t work hard, but it would be nice for the work to offer a living wage, and in most cases it doesn’t.

Would someone please let me know what would happen if we asked a foot to be an eye? All the answers here are too pat. I want to make films. Why should I not pursue that? Based on what you all are saying I should be just as happy and fulfilled as a tow truck driver or museum guide. If God doesn’t care what my job is, why not follow my passion? I can honor Christ as a filmmaker just as much as a janitor or CPA. SO WHY SHOULD I NOT SEEK THAT GOAL?????? If I have worked hard and saved money, what is wrong with living off of that while I pursure my interests? You all seem to think that God doesn’t care if enjoy this life or not. It is rather sick and twisted to say that God loved us so much that he gave his only Son for us and backhandedly mean that your life is still not worth God’s care for your works. Faith and works are woven together. Saved by faith, but my works are the actions of that faith.

Saint,By all means, you should pursue your film-making goal. And I sincerely hope that you achieve that goal, we need good Christ-loving film-makers. But perhaps you will not. And if you do not, I also sincerely hope and pray that you do not decide that, since you did not achieve your film-making goal, you can accept nothing “less.” And the reason is because - - perhaps it won’t be “less.” Maybe the cure for cancer lies within you, and the rest of us would never benefit from that, because you decided that, with your “advanced film-making degrees” and your deep desire to be a filmmaker, you simply cannot work on cancer. It is too demeaning. The example is a ridiculous one, I suppose. But that is what I am bemoaning; there are a lot of folks out there right now who, since they are unable to “use” their doctorates and their masters’, have decided to simply opt out, since the world clearly does not recognize their great talent in the same way they do. I pray you will not do that, should God decide to send you down a different path! Godspeed in your filmmaking pursuits!

Among The Missing

2006-09-11T12:14:00.000-05:00

From blogs for industry...blogs for the dead

The NYT profiles men who are not in the job market:

Alan Beggerow has stopped looking for work. Laid off as a steelworker at 48, he taught math for a while at a community college. But when that ended, he could not find a job that, in his view, was neither demeaning nor underpaid.

So instead of heading to work, Mr. Beggerow, now 53, fills his days with diversions: playing the piano, reading histories and biographies, writing unpublished Western potboilers in the Louis L'Amour style - all activities once relegated to spare time. He often stays up late and sleeps until 11 a.m.

"I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me," he said.

Sure, but it's not worth jack to the rest of us, grasshopper.

Apparently there are now record numbers of men like this.

About 13 percent of American men in this age group [30-55] are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960's. The difference represents 4 million men who would be working today if the employment rate had remained where it was in the 1950's and 60's.

I'm not sure which is more a sign of the country going to the proverbial hell in a handbasket...that people are in this situation, that banks will give these guys second mortgages, or that they are willing to have their lifestyles plastered all over the NYT website.

Now This Is A Trend I Can Get Behind

2006-09-11T12:08:00.000-05:00

From StepBlog:

August 2, 2006

The New York Times ran a front page story Monday about a new trend - men who are laid off or lose their jobs and are unable to find suitable replacements are deciding to just stay home. The guy profiled in the story, Alan Beggerow, is using his time play the piano, read non-fiction and write Westerns, after getting a really good night’s sleep every night. “I have come to realize my free time is worth a lot to me,” he says.

No kidding! Coincidentally, the same day the story ran, Loverman stayed home from work. He was feeling puny, as we say in the South, after having gotten all dehydrated playing that rock and roll music the night before at an outdoor party. After a nap, he worked on a beautiful cabinet he is building, worked in the yard, played guitar and started dinner.

I was reminded after reading the article and thinking of Loverman happily puttering at home of a line from Office Space, when a consultant says to the main character, Peter, “Looks like you’ve been missing a lot of work lately.” “I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob,” Peter replies with an ironic smile. Amen, brother.

This all plays into a strange neo-feminist slacker fantasy I have of getting to a place where Loverman doesn’t have to work, and can stay home and do all those things he did on Monday and other such things that will improve the quality of our home and our lives. Sure, I would love to be able stay home too, but for some reason seeing Loverman getting dressed in his togs of oppression to go off to the office everyday seems like such a WASTE of his talents.

So, as one that embraces and supports loafing, I was cheering on Mr. Beggerow. Many readers of the story felt quite differently about it, according to several of the letters to the editor.

But c’mon, surely you’ve felt this way? Wondering why you go work for the Man day after day after day when you could be hanging with the kids, doing yoga, sewing, gardening, blogging, etc.? I know why we do it - mortgages to pay, kids to feed and make happy and be secure, etc. But even though I like my job I am not one of those blessed people who skips off to the office every day to receive deep personal fulfillment from work.

Mr. Beggerow and his wife aren’t independently wealthy. He’s decided to just… care less about money. His wife is pictured laughing in the article ,so she doesn’t seem to mind too much, though it sounds like they’re getting kind of close to the edge financially. But, they’re not overly worried, living instead in a new paradigm.

“When you are in the mode of having money coming in,” he explained, “naturally you are thinking about planning and saving. And then when you don’t have the money coming in, you think less about the future, at least moneywise. It is still a concern, but not a concern that keeps me up at night, not in this life that I am now leading.”

I have long harbored a fantasy of not working myself, in addition to making it possible for Loverman to do so. Buying the occasional lottery ticket is as close as I’ve gotten to doing anything about it, and let’s face it, it will never happen. But it’s nice to dream of being a slacker. One can dream.

August 9, 2006

So last week, I blogged about an article I read in the New York Times about people choosing not to work, getting off the merry-go-round, out of the rat race, on the slow train to happyville. The article focused on one guy, Alan Beggerow, and I wrote about him. Then he read my blog and wrote back! In the comments! The dialog continues! How cool is that? To me, it’s the coolest thing about all this new communications stuff. Dialog. Strangers not being so strange. Making the big world somewhat smaller, or at least more accessible.

The Solutions to Everything

2006-09-11T11:33:00.000-05:00

by Michael Ventura

It's happened once too often. Somebody says or writes to me, "You talk about what's wrong but you don't offer solutions," or "My girlfriend - boyfriend - lawyer - therapist says you should suggest solutions, not just talk about bad stuff." And maybe they're right. Maybe to detail one's visions and let readers take it from there is they feel like it just isn't enough. Maybe there are solutions, and maybe I should know them.
So I sat down and thought real hard, and here, numbered for your convenience, are my solutions to everything.

00. Indulge in secrets. Without one or two major secrets, your life will surely fade. (If you're over forty and don't understand this . . . you're in big trouble.)
A conundrum: secrets aren't lies--they're mysteries, havens, passageways. Lies wreck your life; secrets can save your life. But sometimes you have to lie to keep the secret. Ugh oh.

1. Make mistakes. As Coleman Hawkins said, "If you don't make mistakes, you aren't really trying."

2. Stop lying about yourself. To yourself. To your friends. To your family. To your business associates. Maybe even to your enemies. (Your enemies oppress you as much by your fidelity to your own lies as by anything else.)

3. Stop tolerating in your leaders what you wouldn't tolerate in your friends. But...

4. Tolerate impurity. Trying to be pure about anything is a way of setting yourself up to fail. Asking other people to be pure is a way of setting them up.

5. Read one book a month--a book that you didn't find out about in a magazine or newspaper. Browse an independent bookstore and wait till some book says, "Read me" and read it.

6. Listen to the voices. The wee inner voices. Even if they don't speak, even if they only breathe a little, like dirty phone calls. Do anything they tell you to do except rape, kill or pillage. (The voices make mistakes sometimes, but they don't make boring mistakes.)

7. Leave people alone when they tell you to leave them alone. If they mean it, they need it. If they don't mean it, they're trying to manipulate you, so fuck them. (Note: This rule applies to grownups only.)

8. Don't make the "sophisticated" error of thinking that a negative voice is automatically smarter than a positive voice.

9. Eat real food but don't be a fanatic about it.

10. Don't be a fanatic about anything.

11. Do only exercises that take you somewhere. Walk, ride a bike, roller-skate, swim. All other exercise is ego- and/or fear-driven, and if you listen to ego and fear you will drown out the voices you most need.

12. Don't run. Really, don't. American likes to run because running from (fill in the blank) is what we do best. Everybody who runs is running down an alley away from something terrible. Stop running and find out what's behind you.

13. Don't dye your hair unless you're a woman over forty and you dye it the color of my obsessions. Even then, don't cover up all your gray. Gray is gorgeous. And if you're a man, then really don't dye to cover gray. Dig it: EVERYBODY KNOWS. And they talk about it in a snide way behind your back. I'm not kidding.

14. Eat Italian food. Italians went from being oppressive Romans to being the inefficient, wonderful Italians they are today. It's probably the food.

[15. No longer applicable.]

16. Given that you're living in a city where driving is necessary, learn to drive. You may think you know how, but my experience of the way you drive is that you probably don't. So here's how:
Drive for space, not for speed. Space in front of you is the safest thing you can have with a car. Darting in and out of traffic doesn't change anything, it just makes you older. You can't beat the average traffic flow on any given street or freeway by more than five minutes, which only makes a difference if you're having a baby. And don't you feel like an idiot when you've passed six cars and they pull up beside you at the next light? They're laughing at you. And they hate you. Which isn't good for you. Drive for space.
If the move ain't smooth, it ain't right. There's no excuse for a jerky turn, stop or acceleration. It's hard on the car, it's hard on the other passengers, it confuses other drivers, it's not aesthetic. Such moves are for emergencies only.
Ninety percent of the time you drive with your habits, not your head, so figure out what your bad habits are--gunning it through yellows? not signaling? tailgating? Your worst habit will turn into your worst accident. So stop it. Drive for space. End of lesson.

17. Dance. Jesus said, in one of the Gnostic gospels, "He who does not dance does not know what happens."

18. Don't worry so much about being fat. Fat feels great in bed.

19. Have at least one other living thing in your abode. Rhododendrons, for instance, are fantastic creatures. They give much, ask little, have marvelous names, and they don't shit where I walk.

20. Look into people's eyes when you talk to them.

21. Call your parents by their real first names the very next time you see them. Try it. Watch their faces. Then do it at least half the time you talk to or about them from now on. (If people all over the world did this, nations would cease to war.)

22. Have candlelight in your life. (If you should get into rituals, it'll come in handy.)

23. No matter how rushed your schedule is, spend at least five minutes in the morning quietly in bed with your loved one just being gentle together. Perhaps drinking tea.

24. Tell your mother and father, individually--and your children, if you have children--what you really think. Once a year, minimum. If more people did this, it would save more lives than arresting drunk drivers.

25. Do not avoid the eyes of the homeless.

26. If you think something's wrong--at work, in your family, in your self, in your country--agitate for change. If you won't do that, it doesn't matter how tan you are.

27. As regards No. 23: Assuming that you want a loved one but don't have one, my bet is it's not because you're fat, ugly, crazy, old, a failure, a drunk, a ninny or a clod. Lot of fat ugly crazy older failing drunk ninnying clods have loved ones. Lots who don't have lovers want one, and would probably even put up with you. So there's some lie at the heart of your loneliness; being with someone would reveal the lie, and you don't want that.

28. Tape this to your bathroom mirror:

One can only face in others what one

can face in oneself.

--James Baldwin

29. Work is a sacrament. Don't despise anyone's.

30. Don't talk down to kids.

31. Don't chicken out about sex. Given that you're with a consenting adult, do whatever you fantasize. This is much more important than quitting smoking.

32. Watch at least one black-and-white film per month.

33. Regarding No. 6: Entertain the notion that there are . . . voices. Some come from within, some from the plants and objects and such around you, and some come from what I call, for shorthand purposes, the Infinite. If you don't listen for them, you life will be more difficult than it has to be.

34. Pay more taxes--and insist that those taxes, and the taxes you already pay, go for education. Giving the young a lively, thorough, truthful education is the most important environmental issue today, even more important than acid rain, tropical rain forests and ozone holes.

35. Let me make that a lot clearer. Recycling and shopping ecologically are almost pointless when one-third of California's high-school students drop out, and most who graduate can't read much and have no skills to speak of. How can these people inherit a world? Even if we give them a greener world, are they equipped to keep it that way? You want a solution, so here's a solution: Take to the Streets for the Education of the Children.

36. Pray.

37. Stop looking for other people to supply the solution. You're the solution. If you're not, there is no solution.

38. Be aware of the Network. We live by a network of connections and links. Your connection to yourself, to your intimates, to your place, to the collective, to the planet, to the Infinite. (Each is a distinct connection.) Equally powerful are the collective's connections to you (not at all the same as yours to it), to groups of intimates, to itself, to the planet, to the Infinite. Finally, the connections of groups of intimates to one another, to the collective, to the planet, to the Infinite. All these levels and connections interweave. All are equally important.
All the links or connective points of this network (call them the acupuncture points of our universe) both take and generate energy. Any link out of sync weakens the others. (The West, for instance, has concentrated too much on the individual; the East, too much on the collective; both approaches have been catastrophic on every level of the network.) This network, from you all the way to the Infinite, is a living whole, ceaselessly changing. Some of these changes take millions of years. Some happen instantaneously.

May the links of the network shine.

From 'North County Forum'

2006-09-11T00:31:00.000-05:00

I don't recall which right-wing scumbag called people who earned less than 12K annually "Lucky Duckies" in a WSJ op-ed a few years ago because they didn't have to pay income taxes but I'm sure David Brooks agrees with him.

According to Brooks long-on-anecdote, short-on-facts rant (below) -

"Through some screw-up in the moral superstructure, we now have a plutocratic upper class infused with the staid industriousness of Ben Franklin, while we are apparently seeing the emergence of a Wal-Mart leisure class – devil-may-care middle-age slackers who live off home-equity loans and disability payments so they can surf the History Channel and enjoy fantasy football leagues."

Fuck him.

As if some elitist pig who sits on his ass and receives a handsome salary shilling for the economic aristocracy like Brooks would know anything about real work or the mountain of shit middle class workers must scale every day, day in, day out in order keep low paying, no-benefit, dead end jobs with ungrateful, greedy, downright abusive and often literally predatory employers in our so-called "globalized" economy.

If the boys in the boardrooms are working their asses off, it's only because they laid off 40% of the workforce to achieve a temporary spike in profits so they can cash out their stock options and move on to some other company where they can do it all over again.

Moreover, I cannot possibly concieve of a more worthless, contemptible "profession" than that of "Conservative Pundit".

Crack dealers and prostitutes have more personal integrity and provide a much more valuable service to society than sleazy albeit, high-class journalistic call-boys like Brooks ever will. It's literally impossible to fathom the depths of moral depravity, arrogance and indolence that would compel an individual to take up the cause of the wealthiest, most powerful members of society against those they victimize and bleed dry.

Is it possible to sink any lower than that?

I don't think so.

And aside from bare subsistence, I really wonder what motivates many mid-to-low income workers to keep working at all, much less working hard, under current economic circumstances.
I can certainly see why Bill Gates and Michael Eisner would be willing to put in 100 hrs/wk-plus doing what they do. If my hourly wage was well into six figures, I might be inclined to put in a little O/T too.

But when you consider that executive compensation has incresed over 300 fold in the past 15 years while middle class earnings and purchasing power remain stagnant and in most cases have lost economic ground, a minor point Brooks conveniently chose to overlook, it becomes pretty easy to see why many workers simply get discouraged and drop out of the workforce altogether and why many who remain have little incentive to kill themselves so the CEO can buy his mistress a new Lexus again this year.

The truth is, Big Business in general and upper management in particular simply does not value or appreciate good, hard, honest work.
It places a much higher premium on Bullshit-Artists, Ass-Kissers and Schmoozers (otherwise referred to as Team Players) than it does on maintaining a competent, qualifed, experienced labor force.

How do I know this?
Because management has told me as much. Repeatedly.

And even when they don't come right out and say it, they clearly demonstrate it by their actions.
To most managers, good workers are "a dime a dozen" but a smooth-talking, boot-licking suck-up (ie; an individual with "outstanding interpersonal, networking and communication skills" ie; David Brooks) is worth his weight in "new business opportunities" and worth at least a dozen good workers. Whether a company can adequately service those new clients once they've secured their business is generally irrelevent.

Few, if any of Brooks' moronic assertions in this article are anywhere close to accurate and any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.
But if US Business thinks the American workforce lacks incentive, it only has itself to blame.

Business should know better than anyone that you can't always expect to get more out of something than you put into it. Unfortunately, years of easy, often obscene profits that come even more often at the expense of their workers have caused many employers to forget that. Rewarding good work, loyalty, efficiency, innovation, etc, simply isn't budgeted in this quarter's operating funds. It would adversely affect the company's bottom line, undermine investor confidence, and put the P/E ratio right in the old shitter.

Sorry old boy, a raise now would be out of the question. How about a new title with increased responsibility (at your current pay rate of course) or a nice coffee cup emblazoned with the company logo instead?
Oh! And keep up the good work.

"It's class warfare, and my class is winning" - Warren Buffet

Perception, Meet Reality Part II

2006-09-11T00:22:00.000-05:00

Or, Are Immigrants Taking Away Jobs from Americans?

One of the common arguments against illegal immigration is that illegal immigrants take jobs away from Americans:

[Mark] Flanagan [Republican candidate for the 13th Congressional District in Florida] said illegal immigration is "taking away jobs from Americans . . . and overburdening our social services and costing taxpayers dearly."

Lets set aside the "overburdening of social services" and "cost to taxpayers" issue. Each of those deserves its own blog entry.

Could it be possible? Maybe, if you realize that things like these are going on in the U.S.:

Alan Beggerow has stopped looking for work. Laid off as a steelworker at 48, he taught math for a while at a community college. But when that ended, he could not find a job that, in his view, was neither demeaning nor underpaid. . . Millions of men like Mr. Beggerow — men in the prime of their lives, between 30 and 55 — have dropped out of regular work. They are turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers opportunities to work. . . About 13 percent of American men in this age group are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960’s. The difference represents 4 million men who would be working today if the employment rate had remained where it was in the 1950’s and 60’s.

Here's another example:

“To be honest, I’m kind of looking for the home run,” said Christopher Priga, who is 54 and has not had steady work since he lost a job with a six-figure income as an electrical engineer at Xerox in 2002. “There’s no point in hitting for base hits,” he explained. “I've been down the road where I did all the things I was supposed to do, and the end result of that is nil.” Instead, Mr. Priga supports himself by borrowing against the rising value of his Los Angeles home. Other men fall back on wives or family members. . . Despite their great numbers, many of the men not working are missing from the nation’s best-known statistic on unemployment. The jobless rate is now a low 4.6 percent, yet that number excludes most of the missing men, because they have stopped looking for work and are therefore not considered officially unemployed. That makes the unemployment rate a far less useful measure of the country’s well-being than it once was.

So it's OK to kick back and not look for a job because "the job is not worthy of you." I think that's insane. I wouldn't want to risk losing everything before saying "well, I guess it's time to find any job after all." But that's just me. They have the "money" or "equity" or "understanding spouse," so it's their choice.

What would you say about this, though?

The fastest growing source of help is a patchwork system of government support, the main one being federal disability insurance, which is financed by Social Security payroll taxes. The disability stipends range up to $1,000 a month and, after the first two years, Medicare kicks in, giving access to health insurance that for many missing men no longer comes with the low-wage jobs available to them. No federal entitlement program is growing as quickly, with more than 6.5 million men and women now receiving monthly disability payments, up from 3 million in 1990. About 25 percent of the missing men are collecting this insurance. The ailments that qualify them are usually real, like back pain, heart trouble or mental illness. But in some cases, the illnesses are not so serious that they would prevent people from working if a well-paying job with benefits were an option.

And, as the article further explains, a determination of disability makes it more difficult for these people to return to work.

So, the next time someone tells you that immigrants - illegal or otherwise - are taking jobs away from Americans, or the next time someone rails about companies hiring or contracting technical staff from India or other less-developed countries, keep this in mind. They may be taking the jobs some Americans won't take because it's beneath them.

TDL/NYT EXCLUSIVE: CAPITALISM CAUSES LAZYNESS

2006-09-11T00:04:00.000-05:00

by Arthur Slutzburger, Jr. of The Dick List/The New York Times

WASHINGTON- A growing number of perfectly healthy American men have chosen not to work any job at all, and this extreme lazyness is caused by capitalism.

Many of these men could find work if they had to, but with lower pay and fewer benefits than were once standard, they have decided they prefer the alternative. It is a significant cultural shift from three decades ago, when men almost invariably went back into the work force after losing a job and were more often able to find a new one that met their needs.

“Men don’t feel a need to be in a career, not as much as they once did,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Nor do men have the incentive they once had to pursue a career, not when employers are no longer committed to them.”

"If employers gave guaranteed positions for life," continued Ms. Milkman, "these unemployed men would gladly take jobs and become productive workers. Further, if they got automatic raises and full benefits, it would inspire them to be the best workers they can possibly be."

In Rock Falls, Illinois, Alan Beggerow has stopped looking for work. Laid off as a steelworker at 48, he taught math for a while at a community college. But when that ended, he could not find a job that, in his view, was neither demeaning nor underpaid.

So instead of heading to work, Mr. Beggerow, now 53, fills his days with diversions: playing the piano, reading histories and biographies, masturbating, and writing unpublished Western potboilers in the Louis L’Amour style — all activities once relegated to spare time. He often stays up late and sleeps until 11 a.m.

“I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,” he said. To make ends meet, he has tapped the equity in his home through a $30,000 second mortgage, and he is drawing down the family’s savings, at the rate of $7,500 a year. About $60,000 is left. His wife’s income helps them scrape by. “If things really get tight,” Mr. Beggerow said, “I might have to take a low-wage job, but I don’t want to do that. It's below me. Who do these guys think I am, that I should have to work to make a living?”

"What really pisses me off" said Mr. Beggerow, "is that the government won't subsidize my slothful behavior. Why couldn't I have been born in France or something? Why couldn't the Democrats have been elected? If the government would just give me money, maybe I would feel good enough about myself to get a job. Yeah, that's the ticket."

Truly, not wanting a job and not working at all has nothing to do with being a lazy, disgraceful, self-absorbed waste, but rather it is a product of the pernicious capitalist system that strips people of thier feelings of adeqacy and forces them to work in a state of quasi-slavery.

I Hope They Starve In The Streets

2006-09-11T00:00:00.000-05:00

Broken Quanta

My contempt for these guys knows almost no bounds. A man who chooses not to work despite the fact that he could work and needs to work isn't fit to scrape the scum off the bottom of my shoe. He certainly doesn't have any "dignity" to speak of. For those who won't click, or who don't want to go through the Times' tedious registration process, here's the drift of the thing:

Alan Beggerow has not worked regularly in the five years since the steel mill that employed him for three decades closed. He and his wife, Cathleen, 47, cannot really afford to live without his paycheck. Yet with her sometimes reluctant blessing, Mr. Beggerow persists in constructing a way of life that he finds as satisfying as the work he did only in the last three years of his 30-year career at the mill.

That "way of life" is being a jobless bum. And apparently, this worthless layabout is not the only guy too vain and slothful to take his ass to work. The article reports on three guys of different backgrounds, all of whom have decided that they just can't stand the psychological strain of gainful employment. Apparently, this is some kind of trend, reflected in various workforce statistics that the author reports on. Strangely, though, the piece seems sympathetic to these losers. The exact reason we ought to feel anything but contempt for them is unclear, presumably because no such reason actually exists.

Totally Ignorant About Capitalism

2006-09-10T20:10:00.000-05:00

Louis Uchitelle, the author of The Disposable American: Layoffs And Their Consequences was on CSpan-2 today discussing the book. Mr. Uchitelle showed once again his remarkable depth of understanding about the current labor situation in particular and the economy in general. I have read the book, and my comments about the book can be found here.

I was interested in the questions asked after his presentation. The questions were varied, but the one that was the most interesting was the one asked by a man that first read a quote by Samuel Gompers, then proceeded to tell Mr. Uchitelle that he was totally ignorant about capitalism. The questioner's point being that if layoffs are the only way for a company to be profitable, what's wrong with that? It is no doubt not the first time the author has heard comments like this, and most likely the questioner was not the rudest the author has encountered.

It isn't that the author is ignorant of capitalism. By what he's written it seems he understands it very well. It is the fact that he does not agree with unrestrained, free market capitalism where maximum profit is gained by the disregard of the ones that are the creators of profit. And who creates profit? Who creates basic wealth? Labor. For the sake of short-term, maximum profit, labor is taking it on the chin. Poor wages, no benefits, no job security for labor while a handful at the top of the pyramid make more and more. The upper echelon recieve high salaries, huge expense accounts, great benefits, while they repeatedly use layoffs and plant closures as profit-making strategies. And for them, it works. Like bands of corporate marauders, they float from position to position, company to company, skim off the gravy and move on.

This is but one part of the debate that the author is trying to put forth to society. Some others are the moral, ethical, and social aspects of layoffs. How they affect productivity, job security, worker's rights, and society in general. So for someone to accuse the author of ignorance shows me that debate is necessary. Without honest dialogue, where beliefs and fears are brought forth in a civil manner, instead of name-calling and ideological rantings, these issues will never be addressed. And they need to be addressed. Nothing less than the future of labor, of our economy, our country , is at stake.

From An Economist

2006-09-09T22:30:00.000-05:00

Free Time is Not Free

We have been discussing the issue of minimum wage. The economist in me was captivated by the "Quotation of the Day" in today's email version of the New York Times.

"I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me."
- Alan Beggerow, unemployed steel worker

The quotation came from a very interesting and fairly in-depth article by LOUIS UCHITELLE and DAVID LEONHARDT in today's New York Times entitled "Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job."

What Mr. Beggerow has come to realize is that in accepting a job, he is selling not only his labor and his skills, he is selling his time. And time is a very valuable commodity. Most of us never really have the opportunity to truly gauge just how valuable our free time is.

That is another aspect of the minimum wage discussion I have largely overlooked.

Just how all of this is going to play out over the next decade is far from clear. Huge numbers of Baby Boomers are entering their 60's. Will they continue to work, or will they discover the true value of their free time?

If they leave the workforce – as they very well may – they will create a massive across-the-board shortage of skilled, experienced workers. This could drive unemployment in the U.S. to record lows, drive up the cost of labor, and put the immigration debate on the back burner.

The Boomers have proven themselves to be very independent. But once they discover the joys of free time, I'm betting it is going to require large sums of cash to lure them back to work.

It's definitely something to think about.

Comments From 'Free Republic'

2006-09-09T21:56:00.000-05:00

Some of my favorite comments:

They'e obviously not scraping by *that* much, as their individual weights look to be around 300 lbs. Where is their sense of shame? A generation ago, men like this would have been scorned by their communities
Good liberal voters!!!! A good sterotype.
A Day in the Life at 1300 Loser Ave.
Cut off the damn welfare! When he gets down to a svelt 250 he'll go back to work!
He can thank his (former?) union for artificially elevating his sense of self worth to the point of being unemployable. Simply put, he can't find a job because he thinks he's worth more than the market does.
For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.” 2 Thessalonians 3:10
They are also white, a statistical aberration, and the New York Times has once again shown us their visceral hatred for the average Joe.
I'm not sure this is the best example of what the Times story wants to illustrate. He isn't spending his entire day watching Oprah. Reading, learning, and writing aren't the worst things a man could be doing on what used to be called a sabbatical. Who knows ? Those unpublished novels might reach a publisher yet. A new Louis L’Amour wouldn't be a bad thing.
Do you think the dog knows he's a future meal?
He and his wife look like wildly successful chin farmers
Mrs. Beggerow seems to be a total moronic dupe dishrag. A usefull floormat to a lazy loser.
Of course not, but I know plenty of 9-5ers who haven't read a book in 20 years. At least this guy is doing that
Well, this story when you read the whole thing definitely has sympathetic bent to it. However, in just punching fun at it, we are missing a factor here that is quite real. There are a lot of people that just give up after they try to reenter the workforce. We have in this country glorified retirement, the general idea that we MUST work to live. That we should live to WORK. The concept of doing what you WANT to do rather than what you SHOULD do (according to the judgments and opinions of others) is an aberration.This story wasn't about people who simply CHOSE not to work, they chose not to work under the conditions that were offered to them. They may have been able to work, but under conditions that they did not see as being worth it.
2 more proud NYTimes readers.
I think if you are too heavy and get resulting health problems you can claim disability. Maybe that is the the plan..How did he teach math at a community college with no more than a high school education?
He was teaching a class directly relevent to his experience. A sheepskin doesn't provide that.
And this would be Bush's fault that he lost his job and just can't bring himself to actually look for something he doesn't deem 'demeaning'. Which by the looks is something like getting paid to do absolutely nothing. And the reason they are 300 lbs is food stamps. Garonteed.
As long as they are not living off of the people, I don't think that it is anyone's business what people look like or if they have a job or not!

Comments From The GOPUSA Message Board

2006-09-09T21:34:00.000-05:00

Some Of The Nastiest Comments

"I've known about this change in the philosophy of liberal men for awhile but this really gets to the bottom of it. Naturally the Times doesn't have a clue how revolting this article is. I hope everyone reads it because it's your taxes that are keeping these lazy slobs at 300 pounds"

"So Mr. Beggerow would gladly work if someone would let him do what he wants to do. Isn't that nice. Perhaps he doesn't realize that most job interviewers are quite perceptive, and will likely pick up on that attitude, thus eliminating him from consideration. Methinks what Mr. Biggerow really wants is to sit home and eat."

"Thanks for posting this. I attribute this narcisism to the breakdown of the 2 parent household. We are now witnessing a generation(s) of men raised by women (mom, grandma, or day care). These men have no concept of a fatherly figure nor an understanding of what it means to be a responsible male. I agree that one way to snap these people out of their woe is me attitude is to ELIMINATE entitlements."

"This article is so interesting to me because I've encountered someone exactly like they describe and who is doing exactly this. Their wife works but they no longer do since they were let go from a job of many years. The person is happy about it and criticizes those who do work. There are apparently a lot of them."

"BOTH of my husbands. I thought I was the only woman married to such selfish, self-centered, self-absorbed men."

"Sorry to hear about your misfits. It sounds as if you were married to male creature, not real men. Men dig ditches, if that is the only job available."

"Sorry folks, but this article is saying exactly what I have been for the past few months: that there is work that Americans WON'T do, and the main reason is that the govt competes with the "unskilled" labor market. Why would one go to work when they can make more and have better benefits from sitting on their "royal" butts? They would (and do) say that they simply "can't afford to go to work." Stupid women and other family members aside...if these lard-fannies didn't have the "entitlements" they would "dig ditches" if they had to."

"I saw this on TV this evening. UNbelievable! What man wouldn't get off his butt at ANY given time and take every opportunity to not only be an example, but actually PROVIDE for his family? Good grief, people.The TV clip I saw showed a guy making his wife's lunch, kissing her as she left for her executive job and then sitting down, hoping he could "hit it big with his BLOG"! And I though, "You Pansy!" But I see what is happening. With thousands of people living "scot free" off government handouts, why not find out how to qualify and just "do nothing".Barring being a quadropalegic or on my deathbed, I wouldn't think of sending my wife to work while I "sat home". I'd clean a public bathroom before sitting home and "giving up". These guys will live stupid and die stupid."

"That's not the end of the story tho...in addition to these "entitlements" is subsidized housing (here would be a 3 BR apt for bout $100/mo, the OTHER $1300 paid for by who? US!!). Then there are food stamps, school breakfast/lunch programs (for those with families), WIC, not to mention at the end of the tax year their REFUND!! For "earned income credits", etc... It's just sickening!!!! Maybe, just maybe, IF our govt wasn't so frigin stupid, we would see guys like this standing on corners looking for day jobs instead of the Illegals... And for those of you in favor of minimum wage, and it's never-ending increases, just remember that when the cost of living goes up, so do the "cost of entitlements"....to US!!"

From 'The Progressive'

2006-09-09T18:42:00.000-05:00

Lazy Men
By Ruth Conniff
August 1, 2006

On Monday, The New York Times ran a fascinating front-page feature on a new trend: men who won't work. The article focused on a couple of men who represent a new trend in widespread, prolonged unemployment. The men featured—an ex-steelworker and a formerly six-figure-earning electrical engineer—are using their savings and second mortgages to fund an inactive lifestyle. They are reminiscent of the character in Herman Melville's Bartelby, the Scrivener who did less and less, saying only of his withdrawal from life, "I prefer not to."
Despite The New York Times article, most of the male unemployed are not lazy or lacking in "personal responsibility.”

The article makes some interesting cultural observations. For example, that not working is heavily celebrated as "the good life" in a culture that touts millionaire retirees in their 40s and 50s. That women's entry into the workforce has reduced pressure on men to find their whole identity in wage-earning. And that Americans generally have the aspirations and habits, but not the funds, to be the idle rich. The future doesn't look bright for the nonworking middle class men in the story, but for now they prefer to defer it.

Alan Beggerow, the former steelworker who lost his job in 2001, has an almost Buddhist present-focus. He is enjoying reading, writing pulp fiction, and getting a lot of sleep. He says he no longer dwells on the future much. Since he doesn't have much money, all that retirement planning and worrying he used to do just doesn't seem relevant anymore.

A common thread among the men the Times interviews is their unwillingness to take low-paying, no-benefits jobs, or jobs that just seem distasteful to them. They are pessimistic about the idea of continuing to improve their lives through work: The most they could hope for is subsistence, and degrading work, in their estimation. They'd rather stay home and read.

I suspect this story will fuel an outcry among conservatives. A particular target will be the news that men like Beggerow are able to maintain themselves in part because of Social Security disability payments and Medicaid--two government programs that are already under assault by would-be privatizers. The idea of lazy stay-at-home husbands disdaining a hard day's work is just what the privatizers need to cut the last legs out from under the social welfare system.

That's a shame, because a closer look at the statistics the Times presents shows that most of the male unemployed are not lazy or lacking in "personal responsibility," to borrow a phrase that fueled welfare reform's undoing of Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

At the very end of the long article, which spends a lot of time on displaced dot-comers and other highly skilled and once highly played workforce dropouts, the Times covers another group that makes up a large portion of discouraged workers--men who have been released from prison, and can't find a job. Odd jobs, off-the-books part-time work, homeless shelters, and soup kitchens make up the web of supports that hold these men's lives together.

In total, of the 13 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 54 who are not working, 43 percent have a household income of less than $25,000, and 71 percent have less than $50,000 a year. Only 24 percent have any college education at all.

So the large photo the Times ran of Christopher Priga, 54, the former electrical engineer, sitting in a trendy cafe reading a book, is hardly representative.

An accompanying bar graph that charts the trend since the 1970s is striking. Less than 6 percent of 30-to-54-year-old men were not working then, compared with more than double that number today.

The big story of this time period is the rise of the low-wage, no-benefits work force, the decline of union membership and manufacturing jobs with family-supporting wages, and the grim outlook of men whose fathers had lifelong careers without lay-offs and plant closings. These are the factors that are driving the insecurity of today's workforce. Instead of delving into them, the Times focuses on the personal quirks of a few men who could easily be transformed into the apocryphal Cadillac-driving welfare queens the pundits and politicians derided when the assault on welfare began.

In his book "All Together Now," Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute--writes about what he calls the YOYO mentality in America--You're On Your Own. It eschews common solutions for a radical individualism that threatens to tear apart our social fabric. He calls for an alternative perspective he calls WITT--We're In This Together--as the only solution to the economic problems that threaten to undo opportunity and fairness in American society.

It would be a shame if Social Security and Medicaid--two programs that still embody the nobler communal values of the New Deal and Great Society eras— fell prey to the You're On Your Own mentality. The concept of social insurance still enjoys widespread support, and keeps alive the sense that we are in this economy together. But the folks who are fueling the worship of wealth that skews our culture and those who would like to keep heaping tax cuts on the rich would like you to think that a few lazy men want to suck up your tax money to fund their idleness.

You can just imagine the outcry on rightwing talk radio--send these guys to work at Wal-Mart! As if all of us should be dedicating ourselves to round-the-clock, low-wage work so the owners and big investors can fund their own idle lifestyles.

The Times piece was interesting from a cultural and existential point of view. But politically it could have some really negative effects. We live in such demoralizing economic times. With high-income tax cheats costing the government between $40 and $70 billion a year and opportunities for hardworking lower and middle income people disappearing, we should focus on these larger conditions instead of blaming discouraged workers for losing faith.

From Edward Winkleman

2006-09-08T20:38:00.000-05:00

A comment about the article byDavid Brooks that can be found here

The "Productive" Class

Back when I was blogging politics day and night (when Bambino, a notorious blog widower, coined the term "bullsh*t websites"), I had exhausted the contempt-conveying phrases in my vocabulary throughout a series of ultra-shrill tirades against New York Times columnist David Brooks. He remains my first example of a thoroughly loathsome pundit, displaying all the integrity of Vidkun Quisling, but none of the charm.

Today, however, Brooks entered the realm of surreal self-parody (must be slow in the pundit world as well, although none of the pundits not working hard to deflect attention away from the Administration's accelerating spiral down past the nethermost position in American Presidential history seem to have any trouble finding topics to write on).

Anyway...The New York Times has deemed such drivel worthy of payment and hidden his column behind their "Times Select" firewall, so I'll have to retype the choice passages from the copy I purchased from my local vendor.

With the Middle East peace process in tatters, Iraq a literal hell on earth, killer heatwaves scorching the planet, and bin Laden & Co. still trotting the globe plotting, what does our Mr. Brooks decide his readers have to know he thinks? Why that rich people are overworked and horribly put upon and poor people are lazy, of course.

Through some screw-up in the moral superstructure, we now have a plutocratic upper class infused with the staid industriousness of Ben Franklin, while we are apparently seeing the emergence of a Wal-Mart leisure class ---devil-may-care middle-age slackers who live off home-equity loans and disabilty payments so they can surf the History Channel and enjoy fantasy football leagues.

Brooks' alarm over this was spawned by an article the Times ran earlier. That one is still free:

Millions of men ... men in the prime of their lives, between 30 and 55 — have dropped out of regular work. They are turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers opportunities to work.

About 13 percent of American men in this age group are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960’s. The difference represents 4 million men who would be working today if the employment rate had remained where it was in the 1950’s and 60’s. [...]

These are men forced to compete to get back into the work force, and even then they cannot easily reconstruct what many lost in a former job,” said Thomas A. Kochan, a labor and management expert at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So they stop trying.”

Many of these men could find work if they had to, but with lower pay and fewer benefits than they once earned, and they have decided they prefer the alternative. It is a significant cultural shift from three decades ago, when men almost invariably went back into the work force after losing a job and were more often able to find a new one that met their needs.

Now I'm a workaholic, so I'm not sure I can relate to those following this trend, but to leap from this article to the conclusions Brooks makes reveals a classic case of fitting the data to support a predisposed position. Again, from Brooks:

Buy I try not to judge these gentlemen harshly. What I see is a migration of values. Once upon a time, middle-class men would have defined their dignity by their ability to work hard, provide for their family and live as self-reliant members of society. [Gee, I'm glad he didn't judge them harshly.] But these fellows, to judge by their quotations, define their dignity the same way the subjects of Throsetin Veblen's "The Theory of the Lelisure Class" defined theirs.

They define their dignity by the loftiness of their thinking. They define their dignity not by their achievement, but by their personal enlightenment, their autonomy, by their distance from anything dishonorably menial or cumpulsory.

GRRRRR.... One of the examples Brooks uses to make his case is that of Alan Beggerow, who got laid off at age 48 from the steel mill he worked in. That's right, Davie...steel workers typically have lofty delusions and distaste for menial work. Beggerow worked there until he was forty-eight! If, as my father did, Beggerow entered the steel mill about age 23, that means he performed a truly grueling, very physical job in hellish conditions for two and a half decades. Further, like my father, he most likely left that job with a series of serious health problems and a badly bruised, if not broken, body. After he got laid off, Beggerow taught math for a while at a community college, but when that ended he decided he'd rather live off what little he had accumulated than take a job he felt was beneath him. For Brooks to challenge that choice suggests he's never spent a day working in a steel mill, let alone 25 years.

What Brooks is really getting at here of course is why the uberwealthy are better than the poor (and you can bet this article about the "willfully" unemployed will weasle its way into some future column defending the tax cuts for the upper 1% of Americans). He's so remarkably deluded he actually laments:

[The lives of t]oday's super-wealthy...are marked by sleep deprivation and conference calls, and their idea of leisure is jetting off to Aspen to hear Zbigniew Brzezinski lead panels titled "Beyond Unipolarity."

Ahh...those unfortunate souls, jetting off to Aspen, celebrity panels and conference calls. Yeah, that's much tougher than filling out job applications at the local McDonald's when you're in your fifties. Why it's just not fair, I tell you. Let's not make them pay any taxes whatsoever. Clearly they're suffering enough already.

Brooks is working here, actually, off a myth that's been gaining ground among conservative bloggers. Its spin is that the wealthy are the "productive class," suggesting they do all the work and hence deserve the lion's share of the government's consideration. It's a notion I find so insidously mendacious, that it's hard not to punch someone offering it.

Then again, with the current Adminstration and its rubber-stamp Congress stacking the deck so heavily against the poor (slashing entitlement programs, refusing to raise the minimum wage, and passing truly evil bankruptcy legislation), is it any wonder that the poor take the advice offered in "War Games" that since you can't win, the only reasonable response is not to play? I mean, I know the Bush & Co are hellbent on creating a permanent indentured servant class, but they can't be surprised that folks aren't happy to both join it AND still have to clean their toilets.

One more aspect of Brook's article should be noted. It reeks of the foulest form of misogyny. Focused on the importance of the traditional role he feels men should play in society (ignoring working women in total), he ends his column on the following enlightened note:

The only comfort I've had from these distrubing trends is another recent story in The Times. Joyce Wadler reported that women in places like the Hamptons are still bedding down with the hired help.

He's attempting, one assumes, to be satirical. But who can tell, really?

A Different Spin On The NY Times Article

2006-09-08T20:23:00.000-05:00

For The Undocumented, Irony At Work As Jobs Go Unfilled
By George Diaz
Published August 13, 2006 in the Orlando Sentinel

Juan was an excellent "prep chef" -- a guy who did grunt work like marinating -- for the primary chef at a Central Florida Cuban restaurant. Juan, from Mexico, was employedfor a couple of years before a payroll company running the books for the restaurant noticed a discrepancy in his Social Security number.

It was bogus.

He was fired immediately.

Juan, his wife and two kids have since vanished.

"I don't even know where he is now," said his former employer, Ruben Perez.

Alan Beggerow, from Rock Falls, Ill., is happily unemployed. Now 53, he hasn't worked regularly since the steel mill that employed him for three decades closed five years ago. He spends his days playing the piano, reading histories and biographies, although he makes sure to get in enough nappy time every day. He wakes up around 11 a.m.

"I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me," he told the New York Times recently. "If things really get tight, I might have to take a low-wage job, but I don't want to do that."

Beggerow was profiled in a story about millions of men in the United States in the prime working-age demographics between 30 and 55 who are turning down jobs they think are beneath them.

Juan is collateral damage in the immigrant crossfire as national and statewide agencies look to flush out undocumented laborers and come down hard on businesses hiring them.

Do any amigos appreciate the irony here?

I would think this puts a hole the size of a Big Enchilada in the patriotic rhetoric of "they're taking jobs away from honest, hard-working Americans."

Nobody is saying here that we need to give carte blanche immunity to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. The immigration reform bill sponsored by the Senate, offering balanced comprehensive reform, is a reasonable compromise in a contentious debate.

But it's obvious that many illegal immigrants are simply looking for economic opportunity and embracing low-wage jobs. The kind that Alan and his friends deem degrading.

The Times notes that the majority of these men fall back on a "patchwork system of government support," which includes federal disability insurance financed by Social Security taxes. More than 6.5 million men and women are receiving monthly disability payments, up from 3 million in 1990. In some cases, the only disability may be an aversion to low-paying jobs.

As money is drained from the U.S. government, federal and state officials have stepped up efforts to deter employers of immigrant laborers.

The Palm Bay City Council recently passed an ordinance authorizing $500 fines per violation on employers of illegal immigrants and imposing two-year bans from work in the city on violators.

Besides meddling in business belonging to the federal government, Palm Bay is simply feeding the prejudiced frenzy, much of it channeling the voice of former President Teddy Roosevelt.

"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism," Roosevelt once said. ". . . A hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts 'native' before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States."

But Roosevelt also said this:

"If an immigrant is not fit to become a citizen, he should not be allowed to come here. If he is fit, he should be given all the rights to earn his own livelihood, and to better himself, that any man can have."

From all indications, Juan was simply trying to better himself here, despite the legal entanglements.

As for Alan, TV Land has daylong marathons of those wonderful sitcoms from another generation. Green Acres starts at 11 a.m. today, assuming you're awake.

Another Opinion...

2006-09-08T20:12:00.000-05:00

OnThe Continuance of Glaring Omissions

After reading the New York Times online version for the last two to three weeks, I have come across to articles about the state of men in the United States that I just can't let pass by without a few remarks.

First, and most recently, is a story in the National news section entitled, "Facing Middle Age with No Degree and No Wife" (NYT 6 August 2006). The story discusses the situation of a growing number of American men who are remaining single well into their 40s, and their inability to find a wife. The article links this trend to various other phenomena, including the fact that these single men are most often not college graduates, usually blue collar workers (although some are thoroughly entrenched in the middle class), and afraid of alternatively divorce or committment. The article also blames the higher standards of single women, who are getting college degrees at a faster rate than men and who seek men with higher degrees, and "hence better financial prospects." The NYT also cites some "experts" who claim that "the greater economic independence of women and the greater acceptance of couples living together outside of marriage" have contributed to the declining marriage rate.

The rate in question, according to the Times, is "about 18 percent of men ages 40 to 44 with less than four years of college." The article goes on to argue that "That is up from about 6 percent a quarter-century ago. Among similar men ages 35 to 39, the portion jumped to 22 percent from 8 percent in that time." And to add icing to the cake, the Times notes that "even marriage rates among female professionals over 40 have stabilized in recent years." Even older professional ball-busting career women can get married, why can't these dopes?

There are many aspects of this article that make my stomach lurch, but of course, that lurching has to do more with what the Times didn't say or didn't bother to factor into their analysis, rather than what was actually included in the article. Although, the article itself is pretty bad.

Firstly, the four page piece fails to acknowledge how many of those 18 percent of men who are still single in their 40s are, in fact, not interested in marrying a woman because well, they just don't swing that way. No where does the Times account for how many of these men might be gay, transgendered, queer, celibate, or otherwise not invested in the Christian dictum of marriage. These men, assuming that some of them might actually not be heterosexual, would have been coming out in the 1970s and 80s - arguably one of the most importantly visible times for the LGBT community. But the Times refuses to acknowledge this possibility. If you will induldge some highly suspect number crunching, if 18 percent are still single, and roughly 6 to 10 percent of the population is gay, this means that there are possibly only 8 to 12 percent of heterosexual men who are still unmarried.

If you consider this configuration suspect, as I myself do, let us take another step back and ask why this matters? Why should we be concerned that people aren't getting married as frequently as they used to? If you listen to Pat Robertson, or even George W. Bush, this lack of married people contributes to the degredation of the US's moral fiber. But then again, so do gays. And feminists. And pro-choice activists, intellectuals, liberals, welfare queens, immigrants, environmentalists, socialists, and communists. Apparently the only people who don't contribute to this decay are white, middle class, married Christians - but don't they have some of the highest divorce rates in the world??

This article confuses me, and I don't know why the NYT insisted on devoting four pages to the declining marriage rates of older men. But in this article contributes to the spectre of fear of disappearance that haunts the heterosexual white male in US culture. A continuing backlash and anxiety attack over what is to become of red blooded American men, now that they are being displaced to the peripherals of society (apparently). Funny, when women and people of color were pushed to the periphery, we didn't have articles debating why they didn't get married with as much frequency as their hegemonic counterparts.

Perhaps these unmarried men should exchange their unworthy jobs for wives and a comfortable life of leisure, as the men in "Men Not Working and Not Wanting Just Any Job" did (NYT, 31 July 2006).

In this article, reporter Amanda Cox profiles several men in their forties and fifties who are currently unemployed and are not actively seeking work because they cannot find a job that is neither "demeaning nor underpaid" and instead rely on disability payments from the government, taking out multiple mortgages on their homes, or relying on their (female) spouses for financial income. Instead of working or looking for work, they spend their days playing piano, reading books, doing crossword puzzles, or sitting at cafes.

Unlike the women (most likely their mothers) who have the luxury or ability stay at home while a spouse works outside of the home, these men do not take up domestic duties, preferring to spend their time with hobbies. Apparently, laundry and cleaning is also demeaning and underpaid - who knew?

Most of the men profiled in the article are without children, or more accurately, are not required to support any children. Most of them are also white. The NYT calls them "America's Missing Men." Huh? They're not missing at all. Chances are they're still in bed (if it's before 11 am) or sitting on their ass somewhere, probably in close proximity to a television.

Loquacious gems from these missing men include:

“I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,” says Alan Beggerow, 48, of Illinois, who draws his standard of living from the second mortgage on his house and his family's savings. Yes, but Mr. Beggerow, how much is it worth to your wife and your child? His wife used to do factory work, until an accident forced her to leave. She now takes on freelance seamstress and baking work, as well as selling items on Ebay for a fee. She is looking for a clerical job, in order to earn a steady paycheck, as the money she receives from her disability payments cannot support her and her husband. “The future is always a concern, but I no longer allow myself to dwell on it,” Mr. Beggerow says. Huh?

"To be honest, I’m kind of looking for the home run,” says Christopher Priga, 54, of California. His income also comes from drawing money against his house in Los Angeles. After being let-go from Xerox in the blow up of the dot-com bubble, Priga is tired of grunt work and prefers to spend his time reading at local cafes.

Near the end of the article, the focus turns to those men who are excluded from the jobmarket because of felony convictions and jail time. But this avenue only affords half of the last page. Rather than draw attention to the systemic discrimination in the prison system and how any links to serving time can severly hinder an applicant's chances in this racist and classist jobmarket, the article spends most of its time profiling men who have been let go from their employment because of economic shifts. Since the 1980's, the American economy has moved away from industrial processing and factory work, and thereby making many men and women redundant and unemployed. This is a tragedy and an immense diservice to the working class of the US, prioritizing high profit margins over community sustainability, but this aspect is also absent from the article's analysis.

What really gets me, though, more than anything in this article, is the extremely gendered representation of work in this country that is reflected in these men's choices to abstain from work. Women have been in support positions and are continually forced to engage in unpaid labor in the form of housework and family care, and now more than ever, women are taking on work outside of the home in addition to this support/domestic work. Beggerow's wife takes care of the home, and her husband, and also manages to do freelance work and search for a clerical job. Additionally, it is her disability payments that keep the household running. Why can't Mr. Beggerow or Mr. Priga flip burgers? Why can't they wash dishes? Drive a taxi? Sell groceries, waitress (intentionally gendered), babysit, do laundry, pick up garbage? As someone who is about to approach the job market once again after having taken a year off to complete a master's degree, I am desperate for any job. The social regard for my degree does not place me above doing whatever work I can find. The only job I won't do is clean the floor of a nightclub with my tongue on Monday morning...but that's a whole other set of issues. Perhaps my perspective is a little different, being in my twenties, having mounting school debts and the prospect of marriage and family on the very near horizon. I've worked nearly continuously since I was 17, and I'm terrified of starting my career. But that won't keep me from working.

These men have worked, have spent twenty and thirty years working. And everyone is due a break at some point. But being able to not work because of retirement and pension is a whole hell of a lot different than refusing to work because you can't find a job that you don't feel is demeaning or beneath you. And being retired is a whole hell of a lot different that drawing on public disability and social security funds to avoid having to pay child support (which one would have to do if one had a paycheck) or to avoid working a job that isn't exactly what you want. I applaud Mrs. Beggerow for having the personal strength to scour the classified/help-wanted ads while her husband reads another history of the crusades on the front porch. I personally would have launched a crusade of my own to kick him out of the house.

The Four Agreements

2006-09-06T21:26:00.000-05:00

The Four Agreements

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

2. Don't Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

3. Don't Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

Robert Switzer's Opinion About David Brooks

2006-09-05T23:18:00.000-05:00

David Brooks, Why Must You Be So Mean?
August 6, 2006

Rite-Lite New York Times columnist David Brooks recently punked a group of unemployed middle-aged men, giving them the full-bore Bobos In Paradise treatment.

David Brooks seems decent and likeable. Those Bourgeois Bohemians he wrote about in ‘Bobos In Paradise’ made great fodder for humor. That whole book was screamingly funny, though I’m not sure the people he lampooned actually exist.

Bobos are like Welfare Queens and Limousine Liberals, great rhetorical devices with little basis in reality. I’m a liberal. Most of my friends are liberals. We’re small businessmen, convenience store clerks, library directors and construction laborers. We’re not Volvo Liberals. We’re Piece-Of-Shit Used Car Liberals.

The unemployed middle-aged men were very real, however, and profiled in a New York Times article called ‘Men Not Working and Not Wanting Just Any Job’. The men profiled include a former steel industry union representative, and a six-figure electrical engineer, formerly employed by Xerox.

The steel industry guy, Alan Beggerow, now 53, fills his days playing the piano, reading histories and biographies, writing Western novels in the Louis L’Amour style, and writing book reviews on Amazon. Beggerow spent 30 years working for Northwestern Wire and Steel in Sterling, Ill., from 1971 until it closed in 2001. During the last three of those 30 years, Mr. Beggerow worked as a union representative on union-management teams that assessed every aspect of the plant’s operations.

There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that Beggerow will find another job in central Illinois even remotely comparable to the one he had with Northwestern Wire and Steel, a company to whom he gave the best years of his life. In return, Northwestern Wire and Steel discarded him a dozen or so years short of retirement.

When the best possible outcome of a job-search is casual labor, fast-food, or retail, I don’t think it should come as a shock that people will opt out and try something else, even if it’s a long-shot. Mr. Priga, the electrical engineer, calls it ‘looking for the home run’. Christopher Priga is an electrical engineer by training who worked in software engineering. A divorce in 1996 left him with custody of his three children. One of them had behavioral problems and to care for the boy he dropped out of steady work for a while, mortgaging his house to raise money and designing Web sites as a freelancer.

He re-entered the work force in 2000, joining Xerox at just over $100,000 a year as a systems designer for a new project, which did not last. In the aftermath of the dot-com bust, Xerox downsized and Mr. Priga was let go in January 2003.

At 54, it is extremely unlikely that Christopher Priga will land another six-figure software engineering job:
“I’ve been through a lot of layoffs over the years, and there is a certain procedure you follow,” he said. “You contact the headhunters. You go looking for other work. You do all of that, and this time around it didn’t work.”

A geek joke goes like this:
“What happens to engineers when they turn 40?”
“They’re taken outside and shot.”

Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about the pitfalls of attempting to re-enter the white-collar workforce in late middle-age. Her book, Bait and Switch bluntly details the scams, humiliations, and disappointments that confront people over forty who find themselves back on the job market, usually against their will.

I don’t know the specifics of David Brooks’ background, but I’d be willing to bet that someone who grew up on Manhattan and attended the University Of Chicago knows little or nothing of what life is like for the working poor. For the working poor, the absence of job security and autonomy of any kind is absolute. You are literally out of control, buffeted by circumstance.

For Mr. Brooks, I recommend another book by Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, or if TV is his thing, the episode of 30 Days in which Morgan Spurlock and his girlfriend do the minimum wage shuffle for a month.

For Mr. Priga and Mr. Beggerow, life among the working poor is both the best and the worst that the job market can offer them. So who can blame them for looking for something else, another way out?

Meanwhile, Brooks is at his most tight-assed and nasty with this:

“Many readers no doubt observed that if today’s prostate-aged moochers wanted to loaf around all day reading books and tossing off their vacuous opinions into the ether, they should have had the foresight to become newspaper columnists.”

Or perhaps they should have had the foresight to grow up on Manhattan and attend the University of Chicago. Brooks, after all, managed to lift himself by his bootstraps all the way from Manhattan to The University Of Chicago.

And then there’s this:

“What I see is a migration of values. Once upon a time, middle-class men would have defined their dignity by their ability to work hard, provide for their family and live as self-reliant members of society. But these fellows, to judge by their quotations, define their dignity the same way the subjects of Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory Of The Leisure Class defined theirs. They define their dignity by the loftiness of their thinking. They define their dignity not by their achievement, but by their personal enlightenment, their autonomy, by their distance from anything dishonorably menial or compulsory.”

From where I sit, Mr. Beggerow is taking some lemons and making lemonade. He’s working hard, has accomplished quite a bit, and he remains self-reliant. First and foremost, he’s survived 30 years in a steel mill, which, I’ll remind Mr. Brooks, involves surviving considerable physical risk. Second, he’s taught himself the piano as an adult. And third, he’s written two novels. Two more than Mr. Brooks.

Sure, it’s a long shot, but who knows, one of those two novels may sell. Or he may write another one that does. Piano lessons go for $45 an hour, and people look for piano lessons everywhere, even central Illinois. When the sure-thing and the worst-case are the same, why not go for the long-shot?

Mr. Priga may never earn a corporate salary again as a software engineer, but he is a man with considerable experience and intellectual resources. For him, the home-run he’s looking for may be a technology startup that would be lucky and thankful to have him.

The tone of Brooks’ column on the article tried for funny but came out nasty. The article itself is also puckered and acerbic. It’s almost like the authors are jealous of these middle-aged dudes, the techie and the blue-collar who had the stones to stand up and say, “Fuck it, hell no. I won’t go to work at WalMart. I’m better than that.” And then these old dudes had the further audacity to spend their days reading, writing and playing music.

These two guys remind me of Travis McGee, the John D. MacDonald character. McGee worked only when he needed the money. Once he accumulated a chunk of cash, he’d take a corresponding chunk of ‘retirement’. His theory was why wait and retire when you’re old and sick? Why not take an installment of that retirement now, when you’re still young enough to enjoy it?

The sad truth is that both Mr. Priga and Mr. Beggerow will probably find themselves at WalMart or worse eventually. But these two men, like most men over 50 may be only a colonoscopy or chest-xray away from a death sentence. They have worked hard and played by the rules all their lives and a brief respite has presented itself. They are truly alive now and living as men, probably for the first time in their lives. So I’m with them. I say go for it. And fuck David Brooks.

Sitting On The Fence

2006-09-02T23:55:00.000-05:00

I consider myself an agnostic. Many of the believers and non-believers look upon me as a theocratic fence-sitter, someone too weak to think things through and come to a definite conclusion. Both sides wonder, how can I sit on the fence without it poking me in the ass? If I am sitting on a fence, it isn't a picket fence, or a barbed wired fence. For me it's more of a comfortable vantage point to observe the ones that are on opposite sides of the fence.

I do not mean that I am on a moral high ground at all. I am willing to admit I do not know the answer to the question 'Is there a God?' I do not find fault with any who do have an answer to that question, regardless if it is yes or no. But as an observer, I have noticed that as I look out over one side of the fence and then the other, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. The rabid believers and rabid non-believers both condemn each other as if what they believed were a provable fact. The fact is that there is no solid, undeniable answer to the question. Either side operates from the side of faith. That statement no doubt brings smiles of agreement to believers, and scowls of disagreement from some athiests. Even a mention of the word 'faith' gets them going. But I don't want to paint all athiests with that brush. As with believers, the non-believers come in all different shapes, sizes and temperments.

As I sit on my perch, every once in a while someone tugs at my leg. Sometimes from one side, sometimes the other. And there are occasions when I hop off my perch and have a visit with some of the folks. But to date I have heard no convincing argument that would cause me to convert. This could be caused by my stubborness I suppose. It's not like I haven't tried. I've given much thought to both philosophies, tried to imagine myself as embracing either, but always there remains nagging doubt. A lack of faith that I readily admit to.

So I'll remain on the fence, thank you. Whether there is or isn't a God, maybe some day I'll know. If there is and it is merciful, or if there is and it is vengeful, either way I'll know. If there is no God, and death is but an eternal nothing, I won't know nor will it make any difference. Call me strange, but I find great peace in that philosophy.

Comments From The Blogosphere

2006-08-26T23:32:00.000-05:00

I offer a compedium of remarks about yours truly and the NY Times article.

Men Not at Work -- A Symptom of Manhood in Crisis
Thursday, August 3rd, 2006
by R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

This article from Monday's edition of The New York Times is a sign of deep cultural distress -- of men without any sense of shame for not working. In "Men Not Working, And Not Wanting Just Any Job," reporters Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt tell an amazing story…

The very fact that The New York Times finds this phenomenon to be of front-page interest tells us something. Such complacency -- matched to an idea that many jobs are just beneath consideration -- flies in the face of our cultural work ethic, such as it is.
For the Christian, of course, the issue is far deeper. We understand that men were made for work, and that a man's responsibility is to care and provide for his wife and family.

As the Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy:

But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. [1 Timothy 5:8]

Thus, the Christian worldview sees work as a man's assignment -- an as a Gospel issue. One who fails in this responsibility by complacency and sloth does injury to the Gospel and the cause of Christ. Manhood and masculinity are in crisis, but those at the center of the crisis seem rather unconcerned. Or, at least not concerned to the point that they would take a job they consider beneath them.

Rev. Mohler is a Baptist minister, hence the obligatory quote from scripture, which proves I am not only in danger of losing my manhood, but quite Godless to boot.

Getting Serious about Our Own Security
Steven Muscatello
August 11, 2006

If America loses the war against Islamic fascism, we might well look back upon the story of an unemployed former steelworker in Rock Falls, Ill. as one of many ignored harbingers of our demise. We’d be better off though, to start paying attention now.

Alan Beggerow, 53, the above-mentioned steelworker, was the subject of a recent New York Times article on the growing number of men aged 30-55 electing not to work. We're not talking about a millionaire here. Beggerow, who after 30 years of steady factory work lost his job in 2001, has only $60,000 in savings. Still, he's not looking for work. And he's not alone. According to the Times, about "13 percent of American men [aged 30-55] are not working [and are not looking for work], up from 5 percent in the late 1960's." The Times figures that the difference works out to about 4 million more men not working today than in the 1960's. Wondering how these men will fare as they age, the Times posited three likely scenarios: "they may be forced back to work"; "they may fall into poverty"; "or they may be rescued by the government."

Let's remove the mystery:In choosing not to work despite lacking the financial means to do so, these men are clearly counting on government rescue. In fact, the Times reported that the "fastest growing source" of financial support for men choosing not to work is a "patchwork system of government support."

We shouldn't be surprised.

In America, we've spent the better part of the last century expanding the federal government and shrinking the sphere of individual responsibility. Thus, we have actually encouraged individuals to count on government rescue. Indeed, millions of Americans now view government as a third party entity, a sort of cracked open piñata, not as an institution granted limited powers—not to mention funded—by individual citizens.

What, then, does this have to do with the war against Islamic fascism?

Consider that once a man abdicates his duty—indeed, sees no need—to provide for himself and his family financially, he will see even less need to defend—by force, political action or intellectual engagement—his country.

We’ve played the charade game for too long, believing that we could cavalierly weaken the will of individual citizens without it having a negative affect on the strength of the country as a whole. And now, after decades of this collective softening-around-the-belly, we come face-to-face with a mortal enemy.

Are we up for the challenge?

Not yet.

Success in the war against Islamic fascism depends on many things: military might, economic vitality, and public resolve come to mind first. These three factors, however, ultimately depend on the overall seriousness of individual American citizens. Serious countries budget to maintain a robust national defense; they find ways to grow their economies in wartime and they elect and support serious, sober-minded public officials. Serious countries win wars.

At the moment, however, we are a fundamentally unserious country. We see this lack of seriousness everywhere, it seems. Indeed, we see it in a May 2006 poll that found that over 60 percent of Americans aged 18-24 couldn’t find Iraq on a map of the Middle East. We see it in the way the media denounced President Bush’s private, off-the-cuff remarks to Tony Blair at the G-8 Summit last month, as though the style of dialogue, and not the content of conversation, was of consequence. Most glaringly, we see it in the way an entire political party has abandoned the world of serious, sober thought for the greener pastures of delusion (see Murtha, Jack; Dean, Howard; Lamont, Ned, et. al).

Now think of Islamic fascism. Really, do it for a minute or two. Is there anything about these perverted, quasi-religious lunatics that strikes you as unserious?

Didn’t think so.

Islamic fascists are deadly serious. They want to kill infidels and establish an Islamic caliphate, and they often sacrifice their very lives to do so.

In response, America needs a new birth of seriousness. We need to redevelop, like a runner training for a marathon, the mental toughness, physical stamina, emotional resolve—in short, the self-reliant confidence—necessary for victory. It starts with individual citizens like Mr. Beggerow, who could begin by getting a job.

Heaven's to Betsy, I'm not only Godless, but if we don't win the war on terror, it's all my fault!

Psycho Phil - DRINK MORE BEER!
Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job
I’ll admit I was a bit dumbstruck when I read this article. I don’t get the mindset of these men at all. They are perfectly capable of working and producing an income but since they feel that whatever job that can find at the moment is ‘beneath’ them, they are instead content to slack off, do nothing productive and leech off their wives and taxpayers. All while steaming headfirst into bankrupty. I could never even imagine doing something like this. I wouldn’t able to look at myself in the mirror in the morning.

Hell, I’ve even been there many years ago. I could have just sat on my ass an collected unemployment, but instead I took the only job I could find at time. It was part time at a Software Etc store and it payed less than what an unemployment check would have. But it was a job. A year later and I was the manager of the Software Etc store in the Inner Harbor Galleria. And by that time the job paid more than an unemployment check. A hell of a lot more.

Get off your ass, get a job and work. Do something. Hell, plant a garden and open a roadside stand. Maybe with some actual hard work you could build that up into a full-fledged business. But I guess its just easier to sit on your butt and wait for the cushy job to come knocking on your door.

Edit: Apparently this article is making the rounds in the blogs.

I'm certainly going to take this to heart, from someone whose byline on their blog is DRINK MORE BEER! Although that's not bad advice I suppose if you like beer.

MY LEFT WING
Someone else may already have ranted about this July 31, 2006 NY Times article: Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job..

ROCK FALLS, Ill. — Alan Beggerow has stopped looking for work. Laid off as a steelworker at 48, he taught math for a while at a community college. But when that ended, he could not find a job that, in his view, was neither demeaning nor underpaid...

The article goes on to describe Mr. Beggerow’s life of leisure, copious reading, practicing piano, writing bad novels, and sleeping 9-plus hours a day. See, he has come to value how much his free time means to him, and doesn’t want to give it up.

This pisses me off on a lot of levels. I’ve known a couple of guys who have done this — one is my asshole brother-in-law; the other is a guy who owned a small computer-networking business with his wife. Both of them — though skilled and educated — decided that they just didn’t want to work. My brother-in-law claimed that he just couldn’t find a job that was good enough for him (actually he didn’t even look; he didn’t want to work); the computer guy just got “tired” of running his own business, but “didn’t like” working for other people because he didn’t get enough “respect”, so stopped working altogether.

Both of these men shared two commonalities.

First, while they wouldn’t consider taking a job they considered beneath their dignity, it was quite all right to have their wives work at low-level, low-paying jobs to pay the bills and get medical insurance. My sister worked the night shift at Wal-mart for several years, while the other guy’s wife has worked a series of retail sales jobs to make ends meet.

Second, both men are rabid Republicans, resentful of paying taxes, constantly bitching about all the lazy bums on “welfare” and sucking up public money. Of course, the reason those people were poor is just because they are lazy and don’t want to work.

WTF? Now, I know my brother-in-law sucked up every bit of unemployment he could get, lying about his efforts at looking for work. His other method of getting money was stealing the inheritances from family members — manipulating his wet-brained father into signing property over before his death, and not distributing the remainder of the estate between himself and his brother (the parents died intestate) until the brother just gave up. How does stealing from your parents and your only sibling make you a better person than someone who applies for and receives government assistance to get ahead?

Which leads to the other tidbit in the NY Times article that really pissed me off:

But the fastest growing source of help is a patchwork system of government support, the main one being federal disability insurance, which is financed by Social Security payroll taxes…

So, we have skilled men, who could work if they wanted to but, since the work available is “too demeaning”, during their prime earning years prefer to suck off their wives and their relatives, deplete their retirement savings so they will be dependent upon public programs in their old age, and apply for and receive disability payments — disability payments financed by the payroll taxes of the rest of us chumps who do work, including payroll taxes of the working poor whom they castigate as being morally inferior.

And if they are like the two men I know, they bitch about how the system is going to hell in a handbasket, how a white man just can’t make it with all those Mexicans and women taking all the good jobs, so that they are entitled to cheat and game the system. They take absolutely no responsibility for improving either their own situations, or the situation of other workers.

Hey, pal! How do you know my novels are bad? You ever read one? This post is from a 'liberal' blogger. Well, whatever he wants to call himself.

August 02, 2006
Not "I Can't Pay The Rent" ADVICE GODDESS
"I don't feel like paying the rent," or rather, doing what it takes to pay the rent. Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt write in The New York Times of men I'll call "The New Lazies" -- men who are out of work, but turning down jobs they feel are "beneath them," and sometimes going on "disability."

Hmmm, disability must sound like a magic, bottomless pot of money to these people, but perhaps they could urge their fallow minds into use and recognize that this means their lives are being financed by their fellow taxpayers. Here's an excerpt from the story:

These are men? I've had a number of jobs I didn't want or like. I worked as a mover at an all-girls moving company (and I am NOT strong of arm) and I worked as a chicken (in a chicken suit, handing out flyers). You do what you need to do to support yourself. Well, you do if you're me, and apparently, I'm something of an idiot with my outmoded ideas against going on the dole.

Whatever you say, oh humble ADVICE GODDESS.

Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job

2006-08-21T13:13:00.000-05:00

New York Times July 31, 2006
By LOUIS UCHITELLE and DAVID LEONHARDT

ROCK FALLS, Ill. — Alan Beggerow has stopped looking for work. Laid off as a steelworker at 48, he taught math for a while at a community college. But when that ended, he could not find a job that, in his view, was neither demeaning nor underpaid.

So instead of heading to work, Mr. Beggerow, now 53, fills his days with diversions: playing the piano, reading histories and biographies, writing unpublished Western potboilers in the Louis L’Amour style — all activities once relegated to spare time. He often stays up late and sleeps until 11 a.m.

“I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,” he said. To make ends meet, he has tapped the equity in his home through a $30,000 second mortgage, and he is drawing down the family’s savings, at the rate of $7,500 a year. About $60,000 is left. His wife’s income helps them scrape by. “If things really get tight,” Mr. Beggerow said, “I might have to take a low-wage job, but I don’t want to do that.”

Millions of men like Mr. Beggerow — men in the prime of their lives, between 30 and 55 — have dropped out of regular work. They are turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers opportunities to work.

About 13 percent of American men in this age group are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960’s. The difference represents 4 million men who would be working today if the employment rate had remained where it was in the 1950’s and 60’s.
Most of these missing men are, like Mr. Beggerow, former blue-collar workers with no more than a high school education. But their ranks are growing at all education and income levels. Refugees of failed Internet businesses have spent years out of work during their 30’s, while former managers in their late 40’s are trying to stretch severance packages and savings all the way to retirement.

Accumulated savings can make dropping out more affordable at the upper end than it is for Mr. Beggerow, but the dynamic is often the same — the loss of a career and of a sense that one’s work is valued.

“These are men forced to compete to get back into the work force, and even then they cannot easily reconstruct what many lost in a former job,” said Thomas A. Kochan, a labor and management expert at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So they stop trying.”

Many of these men could find work if they had to, but with lower pay and fewer benefits than they once earned, and they have decided they prefer the alternative. It is a significant cultural shift from three decades ago, when men almost invariably went back into the work force after losing a job and were more often able to find a new one that met their needs.

“To be honest, I’m kind of looking for the home run,” said Christopher Priga, who is 54 and has not had steady work since he lost a job with a six-figure income as an electrical engineer at Xerox in 2002. “There’s no point in hitting for base hits,” he explained. “I’ve been down the road where I did all the things I was supposed to do, and the end result of that is nil.” Instead, Mr. Priga supports himself by borrowing against the rising value of his Los Angeles home. Other men fall back on wives or family members.

But the fastest growing source of help is a patchwork system of government support, the main one being federal disability insurance, which is financed by Social Security payroll taxes. The disability stipends range up to $1,000 a month and, after the first two years, Medicare kicks in, giving access to health insurance that for many missing men no longer comes with the low-wage jobs available to them. No federal entitlement program is growing as quickly, with more than 6.5 million men and women now receiving monthly disability payments, up from 3 million in 1990. About 25 percent of the missing men are collecting this insurance.

The ailments that qualify them are usually real, like back pain, heart trouble or mental illness. But in some cases, the illnesses are not so serious that they would prevent people from working if a well-paying job with benefits were an option.
The disability program, in turn, is an obstacle to working again. Taking a job holds the risk of demonstrating that one can earn a living and is thus no longer entitled to the monthly payments. But staying out of work has consequences. Skills deteriorate, along with the desire for a paying job and the habits that it requires.
“The longer you stay on disability benefits,” said Martin H. Gerry, deputy commissioner for disability and income security at the Social Security Administration, “the longer you’re out of the work force, the less likely you are to go back to work.”

As a rule, out-of-work men are less educated than the population as a whole. Their numbers have grown sharply among black men and men who live in hard-hit industrial areas like Michigan, West Virginia and upstate New York, as well as those who live in rural states like Mississippi and Oklahoma.

The missing men are also more likely to live alone. Nearly 60 percent are divorced, separated, widowed or never married, up from 50 percent a decade earlier, the Census Bureau reports. Sometimes women who are working throw out men who are not, says Kathryn Edin, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. In any case, without a household to support, there is less pressure to work, and for men who fall behind on support payments, an incentive exists to work off the books — hiding employment — so that wages cannot be garnisheed.

“What happens to a lot of guys who become unmoored from family life, they become unmoored from everything,” Ms. Edin said. “They are just living without attachments and by the time they are 40 or 50 years old, the things that kept these men from falling away — family and community life — are gone.”

Even as more men are dropping out of the work force, more women are entering it. This change has occurred partly because employment has shrunk in industries where men predominated, like manufacturing, while fields where women are far more common, like teaching, health care and retailing, have grown. Today, about 73 percent of women between 30 and 54 have a job, compared with 45 percent in the mid-1960’s, according to an analysis of Census data by researchers at Queens College. Many women without jobs are raising children at home, while men who are out of a job tend to be doing neither family work nor paid work.

Women are also making inroads in fields where they were once excluded — as lawyers and doctors, for example, and on Wall Street. Men still make significantly more money than women, but as women become more educated than men, even more men may end up out of the work force.

At the low end of the spectrum, men emerging from prison with felony records are not easily absorbed into steady employment. Hundreds of thousands of young men were jailed in the 1980’s and 1990’s, in a surge of convictions for drug-related crimes. As prisoners, they were not counted in the employment data; as ex-prisoners they are. They are now being freed in their 30’s and 40’s and are struggling to be hired. Roughly two million men in this group have prison records, according to a calculation by Richard Freeman and Harry J. Holzer, labor economists at Harvard and the Urban Institute, respectively.Many of these men do not find work because of their records.

Despite their great numbers, many of the men not working are missing from the nation’s best-known statistic on unemployment. The jobless rate is now a low 4.6 percent, yet that number excludes most of the missing men, because they have stopped looking for work and are therefore not considered officially unemployed. That makes the unemployment rate a far less useful measure of the country’s well-being than it once was.

Indeed, a larger share of working-age men are not working today than at almost any point in the last half-century, which raises the question of how they will get by as they age. They may be forced back to work after years of absence, they may fall into poverty, or they may be rescued by the government. This same trend is evident in other industrialized countries. In the European Union, 14 percent of men between 25 and 54 were not working last year, up from 7 percent in 1975, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Over the same period in Japan, the proportion of such men rose to 8 percent from 4 percent.

In these countries, too, decently paying blue-collar jobs are disappearing, and as they do men who held them fall back on government benefits for income. But the growth of subsidies through federal and state programs like disability insurance has happened largely without notice in this country while it is a major topic of political debate in Europe.

“We have a de facto welfare system as Europe does,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist at the University of Notre Dame. “But we are not proud of it, as they are.”

Reading, Sleeping, Scraping By

Alan Beggerow has not worked regularly in the five years since the steel mill that employed him for three decades closed. He and his wife, Cathleen, 47, cannot really afford to live without his paycheck. Yet with her sometimes reluctant blessing, Mr. Beggerow persists in constructing a way of life that he finds as satisfying as the work he did only in the last three years of his 30-year career at the mill. The trappings of this new life surround Mr. Beggerow in the cluttered living room of his one-story bungalow-style home in this half-rural, half-industrial prairie town west of Chicago. A bookcase covers an entire wall, and the books that Mr. Beggerow is reading are stacked on a glass coffee table in front of a comfortable sofa where he reads late into the night — consuming two or three books a week — many more than in his working years.
He also gets more sleep, regularly more than nine hours, a characteristic of men without work. As the months pass, they average almost nine-and-a-half hours a night, about 80 minutes more than working men, according to an analysis of time-use surveys by Harley Frazis and Jay Stewart, economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Very few of the books Mr. Beggerow reads are novels, and certainly not the escapist Westerns that he himself writes (two in the last five years), his hope being that someday he will interest a publisher and earn some money. His own catholic tastes range over history — currently the Bolshevik revolution and a biography of Charlemagne — as well as music and the origins of Christianity. He often has strong views about what he has just read, which he expresses in reviews that he posts on Amazon.com: 124 so far, he said.

Always on the coffee table is a thick reference work, “Guide to the Pianist’s Repertoire” by Maurice Hinson. Mr. Beggerow is a serious pianist now that he has the time to practice, sometimes two or three hours at a stretch. He does so on an old upright in a corner of the living room, a piano he purchased as a young steelworker, when he first took lessons.

His new life began in the spring of 2001 with the closing of Northwestern Wire and Steel in Sterling, Ill., where he had worked since 1971. During the last three of those 30 years, Mr. Beggerow found himself assigned to work he really liked: as a union representative on union-management teams that assessed every aspect of the plant’s operations.

What made him valuable was his dexterity as a writer. No one could put together committee reports as articulately as he did, and he found himself on nearly every team. His salary rose to $50,000. During those years, he taught himself more math, too, to help in the analyses of the issues that the teams tackled: productivity, safety, plant layout and the like.
“I actually loved that job,” he said. “I even looked forward to going to work. The more teams they had, the more they found out what I could do and the more I found out what I could do.”

Mr. Beggerow would take another job in a heartbeat, he says, if it were like the work he did in those last three years at Northwestern. The closest he has gotten has been as an instructor at a community college, teaching plant maintenance and other useful factory skills. His students were from nearby manufacturing companies, which subsidized the courses, including his pay of $45 an hour. But factory operations in the area are shrinking, and Mr. Beggerow has not had a teaching stint since November.

Like Mr. Beggerow, the great majority of the missing men are out of the work force for months or years at a time rather than drifting in and out of jobs. There appears to have been no rise since the 1960’s in the percentage of men out of work for short periods, according to research by Chinhui Juhn, a University of Houston professor, and other economists.

Mr. Beggerow will not take a lesser job, he says, because of his bitter memories of earlier years at Northwestern Wire, particularly the 1980’s, when the industry was in turmoil. A powerful man, over 6 feet and 200 pounds, he worked then as a warehouseman.

What got to him was not the work. It was the frequent furloughs, the uncertainty whether he would be recalled, the mandatory overtime and 50-hour weeks often imposed when he did return, the schedules that forced him to work every holiday except Christmas, and then, as rising seniority finally gave him some protection, a six-month strike in 1983 followed by a wage cut. His pay shrank to $13 an hour from $17, a loss he did not fully recover until those last three years. “I was always thinking if there was some way I could get out of this, do something else,” Mr. Beggerow said. “What made me so upset was the insecurity of it all and the humiliation. I don’t want to take a job that would put me through that again.”

Shortly after Northwestern closed, Mr. Beggerow married. It was his third marriage, and also Cathleen’s third. He has one adult child by the first wife; Cathleen has no children. For six months they lived on his $12,000 from a shrunken pension and her $28,000 as a factory worker — until severe injuries in an auto accident five months after their wedding forced her out of that job. She eventually qualified for $12,000 a year in disability insurance.

Their two incomes are not enough to cover expenses, which bothers Mrs. Beggerow, although not enough to badger her husband to take a job, any job. She respects him too much for that, she says. Instead, she finds ways to make money herself, in activities she enjoys. She is taking in work as a seamstress, baking pastries for parties and selling merchandise for others on eBay, collecting a fee. Still, she says, she hopes to land a part-time clerical job. “The comfort of a paycheck every week would take a load off my mind,” she said.

While she is tolerant of her husband’s reluctance to work, respecting his current pursuits, she is not above looking for a job he would consider suitable. “I look at the employment ads every day,’’ she said, “and every so often I find one that I think might be right up his alley.”

Less Concern About the Future

Recently there was an opening for an editor-writer at a small travel magazine published in a nearby town. “I applied,” Mr. Beggerow said, “but the publisher did not seem to want someone my age.”

Meanwhile the Beggerows’ savings are shrinking. This year, for the first time, they have drawn down so much from their 401(k)’s they have been forced to pay early-withdrawal penalties. But Mr. Beggerow resists being stampeded. “The future is always a concern, but I no longer allow myself to dwell on it,” he said, waving aside, in his new and precarious life, the preparations for retirement and old age that were a feature of his 30 years as a steelworker. “When you are in the mode of having money coming in,” he explained, “naturally you think about planning and saving. And then when you don’t have the money coming in, you think less about the future, at least money-wise. It is still a concern, but not a concern that keeps me up at night, not in this life that I am now leading.”

Men like Mr. Beggerow, neither working nor looking for a job, also have become more common in the popular culture, making the phenomenon more acceptable. On the television show “Seinfeld,” Cosmo Kramer, who did not work, and George Costanza, who regularly lost jobs, were beloved figures. Personal-finance magazines whose circulations have grown rapidly over the last 25 years also encourage not working — by telling readers how to afford retirement at 50 and by painting not working as the good life, which it apparently is for a small number of wealthy men. About 8 percent of non-working men between 30 and 54 lived in households that had more than $100,000 of income in 2004.

“Men don’t feel a need to be in a career, not as much as they once did,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Nor do men have the incentive they once had to pursue a career, not when employers are no longer committed to them.”

Mr. Priga, the former Xerox engineer who lives in Los Angeles, has been wandering in this latter Diaspora. He is a tall, thin man with a perpetually dour expression. His dress — old jeans and a faded khaki shirt — seemed out of place in the upscale Beverly Hills restaurant where he was interviewed for this article. But his education and skill were not out of place.

Mr. Priga is an electrical engineer skilled in computer technology, and much involved, as he tells the story, in writing early versions of Internet and e-mail software for banks and other companies. A divorce in 1996 left him with custody of his three children. One of them had behavioral problems and to care for the boy he dropped out of steady work for a while, mortgaging his house to raise money and designing Web sites as a freelancer.

He re-entered the work force in 2000, joining Xerox at just over $100,000 a year as a systems designer for a new project, which did not last. In the aftermath of the dot-com bust, Xerox downsized and Mr. Priga was let go in January 2003.

From Prison to Joblessness

“I’ve been through a lot of layoffs over the years, and there is a certain procedure you follow,” he said. “You contact the headhunters. You go looking for other work. You do all of that, and this time around it didn’t work.” So he went back to designing Web sites as a freelancer, postponing the purchase of health insurance. No work has come his way since March, and even if people had hired him to design Web sites for them, Mr. Priga would not consider that real employment.
His father is his standard. At Mr. Priga’s age, 54, “my father was with Rockwell International designing the fiber optic backbone for U.S. Navy ships,” he said. “He got a regular paycheck. He had retirement benefits, medical benefits, all of that. I’m at that age and I don’t see that as even possible. I’ve kind of written off the idea completely. I’m more like a casual laborer.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics determines who is working through a monthly survey of 65,000 representative households. People are asked if they did any work for pay in the week before the survey, including self-employment. For Mr. Beggerow and Mr. Priga, the answer has been no.
The same goes for Rodney Bly, a 41-year-old Philadelphia man struggling with a prison record, although he has had income — from off-the-books work that he refuses to think of as employment.

Mr. Bly, a lanky, neatly dressed six-footer, was in and out of jail, mostly on drug convictions, from 1996 until 2003, but has been clean since then, he said in an interview last month. He has even been a leader of an Alcoholics Anonymous-style group of former addicts who meet regularly and do their best to stay off drugs and out of jail. Mr. Bly has been living in a recovery shelter for addicts and shows up occasionally for meals at St. Francis Inn, a soup kitchen and health clinic in a poor North Philadelphia neighborhood that tries to help ex-convicts get work and keep it.

He has worked pretty regularly, distributing flyers. But that brings him only $270 a week, most of which goes to the shelter for rent, utilities and food. More to the point, the work is off the books, which makes Mr. Bly invisible in the national statistics as a member of the work force.
Still, he has a girlfriend, reports Karen Pushaw, a staff member at St. Francis, “and that grounds him, keeps him looking for legitimate work.”

Ms. Pushaw tries to help. At her encouragement, he applied for 25 jobs this spring but received no offers, not even an interview. The obstacle is two felony convictions, one for car theft, the other for three instances of drug possession. “Because of the two felonies, I can’t get a job as a security guard or a sales person or a short-order cook,” Mr. Bly said. “I can be a pot washer or a dish washer, but I can’t get a job that pays more than $8 an hour, not a legitimate one. I’m excluded.”
Amanda Cox contributed reporting for this article from New York.

A Trip To Chicago

2006-08-17T03:06:00.000-05:00

Or: Here He Comes! Ever’body Hide And I’ll Ambush Him At The Pass!

Due to popular request from my friends (all three of them) I have written the following trip report. It is the truth (mostly) and covers events before, during and after my trip to Chicago for an interview with Tucker Carlson.

Monday, July 31st, 2006 9:00 AM - Today is the day the article featuring yours truly was published in the New York Times. The phone rang, the wife answered, said it was for me. A very pleasant female voice answered:
Adrian : Hello, Alan Beggerow?
Me: Yes.
Adrian: This is Adrian from the Tucker Carlson show.
Me: Who?
Adrian: Tucker read the article in the New York Times, and has said get Alan here for an interview!
Me: No kiddin’?
Adrian: Would you be willing to do that?
Me: Sure.
Adrian: Alright! Thank you! We’re gonna make this happen! We’re gonna make this happen! Is there a television station in Rock Falls?
Me: Uh, no.
Adrian: What’s the nearest big city?
Me: Oh, either Rockford or the Quad Cities. Each about an hour’s drive.
Adrian: Good! We’ll get this done today! Alright!

Adrian gave me her number and said she would call me back with all the details. As I hung up the phone, my wife asked me who it was. I told her, it was the Tucker Carlson show requesting an interview.

“Who?” she replied.
“Tucker Carlson.”
“Who’s that?”
“He’s got a show on MSNBC and wants an interview.”
Evidently my propensity for leg-pulling caused her to doubt my sincerity, for she said, “Will you be serious!”

After my assurances that it indeed was the truth, I settled in to wait for the return call in front of the computer. I went to the on-line version of The New York Times and looked at the picture of my wife, me (and our little dog too) on the front page. Is this what Andy Warhol meant when he said, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”?

9:45 AM - Adrian is back on the phone. No mention is made of Rockford or the Quad Cities. Now it’s Madison, Wis. or Chicago. I told her it didn’t matter to me if they were going to drive me either place. She responded with her usual enthusiasm, “We’re gonna make this happen!” and told me she’d call back.

In the meantime, another phone call. This time it was Ron Mott from the NBC Today show. Gosh, by now my normally modest nature was being threatened by thoughts of over-importance. He wanted an interview that same afternoon. I regretfully had to tell him that I was already committed to the Tucker Carlson show, and was not available in the afternoon. After some pleading (at least I took it to be pleading) from the reporter to cancel my previous engagement and take his, I stood firm in my resolve to honor my commitments, no matter how much my fame increased.

Now I’ve always been a daydreamer, even been known to develop some wild fantasies in my vivid imagination. But I never thought that two major television shows would ever be fighting over an interview with me. This is by no means the most desirable fantasy I’ve ever had. My fantasy as a young man that two raving, buxom beauty queens were fighting over my attentions still holds the #1 spot for that. But at my age, two television shows fighting over me will do.

So I sat and waited for the phone to ring. Within the next two hours, it rang incessantly. Adrian called me, someone that works for Adrian called me, and someone that worked for the one that worked for Adrian called me. I had to email them a picture of my wife and myself, the interview would now be held in Chicago, would I agree to have a car pick me up and take me there. As I felt my fame increasing, I suddenly realized that all of the calls and the interview itself weren’t for my benefit. It was all for the benefit of the show and its ratings. I knew of Tucker Carlson’s reputation, and had seen his show before. He’s an ultra-conservative, and I wondered how he would treat me in an interview. The Times article more or less was making the point that for so many men my age to be out of work meant that perhaps, just perhaps the economy wasn’t doing as well as the administration says. Would Tucker roast my butt, or would he be nice?

12:00 NOON- Adrian called and said they couldn’t get a car to take me to Chicago on such short notice. She offered to pay me $200 to drive myself into Chicago to the NBC Tower downtown. I’ve been to downtown Chicago 4 times in my entire life. My driving skills are good, and I’ve driven in big cities before. But call me a coward, I won’t drive in downtown Chicago. Not even for 200 bucks. For me to turn down that kind of money must mean I’m serious. The tones that Adrian had in her voice almost made me change my mind. It sounded like someone just ran over her dog or slapped her mother. It was a terrible sound, unlike the exuberant voice I’d heard before. But it was only momentary. With renewed vigor and a return to her optimistic, get-‘er-done voice she told me she’d call right back. She was going to make this happen! After so many calls and aborted plans, I must admit I was beginning to wonder.

1:45 PM- Adrian called right back. Would I consider driving to Madison Wisconsin to the NBC affiliate there? For $200? I was starting to feel more important by the minute, so I decided to do a little negotiating. Seeings how Madison was further away than Chicago, how ‘bout making it $300? “Yes! Absolutely! We’re gonna make this happen! Yes!”, she said, over and over. By this time, her rah-rah attitude was wearing thin.

I told her I could be on the way within 15 minutes. Didn’t tell her, but I needed a shower. Can’t be going on national TV smelling like a skunk, you know. And 15 minutes, despite the large surface area I have to wash, is sufficient to do a thorough job. I’ve been doing it a long time, and have gotten rather efficient at it. She said ‘Great! Be at the studio by 3:15! Here’s the address…” It was then I realized she actually had no idea where Rock Falls IL is, for it takes at least 2 hours to get to Madison from here. When I told her that, her voice changed again. With regret, she told me it just wasn’t going to work out. But she assured me she wouldn’t give up, and would try again tomorrow.

I thought about calling the Today show reporter, but I was tired of talking on the phone. Besides, I didn’t want to seem like I was over-anxious. That wouldn’t fit my image as a person of fame, now would it? No, by golly! They want me, they can call me! Who do they think they are anyway?

Tuesday, August 1st, 10:00 AM - The phone rings, but instead of Adrian’s voice it is Ron Mott from the Today show. We talked, and arranged for an interview at 2:15 PM, as I had a previous appointment at 1:00. It was nice to talk to someone on the phone that wasn’t so effervescent. So the Tucker Carlson show lost out! Good enough for them! The today show was a lock, didn’t have umpteen phone calls. Good riddance!

12:50 PM – I’m on my way to my appointment and my cell phone rings. It’s the photographer for the Today show. He’s gotten into town early and wanted to come to the house and set up his gear. I assured him that I would be tied up until 2, but that he could go to the house and wait if he liked.

2:05 PM – I turned the corner on the street to my house with visions of an NBC vehicle parked in my driveway. With neighbors standing in their front yards and looking out their windows gawking and wondering what was going on. I got to my house and my vision was shattered. No NBC vehicle, no gawking neighbors. Now what?

My wife was standing by the phone and said, “You’ve got a message.” She played the message back, and it was Ron Mott. The photographer was suddenly reassigned to cover another story, as the head honchos at The Today Show had changed their minds and pulled the story. Oh well, such is the price of fading fame. But I did wonder. Just what story could be more important than an interview with me? Was it the Mel Gibson DUI story? Could it be that The Today Show thought a sordid tale of a raving intoxicated movie star was more newsworthy than an interview with a charismatic guy like myself? I was finding out just how fickle and unpredictable the media can be. And the Tucker Carlson Show didn’t call either. My despondency at the turn of events was overwhelming, so I took a nap.

Wednesday, August 2nd, 10:00 AM - Guess who’s on the phone. “We’re gonna get this done! Yes!” Lucky me. Adrian asked me if I was free today for the interview. I told her to hang on a minute and I’d check my appointment book. I riffled through the phone book to make it sound good. I then answered that by some quirk of fate, my usually full calendar was uncharacteristically void of obligations for the day. Another barrage of rah-rahs, and she told me she’d call me right back.

10:42 AM – Adrian calls and says there will be a car to pick me up and take me to Chicago at my house by 1:30. I tell her we can’t get there by 3:15 if we leave at 1:30. She assures me the livery service guarantees that they will get me to Chicago in time. Whatever. It’s your money.

10:47 AM - Adrian calls. The livery service has got a vehicle but no driver. Would I be willing to drive to Chicago myself for $200? Hmmm…seems to me we’ve had this conversation before. No, I won’t drive to Chicago. She’ll call me back.

11:07 AM - Adrian calls. Am I sure I won’t drive to Chicago? I reassure her I won’t, but that I’m still open to driving to Madison. For $300 that is. She’ll call me back.

11:15 AM – Guess who? She’d rather I go to Chicago. Madison’s out. She’ll attempt to get a vehicle (and a driver with it). She’ll call me back.

11:25 AM – Got a driver AND a vehicle. They’ll pick me up at 1:30. I don’t even bother to tell her it’s not enough time for the trip.

11:55 AM – All right, here’s the low-down. The livery service thought I lived in Rockford instead of Rock Falls. It is possible to get to Chicago from Rockford if you leave at 1:30, but not if you leave from Rock Falls. How did I know this? Adrian told me. Her voice was full of emotion and pleading as she asked if a vehicle picked me up at 1:00 SHARP, if I would PLEASE consent to the interview. As much as I was enjoying hearing a woman beg, I told her yes. You can imagine her reaction. It was sickening. My reaction by this time could be described as underwhelming. I would believe it when I was in the vehicle on my way to Chicago.

1:00 PM SHARP! – The livery vehicle pulls up to our house. By this time my wife had asked to go along. I made her give a solemn promise that she wouldn’t try to steal my thunder, and she agreed. We were escorted by the driver to a very nice van, and away we went.

2:00 PM – We’re making excellent time, already passed the Dekalb rest stop a while ago. The driver listened to the Chicago traffic reports on the radio and seemed to know what he was doing. Speaking of the driver, I’ve known some name droppers in my day. You know, the people that drop names of other people and expect that you actually know who in the hell they’re talking about. The driver didn’t drop names of people, but names of places he’d worked. He was in his sixties, and had worked for many different companies in many different capacities. He rattled off these names with great pride, but I wasn’t too impressed. I didn’t know most of them, and besides, I had worked for the same company for 30 years (30 years, 4 months and 2 days, to be precise), so it sounded like this guy had trouble holding a job. That, or he had learned the value of being a moving target.

He prattled about all the different companies so fast, that I couldn’t understand him most of the time, but here’s some examples: Rottenblumer Corp. as a salesman; Inkledinkle International as a quality control engineer (I think they make widgets); Taught a Dale Carnegie Course, and a myriad of other jobs. He now is retired and works as a driver for the livery service, between 45-60 hours a week. I suppose the definition of retirement is a personal thing, but those kinds of hours don’t sound like retirement to me. But perhaps, despite his constant changing of jobs, he slowed down with age and couldn’t be as swift of a moving target. The steady drone of the tires on the pavement and Mr. Important’s voice caused me to nod off occasionally. But it didn’t bother him. When I woke up, he was still talking. Perhaps he was used to others doing the same thing.

During his monologue, he was talking about how the economy has changed, how it was getting more difficult for companies to be competitive. I agreed. He then proceeded to lay the lion’s share of the blame onto organized labor. I didn’t agree, and suggested that we change the subject. Evidently the look on my face told the story, for he went back to name dropping.

2:15 PM – Interspersed within his monologue, the driver’s cell phone was constantly ringing, with most calls coming from his wife. I can relate. A cell phone in the hands of a wife can be an annoyance at best and dangerous at worst. As soon as he hung up, I heard it ring again. He fumbled for his phone, but realized it wasn’t his phone ringing.

“Oh, that must be MY cell phone ringing,” I said. It was the reporter from the NY Times. He just wanted to know how things were going. I told him what was up, and he gave me some advice, “Whatever you do, don’t admit to being lazy.” Strange advice, I thought. I was later to find out it was good advice.

2:40 PM – I might as well have country bumpkin stamped on my forehead, because every time I’ve been to downtown Chicago I’m always looking up in the air at the buildings. But it’s a natural reaction for someone from an area where the tallest structure is the city water tower down the road.

The driver, despite his monotony, knew how to drive downtown. Weaving in and out, cutting off buses and taxi cabs, creating his own lane of traffic when necessary. His goal was to get us to the NBC Tower by 3:00. He had gotten 3 phone calls from Adrian (were we really gonna make this happen after all?) checking on his progress. But barring any traffic snarls (which I was confident our driver could handle) we’d be right on schedule.

3:07 PM – The driver pulled up in front of the NBC Tower, and gave me his card with his cell phone number on it so we could call when we were finished. The NBC Tower was impressive. We walked in through a revolving door that was framed in brass, and after walking up some stairs we saw a crowd of people behind brass railings. We found out later that the Jerry Springer Show tapes there. I don’t know if the crowd was waiting to get into that show or not. Didn’t hear anyone chanting “Jerry! Jerry!”

We walked to a large circular desk that I took for the information area. Told the attendant why we were there, he made a phone call and then asked for our picture ID’s. He ran them through a scanner, and out came an NBC ID to put on our person, and LEAVE it on our person at all times. Security was pretty tight, and I could imagine a pot of boiling oil waiting for anyone that wasn’t supposed to be in there that didn’t have an ID.

As we took the IDs the attendant told us to make sure that we turned them in before we left. I heard a voice behind us say, “Yes, please turn them in. You won’t get very far if you don’t. They’ll chase you down.” I turned to see a slightly build, short bald man. He introduced himself and told us he would take us to the studio.

He was very personable as we rode the elevator up to the studio. He had to use a plastic ID card to get into the studio door. I guess I was expecting something different, for the studio consisted of a chair in front of a picture of the Chicago skyline, and what looked like a fancy home video camera on a tripod in front of it. The rest of the ‘studio’ consisted of desks with folks typing away on computers.

We were introduced to the makeup person, a lady by the name of Chiquita. No, she wasn’t a Latino. She was a young black woman, and she escorted us down the hall. Again, I was expecting something different. There wasn’t a big fancy makeup chair, but just a plain chair that she sat me in. She placed a barber bib over me, and proceeded to dab some funky smelling stuff on my face. “This is just a basic, simple makeup,” she said as she proceeded. After she got through dabbing my face, she took a brush and brushed my face with some sort of powder. I told her to make sure and make me look pretty, but she just laughed. Perhaps the task was too great.

After that, she combed my hair. After every hair was in place, she told me to close my eyes. Hairspray! What stinkin’ stuff THAT was. After the makeup ordeal, I asked to use the facilities (the bathroom, silly!) As I washed my hands I looked at my made-up self in the mirror. I actually did look better, but I suppose that’s no big deal. Most anything would be an improvement. The usual dark circles under my eyes were gone, and my skin had a downright healthy glow to it. My double chin was still prominent, but I was born with that. But my hair! The hairspray was like helmet-in-a-can. I could have whacked my head against the door and not felt a thing. But I refrained from testing that theory. I did touch it, and it felt weird. I even sprinkled a little water on it, just call me curious. It beaded up and rolled off. There wasn’t a hair out of place. No rebellious hair had a chance with all that goop on it.

3:27 PM – There I was, all gussied up and waiting my turn before the camera. My wife and I sat on chairs along the wall of the ‘studio’, and I leaned my head back against the wall. Not a smart thing to do. When the cameraman (the same guy that escorted us up to the studio) told me to get in the chair and he’d get me wired up, the back of my head stuck to the wall. I gently pulled my head away, and most likely there still is a spot on that wall with a few of my hairs stuck to it.

They got me wired for sound, got the hot lights focused on me. I was due to go ‘on’ in a few minutes. Chiquita was there waiting with more makeup, and it was a good thing. It’s not that the hot lights caused me to perspire copiously, I was just plain sweating like a hog (even if hogs really don’t sweat. That’s why they roll around in the mud to keep cool). I could feel the sweat rolling out from underneath my hair helmet and down my neck. But a few dabs with the makeup sponge, and I was once again gorgeous.

So I sat with an earpiece jammed in my ear. Turns out the only ones that could hear what was going on and what was going to be said were the cameraman and myself. After a few sound tests (4, 3, 2, 1, over and over again), I heard the voice of Tucker himself:

Tucker: Hello, Mr. Beggerow. Thanks for being on the show.
Me: Thanks for having me.
Tucker: Have you gotten any comments about the Times article from people?
Me: And how. Doesn’t seem to be any half-way opinions about it. Either people think I’m a lazy no good bum, or they give me an atta boy.
Tucker: Interesting…I won’t tell you which camp I’m in.

Like it was a big secret or something. There were two more commercial breaks before I went on, and Tucker’s lead-in to the first break was:

Tucker: Coming up- Isn’t any job better than no job? Later in the show we’ll meet a man that doesn’t think so. He spends all his time with his hobbies, sleeps late, and refuses to work, as he sponges off his wife that has three jobs.

Holy crap! This was going to be nastier than I thought. I looked at the cameraman, and I saw him close his eyes and lower his head. He knew better than me what I was in for. “Hey, we’re gonna have fun with this!”, I said. He perked back up and gave me a big smile. Perhaps he was concerned about how I would take the shellacing I was about to get. Like I said, he was a little guy, and I’m a big lummox. After a few more minutes, Tucker came back on with his intro to my interview :

Tucker: Welcome back. Isn‘t a low-wage job better than no job at all? Well, not if you‘re one of the million of American men who‘ve been laid off and refuse to take jobs they view as demeaning or low paying. My next guest is one those men. He spends his days dabbling at hobbies at home. He stays up late, sleeps until 11:00 in the morning, all while living off his wife. Alan Beggerow lives in Rockfalls, Illinois. He joins me now from Chicago. Mr. Beggerow, thanks for coming on.

And it went downhill from there. I did notice that before the interview started, the others in the office were looking at me and smiling. After it started, all I saw was their backs. But I held my own, I guess. Not much else I could have done. I felt as helpless as a one legged man at an ass-kicking contest, so I just smiled my way through it. There was no way I was going to let that snot-nosed punk piss me off. He sure did try his best though. After the interview and during yet another commercial break, Tucker came back on and talked to me through the earpiece:

Tucker: Thank you again (chuckle) for being on the show (snicker). You’re a (Ha-ha) real good sport!
Me: You’re welcome. Like I had a chance to be anything but a good sport?

3:56 PM - After the interview was over, the cameraman took off his headset and told me how great I was, how well I handled it. No doubt he says something similar to everyone in the same position, but he did show signs of relief that I kept my temper. They unwired me, took me back to the make-up room and as I wiped the glop off my face, Chiquita also told me how well I handled the interview. But the interview had broken the spell. My egotistic flirt with fame had been brought back down to reality.
The cameraman took my wife and I back down stairs. We turned in our ID’s and he walked us out to the back door of the building. We walked by the Jerry Springer studio, and my wife and I both were taken with the fact that just upstairs we had gone through a somewhat similar show, but with one big difference. Jerry Springer makes no bones or excuses about what his show is, and admits it freely. Tucker on the other hand, tries to come across as a legitimate ‘journalist’ when all he really does is pander to his ratings by using his sensational and obnoxious opinion. I’ll take Jerry Springer over Tucker any day. He’s more honest.
The cameraman called the driver to come and get us, and he gave us each a bottle of cold water. That was a nice gesture, as I needed to replenish some fluids due to the hot lights and all, but a couple hundred bucks wouldn’t have been refused. We both wondered why the driver was taking so long getting back.

4:17 PM – The driver finally showed up, and we got in the van. The cameraman waved as we left and entered the traffic of downtown Chicago. It was obvious we weren’t going to get back home in the record time we got to Chicago. But the driver showed his skill once again as he hopped curbs, ran red lights, and barely missed pedestrians as he made his way through the conglomeration of humanity. All the while, he chattered away and continued dropping names as I leaned my head against the window of the van.

4:55 – After nodding off a few times after unsticking my head from the van window, I noticed that traffic was beginning to thin out. The driver suddenly became curious about my retirement and what I do with myself. He found it incredible that I didn’t work. Why, he works 45-60 hours a week! I relayed my good tidings at his ambitious retirement, and tried to change the subject. But he persisted. How did we get by? How can a man only 53 retire in the prime of my working career? I told him that since my working career consisted of 30 years of steel mill work, I had no desire to get back in the rat race. He looked at me incredulously. It was then that I had an idea why the driver took so long getting back. Was he sitting in a tavern someplace in downtown Chicago, watching the interview? Rooting for Tucker? It was not outside the realm of possibility. That could explain the persistent questioning. But I already had enough rocks thrown at me for one day, so I ignored him and fell back asleep.

6:55 PM – It’s been a long day, and home was but a few blocks away. My wife was happy, for she got home in time to see ‘America’s Got Talent’, I’m happy because I’ll not have to listen to the name-dropper any more. Now I know why my gracious offer to my wife to ride in the front seat on the way back was declined. It’s easier to ignore a blow-hard from the distance of a back seat.

Once we were home, my wife settled in front of the TV, and expressed her desire to eat something. So being the dutiful, loving husband that I am, I provided her with sustenance. I went and picked up some sandwiches.

7:17 PM – Most people when they watch TV are sedentary. They sit and watch, sometimes doze off. Not my wife. With the shows that she watches, she always ‘gets into’ them. Wheel of Fortune finds her on the edge of her seat when she’s figured out the answer, telling the contestants what it is. Like they could hear her. America’s Got Talent is the same. When the judges make a negative comment about an act she likes, she expresses her opinion about the judge in no uncertain terms. The same happens when she doesn’t like an act and the judges do. Many times my wife is more entertaining than the show. But I had bigger fish to fry.

I found the Tucker interview online. The website had a picture of me, punkin' head, double chin and all. It was not a good picture. I looked like I had just been wakened after an all-night bender. But I must admit, there was not a hair out of place. I watched the interview and laughed. What a joke it was! I told my wife that she could watch the interview. But she hastily told me not until 9:00 when her show was over. She does have her priorities.

9:15 PM – My wife watched the interview. The first time around, I heard language from her that was less than complimentary about Tucker. So much so that she had to listen to the interview more than once to hear it all. I came to the conclusion that it was just as well that she couldn’t hear Tucker at the actual time of the interview. She might have made a scene, bless her heart, right on national television. Now that would have been cool!

EPILOGUE - So what has been the results of the interview? Not much, really. Had a few phone calls and emails from people, all of them quite supportive, and one call from a guy in Tennessee that said he sent an email to Tucker and “ripped him a new one.”

But the one incident that tops them all is what my wife said to someone on the phone. I wasn’t home, but she told me about it. The call was from a person that was instrumental in getting me involved with the NY Times article in the first place. I will refrain from mentioning his name. Not because he’s innocent or anything. He’s guilty as hell, and I will get even. I have informed this person of my intentions, but not how or when. I am getting a great deal of satisfaction knowing that this person, when he least expects it, will get what’s coming to them. Anyway, my wife told this guy, “What do I think of Tucker? If you drop the first letter from his first name and replace it with an ‘F’, that’s my opinion of Tucker!” Ah, is it any wonder why I love the woman so much?

'Possum Living Skills

2006-08-17T01:08:00.001-05:00

"I think that the US is going to need folks with "possum living" skills in the future. "

The above quote is taken from a comment left by Teri on another post. I like the term, 'possum living skills. Never heard it put that way before. I've heard of living frugally, living a spartan life, and just plain livin' on the cheap. But whatever you prefer to call it, 'possum living skills have certainly come in handy for me.

So why use a 'possum as an example of living frugally? By the way, it is 'possum. Only biologists and such use the 'correct' name opossum. Well, a 'possum (the North American variety is the type I'm talking about) is a very resourceful critter. So well adapted to life that they haven't changed for many millennia. I have read about some of the 'possum's ancestors that lived in the same times as the saber-toothed tiger and wooly mammoth. 'Possums that stood 8 feet tall, and could be pretty nasty (Oppossumus maximus nastius?) . But obviously the more diminutive cousin of these monstrosities were better equipped for survival, for I've never heard of a modern day sighting of the big ones.

A 'possum is an omnivore, which is a nice way to say that they'll eat anything. They tend to be nocturnal. The picture I've included shows that even a 'possum can have their cuter moments. But with a long hairless tail, fur that looks like a dirty dustmop and a thin bony face, they'll most likely not win the best looking critter award. But we're talking survival here. If I had my choice between livin' and eatin' versus good looks, I'd take livin' and eatin' every time.

They also have the famous survival tactic of 'playing dead'. I've seen 'possums do this, and it is a strange sight. They go into convulsions, keel over, hang out their tongue and roll their eyes. Sure looked like it was dead to me. Biologists still don't know why they do it, or whether it is really 'playing 'possum', or it is a bodily reaction to stress. But be forewarned, 'possums don't always play dead. Sometimes they get quite aggresive when cornered, and with a mouthful of needle-like teeth they can do some damage. They also on occasion hiss like a snake. A most disagreeable sound. So what possesses a 'possum to decide whether to play dead, hiss, or fight? Nobody knows. Perhaps a 'possum, like a human, gets up on the wrong side of the bed and is cranky, or maybe they just don't want to deal with things. In any case, their defensive mechanisms have no doubt been a factor in the species' longevity.

Some 'possum living skills pointers:

Live on the cheap. You'd be surprised how little you can live on if you really try.
Get your priorities straight. You want to keep working all of your life at a job you hate, or do you want the opportunity to be like a 'possum in a persimmon tree? Folks from the south have told me that when the persimmons get ripe, the 'possums are happy. Find out what makes you happy. What are your 'persimmons'?
Pick your battles wisely. Know when to hiss, to be aggressive, to play dead.
Don't neglect the night. Sit outside in the dark once in awhile. There are less visual distractions at night, and you can think better.
Good looks aren't nearly as important as getting enough to eat.

Didn't think 'possums were that smart, now did you?

Shame For Shame, Oh Idle Middle Class!

2006-08-14T00:40:00.000-05:00

Bye Bye Bootstraps

By David Brooks
THE NEW YORK TIMES

August 4, 2006

In all healthy societies, the middle-class people have wholesome middle-class values while the upper-crust blue bloods lead lives of cosseted leisure interrupted by infidelity, overdoses and hunting accidents. But in America today we've got this all bollixed up.

Through some screw-up in the moral superstructure, we now have a plutocratic upper class infused with the staid industriousness of Ben Franklin, while we are apparently seeing the emergence of a Wal-Mart leisure class – devil-may-care middle-age slackers who live off home-equity loans and disability payments so they can surf the History Channel and enjoy fantasy football leagues.

For the first time in human history, the rich work longer hours than the proletariat.

Today's super-wealthy no longer go off on four-month grand tours of Europe, play gin-soaked Gatsbyesque croquet tournaments or spend hours doing needlepoint while thinking in full paragraphs like the heroines of Jane Austen novels. Instead, their lives are marked by sleep deprivation and conference calls, and their idea of leisure is jetting off to Aspen to hear Zbigniew Brzezinski lead panels titled “Beyond Unipolarity.”

Meanwhile, down the income ladder, the percentage of middle-age men who have dropped out of the labor force has doubled over the past 40 years, to more than 12 percent. Many of the men have disabilities. Others struggle to find work. But in a recent dinner party-dominating article, The New York Times' Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt describe two men who are not exactly Horatio Alger wonder boys.

Christopher Priga, 54, earned a six-figure income as an electrical engineer at Xerox but is now shown relaxing at a coffee shop with a book and a smoke while waiting for a job commensurate with his self-esteem. “To be honest, I'm kind of looking for the home run,” he said. “There's no point in hitting for base hits.”

Alan Beggerow, once a steelworker, now sleeps nine hours a day, reads two or three books a week, writes Amazon reviews, practices the piano and writes Louis L'Amour-style westerns. “I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,” he said.

His wife takes in work as a seamstress and bakes to help support the family, as they eat away at their savings. “The future is always a concern,” Beggerow said, “but I no longer allow myself to dwell on it.”

Many readers no doubt observed that if today's prostate-aged moochers wanted to loaf around all day reading books and tossing off their vacuous opinions into the ether, they should have had the foresight to become newspaper columnists.

Others will note sardonically that the only really vibrant counterculture in the United States today is laziness.

But I try not to judge these gentlemen harshly. What I see is a migration of values. Once upon a time, middle-class men would have defined their dignity by their ability to work hard, provide for their family and live as self-reliant members of society. But these fellows, to judge by their quotations, define their dignity the same way the subjects of Thorstein Veblen's “The Theory of the Leisure Class” defined theirs.

They define their dignity by the loftiness of their thinking. They define their dignity not by their achievement, but by their personal enlightenment, their autonomy, by their distance from anything dishonorably menial or compulsory.

In other words, the values that used to prevail among the manorial estates have migrated to parts of mass society while the grinding work ethic of the immigrant prevails in the stratosphere.

This is terrible. It's a blow first of all to literature. If P.G. Wodehouse were writing today, Bertie Wooster would be at Goldman Sachs and Jeeves would be judging a meth-mouth contest at Sturgis. Anna Karenina would be Miranda Priestly from “The Devil Wears Prada.” “The House of Mirth” would become “The House of Broadband.”

More important, this reversal is a blow to the natural order of the universe. The only comfort I've had from these disturbing trends is another recent story in The Times. Joyce Wadler reported that women in places like the Hamptons are still bedding down with the hired help. R. Couri Hay, the society editor of Hamptons magazine, celebrated rich women's tendency to sleep with their home renovators.

“Nobody knows,” he said. “The contractor isn't going to tell because the husband is writing the check, the wife isn't going to tell, and you get a better job because she's providing a fringe benefit. Everybody wins.”

Thank God somebody is standing up for traditional morality