Monday Male Beauty

The Death of the American Middle Class

If you're happy with the Republican Party's approach to the economy and financial regulation, then I can only guess that you must think that the following data is just fine and dandy. For years Americans could expect their children to have a better lifestyle and more financial security than they themselves did. Sadly, not any more. And what's most shocking is that the cited statistics largely came about or the conditions giving rise to them arose on the watch of Chimperator Bush. Obviously, more of the GOP's management of the economy, financial regulation and a host of other things is NOT good news unless one is in the top 1% of the population. For the rest of us, things look grim and are worsening. What's insane is that the tea partiers - many of whom fall into those seeing their finances collapse - are in general backing the very political party that has helped lead them to ruin. Here are some very sobering highlights from Yahoo News:
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The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker 10 times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool.
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• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
• 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
• The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
• In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
• The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
• For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
• This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.
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What has developed is a situation where the people at the top are doing quite well, while most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make it. There are now about six unemployed Americans for every new job opening in the United States, and the number of "chronically unemployed" is absolutely soaring. There simply are not nearly enough jobs for everyone.Many of those who are able to get jobs are finding that they are making less money than they used to.
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Again, if these statistics look good to you, vote for the GOP and its efforts to obstruct any meaningful changes in this country that might help address the financial melt down facing more and more Americans. To me, it looks like the USA is fast on the path of Ancient Rome where there eventually came to be little incentive on the part of most citizens to uphold the empire. Rome's fall had nothing to do with homosexuality and everything to do with too much squander treasure and lives on endless wars and the annihilation of the Roman middle class.

Evangelical Lutheran Church Reinstates Gay Clergy

In a move that will drive the Southern Baptist want to be Missouri Synod Lutherans to apoplexy, The larger and modernity embracing Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has reinstated six gay clergy who had previously been removed from the ranks of rostered clergy because they were in committed same sex relationships. More reinstatements are to follow. In my view, this is a wonderful occurrence and I hope more previously demonized gay clergy will find themselves reinstated within the ELCA. The irony in the whole partnered gay clergy issue is that evangelical Christians who are typically the most homophobic also have the highest divorce rate - they personify those who wear their religion on their sleeves, seek to inflict their religious beliefs on all, and then are utter hypocrites when it comes to their very selective application of Bible passages. Here are some highlights from the Plain Dealer:
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Seven pastors who work in the San Francisco Bay area and were barred from serving in the nation's largest Lutheran group because of a policy that required gay clergy to be celibate are being welcomed into the denomination.
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The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will add six of the pastors to its clergy roster at a service at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in San Francisco on Sunday. Another pastor who was expelled from the church, but was later reinstated, will participate in the service.
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The group is among the first gay, bisexual or transgender Lutheran pastors to be reinstated or added to the rolls of the ELCA since the organization voted last year to lift the policy requiring celibacy.
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Megan Rohrer, one of the pastors who will participate in Sunday's rite of reception service, grew up in South Dakota and attended a Lutheran college where she said students tried to exorcise her "gay demons" by throwing holy water on her. Some of those people are now Lutheran pastors in South Dakota, she said.
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Rohrer, who is transgender and a lesbian, was ordained by four congregations in San Francisco in 2006, but could not join the ELCA roster until the denomination's national assembly approved the new policy in August.
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Jeff Johnson, another one of the pastors who will be added to the roster, said the ELCA's position for years of not accepting the choice of some congregations to ordain gay clergy was painful and disappointing. "The actions the church is taking on Sunday affirms the decisions of those congregations," Johnson, pastor of the University Lutheran Chapel in Berkeley, said. "The church is respecting our family, our partners, the choices we're making."
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The special rite of reception that will be used for the first time on Sunday was developed specifically to welcome gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender pastors, said Melissa Ramirez Cooper, a spokeswoman for the ELCA.
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Two more rite of reception services are scheduled for September in the St. Paul-Minneapolis area and another will follow in Chicago, Cooper said.

Will the USA Follow Japan's Example Into Stagnation?

The latest issue of Time magazine has an article that looks at the long term economic and political stagnation that has overtaken Japan - once the dynamo of Asia and now one of Asia's "sick men." I find it interesting that one of the overriding problems is the nation's political system which has become a constant revolving door with few legislators who to accept a changed society and economy and who are willing to put the long term interests of the nation ahead of short term political gain. I could not help but immediately see the parallels between the problems in Japan with the current tactics of the GOP which are all about short term political gamesmanship and which exhibit absolutely no concern for the long term best interests of the nation. The irony, of course, is that the Republicans market themselves as the super patriots and "real Americans" and yet they are only too willing to short sell the country's long term well being for short term partisan political gain. The reality is that the world and society are changing rapidly. Trying to re-establish a remembered time that in fact never existed does not provide the leadership that is needed nowadays. These uber-patriots of the GOP - and the talking heads at Fox News - should more appropriately viewed as traitors to the national well being. Here are some highlights (make sure to note the parallels with the current situation in the USA):
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While Asia lurches forward, Japan inches backward. And yet no one in Japan is doing very much about it. For 20 long years, ever since the spectacular collapse of a stock-and-property price bubble in the early 1990s, the economy has existed in a near cryogenic state. The postbubble period of malaise called the "lost decade" has stretched into the lost decades.
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Every few months, Tokyo's political revolving door spits out a new Prime Minister (Japan's had six PMs in the past four years) who inevitably vows that the time has come, finally, truly, to reform. But the proposals announced with expectant fanfare usually get swallowed up in Japan's dysfunctional political system.
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Japan's struggle today starkly shows the perils of inaction, of allowing domestic political calculations and ideological inflexibility to take precedence over the pragmatism necessary to thrive in a changing world.
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The business-as-usual approach in Sendai shows how stale Japan's bureaucracy-led economic model has become. "Japan still craves the old structure, but that structure is preventing the emergence of new industries," says Kazunori Kawamura, a political scientist at Tohoku University. "The bureaucrats create a system that benefits themselves.
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"The economy has continued to be stagnant because of the pursuit of economic policies that did not match the changes in the structure of industry and of society," Kan said in a June policy speech.
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Japan's corporate sector hasn't been any more enlightened. The biggest names of Japan Inc. have been steadily losing ground in key industries and markets around the world, often to more nimble competitors from elsewhere in Asia. That is especially the case in the crucial emerging markets of the future — China and India — where Japanese managers have been slow to adapt product lines to the different needs of their up-and-coming, but still low-income, consumers. In India, for example, South Korea's Hyundai sold two-and-a-half times more cars in the rapidly growing market in 2009 than Toyota and Honda combined, according to J.D. Power & Associates. Japanese brands are also falling behind in hot, new consumer markets. South Korea's Samsung and LG Electronics are tops in the expanding LCD TV business, not Sony, Sharp or Panasonic, while Taiwan's Acer is winning in the mini-PC netbook market.
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In fact, Japan's entire economic model needs an overhaul in order to create new opportunities for the nation's youth. Policymakers must break once and for all from the export obsession held dear for decades and find new sources of growth at home. That means ending its traditional bias toward manufacturing and developing the inefficient services sector by slashing the red tape that stifles competition. Japan also requires major labor-market reform in order to boost wages, productivity and worker welfare, thus stimulating more consumer spending.
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Such a sweeping vision for the nation's future and its role in the world is regrettably absent. Katsuji Konno, president of Igeta Tea Manufacturing, a Sendai-based chain of specialty tea shops, complains that the country's leaders are too focused on short-term fixes rather than long-term solutions. "You have to think of more drastic measures," he says. "You need to think 10, 30, 40 years ahead." Until Japan stops living in the past, it may not have a future.
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Success in the future requires that one recognize that the past is just that - the past. As the world and the global society changes, nations must change or suffer the consequences. Sadly, the GOP - and cities like Martinsville, Virginia - want to go backwards in time, not forward to embrace the new world. If the USA sticks to the Martinsville/Ken Cuccinelli model, the future will be bleak indeed.

More Sunday Male Beauty

What This White House Is Missing; GOP Racism

It seems at times that the White House doesn't "get" much of anything when it comes to issues important to the Democratic base. Are the President and his advisers brain dead, deaf, or just indifferent to those who put Barack Obama in office. Indeed, since taking office, Obama seems to have paid more significant attention to kissing up to Bible thumpers like Rick Warren and obstructionist Republicans who will die before supporting him than he has to minding the store so to speak with moderates and Democrats. His circle of advisers all too frequently seem to - bluntly put - have their heads up their asses and are doling out just plain bad advice. That, combined with Obama's refusal to be a leader, has lead to all kinds of missteps and mistakes. Maureen Dowd sees the Shirley Sherrod debacle as yet another example of the president refusing to surround himself with advisers in touch with both the party base and objective reality in terms of GOP racism. Here are highlights from her column in today's New York Times:
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The Obama White House is too white. It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran. . . . Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand “the slave thing,” as a top black Democrat dryly puts it. The first black president should expand beyond his campaign security blanket, the smug cordon of overprotective white guys surrounding him . . . .
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The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong.
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Charles Sherrod, Shirley’s husband, was a Freedom Rider who, along with the civil rights hero John Lewis, was a key member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the ‘60s. As Lewis, the longtime Georgia congressman, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he knew immediately that something was amiss with the distorted video clip of Sherrod talking to the N.A.A.C.P.
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[W]e may have a West Wing of cowards on race. The president appears completely comfortable in his own skin, but it seems he feels that he and Michelle are such a huge change for the nation to absorb that he can be overly cautious about pushing for other societal changes for blacks and gays. At some level, he acts like the election was enough; he shouldn’t have to deal with race further. But he does.
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His closest advisers — some of the same ones who urged him not to make the race speech after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright issue exploded — are so terrified that Fox and the Tea Party will paint Obama as doing more for blacks that they tiptoe around and do less. “Who knew that the first black president would make it even harder on black people?” asked a top black Democratic official.
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Frank Rich likewise laid into the White House and others on the Sherrod fiasco in his column (he should have slammed the laziness of the MSM harder in my opinion):
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This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we reached a new low last week. What does it say about America now, and where it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the N.A.A.C.P. and the news media were all soiled by this episode. Meanwhile, the majority of Americans, who believe in fundamental fairness for all, grapple with the poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who served as accessories to a high-tech lynching.
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The smear might well have stuck if the white octogenarian farmer saved by Sherrod 24 years ago was no longer alive and if he didn’t look like a Norman Rockwell archetype. Only his and his wife’s testimony to her good deeds on CNN could halt the lynching party.
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[O]ne thing was certain: the N.A.A.C.P. was wrong to demand that the Tea Party disown its racist fringe. It should have made that demand of the G.O.P. instead.
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The Tea Party Express fronted by Williams is an indisputable Republican subsidiary. It was created by prominent G.O.P. political consultants in California and raises money for G.O.P. candidates, including Sharron Angle, Harry Reid’s Senate opponent in Nevada. But Republican leaders, presiding over a Congressional delegation with no blacks and a party that nearly mirrors it, remain in hiding whenever racial controversies break out under their tent. “I am not interested in getting into that debate,” said Mitch McConnell last week.
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The pace is set by right-wing stars like Glenn Beck, who on Fox branded Barack Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” and the ever-opportunistic Newt Gingrich, who on Twitter maligned Sonia Sotomayor as a “Latina woman racist.”
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While America’s progress on race has been epic since the days when Sherrod’s father could be murdered with impunity, we have been going backward since Election Day 2008.

Melancholy Sunday Afternoon

UPDATED: With the help of our friend Rob and the boyfriend - who being "Martha Stewart" at all times - came up with a great place for the corner chairs and the boyfriend just happened to have spare fabric to cover them. The finished work on the chairs next to the boyfriend's century plus old Austrian chandelier is shown above in the great room. The chairs proviide another discrete conversation area and tie in with the traditional/asian theme of the room which measures 25 by 30 feet.

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*The boyfriend and I are back from a trip up to Charlottesville to help move my mother out of her own place and into an apartment in one of my sisters' home less than 15 minutes from where my mother has lived for the last six years since leaving Virginia Beach before my father died. She seems happy with her new place which has just been remodeled and which affords her ground level access. A lift is being installed so that she can access the main floor of my sister's home as well. It is so, so hard to see one's parents age and begin to fail (the photos is my mother 60 years ago). The trip was uneventful and everything was accomplished that we needed to get done and I will feel far better not having my mother living alone.

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Nonetheless, I find myself with an overbearing feeling of sadness. I'm not sure exactly why. Perhaps it's from memories stirred both by pieces of furniture, photos and other items each of us siblings took since the new apartment is far smaller than her former three bedroom two bath home. Items that we brought back to Hampton include the heavy iron bed frame from my parents' former bedroom in Virginia Beach, another Chippendale corner chair that my dad made from an expensive historic reproduction kit years ago (he made a total of seven: one for each of his children and one for himself and my mother), assorted photos, and a rugged solid Honduras mahogany shipping chest that my grand parents used to ship dishes from Panama over 70 years ago. Figuring how to integrate things into the house will be a challenge since the boyfriend had it beautifully furnished before I moved in some of my meager possessions. Other items - a TV, lamps, artwork - will be transported to the house I own in Norfolk and rent out to tenants.

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Another item I brought back is my 7th grade wood shop project that my mother had kept all these years - a cherry salad bowl that I made on a wood lathe. Ironically, 7th grade was the year that I seriously began to realize that I was "different" and had attractions to other boys. Much has happened over the intervening decades - high school, college, law school, marriage, three beautiful children, finallt "coming out", being fired for being gay, a horrific divorce and bankruptcy, a tumoultuous relationship with my ex-boyfriend and now two years with the boyfriend (Friday was our anniversary). At times I truly don't know what the point of it all has been. Other than my wonderful children, have I made any difference in the world? I really don't know.

Gay-Baiting Poll Used Against Pro-Equality Candidate

Krystal Ball (pictured at left) is one of the three gay supportive candidates running for Congress in the Hampton Roads region. Krystal is running for the 1st Congressional District, Glenn Nye is running for the 2nd District, and Bobby Scott is running in the 3rd District. The incumbent running for re-election in the 4th District is my former classmate, Randy Forbes who I can only assume has had a nervous breakdown or submitted to a "Stepford Wife" like program to turn him into a hard right Christo-fascist. All of the Democratic candidates face the prospect of running against an energized GOP base while their traditional base id apathetic due to the endless broken promises of Barack Obama and the weak kneed Congressional Democrat leadership. Part of my undisguised anger at Obama, Jim Webb and others who are throwing the LGBT community and other elements of the Democrat base under the bus arises from the fact that good candidates may well be defeated because of the "what difference does it make" feeling that is palpable among many people that we know (This article in the Washington Post looks at this severe problem for the Democrats). Pam Spaulding looks at the sleazy anti-gay tactics being used by Krystal's opponent, Rob Wittman. Here are some highlights:
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Pro-equality ally and Virginia U.S. Congressional candidate Krystal Ball attended her second Netroots Nation this year, and she's doing extremely well in the race to represent the 1st district in Virginia.
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Her opponent, anti-gay Republican incumbent Rob Wittman, is a real bible beater: As a member of the Values Action Team, I will continue to support pro-life, pro-family legislation. I will work in defense of parental rights, religious liberty, and the definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Furthermore, I support efforts to curb internet pornography and obscenity.
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Now one would assume, even with those fundie credentials, Wittman would not want his supporters or his party, given the state of the economy and how it affects his constituents, focusing on gay-baiting Krystal Ball. Well how wrong is this - the Blend has learned that a push-poll in support of Wittman, dialed up voters in the district with lines of questioning that harken back to the 1990s-2004 gay-baiting bullshite of the highest order.
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First of all, the lead-in statement is for the caller to tell the resident the questions are about "Krystal Ball's obsession" regarding support for "special rights" for the LGBT community. And then the caller is asked this (I sh*t you not): "Krystal Ball has a strange infatuation with gays and lesbians. It makes one wonder what is in her past."
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It's pretty disgusting, yet folks like Wittman may well be re-elected because of the failure of Democrats to keep campaign promises in any significant way. If Democrats are massacred in the 2010 mid-terms, Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Jim Webb and others will bear the ultimate responsibility. They will have taken a golden opportunity to effect real change and they demonstrated a reverse Midas touch - gold turned to sh*t.

Sunday Male Beauty

the Proportion of Gay Priests in the Italian Capital at '98%'

The Vatican's PR nightmare continues to run out of control - and deservedly so. The moral rot and bankruptcy throughout the Catholic Church hierarchy in respect to the sexual abuse scandal seems to encompass the majority of high clerics as opposed to being the exception to the rule. With this week's expose on the sexual partying and cavorting of priests in Rome, the Vatican is having vapors - or at least pretending to do so - and claiming such reports are untrue. The Guardian has more on the continuing fallout. My favorite is the statement that 98% of the priests in Rome are gay. Here are story highlights:
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The Catholic church, already reeling from a string of clerical sex abuse scandals, is facing new embarrassment after an Italian magazine published an investigation into what it termed the double life of gay priests in Rome.
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The diocese of Rome lashed out at the prime minister's magazine, saying its aim was "to create scandal [and] defame all priests". But it also urged gay clerics to leave both the closet and the priesthood.

It said, "Consistency would require that they come into the open", but that they "ought not to have become priests". The semi-official papal daily, L'Osservatore Romano, made no reference to the affair. Vatican Radio reported it briefly.
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A member of the clergy quoted by the magazine put the proportion of gay priests in the Italian capital at "98%". The Rome diocese insisted the vast majority of priests in the city were "models of morality for all", while adding that the number of gay clergyman was "small, but not to be written off as isolated cases". A review eight years ago of research on the American church concluded that between a quarter and a half of seminarians and priests there were homosexual.
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A former Italian MP and gay activist, Franco Grillini, said: "If all the gays in the Catholic church were to leave it at once – something we would very much like – they would cause it serious operational problems."
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In March, the pope's own household was rocked by scandal when court documents revealed a Vatican chorister had procured male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting.