By Jerry Levine. It’s been a month since George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin. Some media commentators suggest that when it comes to race relations, little has changed in the past 50 years. “No white jury is going to convict a white person of murdering a black person in the South.” I disagree. To quote Charles Barkley, “When it comes to race, I don’t think the media has a pure heart.” Driving for high ratings, which enhances advertising dollars, the cable news stations ran the trial non-stop, knowing the racial animus they created would keep people glued to their sets. I…
Author: Lloyd Graff
By Lloyd Graff. Labor Day Weekend is coming up. As a kid it was a day for double headers on TV, barbecue and watermelon. It was the demarcation line between vacation and school. When I joined the working world, it was the signal that the machining world was going to get serious about finishing the year strong. It meant IMTS every four years and selling machines. But for the last five years, it has been the long weekend when my life teetered on the blade of life and death. Labor Day 2008, is shrouded in fog for me. The doctors…
By Lloyd Graff. A big topic of conversation these days is “What do you charge per hour?” The hourly rate, either as a wage or a basis to charge clients, has been baked into the economy for decades, but is it the wrong way to measure the value of time? Adam Davidson, an economics writer for NPR, just published an excellent piece in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, entitled “What is an Hour of Your Time Worth?” The subtitle was “The hazards of measuring the economic value of an idea.” Davidson discusses Jason Blumer, an accountant who took over his…
By Lloyd Graff. The wine shop that sold $40 bottles of French Sauvignons shut down in the elegant red brick storefront in downtown Flossmoor, Illinois, an upscale suburb south of Chicago. The new tenant moved in soon after they closed. Yesterday’s Gentlemen Barbershoppe & Spa–a Black men’s barbershop, with a shoe shiner. Across the street is Cutters, a barbershop owned by a woman that caters to White men. I’ve gone to Cutters for many years. When I saw that a new shop had opened across the street I immediately checked it out. All Black clientele, all Black staff. America 2013,…
By Lloyd Graff. Back in the day, I was the Sports Editor and Columnist of The Michigan Daily, the best college newspaper in the world. Today I’m returning to my roots and writing unabashedly about one of my true loves – Sports. An important change has apparently taken place in Major League Baseball. The majority of players seem to have decided for various reasons, primarily fear of getting caught, to abstain from “performance enhancing drugs.” They are angry that some of their peers who they are competing against are still getting an unfair advantage and potentially robbing them of a…
By Lloyd Graff. I am spending $25,000 this summer to repave the parking lot, install a generator, fix the roof and redo the bathroom of the 21,000-square-foot factory my company, Graff-Pinkert, occupies. These are repairs I’ve put off for several years, but I am finally feeling confident enough about the future of our economy and my business to make some improvements that will not be directly reflected on my bottom line. I also have raised the hourly wage I pay my key employees significantly, without them asking. Most of them have worked at the company for many years, and many…
My wife and I used to buy our drugs at Walgreens, the largest drug purveyor in Chicago and one of the largest in the United States. Now we don’t. Figuring the retail value of my wife’s various medications and my heart medications – the alpha-blockers, beta-blockers and assorted linebackers – we used to spend several thousand dollars a year there. Walgreens wasn’t a horrible store. The prices were fair, if American pharmaceutical prices can ever be labeled fair. We stopped going there primarily because they forgot about “niceness” at the pharmacy and frequently made us wait a half an hour…
Bill Moyers, the old grumpy liberal of the Lyndon Johnson era, was bemoaning the income gap between the rich and poor in America on Charlie Rose recently. Moyers was despondent enough to advocate the tired remedy of raising (actually doubling) the minimum wage in the U.S. to $15 per hour. Although I think putting this into practice would be disastrous for working people and the economy, I am sympathetic to the distress in this country over the widening income disparity and a widespread hopelessness of people who look at Wal-Mart cashiers with envy. College is no longer a pipeline to…
The Bryan twins, Mike and Bob, won the Wimbledon Tennis Doubles Championship Saturday. They now hold every Grand Slam Doubles title simultaneously, plus the Olympic Gold Medal won in London in 2012. Mike and Bob Bryan have been winning at doubles since they won a 10 and under tournament when they were 6. At 35 they have won 91 professional events and the NCAA title when they were at Stanford. They own 15 Grand Slam Doubles titles. They have to be considered the greatest doubles team in the history of the sport. The Bryan twins are not just twins, they are…
Sometimes we get a week in the news that compels me to write about it, even if I’d rather talk about the Blackhawks, the NBA, or what a great year it is for the tree fruit crop. Edward Snowden, a real life Terminal Man, can’t seem to get out of the Moscow Airport, but he’s causing a heartburn epidemic in Washington by exposing widespread collection of data on just about everybody everywhere. It makes it hard for Obama to complain about Chinese spying and theft of intellectual property when the NSA is gathering data on you and me and every…