They just don’t get it…
The metaphorical “They” there can apply to many right now…
First, I’ll let Matt’s blurb (rogersmj.com) take the front lines on why the media companies have become downright ridiculous.
The next instance of “They…” comes in the form of the Republican party, courteousy of one of the LATimes Blogs.
Carly is the wonderful lady responsible for the Compaq/HP Merger. She has been in management her entire career, and is a far cry from representing the “tech industry”. I’ll only say this once:
Working for a Tech Giant like Dell, HP, Apple, etc. Does NOT make you a technical expert.
Just like every field, there are the people who do the work, the idiots who stand and watch, and the management who lord over both without understanding much at all (Dilbert doesn’t come out of thin air folks).
Ms. Fiorina is a FORMER CEO of HP. She was dimissed by HP’s board of directors after lackluster performance. But because she has it in her resume, it becomes a tag line that she is an expert in the field and therefore is the perfect person to endorse Senator McCain.
For the “they just don’t get it” tie in, the American public is slowly becoming sick of hearing these endorsements. The middle class is waking up and coming (slowly) to the realization that, holy shit batman, we are being turned into the serfs and lower class. Greater numbers or not, we are so deluded by our search for our own piece of high society that we LET them dangle it just outside our grasp while they make millions from our labor. Rewards haven’t been even remotely distributed fairly for 20 years, while executives hide behind the protections of the government (some created by their money lubricating the gears of the American Law Machine) as well as the promise that its a capitalist society, they are well within their rights, and that anybody who says otherwise must be a communist, socialist, against democracy, etc (sound familiar?). The average CEO makes over 250 times what his or her average employee does (source), and that was 3 years ago. There are some numbers that place the multiplier even higher, upwards of double that.
Take into effect that these people pay nothing into social security (usually), draw most of their salaries from bonuses that let them escape and/or outright evade several taxes, and even then, still pay a lower tax (based on percentage) than the “average” American worker, and then tell me who is getting screwed here. When the Democrats suggest raising taxes for a public health care system to help wrench our society out of the gutter it is in, the Republicans who get to *feel* powerful in office while really just being puppets for whatever enterprise(s) were willing to donate generously to their campaign. (on the note of Universal Health Care, nobody points out that done correctly, it would eventually balance out, given that employers wouldn’t be paying as much for insurance per employee, and therefore should pass the extra cash flow back to the employee to offset the tax increase, but they are set against it since the tax increase would severely affect THEIR incomes in the short term, not yours or mine. Not that we can count on it being done correctly, because our two party system results in constant bickering about who’s right and who’s wrong with nothing ever being suggested about a solution born of compromise, if we need any better example of that, look at Social Security).
Do i think Sen. Obama is going to be the quintessential leap forward in the way politics are run in this country…..meeeeeeeeh…no. But if the American public isn’t as collectively stupid (as they’ve been for the past decade) and gives him a Democratic Congress to work with him, rather than split-ticket vote and give him a Republican Congress to fight with (something the Repubs seem to do out of pure spite) he has a chance to make enough reforms to at least start to heal our broken society.
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