Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Feeling bamboozled

9-21-10 pondering brain
Sorry I am boring you all with boring business and politics here in my blog….. once the temperatures shift to autumn weather, for some reason I feel in the mood to start listening to talk radio again, mostly to NPR, but I also throw in a little Fox/Rush to get me stirred up.

And for this reason, my mind has been really working away on trying to make sense of what is currently happening in our country and the strange discourse. Why do two people (like a Beaver and a Chicken) look at the same problem and see two completely different solutions?

Beaverdale Festival Friday Night:


Iowa City last week (Renee's picture of me)

Maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong type of animals lately?? Where is that wise old Owl when you need him?

Which brings me to a quote by Richard Doak, retired newspaper editor, who wrote an article in the Des Moines Register paper Sunday.

We’ve all been bamboozled. Doing what’s good for business is not always the same as doing what’s good for the economy, although almost every politician in the country believes it is. To see how the interest of the business and health of the economy can diverge, consider wages.

For a business, low wages produce the ideal environment. For an economy, low wages are slow poison. Underpaid employees can’t buy enough goods and services to keep the economy humming, and can’t save for the kids’ college and make the other investment that make the economy grow in the long run. ….

For at least four decades, American economic policy has been run on the advice of the business community, with emphasis on deregulation, hostility to organized labor and tax cuts for business and the wealthy….”


OK, maybe that tells me how our country got to this point we are in. That might be enough clarity for one day..... my brain hurts now.

1 comment:

  1. Judy, that's exactly how this country got into the shape it's in. Big business wants to keep more and more of the profits for themselves by not paying their employees a fair wage, a living wage. My daughter and son-in-law both work nearly 40 hours a week and still can't afford to pay all their bills. It's not right. It's being unemployed and underemployed that is killing our middle class way of life.

    ReplyDelete