Children's Theatre auditions are Aug. 19

  Blackbeard the Pirate  

WHAT
Missoula Children’s Theatre with 60 Payson area kids.
Auditions August 19 at Payson High School. 

WHEN
August 23 and 24,  6:30 p.m.

WHERE
Payson High School Auditorium

WHY
To give our kids a chance to be part of great children’s theatre!

YOU CAN HELP
Be a sponsor, bring kids to auditions, buy tickets, tell friends, come both nights.

SPONSORSHIP
Supporter: $50. Program recognition plus two free tickets.
Director: $100. Program +4 tickets.
Exec. Producer: $200. Program + 8 tickets. You will be contacted about ad copy.
 
Send to PHS, P.O. Box 919, 85547

AZ TAX Credit
Check memo: CKF-PHS Drama-MCT

TICKETS
$5 adults, $4 seniors, $3 students in advance.  +$1 at the door.

Apple CEO's pay obscene next to employees

toomuchonline.org

 

  PROGRESS AND PROMISE  

Computer giant Apple could afford to drop a pay package worth $378 million on chief exec Tim Cook in 2011, his first year as CEO. But Apple can’t seem to afford to compensate the 42,000 employees at the company’s fabulously profitable retail stores for the time they spend every day waiting to get searched — for stolen goods — before they can leave the store premises. Two former Apple employees have just filed a class-action lawsuit to recoup those unpaid wages, estimated at about $1,500 per year. Apple retail stores, notes Forbes, “take in more money per square foot than any other United States retailer.” Yet Apple store employees take home on average only $25,000 a year.

GOP resting up for meaningless votes ahead

August 5, 2013

Posted by Andy Borowitz

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—As House Republicans began their five-week summer vacation, their leader, House Speaker John Boehner, urged them to rest up for “the many symbolic and meaningless votes that lie ahead.”

Mr. Boehner, while congratulating his colleagues on having voted to repeal Obamacare forty times, reminded his fellow-Republicans that their work is “far from over.”

“I want you to come back from vacation rested and refreshed, because we’ve got another year of futile, time-wasting votes to cast,” he said. “Only the strong will survive.”

According to Mr. Boehner, this year’s gruelling schedule of fake-repeal votes had been the G.O.P.’s “most physically punishing ever.”

Noting that the exhausting ordeal of frequent, pointless Obamacare votes had transformed his fellow House Republicans into hollowed-out husks of their former selves, the Speaker observed, “Purely symbolic voting may be even more exhausting than actual work.”

“It’s true that voting to repeal Obamacare has cost the American taxpayer over fifty million dollars,” he said. “But that’s nothing compared to the toll it’s taken on us.”
For his part, Mr. Boehner said he intends to spend August at the beach, as he always does, fruitlessly trying to change the rules of volleyball.

Ralph Nader on love, corporate-style

Ralph Nader. (photo: unknown)

 Let's inform abusive companies like McDonald's and Walmart that entities created for profit are not our buddies

By Ralph Nader, Reader Supported News

5 August 13

readersupportednews.org

itt Romney famously said during his most recent bid for the presidency: "Corporations are people, my friend." Perhaps nothing else better surmises the state of our country -- even the state of our culture -- than a prominent politician running for the presidency openly advancing such a flawed opinion. It is no secret that corporations now wield immense power in our elections, in our economy, and even in how we spend time with our friends and families. Corporate entities, in their massive, billion dollar efforts to advertise and "brand" themselves, not only want consumers to think of them as people, but even as "friends." If a corporation could hit the campaign trail itself, one could imagine it uttering the phrase: "Corporations are friends, my people."

I recently came across a full-page ad in the New York Times. The ad, which shows a tiny baby's hand clutching the fingers of an adult hand, is captioned with the words: "Love is the most powerful thing on the planet." It goes on to read: "For all the things in your life that make life worth living -- Johnson and Johnson, for all you love." Notably, this is Johnson and Johnson's first "corporate branding" campaign in over a decade.

This poses an interesting question. What exactly is corporate love? Love is a very human emotion -- but, coming from a business conglomerate whose over-riding goal is bigger profits -- this message rings hollow.

An April 24 New York Times article (interestingly enough, the same paper the "For All You Love" ad appeared in) notes that Johnson and Johnson recalled 280 million packages of over-the-counter medication and two hip replacement models in 2010. Ten thousand lawsuits were filed as a result of these faulty hip replacements, including one lawsuit that forced Johnson and Johnson to pay out $8.3 million in damages.

Suddenly, a clearer picture begins to emerge. In this case, "corporate love" is merely a two-faced attempt to establish trust after -- or in anticipation of -- the disclosure of a negligent product failure. The phrase "to err is human, to forgive is divine" comes to mind. But, of course, corporations aren't human.

The idea of "humanizing" a corporation is certainly not unique to Johnson and Johnson. Our corporate "friends" are all around us. They are dominating our publicly owned airwaves with their slogans, filling our skies with their logos on billboards, showing up on the sides of city buses, and collecting our browsing preferences so as to better appeal to us on the internet. One might say that "corporate love" has been a part of American culture as long as corporations have advertised. This idea of trust in a brand name -- of allowing a corporation to "earn" your "friendship" -- is one that perhaps has allowed the corporate entity to dominate so many aspects of our culture. People become attached to brands. How many people do you know that only use a certain type of shampoo or drink their preferred brand of beer?

To the younger generation, social media has become a massive part of the public forum. Look to Twitter, where companies like Walmart routinely "tweet" benign questions such as: "Cats or dogs... or both? Tell us what pet companion keeps you happy." McDonald's recently tweeted: "Good morning! Any big plans for the weekend?" Coca-Cola says: "Proven fact: making friends is easy when you're bubbly, refreshing and delicious." They're not kidding -- Coca-Cola has over a million "followers" on that website. (Who's going to make concepts like "justice" bubbly, refreshing and delicious so as to get a million followers?")

Don't be fooled by these friendly panderings. These are multi-billion dollar companies attempting to win your trust to sell their products and often, to divert attention away from more disturbing truths -- perhaps their products are unhealthy, or addictive, or damaging to the environment, or simply that their corporate executives regularly place profits over people. Social media accounts such as @Walmart "feign humanity and engage with users" as comedian Rob Delaney recently put it in an interview with Yahoo!

As the official Walmart account tweets: "Whew- Retweet if you agree that it's too hot for hairdryers!" the executives that run that company choose to underpay their workers which forces taxpayers to subsidize many Walmart employees through social service programs, take advantage of communities, and use excess profits to buy back stock to line the pockets of its biggest shareholders. Given these transgressions, who cares about hairdryers?

So let's conduct an experiment. The goal is to send a message to some of these giant corporations who are so obsessed with establishing themselves as your "friends" while taking advantage of our health, our workers, our electoral system, our government, our justice system and our economy. Take to the social media ramparts. Send out a tweet directed at the corporations you feel are the worst perpetrators of this snake-oily style of branding and question their worst offenses. Use the hashtag #corporatelove.

Let's inform abusive companies like McDonald's and Walmart that entities created for profit are not our buddies, but rather "legal fictions" that must be held accountable to human necessities.

Free tuition, creative writing at GCC this fall

By Jim Keyworth
Gazette Blog Editor

Tuition is free once again for Rim Country seniors at Gila Community College, and the age has been reduced to 55 and over.  That's right: if you're 55 and over, you can take classes at the Payson Campus (AZ 260 and Mud Springs Road) for free.

Better yet, yours truly is offering a new creative writing class that's perfect for seniors who want to record their family history or write their autobiography.  It's called Writing Reflective Essays (ENG 217) and in it we'll cover biography, autobiography, memoirs and literary journalism.

So if you've ever wanted to record your story or the story of your family, this is your opportunity to learn how to do it absolutely free.

The course does have a prerequisite of English 101, but you can request a waiver to take the course for personal enrichment. If you've ever wondered if there's a writer inside, sign up today for Writing Reflective Essays and find out in a non-threatening environment.

Stop by the Payson campus to register.  If you have questions about the class, give me (Jim Keyworth) a call at 928-474-8787 or call GCC at 928-468-8039.

Fall classes begin Monday, Aug. 19, and the Writing Reflective Essays class meets Thursday evenings.

But don't wait.  Tuition is free next semester, but there's no guarantee how long it will last.

Why Dems and GOP disagree on job growth

Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

04 August 13

 
ob-growth is sputtering. So why, exactly, do regressive Republicans continue to say "no" to every idea for boosting it - even last week's almost absurdly modest proposal by President Obama to combine corporate tax cuts with increased spending on roads and other public works?

It can't be because Republicans don't know what's happening. The data are indisputable. July's job growth of 162,000 jobs was the weakest in four months. The average workweek was the shortest in six months. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has also lowered its estimates of hiring during May and June.

It can't be Republicans really believe further spending cuts will help. They've seen the effects of austerity economics on Europe. They know the study they relied on by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff has been debunked. They're no longer even trying to make the case for austerity.

It could be they just want to continue opposing anything Obama proposes, but that's beginning to seem like a stretch. Republican leaders and aspiring 2016 presidential candidates are warning against being the "party of 'no.'" Public support for the GOP continues to plummet.

The real answer, I think, is they and their patrons want unemployment to remain high and job-growth to sputter. Why? Three reasons:

First, high unemployment keeps wages down. Workers who are worried about losing their jobs settle for whatever they can get - which is why hourly earnings keep dropping. The median wage is now 4 percent lower than it was at the start of the recovery. Low wages help boost corporate profits, thereby keeping the regressives' corporate sponsors happy.

Second, high unemployment fuels the bull market on Wall Street. That's because the Fed is committed to buying long-term bonds as long as unemployment remains high. This keeps bond yields low and pushes investors into equities - which helps boosts executive pay and Wall Street commissions, thereby keeping regressives' financial sponsors happy.

Third, high unemployment keeps most Americans economically fearful and financially insecure. This sets them up to believe regressive lies - that their biggest worry should be that "big government" will tax away the little they have and give it to "undeserving" minorities; that they should support low taxes on corporations and wealthy "job creators;" and that new immigrants threaten their jobs.

It's important for Obama and the Democrats to recognize this cynical strategy for what it is, and help the rest of America to see it.

And to counter with three basic truths:

First, the real job creators are consumers, and if average people don't have jobs or good wages this economy can't have a vigorous recovery.

Second, the rich would do better with a smaller share of a rapidly-growing economy than their current big share of an economy that's hardly moving.

Third, therefore everyone would benefit from higher taxes on the wealthy to finance public investments in roads, bridges, public transit, better schools, affordable higher education, and healthcare - all of which will help the middle class and the poor, and generate more and better jobs.

Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.

Entire Library Bookstore on sale in August

During August, the Library Friends of Payson Bookstore is staging an End-of-Summer Clearance featuring the entire Bookstore inventory on sale at two for the price of one.  Customers may mix and match videos, puzzles, children’s books, CD’s, vinyl records, paperback books, magazines, and hardback books.

 

Don’t miss this annual event.  As always, the second item must be of equal or lesser value than the first.

 

Recently, the Bookstore has received a large donation of western novels.  This is a unique opportunity for western lovers to add to their librarys.  Hurry in to see this collection because it will disappear quickly.

 

If you are looking for a volunteer position, please give the Library Friends of Payson Bookstore careful consideration.  Bookstore volunteers work two mornings or afternoons a month and provide an invaluable service to the Library.  If you are interested, stop by the library and pick up an application.

 

Bookstore stock changes daily, so visit often.  Bookstore volunteers are always happy to see you.

 

The Bookstore is located to the right of the circulation desk just inside the Payson Public Library, 328 N. McLane Road.  For more information visit the Library Friends of Payson website at www.libraryfriendsofpayson.org