earlbo: No More GOP Mistakes! (28/1) Glenda: No More GOP Mistakes! (28/1) earlbo: Reverse Lolita; Female Teacher Sexual Abuse! (16/1) Glenda: Reverse Lolita; Female Teacher Sexual Abuse! (15/1) earlbo: Dad Sells Kid For Beer, Beef & Cash! (14/1) Glenda: Dad Sells Kid For Beer, Beef & Cash! (14/1) earlbo: When social Scientists Go To War! (12/1) sirona: When social Scientists Go To War! (12/1) earlbo: It's Just Love; with Fury And Fists! (6/1) earlbo: It's Just Love; with Fury And Fists! (6/1)
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Again, It's Just Like The Last Time!
Anyone suggesting that right wing violence is on the rise is completely delusional. It's left wing violence that is on the rise --- al Qaeda, cop killers, Rush Limbaugh and anti-semites are all liberals.
Code words, trash talking, demonizing and a host of other propagandist methods is what the Right-Wing Media is all about. They truly represent 'any means to an end'...there is free speech, and then there is calculated dangerous lies, slander and malfeasance.
For decades, the mainstream press has tended to avoid the cauldron of craziness bubbling beneath the surface of our public discussions. But the mainstream press corps loves to avoid all such difficult, unpleasant regions. Isn’t it time to report it out straight? But isn’t it time to report it out straight: That there’s lunacy inside our political discourse?
But Bob Somerby surprised me with this --- I'd totally forgotten about it:
Last week, Scott Roeder killed Dr. George Tiller. Result: Some are wondering if the rise of Obama is creating stress in the minds of some unbalanced people, stress which has led them to act. This is a thoroughly worthwhile discussion. And it’s worth remembering that the same damn thing pretty much happened the last time.
By “last time,” we mean the last time we had a Democrat president. As you may recall, that president was Bill Clinton—and crazy stories spread far and wide about his intolerable ways. The liberal world ran off and hid in the woods—and, to all intents and purposes, the “mainstream press corps” didn’t exist. And sure enough! By September 1994, a man name Frank Corder decided to act. This incident largely went down the memory hole, like most misconduct directed at Clinton. But in real time, Judy Keen reported the apparent attempt on the president’s life in USA Today.
“Crash exposes risks,” the headline said. “How tough is it to protect a president?” Even after 9/11, this event remained largely deep-sixed:
KEEN (9/13/94): Frank Corder's flight in his tiny red-and-white Cessna exposed one of the White House's main vulnerabilities—an attack from the air.
"It finally happened," says Marlin Fitzwater, press secretary to former presidents George Bush and Ronald Reagan. “Everybody has always speculated that someone could fly kamikaze-style into the White House. I don't think there's any way to prevent it.” If there is, Secret Service officials are hunting for it now.
President Clinton and his family were asleep at Blair House, across the street from the White House, when Corder flew over Washington's treetops under a sliver of moonlight, somehow evaded what's supposed to be the world's best security and crashed into an old magnolia tree two floors below the Clintons' empty bedrooms.
The worst damage: a cracked window.
But the "what ifs" surrounding the incident reignited ominous questions around the capital—questions that get to the heart of how tough it is to protect a president. What if the plane had been carrying explosives? What if terrorists had been piloting it instead of the inexperienced Corder?
The White House's occupants made light of the dramatic crash. "This has been quite an unusual day here at the White House," Hillary Rodham Clinton told guests.
Still, one fact loomed large: Monday's incident was the worst White House security breach in nearly two decades.
In fairness, the rightwing knew that the Clintons were murderers, drug-dealers, socialists. Perhaps for that reason (no one seemed to know), Corder had finally decided to act. He tried to crash his plane into the White House, hitting a large tree instead. Corder died in the incident.
It was “the worst White House security breach in nearly two decades,” Keen reported. And a few weeks later, it happened again. “Target: White House,” said the headline on Keen’s report. “Did bullets also bring a wake-up call?”
KEEN (10/31/94): Two weeks ago, President Clinton stood at a podium outside the White House's north entrance to welcome a U.S. delegation home from Haiti.
Saturday, that same north entrance was sprayed with a gunman's bullets.
If the motives for the shooting spree at the White House were murky Sunday, one thing seems increasingly clear: This president—who loves to mingle with crowds and chafes at being trapped in the Secret Service's protective bubble—is probably about to change his ways.
That may mean no more meandering across Lafayette Park on his way home from church, as he did a few weekends ago, with tourists flocking just feet away. And no more north entrance appearances.
The shooting was the second frightening White House security breach in six weeks. Last month, a Maryland man crashed a stolen plane onto the lawn, killing himself.
"These two incidents may save this president's life at some point, because he's had a wakeup call," says terrorism expert Neil Livingstone.
In this incident, a man named Francisco Duran “pulled a rifle from his coat, stuck it through the fence and started spraying rounds,” Keen reported. “It took Duran 10 seconds, the Secret Service estimates, to squeeze off 20 to 30 rounds” before “two passersby subdued him.”
Given the zeitgeist of the 1990s, memory of these incidents quickly disappeared. We recall them because, as a comedian, we did a few jokes about these events (and perhaps one other) for a brief time in early 1995. Our premise? The crazy attacks seemed to stop as soon as Newt Gingrich became House speaker. (In the wake of the November 1994 elections.) Our jokes got a few laughs in DC. (We were surprised.) We didn’t try them elsewhere.
Were unbalanced people driven to act by all the crazy talk about Clinton? Are unbalanced people being so moved by Obama’s rise today? By crazy and semi-crazy talk about him? Von Brunn, who killed a decent person, apparently believed Obama isn’t a citizen. But then, Corder and Duran may well have thought that Clinton kept murdering people. Not to mention his drug-dealing ways!
We think it’s worth remembering that this happened the last time too. Beyond that, we think it’s worth wondering why the attacks by Corder and Duran found their way down the memory hole to the extent that they did. Hint: This was very much the way of the 1990s. In its own more dignified manner, the mainstream press corps was also flying little planes into the White House at this time. (They have never tried to explain why.) Later, they spent two year flying planes into Campaign 2000. In that case, they finally got their way. Are we happy with how that turned out?
Posted by TJ on Saturday, June 13 @ 14:15:22 EDT (65 reads) (comments? | Score: 0)
Fox News's Shepard Smith May Be In The Process Of Losing His Job
In classic Anarchist theory, there is a concept known as Propaganda of the Deed. This is basically the use, by a terrorist (or Anarchist provocateur, or what have you), of physical violence in order to make a political statement or trigger change.
It doesn't usually work, and there are ample historical examples of governments putting the screws to extremist groups and the like after an incident.
Today, in Washington, DC, a man described by law enforcement sources as an 88-year-old white supremacist from Maryland walked into the National Holocaust Museum there (it's across the street from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, if I recall aright) and started shooting. A private security guard and the shooter were both injured, no one was killed.
No one can say we weren't warned about things like this, folks.
The Department of Homeland Security timidly released the results of a report commissioned by the Bush Administration in its waning months that pointed out that economic factors as well as the cold fact that white people will become a minority before 2050 will trigger a surge in the number and virulence of right-wing hate groups and concomitant domestic terrorist activities.
I say "timidly" with great conviction, as the right wing immediately howled and DHS flinched as if it were an abused puppy. Pundits such as Hannity, Limbaugh and the rest of their oleaginous ilk couldn't conceive that anyone, let alone The Big Evil Nasty Gummint could ever dare to tar the innocent and childlike Right.
It's pretty clear that the right wing has lost whatever restraint it had and that the ongoing paroxysms of violent, extreme rhetoric are having their effect. The crocodile tears of the anti-abortion forces after the Tiller assassination notwithstanding, it's also pretty clear that they know this violence is effective. If you want to paralyze a society and force people to capitulate out of fear of random violence, nothing beats terrorism.
And once the right gets everybody looking over their shoulders, they'll misdirect the citizenry and run to the rescue with calls for "law and order."
Posted by TJ on Wednesday, June 10 @ 20:30:21 EDT (64 reads) (comments? | Score: 0)
Betty Bowers Explains Traditional Marriage
Betty Bowyers is America's greatest Christian. She's a fabulous creation, and this video is actually rather interesting, in addition to rather hysterical. Betty walks us through the Bible's definition of traditional marriage.
The Old Testament is full of great wisdon. I wondered what had become of Betty. My favorite line from BB: "Love the sinner, hate the clothes".
Gosh, who knew that the Bible could be so smutty???
Posted by TJ on Wednesday, June 03 @ 20:20:39 EDT (98 reads) (comments? | Score: 0)
Talks Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm
"Bonk" author Mary Roach delves into obscure scientific research, some of it centuries old, to make 10 surprising claims about sexual climax, ranging from the bizarre to the hilarious. (This talk is aimed at adults. Viewer discretion advised.)
I found it interesting that there was a lot of throat-clearing and other latent signs of discomfort. On the one hand, it adds to the humor, but on the other hand, it's so strange that we can't talk about sexuality without being self-conscious of its taboo nature.
Posted by TJ on Wednesday, May 27 @ 22:54:13 EDT (78 reads) (comments? | Score: 0)
The Bush Doctrine Led US To Torture!
The Bush Doctrine of "preemptive" war repealed the Carter Doctrine of human rights for all. The Bush Doctrine is the logic of The Terminator: Destroy your adversary before he has the chance to become your adversary.
SHORTER POST: the bush doctrine means that the US can invade, maim, destroy, and torture any country because we are afraid.
I should add that using torture to coerce false confessions about lies previously told about an Iraq-al Qaeda link would be called "The Cheney Doctrine."
They said that Saddam was likely to be a threat some time in the future and we couldn't wait for the (ticking) smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud. The torture regime is based on the same logic: we don't know for sure that there might be a ticking time bomb, but in case there is we need to torture prisoners just in case they have some information about one in the future.
The Bush Doctrine is the source of all this horror. The idea that you can invade another country simply because they might pose a threat someday is nothing more that than the illegal concept of preventive war (which the Bushies simply rebranded as "preemptive" war.) And it's what leads to the idea that you can torture and imprison indefinitely in the name of that war. You don't need a real ticking time bomb, just the belief that there might be one someday.
The Bush/Cheney preemptive war philosophy also leads ineluctably -- and not at all theoretically, but as an already documented result -- to something I recently read about from Lawrence Wilkerson, former aide to Colin Powell. Wilkerson reports:
There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus, of which the American people are almost completely unaware. For that matter, few within the government who were not directly involved are aware either.
The first of these is the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there. Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.
It did not help that poor U.S. policies such as bounty-hunting, a weak understanding of cultural tendencies, and an utter disregard for the fundamentals of jurisprudence prevailed as well (no blame in the latter realm should accrue to combat soldiers as this it not their bailiwick anyway). Moreover, the fact that among the detainees was a 13 year-old boy and a man over 90, did not seem to faze Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney. They were not about to admit to any errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released.
...that the Bush administration actively embraced arresting and interrogating innocent people. The justification was something they called the "mosaic philosophy." Since innocent people may know valuable bits of information, it can be useful to interrogate them. Then we, in our wisdom, can assemble their innocent bits of information into a "mosaic" picture that will help us fight our war.
Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals--in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified."
Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees' innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot.
Another unknown, a part of the fabric of the foregoing four, was the sheer incompetence involved in cataloging and maintaining the pertinent factors surrounding the detainees that might be relevant in any eventual legal proceedings, whether in an established court system or even in a kangaroo court that pretended to at least a few of the essentials, such as evidence.
When--and if--the truths about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay will be revealed in the way they should be, or Congress will step up and shoulder some of the blame, or the new Obama administration will have the courage to follow through substantially on its campaign promises with respect to GITMO, torture and the like, remains indeed to be seen.
On that revelation and those actions rests much of the credibility of our nation's return to sobriety and our truest values. In fact, on such positive developments may ultimately rest our entire future as a free people. For there shall inevitably be future terrorist attacks. Al-Qa'ida has been hurt, badly, largely by our military actions in Afghanistan and our careful and devastating moves to stymie its financial support networks.
But al-Qa'ida will be back. Iraq, GITMO, Abu Ghraib, heavily-biased U.S. support for Israel, and a host of other strategic errors have insured al-Qa'ida's resilience, staying power and motivation. How we deal with the future attacks of this organization and its cohorts could well seal our fate, for good or bad. Osama bin Laden and his brain trust, Aman al-Zawahiri, are counting on us to produce the bad. With people such as Cheney assisting them, they are far more likely to succeed.
As Wilkeron sums it up, "Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees' innocence was inconsequential." This, of course, was basically the same intelligence strategy followed by the KGB and the Stasi. Totalitarianism can be so damned seductive.
This is the philosophy of preemptive war applied to individuals.
Posted by TJ on Wednesday, May 20 @ 03:56:40 EDT (155 reads) (Read More... | 12347 bytes more | comments? | Score: 0)
Liberate The Breast Cancer Gene!
I understand patenting a medicine or a medical cure but how the hell can a Company prevent people from studying the genes found in their own bodies. Patenting something found in nature goes against the whole idea of patents. They haven’t created anything novel, because not only is it not novel, but they didn’t create it!
Genetic testing for the BRCA mutations allows women with a strong family history of breast cancer—diagnosis of the disease in two or more immediate family members—to make some important decisions if they turn out to be carriers. They can take steps to get early screenings with high-tech imaging tools like MRI. They might also opt to have prophylactic mastectomies, the surgical removal of healthy breasts, which has been shown to lower breast cancer risk by more than 90 percent.
The lawsuit plaintiffs are also contending that the price of the test, about $3,000, is far too high and would be lowered if more companies were allowed to offer the test. Two women involved in the lawsuit say they couldn't have the test because Myriad doesn't accept their insurance. (Myriad did not return a call seeking a comment.)
Did you know your genes could belong to someone else? Oh I don't mean the obvious - the genes you share with your parents and relatives. In some weird way that makes sense, your crazy Aunt Myrtie and cousin Barnard can own your genes too because, much as you hate to admit it, they have as much right to them as you do. Right?
But what about a faceless corporation? How would you like discovering they owned your genes? That they, in fact, owned a piece of you.
Well they do. Believe it or not, corporations already own about 20% of all human genes. They've patented them. Which means that no one can test for those genes, no one can fix those genes, no one can remove those genes, and no one can do research on those genes - not without paying the company (big time) for the privilege. Corporations own genes even if the genes are clearly and solely found within a small family - a family that never agreed to the patent.
Now that the race to map the human genome is over, another competition has ensued. Biotech companies, universities, and research institutions, sensing a biological gold mine, have been engaged in a furious scramble to patent human genes. Presently, more than one-fifth of the human genome is fully patented. As far-fetched as it may sound, corporations and universities now own the exclusive rights to many precious parts of you.
How can this be? Patenting human genes violates international agreements and flies in the face of historical and legal norms regarding the ownership of human parts. Not only that, the practice is a costly and unethical aberration in the law of intellectual property that threatens to impede the pace of scientific and technological progress. Who Owns You? is a wake-up call to the far-reaching implications of the insidious nature of gene patenting.
Corporations have been running around grabbing patents in a frenetic game of genetic musical chairs for years. The mingled distaste and competitive drive to claim a gene - quick! - has been an open, dirty secret in lab research for most of the last two decades. Researchers have grumbled and gasped about it, but nothing seems to have slowed, or successfully challenged corporations' claims.
Well, it's kind of like running around patenting colors of skin. Frog-belly white with streaks of blue? Glaxo's. Mocha with a hint of sun-color? Merck's. Imagine if the early anatomists and physiologists had taken this approach - what if when Greek physician Claudius Galen (A.D. 131-200) "found" a kidney, no one else could treat kidneys without paying up. Or what if Robert Hooke (1635-1703) had patented all cells - preventing anyone else from studying them without paying for the privilege? How can you own the fabric of humans, at whatever macro or molecular level?
So is anyone standing up to say, hey, this ain't right? Believe it or not, yesterday, the group that finally decided to take a stand on whether or not a corporation owns you is...the ACLU.
Posted by TJ on Thursday, May 14 @ 23:32:15 EDT (188 reads) (Read More... | 8365 bytes more | comments? | Score: 0)
Why Are We De-bashing Torture!
Despite repeated claims by the Bush administration and its supporters in Congress that the vast majority of the detainees were "vicious killers" who had been "captured on the battlefield," it turns out that only about 5 percent of the detainees were captured by U.S. forces. Most of the rest -- 86 percent, according to a detailed study by Seton Hall University School of Law -- were rounded up by the Northern Alliance or Pakistani security forces in exchange for the reward money, or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Aside from the 14 "high value" detainees who were brought to Guantanamo in September 2006, virtually all of the remaining 241 prisoners are being held because, as Hood put it, "nobody wants to be the one to sign the release papers." Nearly everyone held at Guantanamo is INNOCENT of ANYTHING.
The argument against torture is slipping away from us. What was once taboo is now publicly acknowledged as completely acceptable by many people. Indeed, disapproval of torture is now being characterized as a strictly partisan issue, like abortions, welfare reform or taxes.
Here's a representative exchange from Chris Matthews today in a discussion on Hardball of whether or not it's a political problem for Nancy Pelosi to be seen as knowing about torture:
Chris Cillizza: There was a poll a week or two ago, an independent poll, a media poll that asked people whether what had gone on a Gitmo was torture and by a large majority people said yes. The next question was did they think that those techniques would be necessary in certain circumstances and a slimmer, but still more people said yes than no so you have this weird disconnect. People do think it is torture, but they feel like if it yeilds results that it's the right thing to do, so this is tough especially as it relates to the Democratic Party base which clearly believes that this is something that is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Matthews: (to Harold Ford) ... You seem to be suggesting you can't be both tough as nails and at the same time looks as if you worry about human rights violations. Is that a problem or not?
Harold Ford: No I ... Eric Holder said this best when referring to the Ted Stevens case in the aftermath when they said they wouldn't move forward when they said the United States would not move forward. He said the most important thing in the justice department is not winning, it is justice.
So, in this sense, I think having the conversation about what happened at Guantanamo Bay, and I'm not as outraged as some about it, because I think some of those techniques were enhanced and might have risen to a level of torture, you have to remember when this was occurring, this was 2002 and 2003. The country was in a different place and a different space and if you were to say to me as an American, put aside my partisanship, that we have an opportunity to gain information that would prevent the destruction of an American city to prevent killings in an American city, and we have to use certain techniques, I'm one of those Americans who would have voted a certain way Chris in that polling that said it might have been torture, but I'm not as outraged.
Ford seems to think that Cheney's call to release all the CIA info will prove that his nervous nsellie-ism will be validated. I'm not so sure. But, it doesn't matter. If everyone but the "Democratic Base" has so lost all sense of decency that they think torture is A-OK, then I'm sure they won't mind if it turns out that the torture didn't work. They have bought into Cheney's "one percent solution" which holds that even if there's only a one percent chance that an America could be harmed the government must prevent it by any means necessary. It might not turn out to be real, and it could result in a terrible catastrophic blowback down the road, but nobody ever said we wouldn't get our hair mussed. And today, we have the head of the Democratic Leadership Council endorsing the logic behind it.
We are in big trouble when torture becomes just another political football. It's the kind of thing that turns powerful empires into pariah nations. Why anyone thinks it's good for America for the world to perceive us as violent, pants wetting, panic artists who could start WWIII at the least sign of threat is beyond me. I certainly don't feel any safer.
There are basically three positions on this:
Torture is wrong, and no civilized country will do it, period.
Torture is wrong, but once in a while it might give us important information, and so we might have to do it.
Torture is bad but these are bad guys and deserve whatever they get.
I happen to think that at least half of the country is at the first position. Courtesy of Jack Bauer about a third (wild-ass guess) of the country is at position 2. And then there is the sixth or so that is just fine with position 3.
My hope is that a lot of people at position 2 will move to 1 when it is demonstrated to them that torture simply doesn't ever give reliable information. And that, I believe, is what the record shows.
One hopes Torture Report Contradicts Cheney: Waterboarding Neither "Efficacious Or Medically Safe" will make a difference. Specifically: The White House has decided to declassify and release a classified 2004 CIA report about the torture program that is reported to have found no proof that torture foiled any terror plots on American soil — directly contradicting Cheney’s claims. Here’s the key nugget from the Post piece:
Government officials familiar with the CIA’s early interrogations say the most powerful evidence of apparent excesses is contained in the “top secret” May 7, 2004, inspector general report, based on more than 100 interviews, a review of the videotapes and 38,000 pages of documents. The full report remains closely held, although White House officials have told political allies that they intend to declassify it for public release when the debate quiets over last month’s release of the Justice Department’s interrogation memos…
Although some useful information was produced, the report concluded that “it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks,” according to the Justice Department’s declassified summary of it.
On another note isn’t it amazing that the conservatives and their media enablers are now equating Democrats KNOWING about torture to the Bush administration ORDERING torture. The wingnuts keep saying “Nancy Pelosi should be prosecuted too then”. What would the charge be? Illegal listening?
In other words, the Republicans can simultaneously claim:
Posted by TJ on Tuesday, May 12 @ 01:31:52 EDT (178 reads) (Read More... | 15711 bytes more | comments? | Score: 0)
The Week In Review 05/10/09
"War and Peace"
--- by Sri Chinmoy
Man invents war. Man discovers peace.
He invents war from without.
He discovers peace from within.
War man throws. Peace man sows.
The smile of war is the flood of human blood.
The smile of peace is the love, below, above.
Peace is the whole truth that wishes to enrapture humanity.
War is the whole falsehood that wants to capture humanity.
Peace begins in the soul and ends in the heart.
War begins in the mind and ends in the body.
War forgets peace. Peace forgives war.
War is the death of the life human. Peace is the birth of the Life Divine.
Our vital passions want war.
Our psychic emotions desire peace.
War is clear futility in dire spear-stupidity.
Peace is flowing infinity in glowing eternity.
Man seeks war when he thinks that the world is not his.
Man invites war when he feels that he can conquer the world.
Man proclaims war when he dreams
That the world has already surrendered to him.
Man seeks peace because his earthly existence desperately needs it.
Man welcomes peace because he feels
that in peace alone is his life of achievement and fulfilment.
Man spreads peace because he wants to transcend death.
The animal in man wars against peace in the outer world,
in the world of conflicting ideas.
The divine in man wars against ignorance in the inner world,
in the world of mounting ideals.
The animal in man wants war for the sake of war,
war to devour the snoring world.
The divine in man wants peace for the sake of peace,
peace to feed the hungry world.
Posted by TJ on Saturday, May 09 @ 22:56:57 EDT (142 reads) (Read More... | 3195 bytes more | comments? | Score: 0)
The Overpaid Masters Of The Universe!
"We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had too much."
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
BreakingViews has an interesting comment in a WSJ article this weekend on Outsourcing CEOs. "Infosys, the Indian outsourcing titan ($29 billion market value), pays its chairman and chief executive $100,000 each and its highest paid top manager $250,000. By comparison, two of Infosys' American competitors, Accenture and EDS, paid their top managers $6.1 million and $8.7 million, respectively, in 2005. Shareholders don't get extra value for money when paying top dollar for U.S. managers. "
In the U.S., the average Fortune 500 CEO is paid more than 400 times as much as the average employee and the myriad senior vice presidents receive 100 times an average worker's wages. Harvard professor Lucian Bebchuk calculates that senior managers in U.S. companies receive up to 10% of after-tax profits in any single year. On this arithmetic, companies could save as much by outsourcing 100 top management jobs to India as by eliminating 10,000 workers.
Dean Baker makes an excellent observation in light of the Chrysler bailout that really should be emphasized. He notes that one of the obvious advantages conferred on the company by being owned by Fiat is that the top executives and designers will be European and will, therefore, save the company a boatload of money. See, they don't pay the ridiculous compensation that American masters of the universe seem to believe is their God-ordained right. And as he explains, this should be an object lesson for the American worker:
The media coverage of the auto bailouts has focused on the need for _union autoworkers to take big pay cuts, causing them to once again miss the real story. The Fiat-Chrysler deal shows that the pay problem is at the top, not the bottom. At the end of the day, the new Chrysler is still likely to be producing most of its cars in the United States. What the new company will be getting from abroad is technology and top management.
This big story was so easily missed because it runs against one of the main myths that our elites have cultivated about the US economy: that the country has a "comparative advantage" in highly skilled labor. In this story, the United States will continue to lose manufacturing and other "less-skilled" jobs as its economy becomes more concentrated in highly skilled sectors.
This story also justified the growing inequality in US society that benefited not just Wall Street bankers and CEOs, but also millions of doctors, lawyers, economists, and other highly educated workers. These people took their six-figure salaries as a birthright, even as the pay of less educated workers stagnated or declined.
Trade agreements like NAFTA were explicitly designed to remove any barrier that made it difficult to export manufacturing goods to the United States, thereby placing US manufacturing workers directly in competition with their much lower paid counterparts in the developing world. Most of these restrictions had nothing to do with tariffs. Instead the key issues were rules protecting investment in the developing world along with limits on the ability of the US to exclude imports through safety or environmental regulations.
There has never been any similar effort to eliminate the barriers that prevent professionals from the developing world from coming to the United States and competing directly with their US counterparts as doctors or lawyers or in other highly paid professions.
The economists and the media somehow failed to notice that professionals were intentionally sheltered from international competition and instead just trumpeted them as the winners in the global economy. We were just treated to a beautiful example of this double standard when the media and the economists got all huffy about the "buy America" provision in the stimulus bill that might have protected a few manufacturing jobs in steel and other industries.
While this provision was roundly condemned and eventually watered down, the buy America provision in the Treasury's latest bank bailout bill went completely unnoticed. This provision requires that any investment manager taking part in the program be headquartered in the United States. Even though the argument against protectionism in financial services is identical to the argument against protectionism in steel, no one bothered to make the argument when Wall Street was the beneficiary of protectionism.
The end result of this protectionism for those at the top is a bloated overpaid sector of top managers, which is what we saw at Chrysler. If we compare wages for assembly-line workers in Europe and the United States, there would not be much difference between the pay of UAW members and their counterparts in Europe. However, there would be a very large difference between the multi-million dollar pay packages of the top executives at the US companies and their European counterparts. The pay gaps persist among the more highly paid engineers and management personnel.
Therefore, it was only logical that a bailout of Chrysler would seek to take advantage of the lower cost management and design skills available at a European car company like Fiat. In Chrysler, as in other companies, the high pay packages for these people are like an anchor dragging them down in international competition. If the US is to be competitive in the 21st century, we must either bring the pay of those at the top back down to earth or we should look to follow the lead of Chrysler and contract out for these services.
And the most ironic thing about this is the fact that these American executives keep threatening to leave the country to take jobs elsewhere, as if they can actually make more money overseas. Running a company into the ground and nearly destroying an industry wouldn't normally be considered a resume builder, but in America, the corporate narcissists and their friends in politics seem to want us to believe that this wrecking crew is so in demand that we must continue to pay them obscene compensation and beg them to keep destroying things on our behalf. They claim to live and die by the free market so maybe we should tell them to let the market decide this one too. Somehow, I doubt they will be too enthusiastic.
Posted by TJ on Thursday, May 07 @ 00:54:08 EDT (163 reads) (Read More... | 11251 bytes more | comments? | Score: 0)
Whats Wrong With The GOP?
Pam Spaulding doesn’t mince any words when it comes to describing the GOP’s self-evaluation in the wake of Arlen Specter’s defection and atrocious poll numbers: “We’re F*cked.”
Republicans are widely viewed by the public as less competent than Democrats to handle issue ranging from health care to education and energy, according to internal polling presented to top GOP officials in Congress...
The survey found the public holds greater confidence in Democrats than in Republicans in handling most of the issues that are involved in Obama's legislative agenda...Democrats were favored by a margin of 61 percent to 29 percent on education; 59 percent to 30 percent on health care and 59 percent to 31 percent on energy...Democats were also viewed with more confidence in handling taxes, long a Republican strong suit. The only issue among nine in the survey where the two parties were rated as even was in the war on terror.
The survey found Obama's job approval at 62 percent.
Columnist Mark Morford is much more poetic, though just as accurate in painting the picture:
The Right goes insane
Evil overlords to flaccid clowns in the blink of Jesus’ eye. Adorable!
This much we know: Hand evil a big, sticky gob of power, and it quickly becomes a feral monster, dangerous and cruel and willing to sell its own shriveled heart and the heart of its very remorseful mother for a shot at everlasting infamy, even more power and maybe some fresh, raw kitten blood, intravenously, just for the hell of it.
Oh, but take that same vile leviathan and suddenly strip away all its power and influence and capacity for wickedness, and watch it deflate like a wheezing circus tent, quickly turning into a trembling caricature of its former self, a tiny, elfin thing small enough to fit into a shoebox of panic and pathos and residual Godspit.
Behold, this delightful rule in full effect with the once portentous, now pitiable Republican party. Watch in wonder as gaff follows gaff, astonishing pronouncement follows childish meltdown, ludicrous statement leads into pure comedy of errors followed by moderate 40-year veterans of the party splitting for bluer, less abusive pastures. What a scene.
There is much good news to be found in the ongoing GOP implosion; their obsession with ‘wedge issues’ like abortion and gay marriage, along with hilarious claims of socialism and fascism are proving to be the absolute best news for the nation as a whole. Because as the GOP wallows in juvenile spectacle, Obama and the Dems are leaping headlong into one of the most ambitious, invigorating, nation-altering agendas in American history.
There’s much more, and it’s all Schadenfreude goodness with flair. It’s a good time to sit back and enjoy the show, because much like a demolition derby, you don’t see these things every day.
The Republican civil/ideological war will not last forever. As soon one of their loathsome brotherhood enjoys a smidgin of electoral success, the bandwagon will fill to capacity with saluting, lock-step marching authoritarian lemmings … teabags and all.
So starved leadership right now, as Aaron Sorkin put it, they are literally drinking the sand of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Joe the (not really a) Plumber. There just aren’t any non-clowns in the party hierarchy right now, and they all know it. I just can’t see them getting it together this time around, not while David Petreaus still has ambitions to be Joint Chiefs Chair before he tosses his hat in the ring.
Maybe by the time Obama is about ready to end his second term they will get their act together and pose a threat to resurge.
Olympia Snowe nails it in the NYT
Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities - indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.
It is for this reason that we should heed the words of President Ronald Reagan, who urged, "We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only 'litmus test' of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty." He continued, "As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement."
Meanwhile, in Oklahoma...
Republicans voted down proposals to hold a convention next year and to ditch the party's 29-page platform for a simple one-page expression of national Republican Party principles.
The party's platform approved Saturday opposes the promotion of homosexuality and supports placing the Ten Commandments in all public schools "as a means of moral guidance."
From the Tulsa County Republican Platform:
7. We believe that the scientific evidence supporting Biblical creation should be included in Oklahoma public schools curricula, and if any evolution theory is taught, that both should receive equal funding, class time, and material. Teachers should have the freedom to cover creation science without fear of intimidation, reprimand, or lack of professional respect.
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The Bush Doctrine is the source of all this horror. The idea that you can invade another country simply because they might pose a threat someday is nothing more that than the illegal concept of preventive war (which the Bushies simply rebranded as "preemptive" war.) And it's what leads to the idea that you can torture and imprison indefinitely in the name of that war. You don't need a real ticking time bomb, just the belief that there might be one someday.
Well they do. Believe it or not, corporations already own about 20% of all human genes. They've patented them. Which means that no one can test for those genes, no one can fix those genes, no one can remove those genes, and no one can do research on those genes - not without paying the company (big time) for the privilege. Corporations own genes even if the genes are clearly and solely found within a small family - a family that never agreed to the patent.
Here's a representative exchange from Chris Matthews today in a discussion on Hardball of whether or not it's a political problem for Nancy Pelosi to be seen as knowing about torture:
One hopes 
