BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
A progressive graduated income tax worked for fifty or sixty years until congress bowed to the power of the legalized bribery known as campaign contributions,while some took outright payoffs from the selfish rich.
The largest job makers are the smaller businesses, who not only hire far more employees than Fortune 500 companies, but also lay off workers at a much slower rate than larger, bottom line oriented businesses.
You've been brainwashed by the selfish rich and probably Fox too, as well as talk radio,which is part of a campaign against the working population started almost forty years ago by the infamous Koch Brothers and their ilk.
Did you know that depreciation ( a tax loophole) works so well for real estate investors that some can spend a life time without paying a nickle in taxes? The oil man's depletion allowance works the same way.
First they suck up the oil that belongs to this country, then they manage to make fortunes without paying taxes. "Leave it t the little people to pay taxes--we don't." Leona Helmsley, one of the super-rich real estate investors of New York, who, among other things, left her dog twelve million dollars.
Then of course, we also have the Ayn Rand cult, a sad adolescent cult, whose Saint, Ayn Rand, made selfishness into a virtue, was an adulteress, and a back-stabber of her disciples. Most kids grow out of her seductive theories, but, unfortunately, it attracts many people who need to rationalize their selfish impulses.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Monday, October 15, 2012
youth & age --Julian Barnes
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
"It strikes me that this may be one of the many differences between youth and age: when we are are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others."
Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending.
"It strikes me that this may be one of the many differences between youth and age: when we are are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others."
Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending.
Monday, August 06, 2012
Saturday, August 04, 2012
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
Important enough to re-post. Bob Herbert's last column.
Bob Herbert was a columnist for the New York Times, who could be relied
upon to give the working man his due. This is what he wrote for his last
column.
Losing Our Way
Important enough to re-post. Bob Herbert's last column.
From Sunday, March 27, 2011
Losing Our Way
By BOB HERBERT
So
here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time
in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing
libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally
letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.
Welcome
to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of
long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human
fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic
policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created
too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a
middle-class standard of living.
Arthur
Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the
essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago.
Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction
to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic
decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will
be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should
send a shudder through everyone.
The
U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful
country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the
horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its
people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.
Nearly
14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is
grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals
looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land
of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited
expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that
graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making
very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.
There
is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But
like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all
the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached
stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy
Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an
unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.
Americans
behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be,
and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era,
income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of
families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the
bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history
now.
The
current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the
richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The
overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just
12.8 percent.
This
inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles
while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe
for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading
to profound consequences.
A
stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread
was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s
Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2
billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States —
General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.
As
The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is
based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax
breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its
profits offshore.”
G.E.
is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey
Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and
Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at
this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not
fully committed to the best interests of working people.
Overwhelming
imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous
imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy
continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The
wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.
New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Dangerous Fool.
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
Goring, who was considered by the British ambassador to be 'dangerous fool', was especially furious, but mainly out of pique. He felt that he had not been properly informed.
Goring, who was considered by the British ambassador to be 'dangerous fool', was especially furious, but mainly out of pique. He felt that he had not been properly informed.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Saturday, July 21, 2012
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
Horace Mann is an important milestone in my life. Now, in it's hour of need I am here.
Horace Mann is an important milestone in my life. Now, in it's hour of need I am here.
Saturday, July 07, 2012
Thursday, July 05, 2012
grammar
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
“I’m really tired of irony. I’m tired
of sarcasm. I’m tired of interacting with my friends, where we make fun
of each other to show each other that we love each other. I’m totally
scarred by that. I’m tired of it and I don’t want to do it. I really
just want to make music that’s really honest and is almost
embarrassingly sincere.”
“Grammar is a piano I play by ear,
since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were
mentioned. All I know of grammar is its infinite power. To shift the
structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as
definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning
of the object being photographed. Many people know about camera angles
now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of words
matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in you
mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates
whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that
ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.
The picture tells you how to arrange words and the arrangement of the
words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture Nota bene:
It tells you. You don’t tell it.”
-Joan Didion, from Why I Write
Sunday, July 01, 2012
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
why I have a few names:
Names are like clothes. Sometimes you wear one type of garment,
sometimes another according to requirements, according to circumstances.
You don't go to a ball in jeans and you don't go to work in an office
in a bathing costume, but you are still the same person inside your skin.
.mek
why I have a few names:
.mek
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
Thank you for having me to dinner.
I apologize for my drunken behavior:
Throwing up on your silken divan,
Using your towels to clean myself,
Disrobing in the living room while singing "This May Be the Last Time,"
Spilling wine on your Grandmother's Damask tablecloth,
Ruining your lampshade by wearing it my head,
Opening and drinking by myself your single bottle of
Chateau Lafite , 1960.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
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Sunday, April 15, 2012
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
From a blog: "the Book Slut."
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2012_03_018728.php
I get into the bathtub with a few novels, a bad self-help book, An Accident of Hope: the Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton, which makes me delighted not to be Anne Sexton, and some books of letters and diaries: Joseph Roth’s letters, Rosa Luxembourg’s letters, Spalding Grey’s diaries, John Cheever’s diaries. I notice that even when the letters and diaries are heavily-edited, they’re more plotless in a way than even plotless novels. Characters disappear. Relationships drift away without closure. People who are important become unimportant, things are left unchanged and untransformed and unresolved, things, some things, are left endless and meaningless, amounting to nothing. As a reader I feel like a creepy stalker, like a voyeur, I can force a plot and a conclusion around things when no plot or conclusion is there, I can get deeply inside these people’s lives and feed on whatever’s been revealed. Anything left private, I can invent. And as a writer. Well, as a writer I can take that sunny day in the movies and pin its wings down so it can’t move again. It might not make anyone bite their fists to suppress all their joy and glee, it might not make them lean out the windows and throw figs and apples onto the streets, but I can fix and freeze it. I can have it, even though I’ll never have it. It’s the most unsatisfying thing in the world, but there it is. Exsultate, jubilate.
One of the novels I bring into the bath starts with an epigraph, a Kafka quote: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside of us.” The death of one we love better than ourselves. The bad self-help book explains to me -- and I’ve already heard it -- that if we obsess about someone, that person can feel it psychically, even if we’re nowhere near them, and they will be completely turned off and repulsed. We have to love ourselves first, and better, says the bad self-help book. But I don’t not-love myself, I just already have myself -- do other readers of these self-help books really get satisfied having sex by themselves without another person’s body involved, or having conversations with themselves? I mean, I wouldn’t be Happy with Ivan or whoever if I weren’t here, I’m just already here, I want to be at the movies with Ivan and kissing Ivan and talking with Ivan with myself too, myself and Ivan. I’m not frozen inside either, I’m trotting and galloping and burning, I’m almost 100 degrees and even though I’m minor, there’s so much of me here that eventually each of my systems will give out and I’ll be inchoate atoms in the plotless universe again. Which happens to everyone. Would we really be happy with no books? Or writing ourselves happy books? Could Kafka have written a happy book, an Exsultate Jubilate, if he’d wanted to? Maybe he wrote a happy book and burned it, and we don’t even know about it.
I don’t not-love myself, but I hate the bad self-help book. The bad self-help book doesn’t think that my life, my beauty, my conversation, my ideas, my warm blood, that anything about me would have worth to another being -- the bad self-help book sees the only measure of my worth in another’s eyes as managing to detach and not want him, to go to the movies alone or with some guy I love less than Ivan, to have nachos alone or with someone who I’m less excited to talk with than Ivan, to have sex alone or with someone I want less than Ivan, to sit in the bath and, instead of obsessing about that day at the movies, think about astronomy or Austrian literature.
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2012_03_018728.php
From a blog: "the Book Slut."
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2012_03_018728.php
I get into the bathtub with a few novels, a bad self-help book, An Accident of Hope: the Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton, which makes me delighted not to be Anne Sexton, and some books of letters and diaries: Joseph Roth’s letters, Rosa Luxembourg’s letters, Spalding Grey’s diaries, John Cheever’s diaries. I notice that even when the letters and diaries are heavily-edited, they’re more plotless in a way than even plotless novels. Characters disappear. Relationships drift away without closure. People who are important become unimportant, things are left unchanged and untransformed and unresolved, things, some things, are left endless and meaningless, amounting to nothing. As a reader I feel like a creepy stalker, like a voyeur, I can force a plot and a conclusion around things when no plot or conclusion is there, I can get deeply inside these people’s lives and feed on whatever’s been revealed. Anything left private, I can invent. And as a writer. Well, as a writer I can take that sunny day in the movies and pin its wings down so it can’t move again. It might not make anyone bite their fists to suppress all their joy and glee, it might not make them lean out the windows and throw figs and apples onto the streets, but I can fix and freeze it. I can have it, even though I’ll never have it. It’s the most unsatisfying thing in the world, but there it is. Exsultate, jubilate.
One of the novels I bring into the bath starts with an epigraph, a Kafka quote: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside of us.” The death of one we love better than ourselves. The bad self-help book explains to me -- and I’ve already heard it -- that if we obsess about someone, that person can feel it psychically, even if we’re nowhere near them, and they will be completely turned off and repulsed. We have to love ourselves first, and better, says the bad self-help book. But I don’t not-love myself, I just already have myself -- do other readers of these self-help books really get satisfied having sex by themselves without another person’s body involved, or having conversations with themselves? I mean, I wouldn’t be Happy with Ivan or whoever if I weren’t here, I’m just already here, I want to be at the movies with Ivan and kissing Ivan and talking with Ivan with myself too, myself and Ivan. I’m not frozen inside either, I’m trotting and galloping and burning, I’m almost 100 degrees and even though I’m minor, there’s so much of me here that eventually each of my systems will give out and I’ll be inchoate atoms in the plotless universe again. Which happens to everyone. Would we really be happy with no books? Or writing ourselves happy books? Could Kafka have written a happy book, an Exsultate Jubilate, if he’d wanted to? Maybe he wrote a happy book and burned it, and we don’t even know about it.
I don’t not-love myself, but I hate the bad self-help book. The bad self-help book doesn’t think that my life, my beauty, my conversation, my ideas, my warm blood, that anything about me would have worth to another being -- the bad self-help book sees the only measure of my worth in another’s eyes as managing to detach and not want him, to go to the movies alone or with some guy I love less than Ivan, to have nachos alone or with someone who I’m less excited to talk with than Ivan, to have sex alone or with someone I want less than Ivan, to sit in the bath and, instead of obsessing about that day at the movies, think about astronomy or Austrian literature.
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2012_03_018728.php
Saturday, March 03, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
When he heard that I would be in London in April of 1967, my Dad, a discriminating gentleman from Brooklyn, who knew who was who, what was what, and where to get it, assigned me the chore of picking up a set of Turnbull & Asser monogrammed pajamas with blue piping , six shirts, and a robe.
Toward the end of his life my mother couldn't get him out of his Turnbull & Asser pajamas and robe. Had it been up to him he would have appeared at Jack & Charlie's or Toots Shor in those pajamas. I'm pretty sure that Jack Kreindler or Toots would have accepted him, but Mother was a tougher breed.
I thought of burying him in his favorite pajamas, but my sister's clearer head prevailed.
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