April 3, 2014 by Michael A. Ventrella

Democrats represent the mainstream

Sorry, Republicans, but your claims that you represent “mainstream America” is just another one of your lies.

A majority of Americans support Obamacare. (This is especially true if you call it “the Affordable Care Act.”)

A majority thinks gay marriage, abortion and marijuana should be legal.

A majority supports more gun control.

A majority wants to raise taxes on the wealthy and do not believe that “corporations are people.”

A majority want to raise the minimum wage and do something about campaign finance reform. (And a majority support amending the Constitution to overturn the Citizen’s United case).

That’s why I have been complaining here about wimpy Democrats who refuse to discuss these issues. They’re winning issues! They are “mainstream America.”

As our country becomes a plutocracy, it’s even more important that Democrats take a page from Teddy Roosevelt and come out swinging against the monopolies, corporations, and billionaires who have ruined our country in the same way they did during Roosevelt’s time. (Before you point out that Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican, please learn some history. The Republican party was the liberal party back then — the party of Lincoln.)

So when you hear a Republican politician claim that America is against health care or gay marriage or raising the minimum wage or basically just about anything, just remember — the facts don’t support their claims.

Which is not surprising.

Editorial cartoon: Spot the difference

April 2, 2014 by Michael A. Ventrella

When we became an oligarchy

An oligarchy is a government run by a small group of elitists; in our case, the very rich. (In which case, perhaps the better term is a plutocracy.) Today’s Supreme Court ruling was the final deciding factor.

How did we get here, in a place that Teddy Roosevelt warned us about?

1. Reagan’s tax cuts. It started under Reagan when the tax rates on the super rich were dropped tremendously. Soon after this, we started going into great debt (unnecessary wars didn’t help any). Infrastructure started falling apart, education was cut, opportunities started vanishing, and they took the middle class with them. And the rich got even richer and, therefore, more powerful.

2. The removal of regulations. Reagan again. From the very beginning, our economy went through periods of prosperity and crash, on the average of every seventeen years. There was the Panic of 1819, the 1837 Crisis, the Panic of 1873, the Panic of 1893, the 1907 Banker’s Panic, and so on up to the Great Depression. Then Franklin Roosevelt put in controls and restrictions on Wall Street and banking and lo and behold, no depressions and no recessions for fifty years. Reagan comes in and removes those and bang! The S&L crisis, the 2001 recession, the 2007 Mortgage crisis, and the 2008 Bush collapse. But more importantly, the lack of regulations produced less competition as huge businesses and banks gobbled up smaller ones and created monopolies. This gives us great income inequality, where the vast majority of wealth in America is concentrated in the very few at a level comparable to the period before the French revolution.

3. Gerrymandering. This isn’t new, but it has gotten so absurd that it keeps those in power there, with hardly any challenges to incumbents. Therefore, there is no one “stirring up the pot” and bringing in new blood to change things. In certain districts, it is impossible for the other party to challenge the incumbent party. This is terrible for democracy, which — like capitalism — needs competition to survive.

4. The removal of campaign contribution limits. With Citizen’s United and today’s McCutcheon decision, the Supreme Court has vested power in the filthiest rich at the expense of the rest of us. You have to be daft to deny that money is power, and what these decisions do is to create the two great fictions that “corporations are people” and “money is speech.” This means those in power now have even more means to keep themselves in power, by being able to spend unlimited, uncontrolled, and unregulated money in politics.

Because, according to the Supreme Court, if you bribe a politician quietly behind the scenes, it’s a crime. But if you do it as a campaign contribution anonymously, it’s protected speech.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this latest nail in democracy’s coffin but for now I am just too angry to think.

Editorial cartoon: Still searching

April 1, 2014 by Michael A. Ventrella

When April Fools was fun

I obviously enjoy a good April Fool’s joke. For instance, my wife and I were married in August and we had some very nice invitations printed and sent to all our friends. Seven months later, I sent every one of them another invitation, in the same type of style and envelope, that said “Michael A. Ventrella and Heidi Hooper invite you to join with them as they exchange divorce papers, April 1, at the Middlesex Courthouse, Boston, Massachusetts. RSVP.”

“A jester unemployed is nobody’s fool!”

It’s a cute joke, no one was hurt, and no one took it seriously.

It’s why I enjoy the kind of jokes certain newspapers and web pages play on April 1st, like the one in England today discussing how they are moving Stonehenge like they do every six months because of Daylight Savings’ Time.

April Fools though has become a bit less fun because (a) we have lots of websites doing these sorts of things every day (Hello, Onion!); and (b) everyone can post their crap on Facebook and usually it’s not very smart and often mean; instead of being clever and humorous, it’s just a lie and then they yell “April Fools” as if it’s the funniest and wittiest thing ever.

I feel sorry for those people who really do lose loved ones today.

So no, you won’t see an April Fool’s joke from me unless I come up with something really clever.

Editorial cartoon: Cauldron of Crazy

March 31, 2014 by Michael A. Ventrella

Wimpy Democrats bound to lose again

Sometimes it seems like the Republicans are the Bully Party and the Democrats are the Wimpy party. (Or maybe that makes the Republicans the Bluto party?)

I remember the Dukakis campaign. I lived in Boston at the time and did a little work on it and recall how the senior Bush called Dukakis a “liberal” as if it was a bad thing — that Dukakis should be ashamed. Dukakis wimped out and didn’t stand up and say “Yes, I am a liberal, like John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, and I am proud of that” until about a week before the election, when it was too late. Instead, liberals cowed down and started calling themselves “progressives” because “liberal” suddenly became bad. Wimps.

The GOP still sets the agenda by bullying their way in, and the Democrats let them. The Republicans claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility and morality and everything else and rarely do Democrats challenge them on this like they should. The GOP is now claiming that Obamacare is a terrible disaster when studies show that it is successful, and that a majority of Americans like it. Yet Democrats are cowering because they are too frightened to embrace things that the American public wants.

“Obamacare will be a disaster!” the conservatives screamed. “There’s no way we’ll get 5 million people to sign up for it!” We’re at 6.5 million as of today, but how many Democrats do you see proclaiming that victory? Why aren’t the Democrats touting all the success stories about people who are covered now that previously weren’t, and who are paying much less? Instead, we get Republican commercials full of lies. (Of course, some of that is due to the Koch brothers spending billions to spread their propaganda, which is very hard to overcome.)

But the public is on our side.

Americans often categorize themselves as “conservative,” but their views on the issues align with Democrats more often than they do with Republicans.

A majority of Americans support Obamacare. A majority thinks gay marriage, abortion and marijuana should be legal. A majority supports more gun control. A majority want to raise the minimum wage and do something about campaign finance reform. A majority wants to raise taxes on the wealthy and do not believe that “corporations are people.”

These positions are not radical dreams of the left. They are mainstream. For Democrats to shy away from what a majority of Americans want is ridiculous.

Editorial cartoon: Religious freedom

March 30, 2014 by Michael A. Ventrella

Top Animated Films (Adjusted for Inflation)

“Frozen” just set the record for highest grossing animated film of all time (as of 2014, when this was originally posted), but these things can be misleading. After all, you have to adjust for inflation.

I used to edit and write for a magazine called “Animato!” which was about animated films, and we would periodically update the “adjusted for inflation” chart. For today’s purposes, we’ll use Box Office Mojo’s list and statistics.

Not surprisingly, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” wins this one. It was a huge success back in the days when there was no TV and everyone went to the movies. It also has the benefit of being re-released every ten years or so, bringing in a new generation and racking up even more dollars. This was the standard for almost all Disney animated films until video came along. (And the list below does not take into consideration video sales.)

This list is for domestic films so doesn’t take into consideration world wide sales, which would be next to impossible to calculate based on inflation.

To make matters worse, since the pandemic, more films are being released through streaming services only, so there are no “ticket sales” to place them on this list. Someday maybe there will be a way to calculate views from downloads and compare them to how many tickets were sold at theaters but we don’t have that yet — and that’s why on this list you won’t see some films released in the last few years that were very popular but were not in theaters.

The Box Office Mojo chart looks like this (updated September 27, 2022):