From the Huffington Post, It seems the bailout recepients are using our money to make sure that the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is defeated in congress. The bill, according to Wikipedia, “is legislation in the United States which aims to “amend the National Labor Relations Act to establish an easier system to enable employees to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to provide for mandatory injunctions for unfair labor practices during organizing efforts, and for other purposes.” So the bailout recepients are using corporate bailout money to bust unions? Really?
Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community’s top legislative priority.
Participants on the October 17 call — including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG — were urged to persuade their clients to send “large contributions” to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.
Bernie Marcus, the charismatic co-founder of Home Depot, led the call along with Rick Berman, an aggressive EFCA opponent and founder of the Center for Union Facts. Over the course of an hour, the two framed the legislation as an existential threat to American capitalism, or worse.
“This is the demise of a civilization,” said Marcus. “This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I’m watching this happen and I don’t believe it.”
This is big stuff. It also shows how more interested people are going to be now in how the bailout money is used, and how these companies are operating. Watching 30-50% of their 401K dissapear into these companies coffers will make people a lot more interested in how the money is made and lost from now on I suspect.
The thought of all that money we will be paying for in taxes and lost services, and the recipients actively plotting against the very employees that have paid to keep them in business, is mind boggling. I guess there is no market on hubris.
I saw this amazing documentary the other day, and was blown away.
Occupation 101 is a frighteningly unbiased view of the conflict in the Middle East as seen from the eyes of outside observers from the Red Cross, the U.N. and other groups.
What the Israeli’s have actully been doing to the Palestinians for over a hundred years is far different than what we see on television here in the United States. What we have been told is a conflict thousands of years old, is actually a brutally violent military occupation.
Thousands of years? The conflict started in the early 1900’s when early Zionists laid claim to, bulldozed, and built new towns on Arab land based on centuries old religious based claims.
As one friend pointed out, 90 minutes is a big commitment for a video. Watch the first 15 or 20 minutes and see if the rest is worth it. I think it is.
I wrote a post a few months ago on the propaganda used to sell the Iraq war to the public. I had watched a great video called “War Made Easy”, and found the tools used to sell us the war fascinating. The film details how selling the war to the American public was accomplished by organized, professional people, similarly to an advertising or public relations campaign. Make no mistake about it, the selling of the war on Iraq was professional propaganda.
Recently, former Bush administration White House press secretary Scott McClellan blasted his former employers in his new book. One of his biggest statements was regarding the propaganda the White House used to get us into Iraq. The intertubes are abuzz with this treachery by the former insider. Raw Story details some of the more sordid revelations and propaganda was one of the biggest tools of the administration, as shown in this post on the Huffington Post:
McClellan says Bush’s main reason for war always was “an ambitious and idealistic post-9/11 vision of transforming the Middle East through the spread of freedom.” But Bush and his advisers made “a marketing choice” to downplay this rationale in favor of one focused on increasingly trumped-up portrayals of the threat posed by the weapons of mass destruction.
During the “political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people,” Bush and his team tried to make the “WMD threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable than they were.” Something else was downplayed as well, McClellan says: any discussion of “the possible unpleasant consequences of war _ casualties, economic effects, geopolitical risks, diplomatic repercussions.”
In Bush’s second term, as news from Iraq grew worse, McClellan says the president was “insulated from the reality of events on the ground and consequently began falling into the trap of believing his own spin.”
All of this was a “serious strategic blunder” that sent Bush’s presidency “terribly off course.”
“The Iraq war was not necessary,” McClellan concludes.
McClellan sounds like the first rat off of a rapidly sinking ship. I was particularly interested in the Orwellian doublespeak-like phrase “through the spread of freedom”. In his book “1984″, Orwell gave us the three bold statements of the government. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” But the question that we always talked about in English class was – for who? Whose peace? Whose slavery? Whose ignorance? And most importantly, whose strength? Spreading freedom sounds a lot like that same kind of doublespeak, and to whose strength was it really playing?
We were all fooled into thinking that the war in Iraq was necessary. In 2002 we were still hurting from the attacks of 9/11 and collectively we wanted to return that hurt, naturally. But now we know the truth, and how we, congress, and the world were sold a war nobody needed, except the people who stood to make money from it.
As we head into a critical election, with the Democrats doing their best not to implode, and the Republicans hoping to stay the course, we must be diligent in separating truth from fiction, propaganda from news, and good from evil. Listen for the drumbeats of war, the next Pearl Harbor, the next reason for attacking Iran. Pay attention to the truth, the reality behind the glossy campaigns, the Fox News headlines. Is the next war in the best interest of the United States, or just a few select people that stand to become richer?
In the things to notice department, note the book makes claims that that Bush outed Valerie Plame, repeats the old news that Bush knew there were no WMD’s in Iraq before invading, and a host of other startling revelations. Here’s what McClellan says about Bush’s purported cocaine use in the 80’s:
“‘The media won’t let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,’ I heard Bush say. ‘You know, the truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don’t remember.’”
“I remember thinking to myself, How can that be?” McClellan wrote. “How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine? It didn’t make a lot of sense.”
Bush, according to McClellan, “isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie.”
“So I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine. It’s the first time when I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true,” McClellan wrote. “And his reason for doing so is fairly obvious — political convenience.”
Maybe we’ll all be lucky and Bush and company will leave without getting to bomb Iran. But remember, John McCain has a plan to bomb Iran too, and he even likes to sing about it.
We had to put our 13 year old dalmatian Madison, to sleep yesterday. She was a great dog, living almost 13 years and never once growling. Her sweetness defined her. Neighbor’s kids would stop in the summer to visit her at the fence, petting her nose through the gaps in the wood. She was a minor celebrity.
I missed her parts in my morning routine many times today. She didn’t come bug me for her breakfast, or do her happy food dance this morning when the kibble was finally delivered to the bowl. I haven’t needed an alarm clock for as long as I have lived in this house because she has woken me up almost every day to go out.
One thing definitely missing is her footsteps on the hardwood floors, her “high heels” clicking as her nails tapped on the hard surface. The silence is so strange.
I was compelled to throw her bed out quickly last night because it looked so sad sitting there empty, knowing full well she wasn’t coming back to lie in it again.
Thank you Madison, for being such a good friend. Thanks for always being there, for always wagging your tail, and for being part of our family. You will be missed. Goodbye girl. I love you.
I have been reading a lot lately about the future of the suburbs. Our family lives in the suburbs, albeit in the first ring, only a mile or so from the city line. We are a mile and a half from the subway and could ride bikes downtown if necessary. Not all of the suburbs are so lucky.
Most of the suburbs here are 10 or more miles from downtown and many of these large suburbs here are full of empty big box stores, and large vacant parcels of commercial real estate. Western New York has a rich history in failed shopping malls too – The Seneca Mall, The Thruway Mall, McKinley Mall (soon), the list is long.
This great video shows how current suburban landscapes are unsustainable, ugly, and doomed to fail. It also shows a terrific plan for reuse of the land, complete with rebuilt, natural village and city centers.
