Who's to blame when nothing trickles down?

From Sunday's Virginian-Pilot. This started out referencing Hank Williams' "My Bucket's Got a Hole In It." No matter how you slice it, someone isn't getting his fair share, whether it be beer or wages.

Capitalism under President Obama has fared better than ever before.

Corporate America is sitting on between three and five trillion dollars of cash reserves stashed in American banks and overseas accounts.

The top 1% of the top 1%—that’s .01% have done even better in the last thirty years. This group of the top 400 billionaires, plus those billionaires left over who couldn’t quite break into the top 400, what I like to refer to as the poorer billionaires, sit at the head of America’s corporate boards. In 1979, there were about three billionaires.

At first glance, the country seems to be doing pretty well under its first Socialist president. Certainly better than anyone would have guessed. Corporate taxes are lower than ever, corporate incentives—they don’t like the term loop holes—are higher than ever at $92 billion, and corporate profits are going through the roof.

The only aspect of Capitalism that isn’t working, as luck would have it, is that aspect that actually affects the workers—the trickle-down.

Apparently—and you would have to ask the CEOs why this is—but apparently nothing is trickling down. It appears as if everything is being sucked up. In 2013, the average CEO salary was $13.9 million, a 9% increase over 2012 while the average minimum wage worker took home about $15,000, the same as he did in 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009.

Half of the workers earning that minimum wage were over the age of 25. They weren’t teenagers earning movie money.

Investors have done as well as CEOs. Apparently, raising their tax rates a few points hasn’t discouraged them to the point where they don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning. That’s a good thing because America does need investors. These so called job creators do have a role to play in the free market.

Job creators are important. But job creators are not more important than the people doing the jobs.

While the right wing attacks Socialist America and the left wing attacks Capitalist America, maybe common sense America should be leading the charge against the real culprits—greedy America.

Everyone from Reagan to Roosevelt, Carry Nation to Tea Party Nation, Rand Paul to Paul Ryan to Paul Bunyan should know what greed is. Greed is what’s doing the country in. No defender of Capitalism should be a defender of greed.

Alms for the rich, Alms for the rich—that's money talking

I wrote this article last Thursday after reading the morning paper. It seems that there were several articles and columns that, although not intentionally, appeared to be related. I tied them all together and sent it off to the paper. Then I checked my email and learned they wished to publish “Here comes the sun, let’s use it,” which I had sent in several weeks earlier

Now I can understand why everyone likes a good dinosaur story. They're so cuddly as little plastic play toys. And if you can tie dinosaurs into global warming, they are almost irresistible.  

The problem is that this piece, because it refers to specific articles in the paper, has a shelf life of about three days. I'm posting the story on the blog because I firmly believe this story has to go somewhere, and there just aren't that many options for this one. The links should take the reader to the original articles.

 

The American Revolution is what you get when intelligent men and women are willing to risk everything they have to be free.

The French Revolution is what you get when the rich and powerful become so arrogant that the poor and weak are willing to risk everything just to get even.

There was no middle road in the days leading up to the French Revolution because there was no middle class. Too bad because a middle road, a road of compromise, could have prevented the revolution from happening and maybe saved some heads in the long run. But you need a middle class to have a middle road.

Middle class gives revolution a bad name. Its people are comfortable, have enough money to eat, dress and live well, and enough education to recognize how well off they are. They have enough morals to treat one another fairly and enough drive to try and get the better of one another. The last thing they want is a revolution. A long, hard fought revolution can knock someone right out of the middle class and into the bread lines.

While it’s hard to have a revolution with a strong middle class it’s pretty easy to have one without a middle class. In fact, the absence of a middle class is what usually causes a revolution, although no one wants to look too deeply into this fact.

Thursday Pilot contained a wealth of information about what’s going wrong in our country. Americans don’t like to hear about class warfare because it sounds so un-American, as well as something only the poor would promote. But class warfare is universal and as old as the Appalachians. Americans would do well to understand this. The same people who don't want to hear about class warfare probably don't want to hear about the French Revolution.