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.

April 09, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

OUR MAN IN BAGHDAD

John McCain paraded through a Baghdad market to "prove" how safe Baghdad has become since George Bush's surge. McCain wore a bulletproof vest, was protected by three Blackhawk helicopters, a hundred American soldiers, and two Apache gunships. If that's what it takes to walk in Baghdad, we can safely say it's not safe. In the meantime, the war meister, George Bush, was busily doing what he does best--lying. This column by Frank Rich is at www.welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com:

As if to confirm we’re in the last throes, President Bush threw any remaining caution to the winds during his news conference in the Rose Garden that same morning. Almost everything he said was patently misleading or an outright lie, a sure sign of a leader so entombed in his bunker (he couldn’t even emerge for the Washington Nationals’ ceremonial first pitch last week) that he feels he has nothing left to lose.

Incredibly, he chided his adversaries on the Hill for going on vacation just as he was heading off for his own vacation in Crawford. Then he attacked Congress for taking 57 days to “pass emergency funds for our troops” even though the previous, Republican-led Congress took 119 days on the same bill in 2006. He ridiculed the House bill for “pork and other spending that has nothing to do with the war,” though last year’s war-spending bill was also larded with unrelated pork, from Congressional efforts to add agricultural subsidies to the president’s own request for money for bird-flu preparation.

Mr. Bush’s claim that military equipment would be shortchanged if he couldn’t sign a spending bill by mid-April was contradicted by not one but two government agencies. A Government Accountability Office report faulted poor Pentagon planning for endemic existing equipment shortages in the National Guard. The Congressional Research Service found that the Pentagon could pay for the war until well into July. Since by that point we’ll already be on the threshold of our own commanders’ late-summer deadline for judging the surge, what’s the crisis?