When will they ever learn … oh, you know the rest

A friend posted a meme on Facebook the other day criticizing among other things "obscene CEO pay." Foolishly I added a meme I had seen that supported my friend's position. It showed the yearly income of CEOs at several of America's health insurers.

The original meme. The health care act mandates 80% of health

 insurance premiums have to go for care. These may drop.

I should know better than that, but some days you just can't resist. Almost immediately another commenter jumped on the entry critical of it and blaming Obamacare for forcing people to buy the insurance, thus increasing executives' pay. It was a knee-jerk uninformed comment like several others this guy had posted about the original meme, many of which espoused the same unsubstantiated or outright lies mouthed over and over again by radical conservatives who would vote against their own interests rather than go along with a black guy in the White House.

While this commenter defends outrageous pay for executives, I believe he is a commercial fisherman, working in an industry notorious for taking advantage of the first element of the supply chain, the individual fisherman.  Large processors for years have manipulated fish prices to line their own pockets while paying the fishermen as little as possible.  These fishermen are mostly small businesses where a family operates a single fishing boat – think family farmer. The government in 2013 estimated the average fisherman's income that year at $29,000.

In one area of Alaska processors this year were buying pink salmon at 28 cents a pound. Given an average weight of about 4 pounds that amounts to right around a dollar per fish.  In 2013 the ex-vessel price paid to fishermen for red salmon, considered the best of the salmon, averaged $1.60 a pound. Price for a filet of salmon in Anchorage was $11.95. It is difficult to understand why someone at the mercy of overpaid executives would defend them the way this guy did.

·      But then there are women who would vote for republicans despite the attacks on their health care and wages.

• ·      And minimum wage workers who vote for people who refuse to raise the minimum wage, but who work maybe 100 days a year, accomplish nothing and are paid a couple of hundred thousand for it.
• ·      And people who now have health insurance they couldn't get before will still vote for people who have tried to repeal Obamacare 50 times. Polls show people don't favor Obamacare, but they do favor the  Affordable Health Care Act.
• ·      And people who hate waste in government still vote for people who get us into useless wars,  those Obamacare votes, spend millions to save a few thousands drug testing welfare recipients, and deny them health care by not bringing their states in line with the nation's health care law.
• ·      And then there are those who keep voting, too, for people who block any attempt at responsible gun ownership, even when children in their own towns are killed by nuts with guns.

The list goes on and on.  And there's no convincing people who will vote against their own interests that they are on the wrong track, the wrong side of history. You just can't argue with ignorance, well, you can argue, but it is  senseless when facts don't matter and you will never change anyone's mind no matter how right or righteous your cause.