Quote of the day

Andrew Leonard wrote:

There’s no getting around the hard truth: right now, there is no such thing as an “ethical smartphone.” Or, for that matter, an ethical flat-screen TV, digital camera, or any kind of personal computer.

Labor abuse offshore is hardly a new phenomenon. It is not strongly correlated to the production of digital technology in the Far East. Nor, for that matter, is labor abuse unknown onshore (see, for instance, this, this, this, etc.). Worker’s suffer abuse because they are exploitable
commodities and because some employers seek to extract well-above average value from the worker’s they use. The abuse often enables these super-exploiters to take this above-average value from their workers.

If Leonard or anyone else wants to purchase ethically defensible goods, they might find during their research that their lives are thoroughly compromised by the objects they consume. And, as I have already pointed out, this is not a new problem. It is a feature specific to capitalist and imperialist economic systems.

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Frank VanderSloot responds to his critics

Surprise! It’s the liberal media!

VanderSloot’s response can be read here.

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My Response and Challenge to Frank VanderSloot

Reblogged from The Idaho Agenda:

  • Click to visit the original post

Frank VanderSloot’s has released his response to Glenn Greenwald’s Salon.com article. You can read VanderSloot’s statement in its entirety HERE. As one of the blogs mentioned in the Greenwald piece, I would like to offer my own perspective on a few of his points, as well as issue Mr. VanderSloot a challenge of sorts. The first time I had ever heard of  Frank VanderSloot was during the “It’s Elementary” controversy. I had only recently come out of the closet and was still trying to figure out what exactly …

James Tidmarsh responds to Frank VanderSloot’s apologia.

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Organized labor tacks to the right

Samuel Gompers

Matea Gold and Melanie Mason of the Los Angeles Times briefly described this rightward shift in big labor:

Last May, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka stood a few blocks from the White House and issued a stern warning: Union members could not be counted on as the Democrats’ foot soldiers anymore.

“If leaders aren’t blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families’ interests, then working people will not support them,” he said in a speech at the National Press Club.

Flash forward to today: Labor appears squarely back in the Democrats’ corner for the 2012 election — pushed there in large part by Republican attacks on collective bargaining rights for public employees.

Those and other anti-union measures are rallying organized labor to the side of its longtime Democratic allies, and not just in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, where they are battling efforts aimed at curbing union organizing.

The country’s biggest unions also have played a central role in helping a network of federal pro-Democratic “super PACs” get off the ground, pouring more than $4 million into those groups in 2011, even as many wealthy liberals kept their checkbooks closed.

And some major labor groups have even inserted themselves into the Republican presidential primaries with ads that take aim at White House hopeful Mitt Romney.

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Feel safer?

Erik Hoffner of Truthout reports that some police departments, like the New York Police Department, have begun to scan the irises of those protesters they arrest during protest actions. Since many of those arrested are neither charged with nor convicted of a crime — indeed, the arrested may not have even been protesters! — these scans serve to deter some of the arrested protesters by indicating that they have gained an enduring official record of their identity and their protest activities. These scans are likely part of a database the relevant local governments are compiling on the protesters. It is prudent to assume that the data collected locally is also shared with the Federal government.

Iris scanning has become a common practice in New York City.

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Police state Chicago?

Fears emerge that the Chicago Police Department will jam electronic communication signals during some protest events:

Protesters will be flocking to Chicago for May’s G-8 and NATO summits armed with smartphones, video cameras and links to social media sites they’ll use for strategizing and sharing images of what’s happening — right in front of a police force known for responding with tough tactics.

Now a city councilman wants to forbid the police department from pulling the plug on the electronic communication during the events, taking away a tactic employed by authorities during a crackdown on democratic protests in Egypt and during protests in the San Francisco Bay Area last year.

We’re putting down a marker and saying this has happened in other places and we don’t even want it considered here,” said Alderman Ricardo Munoz, who proposed his anti-crackdown ordinance at a Chicago City Council meeting Wednesday, after which it was referred to a committee.

Munoz said he has no indication police are contemplating shutting down cellphone use or social media sites. A police department spokeswoman said Superintendent Garry McCarthy has no plans to take such a step.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office has said the same thing. But after he was asked Wednesday whether he was concerned that an ordinance could hamstring the police department’s ability to react to an emergency, Emanuel would only say that “Garry and Al (Wysinger, McCarthy’s first deputy superintendent) are working with the alderman on that.”

Of course, Chicago’s city government could always declare a state of emergency and use that declaration to evade any law restrict government interference with the local communication system. It is not unknown for the police to break laws when it considers law-breaking to be an acceptable consequence of a useful tactic.

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Middle class welfare

The New York Times briefly describes a case of middle class welfare:

Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.

He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.

Middle class welfare? Is that not a self-contradiction?

The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last year.

I guess not. Yet…

And as more middle-class families like the Gulbransons land in the safety net in Chisago and similar communities, anger at the government has increased alongside. Many people say they are angry because the government is wasting money and giving money to people who do not deserve it. But more than that, they say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age.

I wish these people good luck solving their cognitive dissonance problem.

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Kudos are in order

Portrait of Glenn Greenwald -creator of Unclai...Glenn Greenwald and Salon.com deserve our admiration for reporting on a vicious man [Frank VanderSloot (hagiography can about the man can be found here)] and the company he leads (Melaleuca), “…a pyramid selling organization, built along the lines of Herbalife and Amway,” according to Forbes.com. We should express our admiration for Greenwald and Salon because VanderSloot and his company promote politically and socially reactionary policies as well as defend their capacity to do so by harassing their critics with frivolous and potentially expensive lawsuits. By critically reporting about VanderSloot and Melaleuca, the nature of Melaleuca’s business, VanderSloot’s politics and these frivolous lawsuits, Greenwald and Salon publicly threw down the gauntlet, daring VanderSloot to bring a lawsuit against him and Salon.com.

VanderSloot is a Mormon, an anti-gay activist and the national finance co-chair of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. Accordingly, Romney ought to be pestered with questions about VanderSloot’s politics and dubious legal tactics until he gives a sensible defense of them. Is this the kind of man Romney wants on his side? The voters ought to know the answer to this question.

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Quote of the day

Chris Hedges states that:

There is a recipe for breaking popular movements. I watched it play out over five years in the war in El Salvador. I now see these familiar patterns in the assault against the Occupy movement. It goes like this. Physically eradicate the insurgents’ logistical base of operations to disrupt communication and organization. Dry up financial and material support. Create rival organizations — the group Stand for Oakland seems to be one of these attempts — to discredit and purge the rebel leadership. Infiltrate the movement to foster internal divisions and rivalries, a tactic carried out consciously, or perhaps unconsciously, by an anonymous West Coast group known as OLAASM — Occupy Los Angeles Anti Social Media. Provoke the movement — or front groups acting in the name of the movement — to carry out actions such as vandalism and physical confrontations with the police that alienate the wider populace from the insurgency. Invent atrocities and repugnant acts supposedly carried out by the movement and plant these stories in the media. Finally, offer up a political alternative. In the war in El Salvador it was Jose Napoleon Duarte. For the Occupy movement it is someone like Van Jones. And use this “reformist” to co-opt the language of the movement and promise to promote the movement’s core aims through the electoral process.

Counterinsurgency campaigns, although they involve arms and weapons, are primarily about, in the old cliché, hearts and minds. And the tactics employed by our intelligence operatives abroad are not dissimilar to those employed by our intelligence operatives at home. These operatives are, in fact, often the same people. The state has expended external resources to break the movement. It is reasonable to assume it has expended internal resources to break the movement.

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