It’s hard to feel bad …

For years, any suggestion that Social Security should be privatized was met with visions of a failing economy — so they came up with the 401k, a scheme whereby we put our retirement money into the stock market, but under the control of people we don’t know, who make money whether we do or don’t
And sure enough, when the economy tanked, the only folks who didn’t lose big time on their 401k were folks who didn’t have one. And when Citibank and AIG drove the world economy into virtual bankruptcy, and we the people, who had been paying our credit card bills and mortgages to the best of our ability, reached into our other pocket to bail them out, somehow none of those billions of dollars made it to the retirement funds of the rank and file employee.
When you’re at, or almost at, the lower end of the financial food chain,it’s difficult to have sympathy for guys how show up in personal jets to cry about how much money they lost.

Going Leaner

I almost can’t believe Circuit City didn’t go looking for a handout from the fat cats in Washington, D.C.

Speaking of CAT, that company said if it got some of the bailout money, it would be able to hire back some of the folks it laid off. Soon as it got the money, the head of CATerpillar said the company would have to lay off some more people before it could hire any back.

He didn’t mention that those hired to replace the recently laid off will be in another country. U.S. workers afraid Mexicans are coming north to take their jobs can relax. The companies are going to them. Think of the money U.S. taxpayers can save laying off Border Patrol.

But Chrysler’s got the best ideas for saving money: it’s thinking Green.

It said this week it will take down all its wall clocks and save $20,000 a year, which, coincidentally, is about the life of a single double-A battery normally used to power a wall clock. Wal-Mart has double-A batteries, package of eight for about $5. That’s 32,000 wall clocks.

The bad news is no one will know when it’s time to go home? The good news is no one will know when they’re late getting to work.

Of course, the company already has laid off several thousand workers, which is why it will stop plowing snow off the top deck of its parking garages. That, Chrysler says, will save the company $350,000 a year it won’t have to spend cleaning parking places the laid off employees won’t need.

Thermostats will be at 68 degrees, which isn’t really all that cold — but in the hallways, not in the offices. The company thinks it will save $70,000 a year on heating its headquarters hallways. Of course, it also will remove half the light bulbs in the place, saving $400,000 a year. There would have been more savings, but the heating plant will have to work harder making up the heat loss from the missing bulbs.

Maybe workers in the new, darker, more intimate working areas will find other ways to keep warm.

Of course, the darkness will lose some of its ambiance when the company sells 32 pieces of art currently adoring headquarters’ walls. That’ll be about $2.3 million in the company coffers, if the artwork sells at its 2007 appraised value.

Hours in the main cafeteria have been cut, and other dining sites have been shut down. One presumes Chrysler will not save a large amount, unless it has been employing the food service workers. Most large companies award that to outside vendors, who pay themselves from the food they sell.

But the savings to remaining Chrysler employees will undoubtedly be significant. There are health benefits, as well, for the employees who will have to walk farther and faster to reach the only food court while it’s still serving.

By comparison, General Motors is a piker. It wants to sell Saturn (the marque that’s selling) and Hummer (the marque that isn’t).

We’re in for some Confucian times.

Beware the winking barracuda

The story of Sarah Palin and her bath towel reminded me of the first time I met, sort of, a woman who seemed remarkably comfortable with her appearance.

“That was nice,” I told the guy who was sitting in my passenger seat.

“What’s that?” he asked.

I was sitting at a stoplight several decades closer to my youth when she pulled up beside me in one of those small pickup trucks that was popular before Ford started selling four-door F-150s to the yuppies. I guess the motion of the vehicle suddenly appearing made me glance over, and there was one of the most attractive young women I’d seen.

It wasn’t lust. I’d read the articles in Playboy, and I knew the difference.

She looked over at me, caught my look, and smiled. I smiled back. The light turned green and I never saw her again.

It was more like a ‘thank you for noticing.’ At least that’s the way I chose to read it.

I never saw her again, so I never learned what lay behind the smile, but years later, I had a friend with a similar smile, with whom I occasionally went swimming in the river on hot summer afternoons. We talked about politics and our kids and such stuff.

Sarah Palin, I think, would not be such a friend. After watching her campaign performance and reading of her rise to becoming vice-presidential nominee, I think she had a different message when she came from her shower, wrapped only in a bath towel, to tell her briefers, both men, she would be “just a minute.”

I think she was making a statement. She was telling her male briefers she was not afraid or them, or subservient. Be not mislead, she seemed from my distant perspective to be saying, by my beauty queen experience and posture, or my blue-collar manner of speaking. I am as tough as you, and will, when this is over, use you up and toss you aside as easily as you will me.

This woman, nicknamed Barracuda by her high school mates, is comfortable in her own body. I like that, almost as much as I don’t like her divisive, power-hungry, “real American” brand of politics.

She and Todd are not done yet with their political career. Those who become distracted by her wink and her towel will find themselves bleeding, broken and discarded in the bushes outside the arena.

Generation Gap

An item in a Newsweek story: “At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys’ club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. ‘I’ll be just a minute,’ she said.”

On MSNBC Wednesday, Andrea Mitchell referred to the story and seemed to chastise Palin for not putting more clothes on when she popped out to tell her male briefers she’d be “just a minute.”

It seems from here that says more about Mitchell than about Palin, and about and old generation more than young. Mitchell is 62, born and raised in a time when the thought of a woman clad less than neck to toenails was scandalous. Sarah Palin is 44, well aware of her appearance, equally comfortable in jeans or $10,000 gown.

In Mitchell’s time, a shapely young woman in a bath towel would have been advertising sexual favors for her spot on the ticket. In Palin’s, men who think “getting comfortable” means “let’s f—” are in for some serious disappointment.

The story, and its subsequent treatment, begs the question whether, had those same male briefers come in the room and John McCain appeared in his boxers, what would have been the response from the press on hearing the story.

Shilling isn’t only for carnies

Carnival operators have a name for people planted in the audience who jump up to volunteer to see the show, turns out they were shills for the pitch man.

Many of us are going to live to see the books telling us Joe the Plumber was on the payroll all along.

Either that, or he really is as stupid as he pretends to be, basking in his 15 minutes of fame, and McCain’s going to be sorry for bringing him up.

He doesn’t have any plumbers licenses. In Ohio, without them, he will never make anough money to buy the company. All he can do is minor service work.

And shill for a politician.

Moving back’rds

Big splash this weekend about comedian Al Franken looking real good as the next junior senator from Minnesota.

There’ve been an awful lot of folks have gone from the entertainment stage to elected politics — Ronald Reagan, Jesse Ventura, and Arnold Schwarzenegger come quickly from recent memory.

Sarah Palin, though, has an excellent chance of reversing the trend.

Fans? or supporters?

Somebody on one of the Sunday morning TV shows said Sarah Palin “has lots of fans.”

The vice president is, in fact, only one heart attack or gun shot away from becoming president.

So is that what we want for a president — someone who has lots of “fans?”

Or would we be better served with lots of trusting supporters.

Executive privilege

“John and I are asking the Obama campaign to release communications it has had with this group (Acorn) and to do it immediately.” Sarah Palin in a stump address.

This from the vice-presidential candidate who, as governor, exhibited her executive experience by refusing to respond to subpoenas issued by her own state legislature.

Scary times ahead

I was wrong. Sort of. The folksy “I’ll get back to ya” really is a put-on, and she only put it on a few times.

But she entered the hall with a set of well-rehearsed statements, from the Reagan-reminiscent “Say it ain’t so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again” to the “Your plan is a white flag of surrender in Iraq” line that she almost couldn’t remember.

She stayed on her talking points, mostly ignored the questions and gave instead the answers she was there to give, and winked a lot.

The most substantive statement of the night was her indication that she would be a strong, activve vice president.

“I’m thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president if that vice president so chose to exert it,” she said.

But the Constitution only allows “a bit more authority” if the president wants to assign it. Otherwise, the vice president is limited to breaking ties in the Senate, and replacing the president if that person becomes unable to serve.

Sarah Palin seems to aspire to a continuation of Dick Cheney’s vice presidency of secrecy and power, provided she can be successful in “making sure too that our president understands what our strengths are.” This lady, if this and other statements she has made, and indications of her style as mayor and governor, may be taken as portents, deals from power of office, rather than power of vote. That can be a scary proposition for the rest of us.

We’re in for a show tonight

One needs to be wicked careful about calling someone stupid just because they put on a show about being common. Every now and again something creeps out of that Sarah Palin that makes you wonder, or should make you wonder, which part’s show and which part’s smarter than she’s letting on.

Like the time Katie was trying to find out about something mavericky McCain’d done and Palin said, “I’ll just get back to ya.”

What I saw was the voice change was a) she’d been embarassingly caught with no answer, or b) she’d just tweaked Couric’s and Olbermann’s chains real hard.

She did it again with the Supreme Court question. She’s from a state that is mostly hunters. There are 120, 611 registered Republicans and 73,446 registered Democrats as of Aug. 4 this year. Anybody betting she didn’t know about the Supremes making gun ownership legal couple months ago better be hanging onto their wallets.

She did it again about what newspapers she reads. She could easily have said the Anchorage Daily News or the Juneau Empire. She didn’t get to be governor, even of Alaska, without knowing at least a little about the Lower 48.

I think we’re in for a show tonight.

Of course, if it plays out that way, she’s even less qualified to be Prez than most folks already think.