June 13, 2012--Pachelbel

Schmaltzy as it is, Pachelbel is playing on Pandora and not Chris Matthews on MSNBC.

I'll get back to Chris in a few days, but for the moment I want to take a break.

The day before yesterday I was emailing back and forth with a friend about what and who are to blame for the failed economy and why (or why not) we are (or aren't) in danger of turning into Greece.

Among other things he wrote--

I don't think there is the remotest chance of our becoming Greece. First, most wage earners pay their taxes, unlike in Greece.  It's the wealthy and the corporations who don't pay their taxes. 

Second, I understand that by reducing others to virtual penury, and depriving them of all basic social supports, the ruling class can foster resentment towards those who do have social security (in the largest sense.) Nowhere is this even remotely being abused as it is with corporate welfare.   In fact,it should be the goal of our society to provide adequate, even generous, social security (in all senses) to our working people.  

Instead of blaming those who are getting what we should all be getting, we should be fighting to get similar social security for everyone.  We're the richest country in the history of the world, and yet we fall near the bottom of virtually every measure of a society's well-being.  

Then I wrote--

We agree about the larger picture but still disagree about the importance of union reform. Since there is little hope that we are  going to become more egalitarian--without legitimate reform of government workers' work rules and other protections--as a part of a truly grand bargain--the unions will continue to wither.  

Remember Dave Powers and the type setters union? How they won the strike with the Herald Tribune but helped put themselves out of work. If they had been more compromising they'd still have versions of their jobs. I feel that to ignore this allows the demagogues to have their way.  In addition, I do not want everyone to have the protections that teachers. municipal workers, and federal civil servants have. Then we'd really be cooked.

And so it went. All day.

So you can see why I'm enjoying Pachelbel. Sometimes I need schmaltz.