The price of regular unleaded gasoline where I live is not four dollars per gallon yet. It's three dollars, ninety nine cents and nine tenths of a cent - a whole whopping tenth of a penny less than four dollars per gallon.
Two sets of financial numbers in the news are the focus of my attention tonight:
First, the price of regular unleaded gasoline where I live is not four dollars per gallon yet. It’s three dollars, ninety nine cents and nine tenths of a cent – a whole whopping tenth of a penny less than four dollars per gallon.
Second, Open Secrets reports a huge difference in the character of the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
The amount of money from PACs (political action committees) taken by Barack Obama: $250
The amount of money from PACs (political action committees) taken by Hillary Clinton: $1,216,842
American Apparel and Skreened are the real thing. They follow American labor and environmental laws. Alternative Apparel doesn't. They went for the ethical loophole. They're just posers. Do you want to wear clothes made by posers?
This week, CafePress sent us a cap as a free sample, to get us excited about selling clothes using a technology they call InfiniStitch. It’s a way to get an image made on a computer automatically stitched as a badge on a piece of clothing.
That sounds really great, but there’s a problem, as seen on the sample cap filmed in the movie below: The stitching doesn’t actually look very good, and the words in the stitching are almost impossible to read.
That’s small stuff compared to the problem I found on the tag: The cap is made in China by a company called Alternative Apparel. The name Alternative Apparel sounds great, but there’s more to a business than just a name.
Alternative Apparel makes a lot of promises when it comes to the ethical treatment of workers in its Chinese factories, and it says that it inspects factories a few times a year in order to see if things are on the up-and-up. However, Alternative Apparel doesn’t really know what’s going on in those factories in China except on those special inspection days.
What’s going on in Chinese factories has been exposed: Forced prisoner labor, worker abuse, and even child slave labor. The New York Times recently reported that “Big corporations have stepped up inspections of factories that produce goods for them. But suppliers have become adept at evading such scrutiny by providing fake wage and work schedule data that suggest they abide by labor laws.” They report the use of Chinese child slave labor as “quite typical”.
Alternative Apparel surely knows about these problems, and the insufficiency of inspections in revealing the problem. Yet, they choose to do business in China anyway.
Why? That’s easy. They do it for the money.
Alternative Apparel chose to have the clothes it sells made in China in order to save money, so that they could make big profits. They knew that China has low labor costs because it has low standards of worker protection.
Alternative Apparel chose to outsource its manufacturing to China in order to avoid American laws that guarantee fair treatment of workers and environmental protections.
Do you want to support that choice? It’s your freedom to do so, but if you buy from companies like Alternative Apparel, please don’t act shocked when you hear about children being forced to work as slaves in China. You helped make it happen, after all, with every cheap thing you bought that was made in China.
There is a true alternative in apparel. You can buy a shirt from Skreened, which prints here in the USA, only on shirts that are made in America, by American Apparel.
American Apparel is the real thing. They follow American labor and environmental laws. Alternative Apparel doesn’t. They went for the ethical loophole. They’re just posers.
Nuclear weapons are designed to kill civilians by destroying entire cities, vaporizing them, melting them, burning them into nothing more than radioactive cinder and ash. These are the moral values of the Republican party: Less medicine for the sick, and more nuclear weapons to kill people by the millions.
The real moral values of the Republican Party are demonstrated in brutal, sadistic form in the last federal budget proposed by George W. Bush.
The federal budget President Bush proposes for 2009 begins a program of cutting 196 billion dollars from Medicare health care benefits for the elderly and extremely impoverished Americans.
Why would the Republicans do such a cruel thing? Well, part of that money taken away from Medicare will go to pay for policies that make rich Americans even richer.
But, some of the money the Republicans will save by cutting Medicare benefits for senior citizens will go to pay for something even more inhumane. The Republicans propose using some of the money taken away from Medicare to pay for a new generation of nuclear bombs.
What do we need new nuclear weapons for? Terrorists cannot be defeated with nuclear missiles. Nuclear weapons are designed to kill civilians by destroying entire cities, vaporizing them, melting them, burning them into nothing more than radioactive cinder and ash.
These are the moral values of the Republican party: Less medicine for the sick, and more nuclear weapons to kill people by the millions.
This isn’t about getting tough, or being fiscally conservative. It’s inhumane. It’s just plain insane.
The Republican Party agenda, led now by George W. Bush, and to be continued by John McCain, leads on a path of fear and destruction.
The Chicago Tribune cites Representative Skelton as saying that the military budget is necessary to ensure the health of the military. The health of the military? My foot. The budget increase for the Pentagon ensures the financial health of military contractor corporations, and their investors and executives who are linked to politicians in Washington D.C. It's a financial scheme for which members of Congress will be rewarded generously in the form of campaign donations. It's dirty, rotten, stinking corporate pork barrel in the form of bullets and bombs.
The three trillion dollar budget viciously cuts programs that benefit the American people, so how come it’s still the biggest federal budget in history? Part of the answer is that the budget proposed by George W. Bush contains the biggest military budget since World War II.
Are we really supposed to believe that the “War On Terror”, a fight against Islamic terrorist riff raff, our generation’s equivalent of a war against pirates, costs more than the global struggle against the forces of the Soviet Union and other Communist nations? No, don’t believe that for a second – you’re being asked to believe something even worse.
You see, when they say that the military budget requested for 2009 is the biggest since World War II, they aren’t even including the nearly trillion dollars extra that the Bush White House is expected to request for the military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Where is the money going this time? It’s going to fund corruption, fraud and waste. It’s going into the pockets of some very well-connected individuals – people in what the charitable refer to as the “defense” industry who have close working relationships with the Bush White House and members of Congress.
The military-linked corruption isn’t only going to the Republican side of the aisle, either. Think about the whopper unloaded upon the good people of Missouri by Democratic Congressman Ike Skelton: The Chicago Tribune cites Representative Skelton as saying that the military budget is necessary to ensure the health of the military.
The health of the military? My foot. The budget increase for the Pentagon ensures the financial health of military contractor corporations, and their investors and executives who are linked to politicians in Washington D.C. It’s a financial scheme for which members of Congress will be rewarded generously in the form of campaign donations. It’s dirty, rotten, stinking corporate pork barrel in the form of bullets and bombs.
Republican politics in Washington D.C. brings us this polluted equation:
40 billion dollars of profits for ExxonMobil in 2008 plus record oil prices plus ever escalating economic damage due to fossil-fuel-fueled climate change equals continued tax breaks for ExxonMobil
This is no joke. It’s what’s really going on. We’re getting another record-breaking federal budget next year, but ExxonMobil won’t be paying its share.
The Republicans in DC are nothing but an oil slick across America’s pocketbook.
How much did a gallon of gasoline cost when George W. Bush took office (and I put the emphasis on took)? Let's end the economy-destroying military occupation of Iraq, and redirect that budget to implementing green power, back here in the USA where the investment will be returned to the government in the form of taxes resulting from a stronger, more efficient economy.
How much did a gallon of gasoline cost when George W. Bush took office (and I put the emphasis on took)?
$1.39
Can you imagine how much your monthly budget would change if the price of gasoline were back down to that level?
It can be done – if America invests heavily in solar, wind, and geothermal power. When I say “America invests”, I mean the American government.
Let’s end the economy-destroying military occupation of Iraq, and redirect that budget to implementing green power, back here in the USA where the investment will be returned to the government in the form of taxes resulting from a stronger, more efficient economy. Those bullets in Iraq don’t bring anyone any economic benefit. Windmills keep on giving, long after their initial deployment.
Long-standing administration policy? What long-standing administration policy? Oh, yeah, the long-standing policy of the Bush Administration to screw over American workers whenever possible - whether they're Native Americans or not!
The Bush Administration is threatening to veto legislation that would improve health care at Native American reservations and would require that federal contracts active on those reservations pay people fairly.
Why? Who would the Bush White House do such a cruel thing, especially just as the American economy is heading into the gutter again?
Long-standing administration policy? What long-standing administration policy? Oh, yeah, the long-standing policy of the Bush Administration to screw over American workers whenever possible – whether they’re Native Americans or not!
The Dow Jones Industrials Average has just plummeted more than 450 points in just three minutes.
So much for putting trust in the fossil fuel economy. So much for the idea that corporations are going to provide a secure foundation for the American economy. So much for steady employment in exchange for the cubicle conformity of corporate life.
What America is learning now is that everything that they have given away to corporations – all their independence, all their privacy, all their local identity, and even their own influence over the democratic process – has been for nothing. The corporations, and the Wall Street financial institutions that back them up, are not competent to run the economy.
We’ll all pay the price for this Wall Street and corporate ineptitude. Don’t think recession. Think depression.
The corporations have taken away America’s economic safety nets, and our national treasure is being blown to bits in Iraq.
Hunker down, people, and prepare for some tough times.
Who in their right mind would not be bothered by the loss of 2.4 trillion dollars, but then when 3.5 trillion dollars is lost, freak out? No one. If 3.5 trillion dollars is bad, then 2.4 trillion dollars is bad too. If 2.4 trillion dollars of burden won't bother you, 20 trillion won't either.
A new report out by the Democratic congressional joint economic committee says that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could end up costing America 3.5 trillion dollars, not 2.4 trillion dollars as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says.
You know what my reaction to that is? So what?
It has to do with the psychology of numbers. People regard their burdens in terms of relative, not absolute, scales. When the country is in debt 2.4 trillion dollars, what’s another 1.1 trillion dollars to add on?
Peregrin Wood tries to put these trillions of dollars into perspective by breaking them down into gumballs. That helps, but there’s only so far that the mind can stretch. What’s the difference in a line of gumballs stretching to the sun and back eight times and a line of gumballs stretching to the sun and back twelve times?
Who in their right mind would not be bothered by the loss of 2.4 trillion dollars, but then when 3.5 trillion dollars is lost, freak out? No one. If 3.5 trillion dollars is bad, then 2.4 trillion dollars is bad too. If 2.4 trillion dollars of burden won’t bother you, 20 trillion won’t either.
This game the congressional Democrats are playing, of saying, “No no, it’s 3.5 not 2.4″ shows a profound deficit of understanding of effective communication.
Republicans actually oppose programs that help people get work. In the federal budget the Republicans have proposed for 2008, the funding for vocational and technical education programs is cut in half. Those programs help give students the skills that will make them valuable to employers, keeping the economy strong. The programs encourage and enable people to get a job, just like Republicans say everybody ought to. Republicans may talk about the value of hard work, but they don't back up their talk with action.
George W. Bush and his Republican followers love to talk about the value of good hard work. They hate people just sitting around unemployed, they say. Their message to Americans having hard times is: Get a job!
Those programs help give students the skills that will make them valuable to employers, keeping the economy strong. The programs encourage and enable people to get a job, just like Republicans say everybody ought to.
Republicans may talk about the value of hard work, but they don’t back up their talk with action. They show the low regard they have for working people in the funding cuts they hurl at the pro-work programs in the federal budget.
Loading ...
Recent Comments