Patti Labelle and the Bluebelles were Patti Labelle, Sarah Dash, Nona Hendryx, and Cindy Birdsong.
The Bluebelles broke-up when Cindy Birdsong replaced Florence Ballard in The Supremes. The three remaining singers moved along, and reformed as Labelle. When they sang back-up for Laura Nyro on her brilliant R&B cover record "Gonna Take A Miracle," they shot into the limelight.
Their album, "Pressure Cookin'" was a highlight of the 1970s for me, and when I saw them at The Music Hall, in Boston, circa 1974, the show was absolutely stunning. They were the only black, all-girl glam act.
One of the songs on "Pressure Cookin'" is a medley of two well-known political songs of the time: "Something In The Air/The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."
The failings of modern capitalism are easily masked by consumerism. The more conspicuous the consumerism, the more obvious it appears that capitalism is remarkably successful, rewards only the hard workers, and is the only path to freedom.
Consumerism is a wonderful thing. I like stuff. I like nice stuff. Modesty, and by extension humility, are difficult in a modern capitalist society because not only is modesty not rewarded, it is denigrated. Modesty is weakness, or worse: failure.
Consumerism is the primary product of modern capitalism (and I define modern capitalism as the open-market economic system established during and just after World War II). If the majority of the citizenry is able to consume, then a happy and productive society and workforce will follow. Without this simple part of the economic equation, modern capitalism is a failure.
For the past thirty years, we have embarked on modifying capitalism in a specific way: we have decided that if we push the majority of the wealth up to the top of the economic ladder (that is, give more money to those who already have the most money), that our economy will grow in ways never known to mankind.
Those of us who voted for Ronald Reagan are primarily responsible for the liberalization of the economy, which is promoted by the most conservative Americans.
After the establishment of Reaganomics as our new form of capitalism, however, those of us who voted for Bill Clinton, Geroge W Bush, and Barack Obama have reinforced the decision to follow this path. The only chief executive of the United States who ever spoke against this economic plan was George H.W. Bush, who succeeded Reagan. He knew that this economic policy would destroy our marketplace, our work force, and our financial stability. He spoke out against it, referring to it as "VooDoo Economics."
His attempts to restore some semblance of stability to our nation when he succeeded Reagan was met with derision and rejection by his own peers. He was chased from office, and those who at one time promoted his career (including his son), have left him to his retirement.
Between 1932 and 1979, prior to the advent of Reaganomics, American capitalism was pretty much like capitalism in the rest of the free world (that is, the Western world), with some minor differences. Workers worked hard and were rewarded with the newly-minted lifestyle called "middle class." The middle class did not exist prior to its creation (using federal subsidies) by us as a society. Workers earned a decent salary and the executives who ran the companies earned about twenty or thirty times more than the workers.
If the average pay for a worker in a company was ten thousand dollars a year, the chiefs of the company earned about a quarter of a million dollars.
This economic structure helped promote hard work in the hopes of reaching the chief level, and provided sufficient income for the workers to maintain a middle class lifestyle, including the consumerism that drives the market.
Since the advent of Reaganomics, the tax code and government spending plans that created the middle class have been changed to this new mode of thinking called supply-side economics, the method of pushing the wealth to the top so it trickles down to the rest of the citizenry and creates vast opportunity and more evenly-distributed wealth.
After thirty years of this, we have fewer jobs, more poverty, less money to run and maintain our infrastructure, and a situation where the income disparity between worker and chief has exploded to embarrassing levels.
In modern capitalist societies in the rest of the free world the difference in income between worker and chief continues to average about 25 times. If the average income of the workforce is $50,000, the chiefs are earning about $1.25 million.
This is what would be called "equity" if it were true in America.
In the last thirty years, however, that difference between worker and chief salaries has increased from about 25 times to about 475 times, in the United States.
If the average American worker is earning $50,000 then the average chief is earning about $23.75 million.
This is called disparity, and so-called libertarians and so-called conservatives would tell you that this is the natural force of the markets. This, however, is not remotely true.
All economic systems, just like all societies, are engineered by laws and policies and codes and mores. Just as the United States created a successful and thriving middle class in the mid-20th century (a phenomenon copied by all of our allies), we have spent the past generation re-engineering our economy and society to eliminate the middle class.
Those earning twenty million a year did nothing special to earn it, they performed the same tasks their predecessors performed for a fraction of the earnings. What has happened is that we have re-written laws and codes, policies and mores to ensure that those at the top garner more of the nation's resources than those at the bottom.
I am actually OK with this, I accept it.
What I am not OK with is our society accepting the notion that these people have somehow done this all by themselves, that government intervention and subsidies have had nothing to do with their success, and in order to save America we must not just continue these policies, but we must further subsidize and codify this system because it is the only way to save ourselves.
By continuing this path of corporate anarchy, this policy of "everything done by corporations is good" and "everything done by the government is bad," we are doomed.
Governments subsidize society. That has been true since the beginning of time, and the more civilized the society, the more social engineering is performed by that society's government. This is what has made Western Civilization a success.
If we are choosing to eliminate government from the social engineering part of civilization building, then we should be eliminating from the top down, not from the bottom up.
We have spent thirty years changing laws and policies, codes and mores to prevent those at the bottom of economic ladder from progressing into a stable middle class, and we have promoted the acquisition of wealth only by those at the top of the ladder, those who need these subsidies the least.
That is what supply-side economic theory is about.
There is nothing in the implementation of supply-side economic theory that suggests the rich will earn their fortunes all by themselves with no help from the society around them. What we have done is change the focus of our social engineering from those at the bottom and in the middle to those at the top.
Billionaires don't exist in a vacuum. Their fortunes have been created by participating in a society funded by everyone along the economic spectrum.
Do I think everyone should get the same resources and benefits like some sort of socialist nirvana? No! But we need to stop pretending that those at the top amassed their fortunes all by themselves without the help of government; and we must shift some of our societal focus away from pushing the wealth to the top, and we must return to laws and policies, codes and mores that will re-establish the middle class.
If you think that is socialism, you are wrong. That is what made America great and created the most amazing capitalist society that ever existed. The path we have been on for the last generation is socialism for the rich.
If you oppose socialism, then you oppose everything the GOP and most modern-day Democrats promote, and if you oppose socialism then the policies of the Tea Party should scare you more than anything else.
Socialism for the rich is NOT capitalism, and it is not freedom.
I do not know who created this image, I got it from Pi on Facebook.
This is a wonderful picture and should be considered by some news agency as a long-term project: dress-up every single elected official in a NASCAR-style uniform showing the corporate sponsorship of each seat in Congress.
Perhaps during elections, the candidates could be dressed the same way!
The statements against Occupy Wall Street have been filled with lies.
Some liars are good liars, and some liars are bad liars.
Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, is a terrible liar. I think this is part of what has made him appealing to voters: they don't know he's a bad liar, but when he's in a jam and doesn't know the answer to a difficult question, he lies. Not vindictively, not with a sense of evil; but he stammers through a couple of sentences that show his ignorance, but makes him endearing to us and in some ways lets us ignore his statement.
The Mayor is remarkably silent about Occupy Wall Street. He's made some statements and answered some questions, but has truly detached his office from the fracas and left it squarely on the shoulders of the police. Sadly, policing is not what this uprising needs, the people participating in Occupy Wall Street need a leader, a billionaire, or a powerful elected official (someone who Wall Street will listen to) to begin negotiating on their behalf.
Bloomberg would be perfect, but there is no way he would ever take the side of the protesters, and hardly acknowledges their existence.
To prove his ignorance about the reality of the situation (a reality that no billionaire could really fathom in this day and age), a recent statement about the protests exposed his ignorance.
The protesters are protesting against people who make $40-50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That's the bottom line. Those are the people that work on Wall Street or on the finance sector. Bloomberg sheds a tear for bankers, makes up bogus numbers
Either the mayor believes that the people working on Wall Street earn forty grand a year, or he is lying, neither of which is really acceptable during these times.
This notion that the employees on Wall Street are somehow victimized by government regulation or consumer protest is absurd.
I know people who work on Wall Street (or for financial institutions that are not on Wall Street, itself, but are considered part of "Wall Street"). Wall Street, although an actual street in lower Manhattan that runs from Broadway to South Street, is an industry, the financial industry. So, many companies whose address is not actually ON Wall Street are considered to be part of Wall Street.
The average amount of money made by people in each industry is information that has been collected and analyzed for almost a century by the United States Department of Commerce. I don't know about you, but I don't think the Commerce Department is involved in a conspiracy to fudge the numbers gathered by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. See for yourself in Section 6 of this page: National Income and Product Accounts Tables
When citizens display anger about Wall Street, they are not actually discussing only the people who work on Wall Street, but are discussing the industry. Generally, Wall Street is considered to be those people who work in securities, commodity trading, and investments. I believe the lawyers who work for them should be included, but for statistical purposes they are not.
Receptionists at Wall Street firms earn more than fifty grand. Analysts, engineers, and other lower-level staff make double, sometimes triple that. Bankers, managers and brokers earn four, fix, six times more than that. Or even more. Executives and directors earn amounts of money that most of us don't even dream of.
What is the average salary on Wall Street?
In 2010, the average salary on Wall Street was $204,539. That's almost a quarter million dollars.
I do not object to those salaries, nor do I think the government should dictate or define, in any way, shape, or form, the salaries. I think American workers should be paid as much money as they can get from their bosses.
When Michael Bloomberg, one of the most successful men on Wall Street, puts forth an argument that people on wall Street earn forty or fifty thousand dollars, when in reality they earn, on average, four to five times that, it proves part of the point that the protesters are trying to make: the people in the financial industry and the government are completely out-of-touch with the realities of being an American citizen.
Unemployment is rising all the time, and the people who control industry and finance, that is, Wall Street, continue to off-shore our jobs, lower our salaries, reduce our benefits, and now are dismantling our government!
The Occupy Wall Street protesters are not hurting working people; they are hurting no one. They are shining a light on the invisible problem that is the control of our financial industry.
People on Wall Street earn a lot of money, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
The Food Safety & Inspection Service (FSIS) of the United Stated Department of Agriculture (USDA) has issued a recall notice for the recall of bee tainted with E.coli.
One of the thing "conservatives" have promised us over the past three decades is that removal of burdensome regulation will lead to a healthier market, more and better-paying jobs, better products, higher profits, and satori. Well, OK, not the last bit about satori, but they have promised all the rest.
It took a little time for us to get this de-regulation thing going full-steam, but Bill Clinton and George W Bush did a remarkable amount of de-regulation in a very slick way: did not close any of the regulatory agencies, they followed Reagan's method and simply staffed them with the CEOs of the industries that are being regulated by those agencies. At the same time, Congress has slowly, but steadily, passed laws that take the teeth out of most agency rules enforcement.
E.coli is discussed at wikipedia.org:
E. coli and related bacteria constitute about 0.1% of gut flora, and fecal-oral transmission is the major route through which pathogenic strains of the bacterium cause disease. Cells are able to survive outside the body for a limited amount of time, which makes them ideal indicator organisms to test environmental samples for fecal contamination. The bacterium can also be grown easily and inexpensively in a laboratory setting, and has been intensively investigated for over 60 years. E. coli is the most widely studied prokaryotic model organism, and an important species in the fields of biotechnology and microbiology, where it has served as the host organism for the majority of work with recombinant DNA. See, Escherichia coli
What this says, generally, is that E.coli is most commonly spread when poo gets in your food.
Food recalls are on the rise.
The USDA is not staffed to inspect the number of factories in its purview.
So, there is poo in your beef. And there will be more poo in your food as time goes on.
The current recall is from Manning Beef, LLC, of Pico Rivera, California. About 80,000 pounds of poo-beef has been distributed.
This is a Class I recall, the most serious type of recall, meaining there is a chance that eating the poo-beef will cause serious illness or death
The USDA defines it:
Class I Recall: This is a health hazard situation where there is a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death.
WASHINGTON, Sep 30, 2011 - Manning Beef, LLC, a Pico Rivera, Calif. establishment, is voluntarily recalling approximately 80,000 pounds of beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today.
The following products are subject to recall:
Combo bins of BroPack Inc Beef Manufacturing Trimmings "65/35, 50/50 or 85/15" produced on Sept. 23, 2011.
Combo bins of Paso Prime Beef Manufacturing Trimmings "65/35, 50/50 or 85/15" produced on Sept. 23, 2011.
30 and 60 lb. boxes of primal cuts, subprimal cuts and boxed beef produced on Sept. 23, 2011.
by Dick Mac
