The Spokane Spokesman Review wants you to vote for a “wretched human being” because he - allegedly - is good for business.
I’ve been warning about this mindset by some in the Fourth Estate. The “wretched human being” is the sole reason some of them remain in business. Newspapers, and print media in general, are finding it difficult to adapt to our hyper digital brave new world. The business world-at-large tolerates this wretched human being’s bigotry, misogyny, misanthropy, ad infinitum because in an ideal capitalist universe all regulations, guidelines and barriers would be removed.
What wolf wouldn’t want the keys to the henhouse?
As a businessman I chafe under the paperwork I need to do. When the state wanted to respond to rafting fatalities by implementing statewide regulations I exercised my right to mold the new law to my satisfaction by testifying before the state legislature. I and my colleagues sought fair, not onerous, regulations. Our activism helped in crafting a law we felt met the needs of both the general public and the businesses affected.
I understand the desire to avoid government red tape.
But you have to wonder about a party that, no doubt, fought on the side of the cigarette manufacturers and are neck deep denying the science on climate because of the money and quack science offered by the largest energy companies. Do those people remember the days when capitalism was truly unfettered?
Do they remember the rivers igniting due to oil slicks? Do they remember smog so thick you couldn’t see the sunset over Catalina Island? Do they remember the trash lining the brand new interstates? Do they remember the Dust Bowl? Or do they even know what the Dust Bowl was?
Progress was made addressing those issues and business in America thrived. The actions we took up until the “Reagan Revolution” worked. For everyone. Not just the major corporations.
But, never mind all of that. I’m going to scrap that line of thought.
Politics Girl expressed it perfectly in this morning’s rant that I just love. I started following her posts in 2015 and 2016 before sixty million Americans selfishly decided to hire a neophyte and his parasitic clan to systematically dismantle our government while enriching themselves. Politics Girl is a bit manic in this video. She exudes the frustration most all of us feel.
I mentioned in another column about how portraitures taken every four days on a twenty four day Grand Canyon river trip would graphically illustrate the cares being shed from the faces as they descended down the canyon. I’ve seen it. It’s a stunning contrast. The Politics Girl of 2016 and the Politics Girl of 2020 - just so you know - are probably a pretty fair representation of how those of us who care have been weathered by this four year storm of dissonance, bullshit, malevolence and corruption.
When comparing the differences between political parties she states that “one party thinks we can make money by fixing the environment, while the other party believes the environment is in the way of making money!” I think that is a fair representation since one party believes in the climate science and is ready to act accordingly while the other would prefer to ignore it.
But, to refute the Spokane Spokesman Review endorsement, I’d go further. I’ve heard my brother-in-law who knows his way around business deals and money say, more than once, that he has often fared better under Democratic administrations than Republican administrations. I know that since its inception the stock market - other than a hiccup here and there - has gone up regardless of the party in power.
I’ve heard Nick Hanauer of Pitchfork Economics fame, and one of the wealthier people in the country, state the $15 minimum wage enacted in Seattle was a boon, not a bust. I’ve read about Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, and his decision to pay his minimum salaried worker $70,000 a year (while he took a pay cut) and the success they’ve had. Both with morale and with productivity.
The argument being - we can have decency, save civilization, as we know it, while working to mitigate the change happening in the climate and be a boon for business, workers and the economy.
I don’t know how newsrags will fare without the combustibility of the insufferable boor, but that is the least of our worries. Media will innovate. Adapt or die.
I mean, I don’t know what the hell I’ll have to say!
I saw Jack Nicklaus endorsed Benedict Donald. I’m not a golf fan, so I couldn’t care less, but I have a Nicklaus comment seared into my brain synapses and it’s a comment that brought the tax structure into focus for me decades ago. I’m thinking he made this comment during the beginning of the Reagan Era because that was when the Science Denying Party started taking a broadsword to tax rates for individuals and companies.
Nicklaus was wingeing and moaning about how he had to pay 90% to the government for earnings above $100,000 back in 1960 or so. Which means, of course, that, if he made $110,000, the 90% would apply to the $10,000 above $100,000. I don’t know what the normal tax rate was on $100,000 but, I can tell you that my parents paid $16,000 for the house we lived in on Teakwood Street in Richardson, Texas.
I don’t know what my dad’s salary was but I will bet it wasn’t more than $16,000.
In other words, Mr. Nicklaus was very well off for the time period. As was the country, in terms of a vibrant middle class, strong unions and considerably less poverty. I know, America was not great because there were all the social issues we are still trying to rectify but the economy was humming and public institutions were doing well. Public universities were easily affordable.
I’ve told many a person this over the years but I was practically paid to go to college and get my bachelor’s degree. Such that it is. When I graduated in 1981, I left with money in the bank and owing nothing. My story is not unique. But it is telling that since then each succeeding generation has had to pay more and more for a public education. It coincides precisely with the tax structure being monkeyed with.
Whoever wrote that Spokesman review has other motives for backing the incumbent. The bluster about business is cover for his or her or their desire to keep thumbing their nose at liberals.
Essentially green lighting four more years of fiddling.