… The Political Version.
Part One
I just can’t do it. There is no way I’m going to vote for Obama. I’ve heard nothing but rhetoric, questionable relations, and negative press about the man. I’ll agree with his assessment that we need change, but the kind of change he seems capable of isn’t change at all. (No I do not believe we’ll be headed directly into a socialist Muslim caliph state - the country is already being given away consistently in a quieter manner.)
You can call my vote wasted if you like. There’s no way I’m going to vote for McCain either. On the positive press, I don’t agree with the more “moral” issues the members of the Republican Party supposedly stand for. On the negative press, I don’t think McCain is the sort of leader I want representing my country to the world. No, I don’t want a beatnik flower child begging for peaceful relations, but after eight years of quick draw McGraw I’m hesitant to put my vote in for more of the same.
I don’t have confidence in either party. Mom’s been trying to convert me into a republican; she’s sent several thought provoking essays written by independent people not running for office that really made me think. I saw a similar pro-republican message linked in :iconkata:’s journal, and it made some very good points against the democratic party. I’ve read quite a few news articles detailing why a vote for one or the other is a vote spent unwisely, and I find lately that if only the candidates themselves could be so eloquent to their own causes, I’d believe in the system again, respect the politicians again … have some hope again.
But the economy and the subsequent bailout simply reinforced the image I already have. Each side blaming the other, ready to bail out big business, while the rest of us watch more of our retirement and living options vanish into thin air. We’re not protected anymore, and I wonder if we ever have been.
“The problem, as his friend Dodge said, was “the utter inability of congressmen to understand why anyone should urge a bill from which no one could selfishly secure an advantage.” … “Mornings on Horseback” by David McCullough, writing about Teddy Roosevelt’s father campaigning in congress for a bill in which soldiers could send part of their pay home to their families during the civil war.
Why then do I insist upon voting for a third party if it never does any good? I think the answer as simple as the fact that our last few elections have divided steadily closer fifty-fifty. You either stand with one or you stand with the other, and the cherished beliefs of one side must be the laughingstock trademarks of the opponent. I know that things do not necessarily work better in England, where there are more than two parties to choose from in political matters. But I do believe a third choice could be a good thing if we could get away from our internal “us versus them”.
“That political parties were an evil that could bring the ruination of republican government was doctrine that he, with others, had long accepted and espoused. “There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other,” Adams had observed to a correspondent while at Amsterdam, … The “turbulent maneuvers” of factions, he now wrote privately, could “tie the hands and destroy the influence” of every honest man with a desire to serve the public good. There was “division of sentiments over everything,” he told his son-in-law William Smith. “How few aim at the good of the whole, without aiming too much at the prosperity of parts!” David McCullough - “John Adams”.
k
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
6 - To The Tune Of 700 Billion
So the failing economy of this country needs a shot in the ass to get it … what, exactly? Stabilized? And what does stabilizing the economy mean for those of us at the bottom anyway? Since when has anyone in office understood what goes on down here? People want to know what ails the economy? I think it’s pretty simple.
When one percent of a nation’s people have 99% of the money in the nation, the 99% that share the rest bear the brunt of that greed. Too long of this without that money changing familial hands, and that top percent is asking for a revolution.
There is only so much money to go around, and everyone knows this. Printing more money at the mint does not mean you have more money; rather it means the money you had before is worth less.
A healthy economy runs off the principles of supply and demand - I need a job, you supply my job. We make goods other people need/want, they give us money for it, you pay me, we’re all happy. As long as things stay balanced, the economy runs pretty well.
What happens when someone gets greedy? Well, the customer consumer wants to pay less for more - the production people lose. The worker wants more pay - the boss and the consumer lose. The boss wants more money, the rest of the chain lose. The way to avoid melt down is obviously to compromise. But that is pretty hard to do. In the meantime, a few more basic facts…
If you turn your entire industry to acquisition rather than production, you will have no factories and be dependant upon someone else to give you goods. If that someone decides to pull the plug, guess what happens to your business?
If no one is making anything in your country, guess what you have to sell on the foreign market? But since it costs less to sell a good than create it, what have our captains of industry done? Welcome to retail nation. It’s been an unpleasant odyssey watching our young men and women spend fortunes on getting a college education only to wind up working at Wal-Mart anyway. Part of me laughs at the youths running the counters who say, “I’m only here until I get a real job”. … A small part, because if things actually do collapse, then chances are pretty good one of those young and able folks will be getting that job for starting wages while the company lets folks like me “go due to a lack of available hours.”
But all of this is simply uneducated talk. I have heard a row of chatter about how all of this is the Democrats fault. Apparently Carter started the Fanny and Freddie programs and Clinton accelerated things so that now we’re in deep doo. I figure it’s kind of strange how all of this depends on big business and banking, and how it’s all a Democratic snafu. I thought the Republicans were the friends of big business, and wouldn’t that explain the bailout?
But the bailout has so far failed in congress. Is it a good thing? I don’t know. Where will we be if all of these banks fail? Well, you can bet that as it stands it won’t be the guys and gals living in huge mansions that suffer. In the great depression, I seem to recall banks were left holding a lot of defaulted loans and properties that were deemed worthless on the market. As I recall, it took World War Two to retool our ailing businesses and the return of our soldiers with GI loans to move much of that residential property. Again it seems to me the government was the big factor. Where did all that money come from then?
Perhaps the best thing to be said would be the biblical passage that states, “neither a borrower or lender be”. If you own a home, be thankful. If you have debt, hope for the best… we’re going to need it. And if you’re anyone else, maybe it’s time to start stashing cash under the mattress. Friend Machinist says his wife is now saving dry goods for stocking up, just in case, ala Y2K. This time, it might just be useful.
k
When one percent of a nation’s people have 99% of the money in the nation, the 99% that share the rest bear the brunt of that greed. Too long of this without that money changing familial hands, and that top percent is asking for a revolution.
There is only so much money to go around, and everyone knows this. Printing more money at the mint does not mean you have more money; rather it means the money you had before is worth less.
A healthy economy runs off the principles of supply and demand - I need a job, you supply my job. We make goods other people need/want, they give us money for it, you pay me, we’re all happy. As long as things stay balanced, the economy runs pretty well.
What happens when someone gets greedy? Well, the customer consumer wants to pay less for more - the production people lose. The worker wants more pay - the boss and the consumer lose. The boss wants more money, the rest of the chain lose. The way to avoid melt down is obviously to compromise. But that is pretty hard to do. In the meantime, a few more basic facts…
If you turn your entire industry to acquisition rather than production, you will have no factories and be dependant upon someone else to give you goods. If that someone decides to pull the plug, guess what happens to your business?
If no one is making anything in your country, guess what you have to sell on the foreign market? But since it costs less to sell a good than create it, what have our captains of industry done? Welcome to retail nation. It’s been an unpleasant odyssey watching our young men and women spend fortunes on getting a college education only to wind up working at Wal-Mart anyway. Part of me laughs at the youths running the counters who say, “I’m only here until I get a real job”. … A small part, because if things actually do collapse, then chances are pretty good one of those young and able folks will be getting that job for starting wages while the company lets folks like me “go due to a lack of available hours.”
But all of this is simply uneducated talk. I have heard a row of chatter about how all of this is the Democrats fault. Apparently Carter started the Fanny and Freddie programs and Clinton accelerated things so that now we’re in deep doo. I figure it’s kind of strange how all of this depends on big business and banking, and how it’s all a Democratic snafu. I thought the Republicans were the friends of big business, and wouldn’t that explain the bailout?
But the bailout has so far failed in congress. Is it a good thing? I don’t know. Where will we be if all of these banks fail? Well, you can bet that as it stands it won’t be the guys and gals living in huge mansions that suffer. In the great depression, I seem to recall banks were left holding a lot of defaulted loans and properties that were deemed worthless on the market. As I recall, it took World War Two to retool our ailing businesses and the return of our soldiers with GI loans to move much of that residential property. Again it seems to me the government was the big factor. Where did all that money come from then?
Perhaps the best thing to be said would be the biblical passage that states, “neither a borrower or lender be”. If you own a home, be thankful. If you have debt, hope for the best… we’re going to need it. And if you’re anyone else, maybe it’s time to start stashing cash under the mattress. Friend Machinist says his wife is now saving dry goods for stocking up, just in case, ala Y2K. This time, it might just be useful.
k
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
5 - What I’m Not Hearing
So who do you figure you’re going to vote for this time around? If there is anything the establishment seems to have heard from the citizens they’re supposed to be serving, it’s the battle cry of Obama, in the point that we want a change. And what a change they’re offering us! How can you not get excited when you see what’s laid before you?
The first black president? The first woman in the vice presidency? I mean come on now? How better to depart from the old standard by placing a whole new roster on the playing field? Just ignore those two old white guys standing there if you’re looking for change, and the possibilities are endless!
And if you’re satisfied with the status quo, then just ignore the other two.
Therein lies the conundrum. Despite the addition of color and gender, the offerings look much the same. And that’s what I’m not hearing. Perhaps I just haven’t got my ear on the conspiracy channel. This little snarf may be all over the airwaves, which I don’t really give two flips about anyway. But this little picture was just too interesting not to wonder about. When you think of it, isn’t it a head scratcher?
Everyone knows what went on with the Democrats this year. Nobody could say for certain who was going to win the nomination, but the other folks in the voter bloc were damn sure they didn’t want either of the front runners to make the grade. Obama wins it, by a nose, by a state, by a clear enough margin… however he won it, he got the top prize. Hillary as the first woman with a serious shot at winning the presidency, was apparently too scary for many to accommodate. Yes, she had a big support bloc. Now how is Obama going to handle that? Well… he Could have tapped her for the vice presidency. But instead he chose…
Mr. White and elderly and possibly conservative. “Change” is in the air, but we don’t want too much of it all at once. Was this a move to attract conservative Democrats? Radical Republicans? Was it a move to appease his support bloc that didn’t want Hillary in the office? Or was it keeping a toehold in the status quo? Or was it something else?
Let’s look over in the other corner. John McCain, who has almost always had the nomination clenched and was only waiting forever and a day until he knew just who his primary opponent was going to be before he picked his partner. And who saw that coming? A woman most of the country hadn’t heard of, to my scant knowledge at least. Now, that isn’t to say a woman has no place in the vice presidency or the presidency… we don’t follow the “a woman’s place is in the kitchen” here. (Mom would skin me alive if I even had a smidge of that thought in my head.) No, I’m sure this lady would do as excellent a job in the post as Obama’s running mate, or anyone else McCain would have picked.
What I wonder, is Why he picked her? What were her qualifications over anyone else… you know, the Other names the pundits and “politicos in the know” were drawing straws and hedging bets over? Could it possibly be that some advisors or other folks were sitting around the Republican camp saying to themselves “how can we woo some of those unhappy looking Democrats”? What could be more logical than the answer that if around half the party wanted a woman for president, maybe they’ll vote for a woman over here?
Of course, by the same measure, Democratic advisors might have just whispered that “those unhappy looking Republicans might just be persuaded to vote for us if we had ourselves a nice old conservative sounding white guy.”
I must say I’ve heard McCain’s camp saying how they intend to change the government and block all the special interest groups and kickbacks for people like big oil. Oh if only it were true… but I really kind of doubt that. Politics equal money, and money is a very powerful motivator. You and I both know that the people who need it most don’t have it, and the only thing we’ve got to offer the system is a tax dollar they refund much of, and one vote. … Oh the mountains they’ll promise to move for that one vote. But from where I sit, the mountains are still right where they’ve always been.
What would I like to see? The aforementioned less special interest funding and less government spending. You want to impress me from office? Drive your own car. Say, a Toyota Corolla. Turn the lights off in your building. Let a country that said they hate us with a passion go hungry. Stop paying my local business owners to support illegal immigrant workers. (Hell stop paying them to support legal ones - let each worker come to work on his own merits and don’t pay half of Jose’s salary and make the business pay all of mine.)
Keep to the budget you propose… if you have to shut the doors a month early, take a lesson in real life and go work at McDonalds until the next budget kicks in. And take a benefit cut while you’re at it… either pay what we pay for the same shoddy health care insurance and insane medical bills, or do without like the lesser fortunate do. (Maybe then you’ll figure out real solutions to real problems.)
First stop, kill the damn inaugural ball. No one threw a party when I started working at WalMart, and we don’t need lavish black tie affairs to put you to work in the White House either. (How much did a Clinton chocolate bar cost? I don’t care what they did with the cash, that’s just idiocy.)
Second stop, gas and oil. We need fuel. Fine, I’ll accept that. Greenhouse gasses? Iffy? I’ll accept that. But every single figure says that no matter what we do with oil, we’ll still run short. And dependence on a foreign country for anything invites said country to have a strangle hold on our opportunities. We would like to have the rest of the world over a barrel and the rest of the world is eager to return the favor. Get with the program and stop hoping for damn handouts. Use some of that power you righteously hold to tell big money corporations to stick Their strangleholds in their ear. Actively push real alternatives through those companies and the public, and quit laughing because “there’s no money in it.” We’re not interested in how much we can throw away forever, but in things we can do now. We have solar, we have wind, and we have even more options most of us know even less about. Yes, they can’t solve the problems either, but after you install solar cells and a wind turbine you get three times the energy options working for your home. If it works for Jay Leno, it can work for us. (And you know if there isn't any wind, there's more solar, and vice versa.) There are hundreds of small inventors that have tripled gas mileage for their cars or eliminated gas usage altogether. A whole plethora of proven workable ideas and nobody is buying because some high paid persons work for other agendas… stop that!
You want to do something for America? Do something For Americans. You promise change? Deliver it. Don’t just talk about it. Please. And maybe, just maybe, those folks like me will believe in the system again. We might even lend you our ears.
k
The first black president? The first woman in the vice presidency? I mean come on now? How better to depart from the old standard by placing a whole new roster on the playing field? Just ignore those two old white guys standing there if you’re looking for change, and the possibilities are endless!
And if you’re satisfied with the status quo, then just ignore the other two.
Therein lies the conundrum. Despite the addition of color and gender, the offerings look much the same. And that’s what I’m not hearing. Perhaps I just haven’t got my ear on the conspiracy channel. This little snarf may be all over the airwaves, which I don’t really give two flips about anyway. But this little picture was just too interesting not to wonder about. When you think of it, isn’t it a head scratcher?
Everyone knows what went on with the Democrats this year. Nobody could say for certain who was going to win the nomination, but the other folks in the voter bloc were damn sure they didn’t want either of the front runners to make the grade. Obama wins it, by a nose, by a state, by a clear enough margin… however he won it, he got the top prize. Hillary as the first woman with a serious shot at winning the presidency, was apparently too scary for many to accommodate. Yes, she had a big support bloc. Now how is Obama going to handle that? Well… he Could have tapped her for the vice presidency. But instead he chose…
Mr. White and elderly and possibly conservative. “Change” is in the air, but we don’t want too much of it all at once. Was this a move to attract conservative Democrats? Radical Republicans? Was it a move to appease his support bloc that didn’t want Hillary in the office? Or was it keeping a toehold in the status quo? Or was it something else?
Let’s look over in the other corner. John McCain, who has almost always had the nomination clenched and was only waiting forever and a day until he knew just who his primary opponent was going to be before he picked his partner. And who saw that coming? A woman most of the country hadn’t heard of, to my scant knowledge at least. Now, that isn’t to say a woman has no place in the vice presidency or the presidency… we don’t follow the “a woman’s place is in the kitchen” here. (Mom would skin me alive if I even had a smidge of that thought in my head.) No, I’m sure this lady would do as excellent a job in the post as Obama’s running mate, or anyone else McCain would have picked.
What I wonder, is Why he picked her? What were her qualifications over anyone else… you know, the Other names the pundits and “politicos in the know” were drawing straws and hedging bets over? Could it possibly be that some advisors or other folks were sitting around the Republican camp saying to themselves “how can we woo some of those unhappy looking Democrats”? What could be more logical than the answer that if around half the party wanted a woman for president, maybe they’ll vote for a woman over here?
Of course, by the same measure, Democratic advisors might have just whispered that “those unhappy looking Republicans might just be persuaded to vote for us if we had ourselves a nice old conservative sounding white guy.”
I must say I’ve heard McCain’s camp saying how they intend to change the government and block all the special interest groups and kickbacks for people like big oil. Oh if only it were true… but I really kind of doubt that. Politics equal money, and money is a very powerful motivator. You and I both know that the people who need it most don’t have it, and the only thing we’ve got to offer the system is a tax dollar they refund much of, and one vote. … Oh the mountains they’ll promise to move for that one vote. But from where I sit, the mountains are still right where they’ve always been.
What would I like to see? The aforementioned less special interest funding and less government spending. You want to impress me from office? Drive your own car. Say, a Toyota Corolla. Turn the lights off in your building. Let a country that said they hate us with a passion go hungry. Stop paying my local business owners to support illegal immigrant workers. (Hell stop paying them to support legal ones - let each worker come to work on his own merits and don’t pay half of Jose’s salary and make the business pay all of mine.)
Keep to the budget you propose… if you have to shut the doors a month early, take a lesson in real life and go work at McDonalds until the next budget kicks in. And take a benefit cut while you’re at it… either pay what we pay for the same shoddy health care insurance and insane medical bills, or do without like the lesser fortunate do. (Maybe then you’ll figure out real solutions to real problems.)
First stop, kill the damn inaugural ball. No one threw a party when I started working at WalMart, and we don’t need lavish black tie affairs to put you to work in the White House either. (How much did a Clinton chocolate bar cost? I don’t care what they did with the cash, that’s just idiocy.)
Second stop, gas and oil. We need fuel. Fine, I’ll accept that. Greenhouse gasses? Iffy? I’ll accept that. But every single figure says that no matter what we do with oil, we’ll still run short. And dependence on a foreign country for anything invites said country to have a strangle hold on our opportunities. We would like to have the rest of the world over a barrel and the rest of the world is eager to return the favor. Get with the program and stop hoping for damn handouts. Use some of that power you righteously hold to tell big money corporations to stick Their strangleholds in their ear. Actively push real alternatives through those companies and the public, and quit laughing because “there’s no money in it.” We’re not interested in how much we can throw away forever, but in things we can do now. We have solar, we have wind, and we have even more options most of us know even less about. Yes, they can’t solve the problems either, but after you install solar cells and a wind turbine you get three times the energy options working for your home. If it works for Jay Leno, it can work for us. (And you know if there isn't any wind, there's more solar, and vice versa.) There are hundreds of small inventors that have tripled gas mileage for their cars or eliminated gas usage altogether. A whole plethora of proven workable ideas and nobody is buying because some high paid persons work for other agendas… stop that!
You want to do something for America? Do something For Americans. You promise change? Deliver it. Don’t just talk about it. Please. And maybe, just maybe, those folks like me will believe in the system again. We might even lend you our ears.
k
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
4 - What We're In For (Maybe)
Out of all the noteworthy news in the month of June one of the most direct may be an article about the US Superbubble popping. What does it mean? Beats the hell out of me, since I didn’t read it. Anyone on the streets already knows that the economy is going through a tanking process, brought about by a variety of factors, one of the most obvious being the ever-rising price of gas. The super bubble probably relates to housing prices (that’s mostly what they speak of when they mention bubbles in economic articles). Anyone with half an eye out knows the real-estate market has dipped pretty far lately.
What does it all mean? Well doof-US, we’re riding out a recession. It’s pretty clear to anyone save King George that the economy is on a pretty good down swing, and while the royal cabinet is continually telling us that “everything is fine, go spend money” it’s pretty obvious to anyone living on the working class economy that things are in fact shaky.
On a personal level, I find the release of state quarters in the states to be a pretty good indicator of economic niceties. It’s not a perfect system but it works thusly - the quarters are released by our two mints, one in Denver, one in Philly. (I think.) You’ll find the mint marks D or P, and depending where you live you’re most likely to get one or the other straight out of the store register. Since I live in the Midwest, I generally get Denver minted quarters. The indicator factor for me depends on how many of the P marked quarters I happen to find. When a new mint comes out, collectors have their way and you get what you get, but after the first month or so, you begin to see the new coin mixed into circulation. The trick I find, is to watch for the opposite mint mark. If the economy is good, people are traveling, spending their money, and you find more opposites passing through your hands. The worse the economy gets, the less people you have traveling, the less of those opposites you find.
I’m not seeing many P marked quarters at all this year. (Only applicable to the newly circulated sets thank you.) I realize as an economic indicator it’s silly, but it works for me.
So what exactly are we in for? If you’re reading this (and I only know one person that is) then you already know how the job market is around this sector of North America. (Starbucks announced today they’re closing 600 US shops.) I’ve been lamenting on the state of the Internet… it’s been slower; it’s been impossible for me to play WoW.
Thing about those two is as follows: Since the dot com crash, Internet is definitely not free. You have to pay for the data-transfer; someone in turn has to pay for the servers. But there are two classes of Internet use out there - business, and personal, and thanks to the market, we’re all paying a business class price. Guess what happens when those businesses we’ve come to rely on quit hosting net connections. The way I see it going, less connections to go around, more Internet congestion, less signal, and them bam.
Limited personal access, if you get access at all. In this case, recession means regression. Maybe I’m simply reading all the wrong signs, and my particular troubles are all in the heart of my aging machine. But I’ve been seeing servers failing recently, and replacements are apparently harder to come by. When it comes down to the non-business machines hosted by those teens and twenty somethings that have long been supplementing our networks, the choice between net time and food is a no-brainer. You know who is going to lose out. And as unfortunate as that may be to me in the short term, if it really is working out this way, the majority of us home users stand to lose out on a valuable personal resource.
What does it all mean? Well doof-US, we’re riding out a recession. It’s pretty clear to anyone save King George that the economy is on a pretty good down swing, and while the royal cabinet is continually telling us that “everything is fine, go spend money” it’s pretty obvious to anyone living on the working class economy that things are in fact shaky.
On a personal level, I find the release of state quarters in the states to be a pretty good indicator of economic niceties. It’s not a perfect system but it works thusly - the quarters are released by our two mints, one in Denver, one in Philly. (I think.) You’ll find the mint marks D or P, and depending where you live you’re most likely to get one or the other straight out of the store register. Since I live in the Midwest, I generally get Denver minted quarters. The indicator factor for me depends on how many of the P marked quarters I happen to find. When a new mint comes out, collectors have their way and you get what you get, but after the first month or so, you begin to see the new coin mixed into circulation. The trick I find, is to watch for the opposite mint mark. If the economy is good, people are traveling, spending their money, and you find more opposites passing through your hands. The worse the economy gets, the less people you have traveling, the less of those opposites you find.
I’m not seeing many P marked quarters at all this year. (Only applicable to the newly circulated sets thank you.) I realize as an economic indicator it’s silly, but it works for me.
So what exactly are we in for? If you’re reading this (and I only know one person that is) then you already know how the job market is around this sector of North America. (Starbucks announced today they’re closing 600 US shops.) I’ve been lamenting on the state of the Internet… it’s been slower; it’s been impossible for me to play WoW.
Thing about those two is as follows: Since the dot com crash, Internet is definitely not free. You have to pay for the data-transfer; someone in turn has to pay for the servers. But there are two classes of Internet use out there - business, and personal, and thanks to the market, we’re all paying a business class price. Guess what happens when those businesses we’ve come to rely on quit hosting net connections. The way I see it going, less connections to go around, more Internet congestion, less signal, and them bam.
Limited personal access, if you get access at all. In this case, recession means regression. Maybe I’m simply reading all the wrong signs, and my particular troubles are all in the heart of my aging machine. But I’ve been seeing servers failing recently, and replacements are apparently harder to come by. When it comes down to the non-business machines hosted by those teens and twenty somethings that have long been supplementing our networks, the choice between net time and food is a no-brainer. You know who is going to lose out. And as unfortunate as that may be to me in the short term, if it really is working out this way, the majority of us home users stand to lose out on a valuable personal resource.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
UULOC 3 : Business Is Usual …
(79) … Politics As Usual.
The only thing that businessmen care about is making more money, and politics is just business under another name. Do you doubt me? Let me put it this way. If a businessman doesn’t run a good business; i.e. if he doesn’t give the customer what the customer wants, then there will soon come a point that he is no longer in the business. The trick to master, is convincing the public that they want what you want to give them. It happens to be a trick that politicians seem to know quite well, and any big business owner knows it too.
Of course, the current political situation has brought this up, but so has a recent change in my store. We’ve recently gotten rid of our fabric, in our fabric and crafts department. What they’ll sell now is crafts and party supplies. What they’ll call it will remain crafts and fabrics, until we get rid of all the older associates who have ever known that we even had fabric, the way we do with the two year gone layaway section.
In someone’s eyes this is a good move for our store. I don’t know if this person is just out of touch with the customer base or they’re in better touch with our bottom line, but I can’t tell you how many sad people I’ve seen come in, step around the corner and just look lost. Not only are we based at the edge of Amish country, but we live in Bible Belt America, where quilting and crafting is a long running flea-marketable way of life. But in the words of one of my managers, the company “isn’t just looking at the moment, they’re looking to the future.” How I wish that were true.
I think the numbers are probably right in some ways. The Amish come into town twice a month or so, and I’ve yet to see the general small crowd that comes in and shops about the store. They didn’t just hit up the fabric; they get some supplies and toys for their children, so perhaps we will see them continue to come in. But I suspect their numbers will fall. So much of our base is a bit lower on the budget ladder; but like those who were hit hardest over the layaway jettison, I suspect our brass don’t really care for the dollars of the people who were making clothes just to save a few bucks. And when you look at the so called “big picture” isn’t it better for the company if those people spending ten dollars on fabric spend thirty on a pre-made shirt from Indonesia that costs our company five dollars?
The people most likely to lose the most are the buyers that got our store in such a mess with fabric in the first place. Friend Navy says that he thinks that was the problem in the first place. And he’s correct; our buyers would buy yards and yards of the oddest looking, gayest, silliest, shittiest cloth you could find. Big sheets of printed cotton with john deer tractors, lint fuzzed purple and pink striped tweed, circus tent striped wool… you name it our customers wouldn’t buy it. The basics always sold fairly well, but there would always be a long wall of “stuff nobody wanted”… things that would inevitably be marked down to fifty cents a yard, from a three-dollar start price. And we know our buyers get paid money under the table to order this stuff. One of our big chiefs got caught in a scandal that necessitated his departure from the company, with only part of benefits package intact.
Anyway, we get a lot of complaints and I’m sure we’ll be getting a lot more. It feels good to complain to somebody, on the spot, or why else would any of us write these blogs? The big thing in this case, is that these customers aren’t complaining to the right people. Our company has a nice 1-800 number that anyone can call for any reason, and I would believe that a huge number of customers calling from any given area would make someone at the switchboard sit up and take notice. But would anyone do anything about it? It depends. If cookie munchers can get Nabisco to bring back the much loved Hydrox, then surely other companies can be persuaded to give the people what they want. At the very least they might retool the department and bring the good selling basics back.
(Not that Hydrox will make a permanent come back. Nabisco doesn’t believe the interest is there to carry the torch against their nemesis the mighty Oreo. But they did say in national press that they’d make more for a few months…)
The truth of the matter though, is that in an effort to bring their image up to par to appeal with more customers who have more money, my company has continued to make more decisions based on that demographic. And in their ongoing struggle to continue to keep prices low enough to offer good bargains, the products we sell just keep getting cheaper. (Not cheap in price, but cheap in quality.) And despite these things, the customers just keep coming in the doors. I shouldn’t be complaining, because it keeps me in a job I (mostly) enjoy.
But the fact remains. We give you what you ask for, after we convince you that you need what we have to offer. And you buy it, expecting more for less while getting less for more. It is business at its finest, and where are you going to go to make it change? After all, we’ve already convinced you that you should settle for getting less…
Kind of like politics of late.
-
I said some time ago that the Democratic Party ought to pull their heads out of their collective ass and offer up a Obama-Clinton pairing. It isn’t that I particularly like either of them that well, but with the drawn out to the max race this year, we’ve seen this one party go through what the whole electoral process has been pairing itself down toward the last few go rounds. Fifty-fifty, minus the few percents that can’t seem to either make a choice or force themselves to choose the stupid. Friend Otter says heaven help us as a country if we get the Dream Team, and many people outside the Democratic fence agree with that statement, because they just can’t stand one or the other or either but really seem to have it in for Hillary.
I personally don’t care but think it would be fitting if we got over the fist-fight. If half the party wants one and half wants the other, give them both. It used to work that way in this country’s earliest years, and couldn’t have been too much worse then than it seems to be now. Better still, there won’t be any disgruntled electoral groups hedging the issue by not voting for the party choice, still voting for the person their voters told them to vote for, or just plain voting for race or gender or whatever reason they have for punching their ticket.
And perhaps most important, if you are a Democrat, that vote you want to give for the gal that didn’t win won’t be automatically transferred to the guys you said you hated at the start of the whole shebang. You know, ala the whole “a vote for a third party is a wasted vote” scenario that so pisses people of my viewpoint off? And just maybe if we give all those people a hand in what they had voted for in the first place, they’d still vote in the primary election come November. Wouldn’t that be something?
But no. A “Dream Team” pairing would probably alienate both sides of the Democratic table, instead of pulling them together. (Incidentally, two things: Hillary is set to bow her head, but has met with Obama, and some voices are calling for that “okay let’s all us Hillary supporters get with the program and throw our support behind Obama.” This means that at this point, still, anything could happen.)
Now the only thing left for me to complain about (besides the lack of anyone I want to cast a vote for) is the fact that McCain and Obama will now commence to duking it out. How much have the Dem’s spent on the race that Clinton didn’t win? And how much are both parties about to spend for the next five months? I think anyone running for federal office should get a set budget and that’s it. Free airtime once a month (debate boys and girls!) and get themselves a blog with their own words (no speech writers for you!) and there you have it! Campaign finance? Oh hell no! Donate that to a worthy cause please. And if Joe and Josephine Public can’t make up their minds who to vote for by transcript, news broadcast and looking into public record over the net by November, well, either the candidates weren’t worth voting for, or they weren’t going to vote by knowledge anyway.
What would the change be, besides a lot less hoopla and money changing hands? But just like from my company, we’ve been convinced we need this junk at the price they’ve set. And in candidates, less worth must be worth more.
“Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at it you lose”
Amen Paul. Amen.
k
The only thing that businessmen care about is making more money, and politics is just business under another name. Do you doubt me? Let me put it this way. If a businessman doesn’t run a good business; i.e. if he doesn’t give the customer what the customer wants, then there will soon come a point that he is no longer in the business. The trick to master, is convincing the public that they want what you want to give them. It happens to be a trick that politicians seem to know quite well, and any big business owner knows it too.
Of course, the current political situation has brought this up, but so has a recent change in my store. We’ve recently gotten rid of our fabric, in our fabric and crafts department. What they’ll sell now is crafts and party supplies. What they’ll call it will remain crafts and fabrics, until we get rid of all the older associates who have ever known that we even had fabric, the way we do with the two year gone layaway section.
In someone’s eyes this is a good move for our store. I don’t know if this person is just out of touch with the customer base or they’re in better touch with our bottom line, but I can’t tell you how many sad people I’ve seen come in, step around the corner and just look lost. Not only are we based at the edge of Amish country, but we live in Bible Belt America, where quilting and crafting is a long running flea-marketable way of life. But in the words of one of my managers, the company “isn’t just looking at the moment, they’re looking to the future.” How I wish that were true.
I think the numbers are probably right in some ways. The Amish come into town twice a month or so, and I’ve yet to see the general small crowd that comes in and shops about the store. They didn’t just hit up the fabric; they get some supplies and toys for their children, so perhaps we will see them continue to come in. But I suspect their numbers will fall. So much of our base is a bit lower on the budget ladder; but like those who were hit hardest over the layaway jettison, I suspect our brass don’t really care for the dollars of the people who were making clothes just to save a few bucks. And when you look at the so called “big picture” isn’t it better for the company if those people spending ten dollars on fabric spend thirty on a pre-made shirt from Indonesia that costs our company five dollars?
The people most likely to lose the most are the buyers that got our store in such a mess with fabric in the first place. Friend Navy says that he thinks that was the problem in the first place. And he’s correct; our buyers would buy yards and yards of the oddest looking, gayest, silliest, shittiest cloth you could find. Big sheets of printed cotton with john deer tractors, lint fuzzed purple and pink striped tweed, circus tent striped wool… you name it our customers wouldn’t buy it. The basics always sold fairly well, but there would always be a long wall of “stuff nobody wanted”… things that would inevitably be marked down to fifty cents a yard, from a three-dollar start price. And we know our buyers get paid money under the table to order this stuff. One of our big chiefs got caught in a scandal that necessitated his departure from the company, with only part of benefits package intact.
Anyway, we get a lot of complaints and I’m sure we’ll be getting a lot more. It feels good to complain to somebody, on the spot, or why else would any of us write these blogs? The big thing in this case, is that these customers aren’t complaining to the right people. Our company has a nice 1-800 number that anyone can call for any reason, and I would believe that a huge number of customers calling from any given area would make someone at the switchboard sit up and take notice. But would anyone do anything about it? It depends. If cookie munchers can get Nabisco to bring back the much loved Hydrox, then surely other companies can be persuaded to give the people what they want. At the very least they might retool the department and bring the good selling basics back.
(Not that Hydrox will make a permanent come back. Nabisco doesn’t believe the interest is there to carry the torch against their nemesis the mighty Oreo. But they did say in national press that they’d make more for a few months…)
The truth of the matter though, is that in an effort to bring their image up to par to appeal with more customers who have more money, my company has continued to make more decisions based on that demographic. And in their ongoing struggle to continue to keep prices low enough to offer good bargains, the products we sell just keep getting cheaper. (Not cheap in price, but cheap in quality.) And despite these things, the customers just keep coming in the doors. I shouldn’t be complaining, because it keeps me in a job I (mostly) enjoy.
But the fact remains. We give you what you ask for, after we convince you that you need what we have to offer. And you buy it, expecting more for less while getting less for more. It is business at its finest, and where are you going to go to make it change? After all, we’ve already convinced you that you should settle for getting less…
Kind of like politics of late.
-
I said some time ago that the Democratic Party ought to pull their heads out of their collective ass and offer up a Obama-Clinton pairing. It isn’t that I particularly like either of them that well, but with the drawn out to the max race this year, we’ve seen this one party go through what the whole electoral process has been pairing itself down toward the last few go rounds. Fifty-fifty, minus the few percents that can’t seem to either make a choice or force themselves to choose the stupid. Friend Otter says heaven help us as a country if we get the Dream Team, and many people outside the Democratic fence agree with that statement, because they just can’t stand one or the other or either but really seem to have it in for Hillary.
I personally don’t care but think it would be fitting if we got over the fist-fight. If half the party wants one and half wants the other, give them both. It used to work that way in this country’s earliest years, and couldn’t have been too much worse then than it seems to be now. Better still, there won’t be any disgruntled electoral groups hedging the issue by not voting for the party choice, still voting for the person their voters told them to vote for, or just plain voting for race or gender or whatever reason they have for punching their ticket.
And perhaps most important, if you are a Democrat, that vote you want to give for the gal that didn’t win won’t be automatically transferred to the guys you said you hated at the start of the whole shebang. You know, ala the whole “a vote for a third party is a wasted vote” scenario that so pisses people of my viewpoint off? And just maybe if we give all those people a hand in what they had voted for in the first place, they’d still vote in the primary election come November. Wouldn’t that be something?
But no. A “Dream Team” pairing would probably alienate both sides of the Democratic table, instead of pulling them together. (Incidentally, two things: Hillary is set to bow her head, but has met with Obama, and some voices are calling for that “okay let’s all us Hillary supporters get with the program and throw our support behind Obama.” This means that at this point, still, anything could happen.)
Now the only thing left for me to complain about (besides the lack of anyone I want to cast a vote for) is the fact that McCain and Obama will now commence to duking it out. How much have the Dem’s spent on the race that Clinton didn’t win? And how much are both parties about to spend for the next five months? I think anyone running for federal office should get a set budget and that’s it. Free airtime once a month (debate boys and girls!) and get themselves a blog with their own words (no speech writers for you!) and there you have it! Campaign finance? Oh hell no! Donate that to a worthy cause please. And if Joe and Josephine Public can’t make up their minds who to vote for by transcript, news broadcast and looking into public record over the net by November, well, either the candidates weren’t worth voting for, or they weren’t going to vote by knowledge anyway.
What would the change be, besides a lot less hoopla and money changing hands? But just like from my company, we’ve been convinced we need this junk at the price they’ve set. And in candidates, less worth must be worth more.
“Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at it you lose”
Amen Paul. Amen.
k
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
UULOC 2 - So Glad I'm Not In Africa
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24759141>1=43001
“NAIROBI, Kenya - A group of up to 300 young men have burned to death 11 people suspected of being witches and wizards in western Kenya — in some cases slitting their victims' throats or clubbing them to death before burning their bodies, officials said.”
Thus begins an associated press article for world news posted some time on the twenty second. This isn’t the first time that I’ve seen such news. A month or so ago a similar, much more humorous article hit the Rutgers weird news category that Kenyan (and forgive me if I have the wrong country) men were calling police stations and explaining to local authorities that local witchdoctors were “stealing their penises”, magicing them away I suppose.
Despite assurances to the contrary, these men apparently sincerely believed this. And I somehow have a problem believing that 300 young men in Kenya had a vendetta with the majority of the recent victims, quoted by the article to be in their seventies to nineties. The crime of these folks was “making smart children in the villages dumb”. (How is it we haven’t noticed the folks who produce television programming for our young folks are doing this very thing yet? Are there shrines to “you know who” in network offices?)
Granted, I’m very uninformed about society over there. If Voodoo and similar practices are to be believed (and I see no real reason to doubt true believers don’t experience something) then maybe these people really were into some kind of powerful stuff. But really, will we ever know? Two villages, and the police are pretty much helpless to figure out who’s at fault and why. Superstition has a way of getting out of hand, and nothing proves it more than this kind of activity. And before you think we’re talking about folks in mud huts, we’re not. The folk in the article’s picture look much the same as you’d likely find in some of our neighborhoods across the US. (Maybe a little more rustic, but I’ve seen such about.)
So very glad I’m not in Africa. For you see, I’m a pagan. I go about wearing my pentagram in public, considered by many of my acquaintances to be a brave move in the middle of Bible-belt America. Brave or foolish, take your pick. (I believe it to be honesty more than the two.)
I’ve long given up any interest in witchcraft practices though. To me the concept of spell casting was nothing more than over-glorified prayer. (To the outsider, the catholic mess with the wine and the wafers looks to be something similar - but try telling that to them.) I just didn’t see the need or have the time, and have since decided I’m kind of like the villager in ancient times. I have my candle, my prayer, and my custom. Anything deeper and it’s time to go see the priest(ess). And even that’s far fetched. While I love something of nature and loathe most of anything that smells of modern church, I am not the wholehearted green fanatic that preaches saving the whales and rainforests. I don’t recycle and I surely don’t live healthy. Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t wear tie-dye and I don’t smoke anything at all. No, I do live my beliefs - I don’t drive a car, and I don’t think of God as particularly masculine, but I’m equally happy to live by the Ten Commandments and follow the golden rule.
But I do like my pentagram. And you wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve caught a person’s gaze meeting my face with a smile, before traveling down to my chest and turning into a very stiff frown. I’ve had people get that look, and cross to the other side of the street to avoid walking too close to me. No, I don’t feel persecuted at all (mostly) but sometimes I’m willing to take bets that it’s because people don’t take my faith seriously.
(Why should they? It’s my faith, not theirs.)
But this is kind of pointless right? I mean the days of Salem are long behind US. Aren’t they? It can’t happen here anymore, thankfully. We have other, more viable witch-hunts to occupy our time. … Right?
But no. I’m not in favor of a wholesale shift to “Christian Politics” thank you very much. What’s “Right” in this country can and oft is well and good for the whole. But what is “Right” isn’t always right, and sometimes the mentality can go too far.
k
“NAIROBI, Kenya - A group of up to 300 young men have burned to death 11 people suspected of being witches and wizards in western Kenya — in some cases slitting their victims' throats or clubbing them to death before burning their bodies, officials said.”
Thus begins an associated press article for world news posted some time on the twenty second. This isn’t the first time that I’ve seen such news. A month or so ago a similar, much more humorous article hit the Rutgers weird news category that Kenyan (and forgive me if I have the wrong country) men were calling police stations and explaining to local authorities that local witchdoctors were “stealing their penises”, magicing them away I suppose.
Despite assurances to the contrary, these men apparently sincerely believed this. And I somehow have a problem believing that 300 young men in Kenya had a vendetta with the majority of the recent victims, quoted by the article to be in their seventies to nineties. The crime of these folks was “making smart children in the villages dumb”. (How is it we haven’t noticed the folks who produce television programming for our young folks are doing this very thing yet? Are there shrines to “you know who” in network offices?)
Granted, I’m very uninformed about society over there. If Voodoo and similar practices are to be believed (and I see no real reason to doubt true believers don’t experience something) then maybe these people really were into some kind of powerful stuff. But really, will we ever know? Two villages, and the police are pretty much helpless to figure out who’s at fault and why. Superstition has a way of getting out of hand, and nothing proves it more than this kind of activity. And before you think we’re talking about folks in mud huts, we’re not. The folk in the article’s picture look much the same as you’d likely find in some of our neighborhoods across the US. (Maybe a little more rustic, but I’ve seen such about.)
So very glad I’m not in Africa. For you see, I’m a pagan. I go about wearing my pentagram in public, considered by many of my acquaintances to be a brave move in the middle of Bible-belt America. Brave or foolish, take your pick. (I believe it to be honesty more than the two.)
I’ve long given up any interest in witchcraft practices though. To me the concept of spell casting was nothing more than over-glorified prayer. (To the outsider, the catholic mess with the wine and the wafers looks to be something similar - but try telling that to them.) I just didn’t see the need or have the time, and have since decided I’m kind of like the villager in ancient times. I have my candle, my prayer, and my custom. Anything deeper and it’s time to go see the priest(ess). And even that’s far fetched. While I love something of nature and loathe most of anything that smells of modern church, I am not the wholehearted green fanatic that preaches saving the whales and rainforests. I don’t recycle and I surely don’t live healthy. Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t wear tie-dye and I don’t smoke anything at all. No, I do live my beliefs - I don’t drive a car, and I don’t think of God as particularly masculine, but I’m equally happy to live by the Ten Commandments and follow the golden rule.
But I do like my pentagram. And you wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve caught a person’s gaze meeting my face with a smile, before traveling down to my chest and turning into a very stiff frown. I’ve had people get that look, and cross to the other side of the street to avoid walking too close to me. No, I don’t feel persecuted at all (mostly) but sometimes I’m willing to take bets that it’s because people don’t take my faith seriously.
(Why should they? It’s my faith, not theirs.)
But this is kind of pointless right? I mean the days of Salem are long behind US. Aren’t they? It can’t happen here anymore, thankfully. We have other, more viable witch-hunts to occupy our time. … Right?
But no. I’m not in favor of a wholesale shift to “Christian Politics” thank you very much. What’s “Right” in this country can and oft is well and good for the whole. But what is “Right” isn’t always right, and sometimes the mentality can go too far.
k
Monday, May 19, 2008
UULOC 1 - Unimportant, Uninformed and Left Of Center
Hopefully this project won't turn into a waste of space-time, or a huge shouting match. While I encourage discussion, and will admit I'm wrong, I have gotten super tired of feeling trod upon, held under fire for my beliefs and suppositions.
Yet, I also know that in many things I am mistaken. What can be expected from someone who doesn't have the time to spend on endless hours of research, on-line or otherwise, looking for backing to prove out my beliefs? In this age, anything can be done, said, and found to uphold a distorted position on anything at all. And arguments are not worth losing friends over. Thus, the title. May it serve you well.
-
There's a lot to talk about. You'll find me over at DeviantArt.com too, but there I've decided to get away from the social-political BS, because honestly, who wants to read my work while I'm ranting about things that have nothing to do with my authorial attempts? I know I don't generally want to wade through similar garbage from the people I watch. When you're not in the mood, you're not in the mood, no? http://katarthis.deviantart.com/
Anyway, for the first post: Voting. I don't know who you're going to vote for, but I know who I'm not. I find it interesting, how friends here in the states (and abroad) have set their sights on the party whose ideas and customary platform is an anathema. These people have loudly proclaimed to me that they would never vote Democratic in the general election; that they despise both candidates and everything they stand for. And yet, for purposes of the primary they decided to hit the polling places, only to vote one candidate over the other, in order to keep the candidate they detested the most from winning the vote.
Am I reading that right? Instead of voting the tickets as we ought, choosing the person we find best suited for the position, we're actively choosing people we don't want to win? And what if this goes all the way back to the beginning? Who gets chosen to run for president anymore, and how does the process start? For the life of me I cannot understand how we've come to the point where our options are Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum to start with... how we no longer vote for the best man, but for the lesser of two dweebles.
And as for the Democrats, what exactly is the problem?
Clinton, who has her past involvement in Whitewater, which most of us don't understand anyway, and the "baggage of Bill" which I cannot see how that matters.
And Obama, who apparently now has "terrorist, black supremacist" ties.
... It isn't who you know as much as who knows you? And if what you say and how you say it was a real problem, our current office holder would be deep in it too, as there is a pile of Presidential gaffe just waiting to be read by anyone digging for goofs.
Meanwhile, McCain, who seems to have promised us four more years of the same Iraq, the same social economic status quo, and more sabre rattling with our "new potential foe" Iran, isn't getting a peep of dissention from the media. I suppose that's likely because he's got his nomination cinched and hasn't had any real opposition from any angle for some time. But could it be...?
When you look at the line up, and the first in line is the good old white boy, while the opposite corner is held by, gasp! A woman and a man of color... (Is he a black man with a white mother or a white man with a black father? Berke Breathed always makes me proud.)
Maybe I'm reading too much into all of it. We've been about style over substance for so long it's hard to find anything to be optimistic about. For every time we've been promised this "change" that's being thrown about, we've gotten the same old delivery. Would we have prospered better under Mondale than Reagan? Gore than Bush? It seems to me that the point, like this upcoming election, is rather moot.
How's this for an idea? You want to produce change? Take Money Out of Politics. It's hard to feel represented fairly when the folks running for office don't seem to live in my part of life. (read: poorly.)
lol. Like that will happen. Oh well, it is my lot to dream.
k
Yet, I also know that in many things I am mistaken. What can be expected from someone who doesn't have the time to spend on endless hours of research, on-line or otherwise, looking for backing to prove out my beliefs? In this age, anything can be done, said, and found to uphold a distorted position on anything at all. And arguments are not worth losing friends over. Thus, the title. May it serve you well.
-
There's a lot to talk about. You'll find me over at DeviantArt.com too, but there I've decided to get away from the social-political BS, because honestly, who wants to read my work while I'm ranting about things that have nothing to do with my authorial attempts? I know I don't generally want to wade through similar garbage from the people I watch. When you're not in the mood, you're not in the mood, no? http://katarthis.deviantart.com/
Anyway, for the first post: Voting. I don't know who you're going to vote for, but I know who I'm not. I find it interesting, how friends here in the states (and abroad) have set their sights on the party whose ideas and customary platform is an anathema. These people have loudly proclaimed to me that they would never vote Democratic in the general election; that they despise both candidates and everything they stand for. And yet, for purposes of the primary they decided to hit the polling places, only to vote one candidate over the other, in order to keep the candidate they detested the most from winning the vote.
Am I reading that right? Instead of voting the tickets as we ought, choosing the person we find best suited for the position, we're actively choosing people we don't want to win? And what if this goes all the way back to the beginning? Who gets chosen to run for president anymore, and how does the process start? For the life of me I cannot understand how we've come to the point where our options are Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum to start with... how we no longer vote for the best man, but for the lesser of two dweebles.
And as for the Democrats, what exactly is the problem?
Clinton, who has her past involvement in Whitewater, which most of us don't understand anyway, and the "baggage of Bill" which I cannot see how that matters.
And Obama, who apparently now has "terrorist, black supremacist" ties.
... It isn't who you know as much as who knows you? And if what you say and how you say it was a real problem, our current office holder would be deep in it too, as there is a pile of Presidential gaffe just waiting to be read by anyone digging for goofs.
Meanwhile, McCain, who seems to have promised us four more years of the same Iraq, the same social economic status quo, and more sabre rattling with our "new potential foe" Iran, isn't getting a peep of dissention from the media. I suppose that's likely because he's got his nomination cinched and hasn't had any real opposition from any angle for some time. But could it be...?
When you look at the line up, and the first in line is the good old white boy, while the opposite corner is held by, gasp! A woman and a man of color... (Is he a black man with a white mother or a white man with a black father? Berke Breathed always makes me proud.)
Maybe I'm reading too much into all of it. We've been about style over substance for so long it's hard to find anything to be optimistic about. For every time we've been promised this "change" that's being thrown about, we've gotten the same old delivery. Would we have prospered better under Mondale than Reagan? Gore than Bush? It seems to me that the point, like this upcoming election, is rather moot.
How's this for an idea? You want to produce change? Take Money Out of Politics. It's hard to feel represented fairly when the folks running for office don't seem to live in my part of life. (read: poorly.)
lol. Like that will happen. Oh well, it is my lot to dream.
k
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