Working Life

It’s a funny thing, though obvious, that when you actually look at all the hand-wringing about budget shortfalls and Social Security funding, it always comes down to the same issue: are the richest among us going to pay their fair share, or are they going to continue to be part of a legalized robbery that drains the wealth of the country into the hands of a few, while the burden increase on most hard-working Americas? So, it is with Social Security.

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It is the strangest contradiction: things have not been so bad for workers probably since the Great Depression, with wages declining, health care costs going up, pensions becoming a thing of the past. People are really angry and frustrated. Yet, at the same time, unions continue to decline in numbers and power.

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When Phil Mickelson whined the other day that his taxes were too high, I tweeted “Mickelson whining abt paying higher taxes, w $47.8 million in earnings. Greedy bastard. How abt work a hard job?” Apparently, the heat was a bit too much for him from other quarters and so now he’s apologizing about speaking up. Bad move.

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Austerity is wildly successful — if you understand that the only logical outcome of austerity is higher unemployment. Take a bow, austerity. You did it.

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Hey, no big deal — you run a company rife with conflicts of interest, you help crater the economy, costing millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth…and you keep racking up more and more money. Life is good for Lloyd Blankfein.

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With all the foolishness everyone seems to associate with the folks in Washington, D.C., don’t worry — coming to a state near you will be same lame-brained ideas that have caused a heap of damage for decades. You know the rap: lower taxes because, presto, that’s the magic potion for all that can be good. Oh, no.

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Have I got a deal for you. You lose a few billion dollars at your job — but you keep your job and pocket $11.5 million. Is that a bargain or what? Of course, this is not the kind of deal for the little people. Nah.This is for the real screw-ups — the people who run the financial institutions who already destroyed an economy.

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Every decade or so, we get a new “gap”. You remember the “missile gap”? Now, we have the “pension gap” — the difference between what sits in pensions funds and what is owed to retirees. But, who caused that gap?

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Somehow there is a bad seed out there in the air freight business. Way back in 2005, I wrote about the bad boys at FedEx. Now, DHL is at it–attacking its workers in Turkey.

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My bullshit radar is working overtime, triggered by two different dust-ups in the political world. I find myself feeling sympathetic to two people who I don’t particularly like or share much in the way of political philosophies.

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