We’ve Got to be Watchdogs on the Watchdogs

  I remember seeing a lawsuit about a home invader that was injured by the home owner. The homeowner didn’t take to being threatened by the robber and scuffled with the thief. The would be home intruder suffered some broken bones and internal injuries. The robber was suing for pain, suffering and the cost of his hospital bill. The jury of course ruled against the robber. If I was on the jury I would have gone along with the rest of the jury. I’ve thought about what could be a similar case. Let’s say a scab got in an altercation with striking workers and was beaten badly. If the striker was put on trial for the beating I think he’d have a good defense. The homeowner said he felt his life was threatened. I think the striker would have a good case by saying his job and livelihood were threatened by the scab. The scab took the job knowing it was a risky job. He was hired by a boss that didn’t care enough to settle a contact with long time workers. If the boss didn’t give a damn about guys he’d known for years why would the scab think the boss would care about the scabs safety. If I was on the jury the striker goes free and the scab would learn a valuable lesson.

  This leads me to my last week hero Mike Trivisonno talk radio host at WTAM in Cleveland. “Triv” won because he didn’t take sides in the Strongsville, Ohio teacher’s strike. He welcomed and listened to callers on each side and asked them good questions. Mike wins again this week because he has stayed the course and heard people out. It is very unusual for a talk radio host to not take a side and call those on the other side idiots. Triv even had one of the scabs call his show. The scab said some of these teachers make over $60,000 a year and that is far too much money. Triv asked, “Then you must think the superintendent who makes $130,000 is way over paid.” She replied “He is underpaid as he works 12 months.” Trivisonno shot back, “He works a couple of months more than the teachers so that justifies the extra $70,000 over the teachers? Who do you think plays a bigger role in the students learning the teachers or the administrator?” She would not answer so he asked her several times. She finally replied, “Both.” Triv said, “Tell me which one the most out of the two.” The scab would not answer. Triv is asking some good questions to both sides and not letting anyone get away with presenting B.S. as facts.

  While I’m on schools I present the local buffoons of the week award. It goes to any Trumbull or Mahoning County school officials that wasted their time going to a Tribune Chronicle Editorial Board endorsement interview about the Tribune supporting their school levy. It would not matter if your school district had all teachers, janitors, bus drivers, coaches, secretaries and administrators work for free Tribune editor Frank Robinson will not endorse your school levy. If your building has free heat and water and you have cut all costs to zero Frank would still not back your school levy. Frank says he wants to see consolidated services and administrations between all county districts or one big county school. If all the districts made one big school and combined all services at that one building the editor would still not be happy. That is because like all conservatives he wants to wipe out public education. He is for wiping out tenure and for pushing vouchers.

  Teachers are in unions and those unions endorse candidates that support working Americans. That mean unions don’t back GOP candidates. Therefore, conservatives like Frank want teachers unions destroyed and that means putting an end to public education. So school board administrators save your time bending and groveling before Editor Robinson because he doesn’t want your school funded and doing well. Editor Robinson wants your public school buried and gone. I might suggest that this valley does not need two newspapers so the Vindicator and Tribune should combine and since two editors wouldn’t be needed Editor Robinson could get a job where his skills could shine. Some kind of job like working at a bowling alley spraying rented shoes with foot deodorant.

  I also want to nominated Bill Maher for national buffoon of the week. On his show yesterday Bill said, “The Head Start program has been shown to be a waste of money by a new study.” I expected and did hear this piece of B.S. from every brain-dead host over at FOX NEWS. I expected Maher would at least read the whole report. Conservatives saw a section that made their case against Head Start but refused to read the rest of the report. Maher heard the conservative media touting the section they liked and actually trusted their reporting without reading the report himself.  Hats off to John Stewart and the writers at the Daily Show who read the whole report and did this funny and poignant piece exposing the real truth.

  I only heard the ‘Tracey and Friends” radio show over at WSOM this week for about two minutes while I was on break listening to my car radio. Those two minutes were enough to educated me on something I was not aware of. Sticks and Jeff were spouting their usual racism against all Muslims B.S. when Sticks said, “Catholics are not Christians.” Jeff added his usual wisdom to that statement “Duh, ummha yea dats right.” I was thinking this was some info I should get to the new pope as it is something he should know. After work I smelled the stench of revisionist history upon entering my car. I put off the call to the pope and now realize the name Sticks is short for sticks for brains (or blockhead). I really do have other things I want to write about but I just can’t tolerate lies in the media. As Aldous Huxley said, ”Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

David Bowie: “Where Are We Now”

‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight)”

Area band:  The Bedspins

“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”—Victor Hugo

A Look at a Week in the Media

  I want to nominate a caller to 1100 AM WTAM talk radio in Cleveland as my so steeped in your conservative rhetoric that you are blind, deaf and dumb to reality award.  The caller called today to the Bob Frantz Show. The topic was the rape trial in Steubenville, Ohio. The caller asked, “Why didn’t the liberals come out to support this woman who was supposedly raped?” He went into further detail about how liberals don’t care about women or victims. If like me the caller watched the TV news or read newspapers he’d of seen liberal folks like women’s organizations and Occupy members holding signs supporting the rape victim in Steubenville. Had he ever turned off FOX NEWS and put on any news show on ABC, NBC, ABC, CNN,  MSNBC or Pierce Morgan’s show he’d of seen liberals being interviewed supporting the rape victim. The caller could have spent one minute on the internet to get photos from newspapers of liberal Occupy members wearing Guy Fawkes masks (I hate these masks as the real Guy was a religious zealot terrorist). Instead the caller spent over an hour on hold to talk to Frantz to express his ignorance. You’d have thought someone in the media like radio host Bob Frantz should have known liberal groups came to Steubenville to seek justice for the rape victim. Then again if you’ve ever heard Bob you’d know what a truly uninformed dumb ass he is. The real irony is that the caller made no mention of all the conservative callers that were phoning in to defend the two convicted of rape and call the girl who was a rape victim a drunken slut.

   Earlier in the week I listen to a much funnier and more informed talk radio host at WTAM. That would be Mike Trivisonno who goes by, “Triv.” Callers to Triv’s show wanted to bash the teachers in Strongsville, Ohio for going on strike. The teachers went on strike after working for two years without a contract and taking a wage freeze. Most of the issues the teachers want addressed do not involve money. The school board has been refusing to meet with the teachers. The board has cried poor yet had lots of money to call in union busting firm Huffmaster. Scab teachers and jackbooted thugs in uniform were provided by Huffmaster. Did anyone wonder that if these scabs are such good teachers why don’t they have teaching jobs? Triv did something I hear very few talk radio hosts ever do. He said he really didn’t have enough information to support the teachers or the school board. Lack of information didn’t stop his callers from phoning to spread rumors, insinuations, assumptions, lies, rhetoric and hypothetical what ifs. These things are actually at the heart of what talk radio is about as facts would just get in the way.

  One caller told Triv “I live in Strongsville and vote against the school levies as I already pay enough taxes.” Triv asked, “What do you pay a year?” The caller said “a lot.” Triv asked, “What actual amount?” The caller replied, “I don’t know as I don’t see the bill because my wife takes care of that.” Triv said, “Let me do the math for you, what is your house worth?” The caller answered, “I don’t know.” Another caller said, “Teachers are overpaid.” Triv asked what the teachers in Strongsville were paid. No callers knew the actual figure but all were willing to guess it was a huge amount. Callers complained that teachers had the whole summer off and were paid for it. Triv explained that the school system takes money out of teachers pay during the school year and then pays that amount to the teachers over the summer. Callers were just too dumb to understand that teachers are just getting their already earned money back for the summer. The truth is that benefits taxpayers as the school system is earning interest on the teachers money being held not the teachers.

  People were mostly just complaining about teachers having a union. They claimed the union protects bad teachers. The fact is Bob Frantz use to be a teacher and is now a talk show host. By that I mean it looks to me like bad teachers don’t stay. Do conservatives think school boards are so dumb they hire bad teachers? Conservatives complain about teachers getting tenure after a few years. Do they believe school officials go a few years without noticing someone is a bad teacher? If the answer to those questions is yes the real problem is not the bad teacher but the bad administration that does the hiring and supervision of that bad teacher. I’ve been in several unions and never saw a bad worker be protected by the union. The truth is all the bad workers I saw were always promoted to management.

   Triv I’m sure was pushed to the limited by callers B.S. about the strike. He finally said, “Listen at one time I was in a union. At another job after that I didn’t like unions. Now after working for many people I’ve come to realize employers want you to work for nothing. They want to squeeze you for every dime so I think that if you don’t have a union where you work to represent your interests you are nuts.”  For this statement and the fact Triv didn’t want to take sides until he had more facts I want to give him my hero of the week award. Triv is right that workers need unions Have you ever heard an employee say, “I don’t need a union because my boss has my best interest at heart?” As I said last post you have conservatives like FOX NEW’s John Stossel that thinks Americans should work for nickels and dimes to compete with Hong Kong.

  My area buffoon of the week is multiple time winner Frank Robinson the editor for the Warren Tribune Chronicle. Frank wins because of his idiotic comments on the Strongsville teacher strike. Frank claims that strike has now made some Ohio voters wonder why they rejected SB5. If you remember SB5 would have taken away rights of Ohio’s state’s public workers, to strike and collectively bargain for wages, health insurance and pensions. When SB5 was up for vote it was defeated by 65% of Ohio’s voters. Editor Frank would have you believe that many of those in the 65% would change their minds because 380 teachers went on strike after working for two years without a contact. Frank mentioned that one of the students claimed teachers were worried about themselves not the students. Frank might be in the media like Triv but unlike Triv Frank will always take the corporate before worker side. That means he will not mention the students who spoke up for and marched with the teachers on the picket line. Editor Frank of course mentioned that scabs were being harassed but made no mention of the striking teachers harassed by Huffmaster thugs and student’s parents. Editor Robinson bought the Weapons of Mass Destruction lie under GW Bush. The editor had no problem with sending our sons and daughter to die for the lie of WND’s. Yet Frank thinks we should not join unions and fight to make our jobs better. The Elecpencil would rather fight for my rights on the job to better my family than to send my kids to die for a lie.

  I turned on the CSPAN channel yesterday to watch some of the CPAC meeting.  CPAC stands for the Conservative Political Action Conference. It is where cavewomen and cavemen gather to long for the good old dinosaur days. I heard Phyllis Shafly the head of the Eagle Forum speak. She is proud to be against the Equal Rights Act and against the Violence Against Women’s Act. Phyllis thinks it is OK to treat women as second class people and that the man is boss in the family so it is OK to slap a woman around. When I saw her speak my first thought was is that woman still alive. I thank God her anti-woman ideas are for the most part dead. Phyllis hates women so much I have long believed she is a female impersonator. She also hates gays even though she has a gay son. She thinks she is a great Christian role model and once told an audience “”the atomic bomb is a great gift given to our country by a wise God?” I’ve heard Jesus called the Prince of Peace but never the smart giver of the Patriot Missile. I give Phyllis the bimbo award and it was hard-fought as Sarah Palin also attended CPAC.

  Former Democrat Rep. Arthur Davis of Alabama spoke at CPAC. He was one of the national co-chairs for President Obama’s 2008 campaign. Davis is an African-American who became a Republican and is now finding it more lucrative to bash President Obama. I wonder if any of the African-Americans in attendance were bothered by the fact that CPAC attendees in a straw poll elected Rep. Rand Paul to be their next GOP presidential candidate? Rand like his father Rep. Ron Paul have said they would have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Check this out: CPAC Tea Party event on racial tolerance turns to chaos as “Disenfranchised” whites arrive.

  In the end CPAC conservatives say they want more opportunities for minorities. Sadly the opportunities they will give minorities are: the opportunity to be asked for your papers, the opportunity to be racially profiled, the opportunity to be pulled over by the police, the right to be discriminated against by realtors, banks, mortgage companies, landlords and on job applications. Minorities will continue to have the opportunity to attend inadequately funded schools, and the opportunity to be thrown in prison more. The o in GOP stands for old (meaning keeping things the old way) not for opportunity.

John Cale: “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend”

“Catastrofuk”

Area band: “Wet Lemon”

“The scab is a traitor to his God, his mother, and his class”~ Jack London

Talk Radio Jihad/ The Minimum Wage

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute shows, almost 90%  of minimum wage workers are 20 years old or older. Also, “more than a third (35.8 percent) [of minimum wage workers] are married, and over a quarter (28.0 percent) are parents.” Conservatives say raising the minimum wage will hurt small business owners. The fact is, two-thirds of low-wage workers work for big corporations, most of these corporations have been doing very well and could afford to increase wages. An analysis of state minimum wage increases showed that those states boosting their wage “had job growth above the national average.” Despite all that, FOX News’s John Stossel said “The U.S. should emulate Singapore where they have no minimum wage and no laws against discrimination.” John went on to say employers should be able to also discriminate against hiring anyone who is handicapped or disabled. Stossel has been one of the vilest pathological liars in the media for years, that is why he earns the buffoon of the week award. In Singapore gun ownership is illegal, free speech is outlawed and an assembly of more than 5 people without a permit is outlawed. No word if Stossell wants those things for the U.S. also.

I wrote what I thought would make an interesting short play a few years ago. It dealt with the manipulation of issues on right-wing talk radio. The issue I was writing about was the minimum wage. Since there is ongoing discussion about raising the minimum wage I thought I’d dig up the following piece.

Talk Radio Jihad/ The Minimum Wage

Leaving work, I turn on my car radio only to hear the last few minutes of the Mush Windbag Show.

Mush: “The Congress should vote against the minimum wage increase, it’s already high, whatever it is. They should give more tax breaks and incentives to corporations and keep workers from getting minimum wage increases.”

Caller: “Ditto Mush on the minimum wage it’s already too high……….whatever it is. I also agree with you about the environment. Environmentalist are commies, green on the outside and red on the inside.”

Mush: “Yes, trees are not beautiful until you cut them down and make something from them. Goodbye ditto heads, be ever vigilant and tune in tomorrow.”

I yell at the radio, “I guess God had in mind big picnic tables when he made the giant sequoia trees. Yes, keep tuning in ditto head lemmings until prophet Mush tells you when to drink the Kool-Aid.” We need national health care to get these callers mental help. It must be very hard to dial the telephone in a straight jacket.

The news comes on to say protesters at a Buchanan fundraiser called Pat, David Duke without the sheet. Pat Buchanan’s sister Bay says, “I hate David Duke, he steals all of Pat’s ideas.”

Next on the radio comes a local show with the host Don Waters

Don: “Now the government wants to regulate wages. The minimum wage is too high already…whatever it is. We don’t need government intervention. Let’s go to the phone lines. Callers what’s wrong with America?”

Don hits line one : Caller; “Big Government”

Ok, line 2: “Big government”

Line 3: “ Big government.”

Line 4: “Big government, big government, big government”

Don: “Caller turn down your radio when you call.”

Next line caller; “Hi Don, Juliet here, long time listener, first time caller. I was struck by a hit and run driver in a BMW last winter as I waited for a bus. I’m in a wheel chair for life and my husband has become an invalid also.”

Don: “Yeah, you old battle-axe, so what?”

Caller: “Well we worked at minimum wage jobs and have no savings and are having a hard time making ends meet. I turned on the radio to hear you arguing against a minimum wage increase. Why over the years have you gotten meaner and meaner to working people?”

Don: “Listen lady I got married a few years ago and had an instant family. My wife wanted a big wedding ring, a big new house, a new car, and a $1500 dryer one of my sponsors sells and a $1000 sweeper another sponsor sells. Hell lady, my life’s been super sized in a short period of time. I had to get a 2nd career running a grass cutting business. I don’t like minimum wage increases because it will mean I’ve got to pay my employees more. Got it battle-axe?”

Don;: “Next caller: Big government bad.”

Next: “Hey Don I can’t talk long, I’ve got to get to my post office box to pick up my Social Security check and re-mail a government college grant check to my son that came to my house by mistake then stop for a check up at the Vet’s hospital.”

Don: “Yeah, old-timer so what did you want to say?”

Caller: “Just that big government is bad.”

Now for a commercial: Hello from Right Wing Wacko Books.com. Check out this great new book, “Benefits Bah Humbug” by Silas Marner. Learn how to keep your workforce from obtaining health care, vacations and how to keep your sweatshop free of: unions, OSHA and EPA regulations. “Benefits Bah Humbug” with a forward by conservative union buster, the Gipper. Order one today.

The next program was an investment show.
“Hi, I’m Rob Grinch, host of Who Says You Can’t Take It with You, Sew Pockets in Your Shroud.” First off: “Big government is bad, they’re trying to raise the minimum wage which is far too high…whatever it presently is.”

On to the first caller: “Rob I agree the minimum wage is too high…whatever that figure is. Now my problem, I make $635,000 a year, my wife $510,000. We’ve got a $985,000 house paid off, $3.5 million in 401k’s, 1.8 million in bonds plus I just inherited 6 million.”

Rob: “What’s your question?”

Caller: “I need your help because, it’s free. Should I spend money for snow tires this winter or can my wife get by with her BMW’s all season tires? Last winter she slid off the road and thought maybe she hit something so she’s concerned about snow tires this year.”

Rob: “What the bleep, bleep, call the auto talk show you bleep. I’m a certified investor.”

Next caller: “Hi Rob, I’m Romeo. I just turned on the show and I don’t know your topic but I need help. I broke my spine on my job as a manual loader of anvils and I have no insurance or health care and a wife and 2 kids and a $15,000 house to pay off.”

Rob: “Did you sock away any money?”

Caller: “Not making minimum wage I didn’t.”

Rob: “What’s that pay?”

Caller: “$5.15 an hour.”

Rob: “Far too much, I knew it. Make your wife work.”

Caller: “She’s in a wheelchair, last winter a hit and run driver in a BMW hit her, jumping the curb while she waited for a bus. She has doctor bills over $300,000. What can I do?”

Rob: “I’ve got one word for you, cyanide. Sayonara until tomorrow listeners.”

Next came the therapist show,
“Hi, I’m Dr. Whora Slutfinger and I’m my kid’s mom.” I’m thinking that’s her way of talking about herself 3 times in one sentence.

Her first caller: “Dr. Whora, my husband has a permanent spine injury and can’t work. I am also an invalid since I was hit by a BMW hit and run driver last winter. We’ve got two kids to feed, no income or health care and 100’s of thousands of dollars in medical bills. We’re so stressed out we don’t know what to do.”

Dr. Whora: “How old are your kids?”

Caller: “ 3 and 5.”

Dr.: “You didn’t stay home with your kids? You worked?”

Caller: “Yes, my husband and I only had minimum wage jobs.”

Dr.: “You should have stayed home with your kids, you shameless bitch. I’m sure God is punishing you for working. You and your shack up honey probably have tons of cash saved since you both worked minimum wage jobs which pay way too much…whatever that figure is.”

Next up was a news break with Saul Harve.
“Hello, Saul Harve here with the rest of the story.”

Page 1: A Romeo & Juliet love story. With Romeo suffering from a spine injury he somehow gets the crazy idea to end it all with cyanide.

Page 2: Juliet finds his lifeless body, pulls her wheelchair next to him and takes the rest of the cyanide. Her small children find her muttering, “shack up honey, shameless bitch, God is punishing me” as she dies in their arms.

Page 3: It is your announcer’s view they ended their lives because they were depressed with their human condition. You see they both had minimum wage jobs and therefore must have been living the life of luxury. Living a decadent, debauched life discovering all their fabulous wealth could not bring them happiness.

Page 4: Yes, the lesson we have to learn is that minimum wage is already too high…………whatever it is. Good day.

ALEC fighting to suppress the wages of low-wage earners.

R.I.P. Alvin Lee. This from him and his band Ten years After: “I’d Love to Change the World”

“Let the Sky Fall”

Area band: The Robbie Jay Band

“I used to work at McDonald’s making minimum wage. You know what that means when someone pays you minimum wage? You know what your boss was trying to say? “Hey if I could pay you less, I would, but it’s against the law.”~ Chris Rock

The Ever-Widening Gap

 

  You hear lots of talk from conservatives saying we are a Christian nation or at least founded as a Christian nation. There is lots of proof to dismiss this but today let’s say these two statements are true. Jesus said many things about the poor such as: Luke 6:20-21 “Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” Mark 10:21 “Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” Mark 10:21 “When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.” Anyone notice any wealthy folks trying to become poorer? Have you been injured by a stampeded of the wealthy giving away their possessions? Today’s Christians seem more interested in getting wealthy then helping the poor that Jesus asked them to care for. Born-again religious scholars can even cite the divine source for worshiping the wealthy. It’s in that section that the Christian prophet Ronald Reagan wrote, stating that wealth is a virtue. I guess they think God sacrificed his only son so the money-changers in the temple could go about their righteous work?

  I hear today’s money changers claiming President Obama is a Marxist who wants to redistribute wealth (kind of like Jesus proposed). The buzzword “entitlements” has been filtered down from the wealthy to the media they own. They want it said enough that the middle class and working class bash the poor. I hear my fellow citizens in these classes spewing the word back and bashing the poor on welfare on a daily basis. That tells me that the non-Christian attitude of the wealthy and their spin is working. If you dare bring up the fact that social welfare is 1% of the federal budget and that corporate welfare is 5% you will be accused of class warfare. I stand guilty and I want to state my case by first pointing out wealthy hypocrites like the Koch brothers. Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars over the years, demonizing government and promoting free-market capitalism, the Koch brothers are huge recipients of corporate welfare. They graze cattle and harvest timber on public lands, reaping the profits while paying minuscule fees.  They use the government’s power of eminent domain to get routes for their thousands of miles of gas and oil pipelines. They also take advantage of direct government subsidies to produce ethanol. Ross Perot and the Walton’s (owners of WalMart/Sam’s Club) are also some of the biggest welfare queens on the planet. Sports lovers love their teams so much they pay big dollars to get seats to a game or season tickets. I can’t believe how much they charge fans to see a game in a building the fans paid for. According to the Wall Street Journal, a typical sports facility costs local taxpayers more than $10 million a year. Looks like the taxpayers are the ones being played to me.

  Right-wing think tanks exist to make the rich richer and they put out lies to keep working people from rising up against injustice. Robert Rector at the right-wing think tank, Heritage Foundation claimed that poor families receive $168 per day in government benefits – more than the median weekly income in this country. Like all figures from Heritage it is full of shit. It includes counting things like federal aid to rebuild communities after natural disasters as “welfare,” including programs that assist the middle class and the wealthy and then dividing the costs of all these programs by the number of households under the poverty line. According to a Census Bureau analysis, one in three Americans are poor. That is defined as struggling to cover the basic necessities of life. The “near-poor” are Americans with incomes between 100 and 150 percent of the poverty line. They found that this group, most of whom earn paychecks and pay taxes, represented a whopping one in six U.S. households don’t have enough savings to stay above the poverty line for three months or more if they lost their job. Another third are living paycheck to paycheck, teetering on the brink with no savings.

  To counter these poverty figures conservatives say that our nation’s poor have it better off than the poor in other countries. I heard one conservative commentator talking about how our nation’s poor have color TV’s.  Of course it is easy to afford a color TV in this country. You can get them free on Craigslist or at Freecycle. People like the latest technology and the only TV’s selling are new HD thin models. People also are buying laptops instead of desktop computers. This all means old computers and TV’s are given away free and free is a price the poor can afford. Our missions are full of homeless and you can see them under bridges. I suppose the windows of BMW’s and Mercedes are tinted extra dark so the wealthy don’t have to see such things. The rich talk about pulling yourself up with your own bootstraps. Let’s be honest, we don’t all start out with the same opportunities (read boots). The reality is that in the United States today, the best predictor of a newborn baby’s economic future is how much money his/her parents make.

   How does comparing our poor to other nations poor help the poor in our country? How does saying other countries have a higher disparity between rich, middle class and poor make inequities in our country better? They don’t they are meant as feel good B.S. Conservatives love info that is feel good (instead of actually trying to do good) and symbols. Feel good B.S. and symbols like flag lapel pins and crosses are popular with conservatives because they require no effort to make things better. These so-called, “Good Christians” wear a cross but won’t do the work Christ asked them to do. The first Christians became martyrs because they were sacrificed to lions because they wouldn’t deny their faith. Today’s Christians think they are being persecuted because they can no longer ram their Christian prayers down the throats of public school children of all faiths. They think they are martyrs because they have endured the pain and suffering of hearing a store employee say, “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” These Christians need to come down from their cross and give the wood and nails to someone who will actually use it to build a better world. If you are a real Christian shouldn’t you be doing something to help the poor all around the world? Did Jesus say, “Just take care of the poor in your own country?”

  My heroes of the week are Diva and Stanley two callers to “The Tracey and Friends” talk radio show at WSOM. They both try to fight against the constant lies of the “Friends.” The “Friends” like to mute them when they can’t argue these two’s points. Stanley is a conservative but is outraged at the ideas expressed by the “Friends.” My buffoon of the week is frequent winner Jeff who is one of the “Friends.” The other day Jeff said that the disparity between the rich and poor wasn’t that bad in the USA. He said countries like China were far worse. Jeff is wrong and part of our lying media. The truth is that the gap between rich and poor in the U.S. rivals that of developing nations, ranking America as a whole toward the bottom of the income inequality barrel. When it comes to advanced economies with the biggest gap between rich and poor the U.S. came in third behind Hong Kong and Singapore.

  Using an international index known as the Gini coefficient the income gap in China reached 0.3949 last year, nearing a “danger level” of 0.40 set by the United Nations for potential social unrest, according to a study released in August by the state-backed Center for Chinese Rural Studies at Central China Normal University. The official English-language China Daily called the reading for last year’s Gini index “alarming.” The National Bureau of Statistics China (NBS) director Ma Jiantang said the findings mean that China “must accelerate its income distribution reform to narrow the rich-poor gap,” By measuring equality as 0 and absolute inequality as 1, the NBS estimate would make China’s wealth gap only slightly wider than that of the United States. The difference is that in China the media and the government acknowledge that the gap between the rich and poor is a serious problem they need to deal with. They fear as the UN said that the gap has the potential for social unrest.

  Here in the U.S. our conservative politicians will not only not recognize the gap they insist that taxes should not be raised on our nation’s wealthiest. At the same time they are trying to destroy unions which built the middle-class and they fight against any minimum wage increases. The UN doesn’t have to tell the U.S. that the gap between rich and poor is so bad that the country should fear social unrest. The people in this country are so complacent they could never pull off a revolution and the powers that be know it. If we even set a date for a revolution those in power could stop women who want change by just have a big Black Friday type sale at malls and at WalMarts. As for the men they’d put an extra Superbowl on TV. Men would buy expensive tickets for the game to sit in a stadium their tax dollars built. Come to think of it I think the 1%ers are trying their best to push us to revolution. The 1% would have stopped the revolution and made money from cash spent at their stores and stadiums. As the middle-class and working-class become the  poor, I wonder what it will take before our citizens do something about the ever-widening gap.

Common Mama: “A New Kind of Something”

Possibly Mine

Local Music: Teddy Pantelas

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” ~ FDR