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Donald's Blog
July 17, 2012 Kitty Wells RIP The queen of country music died yesterday, aged 92. Every woman who's had a hit on the country charts owes something to Kitty Wells.
That's it. Three short simple verses, written by a J.B. Miller, that caused record company executives to take another look at female country singers. Nowadays they have movies made of their lives; before Kitty Wells, they couldn't even get recording contracts. July 17, 2012 It's True: Corporations are People Jack and Suzy Welch so argued in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Jack Welch was CEO of General Electric for 21 years, fabulously successful during American boom years by firing people each year if their divisions/ departments didn't make enough money, never mind what they may have been working on that might have changed the world next year. Meanwhile my General Electric water softener went phut in 2009 after only a few years; but then Welch's kind of business is what has put the country and the world in the toilet.
And so on, for several paragraphs of appealing question-begging sob stories. Of course corporations don't invent things or create jobs or steal from the public; it is the people who work for the corporations that do those things. And as a person who works for a corporation, I am free to donate money to the political candidate of my choice. I can also vote. Corporate profits are healthy these days, we know from reading the Wall Street Journal, and the corporation is legally a person, and free to throw obscene amounts of money at a political campaign. It can certainly afford to donate 50,000 times as much money as I can, and it's a person, so why doesn't it have 50,000 votes?
Britain or the USA, financial ratings or bundles of toxic mortgages, it makes no difference. We will continue to fine Mr Corporation, while Mr CEO (a different person) continues taking home telephone numbers. Our economies are starving to death because corporations suck the life out of them like vampires. We cannot do without corporations, and we should not wish to do so, but we could get them under control, if we could get our heads out of the place where the sun doesn't shine. July 17, 2012 Time to pick on Hillary Also in today's Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens couldn't think of anything to write about, so he redefines loyalty, principle etc in order to expose "The Hillary Myth". The most ridiculous paragraph:
This rubbish presupposes that Carter sent teams of brave Americans into the darkess of that desert in 1980 for party political reasons; nobody who knows anything at all about Carter would believe that for a second. It also implies that everybody knew the operation was going to be a disaster. Everybody wanted Carter to do something about the American hostages in Tehran. Everybody wanted Bush to do something about Osama bin Laden, but Bush let him get away at Bora Bora; everybody wanted Obama to do something about Osama bin Laden, and he did, and that operation could have been a disaster. But maybe we should have said to the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, "Okay, you can have Asia. We're afraid of a disaster and anyway we can't afford a war." July 17, 2012 The Transportation Security Administration In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, in an article about warehouses selling items confiscated by the TSA in airports, or lost by travelers:
This is the kind of thing that makes writers and editors despair. By the time you are dealing with the TSA you are already halfway through customs, and cannot go back to your car, assuming that you have one parked outside; your checked baggage has already been checked, and the TSA is not going to provide you with packaging and stamps so that you can mail your corkscrew to yourself. Unless you want to miss your plane and forfeit the price of the ticket you have no choice but to kiss your fingernail clippers goodbye. Isn't this problem irritating and intractable enough without commentary from someone who has apparently never traveled?
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