The Law of the Duck!
Posted: Saturday, February 28, 2009
by Tex Norman
A few years back, when I was still teaching school, the vice principal begged me to work a Saturday Work Detail. Kids that had broken school rules too often were assigned Saturday Work Detail where they would go around the campus in groups of 15, on Saturdays and pick up trash. Each group of petulant pupils needed an adult school staff member making sure the kids did what they were being asked to do and not destroy school property while serving their sentence. Now I am not a strict disciplinarian and I don't enjoy Gestapo duty, but they were going to pay me $25 and it was just for three hours. They gave me a golf cart to go up and down while the kids picked up stuff.
For a long time lower middle class folks were in a place similar to me doing my one and only Saturday Work Detail. We have been pelted by economic impacts and we have had trouble figuring out where these econo-bombs were from or who was doing the pelting.
For a long time the money suffering folk turned their aggravation toward the government. It made sense. After all, if you got a pay check you also got a pay stub and on that stub you could see all that money going out of your pocket. It seemed as if the bad guy was Government Spending. Millions of working folk started voting Republican because that was the party that claimed they wanted to cut back government spending. The rhetoric sounded so sincere and convincing, and, to sweeten the deal, the Republicans added a lot of Christian Conservative issues like anti-abortion, anti-gay stuff. The Republican Party became, for a long time, the party that supported Christian moral tenets of faith and they promised to kick Uncle Sam in the ass and take back some of our money. By including these moral issues it encouraged lots of moral, fundamentalist conservative Christians to keep voting Republican even when it became clear that they were not doing better (pay check wise) because this was the party that supported their religious values. For the last 8 years a large segment of Americans have voted against their own economic interests because Republicans promised to protect the sanctity of hetero-marriage, and to over turn Rowe v Wade.
You can, for a while (for a long time as it turned out) get people to vote against their own pocket books if you cater to their religious views. It seems as if this tendency is not inexhaustible. Today it seems as if we have figured something out: the culprit lobbing these economic hurts at us may not be the government, but it may be Big Business that Republicans have catered to for way too long. Now we read about the Corporate excesses and their disregard for the citizens of the United States and some of us are getting pissed off.
In a quick scan of news items I uncovered the following examples:
In 2006 Loyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, got a $53.4 million dollar bonus. In 2006 this was the record. Mr. Blankfein broke the bonus record again in 2007 when he was given a $67.9 million dollar bonus. Then in 2008 Mr. Blankfein's company, Goldman Sachs got a $10 billion dollar bailout . The question of need is debatable. Do we NEED to bailout banks and financial institutions to protect the economy of our people? Maybe. Maybe not. What chaps my hide is that the CEOs and other upper level management folk are getting huge bonuses regardless of the success of their companies.
In December Executive Vice President of Merrill Lynch, Peter Kraus quite and was given a $25 million dollar severance package, one of those so called Golden Parachutes.
In one news report I read that one business applied for bailout funds, and the entire process took 27 minutes. If you apply for welfare the average time to complete the application process is 4 hours.
An heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune wrote on the Huffington Post that,
For the mega-rich, a recession brings with it the ability [for the rich] to live well at a lower cost and with less of a hassle.
So for the mega rich a recession is not a recession, it is an opportunity to live well, hassle free, spending freely in a buyer's market, a buyer's market because there are so few buyer's those still lucky enough to stay in business will make sweet deals to anyone who still has money to spend.
The economy of the US is in such a bind that the only entity big enough and with enough authority to fix it is the Government. This is scary, because there are so many cooks involved that the stew created on the fly and often ends up tasking like something you wouldn't want to step in, if you know what I mean. We have little choice but to demand that the government get their best and brightest and figure out some plan to get our economy under control and hurt as few people as possible. Who is lobbing the green fruit at us? Everyone. No matter where we turn we keep getting binged in the back of the head by Republicans, Democrats, Corporations, the War Industry, local and foreign investors, money mover crooks like Madoff, wand on and on it goes.
When I was growing up we had something in my home called the Law of the Duck. My dad would talk and we would all duck. Well it is time for all of us to follow the Law of the Duck. We are being pelted from every side and we must be on guard all the time.
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