The Diary of A Simple Man

I lost my temper in a discussion of salaried and exempt employees over on Askville.

"I'm exempt (salaried) employee in CA, I'm suppose 2 work 8-6 w/1 hour lunch, which means 10hr day is that illegal?"

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"Be glad you even have a job right now."

What I hate about that sort of statement is that it could be used to excuse any kind of abuse by an employer.

"My boss makes me work nights and weekends." "Just be glad you have a job."

"My salary got cut in half but my boss got a bonus." "Just be glad you have a job."

"My boss raped my wife." "Just be glad you have a job."

"My boss is forcing me to donate all my organs to his family, even the organs I need to live." "Just be glad you have a job."

At what point can we STOP being glad, and start getting angry? "Just be glad you have a job" just perpetuates the worst kind of treatment of employees by abusers. Shutting up and being "glad" just means that things will get worse and worse. There are companies out there that would gladly kill their employees and sell their bodies for dog food if it would make a ten-cent profit in their bottom line. How much are we supposed to endure? At what point can we insist that our lives and time have value that's measured by more than money - that's we're human beings, deserving dignity and fair treatment?

Someone asked an anti-Obama question about the government owning GM (which is SOCIALISM!!!). I didn't feel like getting into it, so I was brief:

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Don't know. Don't care. If you're stupid enough to buy a GM car, you deserve whatever breakdowns you get.

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She responded that I didn't seem to like GM, so I gave her a bit that I made up long ago:

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In Japan, if a worker makes a bad car, he must ritually disembowel himself in order to extirpate the shame that he has brought upon his family. If an auto executive's company brings out a bad car, he does the same thing on national TV, so that all may see his disgrace.

In America, if a worker makes a bad car, he scratches his @ss and goes for a beer. If an executive is responsible for a bad car, he raises the price, runs more ads prominently featuring the American flag, and applies for a government bailout - which he gets. Then he turns around and uses some of that money to lobby the government to eliminate or delay safety features and fuel efficiency improvements (see Iacocca, Lee), thereby killing thousands of Americans, ruining the environment, and increasing our dependency on brutal Middle Eastern despots.

What's not to love?

Seen standing on a street corner near Fenway Park today, handing out flyers: a well-groomed middle-aged man in a business suit. The flyers were for Citibank.

Weird!

I ended up writing a letter to Salon about the "Infinite Debt"/Dateline NBC takes on debt:

There's another article on the same topic which absolutely horrified me recently: "Infinite Debt" by Thomas Geoghegan in Harper's. It lays out in stark detail how the abolition of usury laws in the US (under the tender ministrations of credit-industry lobbyists and our corrupt Congress) allowed the financial sector to produce profits for their investors of 300% or more. With that sort of profit to be had, is it any wonder that investors ran away from the manufacturing industries - industries which would normally produce 3-5% profit?

There's a great deal more in the article, which is well worth reading. Unfortunately, it's only available to subscribers (and by coincidence, I got my subscription to Harper's for renewing my Salon subscription). It's well worth looking up. If you can't afford Harper's, try to see if you can find it in your local library; it's the April 2009 issue.

But I ran into an odd juxtaposition last night: a story on NBC's Dateline about the "Debt Trap". I thought it might shed an interesting sidelight on the insights raised in "Infinite Debt". And it did - but not in the way that I hoped or expected.

Rather than report on the wholesale usury of the financial sector and the complicity of Congress in abolishing age-old protection for the public from financial wolves, Dateline instead focused on some sleazy debt collectors who used "questionable" practices. They - gasp - lied to the people they were calling! Watching these lower-class employees chatting and smoking on secret camera in their parking lot, I couldn't help but be reminded of the "bad apples" like Lyndie England who carried the Bush Administration's torture policies and ended up taking the fall for them.

Dateline thoughtfully announced that everyone filmed by the secret camera had later been fired.

But it was the management of that debt collection company that really must have run up the Dateline dry-cleaning bill. The producers must have ejaculated into their pants about twenty times over when they found that the owners of the company were all black "gangsta"-types. Thugs and criminals, to be sure. But very minor criminals indeed compared to the real criminals: the respected members of Congress, the titans of industry, and the media who all cheered as organized labor was broken and the game was rigged in favor of a financial sector whose sole purpose was to shear the sheep - the public - to the bone.

The maximum interest rate allowed used to be 9% plus a small additional percentage. And now...there IS NO maximum. We have been turned into nothing more than beasts to be slaughtered in the financial stockyard. And the "winners" of society, obscenely wealthy and virtually all-powerful, continue to hold the reins of power firmly in their hands - and by all signs, they always will.

It's a bitter pill to swallow.

I just read an interesting article over on the New York Times about A.I.G. It explains what happened quite well...but I wanted to express it in slightly more graphic terms.

Propping Up a House of Cards

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Let me see if I've got this right. In simple (and earthy) terms, A.I.G. used its golden reputation - its rating - to gild turds for other entities. Those entities then traded those turds back and forth as if they were solid gold. And in the end, somehow A.I.G. was stupid enough to buy many of those turds itself!

But it's we, the American taxpayers, who are now left to clean out the sewer. Meanwhile, AIG management and most of the rest of the financial community, the self-professed "elite" who raked in billions or trillions over the past 30-odd years, won't even deign to apologize to the American people.

And why, exactly, are we NOT hanging these people (and the politicians and regulators who were supposed to exercise oversight) from lampposts?

I love Jon Stewart.

As you might remember, at the height of the recent gas price surge there was a strange event. All sorts of products started shrinking. Ice cream in particular went from 2 quarts (the standard half-gallon) to 1.5 quarts; a 25% reduction in product with no corresponding reduction in price.

But a few days ago I bought ice cream, and was amazed to see that it somehow looked...bigger. Sure enough, it was 1.75 quarts. And what's more, all the brands are that size now - even the store brands.

It's odd how they all stay in sync. I have to wonder if there's some sort of conspiracy between the manufacturers to all stay at the same sizes!

A comment I made over on Askville in response to a post someone made about stopping the bailouts and letting the chips fall where they may.

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I'm afraid that it's easy to talk of "chips" falling. That way, you don't have to think of them as people. Hard-working people, most of them, many with families...children. Children who, when the "chips" fall, will lose their health care, if they ever had it to begin with. Their homes. A decent education. All the things that any child needs to grow up to be a healthy, happy, productive human being and citizen.

The problem is that when the "chips" fall, it won't be the corrupt millionaire and billionaire executives who suffer. It won't be the crooked politicians who pay the price. No, it will be the ordinary hard-working Americans and their families - for generations to come! - who will pay, and pay, and pay.

No question, the bailouts suck. Taxpayer dollars are being shoveled out by the trillions to the very people who caused the disaster in the first place, by the very politicians who willfully and deliberately closed their eyes while all this was going on. No matter what happens, it's the working class and middle class who will be screwed for it. Because that's how the world works.

I have no happy solution to offer. It would be nice to believe that there are honest people of good conscience in government who might work to serve the people and the nation as a whole, rather than just the wealthy elite that pull the strings. Doesn't sound very likely, though, does it?

But at the least, if millions of ordinary working Americans are going to face years, perhaps decades of fear and poverty...if millions of children's lives will be forever blighted and ruined, for generations to come...please do them the courtesy of remembering that they are human beings, not merely "chips" who somehow deserve to fall.

A couple of things I forgot to mention:

While we were waiting in the staging area for the parade to start, a group of adults, teens and children walked by handing out pamphlets to everyone - they even gave one to Sebastian! The pamphlets were about Falun Gong. The front part was basically spiritual advertisement, and the last page-and-a-half was a political plea about the repression they're experiencing at the hands of the Chinese government.

Also, this apparently may be the last Autumnfest. Apparently the city has stopped funding it, and they even stopped maintainence on the Social Ocean park. Many mom & pop businesses which used to donate to the Autumnfest have gone out of business, and most of the remainder can't afford to contribute.

So once again, I've discovered something fun only to find that it is on the cusp of vanishing forever!

Looking at the wildly see-sawing graph on the New York Times website that represents the stock market this morning, I have to say that it reminds me of nothing so much as the EKG of someone having a heart attack.