Labor Day repost: I Made the 1% Rich

Labor Day is a good time for a repost from October of 2011, in the midst of the Occupy! days.

According to that pizza-making idiot who wants to be president next year, it's my fault I'm not an entitled elitist rich raging asshole like him.

But actually, it's because of minimum-wage workers like me that he's an entitled elitist rich raging asshole. He didn't get there on his own, no matter what he wants you to believe.

No. His millions came because of waitresses and kitchen staff in his Godfather's restaurants, people who worked for whatever the company could get away with paying. His money came from regular people like me busting their asses for 40 hours a week, or maybe working more than one job.

I knew people like that in my last job, as a delivery driver for one of the national auto parts chains. I hired on in early 2007, working full time and getting a little more than $7 an hour. Because it was February, once my 90 day probation was done, I still couldn't get into the health plan, since enrollment only happened in January.

But their plan was utter crap; the one I could afford wouldn't cover much of anything. The one I needed was too expensive. I did without.

No raises for ANYbody. Most of the other drivers and counter staff who'd been there as long or longer than me hadn't gotten a raise in years. Every time someone brought it up with management, they'd get runaround, or told to talk to the district manager, who would just give more runaround and excuses.

But the store managers got their bonuses. The DM got his bonus. His boss got his bonus, and so on. Us non-management types got a share in the "store bonus," which was based on overall sales for that store. If your sales are down, you don't get the extra few bucks.

All the while, the DM was screaming that payroll had to be cut, no new hires, no overtime for anyone. This meant that everyone but the store managers got cut back to 30 hours or less and the stores were running on skeleton crews. Customers would complain--both walk-in and commercial--because there weren't enough people to handle the workload. There were only 4 people in my store in the morning: two drivers, one at the Commercial desk (selling parts to local repair shops), and the store manager running the front, alone, until the afternoon guy came in. This freed the manager to go do paperwork, make the bank deposit, and grab lunch. The Commercial side closed down at 5 pm, the store manager left, and the evening guy came in, leaving two people to run the store to close.

And so both walk-in and commercial customers would go to the competition, because the store managers couldn't do anything about it--can't hire anyone, can't bring extra people in to help--and so the DM would scream about getting sales up.

We two drivers did an awful lot to help--checking in stock, putting it on the shelves, helping customers, re-stocking, putting up displays, answering phones, cleaning, anything and everything. I knew the system well enough to do parts lookups and run a register, run the test equipment (batteries, starters, alternators, ignition modules) and brake lathe, maintained the delivery trucks, maintained store equipment (I rigged up a drain for one of the air conditioners when its pipes got clogged up, re-stocked half the hard parts when the part numbers changed or new stuff came in), and other stuff that a "delivery driver" didn't need to do. This is assuming I wasn't out on a run, where I interacted with the customers, listened to their complaints about how long it was taking to get their parts, told them about the company's cutbacks, and asked them to call Corporate and give them an earful.

Basically--and this isn't an exaggeration--I did everything. Most of us in that one store could handle someone else's job and chip in, because we HAD to. Most of us were making about the same, without raises, with our hours cut, and we heard the same bullshit from Corporate--"More sales! Less payroll!"

We got a new DM in January 2010, the third one since I got hired. This asshole went on vacation in February, but not before showing everyone a sales brochure for his $50,000 boat. Nice.

He started shuffling people around. I got moved to the hub store, which warehoused more parts than the others. I was back on a 40-hour week, which was good, and all I had to do was make 8 circuits a day from the hub to two other stores and back. During one stop, I learned that the Company had posted record profits for 2009, $300 million. The Company guys simply gushed about it on the employee indoctrination information website. We were expected to gush, as well, because we're all one big happy family!

Record profits--but at the cost of cutting payroll hours, running stores with minimal staff, running off customers who weren't getting good service, freezing any raises...basically fucking us over for their big profits.

It was people like me who made that $300 million for the Company, people like me who made those sales and helped those customers, people like me who busted our asses so the Company assholes could enjoy their bonuses and record profits while we decided whether to pay the electric bill, the phone bill, or insurance this pay period.

Car broke down? Crap...got to juggle the bills around. Maybe one of the shops'll cut me a deal. At least I get a discount on parts.

Lights got cut off? They want HOW MUCH to turn them back on? Well shit, there goes that paycheck. Guess we're hitting Dollar General for mac & cheese, ramen noodles, and tuna sandwiches for the next two weeks.

But did you SEE the District Manager's new $50,000 boat?! It's got wells for keeping bait, it's got a cooler under this seat, a stereo...everything an entitled asshole could want! Maybe if we're productive enough, he'll let us buy some of the fish he caught on vacation while we were keeping his stores alive for him and earning him his next bonus!

Since the Aorta Fairy visited me last year, things have actually gotten worse for my former coworkers. No raises, payroll cut ever further, and the Company's entitled elites making ever more money.

No, we don't owe the fuckers any thanks for allowing us to work for them and bask in their light. They owe us for making them rich. They owe us better wages, better working conditions, some fucking respect for all the work we do to keep their companies going. Without us, their companies die and the money stops flowing. Without us, their customers go somewhere else.

They owe us the courtesy of keeping American jobs in this country, instead of sending them to places where people will work for much less than we will.

Fuck you, Herman Cain.

You Mean That's IT?!

After making the decision three months ago, I finally closed out my bank account yesterday. I've been banking through my new credit union account since late October, ignoring the Regions account, not really putting things off so much as just sleeping all day and not thinking about it.

As it happened, I was lying there trying to go back to sleep and started thinking, "There's probably enough in the Regions account for me to buy a good cable modem...it's time to drop the Dialup...."

In all, it took 5 minutes once I got there. Neither the bank rep nor the teller even asked why I was closing out, didn't express polite remorse for losing my business. Just the standard pleasant "have a nice day" persona, no different from any other transaction. "A deposit? Thank you, sir!" "You're leaving us after nearly 8 years? Thank you, sir!"

I'm disappointed--I had arguments, talking points, and a slightly indignant attitude set and ready in the wings!

I was going to tell them about how when I needed a loan to get the X-11 three years ago, they couldn't help me even though they'd done exactly the same loan three years before for the Tracker. I didn't miss a payment, even when it meant I'd go without gas money or food for two weeks. I had to cash in a CD to buy the X.

I was going to tell them about how there was no way I'd be able to meet their new checking account standards, so I'd be stuck paying them $10 a month for what had been a free checking account when I opened it in 2004.

I was going to remark that when they could have been helpful, they went for the corporate interest ahead of the customer.

Still, I'd have been delivering those talking points to the wrong ears--they of all people would be in a position to understand and even sympathize, since they're at the bottom of the bank industry, the people in the trenches as opposed to the corporate scumbags who might notice a dip in their bonuses this quarter, given that in the last few months the number of new credit union accounts exceeded the previous years' total.

Glad I could help with that.

Beating, Spraying Cops Out of Line

I've watched the Occupy protests growing from a handful of people on a September weekend to hundreds of thousands or millions of people across the world.

I think it's the best thing ever--and long past the time when such protests should have happened.

The big snag is that in the face of mainly peaceful protests, cops and governments have done the wrong thing, spraying, shooting and beating in an attempt to suppress the protests.

They didn't bat an eye at teabaggers showing up to Town Hall meetings with guns, or toting violent messages ("We came unarmed--this time!"), speaking of "taking their country back." They didn't blink when teabaggers assaulted black members of Congress. They didn't go after Sharon Angle when she threatened "Second Amendment remedies" if she lost her bid for election.

But let a college kid or an elderly woman or a retired cop sit on a public sidewalk (paid for and maintained by their own taxes), though, and the unconstitutional beatings and sprayings and arrests begin!

Unconstitutional? Absolutely. What the cops are doing amounts to punishment without due process--an assumption of criminality and an on-the-spot conviction. So much for "innocent until proven guilty." There's also the First Amendment's assurance not just of free speech, freedom of religion, and a free press, but also the right of peaceable assembly and the right to petition our government for a redress of grievance. Thanks to the 14th Amendment's "due process" clause, this applies to all levels of government, from the Feds to every city. Then there's the Fourth Amendment's protection against excessive force.

Back in my National Guard days, we got some of that same beat-on-people, spray-the-shit-out-of-people training. We learned how to club and poke with batons, how to subdue our fellow humans if some politician thought they were getting out of line. I never got called out to use it--and I would have refused to do so on people just sitting peaceably. It's simply not right. I took an oath to protect the Constitution--and, by extension, the People--from all enemies, foreign and domestic. How is an 80-something woman a threat to the country?

As long as they continue their violent assaults on peaceful protesters, they're nothing more than mercenaries for the scumbag elites. Those cops should be using their batons and pepper spray and rubber bullets on the bankers and politicians and predatory foreclosure executives and others--the real enemies of the state--who have screwed this country's citizens for so long.


Ray Pensador has an excellent writeup on the culture of brutality, "Take Your Hands Off Me" over at Kos.

There's an excellent write-up about pepper spray at Speakeasy Science--and some excellent comments there, as well; Leo says:

There seems to be a mentality of “I have pepper spray, so y0u’d better do what I say,” even if the order from the cop is unlawful. Does might make right? I thought we’d progressed beyond that caveman mentality. There’s a reason people employ peaceful protests and sit-ins. They’re not SUPPOSED to be convenient. If they were convenient, people could ignore them. Instead, they’re inconvenient… but also NON-violent. When the police use violence against nonviolent protesters (fire hoses against civil rights marchers, for example), all it does is make even clearer who is right and who is wrong.

And even more on the evolution of police attitudes toward demonstrators can be found here.

He Has a Right to Speak!

...said the cop to the banker.

In a post at Daily Kos, marvinborg relays his experience in passing out fliers in front of Chase and Bank of America branches in San Francisco.

The banksters tried to intimidate him, right up to calling the cops on him when their own private rent-a-goons didn't scare him off.

The sweet, sweet moment:

"He has the right to speak and the right to hand out flyers. Unless he blocks you or causes a disturbance, he has the right to be here - please don't call the police again if he is not bothering you. If you don't like free speech you should move to another country"

Awesome. In your FACE, banker boy.

Moving My Money.

I opened a new checking account at a local credit union last week; I'd been considering such a move for months, ever since I learned of the Move your Money Project.

My soon-to-be-old bank pissed me off. Following the lead of Mega Scumbag bankers Bank of America and others, Regions started charging me to use my own money in my checking account.

Where BofA was charging $5 per month for the use of a debit card, I was getting hit for $4. If I used the card at the bank's ATM or wrote checks, no charge. I make even one debit purchase in a month, $4.

There's also a new $10 per month fee just to have the account if you don't maintain the new minimum account balance.

Their notice:

We recently sent you information about some updates to your checking services. As a reminder, these changes are effective in September and will be reflected on your October checking statement.
As a reminder, what you'll see:

• The monthly account fee for LifeGreen Checking will be $10.
• This fee will be waived when you meet the account's balance or direct deposit requirement.
• Continued access to Online Banking with Bill Pay, Mobile Banking with alerts, and Regions Cashback Rewards.
• You will be charged a $4 monthly CheckCard fee for any statement cycle in which you use your card to make purchases or non-ATM transactions. Make as many of these transactions as you like during the statement cycle with no additional fee.
• No monthly CheckCard fee to use your Regions Visa® CheckCard to make transactions at any ATM.

The new minimum balance is something like $1500.

I make less than $800 per month, living check to check. Obviously, there's no way for me to meet their minimum--so I get sacked for $10.00 per month.

Fine.

Regions got their $14.00--or maybe $28.00, by the time I've shut the account down. I have to wait out the credit union's 8-day waiting period, so maybe I'll be able to boot Regions by Monday.

On the day I was setting up the CU account, I had to go into the nearby Regions branch to cash my Disability check. The teller was very friendly...and I thought of him--and the bank--as the person in a relationship who's the only one who doesn't know he's about to get dumped. I've been telling people about the Move your Money Project for weeks, now. They're sponsoring a big bank-dropping action--Bank Transfer Day--this Saturday, November 5th. Even my new credit union is participating.

"Idiots" tag to Regions and their bigger banker pals.

Move your money, folks. Screw the screwers.

"Regions: It's time to expect more"...of my money to go to your competition!


[UPDATE: Within a few days of this post, Regions discontinued the debit fee. Bank of America dropped theirs a weeks or so earlier. Too little, too late :) ]

Song Of The Day: Bastille Day (Rush live, 1976)

With all the Occupy action growing daily in the US and around the world, and with the whiny arrogance from certain shitbird one-percenters, I'm reminded of a time in history when the humble masses stood up and took down some people who needed taking down.



Is it time yet?

The 53% Who Suck At Math.

One of the more amusing--and pathetic--responses to the 99%/Occupy Wall Street protests that have blown up into a worldwide movement in the last few weeks has been the righties' "53% Movement." I ran across this write-up of these mathematical illiterates at Speakeasy in the last couple of days.

See, in their world, only 53 percent of Americans pay Federal income taxes. Everyone else is a deadbeat, a leech, or whatever--and those valiant 53 Percenters are supporting all the rest!

They conveniently ignore the fact that for people making less than a certain amount, there's no tax. For the 10% or so who can't find jobs, there's no tax. If you have enough deductions, there's no tax.

I used to be in a 10% tax bracket. In my last job, I was making just above minimum wage and making about $15,000 a year. Now I'm on Disability and making somewhere just above $9,000. Oh, I'm living it up.

The amusing thing is, every one of the excerpted posts in the Speakeasy piece is parroting the talking points I'd already heard from various right-wing turd-hurling howler monkeys just a few days earlier, including several of the Nine Stooges who think they're presidential material--"Only 53 percent of Americans pay taxes!!"

I especially liked this woman's "logic":

3 years ago I started my own business with nothing. Finally after 3 years I’m starting to see a profit. I work a second job over 40 hours a week, and I go to college full time! I do all this while raising and providing for my two toddler sons. I don’t have a babysitter, and can’t afford daycare, so instead of complaining and being lazy, I found a second job where I could work from home… I fight and struggle every day! Yes, it’s hard, but it’s not supposed to be easy! … I’m a good role model for my kids so they will never be one of the 99%.

Um...yeah. See, unless your kids grow up to be multi-billionaires who own 40% of the country, your kids will be down here in the 99% club with us non-taxpaying deadbeats.

More importantly--and this should be something obvious to her--99% is bigger than 53%. The imaginary piece she thinks she's part of is actually part of the bigger one, and both of us are getting screwed by the remaining 1%.

Wait, wait, it gets better!

I am the 53% and do not appreciate the lazy, liberal children of Hard Working Americans including me in their socialist 99% movement.

There's that math problem again, coupled with the standard wingnut "socialists!!!!11!1" scare-word and the assumption that the Fifty-Threes are their own majority.

I wonder what the odds are that many of these people are also Teabaggers. We already know they're Republicans. The math issues make that obvious.

There are so many more, and all of them are strangely proud of living in near-poverty, working their asses off, barely scraping by, and carrying the other 46% or of us around on their broad, tireless shoulders.

What an arrogant bunch of crap! What about the tons of other taxes we all pay?

I just registered my two cars and renewed my driver's license. Paid taxes on all three.

I went to Waffle House this morning for breakfast. Paid tax at the register.

Yesterday? Bought a drink at a convenience store. Paid tax on that.

Last week? Put gas in one of the cars. You bet your ass there were taxes in there.

In the next few months, the property taxes on my house come due. We pay tax on the electric bill, the water bill, various insurance bills.

The only difference for me in this is that I probably don't make enough money on Disability to pay much in Federal taxes. No one in my household does--there are three of us, ALL on one form of Disability or another--oh, what a healthy lot we are! Me with a damaged aorta, my mother with her damaged spine, and my sister with Cerebral Palsy.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Fifty Threes are just the fucking stupid part of the 99%. They're making excuses for the corporate dirtbags who've wrecked the economy and bought our political system. They listen to the right-wing scumbags who all have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are and parrot every talking point. They vote for the job-killing Republicans against their own self-interest, driven by stupidity and fear, listening only to the dog-whistles--"SOCIALISM!!! AAAAAAAAAGH!" "ABORTION!!!!" "QUEEEEEEEERS!"

Here's a friendly note to you Fifty Threes: The Ninety-Nine are bigger than you, and we intend to take this country away from the elitist 1% and set things right.

You can join us in making things actually better for all of us, or you can sit on the sidelines and whine about how those poor billionaires are being mistreated. But don't think to get in our way. We will walk around you and leave you behind.

I Made the 1% Rich.

According to that pizza-making idiot who wants to be president next year, it's my fault I'm not an entitled elitist rich raging asshole like him.

But actually, it's because of minimum-wage workers like me that he's an entitled elitist rich raging asshole. He didn't get there on his own, no matter what he wants you to believe.

No. His millions came because of waitresses and kitchen staff in his Godfather's restaurants, people who worked for whatever the company could get away with paying. His money came from regular people like me busting their asses for 40 hours a week, or maybe working more than one job.

I knew people like that in my last job, as a delivery driver for one of the national auto parts chains. I hired on in early 2007, working full time and getting a little more than $7 an hour. Because it was February, once my 90 day probation was done, I still couldn't get into the health plan, since enrollment only happened in January.

But their plan was utter crap; the one I could afford wouldn't cover much of anything. The one I needed was too expensive. I did without.

No raises for ANYbody. Most of the other drivers and counter staff who'd been there as long or longer than me hadn't gotten a raise in years. Every time someone brought it up with management, they'd get runaround, or told to talk to the district manager, who would just give more runaround and excuses.

But the store managers got their bonuses. The DM got his bonus. His boss got his bonus, and so on. Us non-management types got a share in the "store bonus," which was based on overall sales for that store. If your sales are down, you don't get the extra few bucks.

All the while, the DM was screaming that payroll had to be cut, no new hires, no overtime for anyone. This meant that everyone but the store managers got cut back to 30 hours or less and the stores were running on skeleton crews. Customers would complain--both walk-in and commercial--because there weren't enough people to handle the workload. There were only 4 people in my store in the morning: two drivers, one at the Commercial desk (selling parts to local repair shops), and the store manager running the front, alone, until the afternoon guy came in. This freed the manager to go do paperwork, make the bank deposit, and grab lunch. The Commercial side closed down at 5 pm, the store manager left, and the evening guy came in, leaving two people to run the store to close.

And so both walk-in and commercial customers would go to the competition, because the store managers couldn't do anything about it--can't hire anyone, can't bring extra people in to help--and so the DM would scream about getting sales up.

We two drivers did an awful lot to help--checking in stock, putting it on the shelves, helping customers, re-stocking, putting up displays, answering phones, cleaning, anything and everything. I knew the system well enough to do parts lookups and run a register, run the test equipment (batteries, starters, alternators, ignition modules) and brake lathe, maintained the delivery trucks, maintained store equipment (I rigged up a drain for one of the air conditioners when its pipes got clogged up, re-stocked half the hard parts when the part numbers changed or new stuff came in), and other stuff that a "delivery driver" didn't need to do. This is assuming I wasn't out on a run, where I interacted with the customers, listened to their complaints about how long it was taking to get their parts, told them about the company's cutbacks, and asked them to call Corporate and give them an earful.

Basically--and this isn't an exaggeration--I did everything. Most of us in that one store could handle someone else's job and chip in, because we HAD to. Most of us were making about the same, without raises, with our hours cut, and we heard the same bullshit from Corporate--"More sales! Less payroll!"

We got a new DM in January 2010, the third one since I got hired. This asshole went on vacation in February, but not before showing everyone a sales brochure for his $50,000 boat. Nice.

He started shuffling people around. I got moved to the hub store, which warehoused more parts than the others. I was back on a 40-hour week, which was good, and all I had to do was make 8 circuits a day from the hub to two other stores and back. During one stop, I learned that the Company had posted record profits for 2009, $300 million. The Company guys simply gushed about it on the employee indoctrination information website. We were expected to gush, as well, because we're all one big happy family!

Record profits--but at the cost of cutting payroll hours, running stores with minimal staff, running off customers who weren't getting good service, freezing any raises...basically fucking us over for their big profits.

It was people like me who made that $300 million for the Company, people like me who made those sales and helped those customers, people like me who busted our asses so the Company assholes could enjoy their bonuses and record profits while we decided whether to pay the electric bill, the phone bill, or insurance this pay period.

Car broke down? Crap...got to juggle the bills around. Maybe one of the shops'll cut me a deal. At least I get a discount on parts.

Lights got cut off? They want HOW MUCH to turn them back on? Well shit, there goes that paycheck. Guess we're hitting Dollar General for mac & cheese, ramen noodles, and tuna sandwiches for the next two weeks.

But did you SEE the District Manager's new $50,000 boat?! It's got wells for keeping bait, it's got a cooler under this seat, a stereo...everything an entitled asshole could want! Maybe if we're productive enough, he'll let us buy some of the fish he caught on vacation while we were keeping his stores alive for him and earning him his next bonus!

Since the Aorta Fairy visited me last year, things have actually gotten worse for my former coworkers. No raises, payroll cut ever further, and the Company's entitled elites making ever more money.

No, we don't owe the fuckers any thanks for allowing us to work for them and bask in their light. They owe us for making them rich. They owe us better wages, better working conditions, some fucking respect for all the work we do to keep their companies going. Without us, their companies die and the money stops flowing. Without us, their customers go somewhere else.

They owe us the courtesy of keeping American jobs in this country, instead of sending them to places where people will work for much less than we will.

Fuck you, Herman Cain.