I’ve never understood the latest social networking trend, the “check-in” apps, like Foursquare. You can let all of your online buddies know where you are right now! Woo! True, it appears that you can get discounts at some shops if you follow Foursquare’s instructions like a good little robot. And I guess it gives the possibility that if you and all your pals have iPhone-y devices, and use these programs, maybe you’ll discover that your friends are partying in a bar just down the street, making impromptu social gathering easier. Or make it easier to brag about all the cool, hipster places you frequent. Honestly, the more I investigate this shit, the more nauseating it seems.

Anyway, the only reason I’m writing about this at all is a quote I ran across in an article about the state of check-in. The focus is a super-predictable bashing of Facebook’s check-in features, by Dennis Crowley, the head of Facebook rival and check-in originators Foursquare. But the true meat of the story is this bit where Crowley describes his vision for check-in:

“In the future, I want Foursquare to be able to tell people where to go wherever they are in the world, based on their previous visiting habits, likes and dislikes and the time of day…We want to be able to push venue suggestions to you. That’s what I am pushing towards as we develop Foursquare’s tools and how we use our data.”

So that’s it. “Check-in”, the fun new social networking tool that combines gadgets, games, and bragging, is a tool for creating marketing profiles of its suckers, and then shoving targeted ads in their faces. In other words, selling audiences/consumers to advertisers. Just like TV.

Nice photo set from Foreign Policy magazine that I ran across thanks to Cuéntame. It’s a little goofy and shmaltzy, but I like the message. The photographer started comparing immigrants to superheroes, in the way that they have “secret identities”, where they are invisible to the vast majority of Americans, but that the difficulties they face to earn a living for their family makes them heroic.

So, the photo set is of immigrant workers in New York, working at their job while dressed as superheroes*. Each photo includes the name, occupation, and amount of money that these people regularly send home to their families. Cuéntame’s comments on the photos are very positive and filled with the stories of thankful people who’s parents sacrificed and worked themselves to exhaustion for the sake of their children. This is the core of the “illegal immigrant” story that is neglected by all our politicians and media: “illegals” (I really dislike the term) are human beings who are trying to make money for their families. They’re not “aliens”, or invaders or demons or whatever. And hell, even though they’re “workers”, that’s not as important as the fact that they’re people.

But to the media and politicians, they will always be a “them”. Immigration, laws, borders, and economics create all sorts of problems and complications, and it’s certainly true that some aspects of illegal immigration hurt legal immigrants and citizens of the adopted country. But all we’re getting is ignorant scapegoating that doesn’t really look at these problems, what causes them, or how we could try to improve things for everyone, to turn a we vs. them into an us vs. the problems.

Most of the anti-immigrant folks I come across (and many of the commenters at Foreign Policy) jump quickly to the “law” part. But breaking the law isn’t inherently bad, and many of us do it daily: breaking the speed limit, jaywalking, taking drugs, pirating music, cheating on our taxes, etc. So the “but they’re breaking the law!” argument is weak. Many of the anti-immigrant folks are outraged, truly indignant that someone would break our laws and enter this country. But it does seem like most of this outrage is reserved for latino illegal immigrants, and not for people of other backgrounds. Frankly, underneath it all, I think the outrage is largely racism, an anger that a different racial group doesn’t “know their place”. The outraged anti-immigrant American is angry that a latino would think that they have the right to be here, in “my” country. That these latinos don’t acknowledge American rules and superiority.*

As always, I have to recommend Aviva Chomsky’s book “They Take Our Jobs!”: and 20 Other Myths about Immigration on this subject, because the entire US-Latin American legal, cultural and economic connection is very complex, deep, historical, and largely misreported in the United States.

—
* The nerd in me can’t help but point out that Catwoman is not exactly a “hero” in the comics. Well, depends on which comics you’re reading, I guess.
** I know, I know, it’s not all racism. Jobs, cultural change, and generalized fears about the future play a large role as well. Like I said, it’s complicated. Read that book I linked to.

I don’t really give a shit about General McChrystal’s rude words about the president, nor his subsequent sacking. But I am intrigued by this article by Frank Schaeffer that attempts to explain the divide between soldiers and civilians in the United States.

Although it’s not his focus, Schaeffer more or less argues that both the American military and American civilians both believe themselves to be morally superior to each other. Although he doesn’t explain it sufficiently, he seems to argue that soldiers (and we might add soldiers’ families to this as well) see the civilian class as making demands of the soldiers, while not risking their own lives or making any sacrifices themselves. This makes them distrustful and resentful of civilians, who seem naive or hypocritical. On the other hand, civilians can easily claim their own moral high ground because they are not involved in controversial military actions, nor are they out there shooting guns at other human beings.

You’ve also got your class differences, in that many members of our “volunteer military” join up because they don’t see themselves having any other job prospects whatsoever, meaning that American soldiers generally come from poorer backgrounds. Then you’ve got the cultural and educational differences that come from these economic differences. In addition, as Schaeffer discusses at length, you’ve got political differences owing to history and political maneuvering in the past several decades. Part of these maneuvers have been efforts by the religious far-right to recruit and court the military, so you also get some religious differences between the military and civilians as well.

No conclusions on my part here, just trying to figure out this crazy, fucked up world we live in.

I think that in the future, the Obama administration may be most remembered for making moderate liberal reforms while massively entrenching corporate power.

We’ve seen it with health care reform, the bank bailout, the recent Citizens United Supreme Court decision, and expect to continue seeing it happen.

It seems to me that the recently passed “health care reform” legislation is mildly positive for some people. It is massively lucrative for pharmaceutical companies, and mostly positive for insurance companies as well. People who can afford insurance but can’t get it should theoretically be able to buy it now, and people who have insurance should not have their coverage abruptly canceled when they need to, y’know, use it.

The “individual mandate” is the most fucked-up part of all this. The bill calls for all Americans who don’t have health insurance to buy it. The “public option” would have made this tolerable; a non-profit, government agency selling you insurance would have been a good fall back for people who can’t afford corporate health insurance. But despite the massive popularity of this idea among American citizens, neither the industry, nor their friends in DC wanted it to become law. So it didn’t.

When this mandate is phased in (2016), people go without insurance will be charged $695 a year, or 2.5% of their income, whichever is higher. However, if health care pundit Ezra Klein is right, the bill actually makes no allowances for enforcement of the mandate. So the reality there is possibly less harmful than I’d thought.

I have been really confused about what the health care bill actually says about abortion. It does sound as though it allows insurance companies to stop covering abortions, which they likely will. So if you’re insured, poor, and need an abortion, this bill shits all over you.

And “confused” doesn’t even begin to describe my take on the “health care exchanges”. We shall see.

Thanks to this bill, pharmaceutical companies can continue to charge ungodly prices for their medicines, more than they charge in any other country on Earth. And while some of these regulations should cut into insurance company profits, the mandate hands them 32 million new customers. Sounds like a bargain to me. Of course, what really happens remains to be seen: devil, details, you know how it goes.

So when your right-wing friends call this “the government takeover of health care”, you really should laugh at them. Almost this whole mess is private. Your employer is writing checks to a big insurance corporation, or you are writing checks to a big insurance corporation. Or you’re too poor, or you’re on Medicare.

(And if they’re really worried about “government-run health care,” they need to start speaking out against the VA. Veterans’ health care is 100% government owned and run: government doctors, government hospitals, government pays the bills. And strangely, public health researchers are finding that the VA gets the highest satisfaction ratings from patients of any type of health care program in the country.)

So this may end up being beneficial to some people. I have, however, heard just the opposite from some informed folks. Jane Hamsher of the progressive FireDogLake blog actually expects the bill to do almost exactly the opposite of what’s been promised, in almost every way.

An insightful book I read recently on the topic of health care (mentioned below) made a very important point. An intelligent public health official (who has helped several national governments set up their health care systems) said that a country needs to decide your health care philosophy first. Everything follows from that. Should everyone have full coverage? Is the free market important? Should everyone have access to every possible treatment? Amazing as it is, I don’t know that I’ve hear any politician in this health care reform debacle even mention a philosophy. About all we’ve heard is that the system needs to be “better”. That’s the only philosophy I can divine, given that the statistics say that this legislation will only cover 32 of the estimated 50 million people with no health insurance.

What is very clear, is that this bill is a massive failure of democracy. Polling data for years has shown Americans favoring a national health care system (“single payer”, Medicare for all, something like that), and a vast majority preferred the “public option” to this bill that eventually got passed. This policies have been popular in this country for many, many years. But, as Noam Chomsky is fond of pointing out, these policies are portrayed as “not politically feasible”. In other words, it was supported by the majority of the population, but opposed by a tiny fraction of Americans who happen to be insanely wealthy and politically connected. We all know that, we all see signs of it regularly, and here is another big ol’ slab of proof. A very popular president with a majority of the seats in both houses of the Congress did not even really attempt to pass a bill that was incredibly popular with the American people. The two obvious reasons are disheartening. Either they are too afraid to take on these powerful interests, or they are on the same side as these powerful interests.

My concluding thoughts: if you actually care about health care and what America should do about it, you really have to read “The Healing of America” by T.R. Reid. It’s a pretty easy read. The author visits about a dozen countries, interviews doctors and patients about their health care system, studies the history and how that system came to be, and then has his own chronic medical condition treated by local doctors there. There are many more options than we’ve been lead to believe, every system has its pros and cons, and every system has its own challenges to face in the near future.

And finally, it’s crazy that this debate about “health care” has so little to do with actual American health. What we’ve been saying all this time is “people should be able to see a doctor and get treatment when they’re sick or injured.” This talk rarely include preventative medicine, where you could see a doctor, who’d give you tips or treatments to avoid future illness or injury. Also not included: our broken industrial food system; pollution of our air and water; stressful work/commute cycles; lack of time for exercise; or conditions caused by drug, tobacco and alcohol use/abuse.

I’ve got plenty to say on the right-wing/Tea Party freak outs regarding health care, but we’ll see when I have time to write about that. Ironically, the only reason I had time to write this is because I took time off of work, because I’ve been sick.

This is some appalling shit right here.

Long story short: cops and prosecutors in New Orleans are using an 1805 law about “unnatural copulation” to have convicted prostitutes labeled as sex offenders. Not only does this allow prosecutors to give longer jail sentences, but when they get out of jail, the prostitutes have an even harder time of things.

First of all, this is perverse. The ancient law criminalizes oral and anal sex, meaning that everyone reading this article, and probably everyone within 100 feet of everyone reading this article, could therefore be convicted as a sex offender in New Orleans. But New Orleans seems to be selecting only the prostitutes (and mostly black female ones at that) to slap with this. The article doesn’t mention if the prostitutes’ customers are getting convicted of this charge or not. I’d guess “not”.

Second, it abuses public fears about sexual assaults. “Sex offender” means, to most folks, “child molesters and serial rapists.” Period. It doesn’t mean hookers, strippers, or people who like kinky sex. But the people who the cops choose to charge as unnatural copulaters will have “SEX OFFENDER” printed on their driver’s licenses, end up in the sex offender registry, and notify all their neighbors that they are sex offenders. For fifteen years. Making a living by having consensual sex with people is really not the same thing as someone who gets their sexual thrills by forcing themselves on people weaker than themselves.

Third, prostitutes generally aren’t in the position they’re because they chose to. Most are extremely poor, can’t find any other work, have drug problems, or all three. Do we really have to go out of our way to punish people who are barely surviving in the first place? Some people apparently so.

It’s a good article, give it a read, and take a little heart that some people are fighting against the unjust law and prosecutions.

I read a rather appalling/heart-warming post yesterday that was essentially about a particular type of ad hominem attack: calling someone “fat”. Apparently there are a number of smart people out there, with smart opinions, who area also arguably overweight. And rather than fighting back against the ideas and opinions of these people, some of their opponents just scream that the smart people are fatty fatty fat fats, and therefore their opinions don’t matter.

Now this debate “tactic” is used all the time, attack the messenger, not the message. Women seem to get the worst of it, presumably because of actual American attitudes about who is good enough, who is “one of us”, and who doesn’t deserve to be heard. The “shut up, you’re fat” attacks, seem to be based on deep held stereotypes that overweight people are lazy, gluttonous, weak-willed, and a host of negative traits that go with that. People also seem to enjoy sitting in judgment on heavy people, acting as though there’s some sort of moral high ground to be had.

I think I found a very good rebuttal to these sorts of attacks in the political realm. You make your argument, someone yells “oh yeah? Well you’re a fat pig.” Then you say:

You know who wasn’t fat?

Hitler.

.
(In fact, I think that most dictators, mass murderers and serial killers were of a healthy weight…)

The websites where I’ve seen this issue discussed then often turn into a debate over two accurate yet contradictory things:

1) being overweight is often a product of an unhealthy Western diet, and can lead to serious health problems
2) our culture has extremely skewed ideas of what constitutes “fat” and “thin”, and often shames people who don’t fit these unrealistic body types

This can end up turning into an unproductive fight of “it’s okay to be fat” vs. “no it’s not!”, and a variety of similar themes. But these really are two different things. Western lifestyles– including diet, work patterns, transportation, marketing, medicine, industry, science, and culture– have devolved to the point where our practices often cause our health great harm, even when we don’t intend to. Aside from that, our society also places great importance on physical appearance, and our criteria for judging attractiveness is largely shaped by mass media, who have their own goals and agendas. Obviously, the societal traits that cause weight-related disease should be fixed, and fast. And the ignorance we endure psychological damage we do to each other based on bizarre beliefs and stereotypes based on a person’s outward appearance also needs some serious work.

But really, I wrote most of this so I could tell that Hitler joke.

Someone at CNN is trying to get fired.

Is aviation security mostly for show?

Short answer: yes.

LMB Radio 12-19-09

- Copenhagen global warming non-treaty
- health care and health care reform
- song by Elizabeth Fraser

Last week: President Obama rejects an international treaty banning landmines.
This week: Obama announces massive escalation of the war in Afghanistan.
Next week: Obama will receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Ludicrous, of course, particularly the Afghanistan part. The absolute bottom line on Afghanistan is that there are no good options. No matter what the US chooses to do, the Afghan people will continue to live in a society filled with corruption, violence, religious extremism, and poverty. Some Afghans wants us to stay, most want us to leave. They see us as “foreign occupiers”, which of course, we are (I’ve seen some news articles lately which project great shock that the Afghans see us as foreign occupiers. Sort of like perceiving the guy with the gun who demands your wallet as “a mugger”). Messier still, the group that we call “The Taliban” is now a mix of the religious extremists that we fought in 2001, but mixed with militant nationalists who just want the US to leave, and are supported by a large number of Afghans who want the foreigners to leave their damn country. So we’re fighting the Afghan people who want us to leave, so we can declare victory, so we can leave.

Even more tragicomic, to get supplies to the US troops, US-hired contractors are having to pay protection money to Taliban forces to get their cargo to the troops unmolested. So the US is paying their enemies to supply themselves to fight the US, and the Taliban are allowing their enemies to maintain their presence for a fee.

The only vaguely reasonable rationale I’ve seen from the US government is that we have to defeat the Taliban, because if the Taliban return to power, then Al Qaeda might return to Afghanistan, and might use the country to scheme and train their recruits. That’s about fifteen “if’s” balanced on top of each other. If the US leaves, will the Taliban return to power? Or will there be a continuation of the civil war between the Taliban and the warlords/Northern Alliance? How will the corrupt Karzai regime and the heroine traffickers fit into this?

Second, if the Taliban seized a significant portion of Afghanistan, why the fuck would they allow Al Qaeda back into the country? They’re not idiots, they remember that Al Qaeda’s presence invited a full-fledged American invasion. They’re not looking for more clusterbomb parties.

Third, why would Al Qaeda need to go to Afghanistan to plan and train? Right now, I understand that most of Al Qaeda (which by this point seems to be a few dozen to a few hundred guys) are set up in Pakistan (where we are in a sort of stealth war, via drone airstrikes), Yemen, and maybe Somalia. Why would they need Afghanistan? And to be honest, how much space do they need? Do they need a few thousand acres of desert, or can they make plans from a single apartment, and train in a large backyard?

The longer this war goes on, the more Americans die, the more Afghans die, and the more American money gets pissed away (often pocketed by murderous scum of whatever faction). They’re saying that it costs $1 million to keep an American soldier in Afghanistan for a year. With Obama’s new plan, we’ll have 100,000 soldiers, plus over 100,000 contractors (no idea how much they cost). This, as the American economy tanks, real unemployment hovers around 20%, a million foreclosures are on the horizon, and tens of thousands of Americans die because they can’t afford even shady, shoddy health insurance. Perhaps we can find a better use for that money than beating down random Afghans.

I’d say that this story was bizarre, if we didn’t see tales like it happening again and again. Activists in NYC had their home raided by the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force on October 1, apparently because one of the residents had been sending Twitter messages during the recent G20 protests in Pittsburgh. So the FBI came to the man’s house in New York and confiscated a ton of personal possessions of the man (Elliot Madison) and his housemates. I won’t be the first to point out that when protesters in a country like Iran use Twitter to inform and organize, Americans cheer, but when you do it in the US, you get a police boot through your front door.

Much scarier, the legal proceedings are becoming increasingly secretive. The residents’ possessions were seized, but law enforcement won’t say why or what the search warrant covered. How do you defend yourself when no one tells you the charges??? Civil liberties under Obama don’t seem much better than they were under George W. Bush.

The activists (who call their home “Tortuga”) are asking for help. Not only must they pay legal fees now and for what may become an expensive, Kafka-esque legal process, they must do so after having all kinds of personal possessions (including computers and phones) taken away by the police. They’re asking for donations (go to their blog and click on the “here” link under the “Donation” heading). If you live near San Francisco, you can attend a benefit show for Tortuga House on October 23. They’re also asking folks to spread the word (let people know about their website, FriendsOfTortuga.wordpress.com.

More information about this situation on the Friends of Tortuga blog, this , and this information from Elliott’s attorney here.

How do you win a peace prize when you’re at war with two countries and are bombing a third?

I’ve got a theory I’m working, haven’t decided yet if it works:

In modern right-wing political rhetoric, “freedom” means “power”, “liberty” means “power” and “justice” means “control”.

Discuss.

First of all, I think it’s very sad that the fevered outburst of Senator Joe Wilson is getting more news coverage than the content of the speech he was bursting out about. And many liberals are basking in their outrage that a man would yell at the president during one of his royal courts, and loving all of the fury and disdain being heaped upon the Senator. Really? Obama’s a human being, and a politician, and deserves to be called on his shit. If he doesn’t lie, he certainly talks out of both sides of his mouth enough that you can’t pin down his claim well enough to determine it’s truth or untruth.

Of course, Joe Wilson was also full of shit, and IS being called on it. But funny that when you bomb civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or give trillions of taxpayer dollars to wealthy investment bankers, it’s no big deal. But when you yell rudely during a speech, you clearly owe the nation an apology.

It also pissed me off when I listened to the NPR talking heads on the radio prior to Obama’s speech. They were talking about what Obama had to say in his speech to win political points, or bring up his poll numbers, or win public support for health care reform. I was thinking, “hey! Why not talk about what he has to do so that my working poor friends don’t get sick and die?”

While health care insurance reform is certainly an important issue, there are many other important issues about American health that aren’t getting much mainstream news coverage. The incredibly unhealthy American industrial diet, the way that healthy foods are often out of reach (economically or geographically) of poorer folks, the uber-busy American work/commute-day that gives them little time to cook or exercise, air pollution, water pollution, and more. None of these issues are currently on the table, just the idea of making some moderate alterations to health insurance regulations.

Which is important, of course. The best figures I can find say that about 22,000 adults die each year solely because they don’t have health insurance (the figure’s a little squiggly, it only covers people 25-64. What about children or the elderly?). That’s 7 9/11’s a year. The deaths of three thousand by horrible terror attacks, we have enough passion to invade two countries (three, if you count the ongoing attacks on parts of Pakistan), give sweeping new powers to the goverment, and scorch large portions of the Constitution. 22,000 dead from corporate business-as-usual, well, that’s not enough to get the blood pumping. Because it’s all part of the plan, as the Joker might say.

The simplest health insurance reform I’ve heard is to expand Medicare. Lower the entry age, let people buy into it, something like that. Americans love them some Medicare, I imagine this idea would be very popular, and not require gymnastic contortions to pull a workable legislative plan together.

One more interesting point, is that for all the fear that the Obama plan is “government-run health care” (it isn’t), a number of recent studies and surveys say that the best health care in the United States today is the Veterans Health Administration (VHA, or VA). This is hard to believe, given the VA’s popular reputation, especially the Walter Reed scandal, but it appears to be true. Of course, this apparently high quality health care institution is government-run health care. Not single-payer national health insurance, like the UK or Canada or Medicare, but actual government doctors, government hospitals, etc. I’m not saying that America needs an all-government health institution for all Americans, just throwing this out there.

And finally, the train wreck of our national health care also shows how bankrupt American democracy really is. In a recent speech, Noam Chomsky pointed out how Americans have favored some sort of national health care program for five or six decades, but it’s always called “politically impossible” by politicians and the press. And it is only now coming to the fore, he claims, is because some big American businesses are starting to favor it: if the government pays for people’s health insurance, the companies don’t have to spend the money to buy it for their employees (it’s a wonder that more businesses haven’t been on this bandwagon for years). But there’s our democracy: large majority of the voters, no change; some players in the business world, Congress takes action.

Okay, let’s start looking at the new plan that Obama outlined in his big speech.

The first part sounded promising: laws to prohibit insurance companies from dropping customers when they get sick, from limiting coverage, and from using pre-existing conditions as an excuse not to take on new clients in the first place. The devil will be completely in the details on this part. If the loopholes are big enough, or the enforcement lax, these provisions will be meaningless.

The second part sounded shady-to-appalling. First of all, all Americans will be forced to have health insurance. If you’ve got it now, cool. If you don’t, you’ll be forced to buy it. His reasoning is valid, that no insurance company would willingly accept the prohibitions mentioned above, without having a larger base of healthy client premiums to add to the pot. But fuck them. Seriously, I give 0% of a shit about insurance company CEOs and their shareholders and their diamond-encrusted polo ponies. Fuck them and what they want. Any justice-minded politician at all would be looking at ways to break the backbone of the insurance companies’ power, not how to help them maintain or prosper.

Then Obama mentioned some confusing “health insurance exchange”, which would somehow make insurance affordable for people who currently can’t afford it. Um… okay? I don’t understand what this is, and have not seen any revelatory analysis that explains what the fuck these exchanges are, how they will work, or how the free market– which so regularly allows capitalistic vultures to pick everyone’s bones clean– is going to accomplish this. His argument is that insurance companies will be competing with each other for all these new customers, and therefore the rates will become cheap and affordable. Honestly, these days companies compete not through price and quality, but through advertising, so I don’t see this as likely.

If you still can’t afford this new, cheap insurance, you’ll get tax credits that will make up the difference. This also kinda sucks. If you can’t afford it, you might not be able to afford paying for it, and then getting that money back in a tax return twelve months from now. I’d prefer some sort of subsidies right away for these folks.

Then, Obama somehow talks about how great it would be to have a public option (as part of the health exchange), yet seems to also say that it’s not mandatory for his new plan to have a public option. This would be presumably some sort of Medicaid-like program, but again, no details, not even enough to tell if this will even exist. This is the only saving grace of his “exchange” idea. If there is a public option, it might actually be a cheap alternative for people. Otherwise, I imagine many of the nation’s poor wil be forced to buy insurance with cheap premiums, little coverage, and exorbitant deductibles if they ever try to actually use their coverage.

The only other good news about this is that there will be some sort of “hardship waiver” for people who still can’t afford health insurance, even after all of the wonderful half-ass measures above. Again, devil in the details, it will depend on what the government defines as “hardship” and how difficult they make it to get one of these waivers.

But never mind that, Obama said that it would take four years to set this up in the first place.

The rest of the plan is about methods to cut cost, which is ridiculous since we’re a) keeping the same corrupt, inefficient, for-profit insurance companies at the head of this thing and b) making it illegal to negotiate with corrupt, inefficient, for-profit drug companies to get medicine at more reasonable prices.

How does the Obama plan match with any of the bills that Congress has actually compiled to vote on? I have no idea. Seems like the whole plan’s moot if no legislator actually puts these elements into a bill.

In conclusion, I typed a lot just now.

Stopping at one of my local gas stations today, I noticed that they were selling advertising space on top of the pumps. As if that was not irritating enough, the ad slot nearest me had a big picture of Uncle Sam warning me that “Proposed ‘Cap and Trade’ Legislation WILL COST YOU MONEY!”

It went on to claim that if this enviornmental legislation is passed, it will cost me an extra 77 cents per galon, $7.70 for 10 gallons, and $15.40 for 20 gallons. It then advised me to take action by visiting VoicesForEnergy.com. It even had little flyers I could take home with me (I am now slightly kicking myself for not taking them all and throwing them away).

So, first off, “cap and trade” is a bad idea. The concept is that government regulations come up with a maximum amount of pollutants that each company can pump into the air (the “cap”). Then, your company can make deals with other companies that are polluting less than their maximum to allow your company to continue pumping out as much crap as you ever did (the “trade”). So the total amount of pollution doesn’t decrease, small companies get cash bonuses, and the big companies continue making robber baron profits, minus a small amount they’ll pay for their pollution credits. Why actually pass laws that will, y’know, regulate pollution, when you can pass half-assed shit like this?

Anyhow, I guess even the small amounts that big polluters will have to pay for their pollution credits is too much for these guys (gold-plated lobster forks don’t grow on trees, you know), so they have started the propaganda already. To their very small credit, the fake citizen outrage group promoted at my Valero gas station actually has the Valero name and logo at the top (mixed in with their astroturf org logo), which is ten times more honest than most corporate propagada. Kudos to you, corporate slime lords.

Their website continues to throw out scare figures, and has a simple form for you to fill out to send to your Congressvermin, with a single link “to learn more about federal climate legislation.” Now, the area of energy economics is not my field of expertise, so I jumped down to the footnotes on this page o’ facts.

Source #1: American Petroleum Institute. Says their website, “we are the only national trade association that represents all aspects of America’s oil and natural gas industry.” Clearly, we can take their word at face value, as they have no conflict of interest in this fight.

Source #2: a study by Garbriel Calzada Alvarez PH.D. A quick googling of this name found an article claiming that Alvarez is a member of the Prague Network “which, according to Radio Prague, is ‘an international grouping of institutions aimed at countering panic connected with global warming.’” Okay, so a global warming denier. Excellent. Next.

Source #3: the Cato Institute. A well-known and powerful conservative/evil think-tank. The mantra on their website is “individual liberty, free markets, and peace.” Presumably, not in that order…

Source #4: MasterResource. The site bills itself as “a free-market energy blog”. The group of bloggers who write for the site include former Enron staffers (including a former speech-writer for Ken Lay), a member of the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Institute, members of the Cato Institute, and several global warming deniers.

Source #5: The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Well, not exactly. This “proof” is actually a press release from Republican Senator James Inhofe (who receives a sizable amount of campaign contributions from energy industries [but honestly, which Senators dont?]), which tries to spin a hearing with EPA officials to mean “if China and India don’t reduce their greenhouse gases too, there’s no point in us decreasing ours”.

Of course, I haven’t debunked a single argument made by these folks, but as it’s a corporate-fronted activist site, with information provided by players with vested interests, spin doctors, and ideologues, I’d at least say “look somewhere else for facts”. And maybe “don’t buy gas from Valero”.

Honestly, without massively cutting our greenhouse gases, we’re probably going to get most of the painful consequences that Al Gore and sci-fi movies warn us about. It’s not going to kill off mankind, but we’re going to get the floods and the droughts and the mass immigration of refugees and some of the disease. And we’re probably not going to massively cut our greenhouse gases, because, as the late great Kurt Vonnegut put it, “we were too damn cheap and lazy.”

Let’s say you worked in an office, and the fellow at the desk next to you was always stepping on your toes as he passed by you. Everyone gets frustrated with him for his clumsiness, and despite every assurance that he’ll be more careful, damned if he’s not crushing your feet again as he enters and leaves.

And then it hits you: what if he’s not clumsy? What if he’s doing it on purpose?

And at a certain point, what does it matter whether it’s intentional or not? Whether he’s clumsy or villainous, your toes are getting bruised just the same, and you ought to move your damn desk away from him.

And if you saw that I was going to use this as a metaphor for the Democratic party, I’m just getting too damned predictable.

Seriously, liberal/progressive types from the highest peaks to the deepest ocean trenches all bemoan the way that their Democratic representatives in government are so cowardly, so spineless, so quick to cave and compromise. But after this happens enough times, you should seriously ask yourself if they are getting tricked into giving up on what they want time and time again, or if they are doing it because THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT.

So are the Democrats in Congress caving in to right-wing pressure for weak health reform legislation? Or do these Democrats WANT weak health reform legislation?

Frankly, I think it’s the latter. What’s in it for them, politically, to get a public option, or single-payer health care? How many votes will it get them next election, versus how many lobbying dollars will they lose from an angry health insurance industry? It’s been shown that almost all of the time in American elections, the candidate who raises the most campaign money wins the election. Sad, but true. Americans could turn this around with some education, dedication, and awareness. But right now, the reality is that politicians have a better chance of winning an election by screwing over their constituents for cash than even by passing laws that the vast majority of those constituents are begging for.

I heard a recent radio interview with blogger Jane Hamsher that made this even more stark. She made a strong case that when you look at the Democratic stances on the bank bailout and health reform* together, you saw a simple pattern: Democratic politicians handing out mountains of cash to two powerful industries that spend lots of lobbying dollars. In other words, instead of using their overwhelming majority to fix the country, the Democrats were using it to try to wrest campaign funds away from their political rivals for the next Congressional elections. Once she put it that way (and tied it in to the efforts of Obama chief of staff, the slimy Rahm Emanuel), I have a hard time seeing it any other way.

Are the Democrats weak, or evil? When they keep hurting you, does it matter?

—
* the Democratic “health insurance reform” seems to be one where 40-50 million Americans will be forced to buy health insurance from private health insurance companies** (which is a lot of new customers), and pharmaceutical companies will not be pressured to lower prices/profits. The only “reform” part is that poor folks might get subsidies to help buy their insurance (your tax dollars going to Aetna and Blue Shield), and the possibility that the insurance companies will be prohibited from declining you health care for pre-existing conditions. And, in my super-cynical opinion, the laws regulating that will probably be vague and weak.

** unless the “public option” goes through, which does not look probable. And even if it did, the estimates I’ve seen are that about 9-10 million Americans will be using it. That still leaves around 30-40 million new, forced customers.

Sigh sigh sigh. I was pretty pissed off when I saw the cover of this week’s Time magazine. For those who can’t read it:

“The Myth About Exercise: Of course, it’s good for you, but it won’t make you lose weight. Why it’s really what you eat that counts”

Now, I’m not a doctor, nutritionist, scientist, or even really a journalist. But I can tell you that that headline is fucking wrong. The way that you lose weight is to burn more calories than you eat. So exercise matters AND what you eat matters. There really isn’t a shortcut, no “eat brocoli and peanuts” solution, or “do 80 crunches a day” answer. If you want to lose weight, you either have to decrease your calorie intake to better match your physical activity level, increase your exercise to compensate for your calories, or some of each. None of this “only what you eat” bullshit that Time is peddling for some reason.

Against my better judgment, I actually read the article (well, skimmed), just to make sure I wasn’t missing some important point. Basically, the article says “sometimes when people exercise, they get hungry and eat. And sometimes the calories that they eat offset the benefits of their exercise.” So that’s Time’s top story of the week, “hungry people eat stuff.” Idiots.

Top story on CNN.com right now:

“Parents seek answers after children abducted”

Yes, I imagine they would…

British Government To Put Closed Circuit TV Cameras Into 20,000+ Private Homes

LMB Radio 8-01-09

Jake pontificates/mumbles about:

- Comic Con and “entertainment journalism”
- Gates-gate and the police
- Obama’s “health” “care” “reform”

I also play one Beastie Boys song as a shout out/get well to Adam “MCA” Yauch, who was recently diagnosed with throat cancer (although we’re told he should be fine after some treatment). Special subtle thanks to Levar Burton.

Kinda spiffy.

Nice article here by radical environmental fella Derrick Jensen- “Forget Shorter Showers: Why personal change does not equal political change”. I think his core point is extremely important: while politicians and advertising encourage the public to change their shopping behaviors to save the planet, the environmental damage caused by corporations and industry absolutely dwarf the damage caused by you and me. Reusing your plastic grocery bags and using “green” toilet paper is utterly meaningless if you live down the block from a coal-fired power plant, or virtually any kind of factory.

Jensen then veers a bit, after implying that you and your lifestyle are insignificant, he then says that people like you and me are very important, because we have to destroy industrial capitalism to save the planet. How? He’s a tad vague. But of course, there is no “right way” to confront and defeat an economic, political, and cultural system. No one “knows” what to do in this situation. You’ve just got to try what you can. But, almost as an aside, he points out that this has consequences as well:

acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world.

Honestly, I think that’s why activist culture in the US is still stuck on non-violence and rallies; if you take action that actually threatens the establishment, it will fight back. It’s much less scary to try to organize the biggest darn legally-permitted protest rally around, than to take terrifying direct action, and face the possibility of arrest, injury, and death.

1) Although America seems now quite taken with the brave political protesters of Iran, until very recently, the country talked quite seriously about killing hundreds of thousands of them in a military invasion because they could, at some point, develop nuclear weapons, which they could then possibly use against the United States, although it wouldn’t make any sense for them to do so, and would guarantee retaliation from the United States in the form of nuclear hell. But I am very pleased that this popular uprising has inspired the news media to cover Iran like it was made up of actual people.

2) It’s a little frustrating that while the American public seems to be on the side of the protesters, there still seems to be a real disconnect. Americans seem to want the Iranian people to have what we Americans want, not what the Iranian people want for themselves. Americans have already decided that our brand of Free Election Democracy is what is best for all people everywhere, no matter what they may think they want (although they do, when not in this mode, acknowledge that the American political system is riddled with corruption, and doesn’t actually represent the will of its citizens). Thinking that you know what’s best for someone else, without pausing to think that maybe they know what’s best for themselves is part of this “American arrogance” we sometimes hear about. Not entirely our fault, we’re propagandized into thinking this since the time we are very young.

3) I’m really not sure what me and my fellow Americans should do if we truly want to help the Iranians. To be honest, I haven’t heard much in the way of Iranians asking for help. Clearly, all of the heavy work and sacrifice will have to be done in Iran by Iranians. Even worse, any public support by Americans can help the Iranian government to paint the protesters as Western puppets and claim that the whole movement is just another sneaky American regime change plot. I salute the folks who are providing telecommunications help (getting around censorship, etc.), but this may be a case where taking to the streets and marching outside in solidarity might do real harm.

4) Obviously, no one knows how this is going to turn out. At this point, it seems like either the government will crack down hard, and force an end to the protests through violence and fear. Or the schisms among political players and authority figures will grow wider, giving the protesters continued breathing room to keep the pressure on. But I don’t see this ending well for the protesters unless Supreme Leader Khamenei gets ousted, or his rivals (in the Iranian theological apparatus) become powerful enough to frighten him into calling for a new election.

5) Fun fact: did you know that the US is still occupying Iraq and Afganistan? If you watched the mainstream news, you might have forgotten.