MINISTER OF RANTS

REV. ART & ARETHA FRANKLIN ARE ONLY 67 TODAY!

TODAY IS THE 67th ANNIVERSARY OF ME'S BEING EXPELLED FROM ME MUM'S WOMB...

"No wise man ever wished to be younger."

 
If I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself. Or... maybe not.

 

BORN ON THE SAME DAY

HERE IN THE USA:

THE QUEEN OF SOUL - ARETHA FRANKLIN

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US!

10 G's

G-String

G-Man

Gee Mini

Gigot

's'up, G?

Gee Whiz

Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific!

G-Clef

G - D

Gee, Dad, it's a Wurlitzer!

HOLY SHIT! A TALKING CAT!!

SYLVIA

It’s hard to believe that it was 17 years ago when we were adopted by our black and white tuxedo kitty. She remains healthy, active and curious and doesn’t look a day over 5.

I hesitate to tell this because it may sound like Da Pagan Baby and I are losin’ it - but we have both heard Sylvia call out from the other end of the house, “Hi, Art.”

She repeats the phrase, actually seeming to form her little mouth and lips around the words, “Hi, Art.”

I realize some will be skeptical, but I assure you we’ve both heard her and it seems to be more than a simple variant of “Meow” or “Mrawr”.

DA REV'S NEMESIS...

I LOVE WESTERN MOVIES...

Da Pagan Baby & I watched the first two Clint films for Sergio Leone this week - the later-acclaimed "spaghetti westerns" - A Fistful of Dollars & For a Few Dollars More... Fistful's the greater of the two.

REMEMBERING "ARMISTICE DAY"...

(Click on any image to ENLARGE it)

My grandmother’s German blood passed through my Dad and runs through me and my kids and grandkids. She was a Hess. In WWI three of her brothers, Charlie, Joe and Fred, all second-generation German-Americans, fought the Kaiser’s Army in France – even though residents of their hometown, Bucyrus, Ohio were split in their loyalty between the Allied Cause and the Fatherland.

These doughboys, like most men who have experienced the horrors of war firsthand, rarely talked about their experiences, except for light-hearted stories of escapades in the French countryside or uncomplimentary references to some of their French counterparts.


[WWI Army Private]

I had the pleasure, as a little kid, of knowing my Dad’s uncles.

Charlie was a fine cellist, and he became a successful entrepreneur. He returned from the War and went into business with a rooming house that catered to the railroad workers, a small grocery store and a cigar store-poolroom-beer parlor.

Joe, who almost died of pneumonia in France, returned to support himself playing boogie-woogie piano in bars and playing poker in backrooms. Later he became a successful commercial painting contractor and semi-retired to Florida at the age of 45.

Fred owned a nightclub in Caldonia, Ohio that featured dancing and backroom gambling. Fred, the youngest of the brother vets, following amputation of a leg, died of complications from diabetes at 45. The onset of the disease was believed to have stemmed from long hours without sleep and irregular and insufficient nutrition during the War in France where he was stuck behind the wheel of a truck for days at a time.

I still remember how almost everyone I knew would take two minutes of silence at 11:00 A.M. on Armistice Day as a sign of respect to those who served and especially those who gave their lives in “The Great War” – as we called it even then, in the midst of WWII. When my mom would take me with her shopping, it seemed there was always an old vet or a volunteer on the streets taking donations for red papier-mache poppies. I always had a poppy pinned to my coat as she dragged me through the streets and stores in Downtown Wilmington or Dayton, Ohio.

Dead Americans of the 38th Infantry at Mezy, 21 Jul 1918

From Wikipedia:

Armistice Day is the anniversary of the official end of World War I, November 11, 1918. It commemorates the armistice signed between the Allies and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front, which took effect at eleven o'clock in the morning — the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month."

Thus ended the “War to End All Wars”, the popular sentiment that carried Americans through the next World War and Korea to 1953, when a ceremony in Kansas was dubbed a Veterans Day celebration. It caught on.

These days we mark November 11 as “Veterans Day” to include all of America’s veterans in the traditional day of tribute. I’ll take a few moments to look at the postcard-photos of the Hess brothers, mailed from the front, meeting their eyes as the doughboys peer from below the brims of their campaign hats, looking comfortable, somehow, in those itchy-scratchy wool uniforms.

As this is being written, there are few Americans among the vets who could tell you of the day when they heard that the Armistice was signed, when so many of them arose tentatively from their trenches, leaving their weapons, as they observed the German soldiers doing the same, each army watching in awe before giving way, at last, to uncontrolled glee. The number of American WWI vets who survive is variously reported as 14-17, including a 109-year-old woman. The oldest, living in Puerto Rico, is 115 years old. This Veterans Day, let’s remember to salute the doughboys, Saturday…

HE SAID, "I'M A BORN REPUBLICAN!" ... Huh?! I thought infants were...

born apolitical?

You, know - like infants are born agnostic - until the indoctrination begins in earnest. 

I was born to a Republican Mum & and a Democrat Dad. Consequently, I had to find me own way. I voted for Goldwater in '64, Nixon in '68 and McGovern in '72.

In '08 I plan to vote for the black guy - you know - the one who's NOT an African-American, as we usually apply the term...

My Dad said I was born with a lead foot, though.

And I was born with callouses on the fingers of my right hand.

I WAS BORN TO ROCK!!

BLAMING THE UNIONS FOR EVERYTHING!... PEOPLE GET READY - CHANGE IS COMING...

Those who are oblivious to history will inevitably be swept up in the replay of revolutions past. It's all happened before, though each time it happens again it shocks the participants, particularly the ones who end up with less power or wealth. Whatever method of conflict resolution one may subscribe to, obstinate resistance and reaction provoke confrontation, then conflict. Change may come in the form of upheaval, "the turning of the worm", the prey captures the hunter, the slave takes over the plantation. Revolutionary moments in our young republic have been few in number and some important changes have been achieved with little or no violence and minimal disruption to the conduct of usual activities and pursuits.

Scratch a union-basher and you'll see either the blue ooze of the rich, or the green ick that flows through the veins of  their accommodating toadies - those who have bought the lie that the PRODUCERS are responsible for the American Dream we're all so fortunate to share. Many among the less-affluent masses can be counted on to echo the elitist lines that blame labor for the jobs that have been outsourced to sub-wage foreigners here and abroad, along with stagnant wages, diminishing benefits and ripped-off pensions.

While they may be aware of the corrupt practices that have bankrupted large employers, and may even suspect that the gummint's globalist trade policies reward the stockholding elites as workers are constrained or tossed away like so much rust-belt debris -  they repeat the line, "The unions have outlived their usefulness" - without knowing what  it may mean or where they  picked up such a notion.

How could American workers be expected to know that even in countries with progressive gummint policies toward labor - the workers NEED their unions. They see the barren terrain, but they're blamin' the wrong gang for choppin' all the trees.

Three decades of antagonistic anti-union legislation have left American wage-workers with the aforementioned stagnant wages, diminishing benefits and ripped-off pensions. We're no longer living and working under democratic capitalism - but a gummint-enabled radical capitalism that has undermined the present and the future for too many wage-workers.

Today's capitalists aren't even "l'aissez faire" - which assumes a level playing field, equal access to markets and opportunities, and fair exchange between workers and owners. The unions didn't destroy economic democracy in America - they NEVER enjoyed that kind of power!

Confrontation of the status quo leads to conflict which is necessary for change.  Justice is usually not attainable except through conflict. In 1929, many among the elites and profiteers found themselves abruptly thrown into dire straits, living hand-to-mouth, and wondering why the masses, the working and the unemployed, treated them as pariahs, petitioning for union representation and fair regulations and taxes on the capitalist class.

What goes around comes around. It's a law of history...

I NAMED MY LOBSTER...

HOW DO YOU COOK LOBSTERS?
Y' boil the sh*t out of 'em!

Little did I realize what I was in for when I brought home 8 - live lobsters in a plastic bucket.

I set about to prepare a fine repast per guest of 1.25-1.50lb Live Maine Lobster, 10 oz. of  Shrimp & Corn Chowder, 1/2lb Shrimp
Potatoes, 4 oz. of Chocolate Espresso Cheesecake. I had fresh Oyster Crackers and a Set of Metal Shell Crackers & Pick Sets for every 2 people, Butter, Lemon, Sea Salt, Bibs, Placemats, Wetnaps, Seaweed & my Nor'Easter Cookbook.



(Click to view Da Rev's Lobster Bake)

I dragged out my heirloom Enameled Lobster Pot and began to bring the water to a boil. Did you have ANY idea that lobsters scream?!? It had never happened to me before - but, check this out - one lobster began squealing in a high (extremely annoying) voice: "OH PLEASE! ARE YOU PLANNING TO BOIL US ALIVE IN THAT THING?"

I was taken aback, but I found my voice and replied, "I've done it lots of times."

The lobster squealed, "THINK HOW THAT MUST FEEL?"

I said, "Every thing I've read says y' just drop the live marine animals into the boiling pot and they feel no pain, seriously!"

The lobster said, "Well, I can see why they might say that. You see, we feel pain - but we're not conscious of the fact that we feel it."

Well, there y' go. I boiled 7 - lobsters we had a magnificent dinner. I stuck the talking lobster in an aquarium. I named her Terri. She talks to me. She says she wants to live . . .


(Click)

Bon Appetit!

CLASS WARFARE?! YOU GOT IT!!... KEVIN PHILLIPS: HAPPY DAYS OVER FOR GOOD?... FREE ENTERPRISE WITHOUT UNIONS?!...

February 17, 2005 http://www.cartoonbank.com/

If the spoke-shills for Wall Street, the Corpies and the 1- Percenters - and that includes the current occupant of the White House, who only dances with them what brung 'im - continue to insist that the income tax is unfair - pretty soon that will become another lie told often enough, etc., etc. It’s time to get rid of the income tax and replace it with a FAIRER tax - such as a national sales tax or (a flat tax).

This myth is part of an orchestrated campaign by "conservatives" of several stripes to do away with a progressive tax that is the fairest tax for all Americans. Replacing the income tax with a national sales tax or flat tax would cut the taxes of corporations and the very rich and impose huge tax hikes on the vast majority of American families.

Look at the state sales tax as an indicator of how a national sales tax would affect people at different income levels. The bottom 20 percent, with an average income of $9,300, pay eight times more of their income in state sales and excise taxes than wealthiest 1 percent, who have an average income of $1.1 million.

(By the way - under typical conservative flat tax proposal, such as Steve Forbes and Jack Kemp and the Repugs in congress were proposing in 2002, all families earning less than $200,000 would pay more in taxes and have lower after-tax incomes. Only families earning more than $200,000 would see their taxes go down and their after-tax incomes go up.)

The higher taxes on the majority of Americans would NOT pay for better schools, improved health care, or shoring up Social Security. Their new taxes would pay for a significant reduction of taxes on the wealthiest 1 percent, who have an average net worth of $10.2 million.

Fair? Hardly. Another perfectly good English word has been co-opted and its meaning distorted - and for what? Will we ever be able to know what someone means when he says or writes the word, "fair" again? How disappointing that the folks who have realized the American Dream would try to get off the hook for propping up the very system in which (and from which) they grew their wealth. And it's even worse that they devise a scheme to shift the burden to the folks who have realized far less from that system - and call it "fair"!

http://www.cartoonbank.com/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

HEY REV! DID YOU KNOW THAT THE PROGRESSIVE INCOME TAX WAS KARL MARX'S IDEA?!

Excuse me for not being sufficiently schooled in Marx and Engels to know for sure - but even Marx couldn't have been wrong about EVERYTHING, could he? That progressive taxation plank in the Communist Manifesto is a convenient boogieman for reactionaries to misappropriate, but it should be noted that the Manifesto also calls for "Free education for all children in public schools and abolition of children's factory labor in its present form."

So - I'll leave it to those who are more conversant with Karl's ideas to say whether, like a broken clock, he may have been right twice a day.

Who thought that the progressive income tax, authorized by constitutional amendment in 1913, would be up for discussion or that the nation was prepared to revisit fundamental aspects of the New Deal's social compact for retirement security? The constitutional amendment allowed a progressive income tax that raised revenue for public services, while counter-acting the overconcentration of wealth and power that was just as much a threat to equality of opportunity and true democracy then as it is today. The liberal consensus on taxes and entitlement programs is unrecognizable as a generation of progressives who grew up taking these policies for granted have forgotten how to fight for them effectively.

 

Meanwhile conservatives in wealth-infused think tanks have mastered the incubation and promotion of radical ideas such as flat or consumption taxes. Progressives are poorly organized to articulate the fundamental principles of fairness that underlie the progressive income tax: the idea that taxation should be based partly on ability to pay: If you earn more, you pay more. Bushco's reactionaries are falling over each other to game the system so the people who work for wages will be the only ones paying income taxes.

Similarly the "social" in Social Security has been lost in the drive to create private retirement accounts. Congress created Social Security not only to protect the elderly against poverty, but also to ensure society as a whole against the social challenges of destitute retirees. Leaving individuals to fend for themselves in the market defeats this basic promise.

The dirty little secret about taxes in this country is that rich people and corporations mostly don't pay them now. We don't need to raise taxes in this country, we need to collect them. The progressive income tax is fair. And a more efficient, fair, and effective tax system is patriotic. Enforcing the law so that wealthy taxpayers don't evade taxes through dubious partnerships, offshore accounts, and unreported income; simplifying the tax code to make it easier to follow the rules; and expanding the earned income tax credit to further reward work - demonstrate a progressive alternative to eliminating the estate tax and creating a national consumption tax.

The Bushco reactionary push seeks to flatten the progressive income tax, to eradicate not just one Roosevelt but two, going after FDR's safety net and the progressive legacy of Teddy. Tax giveaways for the wealthy - from flat taxes to a national sales tax to cuts in capital gains taxes to reduced estate taxes - are just that. There's no trickle down, no mitigating economic effects likely to spread their wealth more widely. Bushco misrepresents fact that the United States is still among the lowest-taxed industrialized countries in the world (by a large margin, compared to most countries). Moreover, the total U.S. tax rate on capital income, according to reasonable estimates, is quite competitive.

ARE THE HAPPY DAYS OVER FOR GOOD? http://www.cartoonbank.com/ 

Kevin Phillips is author of "Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street and the Frustration of American Politics" discussing PARASITES & POLITICS:

~~~ (Corporate leaders these days) are less concerned about actual work. They don’t want to build things. They want to manipulate things. There’s always a lot of pioneering by these cultures, and it’s all negative for the average person. It’s all financialization.

The ultimate financialization has come with the superelectronic age. Lower Manhattan has become the new Tortuga, which was the pirate center in the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The investment firms can do more with modems and quotrons than Henry Morgan and Blackbeard and all the rest could do under the skull and bones.

The result of this financialization process, where more and more are sucked into the orbit of Wall Street and the financial sector, is that all kinds of people in different parts of the country start thinking about how they can do a leveraged buyout of their business, or how they can get in this or that speculative side. It is very striking in the business community how many people who worked hard as humdrum presidents of little companies in Springfield, Ohio wanted to get pulled into the orbit of finance and somehow sell out or do a leveraged buyout. That was the way to go instead of being somebody who retired as having merely made good money for 20 or 30 years ...

http://www.cartoonbank.com/

What we began to see, even before the rise of electronic finance, was the breakdown of employees getting the rewards of their productivity, and more and more of the profits in companies being taken by the top small group of managers. And whereas the CEOs of companies averaged 25 to 40 times the pay of the average worker back, say, in 1970, by the mid-to-late 1980s, you were looking at ratios like 120, 130, 140 to 1.

One of the reasons for this was the extent to which the senior people in companies were getting caught up in the whole financialization process. They wanted to get into buyouts. They wanted big salaries. They wanted deals. They wanted options. They’ve talked about golden parachutes.

A whole mindset developed in companies that had very little to do with whether you were actually making things that society needed or employing a lot of people or giving strength to a community. What counted was how much money you could get in your bonus, and how high you could get your stock price.

In the name of competitiveness and global problems, which obviously were very substantial, an awful lot of stuff was justified that was really just aimed at increasing the price of a company’s stock. When Xerox laid off 11,000 or so a year or two ago, their stock price went up about 7, 8 or 9 percent very quickly. The CEO’s bonus increased because the stock price increased. So in essence, he got a bonus from laying people off.

This undercuts the fabric and pulls things apart. There are all kinds of examples of the way this has worked against the average person. You have banks getting away with paying 2.75 percent on deposits while they charge 17 percent on credit cards, and politicians back off regulating this because it might upset the stock market. Pension funds have been undermined. There’s just a whole mindset out there that grew up around the assumption that all this was acceptable and even useful ...

EEK!!

Phillips describes other cultural shifts that take place among elites in declining powers such as the U.S.:

~~~ You internationalize. You lose your parochialism. In the early stages of the rise to power, you’ve got countries, whether it was Rome, Holland, Britain or the United States, that were somewhat Puritan, that worked very hard. But as the country hits its peak, it becomes the center of the world. It becomes much more fashionable and internationally oriented, especially the elites ...

The other thing that happens is that people get caught up in the sophistication and economic opportunity of global finance and investment. And as a country tends to peak, investors don’t get as much money from investing in the weakening parts of their own economy. So they want to ship it overseas. The Dutch financed a lot of the growth of Britain; they were major stockholders in the East India Company and the Bank of England. Then the British did, right before World War I; one of the reasons why their industry was aging was that they would rather put money into a tea plantation in Ceylon or a railroad in the Argentina, or for that matter, even something in Germany. They wouldn’t invest it at home.

This whole sense of internationalism and sophistication removes the elites from a commonality with their own peoples. They don’t care about decay in the Great Lakes or in the north of England, or in the old textile centers of Holland. It’s much more exciting to worry about where you can put your money 4,000 miles away ... As the elites pursue globalizing the economy and sophistication and progress, but (financialization) actually helps the 1, 2, 5 or 10 percent who have capital skills and education, whether it’s the trade consultant, or the international ship broker, or the commoditity company that trades globally, or Goldman Sachs or First Boston. There are other people who lose the standard of living they enjoyed 10 to 20 to 30 years ago. As we accept globalization, more and more people in the midsection of the population may have slightly cheaper sweatshirts coming in from China, but somehow or another their whole standard of living is stabilized or heading down, and their children don’t have the opportunities, and both parents are working to keep the same income coming in. ~~~

http://www.cartoonbank.com/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

UNIONS ARE CONSISTENT WITH A FREE ECONOMIC SYSTEM - Whether we can do without them or not, depends on whether you're satisfied and well-paid for your work, I'd guess . . .

I believe one should be able to do whatever one wants as long as he isn't hurting anyone else, hurting defined as the use of force or fraud. The primary - and proper - role of government is to protect individuals' rights to do what they want, and to help individuals protect themselves against force and fraud.

The acts of forming a union and negotiating via a union do not inherently rely on force and fraud. In the absence of a voluntarily signed contract forbidding it, one has the right to go to an employer and ask for a raise, benefits, or improved working conditions, right? If one tells his coworker that he plans to do this, the coworker has the same right, doesn't he?  And don’t we have the right to go ask together? So, there’s nothing inherently anti-libertarian about unions.

Unions are a consistent libertarian response to the market failure of asymmetrical information. The market model assumes perfect information to get efficient outcomes, but this obviously isn’t the case in an employer-employee relationship. Unions allow these workers to band together, pool their money, and hire their own lawyers to negotiate for them, putting them on a much more equal footing with employers, minimizing the potential for abuse.

The alternative is government intervention into the employment relationship, with the imposition of minimum wage laws, mandatory overtime pay, OSHA working condition regulations, etc. These rely on government force instead of voluntary negotiations. It would seem the employers and employees (via their unions) - who actually know what’s going on in their business and workplace - are better able to negotiate efficient results than politicians pitting one special interest against another and legislating one-size-fits-all universal mandates.

Unions get their power from contracts, special government protection, financial pressure on employers and social pressure on scabs. At present, our body of labor regulations deal with an economic reality from the '30s -'50s, Taft-Hartley, et al. As our national government is seen by many wage-workers to be colluding with corporate interests and unseen captains of finance, labor stands as a seeming anachronism with little or no tools to effectively contend for representation of workers or to effectively represent their interests in the rapidly changing global marketplace. I'm willing to write off the unions as "beyond their usefulness" - but first - there needs to be another institution that represents the interests of those who market their labor lest they be exploited unfairly by capital.

 

"IT FEELS LIKE ARGENTINA!"

http://www.cartoonbank.com/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~