Monday Musings: November 29, 2010

What a day of extremes this has been. I picked up ski buddy, Shelley, this morning so we could get in a couple hours of bliss on the slopes of Mt. Rose. And, believe me, it was just that good. The Slide side is now open. Then blast back to town for group lunch meet up at Peg’s Ham & Eggs on South Meadows Parkway for the best damn Chicken Tortilla Soup that I’ve had short of Mexico City back in the ‘80’s.

After a quick ‘fluff ‘n’ puff’ at home, I picked up Mom and took her to the neurologist for a 1430 hours appt. she’s been having a rather odd problem where her leg just starts to jerk in spasms for no apparent reason. Needless to say, perhaps, but at 93 that can send her to the floor in a hurry.

If you need a neurologist in Reno, may I recommend Dr. William McHugh, M.D., Ph.D. A couple of months ago, Mr. Maven saw him, and was impressed. Today he connected with my mother - who can be at once impossible or impossibly ‘cute’. She’s not easy for any doctor to deal with. McHugh managed to really engage her and get her to cooperate for a change. For this, she really made his day - he was looking through the tomes and may actually have something to write a paper on with this.

Myoclonus. It might be spinal myoclonus, but he’s not sure yet. Evidently, he’s only seen one other case in his lengthy career, and in a much younger person.

So we’re trying some mild sedatives at night to see if it relieves it. Oddly, this is similar to what causes hiccups.

I’m full into my seasonal existential crisis. The holidays. Bah Humbug. What’s it all about? Why are we doing what we’re doing?

The article in the Sunday Reno Gazette-Journal really torched this nerve - they are promoting the annual “Let’s go ooh and aah over how the local Hoi-polloi live” tour of homes. The proceeds benefit women and children in some manner- Step2. If I were Queen for a day, I’d simply declare that they donate a nice amount and spare us trotting around to see how Tom Dolan of Reno Toyota has justified a 10,000 square foot manse for he and the trophy wife. Just the two of them. Yup.

This 10,000-square-foot French country home has four bedrooms and four-and-a-half bathrooms.

An elegant crystal chandelier greets guests when they first walk in the house. The three-level home is decorated with souvenirs and art from the owners’ travels to Ireland, Vietnam, China, Africa, Thailand, Argentina and New Orleans.

A handmade wrought-iron railing leads visitors to the wine cellar and walk-in safe designed to look like an old Virginia City brothel, complete with a safe door and panic button. The home also features a media and game room upstairs decorated with sports memorabilia and stocked with hundreds of video and board games.

Other features include a stone wall bathroom, a study reminiscent of Ireland and a natural spring-fed pond outside.

Chandeliers and souvenirs! Whoa! And a brothel themed safe with panic button … for what? In case the starving villagers revolt?

How are times for you and yours these days? Sounds to me like Tom Dolan is making a pretty good chunk of change selling Toyotas. If you are in the market for a Toyota, I suggest you drive a harder bargain. Or better yet, buy gently used from somebody who actually needs the money.

I’ve been on this tour. Once. It’s all I could take without gagging. I was there for the architecture. The only thing I got out of it was how lacking in imagination the nouveau riche are. Where was the cutting edge design or use of technology? How about something that didn’t look like another retread out of the Ennis book of ‘home decorating’. I’d be off the grid, could I afford to re-engineer my 40+ year old house. To build a multi-million dollar home in 2005 to please the trophy wife, that doesn’t seem to be taking at least a stab at real energy savings, wth a ‘less is more’, socially responsible approach seems, well … fucking arrogant.

Maybe it’s the likes of the Dolan’s that makes me less inclined to extend Bush tax cuts to the upper 2%.

I guess it’s all politics in the end, and you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do. In this case, extend unemployment benefits. Yes, I think the Dems need to draw a line in the sand and it should look most like a … uh, spine. Quit this nonsense of redefining the middle class as anybody making up to $1 million a year. Gawd, get a clue. Shame on Chuck Schumer. He knows better. And shame on the DINO’s who pull their skirts up and run whenever the likes of Mitch McConnell says that taxes shouldn’t be raised during a recession.

Read our lips Mitch: ending the tax cuts isn’t ‘raising’ taxes.

I’m back to reading ‘Wealth and Our Commonwealth’ by William H. Gates, Sr. and Chuck Collins. Powerful stuff, especially within the current context of this tax cut crap.

“As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis observed a century ago, “We can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few or we can have democracy. But we cannot have both”

This ought to be the rallying cry of the Democratic Party. They ought to brand it into the foreheads of every Dem out there. Like the Dolans, once a household moves beyond a certain level of accumulated wealth - say about $15 million - they’ve gone far beyond simply meeting their ‘needs’ and aspirations. They are a part of the richest 1%.

Meanwhile, the country is seeing the chasm between the richest and everybody else become wider than at anytime since the Gilded Age. The United States is now the most unequal society in the entire industrialized world, and a ‘living wage’ which was once defined as the minimum wage isn’t doing the job.

The redistribution of wealth during the postwar years of the late 20th century parallels the greatest economic expansion in our nation’s history. This was when the share owned by the top 1% actually dipped below 20%. I can’t imagine that anybody with half a brain today, would dispute the greatness that America achieved during that time:

The GI Bill, the federal mortgage assistance programs, college loans and grants, growth of small business, innovation on a scale never before seen, a huge middle class with money to spend. We were the envy of the world. Then.

Today, the wealthiest own more than 38% of all private wealth, and the tide flowing in that direction is turning into a flood thanks to the GOP and their DINO pet poodles.

Get ready for an approaching economic apartheid - a Tiffany/Kmart dichotomy -  that will destroy communities, the economy, education, and our democracy. Yes, it’s really that serious. And if you are African-American or Hispanic, be even more afraid. Your share of the great economic bubble during the go-go 1990’s was zippo. Bogus. You barely maintained.

“The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we’ll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.”
Warren Buffett, the billionaire CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., appearing on ABC’s This Week With Christiane Amanpour, November 28, 2010

Want to learn more? Here’s a blog you might like - Too Much. Edited by Sam Pizzigati (Institute for Policy Studies) a historian of unequality in the United States.

It’s time American’s generally get a clue that economic development - as measured by the vestigial GDP - is not necessarily synonymous with human development. Inequality holds societies and economies back. It puts the brakes on human potential, health and well-being.

Here’s what a UN commission recently published:

Hmmmm, could they mean that the tax breaks for the upper 1% aren’t trickling down and improving the lot of those of us at the bottom?

Sheesh.

Gawd have I got allergies from hell. I’m suffering. I ache all over. I’m sneezing. I’m tired. It’s time to get out the nasal irrigator - yes, the Neti Pot - and get with it, and take a weeks’ worth of Allegra. I’m also using Alkalol. It’s helpful, too. You can use it with it’s one little ‘pot’ type irrigator.

Finally, I’d like to mark the passing of a wonderfully funny, warm and wonderful actor - Leslie Nielsen.

Now, I’m going to get a hot mug of tea, take some aspirin and tuck self into a warm bed with a book. That said, I’ll be fine tomorrow, and I want you to have a dandy week ahead.

Let me know how it all turns out.

-maven