A Comedy About A Rigged Economy Angered Me, And That's A Good Thing

The play "American Hero" now running at Vermont
Stage Company, is a comedy that might leave you
feeling frustrated by the state of America these days.
That, actually, is a very good thing. 

Last night, I went to a preview of Vermont Stage Company's latest production, a comedy called "American Hero."

The play was excellent and I recommend it, for sure, but still, I left after the show feeling kind of pissed off.

That's NOT a diss at all against Vermont Stage.

The cast and crew at this small Vermont theater company did their usual excellent job with this production, and "American Hero" certainly accomplishes its goal of making me and the rest of the audience have quite a few good laughs.

"American Hero," set in troubled shopping mall sandwich shop, is totally worth seeing during its official October 12 to 30 run in Burlington, Vermont.

Without giving too much away, "American Hero" touches on how the economic system is rigged. The haves are thoroughly corrupt in taking, taking taking, while the have nots who are highlighted in the play struggle with the consequences of what the 1% are doing to them.

The goal of Bess Wohl, who wrote "American Hero" was indeed to anger its audience, despite the laughs. It's another example of pop culture underscoring the absurdity and rotteness of the current Guilded Age.

When entertainment taps into an issue that needs all the attention it can get, that's always a hopeful sign. We see pop culture highlighting the rigged economy and income inequality in other venues, such as in the television comedies "Superstore" and "2 Broke Girls."

Musicians like Bruce Springsteen have also been covering this topic for decades now. Keep at it, Bruce!

The attention the New Guilded Age is beginning to receive away from the economic papers and the dull newscasts means regular Americans are Fed. Up. with things.

Television comedies like "Superstore" can help
propel the national discussion of income inequality.

As if we didn't know that already.  Polls over the past year indicate 7 in 10 Americans think the economy is rigged against them. 

People are so insanely mad about the situation that a substantial portion of Americans are prepared to vote for Donald Trump, a misogynist, racist, thin-skinned, ignorant, spoiled rich kid con man because he says the system is rigged against all of the regular people out there.

Never mind that Trump is one of the people who is rigging the economic system against the 99 percent. Like I said, he's good at being a con man.

I suppose Trump is a form of entertainment, so the fact that he mentions the New Guilded Age, even though he helped create it, is probably a good thing, as long as he doesn't win the Presidential election.

Other politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are having their day in the sun because they hammer away at income inequality and a corrupt economy every chance they get.

I hear the talking points from the 1 percent entering right now. They're saying that how dare you suggest taking away hard earned money from people who got rich through ambition, hard work, and creativity.

Of course, that's a fallacy. Even on my, Sanders' and Warren's worst days, we all agree it is a very good thing in America to get rich through honest work, smarts and moxy.

Just as long as you don't screw over everybody else while doing it. And screwing over people seems to be the current ethos in corporate boardrooms, political back rooms and in political lobbying offices across this nation.

So when popular culture, even in small venues like Vermont Stage Company use satire and gallows humor to poke at the 1 percent, that's always a good thing.

It fires people up. It makes us feel like we could and should keep working for change, even if the odds seem stacked against us.

Yes, I left "American Hero" last night annoyed at the world around me. Americans are already pissed off. Channeled correctly, with a solid dash of humor, we might actually end the New Guilded Age.

Wells Fargo Scam Is Ugly Look Inside Big Banks

Wells Fargo bank got fined big time for widespread
corruption and hijinks, including opening
bank accounts with fees for customers who did
not ask for the accounts or want them.  

Maybe we should be putting our money under mattresses after all and avoiding banks, given the news about Wells Fargo this week.

Wells Fargo Bank is paying  $185 million in fines to various agencies for opening up millions of phony accounts for unwitting customers.

This wasn't just a few bad apples at Wells Fargo doing this. About 5,300 employees have been sacked for doing this, which means it was part of the bank's culture for doing this.

It looks like the trouble started when Wells Fargo brass instituted, shall we say, aggressive sales targets for its employees.

So aggressive that most of them figured they'd never make it to their goals. So they created fake email addresses to sign up customers for online banking services. Apparently, there were about 1.5 million - yes million - such accounts opened.

The emails were fake, but the customers were real. And these customers did not know they were being signed up. Or would be subjected to fees and such that would help make Wells Fargo big, fat, rich and happy. (Wells Fargo will have to repay these customers fees they paid for their unwitting accounts.)

About $100 million of the settlement went to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Elizabeth Warren's favorite consumer protection agency which was created half a decade ago.

"Wells Fargo built an incentive-compensation program that made it possible for its employees to pursue underhanded sales practices, and it appears the bank did not monitor the program carefully," said CFPB Director Richard Cordway, as NBC news quoted.

I'm glad Wells Fargo is being called on their misdeeds, but as is usually the case when big banks or big businesses are up to no good, the top brass that condoned it are totally getting away with it.

It looks like the 5,300 or so people who were fired were pretty low level people. Maybe they deserved to be fired. But with that many people involved, Wells Fargo must have had a culture in which they did bad things to make profits.

Company culture usually comes down from the top. So why aren't the executives who had to know about this and did nothing still collecting nice big salaries at Wells Fargo?

It's not just envy of the fat cats that are getting away with this. We are all victims of this weird money making system.

As Douglas Rushkoff noted on CNN:

".......We are watching what we might call 'extreme capitalism' at work. Banks don't make money by creating value; they make money by extracting funds from anyone who wants to build a business or even just make transactions."

Rushkoff went on to explain that when the economy was growing vigorously, shareholders in banks were happy because the banks were making money through business loans and general commerce.

In the past decade, things have been slower, so to keep shareholders happy with every rising profits, banks like Wells Fargo try to make more money by issuing more credit cards with high fees and new loans with high origination costs.

So we're screwed. Because banks aren't really creating anything or helping anybody. They're just finding creative ways to transfer more wealth away from most of us, and concentrate it in their pockets.

I don't know if I agree with Rushkoff in the following or not, but his idea is intriguing:

"The only real solution here is for banks, like any business, not be required to grow. Banks, particularly savings banks, are more like utilities than businesses. With their monopoly power on the ability to issue currency, they are in a unique role to enable business of every other kind. This makes them at least as responsible to the public good as their shareholders.

By seeking to extract a higher percentage of our economic activity to pay for their financial services, they don't help anyone. Rather than promoting business, they serve as a drag."

Many conservatives and business types hate the CFPB, the consumer protection agency that is collecting fines from Wells Fargo and want to abolish it.

It's the agency I noted Elizabeth Warren loves.

The fines show that CFPB can help rein in the excesses of the banking industry.  Paying $185 million isn't a big deal for a behemoth like Wells Fargo. But the publicity sullies its reputation. The CFPB basically shamed Wells Fargo into behaving.

Sometimes a little public shaming is the best way to make people - and businesses behave.

If that doesn't work, maybe we should all withdraw our money and stow it under mattresses, I don't know.

Is Donald Trump The Sign Of The Apocalypse?

Is Donald Trump so popular because America lost its way?  

You gotta hand it to Donald Trump. He's simultaneously turned himself both into a national crisis and the Great Buffoon Of The Day. And, to many, a savior.

Half the country is scared to death that he might actually become president and ruin the nation and the world. I'm pretty much in the camp.

The other half want him to do all the outrageous things he proposes, because it's "fighting back" against all that they see is wrong with the world.

There doesn't appear to be a way out of this standoff.

Getting Serious About Trump:

Trump had a great Super Tuesday primary. Google searches of the phrase "How to move to Canada" increased by 1,500 percent late Tuesday night as the results came in.  The government of Canada's immigration page experienced delays under the load of presumably mostly Americans looking at it, the Montreal Gazette reported. 

Trump has repeatedly said he wants to build a wall along the United States southern border to keep illegal immigrants from Mexico out. So many Americans might want to move to Mexico to flee Trump that it might be Mexico that builds that border wall.

Hey, if that happens, at least Mexico would pay for it, fulfilling one of Trump's campaign promises.

More seriously, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, writing in the Washington Post, said just the threat of a Trump presidency could well badly damage both the national and global economy.

Summers went so far as to call Trump a threat to American democracy with his authoritarian viewpoints.

He wrote:

"The economy is already growing at a sub-two percent rate in substantial part because of a lack of confidence in a weak world economy. A growing sense that a protectionist demagogue could soon become president of the United States would surely introduce great uncertainty at home and abroad.

The resulting increase in risk premiums might well be enough to tip a fragile U.S. economy into recession. And a concern that the U.S. was becoming protectionist and isolationist could easily undermine confidence in many emerging markets and set off a financial crisis."

I know in my head I've started thinking about spending less money and trying to horde as much cash as I can to stave off what is to my mind the inevitable Great Trump Economic Depression if he's elected president.

Rise Of The Authoritarians:

There's an incredible amount of commentary floating around as to whose fault it is that somebody like Trump could capture the imagination of so many Americans.

The hard question is how to reverse this. It won't be easy.

One major reason why Trump is so popular is that so many people have lost trust in most institutions and the "establishment." Which means not many people are going to listen to the likes of Lawrence Summers and abandon their infatuation with Trump.

And sorry, Mitt Romney, they're not going to listen to you, either. 

Vox this week had a long but fascinating piece on how big picture fear and uncertainty and societal change can bring out the authoritarian in a large segment of the American public.

Vox cited the work of Karen Stenner, author of the book "The Authoritarian Dynamic."

Vox reported:

"According to Stenner's theory, there is a certain subset of people who hold latent authoritarian tendencies. These tendencies can be triggered or 'activated" by the perception of physical threats or by destabilizing social change, leading those individuals to desire policies and leaders that we might more colloquially call authoritarian.

Authoritarians prioritize social order and hierarchies, which bring a sense of control to a chaotic world. Challenges to that order - diversity, influx of outsiders, breakdown of the old order - are experienced as personally threatening because they risk upending the status quo order they equate with basic security. 

There's certainly a drumbeat of big changes in threats we're all hearing about, amplified by the 24 hour news cycle, cable TV shoutfests, zillions of radio shock jocks and social media that scream all kinds of dire news and warnings.

Some of the changes and upheavals are good:  Gay people can now marry in the United States. The Black Lives Matter movement is putting a spotlight on racial injustice and the excesses of some police forces. Authoritarians equate police with social order, so even objections to police shootings of unarmed citizens is equated with a breakdown of social order.

Other changes are indeed threatening to all of us. Rising income inequality is threatening everyone's livelihood, except for the elites, which were the ones who were suppose to maintain social order. They're not anymore, which encourages the authoritarians. Money in politics, and inaction by Congress do the same thing.

You can see why the world seems to have turned upside down and inside out, especially from the perspective of white lower and middle income men, who are really being buffeted from all sides.

Ever notice how many white male faces you see at Trump rallies? I don't think that's a coincidence.

This Won't End Soon

Here's the intractable problem:  Even if the Trump candidacy implodes, the nation is ripe to embrace some other demagogue. The "Trump problem" isn't going to go away if Trump goes away, as Vox notes.

So-called establishment Republicans are in a tizzy, because they fear Trump will be the Republican nominee, and might not win the presidency because of his crazy ideas. Sure, Trump, with all his excesses, might open the door for Hillary Clinton or even Bernie Sanders to win the White House.

But there's still a chance Trump could win. Or, because I don't see signs of our nation's upheaval and resentment among its citizens going away anytime soon,  another dangerous authoritarian overlord type, one that's less of a clown than Trump, could become President in 2020, or 2024.

Yeah, I'll keep laughing at Trump's buffoonery, but meanwhile, I, like Summers, am fearful of some authoritarian jerk, be in Trump or someone else, taking power.

We've gotten into this mess because leaders don't lead, the idea of making money while maintaining a sense of ethics and fairness has gotten quaint, and many members of the media value ratings more than responsibility, and let every wacko commandeer the microphone.

No wonder so many people are pissed off and would go so far as to vote for Trump. In embracing a crazy person, they're screaming for some sanity in this nation.

McDonald's To Low Wage Employees: Don't Forget To Give Your Au Pair and Nanny A Christmas Bonus!

Sometimes, the best thing to keep in mind is if you want to help, don't.

McDonalds (sort of) suggests she just send
back the Christmas gifts she gets so she can
pay her imaginary au pair.  

McDonald's needs that advice.

It seems like every other day, some news trickles out on how they are giving their low wage employees financial advice. (My advice is, hard as it is to do, all you McDonald's employees out there, keep trying to find a job with higher wages)

Anyway, much of the source of McDonald's advice comes from the McSource line, which is McDonald's way of offering helpful lifehacking hints to their employees.

The latest installment gives their often minimum wage employees advice on how much to tip their au pairs, housekeepers, pool cleaners, massage therapists, garage attendants and personal fitness trainers for the holidays.

Because it's no problem affording all those people, and the holiday bonuses on a $7.50 hourly wage with a limit of 30 hours a week, right?

McDonald's tells CNBC that the advice comes from the etiquette experts at the Emily Post Institute in Vermont. They ought to know what's the proper way to acknowledge employees at the holidays, right?

Well, we can't find anything wrong with Emily Post's advice, either. But I wonder if Post would consider it rude to mock low wage employees, however unintentionally, with this advice for people who have money, in other words, people who aren't McDonald's employees.

And I have to note it wasn't Post's idea to give this advice to McDonald's employee. It seems some contractor working for McDonald's lifted the Emily Post etiquette advice from some other side. After CNBC's embarrassing little questions about this matter, the "holiday gift to your au pair" advice has apparently disappeared.

This little crisis I guess is an improvement to previous advice the low wage McDonald's workers got. That was to return the unopened Christmas gifts they got and cash them in, to supplement their poverty level pay.

 Just a little Scrooge-like, no?

Before that, McDonald's helpfully provided sample budgets for its workers so they can figure out how to stretch their measly dollars.  The budgets included no money for heat (take THAT, Minnesota McDonald's workers) and only $20 a month for health care.

No wonder so many fast food workers have been going on strikes this week, despite the fact there's no real organized union backing them.

I remember back in the 1980s or 1990s, when politicians railed against "welfare queens" who got government benefits they didn't  qualify for or deserve.

I totally agree that only people truly in need should get a helping hand from the government.  So why are the corporate CEOs and such getting rich in part by paying their employees so little that they can get food stamps?

My tax dollars, then, are going to enrich the already rich because they're benefitting from food stamps by not paying their employees enough. What, some millionaire or billionaire needs my help to give the annual Christmas bonus to their pool boy at his mansion in Barbados?

Here's my Christmas gift to myself: No eating at McDonald's for me. It'll be a healthy choice anyway.

Employer Would Pay Workers Via Debit Card With Lots of Fees To Eat Up Workers' Earnings

A woman in Pennsylvania, Natalie Gunshannon, was just about to start working at a local McDonald's.  She was going to earn just $7.44 an hour, not much more than the $7.25 minimum wage in her area.

In other words, she'd need every penny she took home from her job.

No thanks, says a woman whose employer
wanted to pay her with a fee-laden debit card

Not so fast, said her employer. The boss said she'd only be paid via a Chase Bank debit card.  That maybe would be a good deal for Chase, and probably for the employer,  but not for Natalie, according to Philly.com

There's tons of fees with that debit card. $1.50 for each ATM withdrawal. $5.00 for each over the counter cash withdrawal. It'll cost $1.00 for every balance inquiry, and 75 cents for every online bill payment. And if she lost the card or it got stolen, that would set Natalie back $15.00.

You can see why she objected. By the time she pays all the fees, there's nothing left for frivolous luxuries like food, rent and utilities.

She went to a lawyer, naturally, trying to get this state of affairs overturned.

I hope she's successful. I'd hate to see a trend take root in which we're paid through expensive debit cards that make us pay all these expensive fees just to access what is and should be our money.

I can see all kinds of problems for employees who get paid through debit cards. If the card isn't at the bank or credit union they normally do business with, they'd have to pay fees to transfer to their accounts, or move their banking business to an outfit they might not want to go to.

And you'd probably have to keep a minimum balance in the account through which the debit card is issued. That unnecessarily ties up money in a bank account that is not used. And you'd have to constantly monitor it so you don't pay huge overdrafts.

Of course, if an employee wants to be paid via a debit card and the employee offers it, why not? Some people are willing to pay a few fees for the convenience of holding a debit card. More power to them.

The trick here is to make the debit card an option, but NOT a requirement.

Let's stop nickel and diming low wage employees so the banks can make more money, OK?

I'm all for banks making money, as long as the money they take in is given to them voluntarily.

Rich Hoarders?

Here's an interesting perspective that's been making the rounds on Facebook and other places.

It certainly is worth considering in these days of Occupy Wall Street and other concerns about the economy and monetary inequality

What do you think of the statement about hoarding? Accurate? Unfair? Silly? Awesome? A rallying cry? Class warfare? Something else?

Discuss!