GOD WANTS LOW WAGES – Pay them nothing and they will teach.

•   McGill comments get national attention,
• AEA boss gives McGill failing grade

I’ve only half-joked for years that God really needs a better PR team here in the temporal world. Some of the most log-headed charlatans, grifters, and just plain logically-challenged people claim to speak on His behalf. Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, and the ethically inept Newt Gingrich are just a few who work non-stop to tarnish God’s image.

Unfortunately, there’s another PR flack trying to grab a share of the ignobility. AL state Sen. Shadrack (Shadrack, really? Shadrack?) McGill is currently charming the nation’s electorate with the fanciful notion that God has issued an edict that teachers should be underpaid, perhaps as foretold in the Book of Ignoramus.

“It’s a Biblical principle. If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach. To go and raise someone’s child for eight hours a day, or many people’s children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. It better be a calling in your life. I know I wouldn’t want to do it, OK?”

Oddly, though not surprisingly, McGill doesn’t extend the same “logic” to lawmakers. Last year he voted for a 62% increase in his pay.

Lawmakers: Bribed, Not Called

I suppose this illuminates his idea that lawmakers don’t need to be called to serve, they must be bribed to take on the job. It’s not unlike paying a large retention bonus to the CEO who ran the company into the ground because his expertise is essential to rebuilding the business.

But in his defense, McGill reasons that by paying lawmakers more they’re less susceptible to bribery – apparently bribery from someone other than the unbribable legislators themselves.

Head-scratcher, ain’t it?

It doesn’t do much for his credibility that he voted to tie legislators’ pay to the average Alabama teacher’s pay last year and reversed course this year. It’s OK though, flip flopping is a venerated sport at the Statehouse Country Club and the all seeing, all knowing God won’t really notice a little free play with facts.

Darby McGill and the Little People claim Alabama teachers are the 4th best paid in the country. Now I don’t know about you, but most people know that pretty much everything in Alabama education sucks a big weenie. They usually joust with Mississippi for the 49th or 50th spot in everything – although Propped 13 California is a strong up and commer. The true value of an Alabama teacher’s pay actually ranks 31st in the National Miseducation Sweepstakes.

Smite That Rascal Lord

Hey McGill, wait a minute. If that No. 4 standing is correct aren’t you overpaying teachers and attracting a bad crowd of the unmotivated kind? Shouldn’t you work harder to lower Alabam’s No. 4 ranking to 49th – or at least 45th?

If you’ll excuse a minor blasphemy…my God. If you claim to be serving as God’s on-scene commander, the least you could do is get your story straight. It might also sit better with the Big Guy if you didn’t stand behind his robes and yell, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but my words and actions will never haunt me.”

God, I know you and I haven’t been on a first name basis for close to 45 years now, but I like to think we at least have a workable truce. So I beseech thee, if you’re really there control people like McGill. They do a disservice to you and just really chap the pants off the rest of us – You-fearing and not fearing alike.

Smite him o’ Lord. Cast him into the fiery pit of the unelectable. Just take away his 62% pay hike before you give him the eternal shove.

Can I get an Amen?

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Anyone who believes that if America had no military the world would live in peace and harmony is suffering from dementia. There’s always disagreement over the list of bad guys, but make no mistake, there are creatively evil people out there. Like it or not, America needs a military that can defend and support our interests. The problem is how we buy it.

Click image for larger >>

The first pig at the barrel is foreign policy. Going off to every piss-hole in the snow costs a lot of money and may ultimately fail anyway. We’re still unraveling ourselves from two unneeded military adventures that, in large part, wrecked our economy. Now, voters expect a peace dividend so the money can flow elsewhere. But it’s not so simple.

Most legislators and corporatists like how big military talk plays at the ballot box. Lost jobs, tax rates, and trying to do right by troops who did what civilian leaders ordered are continuing costs. Costs that proportionately make Medicare look like a game of penny pitching. Iraqistan will cost us for decades.

Military doctrine is also a big driver. The US is equipped for WWIII, not guerilla wars like Afghanistan. Their mandate is to conduct 2 wars simultaneously. That takes lots of people, lots of very expensive equipment, and lots of money to run 0.6 mpg tanks. It ain’t cheap to blow things up.

Congress Says Soldiers Need More Pork Chops
There’s a lot less waste than you might think, not the least of which are the “unfunded mandate”, anti-pork barrel legislators who dangle the pork chops over the Pentagon. Congress sets detailed spending priorities for almost all major military programs – whether they make sense or not. If the military needs a new airplane Congress tells the military whether that is the airplane they want, regardless of whether it’s what the military needs. Almost every major weapons system sends business to all 50 states, regardless if those are the cheapest contractors.

Finally, Monday morning quarterbacking takes its toll. Legislators knowing zip about how to fight a war, along with Congressional and Presidential foreign policies, do their part to jack costs up. Politicians want to use military spending for jobs programs instead of efficient war-fighting, except when something happens. Then, they want to destroy whoever spent all that money on creationism schoolbooks than tanks.

And last, voters make decisions about military spending while knowing even less than Congress or the President. That doesn’t stop them from meddling with the process though.

Save a Penny, Spend a Penny Isn’t Always Smart
This chart shows some sample costs and what we could buy if we weren’t buying weapons. However, the list includes some items that may make a stronger case with a bit more information. A few examples:

• Equipping soldiers – This isn’t the amount for every soldier. It’s an average across all soldiers. Depending on the mission, expenses vary greatly. Special forces soldiers cost considerably more than cooks. But regardless, we ask all troops to do more and more per person. There are no more soldiers that just tote rifles, they’re all multi-tasking like never before.
• Abrams tanks – The US is scaled for large, Cold War missions. You need a lot of tanks for huge land battles, not so many for hunting terrorists in caves. We need a lot of tanks because the military still has a Congressional mandated mission to conduct both a large-scale war and a guerilla war.
• B-2 bombers – A billion per is astronomical by anyone’s standards. However, the B-2 uses state of the art technology and there are relatively few of them. This is another weapons system with manufacturing work spread all over hell and back. Finally, the B-2 is for large-scale WWIII Wars. It was designed to carry nukes against well-equipped adversaries. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to risk your billion dollar airplane bombing a place like Baghdad where there wasn’t much chance of being detected in the first place and defended by people firing guns randomly into the air in hopes of downing one. We could have evaluated whether current airplanes could do the mission, whether we needed as many as we bought, and whether our anticipated adversaries had much of a defense against them.

Let’s face it, people like to see things blow up and if the military does anything, it blows things up very well. We’re a very shock and awe country. Compare a Bruce Willis movie where Bruce torches a skyscraper to a film depicting Bruce building the tower. It’s not even a close call.

Despite what many people believe, governing is an expensive, complex task. It takes knowledgable people who listen to the professionals (not manufacturers who aren’t necessarily pros) and not make it up as they go along. You must weigh the facts actually related to the task so you can make  better decisions. It’s not the place for toxic partisanship. Unfortunately, critical thinking skills are scant among politicians and voters.

Sadly, America has reached the point where the process drives spending  instead of people driving it.

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Good Idea - Thinking long is a good idea, but the devil is in the details of how you get it to work.

California, which has a budget crisis that when scaled, is equal to or greater than the country’s has a bipartisan “supercommittee” called the Think Long Committee to  generate ideas for how to get the state out of the mess it’s in. That’s not a bad idea. Undoubtedly, someone should be thinking long.

Among others, Republicans George Schultz and Condi Rice and Democrats Gray Davis and Willie Brown represent the politicos. State Supreme Court Justice Ronald George can weigh in on legal ramifications, and biz guys Eli Broad and Eric Schmidt can address the concerns of business.

But, there’s something obvious about the committee. Do you see a missing stakeholder? It’s the largest stakeholder by far. It’s the stakeholder that will ultimately fund any suggestions that are taken up and has the most to lose if the suggestions turn out bad or get watered down to become hindrances and not successes. One last hint – they’re a whopping 99% slice of California and the other 49 states.

Marge and Joe
Citizens. The plain old Marges and Joes who work hard for a living. They’re the ones that don’t camp out on City Hall’s nice lawn because they’re too busy with two jobs and the grinding work of feeding the kids and keeping a roof of over their heads. They are part of the growing herd of people seeing their worth reduced to that of a “resource” and amortized like a closed factory similar to the one they used to work in.

Citizens are a commonly unrepresented constituency. When a company bankrupts itself through malfeasance and incompetence, workers – who provided more sweat equity and value than any shareholder or executive – are last, or non-existent, on the list of creditors.

In an era where corporations have evolved into supercitizens, fat with an unlimited supply of money from selling the overpriced to the underpaid, Justin P. Citizen can’t be heard for love or lack of money.

All that’s not to say the committee has bad ideas. Among other things, they propose rejiggering tax rates to bring in more money and make  revenue more predictable and less volatile. The want the Legislature to suck it up and plan budgets based on reality, not alchemy. They champion more money for schools, more funding for local governments to do the business of government, and investments in infrastructure. Finally, they say we need to lower the state’s debt.

Well, duh.

The committee’s recommendations are both spot-on and stupid at the same time. Spot-on because no one with an IQ higher than a peanut’s can’t see the wisdom of the proposals. And, the stupidity of thinking that will happen in the sausage factory in Sacramento. In the end, this makes the Think Long Committee more of a Think Short and Let’s Break for Martinis Committee.

Death to Runaway Ballot Initiatives
However, even as they left the terminal tumor of Prop 13 intact, they did suggest calming California’s runaway ballot initiative governance. The initiatives allowed Legislators to have interest groups draft initiatives they can use to duck responsibility for bad decisions and place responsibility on the shoulders of an increasingly polarized and less educated citizenry.

Oddly though, this may have been the most important proposal of them all. The state needs citizens capable of making intelligent decisions, not voters who duck responsibility for spending like, well, legislators. California needs a legislature capable of leading rather than muddying the waters with a baffling array of conflicting ballot initiatives that even the authors can’t understand. California needs a partnership between ALL stakeholders. Educated citizens should work with politicos – and yes, business interests that are not supercitizens, but ancillary institutions – to think long-range and take heat in the short-term in the interests of the long-term. Only then will we see a future any less dire than our present.

But, the most important question remains unanswered:

How the hell to you get this thing to work?

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GOLDBRICKERS - It's easier to not care about jobs when you already have one.

Tea Partiers often cite the inability to cut budgets through the bone and still run the government on drill baby, drill fumes as a cruel thing to foist on future generations. While we need to cut expenses, the more important task is creating jobs with livable wages – not the French frying legion of Rick Perry’s Clown Star economic miracle nor the too-small-to-live businesses so poorly run and under-capitalized they can’t afford to pay them.

As the OWS uprising shows, 99 Percenters are fed up with economic policies that benefit the few at debilitating cost to the many. New polls show the even the 99 percent are in the throes of economic balkanization among themselves. The income disparity between subgroups that help define the 99% and America’s greatest contribution to the global economy – a sustainable middle class -  show a clear and present danger that taxes will be the least of the next generation’s worries.

The 1 Percenters argue that pillaging the economy to fuel an ever-growing income disparity will keep the middle class vibrant. Like most of their decisions, their greed blinds them to their folly. Just as you can’t collect taxes from people without income, you can’t sell things to people with no money. They believe mushrooms can sprout from the cow flop of their bad ideas. They think they can get richer off people who can’t even buy the fertilizer to make the flop indefinitely without seeing what they’re doing to themselves.

We need a flood of economic benefit to all, not some feeble Reaganesque trickle. The idea that trickling works defies logic and belief. We’ve been trickling for decades and the only thing that’s changed is a massive wealth redistribution leading to the collapse of the middle class. Yes, we may be willing higher taxes on future generations, but we’re willing even bigger despair and woe to them.

There’s only one bright spot in our lead-lined cloud. Through their audacious greed and self-interest the 1% is strangling itself faster than they’re garroting the middle class. When no one has a proverbial pot, we’ll finally be made into a 100% economy – albeit one that will be a damned economic wasteland with nothing to do but start all over again.

That’s the sort of hope that is our toxic inheritance to our future.

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FLIP FLOPPER - Apparently Mitt Romney has as much fidelity to his "principles" as John "Flapjacks" McThusela.

The demographics of Occupy Wall Street: By the numbers

Opinions are like bandwagons, everybody has one. Almost all opinions have a grain of truth at their core, but you have to winnow through a lot of crabgrass to get to it.Many people like to compare the Tea Party to Occupy Wall St. I’m sure it’s a delight for the pundits to debate themselves on innumerable news programs and shout fests, but it doesn’t mean much right now. The situation is simply too fluid to predict where it will go.

One notion says the Tea Party is a laser-focused group of very loud Stepfords harping on taxes, healthcare many of them already accept, and the Obamunist. They applaud anything that agrees with their Pollyanna view and boo anything that doesn’t. By contrast, OWS (there’s an unfortunate abbreviation for you) is a complete rabble of hippies and drifting malcontents that don’t have a cogent message, much less a strong organization culture. They might possibly be Communists or, worse yet, liberals.

MILITANT LIBRARIANS - Hell hath no fury like a librarian scorned.

The profile of your average Tea Bagger is quietly in flux. Some of them want limited protest and unquestioning adherence to their own ideology. Some are hammering in a religion plank and are thrilled with Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann, the goofiest two candidates who have personal speed dials for God. Mitt Romney, of course, can’t stand on that plank because he belongs to a cult/non-cult called Mormonism. They’d vote Muslim before they’d vote for that quasi-Christian poseur. At least Muslims look different so you can always see their evil or require their papers.

The Tea Party is a-changing as they’ve been co-opted by more mainstream Republicans and corporations. Many have become disillusioned as they’ve seen their champions behave like the carpetbaggers they threw out in the midterms. Some have even joined the Occupiers in protest. The national GOP has struggled to keep them in line – sometimes at great risk to themselves – but it’s been a chore that lost lots of revenue and fractured what might have been a solid voting wall.

Campaign Contributions Are OK, Tax Hikes Are Job Killers
BTW baggers, how come revenue from a campaign donation is pure, but a federal tax hike is strictly verboten at pain of death? What’s up with that?

On the other hand, OWS is a whole different animal. They carry the recessive gene of many Democrats, liberals, and moderates that precludes them from making cohesive decisions. You can’t always get things done if every decision must be so egalitarian it’s talked to death in committee – which sort of makes the Baggers’ point. It’s the Herding Cats Principle. But, many like it just the way they are.

There’s little money (so far). There’s little governance. There are no demands – yet. Many 99 Percenters don’t have jobs, so there are the lunchtime protesters and a smattering of 1 Percenters lost on the way to the executive bathroom, or oddly enough, siding with the Occupiers. And, the Occupiers sometimes party in full view while whizzing on the grass one is not supposed to walk on. Still, their attitude is better than a bunch of lunkheads trying to shout over one of their own candidates in the stuff local high school cafeteria. Give me a rousing rendition of Imagine any day (even if I do hate the song).

Occupy the Bastille!
The general lack of discipline makes it easier for their opposition to prattle nonsense about them. They’re everything from an unruly mob on the way to “occupy” the Bastille to basically good kids who just didn’t get enough discipline as kids.

Serious co-opting hasn’t begun yet, so their mostly free and easy manner is still a foreign concept for the banks they picket – then again anyone who’s not a banker is just as foreign a concept too.  Daddy One Percentbucks doesn’t know what to do with them. Neither do those wildly boiling tea pots on the other side of the equation. “C’mon out and fight like non-homosexual men, damn you,” they might say.

But, the tiny shoots of co-option are creeping in. The Occupiers are already getting some donations from The Man. Companies see a movement that’s growing from a marginal protest carried out by people in tie-dye shirts. So, they want to be on the heftiest bandwagon as early as possible. If the Occupiers aren’t careful, they’ll be the Clydesdales that will eventually pull that bandwagon. Paying off both sides is a time-honored tradition of Wall St., and Washington swells. It will continue now.

There’s far too much wiggling going on. Many Occupiers are still kids. The corporations and politicians are still the parents. But, they’re abusive parents and one day the 99 Percenters will have to follow the maxim, “Someone has to do something, it’s just incredibly sad it has to be us.”

Here’s to hoping the new La Manchas hit the windmill this time.

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