Oh! I wish I didn’t have to see his Weiner…,

This week, I was working with a middle school class and I was asked what my opinion was of “The Weiner Thing”. Okay, I’ll admit that my first instinct was to make inappropriate jokes that were at the level of the student asking me. My second instinct was to make another, even worse, joke. I think my exact words were something along the lines of “I love it. I carry it with me all the time.” I told you, these are my first instincts. Eventually, I came around to answering the very serious and encouraging question asked by a student who hasn’t demonstrated (up till now) an engagement with current events. I’m posting a response more for the parents who might have questions to answer from kids who hear or see news (mostly accidentally), or who are force-fed a line by the government school system (it happens way more than you want to believe).

First, let’s get straight what this post isn’t about. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a Conservative, based mostly on economic positions. On a personal level, I don’t like Anthony Weiner because I disagree with his politics. I’m not terribly interested in this subject. All that being said, the “Weiner Thing” is really about two separate and wholly unequal issues. One is incidental, and one is very important. Let’s start with the former.

The Facts:

-Congressman Anthony Weiner has, by his own admission, sent what are considered to be inappropriate pictures of himself to Twitter Followers.

-He has done this both before and after his marriage.

-He accidentally broadcast a picture of his junk in underwear through Twitter.

Those are the facts of the issue that are not important. See, Weiner is an adult. If he wants to display his shortcomings to the world via Twitter, FaceBook, or a Billboard in New York, this is his right and prerogative to do so. Weiner would like to leave this post at that, but then there is the little problem of the second issue, which is important.

Some More Facts:

-Congressman Weiner is one of 500+ people who make the rules of the Country. He should be held to a standard of ethical behavior and honesty.

-He repeatedly lied about what isn’t really that big a deal.

-(Pardon the pun) He was a real dick in the way he dealt with the media.

-He didn’t know the people he sent the pictures to.

This is important to young people because aside from the jokes and the overly jaded political ideologues out there, young people are told that they should trust those in authority. They should be able to look up to “officials”, and emulate their behavior. At the very least, they should believe that those in authority are smart enough to know that you shouldn’t send pictures of your junk to strangers, and especially not to people who may be under-aged.

Further, the Weiner debacle serves as a cautionary tale against arrogance. He might be destroying his career because of the way he approached the media, first in his lie, and later in his arrogance.

When further asked if I thought Weiner should be fired or jailed, here are my thoughts on that. I live in California, not New York. I’m never going to be in a position where Anthony Weiner will be on my ballot. His behavior certainly will have repercussions with his wife, the House of Representatives, and with his constituents in New York, my involvement ends at helping young people to learn to avoid the mistakes that Weiner made.

 

 

A Day in The Life

I’m not a Beatles fan.  I’ve said that before, and I’ll probably say it again.  Sometimes, though– there just isn’t a better way to express what is going on in the world.

I read the news today, oh boy!

Story #1:  Student told to take U.S. flag off bike

Here’s the gist.  Cody Alecia flies a flag on his bike when he rides back and forth between school and home.  The school district tells him to take off the flag.  I wrote about a similar situation back in May, dealing with the students at Live Oak High School.  Click HERE to re-read that story.  My take back then was that these kids were trying to piss people off, but they were within their rights to do so.  My take on young Mr. Alecia is that this is a kid that is doing what he believes is right, and he is doing it in the exact right way.

I’ve told you for years now that you need to stand up for what is right and not allow people (adults) to sit you down and shut you up.  This young man may not have ever heard of or read Finance For Youth, but based on all the stories that have been in the news about him, he certainly follows the QUALITIES OF SUCCESS that I’ve been talking about for a few years now. 

That’s all well and good, but the surprising thing is that this was in the news.  Young people express themselves.  Some do it in a positive way.  Others do so in a less positive way.  The problem is that we adults have forgotten that there is a difference.

About a lucky man who made the grade..,

Story #2:  Charles Rangel Convicted of Ethics Violations

House Ways and Means committee.  You know, the group that writes the tax laws?  Charles Rangel used to be in charge of that group.  Charles Rangel has been a Congressman from New York for 40 some years, and has recently won reelection by a wide margin.  Charles Rangel has been found guilty of 11 charges that he broke the House ethics rules by doing things like:

• Asking for money for a personal project from people who were asking for things from Congress. 
  • In other words, let’s say you work for Walmart.  I come in and ask for an item.  The item is in the warehouse, but not yet on the sales floor.  While we are walking towards the area where the item should be, you and I start chatting.  You mention that you need to buy a new car because you have to take your mother to her dialysis treatments and to get her medicine.  I give you money to help you.  Right after, you go to the back and get the item I came in for.  Is there anything wrong here?  Maybe.  Wrong enough that there is a rule against it.
• Using House of Representative stationary to write letters asking for money for Rangel’s center. 
  • If Charlie Rangel asks for money on a regular piece of paper, then its just a guy asking for money.  When he does so using the company stationary, it sounds like the House of Representatives is asking for money.  I can say no to some guy.  I think twice about saying no to a big group.
• Misusing his Congressional staff to ask for money.
  • I pay Charlie Rangel’s staff.  I want them doing Congressional things, not writing letters asking for money for his personal ego center.
• Failure to accurately report financial reports.
  • The guy had a house in the Dominican Republic.  He didn’t pay taxes on it.
  • He had several rent-controlled apartments that he used as campaign headquarters.
    • Rent control means that there is a limit as to how much rent can be charged.  This program is designed to allow people who couldn’t ordinarily live in a neighborhood because of the price to move in.  Charlie Rangel has enough money that he shouldn’t even qualify for the program, yet here we are.

You can read all of the charges in their entirety HERE:  In addition to violating many of the aforementioned QUALITIES OF SUCCESS, Rangel has acted with great dirtbaggery.  He’s one of those that I had in mind when I recently warned you to be careful of who you follow.  Here’s the very worst part of it all.  Charlie said he never did anything to enrich himself.  He said he might be considered stupid, sloppy, or any number of other things, but not corrupt.  He was in charge of the group that writes the tax laws!  He cheated on his taxes!  He is stupid but not corrupt?  That is too much.

And though the news was rather sad, I just had to laugh…,

Story #3: Bush-era “Tax Cuts” set to expire.

I didn’t set a link for this one because there are so many links with differing points of view that I don’t want to pick one over the other.  Let’s just boil it down.

In 2001 and again in 2003, former President George W. Bush cut the amount of federal income taxes.  The congress at the time wouldn’t do it unless the cuts were deemed to be temporary, expiring NOW!  Nobody knew we’d be in the early stages of the greater depression at the time.  Everybody believed that happy times would be here again.

Fast forward to today and the outgoing Democrat Congress wants to make permanent the current tax rates.  For everybody except those who do most of the hiring and already pay most of the taxes.  They cloak their desires in words like “middle-class tax cuts” and “protect 98% of the tax payers”.  Here’s the fact.  As I said in an earlier POST it is your money.  What the government employees don’t understand is that it isn’t their money.  What they are talking about isn’t resetting the tax rates to the way they were when Clinton was in office.  They are talking about raising taxes on people who pay more taxes than anybody else.  I’m not rich, and I don’t even want to be rich, but I don’t begrudge those who have put in the hard work to become so the fruits of their labor.

What does it all mean?

There are other huge news stories, but I just couldn’t rehash all of them today.  I mean, I could but doing so would only serve to depress me more.  I don’t always like being right about this stuff.  I really don’t even like being able to sit back and see how all these pieces fit together, but here we are.

For you, there are some things that you should consider doing as well.

1. Educate yourself.  Sure, read F4Y, but then jump online to do some fact-checking.  I’m not going to tell you that I am the only answer out there.  I’m not even telling you that I’m the best answer.  If you read something that you think smells fishy, if you are like my friend here, eat it.  If not, verify it. 
   1. But don’t stop with F4Y.  Go out and learn what’s going on in the world.  I generally don’t cover news stories.  I don’t do so for a reason.  There are a bunch of websites out there that do cover the news.  I follow a bunch of them, so should you.
2. Understand that EVERYBODY has a point of view or bias.  I’m admitting mine, but there are many “news companies” out there tat are far less forthcoming.
3. Get out!  Get out and meet with others.  Talk with them.  Argue and disagree with them. 
   1. Disagree without being a dick.  Some of the most fun I have on Facebook comes from heated debates I have with people.  We disagree on almost every issue, but we can still find humor in life. 
   2. As much as I hate to admit it, I want you to turn off your computer and go meet real people.
   3. We have compartmentalized ourselves, separating ourselves from each other by using “social” media (Facebook, MySpace, et al), iPods with ear buds, Nintendo DSi, or anything else designed for individual usage.  I’ve already mentioned one way that I use social media to be, you know- social.

Given the tenor of this post, I’m afraid there is only one song I can end this post with.  The problem is that dislike of the Beatles won’t allow me to post one of their videos.  I’d like to thank the band Phish for allowing me to keep to my personal morals.

 

 

 

Annual Reviews

Most employees go through a process about once a year at work that is stressful, and sometimes painful.  Whether this happens on the anniversary of being hired or on some arbitrary day designated by the company, everybody knows when review time is.

More than telling you how you did over the year, these reviews generally also tell you how much of a raise, if any, you may expect, and whether or not you should be worried about having to look for another job soon.

I’ve been through several of these over the years, but it wasn’t until later in my career that the stress and fear was taken out of these procedures.  My dad used to tell me stories about how he never even read his reviews, and he just signed them in order to get out of the meeting.  I never had that kind of confidence.  I always wanted to know what my bosses thought about me so that I could improve.  Later in my career, I realized that my reviews had less to do with my actual performance and more to do with the politics of the company I worked for.  So I too started signing without reading my reviews.

Some of my reviews were pretty funny to read.  Reviews generally list your accomplishments during the previous year, your progress on meeting goals, and commentary from your boss.

At one company, I took a failing branch, made it more profitable than the home office, and forged relationships with the customers that were unprecedented, all of which made the institution more profitable.  This institution was a small institution surrounded by at least four other credit unions that would have been able to buy my credit union outright.  Many individual branches of these credit unions were bigger than our whole institution.  My rating indicated that I met expectations.  More humourous was the commentary that I was a sub-par employee, despite the fact that I saved the credit union from losing one branch, and made the credit union much money.

At another, I was named Employee of the Year.  Not Employee of the Month, or the Quarter, but of the whole year.  Weeks later, I was fired.

Many of my reviews shared a couple of traits.  The subjective portions were almost always slated as negative.  According to these, I was a slacker who barely made it through each year.  The objective portions told a different story.  I always far exceeded goals, made the company tons of money, and was positively viewed by my peers (but not management).  I know what a tough review is.

Today marks the anniversary of B.H. Obama’s most recent job position.  I think it is fitting that we look at his accomplishments, his successes, his failures, and what this past year has actually brought us.

I suppose we need to define what we are looking at when judging the President on his Job Performance.  I saw an e-zine article by ERIC SCHULTZ and I figured this was as good a place to start as any. 

I’m thinking that with a job so important, we should allow the President to set the terms of his review himself.  Candidate Obama issued several criteria on his  CAMPAIGN WEBSITE to judge himself by.  But that wasn’t President Obama.  For that, we turn to his own words, as spoken one year ago today in his INAUGURAL ADDRESS.

The state of our economy calls for action, bold and swift.  And we will act, not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.  We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.  We’ll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.  We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.  And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.  All this we can do.  All this we will do.

Mmm, okay that’s a lot there.  Let’s start with jobs.  At the end of December 2008, unemployment was 7.4%.  Today, it is 10.0%.  I can’t think of any measure that calls that a success.  To be fair, Obama will say that he has created or saved millions of jobs and that the unemployment rate would have been much worse.  Economists will disagree.

Healthcare?  Obama’s signature “reform” has devolved into union payoffs, congressional buy-offs, and senatorial kick-backs.  By any measure, it will cost more money for more Americans than it will save.

Schools?  As an unemployed teacher, i can’t say he is successful here either. 

Apparently, we haven’t done it yet.

Let’s see what else.  He went the Olympic committee to bring the Olympics to the US.  Failed.

He went to Copenhagen to get world leaders to do more for “climate change”, he was told, “Okay, you first.  And you pay for us.”

Politifact has a bunch of other criteria HERE:

Campaigning for his people?  Ask Criegh Deeds, Jon Corzine, or Martha Coakley how they feel.

Given all of this, were Obama to be like all of us who work for a living, he should be scared.  Were it not for the fact that he has a four year contract, he would most likely not receive a second year.

Rules? Who needs rules? We don’t need no rules!

Forgive my grammar in the title, but I couldn’t think of a better way to express what is going on with the market, and to a greater extent the economy.

Today, the Dow was down 290 points, bringing the average below 8,000. Not so surprising given what has been going on over the past year in the economy, right? Well, given the recent suspension of so-called “Mark-to-Market” accounting rules, as well as talks to reinstate the “UPTICK RULE“, this actually is a surprise.  See, it becomes hard to bet that a company is failing when the bank (US Government) makes rules that say you can only bet on success.

Recently both of these practices have come under attack by the government.  To solve the problem, the SEC, along with Barney Frank and ultimately Barack Obama have been working to change these rules to ensure (read: force) the market to go up.  When this happened, the market had it’s best week since the first Depression.  That was no surprise.

See, think of the market as a 100 yard dash.  Each company is a runner, as are people who believe that the companies will fail.  The officials of the race (the government) don’t like people to bet on negative outcomes, kind of like this guy:

So what they do is tell the runners who think the companies will fail to start 15 seconds later.  And they have to run 110 yards instead of 100 yards.

So the idea that the market would still go down after these radical steps should frighten people.  Wether the market starts coming back sooner rather than later, we’re screwed right now.  We’re screwed, and the politicians out there are fiddling while America burns (through our children’s money).

Tea-bagging Obama with lessons learned from Reaper

Today is April 15th. For many people in America, this is the day that taxes are due. President Obama had promised to raise taxes in an effort to give money to those who he feels are deserving. As someone who wasn’t collecting a salary for the past few months, it is easy for me to say, “Yay, Barack!”, but I’m not. I’m not really excited that my salary, now that I’m earning again, isn’t going where I want it to go. Apparently, many people across the nation feel the same way.

In several cities across the country, thousands of people, frustrated with the fact that they have no voice in the direction of the country, frustrated because of the TRILLION DOLLARS of money spent on bailing out broken businesses with no end in sight, and frustrated because the people most responsible for the Depression are the same ones with the checkbook who are going to “fix” the problem.  They are calling these events “tea parties”.

The last tea-party of any consequence was a scene in which a despondent Buzz Lightyear, forced to face the fact that he was a toy, and not a real space ranger, was captured by the children next door to Andy.  With one arm broken (off!), Lightyear, now going by the name of Mrs. Nesbitt, is having a tea party with a couple of headless dolls as Woody plans an escape for the both of them.

The one previous to that with any significance happened in December of 1773, when a bunch of people, frustrated because they had no voice in the direction their (new) country was headed, frustrated with onerous taxes levied on every aspect of life by an absentee leadership, boarded ships in the Boston Harbor and dumped all of the tea into the ocean in protest to the tax on tea and other commodities.

So are they right?

I was invited to several “tea party” events around California, to add my voice to those who were frustrated.  I didn’t go.  Not because I think their idea is wrong, but I don’t believe that they will do any real good.  Too many right-wingers have attached their personalities to these events to make them effective, and too many left-wingers are trying to paint these legitimate protests as political posturing.

So is there even a problem?

Obama’s press people will say that 95% of Americans will not see any increased taxes, but will see lower taxes, even rebates.  The problem is that many of these people don’t pay taxes to begin with.  They are getting refunds on taxes they never pay!  They are getting these refunds on the backs of Americans who are seeing their taxes increase.  They are getting these refunds at the expense of their neighbors, who are also facing hard times right now.

So is there a solution?

I really want to say that there is some magic bullet that will make all of this better.  I want to say that the solution is coming forth from some politician somewhere.  The reality is that the only solution that has any hope in working is education.  Parents need to start teaching their children how to survive on what they can make.  They need to demand that the billions of dollars spent every year on schools go towards providing honest, objective financial education at all levels.  All Americans need to start using their voices (their votes) to get rid of those who did this to us.  Bush is gone now.  That is a good start, but just one step on the path.  We also need to get rid of Pelosi, Reid, Schummer, Cox, Frank, Dodd, Geithner, Bernanke, any other politician who puts their own career safety in front of the will of the public, and maybe even Obama.

With education, future generations will make sure that the mistakes of today aren’t repeated, or even worse, compounded in the future.  What can you do today?  If protesting is your thing, find a peaceful protest and join in.  If not, make sure you are educating yourself on these issues, and don’t fall prey to the talking heads of either political party.

Where does Reaper come in?

Reaper, for those who don’t watch, is a TV show on the CW about a young person who’s soul was sold to the Devil in exchange for immortality for his father.  Let me say that again.  Dad sells his son’s soul to the Devil, so he can prosper.  The son, screwed beyond belief by his parents, tries to make the best of his situation while paying the price of his parents’ greed.  Sound familiar?  Here’s some more.  The young man has to work for the Devil, or be taken to Hell.  The Devil seems like a nice enough guy, he’s actually kind of cool.  But nobody deals with the Devil and comes out on the winning side.  The young man, much like America’s young people, is very forgiving of his family, and even of the Devil.

Did you or your family go to one of these protests?  Share your story in the comments!