In cancel culture, people who do something offensive find themselves out of work. Shouldn’t it work the other way around too? Why not reward incompetent people with great jobs if it turns out that they are nice outside of work? Or are we just a bunch of negative people?
The Biden Administration would like to increase corporate taxes. Big companies complain that the US has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, which is true. What they don’t like to talk about, and it’s also true, is that there are so many loopholes and deductions that they pay some of the lowest taxes in the world. Many large companies like Apple computer pay no taxes at all.
Transgender people often report having felt trapped in a different body gender than their actual identity. There was a “trans racial” NAACP official who identified as African-American though she had no black ancestry. Can transclassism be next in the battle for self identity and the right to live as we feel inside?
I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week:
“In 2005 and 2006, patient dumping on L.A.’s skid row grabbed national headlines with images of mentally ill patients in hospital gowns, one holding a colostomy bag, being dropped off in ambulances, taxis and vans,” Richard Winton of The Times remembers. Major hospitals, including Kaiser Permanente, were forced to admit routinely driving indigent patients downtown, dumping them on the sidewalk and speeding off. “Hospitals don’t like dealing with homeless patients, who are often uninsured and sometimes unpleasant to treat. So they literally dump them on the streets of Skid Row, even if the patients come from other places in Los Angeles, and are in no condition to fend for themselves,” “60 Minutes” reported in 2007.
Most people thought the problem had abated since hospitals got slapped with major fines.
Alas, we were wrong.
“In a settlement announced Friday, the 224-bed Beverly Hospital in Montebello agreed to pay $250,000 in civil penalties and legal fees after it was accused of taking a patient by taxi to skid row and leaving her there without making any arrangements with a shelter,” Winton reports.
Charming.
So Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer says he’s going after this miscreants.
Which brings me into the picture. I want to help!
For a hospital like Beverly, a quarter million bucks is a drop in the bucket. It’s cheaper for them to pay the occasional penalty than to give proper care to every patient who walks or rolls through the ER doors. From now on, therefore, I humbly suggest that when cops and homeless shelters come across a case of patient dumping, they take the person to the hospital’s CEO. In Beverly Hospital’s case, that would be Gary Kipp.
I’m guessing that Kipp, with an annual salary of $400,000 that safely ensconces him in the top 1%, has a sweet crib with lots of spare room for sofa surfers. Maybe CEO Kipp can take in some of the nurses he is underpaying and refusing to let unionize, as well.
I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week:
The City of Bell is a small blue-collar community in southern L.A. County whose top officials were discovered to be earning the highest municipal salaries in the United States. Six of them, including the former mayor, face multiple counts of misappropriation of public funds, conflict of interest and other corruption charges.
This week, former Assistant Chief Administrator Angela Spaccia was on trial. For a small-time administrator of a hardscrabble town, Spaccia made a killing, her annual income maxing out at $564,000.
That’s more than the President of the United States.
She must miss what was undeniably a very sweet gig. “[In testimony] Spaccia pointed out that although she worked in Bell from 2003 through 2010, there was about a year and a half total when she never showed up to work…during these absences, she acknowledged, she was still paid her full salary. Not only was she never docked a sick or vacation day, she continued accruing more days off,” reports The Times’ Jeff Gottlieb.
Spaccia candidly admitted that her salary for the “last two or three years” was “twice what I needed to be paid.” But defense attorney Harland Braun argued that there was nothing wrong with that. “Everyone’s greedy,” Braun told jurors. “Everyone takes money. There’s no crime in taking too much money. It may be excessive. The issue is whether this is criminal conduct. Ethically, she basically accepted the money, and looking back on it, it looked like it was way too much money and she was also very preoccupied with personal problems, but she recognizes it. How many of you have turned down an excessive raise?”
Like everyone else, I can’t imagine what Spaccia and her co-defendants were thinking back then. Then again, as a contrarian who tries to think outside the box, I see Braun’s point. Maybe there ought to be salary caps on public paychecks, but there weren’t and there aren’t. Self-restraint is voluntary.
Then I got to thinking about pay in the broader context.
Average CEO pay for 2011 and 2012 has run $9.6 million and $9.7 million, respectively — and this was in the middle of a brutal recession that cost millions of Americans their jobs. The average CEO earns 354 times the pay of an average American worker.
When you consider that ratio in other countries like France (104), Australia (93) and Japan (67), it seems pretty obvious that greed is indeed the American way.
All over the world, and now here in the United States with the so-called “fiscal cliff” accounting crisis, ordinary people are being told that they must tighten their belts. Why? In order to pay the bills of wealthy elite individuals and corporations that enjoyed almost all of the profits of the boom times and indeed are continuing to live lavishly today.
Democrats and Democratic front groups like MoveOn.org are trying to channel the Occupy movement back into the system with such “Astroturf” actions as “Occupy the Ballotbox” and “Occupy the Primaries.” What bizarre co-option schemes can we look forward to next?
Corporations have more cash than they need—but Republican politicians are offering them even more.
Barack Obama’s speech at Notre Dame about abortion continues his ongoing quest for oppressed people to make nice with their oppressors.
