Watch the video for Digby's thoughts on the process of right wingers dehumanizing Occupy Wall Street with an eye towards rationalizing the crushing of dissent with violence. I want to agree with what she says here and add another thought: dehumanizing the protesters is part of a larger process of dehumanizing all the victims of the economic recession. Since that figure includes, to one extent or another, most of us, that means the best bet for the right now is encourage a culture of complete alienation, where we not only can't feel empathy for people down the economic ladder from us, but also a culture where our attitude towards people like us is indifference and towards people up the ladder is uncritical and worshipful. Where Americans don't see each other as human beings at all, but where all relationships are about competition and dominance at all times. That includes and may even be especially true regarding romantic and familial relationships, which is why there's so much emphasis on the right on "traditional", i.e. male-dominated marriage and protecting "parental rights" to control your children with violence. It also explains the escalating hostility to even the most basic forms of sexual expression, unless they're tightly controlled and have all the eroticism squeezed out of them. Sex is a subversive force, after all, that encourages intimacy and affection and distracts you from constantly establishing dominance and submission in every encounter you have. (Ironically, this is true even in BDSM, where it's the dominance/submission aspects that are met with controls and limits, but value is put on self-expression and a sort of anarchy of spirit. Well, at least in the best examples of it.)
This is why the pepper-spraying incident at Wal-Mart bothers me so much. I all too easily can see how someone can convince herself that it's nothing more than weeding a garden. It stems from the same place as Republican voters cheering the idea of allowing people to die of preventable causes or a foreclosure firm thought it was a great idea to mock the people they foreclose upon for Halloween. We're being encouraged to stop seeing each other as people, and more as obstacles or annoyances. We're encouraged to look at another's suffering and think not of ways to relieve it, but simply, "Better you than me." It's the Ayn Rand-ization of America, in other words, and I'm not sure what it's going to take to turn the ship around.
Via Crooks and Liars, there's been some illuminating research from Cornell on public perceptions of what constitutes a "government social program". Turns out that whether or not you identify as someone who has used a government social program doesn't really depend on things like having used a government social program.
Levels are shockingly high across the board, but the data suggests that it's middle class people who don't identify as someone who has used a government program, even when they get a check in the mail from the U.S. Treasury. I highlight that, because the obvious dodge away from seeing what's going on here is to claim that people don't perceive tax credits or deductions as government programs, because they think of government programs as things where you go directly for services or money. But Social Security and VA benefits look like a government program just as much as food stamps. Also, the aesthetic difference between Head Start and student loans isn't enough to justify the gap in perception, and interestingly, Medicare and Medicaid are very similar, and yet there's more than a 10 point gap in perception of yourself as being on a "government program" if you use it.
These numbers only make sense if you assume that whether or not one identifies as someone who uses a government social program depends on irrelevant things like class status. This table demonstrates the effectiveness of decades of Republican propaganda equating "social program" with deragatory stereotypes of poor people and non-white people. When you call someone up and say, "Are you in a government social program?", you're going to get a lot of white, middle or upper class conservatives thinking, "I'm not some low rent welfare queen," and they're going to answer no without really connecting the dots.
The obvious result of this is that Republican voters are supporting ideas they clearly don't understand, because their prejudices are preventing them from thinking clearly. So you see a lot of conservatives raving online about how we don't need to raise the debt ceiling, and they're thinking, "We've borrowed enough money to pay for the liquor and cigarettes for an undifferientiated hoarde of dark-skinned layabouts. Screw 'em. They should get a job and spend their own money." This is wrong on many levels, and liberals tend to focus on the most obvious wrongness of it---the classism and the racism and the total lack of empathy and the broad stereotyping that has no basis in people's realities---but there's another level of wrongness here that is driving this entire debt ceiling fiasco. And that's the assumption that the main role of government is to tax well-off people and hand it out to people who have less. The government actually does very little of this. If anything, they tax well-off people and then give it right back to them in credits, deductions, subsidized loans, etc. in order to to make their lives easier and more secure. And that's after all the money that's spent just running the country and of course the untouchable defense program. The amount of taxation that goes to redistribution of wealth is measely. It's certainly not enough to get the people who depend on it on a road out of poverty, unlike middle class subsidies that really do help middle class people start accumulating social capital and wealth at an early age that pays off their entire lives.
Based on Monday’s column, a projection of “moderate” conservative Brook’s column a few years hence.
It was a season of constitutional perestroika. Last fall, the Simpson-Bowles governmental commission released a bold report on how to avoid the continued suffrage of non-land-owning Americans. For a few weeks, the think tanks and government offices were alive with proposals to reestablish a series of fiefdoms, our labor policies on serfdom, and just about every other government program.
The mood did not last. The polls suggested that voters were still unwilling to accept being assigned to a manors and forced to work in poverty while paying tributes to lords and vassals. Smart Washington insiders like Mitch McConnell and President Obama decided that any party that actually tried to implement these ideas would be committing political suicide. The president walked away from the Simpson-Bowles package. Far from addressing the fiscal problems, the president’s budget would double the nation’s debt over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
But the forces of reform have not been entirely silenced. Over the past few weeks, a number of groups, including the ex-chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers and 64 prominent budget experts, have issued letters arguing that military use would be a more effective road than simply expecting people to vote their democracy away. What they lacked was courageous political leadership — a powerful elected official willing to issue a proposal, willing to take a stand, willing to face the political perils.
The country lacked that leadership until today. Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, announced that he’s formed an army, financed by the Koch brothers, in order to sack the countryside and divide it into fiefdoms. Ryan is expected to leap into the vacuum left by the president’s passivity. The Ryan plan will not be formally enacted this year, but the raping and pillaging of suburban and rural Virginia is already informally under way.
His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion. It will become the 2012 Republican platform, no matter who is the nominee. Any candidate hoping to the Southern dukedom controlled by the GOP will have to be able to talk about ransacking with this degree of specificity, so it will improve the G.O.P. jockeying for position.
The Ryan proposal will help settle the fight over the government shutdown and the 2011 budget because it will remind everybody that the real argument is not about cutting a few billion here or there. It is about dismantling the underlying architecture of our government in 2012 and beyond.
The Ryan civil war will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.
The initial coverage will talk about Ryan’s logistical priorities — especially focusing on sacking the dense Eastern seaboard instead of knocking out easy victories in the South and Midwest. But the important thing is the way Ryan would reform government. He would reform government structures along the Simpson-Bowles lines, but without the same responsibilities put on vassals. (It’s amazing that a budget chairman could include military manuevers in his proposal, since it’s normally under the purview of the Ways and Means Committee.)
The Ryan budget doesn’t touch the freed man status for anyone making over $250,000 a year, but for poorer people it lays out a defined contribution plan. Instead of assuming open-ended future costs, the serfs will give the vassals a sum of money (starting at an amount equal to 40% of your annual income) and a regulated menu of protection options (mainly, which knight’s fief you’d like to live) from which to choose.
The Ryan budget will please leaders of both parties by turning most of the country into block grants — giving leaders flexibility in terms of how to divide and distribute it amongst their cronies. It tackles agriculture subsidies and other corporate welfare, by shifting those obligations to the serfs. It consolidates the job-training programs into a single program to be determined by local lords according to their needs. It reforms housing assistance and food stamps. It dodges Social Security mainly be eliminating it. The Republicans still have no alternative to the Democratic health care reform—-it’s unclear where the medical class and hospitals fit into a feudal landscape—-but this budget tackles just about every politically risky issue with brio and guts.
Ryan was a protégé of Jack Kemp, and Kemp’s uplifting spirit pervades the document. It’s not sour, taking an austere meat ax approach. It emphasizes relationships between upper and lower classes, social mobility for the upper middle class, and personal choice. I don’t agree with all of it that I’ve seen, but it is a serious effort to create a sustainable welfare state — to return to a more traditional form where the welfare of those offering leadership and protection is treated with due reverence.
It also creates the pivotal moment of truth for President Obama. Will he come up with his own counterproposal, or will he simply demagogue the issue by railing against “savage” Republican firebombing and rape campaigns? Does he have a sustainable vision for government, or will he just try to rise above the fray while Nancy Pelosi and others attack Ryan?
And what about the Senate Republicans? Where do they stand? Or the voters? Are they willing to face reality or will they continue to demand more unsustainable democracy?
Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.
Sorry, Virginia. I don’t have anything against you, but I just imagine that’s how it would go.
As I’m sure you all know, the Republican excuse for the attack on unions in Wisconsin is that this is about “fiscal conservatism”, i.e. they are just trying to put through cuts on teacher compensation in order to save money, and this has nothing to do with an ideological assault on the rights of workers to collective bargaining. Then this:
After claiming for weeks that it was essential to strip government workers of collective bargaining rights in order to help balance the budget, Wisconsin Republicans pulled a neat legislative trick on Wednesday night: by defining the collective bargaining rules as non-budgetary in nature they were able to go ahead and pass their stripped down bill.
Let’s repeat that: Wisconsin Republicans stripped the “fiscal” elements of a “budget repair” bill in order to pass it. If that sounds like a contradiction-in-terms to you, you’re not wrong.
This is and has always been about the belief that anyone that isn’t a millionaire doesn’t count as a full citizen, but is instead a prole who should be grateful to be permitted to have bread to eat and water to drink in exchange for working your fingers to the bone while the rich get richer.
Consider that the top 400 wealthiest Americans have a combined wealth that’s almost equal to what the bottom 153 million Americans have. Consider that Republicans are saying that’s not enough, and they will do whatever it takes to break working people and turn this country into a banana republic. The ideal system, it appears, would be one where the rich live in heavily guarded mansions while the rest of the country is notable for its widespread poverty and deprivation.
Still, I think that the Repubicans have made so naked their desire to destroy the middle class that people have really started to pay attention. Most Republican voters really haven’t yet figured out that the people they keep electing want them to make less money and live in more debt and deprivation. But in Wisconsin, people are starting to wake up to this. And the realization is spreading.
This article at Salon exposing Proactiv as a sham made my morning, as I’m sure it will any of you who, for whatever reason, are exposed to a lot of cable television and therefore relentless ads for Proactiv. (In my case, it’s mostly because Marc is a soccer fan, and every time some game is on, we have to endure the ads. If you were judging on ads alone, you’d think that most soccer fans are suffering epic amounts of acne.) I mostly hate the ads because they’re relentless and the worst kind of celebrity endorsement, but I always suspected that they’re selling overpriced crap that you can get for cheap at the drugstore. And sure enough:
Make a few clicks around Proactiv’s website and you’ll find out the active compound is benzoyl peroxide. That’s the same stuff in Stridex, Clearasil and just about every nonprescription acne medication available in drugstore aisles across America. A tube of the same compound costs $5.25 at my local pharmacy.
Since writing about this stuff invariably brings out a true believer or two or a dozen in comments, I will add that the doctor who wrote this, Rahul Parikh, doesn’t disagree that some times it works better than the cheap stuff, but not because it is better. It’s because the expense and the “system” they create gets clients to be more consistent with use. Spend less money, but contribute the same diligence and Clearasil would work just as well. (I’m a fan of Neutrogena’s stuff, just because it’s less thick, but not because it’s better in any chemical sense.) As a perennially cheap person, I figured out the trick to flip stuff over and check the ingredient list a long time ago, much to the dismay of anyone trying to sell any of the various products that cost four or five times as much for exactly the same stuff. Right now, a big scam is glycolic acid, which is the active ingredient in a lot of first rate exfoliating masks. I’ve seen places like Bath and Body Works try to sell tubes of the stuff for $60-$100, which you could get it from Oil of Olay for $20. (I’ve looked for it even cheaper than that, but sadly, there does seem to be a bottom in this department that’s set awfully high.)
For some reason, exploiting people’s anxieties about their skin to sell them overpriced products pisses me off more than most scam-y things like it. I think it’s because having bad skin makes you especially vulnerable to hucksters, because it’s so hard to conceal and it’s the first thing people notice about you, since it’s on your face and all. People with bad skin will take drastic measures to have nice skin, and therefore they’re easy to convince that drastic measures—-like spending tons of money—-are necessary when they’re not. To make it worse, unlike other appearance-based problems, like bad hair, bad skin doesn’t even go away once it goes away! You can fix the zits, but you still have the scars. Proactiv ads are especially vicious in this department, with the exploitative lighting and the glowing skin of heavily-made-up celebrities. You’d have to be made out of stone not to look at that and feel a tug of envy and desire, especially if you struggle with bad skin. Just the hope that this could happen for you has got to weigh heavily. They must be making a ton of money, too. According to this article, the company that owns Proactiv spends $12-$15 million a year on celebrity endorsements alone.
Once in a blue moon, you get some genuinely good news in the world of cranks and scam artists pushing “alternative” medicine. This story is a little old, but it came to my attention this morning because of Gizmodo. The manufacturers of the obviously farcical Power Balance wristbands were forced in Australia to admit their products are crap, refund customers’ money, and publicly apologize for trying to deceive the public.
I would also like to take this time to point out that the libertarian argument that markets correct themselves without interference from the government is neatly disproved by the very existence of Power Balance bands, and alternative medicine in general. The notion that consumers are generally rational and that bad products will be shoved off the market without assistance from regulation is farcical to begin with, but these wristbands were selling like hotcakes. I watched, as much as I could, a video advertising them, and the “explanation” for how they worked was basically magic. They supposedly channeled the force fields in your body that somehow extended 1-3 inches outside of your body. They claim to improve strength and balance by harnessing this magic through methods unknown, though I have to say that if your body has powerful magic fields of strength and balance in it, I’d think that would suffice to make you strong and balanced without a rubber bracelet.
The problem with the notion that all consumers are rational enough to control the markets with regulatory interference is that people don’t make choices on strictly rational bases. Or, they’re rational in one sense—-it’s rational to want to be able to spend a little money and get a lot stronger without working out extensively to get there. Also, it’s not irrational to listen to people who should be experts endorsing a product. For instance, Shaq has endorsed the wristbands. If you asked a random person on the street, “Do you think Shaquille O’Neill knows a little something about working out and getting strong?”, the only rational answer is, “Yes.” Thus, it’s not really that stupid to think that if Shaq thinks something works, then it has a good chance of working, especially if you’re not really familiar with the arguments against magic.
By the way, libertarians themselves exploit people’s irrationality, in aligning themselves with social conservatives who believe in magical deities that justify their misogyny and homophobia, and often libertarian beliefs. Also, even secular libertarians are living proof against their assertion that average people can be expected to shape the markets with rational choices. Libertarians believe all sorts of lies and bullshit, particularly with regards to the scientific proof for global warming, and of course their crackpot economic theories.
Of course, the next gambit in the argument is that people who make stupid choices Have It Coming. Of course, this presumes—-irrationally—-that there’s an objective standard of justice in the universe and that bad things only happen to people who are stupid or mean. This doesn’t pass the reality-based test. It also presumes—-irrationally—-that there are people who effectively avoid negative consequences by always being rational. There isn’t a person alive who doesn’t harbor some irrational beliefs. That doesn’t make them stupid or unworthy or deserving of being punished or ripped off. The person who loses money on a Power Balance wristband and maybe injures himself by thinking he suddenly has a lot more strength than he did before might otherwise be an excellent worker, a good father, and a decent citizen.
Plus, the They Have It Coming argument directly contradicts the Markets Can Regulate Themselves argument. A market that’s dictated by a bunch of people getting ripped off all the time is, by definition, not self-regulating.
It is, however, a perfect environment for scum-suckers and con artists, who are the only people who really benefit from libertarian arguments. So, instead of pretending this is an airy, intellectual debate, I like to ask, “Who benefits?” If you side consistently with the scumbags and con artists against decent people trying to make good choices within the limited framework of being human, then it’s really time to rethink your “philosophy”.
Rick Perlstein has a wonderful article up at The Daily Beast about how voters turned out in the polls to register their disapproval of having their taxes raised, when actually, their taxes were cut. He argues, correctly in my opinion, that governance is impossible in the current atmosphere, because what you actually do doesn’t matter a bit in terms of convincing people to vote for you. What matters is what people think you do. In a properly functioning democracy, what people think aligns more closely to what is actually true, but in our dysfunctional democracy, the voters actually are more likely to believe something that isn’t true than something that is.
This is for two reasons: 1) Republicans are shameless liars and 2) There are no checks on their shameless lying.
On cable news, the belief that taxes were raised for most people is trotted out without correction, since everything is about what someone said, not what the actual facts are. The most you’ll get most of the time is, “Republicans claim taxes went up. Democrats claim taxes went down. Let’s talk to this moron over here about what this means for the elections.” Rarely do you get a report on what actually happened, and rarely do they make it as entertaining as the horse race coverage on the rare occasions they do report the facts.
But in recent years, it’s gotten even worse, since the coverage has gone from, “Republicans said (fill in uncorrected lie). Democrats said (something closer to the truth).” Now it’s “Republicans said (lie that’s so outrageous that it can be fact-checked in two seconds, not that anyone is going to do that). Democrats said (mumble mumble civility).” As Rick argues:
When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes “uncivil” to call out liars, lying becomes free.
And dammit, the essence of Obamaism as an ideology is that it is Uncivil to Call Out Liars.
Which brings me back to the Rally To Restore Sanity, which was widely and correctly criticized for embodying Jon Stewart’s worst tendencies of making false equivalences. But I want to commend them strongly for one thing they did do exactly right, which was to stake out territory where calling out lies and bullshit is not considered uncivil. That’s basically what “The Daily Show” is all about, after all. The definition of “civil” isn’t “never do anything that makes someone else uncomfortable or angry”, because that automatically means that you have to be complicit with people who exploit that to do actual bad things. Indeed, bad people are drawn to those with a mistaken idea of what civility is, because they’re easy to exploit. You don’t have to forget someone is a human being to call bullshit. In fact, I would argue that the greater call towards civility is towards the public at large. The only way to be civil to the voters is to speak the truth without shame.
Assigned, must-read reading of the day: Jane Mayer’s amazing article synthesizing the political and “philanthropic” careers for David and Charles Koch. They are basically the funding arm of the Tea Party movement, secular libertarianism, and have their fingers all over global warming denialism. I put “philanthropic” in scare quotes, because while the Koches give lots and lots and lots of money to non-profits, they usually do so with their own self-interest in mind. Their self-interest is, of course, their enormous corporation Koch Industries. They’re oil billionaires, giant polluters, and they really don’t like environmentalists or the little, insignificant non-billionaire portions of the population.
There’s a couple of insights Mayer brings to her analysis of the brothers Koch that I want to pull out and expand a little on. By no means are these the sum total of the article, so please do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. But I want to talk about what I consider a major misunderstanding of the relationship between the peons who show up at Tea Cracker protests and read right wing blogs, and the big money people who spread a lot of cash around convincing the peons to be angry about things like scientists telling the truth about global warming. There’s a tendency amongst liberals to give rich right wingers too much credit, which shows that even as we decry classism, we still fall for some of the prejudicial fallacies, such as believing the rich to be more clever than ordinary people. A lot of liberals spin this story of how big money types like the Koches put together these ridiculous stories that they then feed to the plebes, who regurgitate stuff like signs demanding to see the birth certificate. We see them as puppet masters whose ideas are so silly that they couldn’t believe it themselves. But that’s wrong. While I think there are definitely political operators who are purely cynical, like Karl Rove, in general most wingnuts, even the rich ones, are true believers. And one thing I really get off this article is that the Koches are able to sell their ridiculous ideas to the public not just because they spread money around like it’s cream cheese, but because they themselves believe their own bullshit.
Indeed, the article is an interesting examination in how to create someone whose worldview is so screwed up that he believes he’s doing the right thing by screwing the needy and destroying the planet for future generations. The Koches’ father was a standard issue racist nut who bought into all the John Bircher nonsense, including believing that Eisenhower was a Communist. (No wonder it’s easy to rationalize believing this about Obama!) And he raised his sons in a way that is what I suggest you do if you want to distort their understanding of what life is all about:
Koch emphasized rugged pursuits, taking his sons big-game hunting in Africa, and requiring them to do farm labor at the family ranch. The Kochs lived in a stone mansion on a large compound across from Wichita’s country club; in the summer, the boys could hear their friends splashing in the pool, but they were not allowed to join them. “By instilling a work ethic in me at an early age, my father did me a big favor, although it didn’t seem like a favor back then,” Charles has written. “By the time I was eight, he made sure work occupied most of my spare time.”
He also spent a lot of time indoctrinating them, but I think this is perhaps more important. Depriving someone of a childhood to instill a work ethic in them is a great way to bring someone up who doesn’t understand the value of work or of non-work life. Marc and I were having an interesting discussion on the subway yesterday, about “Mad Men”. (Which I’ll have to post about tomorrow, sorry!) We got to talking about their portrayal of Conrad Hilton, which actually softened the real life man’s uglier, harder edges, if you can believe it. And Marc said that, in his eyes, Paris Hilton is by far the better human being. After all, she knows what money is *for*, which is in service of living. The rich, he argued, are better off being the idle rich than getting sucked into the crazed business of making more and more money just to do it. Is it really a “work ethic” if you start to believe that money is the end, and not just the means to an end? Not that running hotels is somehow evil, but the end game of making money just to make money is purely evil, since it disassociates money from what it exists for, which is in service of human beings. And once you do that—-once you start to see human beings as existing for money and not the other way around—-libertarianism, anti-environmentalism, and general hostility towards government and social services all follow. To call that a “work ethic” is to put a moralistic gloss on immoral behavior.
This post is a bit of LGBT inside baseball that has caused a bit of a stir, mostly because it has not been covered much in LGBT media to date - a major figure in the community is handling the crappy PR effort to spread BP’s propaganda and spin—and the question is whether there will be any blowback because of this association.
Hilary Rosen. The former honcho of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and now-former political director of Huff Post is knee-deep (or is it neck-deep) in this BP quagmire as part of its image clean-up effort, which surely pulls in big bucks for her.
After the spill, the company brought on crisis communicator Hilary Rosen, former Democratic congressional staffer, former chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, and a current editor-at-large for HuffingtonPost.com. Ms. Rosen heads the Washington-based office of U.K. communications firm the Brunswick Group. Public records are not yet available on the new Brunswick contract. Ms. Rosen declined to be interviewed on the record.
With the level of almost-certain criminality (the Obama DOJ is looking to press charges) and just plain brain-dead public statements by BP executives, Rosen, who has been MIA on CNN as a talking head since this development, surely has to consider the blowback because of her association with a company that is literally destroying the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystem and the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people.
When HuffPost tossed her overboard, it was clear that it realized its aggressive coverage of BP was in conflict with Rosen’s new relationship with the oil giant.
“Hilary is no longer our Washington Editor at Large, a mutual decision we recently reached given her involvement with BP,” wrote Arianna Huffington in an email today, responding to a query from POLITICO. “However, we still have a great personal relationship. And, of course, Hilary’s work with BP has had zero effect on our coverage of the company or the disaster in the gulf. Comprehensive and hard-hitting, our coverage speaks for itself.”
And there’s reason to make that split. Rosen is not indirectly involved with BP—she’s hands-on working with the team to coach gaffe-prone BP CEO Tony Hayward.
Orchestrating the response is the Brunswick Group, whose Washington managing partner, Hilary Rosen, has connections throughout the city as the former head of the Recording Industry Association of America and from previous jobs that include working for Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat.
...The experts talk daily to plot strategy and dissect the day’s events. In prepping Hayward for his hearing, says one adviser, the basic message was: Don’t say anything you don’t know to be true.
It’s pretty hard to say that Brunswick and Rosen are succeeding in any respect. Bloomberg Businessweek bluntly said:
The bottom line: BP’s hiring binge of lawyers, lobbyists, and media experts to help it deal with angry demands from Washington may not be doing it much good.
And we thought that BP lobbyist was the worst job in America. It’s a piece of cake, compared to BP PR person.
After all the gaffes by Tony “I want my life back” Hayward, the company puts chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg in front of the mike and Svanberg talks about the “small people.”
Then BP eases Hayward out as the U.S. frontman for the emergency efforts and where does he go? To the Isle of Wight to watch his yacht, “Bob,” compete in the Round the Island Race, sponsored by JPMorgan Asset Management. (Is he flipping us off or does he really not get it?)
Hilary Rosen must be ready to take a dive into the Gulf.
The dilemma of pocketbook before principles—it’s a personal decision whether one engages in a professional relationship with a client regardless of the ethics of its practices—but it something worthy of discussion here, particularly because of the ties Hilary Rosen has to the LGBT community. Muckety, which maps out the connections of players of power and influence, shows us why this is relevant.
If The Huffington Post has seen fit to sever ties with Rosen over her relationship to BP, where does that leave HRC? Does the HRC/HRCF board have any problem with this (Rosen is on the HRCF board)? Surely some large donors might take issue.
Considering the horrible experiences I’ve had recently on American Airlines (multiple cancelled flights with sucktastic customer communication about them), it was fortuitous to run into Ray Balis, an active flight Attendant, at Netroots Nation 2009.
Ray was elected by the American Airlines Flight Attendants to represent them during the negotiation process with American Airlines. He reveals some onerous corporate practices that may (not) surprise you. Flight attendants feel your pain in many ways, as much as you are as a consumer—they are getting jerked around by the financial woes of the airlines—and the decisions made up the food chain. When flights are cancelled, flight attendants aren’t paid; they are often stranded with all the same inconveniences we are, and they don’t receive a paid-for lunch (I’ve spoken to others who have to brown bag it), except on international long flights. That was one benefit negotiated away when the airlines played hardball.
To learn more about American Airlines flight attendants negotiations, visit the site Ray refers to in the video, http://APFAVirtualPicket.com.
Madoff will be joining several other well-known inmates at Butner. They include Omar Abdel-Rahman, the terrorist known as the “Blind Sheik” who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and former Adelphia Commmunications Chief Executive Officer John Rigas.
Also incarcerated there: former U.S. Naval Intelligence Analyst and convicted spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard; former Colombo crime family boss Carmine Persico; and Russell Weston, the perpetrator of a 1998 U.S. Capitol shooting that left two U.S. Capitol Police officers dead.
Bernie wanted to serve out his sentence at up in Otisville, NY to be near home, but too bad, so sad for the white collar criminal. The Butner site, which has two medium-security facilities and a low-security prison facility, will provide him with a few creatur comforts—and a new way to earn a living.
From rubbing elbows with millionaires to sharing a prison yard with drug dealers and gangsters, Bernard Madoff’s life is about to change dramatically.
Madoff will find himself earning pennies a day sweeping floors, cleaning toilets or manning a stove in the prison kitchen. Like all prisoners, corrections officers will shine a light in his face twice in the middle of the night as part of six or seven daily checks.
Among the amenities Bernie will receive when he arrives in Butner will be a prison-issued hygiene kit containing a matchbook-sized bar of soap (no info whether he has a selection of manly scents to choose from or it’s just Cashmere “signals luxury” Bouquet in the kit), a toothbrush, a comb and a razor. He can call home for at the rate of 25 cents/minute, but if Mrs. Madoff shows up, there aren’t any conjugal visits allowed.
A woman in the audience told Obama about how her 105-year-old mother had a pacemaker installed, against some of her doctors’ advice, at age 100. It had improved her life significantly. Would the president’s healthcare plan ask doctors to take into account qualities in patients like love of life, she wanted to know—qualities that helped convince her mother’s doctors to try the pacemaker despite their reservations about her age?
Obama, as most of us have heard, blew the question. But here’s the thing: It doesn’t matter that he blew the question, because it is, on several different levels and for several different reasons, a nearly meaningless question.
It’s time for another airline horror story. Cheer me up by sharing your worst experiences...
I was supposed to be in Chicago right now, where I was to appear on a panel tomorrow AM at Blogging While Brown, one of the few conferences I really wanted to attend this year:
To back up a bit, this is the second time this week my flight has been deep-sixed by this airline. On Monday, American screwed me (and Kate) by canceling the flight to NYC for the Women’s Media Center Media Awards. We had planned to go a day early so we could spend time with family. But American couldn’t rebook us until almost 4PM the next day, meaning AA stole our day there, and pickpocketed me for a night’s hotel stay.
What happened this time? My flight to Chicago today was 2:30 PM. I was to return on Sunday AM around 10:30, so it was a quick trip. The above-mentioned panel was at 11AM on Saturday.
So I arrive at a reasonable hour at RDU and settle in to wait at the gate for about 45 min. I go get a soft drink and look at the board and it says “delayed” with a revised arrival time at 3:30 PM. I figured it was weather, no big deal. I popped open my laptop so I could check mail and blog (which is why you had fresh posts from me this afternoon). I had the AA site open so I could monitor the delays, and it kept creeping up by a half hour.
Eventually someone came on the PA system and mentioned the weather was poor (t-storms). They said the plane was arriving at O’Hare soon and would be taking off around 5PM. Time goes by and across the terminal, a United flight bound for Chicago boards and takes off. My fellow AA passengers take note of this. The man comes back on the PA system and says around 6 that the plane is taking off (actually I wasn’t the only one who heard him say it was “in the air”) and that it would be here in around 2 hours, putting our departure at 8:04PM.
Well, by this time I was starving so I went and had a bagel. Came back and sat down and popped the computer back open and rechecked the AA site. It said FLIGHT CANCELED. I hadn’t heard anything on the PA, and the board didn’t show it canceled. I went over to the gate where a line had already formed for people looking to rebook. The word on the line was that there were no direct flights to Chicago now and none tonight.
Well, it’s about 7:30 PM now when I reach the counter and the weary AA agent, who had been unfairly taking abuse from (justifiably) irate passengers, asked me what my situation was. I was kind to him despite being pissed beyond belief and said, “Well, I think I’m screwed. Can you get me to Chicago by 11AM tomorrow?” He just shook his head. The problem was that he couldn’t get me there earlier than 4PM CT, which kind of defeats the purpose of the trip. Even on other carriers.
My favorite part of this nightmare is when I asked if I could get a voucher or refund. He said no, unless you had bought trip insurance, weather isn’t covered. But I told him that I HAD done this when I ordered the ticket, and then received an email the following day from Travelocity that it could not be processed “for technical reasons.” So even when I tried to protect my investment, I was screwed.
As I was about leave the counter, a disoriented flight crew was visibly (and audibly) pissed that they were stuck in RDU and another pilot clearly didn’t know where he was supposed to be and asked why they (the airline) didn’t bother calling to tell him (that his schedule had changed).
Now I know that AA picks traveler’s pockets—and it has a crappy scheduling department that screws over its flight crews as well.
I drove home and I called Travelocity to see if I could beg for mercy there. I explained the situation to the agent and he obviously thought I could be rebooked somehow, so he put me on hold to call AA. I was on hold for about 10 minutes as I contemplated throwing the phone across the room. He came back on and said “American Airlines will credit you the full amount for your ticket.”
While that’s somewhat good news for me, or at least my wallet, it shows you how f**ked the airline is. AA must have screwed so many people that they couldn’t rebook in any sane timeframe that it felt it had no choice but to refund.
But the real mess is that I am missing a conference that I very much wanted to attend. Again, from AA’s web site’s customer commitment service plan:
American Airlines and American Eagle are in business to provide safe, dependable and friendly air transportation to our customers, along with numerous related services. We are dedicated to making every flight you take with us something special. Your safety, comfort and convenience are our most important concerns.
Fox News finally discovers class warfare, and they can’t help but dial up the crazy. At the bottom of a Media Matters entry dealing with the already-batshit premise of comparing the Democratic party to a crime family - Mike Malloy is probably considering an intellectual property lawsuit - the apparently-lobotomized host Brian Kilmeade says this about George Soros:
FRANZESE: Yes, and with good reason. I had, you know, my issues in walking away from that life. People were pretty upset with me about it, and—so it took years to get over. But, you know, George Soros, you know, to me, he’s the guy. I mean, he’s the guy you gotta be concerned about here because he exercises a lot of control.
KILMEADE: And here’s the scary thing: He’s made money through this global downturn. He came out of retirement because he predicted it. I don’t know if he orchestrated it—if that’s possible with his money—but he’s made billions.
FRANZESE: Yes.
KILMEADE: So, he’s in control, while everybody else wonders what the heck happened.
FRANZESE: And I wonder why they associate with this guy. I mean, here—one thing about mob guys, now, we were pretty patriotic. We may have been doing our thing on the streets, but we didn’t like anybody messing with the country. And I recall, you know, after 9-11, he was—he did some damage on Wall Street.
KILMEADE: Absolutely.
Allow me to illustrate the utter absurdity of this by imagining a conversation between myself and My Wingnut Cousin.
Your tax dollars at work. Bush rolled out TARP with little oversight and this is why almost no one has sympathy for the banks and financial firms that have done everything in their power to keep living the high life on your dime. This Huff Post piece by Sam Stein (and it includes audio) will have steam coming out of your ears.
Two Wall Street firms that received at least $60 billion in government bailout funds will be rewarding their financial advisers with controversial retention payments, the terms of which one senior executive described as “very generous” in audio obtained by the Huffington Post.
The soon-to-be-merged financial giants—Morgan Stanley and Citigroup’s Smith Barney—announced the payments during an internal conference call last week, but warned advisers against describing them in terms that would cause PR headaches.
“There will be a retention award. Please do not call it a bonus,” said James Gorman, co-president of Morgan Stanley. “It is not a bonus. It is an award. And it recognizes the importance of keeping our team in place as we go through this integration.”
What’s sickening is the game that is being played—the self-proclaimed faux bonuses are based on the rosier 2008 performance figures rather than the tanking 2009 numbers. And they know exactly what they were doing. James Gorman thought it was a knee-slapper.
“I think I can hear you clapping from here in New York,” Gorman joked during the call, after announcing that the payments would be linked to ‘08 performance. “You should be clapping because frankly that is a very generous and thoughtful decision that we have made. We spent a lot of time kicking this around. We could easily have done it from the point of closing, which is obviously going to be somewhere in the latter half of this year or around the middle of the year. But we just decided… that it was right thing to do, to give you that certainty that it would be based off ‘08. ‘09 is a very difficult year… So that degree of anxiety, which many, many of you have emailed me about… is now off the table.”
As I’m sure you all know, the Republican excuse for the attack on unions in Wisconsin is that this is about “fiscal conservatism”, i.e. they are just trying to put through cuts on teacher compensation in order to save money, and this has nothing to do with an ideological assault on the rights of workers to collective bargaining. 
Once in a blue moon, you get some genuinely good news in the world of cranks and scam artists pushing “alternative” medicine. 
Assigned, must-read reading of the day: 
Hilary Rosen
And there’s reason to make that split. Rosen is not indirectly involved with BP—she’s hands-on working with the team to coach gaffe-prone BP CEO Tony Hayward.
Considering the horrible experiences I’ve had recently on American Airlines (multiple cancelled flights with sucktastic customer communication about them), it was fortuitous to run into Ray Balis, an active flight Attendant, at Netroots Nation 2009. 
Bernard Madoff, #
What happened this time? My flight to Chicago today was 2:30 PM. I was to return on Sunday AM around 10:30, so it was a quick trip. The above-mentioned panel was at 11AM on Saturday.