House progressives should simply walk away from this bill that's in conference. People who say accept what we've been offered don't have the negotiator chops to make the call.
Just walk away.
Imagine paying $100 for a store brand loaf of white bread. That's what the senate is asking us to do.
I learned about walking away from a deal in morocco, back in 1973. There, in the souks where tourists and locals buy goods, the vendors expect you to haggle. The vendors expect to rip off the most naive tourists, so they start off asking an outrageously high price. This happened to me when I was looking at a tapestry.
"How much," I asked.
"Eight hundred dirhams," he replied, about $200.00.
I knew my brother had bought one of these for $20 or $30 in the states, so I took a deep breath and offered ten dirhams, $2.50, and laughed.
He looked at me like I was crazy, so I started to walk away, as I'd done on numerous other occasions on my one month, post college graduation trip to Morocco.
"I give you special price-- 400 dirhams," he called to me.
"You insult me," I replied. "I'll give you 15 Dirhams," turned to see his response, then kept walking.
"Wait, wait. two hundred. Is very good price." He tried again.
I turned again towards him. "My brother bought one of these in the US. I know what it's worth. I'll give you 20 dirhams," I said.
"I have a wife and four children," he opined. "One hundred Dirhams. You take, yes?"
I walked again.
After a few more exchanges, I finally bought the tapestry for 40 dirhams-- ten dollars, a fortieth of the price he'd originally asked But I'd been ready to walk and did start walking several times. Just because he told me he was giving me a good deal didn't cut it. His offers had sucked. They had been insanely unreasonably initially.
I've been self employed as a freelance writer or entrepeneur since 1980, almost 30 years. I don't take the offered price as THE price. I almost always ask if they can do better. I often shop for better prices and often inform my potential suppliers that I am shopping. This is what business people do to survive. It's not what you gross. It's what you keep. You have to cut good deals every time to make a living.
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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)