May 31, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THE GREEK WAY?

At Fresno State University there is a professor of classical studies named Victor Davis Hanson who has done very well thanks to the war in Iraq. Professor Hanson became a kind of guru to Snarling Dick Cheney by putting an intellectual veneer on the U. S. attack on and occupation of Iraq. Hanson likes to apply the "lessons" of antiquity to our own times. Looking to the Greeks seems to be fashionable these days in neocon circles. This article by Maureen Dowd is at roziusunbound.blogspot.com:

The odd thing is that conservatives wear pinstriped suits, when they really should be walking around in togas. The main contribution of the Greeks to modern American politics may have been Michael Dukakis, who once climbed the Acropolis in wingtips.

But that doesn’t stop conservatives — especially the Straussians who pushed for going into Iraq — from being obsessed with ancient Greece, and from believing that they are the successors to Plato and Homer in terms of the lofty ideals and nobility and character in American politics — while Democrats merely muck about with policies for the needy.

Harvey Mansfield, a leading Straussian who teaches political science at Harvard and who wrote a book called “Manliness” (he’s for it), gave the Jefferson lecture recently at the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington.

It was an ode, as his book is, to “thumos,” the Greek word that means spiritedness, with flavors of ambition, pride and brute willfulness. Thumos, as Philip Kennicott wrote in The Washington Post, “is a word reinvented by conservative academics who need to put a fancy name on a political philosophy that boils down to ‘boys will be boys.’ ”

THE MEDIA AND LABOR

I've wondered sometimes why so much attention is paid to the stock market, big business, CEOs, and celebrities while scant attention is paid to unions and working people. There are far more of us who work for wages than there are stockholders. An index of how life is for working people would be more appropriate than the daily recitation of the Dow Jones average or where NASDAQ closed. Part of it, of course, is that the media are owned by the wealthy and the powerful. They have a vested interest in keeping working people ignorant. This article by Nancy Cleeland is at www.huffingtonpost.com:

In a way, the Times created my obsession for economic and class issues by sending me into low-wage Los Angeles as part of a 1998 initiative to increase coverage of Latinos. I was a seasoned journalist with lots of experience in Third World countries. Still, the level of exploitation I saw shocked me. Illegal immigrants, in particular, had no rights. In a range of industries, including manufacturing and retail, they were routinely underpaid and fired after any attempt to assert rights or ask for higher wages.

That disregard for workers spread up the chain of regional jobs, just as a crash in subprime home loans eventually lowers the entire real estate market. The same is happening to various degrees across the country.

Rather than reverse those troubling trends, recent political leaders have done just the opposite. Enabled by a Milton Friedman-inspired belief in free markets and the idea that poverty is proof of personal failure, not systemic failure, federal trade and regulatory policies have consistently undermined workers. The inequities worsened under President George W. Bush, who wears his antipathy toward labor on his sleeve. But few alarms were sounded by the mainstream press, including the Los Angeles Times.

April 12, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THE STRATEGY TO DRIVE DOWN WAGES

A good website called www.conceptualguerilla.com talks about "cheap labor conservatives." Conservatives like to maximize profits for the already well to do and if that means suppressing wages so be it. These days corporations are crying "labor shortage" as an excuse to bring in cheaper labor from outside the United States. This column by David Sirota is at www.workingforchange.com:

We are expected, for instance, to ignore academic studies published recently by the National Academy of Sciences showing that, in fact, there is no shortage of high-tech engineers here in America. We are expected to ignore the data showing that companies are using the H-1B program to drive down domestic workers' wages by forcing them into competition with imported workers from impoverished countries. We are expected, in short, to believe that layoffs, wage stagnation and pension/health care cutbacks have absolutely nothing to do with corporate executives trying to line their own pockets, and everything to do with workers themselves - and we are expected to believe all this at the very same time new government data shows that the share of national income going to wages is at a record low, and the share going to corporate profits is at a record high.

Yet a few paragraphs into the Businessweek article, the real story starts to trickle out:

"A global labor crunch, already being felt by some employers, appears to have intensified in recent months. That's in spite of widely publicized layoffs, including Citigroup's plans to shed as many as 15,000 staffers... Corporations are determined to keep labor costs under control, so they're reaching deeper into their bag of tricks...Some are lowering their standards for new hires or moving operations to virgin territories other outsourcers haven't discovered... Economists, of course, will tell you there's no such thing as a labor shortage. From a worker's viewpoint, many so-called shortages could quickly be solved if employers were to offer more money. And worldwide, millions of people still can't find jobs. The strongest evidence that there's no general shortage today is that overall worker pay has barely outpaced inflation."

There, finally, is the real story - the story that corporate executives and staid political pundits don't want anyone to talk about: The Great Labor Shortage Lie (related, of course, to the Great Education Myth - the one I've debunked before that claims all of working America's problems are due to a bad education system, and that if we just fixed our education system, everything would be great for workers). There's no labor shortage - there's a cheap labor shortage, because, as the free market fundamentalists all love to say, supply and demand rules everything. And if that's the case - then there's no way you can have a real labor supply shortage at the very same time wages (the monetized manifestation of employer demand for labor) continue to stagnate.

UNBELIEVABLE

Today there is a letter in The Fresno Bee from a guy claiming that global warming is God's work and that humans shouldn't "try to control the weather." It's simply amazing how some people don't bother to think at all. I don't believe there is a God. I don't think there is much evidence there is. But if there is some supernatural being that can be called God, I would have lots of questions.

If God is in such control, we have to assume that God has allowed thousands of years of cruelty and murder to proceed without interfering. We have to believe that God stood idly by and allowed the Nazi Holocaust. We have to believe that God allows all manner of tragedies from hurricanes to earthquakes that kill thousands and deprive others of their homes and livelihoods. We have to believe that God permits the ravages of cancer and AIDS and other hideous diseases. If such a being exists, he, she, or it doesn't deserve reverence.

CHENEY THE LIAR

Dick Cheney was on gasbag Limbaugh's show the other day still trying to claim a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Those claims have been disproved over and over again. Cheney, Bush, and their cadre lied about the reasons for this war and they're lying still. It's going to take a very long time for the American government to have any credibility in the world again. This column by Carl Levin is at www.latimes.com:

It is incredible that more than four years after the invasion, the vice president is still trying to convince the public that Saddam Hussein's regime was connected to Al Qaeda and that Zarqawi's presence in Iraq was evidence of a connection.

While the vice president doesn't say directly that there was a tie between the two, his clear purpose is to blur the line between Al Qaeda — the perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks — and the Iraqi dictator in order to justify the war in Iraq.

The problem is, that's simply not supported by the facts or by our intelligence community — and everyone except the vice president acknowledges it. In September, for example, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a bipartisan report that Hussein was "distrustful of Al Qaeda and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from Al Qaeda to provide material or operational support." And the CIA reported a year earlier, in October 2005, that the Iraqi regime "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates." As the Intelligence Committee report noted, the Iraqi intelligence service was actually trying to capture Zarqawi, who was in Baghdad under an alias. Is the vice president willfully ignoring what the rest of the government has concluded? Or does he have access to information he hasn't shared with us? If so, he should produce it.

The vice president has a clear, documented pattern of overstating and misstating information with regard to Iraq. He also, for instance, continued to claim that 9/11 terrorist Mohamed Atta may have met with an Iraqi agent in Prague — long after the intelligence community believed otherwise. Again, his obvious purpose is to link Hussein's regime with Sept. 11, even though the rest of the world has concluded that no such link exists.