Political Psychic

Daily Rants about Politics

Most states by now have “At-Will” employment laws, versus “Right to Work” laws.  “At will” laws prevent you from suing your employer for what might be considered an unlawful termination (discrimination, whistleblower, etc).  In the old days, “Right to Work” laws meant you could not be fired by your employer on a whim.  Proof of incompetence along with documented warnings is usually required to show your termination was justified.   You were usually given a week or two notice (like a pink slip in your paycheck envelope).  But now, most employers (depending on the laws in your state), your boss can get rid of At Will, without any reason or warning.

But under Reagan and both Bushes, because companies were generously rewarded with huge tax breaks if they sent jobs outside the U.S., At Will employment rules became the new tool to help destroy unions and fair labor standards.

One of the things the Obama administration needs to push forward is an agenda that requires or rewards states that recognize “Right to Work” rules or laws.

It basically gives an employer the right to fire anyone he wants for no legal reason, without being liable for any potential lawsuit.  For example, if someone is discovered to be gay or Muslim, or refuses the unwanted advances of a boss who is sexually aggressive, that employee can be fired without any explanation.  An employer is given unlimited rights to fire someone, regardless of the quality of job performance or contractual obligations.   The only thing that employer is liable for is outstanding unpaid wages.  And for some reason, this is still not enough for many employers.

Nowadays, you keep your product on the shelves for as long as possible (and maybe even throw in a discount, thus preventing a potential refund/return).   I’ve worked for a number of companies that did this all the time.  They kept up an appearance of feigned innocence and ignorance, swearing they didn’t know that there was a reoccurring problem.  One place I knew of even re-sold the rejected products at a steep discount, regardless of the number of times it had been returned.

In the good old days – back in the 60′s and 70′s – drug companies and such were so concerned about bad press about their products (like the Bayer and Tylenol scares over poisonings and tamperings), that they would immediately pull items off the shelves to prevent any kind of accidental death or injury from their product.  Sales would literally plummet the moment anyone worried about an irresponsible manufacturer’s product on the market.  But now, people seem to shrug it off, because the media tends to blow things out of proportion too often – thus numbing your senses into oblivion.

In the movie, The Insider, Russell Crowe, who plays a whistle blower for a cigarette company, expresses his disgust at how his bosses actually manufacture addictive poisons to be put into cigarettes. He then goes on to express how impressed he was with his former employer’s immediate response to news reports of deaths from tainted aspirin tablets, back in the 70′s. Back then, some companies actually went out of their way to make sure their products were 100% safe for consumption. Now, you’re lucky if they even tell you what’s in it.

Sigh…

I **LOVE** this!!!  We need more Democrats like this!  Representative Anthony Weiner (from New York) tells it exactly like it is.  And the House tries to say that he’s being offensive.  It’s such a shame that telling the truth is deemed “offensive” by the House.  Ugh.

So, let me get this straight… you hate paying taxes and you want to privatize everything?  You want schools, police and fire privatized?  And you want your healthcare to remain private, too?

Okay….Here’s what you’ll get from a government office – and won’t get from a corporation:

Under the Consitution…

• Government provides transparency.  But corporations don’t… and won’t.
• Corporations don’t have to tell you anything about how they’re doing what they’re doing.  They can ignore laws, pay off lawmakers and judges, make unlimited donations, etc.  They can monopolize the marketplace with poor quality, overpriced, unsafe products and services, drive down prices to drive competitors out of business, and they don’t have to be competitive or fair.  They can hire and fire anyone “at will”, discriminate lawlessly, and practice illegal labor habits (like not paying unemployment benefits or lie about working conditions or financial debts/health)

• Government doesn’t operate at a profit.
• Corporations are all about profit.  They put profits before people.  They can – and will – jack up their rates for no reason, charge whatever they want, and bankrupt you while doing it.  Can’t pay?  You’re sick?  Lost your job?  Too bad.  They can sue you for anything they want when you owe them money.

• Governments have to follow laws.
• Corporations hate laws.  Regulations, i.e. laws, protect the consumer and force businesses to operate fairly.  Corporations have “limited liability”.  In other words, if they f*** up something, no one will go to jail.  They simply pay a fine and will still remain in business.

• Governments have to respect privacy (in the old days).
• Corporations don’t have to respect your privacy.  They get to spy on you, but you can’t spy on them.

• Governments create jobs that last a lifetime and are mostly unionized.
• Corporations hate unions.  Unions provide guaranteed protection of benefits, wages, job protection, etc.

I’m not against corporations.  I’m just against replacing governments with corporations.  I don’t believe we should be allowing corporations to write laws that benefit them at our expense – like the kind of legislation that created Medicare Part D.  I don’t believe in allowing oil companies to donate huge amounts of money to lawmakers or to pay for high-priced lobbyists who are only interested in helping corporations gain more power (i.e. by obeying fewer regulations).

We are at the mercy of the corporation — an entity that only once existed for the benefit of stockholders, investors, and people who wanted to gain greater tax benefits.  Now, there is absolutely nothing that is sacred anymore.  Not even our constitution or our government.

Please be wary when you hear anyone talk about getting rid of “big government” by “privatizing” it with big corporations.  It might sound glitzy and secure.  But it has proven to be nothing less than our worst nightmare.

The moment we let the Republicans control the arguments, we let them place doubts in our heads about who we are as a party.

We let them doubt ourselves on abortion, single parenthood, genderhood, homosexuality, infidility, spending, taxes, you name it, they control the argument.

Hell, I’m surprised we haven’t started scratching our heads on evolution and global warming.

The media might be on the Republicans’ side of the argument – but that doesn’t make them right about ANYTHING.

Yelling louder doesn’t make you correct.  You can have your own opinions but you can’t have your own facts.

Clinton really dropped the ball when he kept denying his affair with Monica Lewinsky.  If he had only said “so?” or “it’s private, my family and I are dealing with this”.  In other words, if we had simply separated the job from the private life, we would’ve all been better off.

It’s not hard for them to control the argument, even when they are wrong.  They own and control 90% of all domestic media – print, radio, television, etc.  If you want to find out anything about what’s going on, factually, you have to go to the liberals for information

If you want to be pounded to a numb, mindless, non-thinking neocon, well you simply turn on any “news” channel in any part of this country, and you’ll hear what THEY want you to hear.

Politically, they are masters.

But they are not academics or experts in any field, except deception.

It sounds crazy to say it, but it’s true.

If you don’t fight off the nonsense, you end up finally backing down and forcing yourself to somehow agree with them.

I have been fighting this for the past decade – and I keep wondering when everyone else will, too.

The rightwing conveniently creates arguments that favor their point of view.  In their mind, if they didn’t see it happen, it never existed.  With that kind of thinking, you end up with flat-earthers who refuse to believe anytyhing other than what the simpleton idiot on TV said, then it must not be true of an “expert” challenged it.

It’s really easy to dumb someone down if you yell at them long enough.

They’ve proven this point over and over again.

What we need is to finally wake up and take back our dignity.

Refuse to be bullied – and start sticking up for ourselves.

If you don’t stick up for what’s right (which in this case, is the left!), then you won’t have anyone left to stick up for you.

I’m not saying he didn’t have a problem with his marriage.  I’ve known a few guys who seemed to be the same kind of idiot Tiger Woods was.

But…seriously… can we now simply leave Tiger Woods alone?  Is it really anyone’s business what he and his family do from here?

To be brutally honest, can it be put out there, that maybe all that sex and excessive living “helped” him?

I’m not saying it’s okay or anything like that.  But, I do believe that it’s an extremely personal matter.  I think it’s wrong to think you can play doctor with the heads of public figures, because you think you can possibly “fix” someone.

To be your absolute best at something, sometimes you need an “outlet”.  Jackson Pollack was an alcoholic.  Some of the greatest writers and personalities of our times had some pretty seedy personal lives.  I took a LOT of art, drama, and dance history to know that what we see today in celebrities is NOT any different than what was going on centuries ago.

If you knew about some of the things Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, did, you’d never want to read his stuff again.  He was, in fact, a pedophile.  He was also a math genius, and a brilliant linguist and, of course, writer.  But you already knew THAT part.  Another example would be Tchaikovsky – the composer of a huge repetoire of ballets  (Swan Lake, Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, etc).  Did you know that he was homosexual and was forced to commit suicide after it was found out that he had an affair with the nephew in the Russian Czar’s court?  Yep.  He was put on trial (a small, private one, to protect his reputation – as he was still highly valued for his music and talent), and was found guilty.  A large number of Russian male court members were homosexual.  But because he had an illicit affair with a younger member of the family, he was put on trial.  His punishment was to swallow a sizable amount of arsenic, in the court’s presence.  The genius in this punishment created the perfect protection for the court, which satisfied the desire to keep everything quiet, while also allowing them to carry out “justice”.  Arsenic actually takes a considerable amount of time to actually work.  It’s not like ingesting cyanide.  He fabricated a story to his friends, after he started showing signs of being sick, that he had accidentally drank some water tainted with cholera (his mother died this way).  Anyway, to make a long story short, he was another example of an artist with an imperfect personal life – and suffered the consequences of it because of his celebrity status.

And do I need to remind anyone of one recently passed musician who had some personal foibles of his own?  Michael Jackson…. We also put the guy on trial, in public, and pretty much ruined his musical career from that point.  I didn’t care for him at all as a person.  But I did respect his accomplishments and loved his music.

Once again – No one is perfect.

So back to my point.  When the public steps in and tries to “fix” someone they don’t deem “mentally sound” – like someone with a “sex addiction” – they immediately wind up ruining such person.  If Clinton had simply said “yeah, I banged Monica Lewinsky…so? It’s personal.  Get a life.”, we’d all be enjoying post-Al Gore prosperity instead of post-GW Bush unemployment.

Tiger Woods sounded like a brainwashed robot yesterday.  It made me sad.  I can only wonder if that sex addiction clinic wasn’t some kind of cult-run place that uses the same kind of ideology that tries to say that homosexuality can be “fixed” and that you can “pray away the gay” if you simply try hard enough.

It’s all so creepy to think about.

Yes, the selacious details of his affairs were fun to read.  But I’ve  got a really big problem with people trying to make him into who we want him to be.  I’d really rather have him sound like himself than some brainwashed zombie who’s been forced to repeat over and over again “sex is baaad”.

Ugh.

To put it simply, it’s really about the business and profits of putting people in jail.

In China, it is against the law to move without the government’s prior written permission – which is almost impossible to get, if you’re even lucky enough to get a response at all. If you leave your house for more than x-number of days, you need to have permission.

What does this all mean? I suppose it should either mean you can’t travel — or you must always worry about getting thrown in jail when you “break the law” for leaving your home for too long.

What this actually really boils down to is, you can basically be thrown in jail for literally doing nothing wrong. If you piss the wrong people off (by saying the wrong thing, reading the wrong things, etc), you will more than likely go to jail, because anyone in China can be found guilty of this one particular law. A law that forces people to leave their villages to big cities to find work – which means they have to break the law or starve to death while trying to support a family.

It’s crazy and very sad. But, it’s also extremely profitable for the very few who build jails.

As crazy as that sounds, our own government has a very similar set of laws here in our own country — the three strikes law. Someone who commits three non-violent felonies – like possession of an illegal substance (which can be as minor as medicinal marijuana), driving under the influence (which can often include pharmaceuticals), and even being drunk or under the influence in a public space. In California, it is simply that common to have such offenses lead up to a minimum 25-year-to-life sentence.

This is completely unfair, and it is sold to the public as a way to keep criminals off the streets. No one is against ridding crime. But it is never a problem to get convicted rapists and murderers lifetime sentences. It might be complicated, but it certainly never leads to the guilty walking away free.

So why the excessive need for such legislation??

The whole notion of three strikes legislation was begun by the prison industry as a way to insure their industry could be bankrolled by the federal government with lucrative building contracts. A good example of a few such companies are Wackenhut Corrections and Master Enterprises Inc, private builders of federal prisons.

We’re all in favor of locking up criminals. But at what cost will it be to our whole society when you lock up people for non-violent offenses?

There are tons of non-violent offenders out there who are almost immune from ever seeing the inside of a jail.

For example, there are CEO’s out there putting dangerous products in our marketplace – but not a single one will ever see the inside of a jail because of it (limited liability laws for corporations) and bankers out there abusing usury laws (skyrocketing interest rates for small loans and credit cards), and of course, healthcare companies letting mothers die because they had the audacity to have acne as a kid and can’t get coverage for chemo treatment or medicine – because they can call acne a “pre-existing condition”. And by the way, that’s exactly how insurance companies get richer – by denying coverage while charging you a very high premium and deductible. Here is an example of a website that describes, in detail, “bad faith” insurance issues (insurance companies who often rip off clients for flimsy reasons).

But to lock up people for life because of three minor offenses? That’s just nuts – and it costs taxpayers too much money, while making jail-builders too much profit.

Republicans love to say that Democrats are weak on crime and terrorism. The truth is, Democrats are in love with obeying the law and protecting and enforcing it. They are, in essence, nerds who love to master their knowledge of the law. Republicans aren’t in love with that part of the law, but instead are in love with finding ways to profit off of it. The War on Terror, just like the War on Drugs, has bankrupted this country, morally and financially. But, hey, at least we got ourselves into a couple of expensive wars which have made some very prolific warmongers (the military industrial complex) very, very rich.

And that is exactly how you make crime into a business…or rather, the crime of “crime profiteering”. (You become motivated in putting as many people in jail as possible, so you can call your ideas “a success”)

Why did Evan Bayh wait until the last minute?

Just heard this on Ed Schultz…

It turns out, Evan Bayh decided not to run about a week ago, but waited tell Dem leaders, because he wanted to make sure they wouldn’t have time to pick a new nominee. Normally, if there isn’t a nominee, there isn’t primary, and the challenger wins by default, sort of.

Since there is no time to choose a nominee in this particular case, Evan Bayh’s senior inside blue-dog, anti-union / anti-labor co-horts get to pick the nominee. Normally, the new challenger/nominee needs to get at least 500 signatures in all nine districts of Indiana. But, again, since there isn’t enough time to do that, Evan Bayh – or rather, his people, will get to pick the nominee.

And we all know how much this guy just loves the conservatives…

CEO’s are treated like rock-stars. Today, your power as a CEO for a giant corporation is almost limitless. And if you run for office, you’re given even more unlimited power over every American life. You’re not just an executive in charge of millions of employees – You’re an executive with almost limitless amounts of power. And if you hate the whole notion of paying taxes or obeying the law – well then, government life just got a whole lot sweeter.

Back during the mafia’s glory days of Capone and such, large cities like New York, Chicago, and even Los Angeles, were completely at the mercy of what mob bosses wanted from them. If you tried to stand up to them, you were “taken out” – with a strong message to others who might try to do the same. It was back during the roaring 20′s, right up until the Great Depression.

Big Oil, Big Pharma and Health Care, have strangled every branch of government by taking away it’s power to govern or go after them. A government that is extremely neutered like ours insures that mafia-ish corporations can operate with as much illegal behavior as possible. They can literally do whatever they want to whoever they want. I really should include “Big Media”, also. It’s a fourth branch of government and it’s all owned by large corporations – foreign and domestic.

And quite literally, they can charge whatever they want – like unreasonably high gas prices, health insurance premiums, sky high prices for life-saving drugs and medication, etc.

They can control what is said about them – they can remove people who talk too much. In the old days, you were simply killed or thrown into the ocean or river. These days, it’s a little more subtle, yet effective. Corporations can retaliate against whistle-blowers and force people to stay-silent about problems and corruption. With this kind of guaranteed government-assisted protection, they can lie and steal from anyone they want. And, again, it’s all done under the protection of our own government.

Think this sounds crazy?

Recently, Al Franken tried to push through legislation to make it legal for an employee who had been raped by it’s employer to sue in federal court. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? I mean, any normal person should be able to go to the feds and talk about illegal behavior by their bosses, right? So you shouldn’t need to get special permission to sue your boss for rape, right? Well, actually, no. Most of the time, you have to agree to have it done in arbitration – i.e. a hired judge. More than likely, a judge that has a nice long record of siding with your bosses. The kind of judge that wants to put away whiney, greedy employees with an axe to grind. Oh, and if your boss is KBR/Halliburton – and you want to speak out against them for criminal behavior, they can pretty much retaliate against you any way they want. Even if it means you getting raped by them.

How do these guys do it? How do these guys literally get away with so much crime???

Well, it’s no secret. For starters, they don’t want any – ANY – kind of regulation over them (i.e. police over their them), regardless of their criminal history. We even let them have giant billion dollar government contracts, regardless of their personal connections to anyone in office.

It’s actually kind of funny…or ironic…when you think about it.

They like to say that the big, bad scary government is trying invade the marketplace and that we should simply leave them alone. But instead, it’s actually the opposite that is happening. It’s the corporations who are invading government – and all they have to do is yell “rape”…or rather “socialism” and every one shuts up to protect them.

In the old days, people were thrown out of office if they were caught providing special favors, like contracts to businesses. It was like a political bribe or special favors and promises. Today, they’re all considered legal, in many ways. Large donations, fundraisers, no-bid contracts, etc. We even let them write legislation – actual laws – that will give them all the power and protection they seek.

And it’s all done without any complaints from the public. Well, actually, there would be lots of complaints – or actual riots and angry protests, complete with burning cars and broken glass.

But it’s really hard to get mad about any of that when the mainstream media – also owned by huge corporations – won’t tell you about any of it.

And we are basically stuck with a corporatocracy.

A corporatocracy or corpocracy is a form of government where corporations, conglomerates or government entities with private components, control the direction and governance of a country. This is sometimes considered to be a form of fascism.

And that’s how you end up with today’s mafia running (and ruining) your life.

Your wife is on the Board of Directors for WellPoint, the second largest health care corporation in America. Conflict of interest, much?

I think that speaks volumes on why we couldn’t get your cooperation on health care votes.

And the reason you gave for leaving? That it’s too partisan??! Speak for yourself, buddy. The partisanship is coming from blue dog a-holes, like yourself.

Everyone is whining about what a jerk Evan Bayh is for giving absolutely no notice about not running. I think it’s a god-send, personally. When Evan Bayh’s name was revealed as a potential V.P. candidate, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC went ballistic. It spoke volumes about Obama’s views on gay marriage, gays in the military, and human rights, in general. The whole notion of picking someone with such a strong rightwing attitude – just because he comes from a “hard to win” state like Indiana – didn’t seem justified. It was clear at the time that Indiana was not going to go for McCain. Heck, half the south was for Obama. It was an unbelievable blow-out. The notion of picking Bayh — while promising some kind of healthcare reform — just seemed too weird. (Maybe he figured Bayh’s inability to vote in the Senate would mean more?). Dunno…

I’m just glad Evan Bayh has decided to leave. He is still there until next January…but at least the Dems have until Friday to look for another candidate. Indiana’s Republican candidate is extremely unpopular (which is why Bayh was ahead by 20 pts), so this is certainly not going to be hard. Unless, of course, you’re counting on Harry Reid for any kind of help…