Today, Turkish (a.k.a. Turkenstein, The Turkinator, Mighty Whitey, Big Pussy, et al.) and Miss Mia Sopaipilla present a bit of guerrilla theater illustrating the two-tiered system being forced upon us by the oligarchs.
The Turk’ represents the moneyed elites (fat, white, enjoying the view from the penthouse) while Mia portrays the downtrodden proletariat (of color, hunkered down in the shabby basement of the economy, yearning for the bright light of freedom from oppression).
Now and then the Turk’ reaches down and gives her a swat, just ’cause he can. She puts up with it for a while, then casts off her chains, pins back her ears and chases the big capitalist bastard round and round the house until he accedes to her demands for equal access to the litter box, the occasional half-sardine and the Tower of Meower, which is to be designated The Turkintower or Mia Mountain depending upon which of them is in residence at the time.
At no point does the deficit come up for discussion.
Mad Blog Media 
At one time, I had an elderly eight pound cat and a seventy pound Black Lab resident in the house. The cat made a practice of hiding and giving the Lab a surprise swat when she got near. The Lab was terrified by the cat.
Cats rule. Dogs drool.
That’s an apples vs. oranges comparison, Jeff. Or should I say a dogs vs. cats comparison?
Have to say that I often prefer cats, if only because they know how to use a litter box. Last night at about 0030, our Aussie mix Cash, who apparently got into something bad, woke me up whimpering loudly and with that look of impending catastrophe that I now know enough to take seriously. I got him out of the house just in time, but had to clean up the dog with the garden hose afterwards and then dump him in the shower at 1 a.m. as he looked like he had been caught in a diarrhea tornado. Talk about a shit-fest…
I luvs me some cats. I have two cats, two dogs, and two fish. I love them all, but I prefer the cats. They come around for attention only occasionally, whereas the dogs are in my face, under my hands, or pushing me out of bed. My dogs are like needy children.
My cats are more like me–they check in when necessary.
Duncan, my first dog, Jojo, was a fierce little mutt. Fight any dog, regardless of size, at the drop of a hat, and he’d drop the hat himself. He got caught in a New York kitchen with two cats and one exit once and I discovered his Achilles heel. Those felines played him like a fiddle.
Jeff and Khal, I confess I have grown to prefer cats to dogs. I still love mutts, but not enough to have one around. They’re kind of like kids. One comes to visit for a while, it’s cool. One comes to live with you and paints the living room with imperfectly processed kibble, not so much.
George Carlin said it was the eyebrows that endeared dogs to us. Cats don’t have ’em. But even without eyebrows, Turkish pulls some pretty expressive faces.
There are times when all you want to do is shout “COCKSUCKER” over and over, as loud as you can. If Americans vote for these bastards, they deserve the consequences.
WASHINGTON — Among the thousands of demonstrators who jammed the Wisconsin State Capitol grounds this weekend was a well-financed advocate from Washington who was there to voice praise for cutting state spending by slashing union benefits and bargaining rights. The visitor, Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, told counterprotesters in what was otherwise a largely union crowd that the cuts were not only necessary, but they also represented the start of a much-needed nationwide move to slash public-sector union benefits.
“We are going to bring fiscal sanity back to this great nation,” he said.
What Mr. Phillips did not mention was that his Virginia-based nonprofit group, whose budget surged to $40 million in 2010 from $7 million three years ago, was created and financed in part by the secretive billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch.
State records also show that Koch Industries, their energy and consumer products conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., was one of the biggest contributors to the election campaign of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican who has championed the proposed cuts.
When my cat was younger, we had a neighbor who chained his dog with a chain that was ust long enough for the dog’s neck to reach over the fence separating our yards but not long enough for the dog’s feet to reach the ground on our side of the fence. The cat would bait the dog into jumping the fence and then the neighbor would have to come out and rescue the screaming dog.
I’ve also seen her have other cats chase her around the corner of our townhouse. She would hide just around the corner and roll over on her back with paws and claws extended. At least the other cats were smart enough not to chase her more than once.
A PS on the cat. I had promised my wife and kids that they could have a particular dog from the pound. When we got to the pound the pound, the sdog was gone so the kids begged for a kitten and I relented. We selected her because she was the only kitten trying to escape from the large kitten cage. We made a good choice.
I love the picture of the two cats – it looks exactly like the way my two cats related. My surviving cat prefers life without his thorn – the beautiful, sweet-tempered one
Libby, they actually get along pretty well. They used to sleep together (I have pictures somewhere), and at least once daily they chase each other around the house and fight pitched but bloodless battles for the topmost seat on the Tower of Meower.
The one thing Mia really hates about Turk’ is that occasionally he tries to groom her in his ham-handed fashion. She puts a stop to that noise in short order. “Get offa me, y’big bastard!”
If we let the Koch Brothers have their way, we’ll be EATING those cats or at least fighting over their “lil’ Friskies”! Isn’t it interesting when you delve down to the bowels of these movements you find they’re often funded by finolks who want to screw over the very folks who are making the noise? A lot of these Tea Party morons will never realize who’s backing their so-called “grass-roots” movement. The Kochs don’t care much about balancing any state govt. budgets but they DO care a whole lot about BUSTING UP labor unions! The guv here in Iowa’s making noise about busting the unions too, while out of the other side of his mouth he’s talking about tax breaks for corporations. The US is well on its way to a 2nd or 3rd world economy if we let the Repuglicans control things!
Close to three decades ago, when I was but an ignorant teenager, we visited a family friend for dinner one evening. This family friend, a taxi driver with no other marketable skills that I recall, monologued for part of the evening on the subject of those damnable unions. Seems, as best I can recall, that longshoreman somewhere on the Pacific coast were out of strike demanding better pay and benefits. This family friend, a wage slave himself, expressed nothing other than contemptuous resentment toward these other blue collar workers for merely wanting a better life. He regarded them as greedy and selfish, as if wages were a zero sum game: for every one penny more they were to make, that he would lose a penny. Even then, as a teenager who had not read Marx and only listened to Lennon (old joke), I thought his opinions absurd: why would he not empathize with other blue collar workers? Instead, he was siding with management, even though a similar company’s management was making his working life hell.
I saw this same attitude yesterday on the Denver news as Tea Party type protesters in Denver, with, no doubt, wage slaves among them, expressed their “solidarity” with the Governor of Wisconsin’s effort to bust unions. There seems to be an odd resentment on the part of some working people toward other working people who have union representation and therefore a better life. It’s like they’re saying, “My ship is going down, and I want your ship to go down with me!”.
I’ve heard it said that what we have going is not a class war, it’s a class massacre. But could someone please explain why some members of the lower class are helping the upper class in this massacre? It’s as if it’s the Battle of the Little Big Horn, only the Sioux can just stand by and watch the soldiers of the 7th Calvary shoot each other.
I learned a bit about this from a recent visit with my aged father. A guy who was in a union working for an aircraft company with retirement benefits and stock ownership in the outfit. Now retired, it seems he falls asleep to AM radio each night where I guess his head gets filled with right-wing rants against “greedy” unions spewed by fat-cat shills for corporate interests like Rush Windbag. Dad’s view is that while labor unions served a purpose in the “good ‘ol daze” their recent demands for a fair share of the wealth have FORCED corporations to outsource their operations and gutted the manufacturing base in the USA. When asked how the corporations were “forced” to do this, the response is maximizing profits (ie greed) is essential to corporations, they simply have no choice in the matter. The next question, – why this doesn’t apply to the workers in labor unions trying to maximize THEIR pay…just gets one of those angry-parent responses of “because I said so!”
These folks do NOT want to be confused by any facts or arguments, their minds are simply made up.
As the wife says (in addition to her classic “people are stupid”) most folks believe what makes them feel good. The Tea Partiers feel good about demonizing the unionized labor as their corporate backers suggest — these are the same folks who supported “law and order” when the guys in the brown shirts were running around in Italy or supported slavery during the USA’s Civil War. The fat-cats know “divide and conquer” usually works — at least for awhile. But as we’re seeing in the Middle East, they don’t go along with it forever.
Look no farther than “Wizard of Oz”, the movie. Remember the line “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”? What we have here is little more than a distraction tactic, where the voters are led by the nose to pay attention to one issue that they care about (we have a huge budget problem) and distracted from the issue that the other party cares about (we want to break the unions). Wisconsin is a case where the distraction technique is not working completely. Hopefully it won’t succeed.
I work for a company that invited the workers to organize (they picked the UAW) and has very good relations with the local, in spite of the painful layoffs that we went through during the recession. I know it can work if both parties want it to work.
Wizard of Oz has been deconstructed as political theatre, right?
Not much to add here as John, Larry, and Jon have said it all. (and O’G has been strangely quiet).
When I was once on a solo ride through the back roads of Waimanalo, a fellow cyclist I often ran into and chatted with suddenly launched into a rant against me when he found out I was a unionized U of Hawaii faculty member. We were all overpaid and had benefits. He had no benefits. So I asked him, why do you want ALL of us to not have benefits, rather than fighting so you having benefits, too?
As Larry said, don’t confuse people with facts. They assume its a zero sum game. Well, sort of. The rich get richer and we get the stuff the cat won’t eat. The rich are playing the poor like a banjo. Unions ensure that there is some workplace democracy. They don’t by themselves determine profitability–teamwork and good thinking helps do that. Greed ensures failure.
VW is unionized. Doing pretty well, too.
It’s the same with taxes and these folks. If we don’t cave in and lower taxes on the fat-cats, we’re told they’ll take their corporations elsewhere! I say LET ‘EM! Heck, they’re doing it anyway, and once we cave and lower the taxes they’ll just come up with another excuse (how ’bout environmental regulations) to justify moving. Too bad we can’t find a way to make the rich CEO’s LIVE in the same country they have their cheapo products produced in rather than here in the USA. They want ALL the benefit of our society, government and civilization but they don’t want to pay taxes to support it!
We happily pay the VAT of 20% on everything (hotels, meals, etc.) we purchase in Italy for our cycling tours despite the fact we could (with some paperwork filing) likely get out of it. We figure it’s the LEAST we can do to support the country we run our tours in and for the same reasons we try to use as many Made-in-Italy products as possible. It certainly doesn’t put a lot of euros in the tax plate there but is more of a “put your money where your big mouth is” issue for me.
The USA was doing pretty well under the Clinton Administration’s high tax rates, despite what the Repuglicans and the Tea Partiers would have you believe. Even Ronnie Ray-Gun’s guy, David Stockman laments the fact that “we’ve demonized taxes”.
Stockman has disowned the modern day republicans (and vice versa) due to tax policies. Everybody remembers Ronnie cut taxes. Few remember that he turned around and raised them again when he had to. That doesn’t fit the mythology.
We are having this discussion of tax breaks for the movie industry in New Mexico. Fact is, the movie biz, like a lot of other corporations, are simply shopping around for tax breaks. Its a race to the bottom in getting essential services paid for. Sure, the bigshots of the movie biz take their money and run. The underpaid underlings who live here get to pay MORE taxes because the corporation has gotten a free ride.
What the fuck is so hard to understand about that?
No kiddin’. Now the arts poobahs here in Colorady want a piece of that movie action, too. They remember when blockbusters like “Cat Ballou” were being made around here, and they force you to remember too, every time you go to the bloody cinema, by showing you an ad depicting the rich history of Colorady movie-making.
Meanwhile, pay no attention to the potholes, the closed DMV offices and the extinguished streetlights behind the curtain. Nothing to see here, move along, move along.
Gents, even those in unions often fail to grasp the concept. I was briefly a member of a white-collar union, The Newspaper Guild, and I was astounded at how little the membership cared about collective bargaining. The folks at our little locally owned paper viewed the union as some sort of Santa Claus who came down the newspaper’s chimney once a year and distributed wage increases, bonuses and protection from overzealous management.
As a consequence, our shop was weak and management strong, and when push came to shove, we all had to assume the position, because the newsroom would not strike. In fairness to the staff, most knew that it was unlikely they would find work elsewhere if a walkout ended badly, especially with the pay and benefits they had come to expect (but not fight for).
I got the hell out of there in short order. And now and then I think about joining the IWW or the National Writers Union. But so far (knock on wood) my own foul temper and tenacity have served me in good stead during my battles with The Man over working conditions. It helps that I work cheap and require little editing (see foul temper).
Ah….that is the crux of the issue Patrick. The problem I have with the union I had no choice in joining (besides that fact) is that they have bargained away holidays, right to strike and wage increases for the sake of security. Now I love having a job, wouldn’t want to go back to not having benefits, and really want to work. However I also want to have some coin in my pocket, a few days off to enjoy having coin in my pocket and the chance to actually prove I can do a job more complex than the one I currently occupy.
I think part of the issue most people have is that they hear “collective bargaining” and think “baseball/football/basketball millionaires.” If this is true, I would LOVE to have their CBAs because we all know that the average salaries those unionized workers make is in the six-figure category. Reality is that the state workers in most states tend to make less than comparable workers in the private sector. So I would love nothing more than to bargain for my own salary, benefits package and pension plan.
I understand the basis of a CBA in this case in Wisconsin. I also understand the sentiment to crack the union. But what I don’t understand that is if the state is pleading poverty, why they want to do away with a built-in price ceiling on the cost of employing a workforce. Is there really someone who thinks that by doing away with the CBA that the cost of paying workers will go down? And if so, maybe then they can deal with the NFL because goodness knows that the millionaires playing ball are not paid enough.
Fuckin’ A, man…this brings back memories.
As Patrick says, good union work is not for the faint of heart. I’d rather race in a crit full of crackheads than be a union boss again. Then again, being a union boss has consequences. Ok, I’ll renege on that statement.
I once went over the hood of a pickup truck because I didn’t move out of a picket line for a scab to run through. And believe me, I know all about the possibility of a strike ending badly. When UHPA (Univ. of Hawaii Professional Assembly) went on strike in 2001, the year I did my backflip over an F-150, we were in a scary stare-down with Gov. Ben Cayetano over who would blink first. He threatened to fire the goddamn work force. We in turn threatened to shitcan the fucking semester for 15,000 students. Shit-oh-dear, how this stuff escalates. Ben and I were exchanging some unofficial gloom and doom terms of endearment over emails.
But Ben was an honorable adversary (and a gun-toting Democrat from Kalihi who drove an old 911). The bottom line was that we had to solve the goddamn strike. Both sides knew it was a political battle we would need to solve without blowing up the system because we had to get up the next day and live with each other and serve the public. Or as I have said before, on a small island, you don’t want to make enemies frivolously. There is nowhere to run or hide. That lesson seems to have been lost on the scorched earth crowd in power today. I don’t think we can afford such stupidity much longer. The crap that goes on today is akin to arguing over who will patch the hole in the Titanic. Well, someone better fucking do it. Now.
This right-wing anti-union movement is spreading north of 49 to Canada. The local newsrag, the Calgary Herald (motto: “Out-dumbing the Republican Party for the Foreseeable Future”) has run some anti-union diatribe or editorial cartoon every day since the troubles in Wisconsin began. I’m beginning to think the Koch brothers have opened a branch plant here, what with the feds reducing corporate taxes, trashing unions, running know-nothing disinformation campaigns against anything based on science, etc. I’d move, but where?
As someone pointed out, the Democrats get plenty of financial support from the labor unions, the Republicans – pretty much zero. Just another reason the Koch Bros. want to help break the unions up. Corporations and fat-cats first, the regular guy….
Someone mentioned the movie filming credit scheme — they had a scandal involving that here in Iowa awhile back. These tax credits or outright giveaways to corporations (supposedly to stimulate the creation of jobs) rarely seem to create the intended results at anything resembling a reasonable cost to the taxpayers. Same old stuff, socialize the risk/losses, privatize the profits. We’ll all be protesting in the streets soon!
Move? Yes! To Italy as soon as I can get the wife to take her retirement, the TIAA Cref folks tell us we must wait until 2018, meanwhile we’ll spend as much time in Italy as we can between her academic pursuits and CycleItalia’s projects. Corrupt as ol’ Sil’s government is there, at least they were giving out incentives to get folks to buy BICYCLES….can you imagine that happening in auto-centric America?
I know this is an abrupt change of subject from bashing the oh-so-deserving Republicans, but I had to share a bit of something. Two friends of ours have been in New Zealand for a bicycle tour, and were in Christ Church when the earthquake hit. They’ve been keeping us all posted via Facebook, and now it looks like they’ve made their way to Wellington thanks to the Royal New Zealand Air Force. Apparently their hotel was hit hard, they say they “Landed in Christchurch NZ with 200 lb of bicycles, computers, etc, Left CHCH with only the clothes on our back.”
Looks as though their two custom ti Seven bicycles and all their stuff is gone. But they’re alive, which unfortunately can’t be said of some folks who were nearby.
Just puts things in perspective, don’t it?
Yow. The old saw used to be, “Flesh heals, Campagnolo doesn’t,” but I never liked it much. You can always buy new toys. A new you is a tad harder to come by.
John, are your friends Adventure Cycling Association members? I bet the Adventure Cyclist mag editor would love to hear their story.
Patrick, I’ll let them know about Adventure Cycling, I’m sure no matter what it’s going to be one hell of a story. I only know so far what they’ve posted on Facebook. They were down there doing an organized tour, not self supported, but they were touring none-the-less.
Oh, and I’m sure the bikes were insured.
Oddly enough, the local news is reporting that a couple from Montrose was in Christ Church at the time of the event also. What are the odds that two couples both from the west slope would be there at the same time as the earthquake?
That story does provide some perspective, John. I am glad they are OK. A pair of Sevens is a bad loss, but bicycles can be replaced. Even nice ones.
Given that NZ is on a subduction zone (edge of Pacific Plate) I’m surprised they were not better prepared. This is typical convergent plate boundary stuff.
Khal, I took a look at Google Earth, and while I personally have never read anything about the geology of New Zealand (except that yep, it’s a subduction zone), Christ Church seems to be situated on either an alluvial plane or a Pleistocene sea bed veneered by alluvium and/or fanglomerates. That stuff is going to shake like jello no matter what. Also, it may be a situation analogous to Kobi (from what I know of Kobi), in which the seismic waves bounced off the bedrock beyond the city, reversed direction, then combined with the later incoming seismic waves creating wave nodes and antinodes, leading to patchy destruction. The result could be seismicity well in excess of what you would normally expect from “just” a 6.3. This is all just a hunch, I’ll have to wait and see what gets written about this event.
I noticed the city was flooded right after the event, have you heard if that was from broken water mains or was it from liquifaction? If it was from liquifaction, that’s pretty darn impressive, in a depressing sort of way.
To everyone else, please forgive a couple geologists rambling on.
I can’t see the Tower of Meower. Can you release it from Facebook Bondage so the rest of the world can see it?