And still they come

In an old Laurel and Hardy movie, Stan and Ollie were arrested for trying to sell bootleg beer to a policeman. On their first day in prison, the Warden shook his head and in a most melodramatic way, intoned “My, my! And still they come!”

That line is now apropos of the Grand Old Tea Party Presidential (GOTP) candidate, Herman Cain. On Sunday, Cain was confronted by allegations on politico.com that he’d been accused of sexual harassment by at least two women while he’d been the head of the National Restaurant Association.

Cain, according to Sarah Palin, is the flavor of the week. Cain, of course, demurred, insisting that he was more like black walnut, a flavor that is good all the time. If the allegations prove to be true, Cain may instead be the extremely popular non-fat yogurt from a Seinfeld episode that turned out to be loaded with fat; hence its good taste.

Well, it’s not like there aren't any hard and fast rules on how to behave when such allegations come up. And the most important rule is this: You never say one thing when the facts are going to show something completely different.

Cain seems not to have been aware of the existence of this rule, because his initial reaction was to deny any knowledge of any such allegations. That quickly went by the wayside on Monday when he finally admitted that, yes, he had been accused of sexual harassment, but that was all there was to it, false allegations that had been disproved.

Cain’s conduct following the disclosure that these allegations had been made was what MSNBC’s Chris Matthews called truth by degree; Cain continued to change his story, each time revealing a little more of the truth. And that, said Matthew, is a sure-fire recipe for disaster.

Cain was heard to have said at one point that no settlement had been paid to either of the alleged victims. That was modified a bit later, when he disclosed that he had recused himself from the investigation, and that there had been a settlement paid, but he wasn’t sure how much it was. In fact, Cain said, he hoped he hadn’t been much, since the allegations were false. And in another statement, declared the settlement hadn’t been more than severance pay of maybe three or four months’ salary.

Since politico.com issued their initial report, more and more information has been coming out, and none of it is flattering to the candidate. In a report on the Huffington Post on AOL, politico.com is said to have at least a half a dozen sources that are “shedding light on different aspects of the complaints”. According to them, the sexual harassment “left the women upset and offended. These incidents include conversations allegedly filled with innuendo or personal questions of a sexually suggestive nature, taking place at hotels during conferences, at other officially sanctioned restaurant association events and at the association’s offices.”

In an interview with PBS’s Judy Woodruff, Cain was asked if his behavior might have been in any way inappropriate. He answered “"In my opinion, no. But… it's in the eye of the person who thinks that maybe I crossed the line."

With that statement, Cain may have finally grasped the reality of the situation he allegedly created for these women

Memories and good times

Time’s been doing some strange things here in the latter part of my life. Suddenly things that happened a long time ago seem like they happened only recently. Take the marriage between my sister Jewell and her husband, Paul James. Wasn’t that long ago, was it?

But the first Thanksgiving Paul spent with our family was way back in 1989. They couldn’t have been married all that long then, still that means their wedding day was more than 22 years ago, unless I ciphered wrong.

Paul and Jewell had a lot in common, which made for a pretty good marriage. Both were Ma Bell’s employees at one time; Jewel for about 15 years until modernization eliminated her job, and Paul for over 40 years until he retired. Paul worked for several incarnations of Ma Bell. There was the original AT&T and South Central Bell in Kentucky, and in South Carolina, Bell Atlantic, and lastly, Verizon.

When Paul was in Kentucky, he worked in the Louisville area and one of his jobs was to set up WHAS’s (Louisville’s 50,000 watt am radio station) broadcasts of the Kentucky Colonels’ games. That always blew me away to hear him talk about that because I was a hardcore fan of this team.

The Colonels were almost a reincarnation of the U K Wildcats because they always drafted a lot of U K’s best players. My favorites were Louis Dampier, one of Rupp’s Runts, and number 44, Dan Issel, one of the best to ever wear the Blue and White in my mind. He was ably abetted by one Artis Gilmore, ironically one year after Gilmore’s team, Jacksonville State, upset Issel and U K in the NCAA in 1969.

Paul got to know them all, and I was always suitably impressed with the stories he told of setting up the broadcasts, staying around for the games, and then taking it all apart afterwards. I’d have given my eye teeth at one time to have worked in his place.

Paul and Jewell both like to fish on their time off, too. Once, while I was visiting them in Aiken, South Carolina, Paul and I took his john boat out on the Savanna River. The Savanna is an alluvial bank river, which means that it can change its course whenever it chooses. This time we took the boat up an oxbow lake off the river to see if we could see an old alligator Paul and Jewel saw there on occasion. 

Not only did we see the alligator, we took the opportunity to see if the fish were being sociable by baiting up a hook with a juicy Catawba worm and lowering it into the water. It was noticed immediately by a big ol’ mud cat who gladly took the bait. A quick look told us we’d forgot the net though, and he was too big to land without it. All we had to show for our effort was the story of the one that got away.

Time slips away too fast, sometimes. Before you know it, the good times are gone and all you have are the memories. That’s what’s left to us now. Paul passed away this past Sunday, quietly at home. He left us all the richer for having known him, though.

Rest in peace, Brother.

Examining Economically Depressing Data

The grassroots movement, Invade Wall Street, has made their rallying cry of “We are the ninety-nine per centers” fairly well-known. By segregating that one percent of the wealthiest Americans, they hope to spotlight just how much of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of this tiny minority. What that slogan doesn’t do, though, is show how little a very sizable percentage of Americans have.

By consulting some facts compiled in a web article entitled “Five Facts You Should know about the Wealthiest One Percent of Americans” (you can google the title to find it online), we find that this aforementioned group does, in fact, control forty-two percent of the nation’s wealth. But when you begin to look at slightly larger percentages of the wealthiest in this country, that’s when you find just how much of the total wealth of the United States is now concentrated in a few hands, and how small the percentage is that controls this wealth.

For instance, instead of looking at the top one percent of the wealthiest, let’s look at the top five percent. This small group of the elite controls sixty-nine percent of the nation’s wealth. When you examine the top ten percent of the richest citizens, that percentage of the nation’s wealth controlled by the oligarchs increases to eighty percent. And when you check out what the top twenty has, that’s a whopping ninety-two percent of the richest country in the world.

That would leave the bottom eighty percent of Americans to split up the remainder of our nation’s wealth. Yes, all the rest of us can get fat on the thinnest piece of pie from this graph, with what represents seven percent of America’s riches.

Scarier than that, though, is the bar graph that shows the growth of income from 1980-2007. This comes from a bar graph shown on a website called Igmur.com. Here you’ll see that the growth is heavily skewed in favor, again, of the top one percent. In that time frame, the one per center’s income increased by 261%. And while the top twenty percent saw their income increased by 95%, if you exclude the top one percent, that figure drops to 31%.

From here on down, the increases in income are far more equitable Those wage earners in the 61-80 percentile, for instance, saw their wages increase by 33% while the bottom 20% had to manage with a more modest 15% increase in their take home pay.

The truth is America has not seen this much economic inequality between its wealthiest citizens and its poorest since the Roaring Twenties, and it can be argued that it was the size of that gap then that played a major part in the Great Depression. In fact, that gap is greater today than it was in that period before the worst economic disaster in our history.

This is what has citizens pouring out in support of the aims of Invade Wall Street. Everyone in the middle class has reason to be concerned, from the young college graduates who find themselves unemployable after taking on huge financial burdens to get that sheepskin to workers who never worried about unemployment until the financial meltdowns that began in President George W.’s second term to those whose life’s savings were taken by the swindlers from that same era.

Redefining the Status Quo

Kentucky ought to be quite familiar with the Grand Old Tea Party (GOTP). After all, we elected a very prominent member, Rand Paul, to the US Senate in 2010. He won over more traditional candidates twice, even though he espoused viewpoints that ought to have made him very unpopular in this state.

There was his insistence that the federal government was just too large and spent far more money than it should. Kentucky voters bought this, hook, line and sinker, even though the state was the beneficiary of the largess from that “bloated” federal government many times. Without help from the federal government, for instance, downtown Pikeville might look a lot more familiar to the old timers, as a lot of the cut-through was financed by the feds when they were flush with money in the sixties and seventies. And this is but the tip of the iceberg.

The GOTP was purported to be concerned about individual rights, but the individuals it seemed most concerned with were corporations. They were intent, for instance, on seeing that the Bush tax cuts for the significantly well-off would not lapse. And when the GOTP faithful showed up at any town meetings meant to discuss the Obama healthcare proposal, they let it be known they wanted no interference in the insurance market or in the healthcare profession whatsoever.

And all during the media frenzy that accompanied the GOTP phase of the 2010 elections, it was maintained that this was a grassroots movement, even though its organization and funding could be traced back to corporate interests as epitomized by Koch Brothers Industries, whose money helped elect, among others, Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker and a majority for the GOTP in that state’s legislature.

But if anyone would have you to believe the GOTP, whose self-proclaimed grassroots designation is widely known, would welcome a newer grassroots movement, the one that has become known as Invade Wall Street, they would be wrong. In fact, a lot of the GOTP members of Congress, for instance, have been quite disrespectful when making statements about the Invade Wall Street movement.

Eric Cantor, Rep., VA, still a darling of the Grand Old Tea Party and the author of the plan to drastically cut the federal budget, including a plan to eliminate Medicare, isn’t at all happy with Invade Wall Street. Cantor called the movement “growing mobs…intent on…pitting Americans against Americans”.

Other stalwarts of the GOTP have called the Invade Wall Street group hippies who are out to get a little notoriety, and nothing more. One conservative commentator on an MSNBC disdainfully told the Invade Wall Street group to “get a job!” And a Fox News commentator said she knew what they needed, then delivered her punch line with a sneer-“A shower!”

Perhaps it’s a matter of perspective: To working people, whose income is shrinking, Invade Wall Street is more important than it is to CEO’s whose incomes are growing exponentially. To the young people who are leaving college with far more debt than job prospects, this movement means more than it does to corporations that outsource jobs.

It’s a matter of how you define what’s acceptable as the status quo, and for the 99 per center’s protesting the largely untaxed status of the one per centers, the status quo needs to be redefined

Got hemp milk?

I seem to know instinctively when I’m not going to get something I’m asking for. This is native intuition that was honed when, as a child, I would ask for something I knew my parents would never give me. But that never stopped me from asking for that candy bar anyway.

I knew just as well what the answer would be when twice I sent our stalwart Member of Congress, Hal Rogers, e-mails asking him to co-sponsor the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2011 (H R 1831), but I asked him anyway. 

I also know that Hal would never read this request. Well, according to the 2010 census, there are 673,670 of us here in District 5, and it wouldn’t take too many letters each day to require some help, so each time I ask Hal to do the honorable thing, his staff hit a button and sent out a form letter enumerating all the reasons Hal could never accept the use of a “variant of marijuana”.

Hal and many other Americans know it is illegal to grow hemp in the United States, lest some pothead get desperate and try to smoke this plant that contains less than 1% tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). That “variant” of hemp, marijuana, can have as much as 15% THC. Hal does not seem to know that hemp can have an adverse effect on marijuana. Hemp can cross pollinate a pot plant, and that greatly reduces its potency.

But what Hal will not acknowledge is this: While it is illegal to grow industrial hemp in the U S, it is not illegal to use hemp in the manufacture of products we need on a daily basis. American manufacturers can import all the industrial hemp they need from those countries that allow their farmers to grow it. By obstinately refusing to think this thing over, all Hal, et al, are doing is ensuring Kentucky farmers will never benefit financially from what is one of the most versatile plants available while ensuring that French, Canadian and Chinese farmers will never face any competition from their American counterparts. 

One of the more than 22,000 products produced from industrial hemp is a variant (there’s that word again) of soy milk-hemp milk. Google hemp milk for details. Yes, this would be a positive boon for Kentucky farmers if they could grow the plant from which the seeds are obtained to produce this THC-free drink that is naturally rich in omega 3 and 6 fatty acids as well as essential nutrients and quality protein.

If you agree that American farmers-and specifically Kentucky farmers-deserve the chance to make money from products such as hemp milk, go to https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/allow-industrial-hemp-be-grown-us-once-again/V2gV7rWy . It is here you will be given a chance to sign a petition that has already met the requirements for being reviewed by President Obama. That threshold is 5000 signatures in 30 days. As of this writing, this petition has garnered 15,076.

At the same time, we cannot give up on Hal. I believe him to be reasonable. He has, in the past, taken money from tobacco interests. I’m sure if you asked him now, he would agree that this was a mistake, just as he would agree that hemp is a very beneficial plant that should be legalized for production if he looked into the matter more carefully