brainiac conspiracy

Brainwashing

I know it's kind of a "loaded" term with a lot of pejorative implications, but something very much like it does happen to some people when they're exposed to too much wingnut rhetoric. I know this because it happened (to a lesser extent) to my own father, too. He was in his younger days a New Deal Democrat, and in his old age he became a cranky reactionary who was prone to send out easily debunked e-mail messages about the horrors of government to everyone he knew. Ironic since the stepfather who raised him spent his entire career working for the Federal government! I don't fully understand how the transformation happens, or why it only affects certain people---I mean, I can listen to Beck and Hannity for hours and think nothing besides, "Who would believe any of this nonsense?"---but it does happen, and considering that this 'washing has affected roughly a quarter of the voting-age population, it doesn't bode well for the future of the Republic. At least that's how it seems from here.

---Baron V

Vo-Tech Education

I'm old enough to remember when the public-school curriculum here in the Marxist dystopia included vocational training: Drafting, wood shop, metal shop, auto shop, agriculture, etc. It started in middle school (where it was mandatory for boys), and continued through high school, where you could take the courses as electives. My own favorite of these was print shop, where we used to print the school newspaper, and it probably helps to explain---a little---how I ended up working the dead-tree business. I realize that public-school students can never have nice things anymore because Michelle Rhee and her band of privatizing grifters, but it might not be bad idea if policymakers would reconsider. Shop class-related program activities have proven effective elsewhere---they might work here again, too.

---Baron V

Light Blogging Day

Went to the downtown library to return a book. Forgot it was a holiday. So, two hours shot to hell, basically. Now it's off to the market to buy a fat pig. Or something.

---Baron V

Reclaiming The Dream

It may be true that American labor doesn't wield as much clout as it did, say, forty years ago, and that a broader-based organizational effort will be needed in the coming (hopelessly nonviolent) class war. But unions do provide the kind of infrastructure that's going to be essential for mass mobilizations and general strikes: Meeting halls, phone banks, strike funds, food banks, etc. Personally, I'm a little disappointed that the major union bosses haven't already held a summit to discuss the possibility of this, but I still think unions will need to be a major player if we're ever to raise people's class-consciousness to the point where they're ready to take a week, or more, off work to man the barricades.

(Via.)

---Baron V

Pay 'Em to Play 'Em

Good on them. And good on the labor board, too. A little more activism like this would be nice to see.

Granted, the horrible persons at the NCAA can, and likely will, litigate this for years, and given the political orientation of the federal judiciary, there's a chance that a player's union won't happen, if ever, for years. But it is good to stand on principle all the same. Team Democrat should try it more often.

---Baron V

The High Cost of Higher Education

If only we knew why it's so expensive. If only we knew indeed.

---Baron V

There Used to be Labor Laws in This Country

I wonder whatever became of them:

Nissan, the first of many foreign automakers to set up shop in Tennessee, is leading a trend. Companies from Amazon to Asurion to Dell have outsourced their warehouses and call centers to the hundreds of staffing agencies that have cropped up in the region. Tennessee went from having 51,867 temporary workers in 2009 to 80,990 in 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics---while median wages have stayed flat. That accounts for nearly all of Tennessee's job growth since the recession, and makes up 3.61 percent of all jobs in the state, second only to South Carolina. In Tennessee's burgeoning manufacturing industry, it's even higher, going from 15 percent of all jobs in 2002 to 26 percent in 2012.

In a way, it's the workers' own damn fault since they've had the opportunity to unionize, and foolishly turned it down. But it reminds us, too, why our current system of capitalism is ultimately doomed to collapse: you keep impoverishing people, sooner or later you're going to run out of customers who can afford to buy your products. Henry Ford understood this. Why doesn't Nissan?

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Edmund G. Brown, Jr.

In-home health-caretakers have some of the toughest jobs and the lowest pay, and due to the nature of their work, they can't always just punch the clock at 5:00 and abandon their charges for the night. Sometimes they need to work overtime---sometimes, even around the clock---and they deserve to be paid for it. Taxes can be raised on rich people to pay for it. Otherwise, you're either screwing low-wage workers, or needlessly endangering the lives of the elderly, both of which are, frankly, evil.

---Baron V

Today's Real Worst Person

City of Long Beach, you are hereby exonerated because

City of Detroit retirees will face sizable cuts to their monthly pension checks in the future, as the city works its way out of bankruptcy, according to a first proposal from Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr.

• Detroit city retirees in the general retirement system will face up to a 34% cut to monthly pensions. So if someone has a $2,500 a month pension, it’s possible such a retiree could lose $850 a month.

• Police and fire retirees face smaller cuts of up to a 10% cut, according to the proposed bankruptcy blueprint filed Friday morning. On a $2,500 a month pension, the possible hit on a monthly pension for retirees would be $250.

• The plan also eliminates cost of living adjustments for pensions in the future.

Of course, this is in complete violation of Michigan law, and if we lived in a nation that was governed by caring and thoughtful people, we'd accept the premise that $1,100 a month is simply not enough to live on---not even in a place like Detroit! But we aren't governed by caring and thoughtful people, so the greedy little moochers will need to be taught another lesson in fiscal probity.

---Baron V

No One To Blame But Themselves

Southerners. They're beyond hope.

I mean, Volkswagen management had all but given the union its blessing, and the idiot workers still voted it down. How dumb-as-a-rock can you possibly be?

---Baron V

If Congress Won't Act, He Will

On January 19, 2017, apparently.

One thing that's been baffling about this administration has been the lack of urgency it has often shown for getting its people embedded in the bureaucracy. Sure, the crazy caucus wielded a filibuster threat for a couple of years, but there were sufficient votes to confirm appointments for the first two years, and Team Democrat only needs 50 Senators plus the Vice-President to confirm appointments now. This is a pretty important responsibility since the good, or the evil, that your civil servants do often outlives your administration, and reverberates across the next generation. Just look at the federal judiciary.

---Baron V

Random Thought

If we can build autonomous cars---and it is going to happen eventually, make no mistake---why don't we consider building autonomous aircraft? If anything, it should be easier to build a self-flying plane since most commercial airliners that I'm aware of already have some sort of auto-pilot technology plumbed into their electronics. And because robots can perform manual tasks much more efficiently than any human can, it might cut down on certain types of pilot error. We build flying robots to bomb people---why not build them to help people instead? Just a thought.

---Baron V

Term Limits

It bears repeating that they were a Republican idea in the first place so Americans could never again elect the same Democrat to the Presidency four times in a row. Besides being vindictive and profoundly antidemocratic, like most Republican ideas, it was---and still is---a spectacularly bad idea that transforms the executive power of the Presidency into an academic exercise the day after a President is re-elected. In other words, the lame-duck period doesn't begin the year before the President leaves office, it starts the minute he's a certified two-termer. There's a reason why so little gets done in second terms anymore---if you're the opposition party in Congress, or a foreign head of state, what incentive do you have to make any deal with a President who you know will be gone four years from now, and someone who may be more to your liking is holding the office?

All I can say is, our state government in Sacramento has been subject to terms limits for the last 25 years, and it's much more ineffectual than it used to be when guys like Jesse Unruh and Willie Brown ran the place. No surprise, really: by the time legislators learn how to perform their jobs well, they have to leave. What workplace in America would work efficiently this way?

---Baron V

He'll Be Missed

Maddening as Team Democrat has been to many of us on the left, one thing I've never had any reason to complain about is my own personal Congressperson, who hails from a time when Democrats actually cared about labor and the environment, and actually threatened to impeach a President for breaking the law instead of imploring us to look forward, never back. But that was then and this is now, so those of us in the district will probably end up being represented by another neoliberal corporatist next year.

---Baron V

Give Us Your Money

Or the city gets it:

A key contributor to the report was Austin Beutner, a commission member who served as Villaraigosa's "jobs czar" at City Hall. Some of the commission's members have been doing business at City Hall for years---and had interests that made their way into the 2020 report.

Part of the report criticizes city leaders for taking eight years to approve a rail yard backed by Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway---a company that was represented by [commission chairman Mickey] Kantor, a corporate lawyer. "Competitive ports have all made major improvements, while Los Angeles bent to the will of special interest groups and NIMBYism," said the report [...]

Another passage hit city leaders for taking three years to approve a $1-billion development plan sought by USC. "Not a sensible way to treat the city's largest private employer," the report states.

Thomas Sayles, USC's senior vice president, serves on the 2020 commission.

The report also warned that the city is "dramatically underinvesting" in the harbor, the airport, and the Department of Water and Power. One of the panel's members is Brian D'Arcy, who heads the DWP's powerful employee union. Sayles served on the DWP commission until last year. And Beutner ran the DWP for nearly a year.

Hey, these things might be all true, for all I know. Maybe we are underinvesting in infrastructure, and maybe it would be a good idea to give more of our money to some railroad, who knows? But the findings of any "bipartisan" panel that's headed by a career fixer like Mickey Kantor deserve to be treated to a little scrutiny because, you know, grifters gonna grift unless somebody stops them.

Also too, a city in decline.

---Baron V

It's All About Policy

There's no reason why millions of skilled laborers should be stuck in jobs that pay abysmal wages, with no benefits, no health care, no vacations, no paid time off, etc. But this is, in fact, the case in this country, and it's not happening because of the invisible hand of market forces but because government allows business to routinely abuse its workforce. There are a number of simple and straightforward policy fixes that could address this problem. Pity we didn't enact them into law when we had the votes.

Then again, for these things to have happened, we would need to have a political party that actually cared about labor. We used to have such a party. Where did it go?

---Baron V

Call it Theft

It's all well and good for those of us in the liberal wonkosphere to talk about income inequality as a failed neoliberal policy experiment, and while it's undoubtedly true, it's a lousy way to make the case to the general public. It's a fault too many of us on the left have, i.e., that if we discuss causes and effects using rational discourse, voters will behave rationally and vote in their own best interests. Unfortunately, our actual lived experience shows that this simply isn't the case; that as many people---if not many more!---vote with their emotions as with their intellect. Team Republican understands this a lot better than our side does, and that's usually how they win elections. That's how they ended up with the crazy Congress: Because they gauged---quite accurately---the national mood at the time, and they channeled the anger and rage that people were feeling over the banks and the bailouts, and the fear and despair over losing their jobs, into voting irrationally against their own best interests. I'm not saying that our side needs to adopt their strategy, i.e., lying to voters, but we could learn something from their tactics. So instead of using antiseptic language like "income inequality" or "neoliberal economics," we should consider making arguments that appeal to people's hearts, not their heads. How to proceed? Try this:

1. We need to raise the minimum wage to retrieve the billions of dollars your employers steal from you each year;
2. No one should go hungry or homeless in the wealthiest nation on the planet, and that's why a job should be a right, not a privilege;
3. Fifteen grand a year is not enough to live on, and that's why we need to increase Social Security;
4. Crime is crime, no matter who commits it, and that's why crooked banks need to be shut down, and the homes they stole returned to their rightful owners;
5. Education should also be a right, and that's why public education should be free from pre-K to grad school;
6. We have the wherewithal to accomplish all of these things. We simply need to revise the tax code so everyone is subject to progressive taxation, not just middle-class Americans.

Yes, I know that these are all "populist" arguments, and that only Republicans are ever allowed to make populist arguments in official Washington, but our side really should give it a whack sometime. A lot of people in this country are still pissed off and angry about the damage that banksterism and crony capitalism has inflicted on them. We just need to give them some reasons to vote for us.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Jay Inslee:

"I'm very pleased that the best place in the world to build jet airliners for decades will continue for decades to come," said Governor Jay Inslee in a brief media conference in the state capital Olympia. "This has been a long road, and I respect everyone who has worked on it, but now's the time to come together, go build this airplane. I'm happy about that."

We may as well drop the pretense that Team Democrat actually gives a shit about organized labor anymore. Sure, some local officials may still champion their cause, but at the state/national level, labor is just another asset class to be mined for votes, and otherwise to be ignored. Giving in to the demands of extortionists may help Jay Inslee's fund-raising efforts in the next election cycle, but it only encourages further extortion down the road.

---Baron V

No, Not Everything is a Partisan War of Ideas

But in the Village, opinions forever differ:

When it comes to increasing partisanship in the United States, it seems no issue is immune. And that includes evolution.

A new Pew Research Center poll shows a widening political gap over theories about how humans came to be, with Republicans growing increasingly skeptical about the idea that humans evolved over time.

It's an insult to our intelligence to frame the question about evolution---more accurately, Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection---in terms of what we "believe" about it. Darwin's theory doesn't rely on faith, or "belief", to be confirmed. It relies on scientific evidence, or "facts" that can be observed. So in other words, we either know Darwin is correct, or we don't. What we believe is irrelevant. As it turns out, science has confirmed the general outline of Darwin's theory many times over, and if we practiced honest journalism in this country, the headline of this article would read: "Republicans' Grip on Reality Grows More Tenuous." But we don't value honest journalism in this country because if we did, we wouldn't be entertaining the notion that willful ignorance is just another type of informed opinion:

You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist"---out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest.

---Baron V

Speeches About Income Inequality Are Awesome

Grand Bargains that exacerbate income inequality, less so.

There is apparently no conservative nostrum so odious that it can't be co-opted by Democrats in the name of "fiscal responsibility" to please the Fix The Debt hucksters of official Washington. The fact remains, though, that if we were governed by people who truly understood the world the rest of us live in, they would be debating over the best ways to put more money in our pockets---like increasing Social Security, and food stamps, and unemployment insurance, and pensions, too!---not imposing more austerity on us. But obviously, we aren't governed by people like that.

---Baron V