Editorial: Bust the Privatizers

Attorney General Eric Holder is on the right track with his order for federal prosecutors to stop seeking draconian sentences on run-of-the-mill drug cases, but efforts in Congress to permanently relax the sentencing rules may run up against the special interests of businessmen who see profits in prisons.

The federal mandatory sentencing laws were passed in 1986 following a media and political frenzy around crack cocaine, which is a derivative of powder cocaine, but the new laws made the penalties for possession and distribution of crack much harsher than powder, and 80% of the people charged with crack cocaine offenses were African Americans, while powder cocaine users were more likely to be white or Latino.

Judges complained that they were forced by the sentencing guidelines to send non-violent offenders to prison for five or 10 years or even life without parole if they are repeat offenders. The number of federal inmates has grown tenfold since 1980 and now surpasses 218,000. (That’s about 10% of the 2.2 million prisoners in the US, most of whom are held in state prisons or county jails)

A 2010 law mitigated the racial disparity between crack and cocaine sentences but many remain imprisoned under the old law. A new bill would make the change retroactive and allow early release of low-level offenders least likely to re-offend.

The private prison industry now has over 200,000 inmates behind their bars as a result of contracts with the federal government and many states. That’s up from 11,000 private corrections beds in 1990. The growth in private prisons provides economic incentives to expand imprisonment, particularly in job-starved rural areas. Looking to increase their share of the estimated $70 billion corrections “market,” Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) has floated a proposal to prison officials in 48 states, offering to buy and manage public prisons at a substantial cost savings to the states. In exchange, the states would agree to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years.

For a state concerned with budget issues, “renting” prison cells rather than having to allocate massive sums to build new prisons may be an attractive feature. But there is little evidence that the private prisons really offer savings. Private prisons can cut costs by employing non-union guards at lower pay, with less training and fewer benefits than their public counterparts, but private prisons also generally take minimum- or medium-security prisoners, leaving more high-risk prisoners to the state-run facilities.

Roger Werholtz, former Kansas secretary of corrections, told USA Today some states may be tempted by the “quick infusion of cash,” but he would recommend against such a deal. “My concern would be that our state would be obligated to maintain these (occupancy) rates and subtle pressure would be applied to make sentencing laws more severe with a clear intent to drive up the population,” Werholtz said.

As prison growth has slowed in recent years, the private prison industry is increasingly looking to immigration detention as a source of enhanced profits. In Arizona, for example, the notorious anti-immigration legislation passed in 2010 was drafted in large part though the efforts of private prison companies working in concert with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Jim Hightower notes on page 3 that now we need to worry about the Border-Industrial Complex lobby that will be promoting the $46 billion stuffed into the immigration reform bill to militarize the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. Once the privateers get a hook into the border war profits, we’ll never see the end of it.

When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney invaded Iraq, the US government ended up sending more private contractors than actual troops. In 2007, the US had 160,000 troops in Iraq, supported by more than 180,000 civilians, including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis.

The Department of Defense spent at least $138 billion on private contractors for services rendered during the Iraq war, and the biggest windfall went to Houston-based KBR Inc., Dick Cheney’s old firm, which got $39.5 billion in Iraq-related contracts over the past decade.

As Jonathan Turley said, “For $40 billion, a single company may be willing to do a lot to keep a war alive. In the very least, it may not be eager to see it end.”

Corruption also ballooned with the expansion of private contractors. According to the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, corruption by defense contractors as of 2011 was at least $31 billion and maybe as high as $60 billion.

If you include the money spent on defense contractors outside war zones, the Department of Defense spent $174 billion on contractors in fiscal 2012, the General Accounting Office reported in May. And KBR, which got $2.27 billion in defense contracts in 2011 but only $978.9 million in 2012, is a piker compared with Lockheed Martin, which got $37 billion in US government contracts in 2012, and Boeing, which got $29.4 billion.

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama railed against no-bid contracting, accusing private contractors of wasting taxpayer dollars. He promised to rein in such spending. The following year, President Obama ordered a broad overhaul of government contracting, including limits to sole-source and non-competitive contracting. But data reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity in 2010 showed that defense dollars flowing into non-competitive contracts had almost tripled since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. According to an analysis the Center’s iWatch News, the value of Pentagon contracts awarded without competition topped $140 billion in 2010, up from $50 billion in 2001.

The National Security Agency also has compromised its operations with overuse of private contractors. Of 4.9 million people with clearance to “confidential and secret” government information, 1.1 million, or 21% work for outside contractors. Until a few weeks ago that included Edward Snowden, an information analyst for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest and most trusted NSA contractors with 25,000 employees. It is believed that 70% of the NSA’s estimated budget of $8 billion — or $6 billion — goes to hundreds of companies. That is a big incentive for businessmen to think of new ways to snoop on US citizens and/or their foreign correspondents.

Keep Fannie and Freddie

Democrats should be wary of joining Republican efforts to reform the mortgage business by doing away with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie Mae — the Federal National Mortgage Association — was created in 1938 as a New Deal agency to providing local banks with federal money to finance home mortgages and revive the housing industry. In 1968, Fannie Mae was converted to a privately held corporation and in 1970, Freddie Mac — the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. — was created to expand the secondary market for mortgages. It succeeded until Freddie jumped into the subprime market in 2006.

When the housing bubble collapsed in 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac owned or guaranteed half of all home mortgages in the US. But they didn’t originate the bad loans. Since then, they have sustained the housing market and they have bought more than 90% of the mortgages issued since the onset of the crisis.

“Given that both are now covering their costs and making profits, which are arguably even too large, it’s difficult to see what the problem is. But President Obama wants to wind down them down and replace them with a new and ostensibly improved public-private system,” Dean Baker recently noted.

It appears that in the new system, private banks such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America will again issue mortgage-backed securities. But this time the securities will be carefully regulated (really!) and will carry an explicit government guarantee for at least part of the value of the securities.

Fannie and Freddie should continue to operate as government-sponsored agencies to promote home ownership. We can’t trust the sharks on Wall Street to do that job. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2013

---

Populist.com
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us

---

Copyright © 2013 The Progressive Populist
PO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652

Selections from the September 1, 2013 issue

COVER/James Cersonsky
Labor movement emerges in Wisconsin

EDITORIAL
Bust the privatizers; Keep Fannie & Freddie

JIM HIGHTOWER
Forget student loans — make higher ed free; Here comes the border-industrial complex; Get radio-active; Corporate greed is making us sick; Monsanto’s Wizard of Oz website

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Pesticides will kill the planet

DISPATCHES
Green Tea Coalition drives wedge between teas, funders;
Obama leads attack on health care saboteurs;
Texas has greatest need for health expansion, but R’s aren’t interested;
House moves to dismantle Postal Service;
NSA vets say, yes, NSA does collect domestic calls;
DEA also uses domestic spying;
White House insists NSA surveillance review will be independent;
Repealing sequester would create 900,000 jobs;
Crowded field for dumbest climate-change denier in Congress:
Republicans back bill banning worker protection;
Texas brags about gerrymander to benefit Republicans;
Texas tragedy: Ample oil, no water ...

BILL JOHNSTON
Labor must regain its cause

DON ROLLINS
The commies and Jackie Robinson

HAL CROWTHER
Moral Mondays: Democracy on trial

WENONAH HAUTER
Trade deals threaten food safety

MARK ANDERSON
Beware bipartisan move on trade, tax reform

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Prospecting in the healthcare minefield

SAM URETSKY
The duel of the economic titans

WAYNE O’LEARY
Dysfunctional deficit hawks

JOHN BUELL
Bankrupting Detroit

BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Critical thinking is at risk

ROB PATTERSON
Documenting aliens of the farthest-out kind

POPULIST PICKS
Tim Buckley; Behind Candelabra; Ed Hardy

and more ...

Buddy Could You Spare Some Food Stamps?

Graphic by Kevin Kreneck

Controlling the electorate in Egypt and the United States

By Marc Jampole

The powers that be in Egypt seem to have the same view of democracy as those in the United States have: it’s fine as long as we get our way. 

In the United States, they pass laws that make it harder for people to vote in hopes of offloading minorities, the poor and students from voter rolls to give future elections to right-wing conservatives.  In Egypt they are taking a more violent approach, first with a coup d’état that no one wants to call a coup d’état, and then violently uprooting thousands of protesters, leading to the deaths of 525 and counting.  The only coup d’état we’ve had in the United States was in 2000, when the Supreme Court used dubious law to declare George Bush (the Younger) the winner even though he lost the popular vote by millions and probably also lost the electoral college before voter manipulation.

Of course in the bad old days of southern overt resistance to civil rights, those who wished to limit voting to Caucasians often resorted to violence.  We’ve come a long way, baby!

All facetiousness aside, the United States is looking pretty foolish today for not having immediately cut all aid to Egypt when the military overturned the democratically elected government of the Muslim Brotherhood.  There was certainly a lot of incompetence displayed by the Brotherhood in running the country, but if incompetence was a justifiable excuse for overthrowing a legally elected government, then we would have endured a number of coups in the United States over the years, including to overthrow Bush II.

Our attitude towards democracy overseas has always been ambivalent, because despite the flowery language about democracy our leaders have spouted from Wilson to Obama, the main concern of American foreign policy has always been to protect the interests of large American companies doing business abroad, secure a cheap source of raw materials, specifically oil, and open markets for American goods, including huge supplies of weapons. Democracy is fine—as long as the democratically-elected government supports those goals.

The Egyptian military is dependent on U.S. aid, as is the Egyptian economy, which was invoked as a reason for the coup. Would the generals have produced a replay of Tiananmen Square if we had withheld all aid until new elections had occurred?

More to the point, why aren’t we halting aid now? The pleas of President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry for an end to violence on both sides sound hollow in the wake of the slaughter of the protesters. Of course, democracy plays little if no part in the equation for U.S. foreign policy makers. It’s a beautiful word we like to throw around, but since we became actively involved in world affairs sometime at the end of the 19th century, we’ve been more concerned with creating stable governments. Military governments are certainly more stable than democracies.  

It’s time to freeze all aid to Egypt and organize our allies to put pressure on the Egyptian government for immediate elections.

Neoteny suggest we’d be better off if we didn’t take our childhood habits into adulthood

By Marc Jampole

Everywhere we turn nowadays we see mass culture infantilizing adults.

Here are some other examples of infantilization of American adults, by which I mean adults in late 20th century and early 21st century America behaving like children and enjoying the entertainments of their childhood:

• Disney’s EPCOT Center, a theme park for adults, opened in 1982 and since then the growth in popularity of all theme parks among adults has skyrocketed.  It is absolutely amazing how many adults now go to theme parks for vacation.
• Around the mid-70s, there began a wave of children’s movies for adults, starting with the “Star Wars” and the Indiana Jones series.  Other children’s movies for adults are the movie versions of situation comedies for children such as “The Brady Bunch.” (But I’m not talking about “The Simpsons,” which like “Gulliver’s Travels” and “Huckleberry Finn,” is an adult entertainment that children can also enjoy.)
• The hundreds of computer games for adults.
• Glorified fast-food chains serving alcohol with video and other games for adults, such as Dave & Busters.

Instead of graduating to something more sophisticated, adults seem to be keeping their childhood and childish entertainments and hobbies, such as video games, comic books and amusement parks. Mass media is spewing out ever more juvenile entertainment targeted for adults such as the recent wave of superhero movies. Adults are showing a much greater interest in juvenilia such as the Harry Potter and the Hunger Games novels. Campus recruiters compare their campuses to Harry Potter’s imaginary school.  Advertisers are also appealing to the child within all of us, as we can see from a recent Oreo Cookie commercial with Sesame Street graphics that appeared in the New York Times, a publication read almost exclusively by adults.

I would submit that from the hellish Little League parent to the helicopter parent, the greater intrusion of parents into the lives of their children nowadays is a related phenomenon—in a sense instead of adult pursuits, many parents relive their childhoods through their children.

One of the most subtle forms of infantilization of Americans is the “buy now, pay later” mentality that makes people use high-interest credit cards or take loans on their houses to buy something now instead of saving up the money and not having to pay interest later.  Let’s amend the phrase and call it what it really is: “buy now and pay more later” because of what are sometimes exorbitant interest charges.

Infants and children can’t wait.  One of the signs of adulthood is being able to delay gratification.  Buy now, pay more later is about instant gratification.  It’s about behaving just like a child.

I kept thinking about the infantilization of American adults while recently reading a popular book of natural history (AKA evolution) recently, titled Last Ape Standing by journalist Chip Walter. Walter uses the most recent scientific discoveries to trace the rise and fall of the 26 other versions of the human species who inhabited the Earth from about 7 million to about 100,000-10,000 years ago. Why did our species make it and the other 26, including the Neanderthals, did not?

Walter attributes the success of human beings to the fact that our birth canal is so small that we do not come out fully formed, so that we keep growing after birth long after any other species. This concept of slowing down development is called neoteny and it leads to the retention of juvenile characteristics. That’s why, for example, compared to apes and the 26 other human species, we have flatter, broader faces, a larger brain, hairless bodies and face, thin skull bones, legs longer than arms and larger eyes. These are juvenile or prenatal traits in our near relatives, but we retain them into adulthood.

In fact, humans are so undeveloped at birth that they are dependent on their parents far longer than any other species, a force that many believe naturally leads to the formation of societies of humans.

According to Walter, the big payoff of neoteny and the big key to the development of humans is, of course, the bigger brain. Humans are able to keep learning new things—new languages, games, bodies of knowledge—until pretty much the day they die. I’ve read elsewhere that we now recognize that the brain of male human beings keeps growing into his twenties.

On a superficial basis, one could claim that the concept of neoteny demonstrates that adult infantilization is a good thing for our species. After all, it’s retaining our youthfulness that gave us an advantage over our 26 closest competitors. 

But quite the contrary—neoteny explains why infantilization is a dangerous trend that threatens our survival. Neoteny offers the possibility of continued learning and continued expansion, constant adaptation to changing conditions. Infantilization means keeping the predilections of childhood. Staying the same is the very opposite of growth. It shows a rigidity of thought process that can be quite dangerous when faced with new and very complex dangers such as global warming and resource shortages. 

Infantilization thus takes away the edge that neoteny has given to human beings, because it sets our thought processes in stone at a young age. The infantilized adult is the adult stuck in his or her own past, the adult who has ceased to learn, and having ceased to learn, has less flexibility of mind and thought. Easier to manipulate, to be sure, easier to convince of the need to buy something. But much less adaptable to change.

Thumbs up to Lavabit, Silent Circle for closing, not cooperating with NSA; down to Pres. for wimping out

By Marc Jampole

Two new American heroes have emerged in the fight for civil liberties and they’re both companies that do the same thing. The managements of Lavabit and Silent Circle, two secure email services, have decided to close their respective firms rather than hand over the emails of their users to the National Security Agency (NSA).

The owner of Lavabit, Ladar Levison, made a particularly poignant statement:

“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on — the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise.”

Bravo to all involved with both companies, who have put their livelihoods on the line to avoid participating in an evil activity—mass spying on the entirety of a nation.

Meanwhile, President Obama has been wimping out. He says that he wants to form a commission to consider scaling back the Patriot Act, yet he continues to have the NSA collect and analyze the personal telephone data of hundreds of millions of Americans.

He expresses concern for the use of drones, but keeps using them.  Why can’t he just say, No!

Just because the executive branch of government has the right to do something, doesn’t mean it has to do it. The Patriot Act does not order the NSA to spy on all Americans; it merely gives it the legal right to do so.

All the President has to do is tell the NSA to stop spying and tell the military to stop using drones. But he won’t do it.

Instead he closes more than a dozen diplomatic posts and intensifies the droning of Yemen based on the so-called intelligence the NSA culled from its vast information sifting machine.  But what was supposed to be a justification for all this spying turned out to be a petard upon which Al Qaeda hoisted the President, claiming that its campaign of terror was succeeding in its mission to terrorize the United States—we were certainly shivering in terror by closing those embassy offices!

Obama seems to be losing his moral compass when it comes to security the same way that all our Presidents since Truman seem to have done, except Ronald Reagan and Bush II. Under the sway of neo-Con and Nativist thinking, Reagan and especially Bush II fully embraced the idea of curtailing civil liberties and spying on citizens as part of their central political agenda from the very beginning.  It’s sad to see Barack Obama continue our drift to a police state.

I have friends in important places. Citizens.

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes:

            It’s been a long time since I’ve sent out a blog, but I’ve been a little heartbroken lately. Today, however, I’m feeling stronger.

I should be ecstatically happy. The weather’s delightful, the family’s all fine, the critters are healthy as ever. None of the neighbors are sick and one of my best friends, who thought she might have to move, is staying.

            But the grapevines planted by Holly and DeLisa… and the redbud tree by the house, where Lushen the farm kid climbed when he was tiny… and that crappy maple that’s always sending seeds into the lettuce beds… they’re dying.

            The culprit is 2,4D. Sprayed by a neighbor on his corn field to kill the weeds that he can’t kill with glyphosate. It’s killing them and I know I shouldn’t get attached to plants, they’re mortals, but aren’t we all?

            When we first noticed the damage, the strangely cupped leaves, then the withering and the onion-skin leaves that you can see through, and it came first on the grapevines, I went into denial. I had seen the spray trucks on the neighbor’s field but I’ve seen them before and nothing died.

So, I thought, maybe we’ve acquired a fungus? Maybe it’s a bug? We scoured the internet and our garden books for answers. We looked for bugs and found nothing. We sprayed with vinegar solution, which discourages fungi and molds but nothing changed.

Last week, we had a potluck supper sponsored by Slow Foods, and one of the guests snapped a few pictures of the vines and sent them to me. So now I had to follow up. Called the extension agent, but our local agronomist retired so the question was deferred to another county, one with an agent that doesn’t seem too interested. He left a message on the answering machine, a bored voice that he was calIing to answer “something about grapes…” 

Next, I sent the pictures to the state grape board and the damage was confirmed as “classic”.

Through this all, I’ve been depressed but weirdly astonished by the power of the universe. Why me? After all, I was onto the ironies of biotech from the beginning, fighting and writing about it all along. When so many weeds have become resistant to Roundup, I started blogging about it and about the dangers of Big Ag, who are my neighbors after all, moving to 2,4D. A clear and present danger.

But, yesterday, I found allies and everything changed.  At the farmers’ market, where we took a little surplus produce, I found other farmers who had the same issues. One of them gave me a sign that says, “Sensitive Crop. Don’t let your pesticide drift…” produced by the Missouri Department of Agriculture. It’s one of those yellow metal signs, like you see in a school zone, and it means the world to me.

Somebody “gets it.” And I have allies. And I’m feeling strong again. 

August 6 - the day that should live in infamy in U.S. history

By Marc Jampole

 

A sudden flash of light, followed by a gigantic ever-expanding mushroom cloud. Within minutes the explosion destroys virtually everything and everyone within a mile radius, including innocent children. A black rain of soot and oil descends on the region. Those who survive have severe burns and other injuries. A silent atmospheric poison leads to tens of thousands of deaths in the months and years ahead. In all, 140,000 people die. 

That’s a fairly sanitized version of what happened at Hiroshima, Japan, where the United States of America dropped an atomic bomb 68 years ago. Three days later, we dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki, another mid-sized Japanese city, killing 80,000 and injuring thousands more. These two instances mark the only atomic bombs that any nation has ever deployed.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that December 7, 1941 was a day that would live in infamy because that was the day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, killing 2,402 Americans and injuring another 1,282. About 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks.  We routinely memorialize these days, yet we keep relatively quiet about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are surely the two most savage and barbarous single actions in the history of mankind. (By contrast, the destruction of 5.7 million European Jews known as the Holocaust consisted of a series of thousands of actions).

Before writing this article, I did a quick check on Google News about the events of the day. Here’s what I found:

Hiroshima: 90,000 stories

Shark Week on the Discovery Channel: 203,000

Apple, the computer and smart phone company: 348,000

Jennifer Aniston, a popular celebrity: 1,930,000

Chris Brown, a popular entertainer: 17,600,000

In other words, the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was effectively ignored by the news media today. Sure, the Wall Street Journal mentioned it as a one-sentence “factoid” at the bottom of its “Morning Moneybeat” and The New York Times buried a short description of Hiroshima Day events in the New York area in its August 1 roundup of upcoming events in the “Arts” section.  Washington Post’s website had a photo gallery of remembrances taking place throughout the world. Compare this paltry coverage with what we get every year about Pearl Harbor Day and 9/11.

August 6 should be declared a permanent day of mourning in the United States, a day when as a society we ask for forgiveness for our sin of mass destruction. Every year, our president should attend a Hiroshima memorial and make a major speech about peace and disarmament.  The news media should give wide coverage to Hiroshima remembrances. Our summer camps should engage our children in some commemoration of this tragic day when America lost its ethical bearings. Religious figures should focus their sermons on the horrors of Hiroshima on the Sundays before August 6.

Moreover, I believe that we should posthumously impeach and convict the president who made the decision to drop the bomb—Harry S. Truman, who should go down in history as a villain as heinous in his own way as Hitler and Mao. Certainly over time Hitler and Mao caused more death and suffering than Truman, but no tyrant, king, dictator or elected leader has been responsible for more deaths in one day than Truman—and he did it twice! Don’t believe the nonsense that Truman saved more lives than were killed by the atomic attacks. Japan was already on its knees and ready to surrender before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was absolutely no reason to drop these terrifying weapons of mass destruction, except to frighten the Soviet Union. Evil does not reside in the mind, but in our actions. Truman was one of the most evil men in history, responsible for the two single most evil actions in the history of mankind.

Despite the fact that the media has practically ignored Hiroshima Day, I hope that my dear readers all take a little time today to feel shame at being citizens of the only nation ever to use the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

Electrical utilities lobby against solar energy instead of developing their own solar capabilities

By Marc Jampole

 

The New York Times article on electrical utilities lobbying against government support of solar powered electricity didn’t surprise me. It did disappoint me, though.

You would think that given what electrical utility executives know about shortages of fossil fuels and global warming, instead of trying to scuttle solar they would develop products and services for the solar market. It doesn’t have to just be a central power plant using solar energy to generate electricity and then sending it to homes and businesses along the grid. The utilities could also lease solar panels to houses and provide all maintenance, servicing, repair and insurance. There all kinds of ways the utilities can continue to line the pockets of the executives and shareholders in a solar and wind world. 

Didn’t any of these guys go to business school?  One of the first things that business students everywhere have to read is the classic Harvard Business Review article on the railroad industry. The thesis of the article is that the railroads declined because they forgot that they were really in the transportation business and they didn’t adapt to the changing conditions.

Did Microsoft or Apple roll up their tents when tablets and portable devices became big? No, they adapted. What did that typewriter and mainframe computer company IBM do when personal computers came on the market?

Electrical industry spokespersons complain that government assistance to people who convert to solar helps to shrink the market for their way of delivering electricity to homes, and that they will eventually have to raise prices. So what? The country has been paying too little for energy for too long, which is why we waste so much. (Of course it’s an illusion to think we have relatively low energy costs, because so much of what we pay for our oversized military is to protect the oil supply chain.) The rising price of fossil fuel generated electricity helps to make solar and wind more attractive. Isn’t that the point of the government support of solar?

Keep in mind that for many years into the future there will still be a market for electricity generated by fossil fuels.

For decades, government gave generous subsidies and tax breaks to electrical utilities, and they still do in the form of the annual rate approval systems and tax exempt bonds to back construction of new capacity.

It once made sense to provide government support for fossil fuels. But those days are long gone.  Now we as a society have a pressing need for government investment into developing and commercializing sources of electricity that depend on renewable resources. Biofuels seem less possible since the ethanol fiasco in which more energy has been consumed to convert corn to fuel than resulted from the conversion while food prices skyrocketed. Our best options are solar and wind.  

If utilities don’t invest in these alternatives, they will end up like makers of buggy whips. But that’s their problem, not the government’s or yours. Our problem is to secure a source of electricity in a world of resource shortages and extreme warming caused by carbon emission.

Editorial: Big Business Drives ‘Stand Your Ground’

Racial divisions exposed by the trial of George Zimmerman for killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida plays into the interests of the corporate sponsors of the Stand Your Ground laws. Paranoia over gun rights and the threat of hoodie-clad black youths running wild have helped the corporate fearmongers carve off a generation of former Democrats, particularly in the South, and lure them to a new home in the Republican Party, regardless of the corporations’ sociopathic positions on their economic well-being.

Texas may have been the proving ground for the potency of gun rights when George W. Bush and Karl Rove seized Gov. Ann Richard’s opposition to a bill allowing concealed weapons licenses on demand and turned it into a wedge issue in 1994. With the assault weapons ban enacted by the Democratic Congress that year, Republicans, with help from the National Rifle Association, depicted the Democrats as gun grabbers, which proved a potent slur in rural Texas. The GOP toppled Richards and longtime Congressman Jack Brooks of Beaumont, Texas, a 42-year veteran who was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, as well as House Speaker Tom Foley in Washington and 52 other House Democrats and nine Democratic senators to win control of both houses of Congress. Republicans also closed the gap with Democrats in the Texas Legislature.

In 1995, the Texas Legislature, with Democrats still in a narrow majority in both chambers, passed the concealed handgun license bill and changed the state’s “castle doctrine” law to allow deadly force against a person who unlawfully entered a house, “regardless of whether a reasonable person would have retreated.” It also provided an “affirmative defense” to civil suit, making it more difficult to sue the defender for damages in cases where the intruder actually posed no threat.

The Democrats’ retreat on gun bills didn’t stop the Republican tide, as the GOP finally gained control of the state Senate in 1996, though Democrats held the House until 2002. But Democrats haven’t won a statewide election since 1994 and a savage gerrymandering once Republicans got control in 2003 under the direction of US House Majority Leader Tom DeLay banished many of the remaining white Democratic incumbents into unelectable districts. Since then, it’s all Texas Democrats can do to muster more than one-third of the members of each legislative chamber to stop a constitutional amendment or break a quorum.

The gun rights movement escalated in 2005 with the “Stand Your Ground” bill in Florida. The NRA promoted the right to use deadly force outside the home without any requirement to retreat from a dangerous situation, arguing that it was needed to provide immunity to gunmen who confronted threatening individuals.

The Stand Your Ground legislation was sponsored by Florida state Rep. Dennis Baxley and state Sen. Durell Peadon, both Republican allies of Gov. Jeb Bush. It was enacted with bipartisan support by the Republican-controlled Legislature and quickly signed by Bush, who called it a “commonsense” approach to making the citizenry safer. But it’s not as if nobody predicted that the law could have unintended consequences. Miami police chief John F. Timoney called the law unnecessary and dangerous. “Whether it’s trick-or-treaters or kids playing in the yard of someone who doesn’t want them there or some drunk guy stumbling into the wrong house, you’re encouraging people to possibly use deadly physical force where it shouldn’t be used,” Timoney told the New York Times at the time. There also were explicit and repeated warnings that people of color and young people would be unreasonably and disproportionately harmed by the law.

Florida state Sen. Steve Geller (D) warned that the Stand Your Ground law ran the risk of encouraging Floridians to think that “you ought to be able to kill people that are walking toward you on the street because of this subjective belief that you’re worried that they may get in a fight with you.”

As soon as the bill was signed into law in Florida, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said the pro-gun organization would use the victory to promote the law everywhere.

Within weeks, a proposed statute with almost the exact working of the Florida law was adopted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). That’s a conservative network funded by the Koch Brothers and major corporations such as Altria (formerly Philip Morris), AT&T, Bayer, ExxxonMobil, GlaxoSmithKline, Peabody Energy, Pfizer, PhRMA (the drug lobby), Reynolds American, State Farm Insurance and UPS, among others, that brings together right-wing legislators with corporate interests and pressure groups to craft so-called “model legislation”

For the most part, John Nichols noted at The Nation, ALEC’s model legislation is designed to ease taxes and regulations for corporations, while weakening unions and undermining tort laws. But the council also dabbles in electoral and public safety issues.

Only a few months after Bush signed the Florida law, NRA lobbyist Marion Hammer worked with NRA operatives and friendly legislators on ALEC’s “Criminal Justice Task Force” to develop a new piece of Stand Your Ground model legislation for passage in states across the country. (For more on ALEC see alecexposed.org.)

According to Mother Jones, 25 states have passed Stand Your Ground laws, which critics also call “shoot first” laws. In Florida, we all now know that a defendant doesn’t have to prove he acted in self-defense — the prosecution has to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the killer didn’t fear for his life, which is a very high bar to clear — particularly when the only other witness is dead.

In Florida, the number of so-called “justifiable homicides” tripled in the five years after Jeb Bush signed the Stand Your Ground Law, the Tampa Bay Times reported Oct. 10, 2010. For the first half of the decade, the state counted an average of 34 justifiable homicides a year. In 2007, it logged 102. In 2008, 93. In 2009, 105. And the first six months of 2010, 44.

Backers of Stand Your Ground laws claim they result in lower crime rates, but a Texas A&M University study in June 2012 found that Stand Your Ground laws have the opposite effect.

“In contrast, we find significant evidence that the laws increase homicides,” wrote Mark Hoekstra, associate professor of economics, and Cheng Cheng, a doctoral student. They found evidence that castle doctrine laws increase “justifiable homicides” by private citizens by 17 to 50 percent, which translates into as many as 50 additional justifiable homicides per year nationally due to castle doctrine. “More significantly, we find the laws increase murder and manslaughter by a statistically significant 7 to 9 percent, which translates into an additional 500 to 700 homicides per year nationally across the states that adopted castle doctrine.

“Thus, by lowering the expected costs associated with using lethal force, castle doctrine laws induce more of it. This increase in homicides could be due either to the increased use of lethal force in self-defense situations, or to the escalation of violence in otherwise non-lethal conflicts. We suspect that self-defense situations are unlikely to explain all of the increase, as we also find that murder alone is increased by a statistically significant 6 to 11 percent.”

Of course, corporations aren’t really interested in increasing the number of homicides or fomenting a race war. What they want are legislatures they can bend to their will, and Stand Your Ground laws are one of many means to that end. As long as pandering gun laws not only sell more guns but also help elect Republican legislators and governors who appoint regulators who keep their hands off businesses, ALEC and the NRA will keep promoting them.

The best revenge for Trayvon Martin’s death would be to make sure every 18-year-old black and Latino youth is registered to vote and has a photo ID to make it past the GOP vote-suppression teams next year. (Make sure your white friends are registered, too, but clue them in about who their real enemies are. And it’s not 17-year-old kids with tea and Skittles.) — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2013

---

Populist.com
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us

---

Copyright © 2013 The Progressive Populist
PO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652

Selections from the August 15, 2013 issue

COVER/David Dayen
Elizabeth Warren’s fight to rein in banks

EDITORIAL
Big business drives ‘Stand Your Ground’

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Healthy food should drive farm bill

DISPATCHES
Obama seeks ‘better bargain,’ GOP replies, ‘no deal’;
White House still seeks ‘grand bargain’;
Senate races take shape;
Global warming could raise sea level 60 feet;
New level of hypocrisy for GOP reps;
Students will pay more under loan compromise;
King sees bad Dreamers;
Obamacare drives insurance costs down;
Senate reviews bank commodity plays;
Ohio gov. wants more tax breaks for rich;
New Purdue prez tried to ban Zinn;
Farmers object to Chinese takeover of Smithfield;
Blumenthal joins TV Consumer Freedom Act;
Super PACs ready for 2016;
No easy solutions in Egypt ...

MARK ANDERSON
School district backs down on chipped students

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kale
For the sake of democracy, kill the filibuster

WENONAH HAUTER
What you need to know about biotech crops

SETH SANDRONSKY
Wal-Mart vs. workers

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Budgeting for health

SAM URETSKY
Charity cases

WAYNE O’LEARY
Citigroup and the Democrats

JOHN BUELL
Journalism, objectivity and godliness

DAVID SCHMIDT
The face of NAFTA goes to the polls

N. GUNASEKARAN
Confronting India’s political dilemma

ART CULLEN
Harkin letting loose as retirement nears

ROB PATTERSON
Keep your head in the game

POPULIST PICKS
‘Endangered List’; ‘Mostly Sex Stuff’; ‘Manhunt’

and more ...

Smarmy eHarmony commercial brings Big Brother into the bedroom

By Marc Jampole

Do Americans want a “Big Brother” figure involved in their intimate relationships?

That’s what eharmony.com, one of the largest dating sites in the world, seems to be saying in a commercial that has been airing for many months now.

The imagery is a bit smarmy, because it suggests a wholesome threesome involving a man and a woman and a sage-looking elderly gentleman, who happens to be eharmony.com founder, Neil Clark Warren.

Here are the three vignettes that visually dominate this 30-second ad:

1. A man gives a woman an engagement ring and the woman shows it to Warren who says, “We took the platinum setting.”
2. A man and woman are getting cozy on a couch, about ready to watch TV when Warren sits down between and the woman offers him a large bowl of popcorn and starts munching.
3. At the beach, a woman gives a man a drink with a little hat or umbrella in it and turns to her other side and gives a drink to Warren.

In all three, Warren has intruded on a romantic moment, making it a kind of ménage a trois.

Meanwhile, the voice over makes a completely grandiose and mendacious claim: “Chances are behind every great relationship is eharmony.com.”  Let’s take a moment for the meaning of this statement to sink in: “Chances are” means probably or almost definitely. The explicit statement here is that eHarmony.com is responsible for all great relationships (at least between men and women). Even if we believe the eharmony.com website when it says that a recent Harris Interactive survey found that an eHarmony match led to almost 4% of all U.S. marriages in 2012, that’s a long way from “every great relationship.” It’s also worth pointing out that not every great marriage involves a great relationship. The claim in the TV ad goes far beyond exaggeration. It’s an outright lie.

More disturbing than this false claim, which most will easily see as self-serving puffery, is the hidden message that eHarmony makes by injecting its founder—a white male dressed in a traditional formal suit—into the happy relationships it shows in the ad.  It’s an authoritarian symbol. It’s one thing to use eHarmony and its questionnaire as a tool to sort potential mates.  As a sort mechanism, it probably works as well as bar-hopping, joining singles clubs, asking friends for fix-ups, taking cruises, using personal ads or going to adult activities such as Scrabble clubs and singles nights at the symphony.  But the ad is not just saying, use us as a tool. It’s saying: interject us—as represented by our founder—into your life and your relationship. Let our “29 dimensions of compatibility” be your guide, your guru, your teacher, an integral part of the relationship with your significant other.

As many OpEdge readers probably know already, Warren is a Christian theologian who first marketed the eHarmony dating site on Christian websites and in other Christian media, touting eHarmony as “based on the Christian principles of Focus on the Family author Dr. Neil Clark Warren.”  EHarmony claims to be secular and now advertises everywhere, but think about it: Isn’t one of the main principles of many right-wing Christian denominations and Catholicism that god is part of the marriage, almost a third person in the relationship. Whether taken on a literal or figurative level, “god in the marriage” represents both the person of god and the principles of action that supposedly lead us to god. One traditional image of god is as a wise old man. Moreover, a genial grandfatherly man has served as an image for pastors, rectors, priests and other figures of religious authority figures for centuries.

The hidden message of the ad then is that eHarmony will bring god (or the religious and ethical values god represents) into the relationship.  The assumption, of course, is that the god in question is Christian.

It’s all done so fast—three story lines, a voice over and all that feel-good gospel pop music in the background. Like all TV commercials, it goes by so quickly that we are unaware or only vaguely aware of the subliminal messages. But make no mistake about it—the ad is meant to appeal to those who want someone to tell them what to do, who to love, how to get it right. Warren and his 29 dimensions of compatibility are a stand-in for an authoritarian, right-wing church.

Anthony Weiner’s lack of judgment makes him unqualified to serve as Mayor of New York

By Marc Jampole

At the end of the day, what any politician does in his or her private life should not matter in considering his or her qualifications. None of us are without sin, and one would want one trait of any leader to be continued intellectual and spiritual growth from youth through old age. When the news media ignores past peccadilloes, it does the country a great service.

The only time the past matters is when the candidate or elected official was a hypocrite, broke an important law or showed a character trait that makes him or her unqualified to serve. Hypocrisy covers such diverse figures as Senator Larry Craig, a vocal homophobe caught soliciting men in a men’s room, and Elliot Spitzer, who prosecuted others for hiring prostitutes and then indulged in a high-priced hooker. Breaking the law covers Watergate, and should have covered the Iran-Contra arms deal and creating a torture gulag across the globe.

But in the case of Anthony Weiner, the issue is his character.

Hearing and seeing his apologies to his wife and the world on every media outlet over a 12-hour period made me think of my deceased father. He had so many ways of telling my brother and me to learn from our experiences.  He had his three mythic men—the wise one learned from the mistakes of others, the average one learned from his own mistakes and the dummy never learned.

Then there was his old saw, “Fool me once, your fault. Fool me twice, my fault.”

Even his favorite joke about the old and young bulls standing on a hillside overlooking a pasture full of cows was about experience, for when the old bull suggested they walk down the hill, it always sounded as if he had tried running in the past.

Weiner did not learn from his mistake.  After being publicly chastised and publicly chastising himself for behaving like a high school freshman while humiliating his wife, he did it again.

I’m not saying Weiner is stupid. I’m sure he’s a very bright guy. But the fact that he committed the same social folly (which, by the way, was likely not criminal and really a private matter) after saying it was wrong suggests a compulsive personality under the sway of his emotions. If he had not resigned, if he had said, “It’s my business and I did nothing illegal,” then doing it again would not be as problematic. It would merely be the sign of a juvenile mind and perhaps a partially open marriage—permission to do 21st -century flirting. But he said it was wrong and he took his own job away—and then he engaged in the same behavior again. That’s an obsession and that’s an obsessive personality. That’s someone who can become out of control.

Weiner expects us to take his word for it that he’s over that kind of behavior, that he’s grown up or been therapized. But the events in question are only a few years ago.  It’s too soon to tell if he’s over his compulsive online sexual flirting or if he’s merely taking a break.  Or maybe he has replaced his sexting with other actions that he or many people find reprehensible. Worst of all—and also perhaps most likely—the obsessive part of his latest scandal may carry over into other parts of his life and negatively affect his judgment and actions as Mayor of New York City.

Weiner should leave the race for Mayor of New York.  He has demonstrated that he has a character flaw that leaves him unfit for leading and managing our nation’s largest city.

Concentration of news origination can lead to repeated errors in media

By Marc Jampole

 

At first glance it looks as if Americans have an abundance of news sources at their fingertips—at least the majority of us with easy access to the Internet. But as other public relations professionals may have noticed, sources of real news have shrunk substantially.  Most of the news we see is repackaged from other sources, sometimes as a news story and sometimes with the spin of opinion attached.

A few years back, the Pew Research Center conducted an in-depth analysis of news reporting in one city, Baltimore, which found that daily newspapers are responsible for 50% of all original news reporting. Most of the local media would pick up stories from the local newspaper or from wire services. Today there are fewer wire services, but most significantly, there are many fewer daily newspapers and those still around have fewer reporters in search of original news.

As consumers of news, we easily and naturally overlook how concentrated the sources of news generation have become in recent years. As a public relations professional, though, I frequently see the results of news concentration. The other day it led to many news stories that were completely inaccurate and had the potential of harming the reputation of a very effective and responsible social service organization. The funny part, though, is that at the heart of the misinformation was a reporter misinterpreting a sentence written in the passive construction. It therefore took an act of bad writing to set off a chain of misjudgments and standard practices that led to erroneous information on several TV stations and in several newspapers.

Here’s how it happened:  A child nearly drowned during swimming at a summer day camp operated by a social service agency. The child was fine and didn’t have to go to the hospital, but as is normal protocol, the social service agency reported the incident to the appropriate regulatory body. After an inspection, the regulator decided to revoke the license of the summer camp because not all the camp staff was following every safety protocol. The social service agency then decided on its own to close down the swimming programs of the other 20 some-odd summer camps it operates for a few days to do a thorough inspection of each, retrain all the staff and make sure that all the staff knew and were following all the safety protocols. Of course, a parent or two called the daily newspaper, which published an accurate report.

Unfortunately, that accurate report contained the sentence, “Each camp site must be inspected and approved before it can reopen for aquatics.” Note the passive construction, which does not require the writer to tell us who is doing the inspecting and approving. In point of fact, it was the social service organization, acting on its own behalf and through no request of any regulatory agency or pressure by any other organization, which decided to close the programs and inspect. No one had been hurt, but the organization was bending over backwards to protect the children in its charge.

Unfortunately, the rewrite professional at the Associated Press (AP) did not do any research or fact-checking when he or she abridged the story into one paragraph. That one paragraph claimed that the regulatory body had closed all the camps and had to approve them before they could reopen again. To avoid the passive, the re-writer had to attribute the actions to someone, and so he or she made an assumption that it was the regulator. Wrong information, and liable to give the public a false impression of the social service agency.  

Several TV stations and many regional newspapers reprinted or read the Associated Press story during the few hours that it was posted.  The social service organization—a client of my company—called me at 10:00 at night and I had to call several local TV stations and the AP to get the story corrected. It was no problem, at all: everyone was very professional. They made the change once I had properly identified myself.  The TV stations dropped the story, because it was no longer newsworthy for TV. A regulatory body asking an organization to close down more than 20 camps is definitely newsworthy. But an organization volunteering to double-check or police itself may or may not be newsworthy; a newspaper may have room for the story, but local TV news likely won’t.

It took two and maybe three mistakes by two (or three) very reliable and professional organizations for incorrect news to get out:

1. The social service organization and its PR counselor (my company!) may or may not have made a mistake by deciding not to distribute a news release that would have specified that it was the organization and not some regulatory body that acted. If and when to release information is the most difficult question for public relations practitioners. On the one hand, subsequent events revealed that it wasn’t much of a news story. On the other hand, if the organization had distributed a news release, it is less likely that a media outlet would have misreported he story.
2. The writer of the original story made a mistake in style against which I often rage in print and with my staff: a passive construction that created a misleading sentence.
3. The AP made an assumption from the passively-constructed sentence that was just inaccurate. The mistake was not taking the time to check the facts.

But let’s be clear, the harm to the organization came in not one story, but in many stories misreporting the facts. And the reason so many got it wrong is that so little original reporting is being done. Any of the TV stations or newspapers that ran the AP could have made a phone call to double-check the information (one TV station actually did call and got the story right). Yet it was not a mistake that these re-users of the AP story were making—it was business as usual.
One more proof that to a great degree, the news has become like casual dining restaurants: whichever restaurant you go to, you’ll have your choice of essentially the same menu.  The name and brand are different, and maybe one has a spicy sauce and another offers something sweet, but the contents are the same.

The same is true of hard news today. We see it everywhere, but most of the people reporting or commenting on it got the information from somewhere else. Thus whatever the brand, you’re essentially getting the same news. Try reading daily newspapers from two different cities. You’d be surprised at how many have the same stories and even the same columnists. Or consider how all the media in one region cover the same story. Yes, sometimes the liberal newspaper will spin the story one way, while the right-wing radio station will spin it another, but the facts and quotes will mostly be the same. One media outlet does the story and everyone else just accepts its version and goes from there.

New York summer museum scene resembles an amusement park

By Marc Jampole

 

That thousands of people would wait in line five hours or more for a 10-minute artificial experience of rain falling befuddles me. But that’s what they’re doing.

For days, the New York news media has been reporting that people are waiting five or more hours to walk through the Museum of Modern Art’s (MOMA) “Rain Room.”

Rain Room is a dark alley way in which a heavy rain is coming down except where sensors detect people. People thus get the sensation of walking between rain drops. Whether or not it’s an aesthetic experience is open to discussion, as is the parallel question of whether Rain Room is a work of art. I haven’t been there and I won’t go, but my sense is that the installation would fit more easily in an amusement park or Universal Studios.  I had a similar feeling about the Punk fashion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I did see, but that was because of the exhibit itself. In the case of  MOMA, it is not the curator who has decided to present artifacts of culture in an amusement park environment, but the artists who have decided to conjure an amusement park experience and present it as art.

That “Rain Room” makes an interesting juxtaposition with a summer exhibit at another New York cultural mainstay—the James Turrell show at the Guggenheim museum, which is also generating enormous lines of paying customers. Turrell is a light artist, which means he makes boxes and other shapes in which all the color is provided by light.  The show includes a retrospective of light boxes meant to look like Joseph Alber’s paintings, but the center is a new piece called ”Aten Reign” that turns the Guggenheim’s famous rotunda into an enormous volume filled with light that gradually changes color. 

Like “Rain Room,” the Turrell pieces depend more on technology than the individual hand craft of the artist. Mental skills such as manipulating light, small engines, gears and arrays of photovoltaic sensors replace the hand skills of applying paint, cutting shapes or molding clay. The raw materials tend to be pre-fabricated parts. 

Of greater relevance is the similarity in the aesthetic experience between “Rain Room” and the Turrells: Both are primarily physical experiences, such as you get from a light show or an amusement park ride. The Turrell may make a much greater claim to being art because of the allusions to Albers and other artists, unless you consider his light versions to be similar to stuffed toy versions of the Mona Lisa or neckties with “Starry Night” printed on them.

The issue of what is or isn’t art has plagued critics and scholars since recorded history began. Dresses, scepters, bowls, jewelry boxes and advertisements have all laid claim to art, as have blank canvases, lumps of material and even jars of the so-called artist’s stool. At the end of the day, the question, “What is art?,’ can have as many legitimate answers as the number of people who ask it.

The more interesting question is not whether Turrell or “Rain Room” is art, but why at the same point of time, two of the most important museums in the United States have decided to have exhibits of art based on the amusement park values of physical titillation and the manipulation of engineering concepts at the same time as a third major museum in the same city is presenting an exhibit which is itself an amusement park experience.

When James Ensor and Emil Nolde used amusement park imagery in their paintings and Fellini and Bergman did so in their movies, they were reanimating the tradition of their respective art forms, but the aesthetic pleasure of the painting or movie remained the same.  This current crop of exhibits takes not the imagery, but the techniques of the amusement park to produce the aesthetic experience of the amusement park. Entertaining, but probably not art.

But the very fact that one can find the amusement park experience at a museum probably is contributing to the popularity of all three shows. People may not want to stand in line to see a Titian or a Picasso, but they are used to long lines at Disney World. 

How does McDonald’s sample budget for employees reflect consumer ideology?

By Marc Jampole

 

McDonald’s created a sample budget for its employees to help them do better financial planning.  The budget is so absurd in its assumptions and serves as such ready proof that Mickey Dee’s doesn’t pay its workers enough that you would almost swear it was satire—something Jonathan Swift might conjure.

Other articles have pointed out the almost mocking lack of reality in a budget that starts off by depending on a second job that pays 85% of what you’re getting for flipping burgers for 40 hours a week—that is, if you’re lucky enough to have a full-time job at Mickey Dee’s.

What I find interesting is the degree to which the McDonald’s sample budget for employees reflects the ideology of consumerism.

We start with the fact that the second most expensive line item is the car payment. Note that McDonald’s is not talking about what one of its full-time employees might spend on operating the car each month—insurance, gas, maintenance. No, this line item of $150 is for paying the loan you took to buy your car. Not only does McDonald’s assumes that everyone has a car, but it also assumes that you borrow money to buy it, as opposed to running your car into the ground. These are two of the major tenets of American consumerism: 1) drive a car and 2) borrow to get what you want before you can afford it. 

The budget offers the possibility that the monthly housing payment is a mortgage. Where can you get a house with a $600 mortgage (which must also include real estate taxes)?  McDonald’s knows that very few of its employees can afford a mortgage, but the possibility of being able to have a house sets a goal for the employee: home ownership, which is another tenant of American consumerism.

Note that the budget assumes that the employee will be completely middle class: have health insurance, cable TV service and a car. Of course the numbers they put down are phony: What health insurance plan is a mere $20 a month? How many people pay nothing for heating?  The $600 a month for rent or a mortgage payment must have seemed quaint to McDonald’s employees in San Francisco and New York.

But this low-balling of virtually every line item enables McDonald’s to give people the magnificent sum of $800 a month for the line item in bold: Monthly Spending Money. That’s $800, or $27 per day, that the employee can spend every month on him or herself. It’s called disposable income and it’s the lifeblood of consumer culture. Movies, clothes, vacations, gambling, jewelry, HBO, restaurants—all is possible with the $800 a month, at least on a small scale.

Except for three things:

1. That $800 has to cover food.
2. It also has to cover car maintenance and gasoline
3. It also has to cover the difference between the low-ball estimates of the other line items and what they will really cost.

Nowhere does the budget let us know that Monthly Spending Money includes food, gas and car maintenance. Let’s hope that the employees who use this budget don’t buy season’s tickets to the Lakers before they figure out that they also have to pay for food with that $800 a month of spending money they get.

By constructing a budget that assumes a typical employee could live a consumer-driven life, McDonald’s not only asserts the consumer ideology, it also attempts to hide the fact that their jobs make it impossible for employees to live the American dream reflected in the budget.  McDonalds has fooled no one, though, as witnessed by the excoriation it has gotten from the mainstream news media. 

The McDonald’s sample budget for its employees is new evidence that we need to raise the minimum wage and not marginally, but by a lot. After the initial jolt to the economy, a minimum wage of $15 an hour would drive up all wages and lead to more consumer spending.  It would give the McDonald’s workers twice as much money each month, which means they might not have to work a second job, or if they did, they could have some real spending money. Of course that would mean that McDonald’s executives and shareholders would have less money to plow into the stock market or expensive art.

In the Zimmerman case, the judicial system worked, but the law was wrong.

By Marc Jampole

 

No one can see into the mind of George Zimmerman. A lot of the people disappointed in the not guilty verdict in his trial believe that he went out hunting someone, just like Bernard Goetz did in the New York subway system almost 30 years ago. But they’ll never be able to prove it.

In the same way, the district attorney was unable to prove that George Zimmerman committed either murder or manslaughter the night he shot Trayvon Martin. Six honest citizens weighed the evidence and found that there was reasonable doubt that Zimmerman committed a crime. Some are saying the judicial system failed in the George Zimmerman case, but they’re wrong. It worked just fine.  Both sides presented their case and the jury deliberated a reasonable length of time. Both the prosecutor and the defense team employed a lot of resources—would that every defendant could have access to such topnotch legal services.  The judicial system worked just fine.

What didn’t work and doesn’t work is the law itself. The extension beyond one’s residence of the right to defend person and property that Florida and many other (mostly Southern) states have made is wrong. It’s wrong because it’s based on another bad law: the one that allows private citizens to carry loaded guns in public.

Racism is not directly the issue in the murder of Trayvon Martin either, although as with most issues in America, racism is part of the backdrop, one of the reasons the issue exists. Gun culture is strongest where racism is strongest—that’s just a simple fact. But I’m not going to state or imply that anyone on the jury was racist.  Unless shown otherwise in vivid detail, I’m going to believe that the jurors put aside their prejudices and rendered a decision to the best of their abilities.

George Zimmerman—now he’s a different story. I could believe that a hate or fear of African-American young men motivated him to pull the trigger.  It might have motivated his desire to become a citizen vigilante. It might have motivated his desire to assert his right to fire under the law, his right to kill another man while still following the law. And it might have motivated him to seek a young black man as his target.

 

None of it would have mattered if the law were different.

From the start, the tragedy of the murder of Trayvon Martin has been about one thing and one thing only—the need of our society to finally stand up to the gun lobby and outlaw possession of loaded guns in public places.