For freelance Santas, this holiday season has been more “no, no, no,” than “ho, ho, ho.” Bookings have declined as paying $125 an hour for Santa to visit a holiday party has become an unaffordable luxury. It’s the second year of declining parties and events, Santas say.
“This year has been a bust as far as making any money,” said McTavish, a retired firefighter who co-owns a landscaping business with his son. “I’ve booked nothing. Usually there’s always something for Christmas Eve, but I don’t even have that.”
In addition to knowing which children have been bad or good, the modern-day Santa also hears which families don’t have enough money for presents.
It’s worth reminding that not a single big Wall Street name has been strung up over the affairs which landed us here. But that they just enjoyed their best year ever and the president guaranteed they’d get their tax cuts.
Surf out to BagNews for two photo essays on Glenn Beck’s trip to Wilmington, Ohio.
It portrays part of his book tour for “Broke,” part of his “America’s First Christman,” a one-man stage show.
I just saw the latter excerpted on Fox. It’s hard to stomach — from Beck masquerading as a Santa pointedly making jokes in a German accent to his wandering the stage in a red union suit.
Beck’s use of Wilmington is drily summed up by the BagNews journalists:
There is something disconcerting about a book called “Broke??? being aggressively sold to people who are, by a writer who isn’t.
On Beck’s Fox News show he’s spun the story of his trip to Wilmington as one in which all that is needed to overcome extreme hardship — crushing unemployment — is prayer and determined self-reliance.
In Europe, when the people get hosed for reparations because of financial crisis brought on by bankers, you get this:
Thousands of Greeks took to the streets of the capital on Wednesday for a protest against a fresh wave of austerity measures which was marred by violence as a general strike brought international travel and public services to a standstill.
The walkout — Greece’s seventh general strike this year — grounded flights, kept ferries in ports, halted train services and shut down government offices and schools while leaving hospitals to operate on emergency staffing and causing a news blackout as journalists joined the action. Public transport was operating for most of the day to enable Athenians to attend demonstrations in the city center.
Here, social protest is the Tea Party — fucked up white people arguing for tax breaks for the wealthiest and who blame the economic mess on too many people of color getting mortgages they didn’t deserve.
I have a friend who thinks there’s still some type of social conscience in this country, like that which brought about the end of the Vietnam war.
He’s dead wrong.
Here we have one entire television network and a good part of the media focusing on what needs to be done about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. They want the government to be more secret. And to put a hit on him in England.
And, of course, there’s also the social protest movement on how corporate America needs more jacking off from the Obama administration.
I was at a late afternoon Christmas party in Pasadena yesterday when I was told a classically 2010 American tale.
The fellow to the left of me was talking about his job. He worked at the big Miller brewery in southern California, west on the superhighway out of Pasadena to Irwindale. It’s a classic joint. Like all breweries, you can smell the fermentation when you drive by.
He informed the room that Miller’s development plan was to downsize/fire 50 percent of the employees at the place.
I was astonished. Beer, like pizza, one would think to be virtually recession proof. Only if you kill off a population do you cut overall consumption of alcohol.
And the biology and thermodynamics of fermentation has not been changed by innovation in hundreds of years. It can’t be done. Beer-making is immutable. You cannot make it more efficient through the application of technology aimed at efficiency and downsizing.
So I asked the man what was the reasoning behind this, since beer-making can’t be revolutionized.
He said that management had figured out that if you had two people who did jobs with overlap, you could fire one of them, award half their salary to the retained worker, and make the person still employed do twice the work. And the leftovers would jump at that.
He added that this made more profit for the shareholders and company heads.
I had nothing more to say. I wanted to ask, “But didn’t that destroy the morale of everyone at the brewery?”
However, it seemed best to remain silent. It was a Christmas party, after all.
“SABMiller plc (SAB.L) and Molson Coors Brewing Company (NYSE: TAP; TSX) today reported MillerCoors underlying earnings grew at a double digit rate driven by strong cost management and net pricing, which were offset by soft volumes due to a sluggish U.S. beer market in the third quarter ended September 30, 2010,” reads a press release from November here.
“MillerCoors third quarter underlying net income, excluding special items increased 36.7 percent to $334 million versus the prior year comparable quarter last year.”
Miller, like every beer, sells itself as true blue collar. It’s typified by the slew of ads featuring the chunky delivery truck man, often affronted or being made queasy by things encountered on his route. Like finding himself being sent to a hockey barn being used by the bluebloods for a dog beauty show.
When you see this from now on it’ll be the guys in the Miller work uniforms making you ‘queasy.’
The story that Miller’s plan was to fire half of its blue collar employees in Irwindale for the sake of the shareholders really puts a dent in the way I see the advertising. And the product.
It shows the company doesn’t give even the slightest shit about the people who its product is sold to. Miller beer might as well be plastic drawstring garbage bags.
Before yesterday I used to think that beer-making was a job one might take pride in. How stupid.
I have occasionally been asked — most notably this week — for opinion and context on hackers as a counterbalance to government and political power.
This week it was a couple journalists asking about Operation Payback and WikiLeaks as some manner of revolutionary change agent.
These types of questions go back a long way. I used to field them when editing the Crypt Newsletter, an old e-zine that covered the subculture of amateur virus-writers.
“This seems like another kind of culture war,” one fellow sent this week. “The hacks and hack nots. The powerless have found a way to overpower.”
Not quite.
Operation Payback did add to the hysteria surrounding WikiLeaks. It contributed to the mess without accomplishing anything other than the symbolism created by revenge in cyberspace.
And it did again prove how easy it is to have a group tantrum, one that always has the potential to inconvenience people.
However, in the short term, the WikiLeaks dumps have demonstrated the power of that agency is finite.
From my point of view, the reaction to WikiLeaks has pushed the US government into being more unreasonable and secretive. This appears to be part of its aim.
But it shows a naïve belief in an end point that’s favorable. Or the experience of one who hasn’t been living in the US and experiencing the way things are.
You can reveal many interior things about US government or corporate dealings today but even if the press writes about it for weeks, and politicians hold hearings, nothing happens.
The best and most obvious case is the worldwide financial meltdown.
“Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s documentary on it has played in Pasadena. And there is no more savage and incriminating an indictment of Wall Street and the US banking industry. Watching it makes the blood boil. In a system that wasn’t broken, such a story would be seen by a lot more people, not just those of us in southern California, San Francisco, NYC or Boston. It’s capability to inflame should stoke outrage and the picking up of pitchforks in Oklahoma, Nebraska — anywhere in the heartland.
But it just hasn’t happened.
And Ferguson’s movie is not the first to tell this story. Many have.
Everyone has already been shown — multiple times, very convincingly — that the bankers engaged in rigging and blew up the economy. And that the people running Goldman Sachs and their corporate rivals are criminal greedheads after everyone’s money.
So if WikiLeaks does another document dump, this time from — maybe — Bank of America, no matter what is revealed about our “ecosystem” of corruption, it’s blinkered to think that things will change. It has already been demonstrated, over and over, that Bank of America participated with other financial institutions in the running of a Ponzi scheme.
What happened after the WikiLeaks release of the helicopter attack video?
Nothing.
What happened after the Afghanistan war diary?
Along with the journalism that has been done on the global financial crisis, these things show us how power is, except for election time, totally insulated from consequences in the US in 2010.
WikiLeaks and Julian Assange can’t change that, probably no matter what material is released.
Does that mean it shouldn’t exist to do what it does? No, not at all!
You would say the same thing to the editors of newspapers who must now realize that despite investigative efforts and the placing of utterly damning material on the frontpage, the power to actually create meaningful change now is just about entirely out of reach.
It’s not an optimistic picture. WikiLeaks has not changed this.
So the idea that hackers can achieve a reversal is beamish.
At the time of underground e-zines years ago, hackers were frequently alleged to be capable of turning the tables on the establishment or government enemies of the moment. And although they can strike at people, companies and agencies, it just never worked out that way.
However, as much reported revenge, which is what this is about, it has always had symbolic value in the domain.
As for instigators of societal change, or protest in the US, the only group that has had any impact has been the Tea Party. And while it is profoundly anti-government, it is the very opposite of WikiLeaks.
The criminal and anti-American enterprise WikiLeaks said in a Twitter message this morning that it was under a “distributed denial of service attack,” a method often used by hackers to slow or bring down websites. If this is the U.S. government at work, good for our civil servants. If this is patriotic citizens taking matters into their own hands—even better. The original Tea Party was a grassroots citizens’ effort. If Tea Party-inspired Americans—and freedom-loving hackers around the world—can act effectively in cyberspace against today’s threats to our liberties and well-being, and to the liberties and well-being of others —that’s something to be applauded. Indeed, it’s community activism one can believe in.
“Freedom-loving hackers of the world, unite!” is Kristol’s subhed. It’s to laugh.
What followed was a lament from an anonymous employee of the Department of Homeland Security.
“It has even been suggested that if it is discovered that we have accessed a classified Wikileaks cable on our personal computers, that will be a security violation,” the person writes.
There has been no sign of leadership from any Administration official who would stand up and say: “National security classification is a means, and not an end in itself. What any reader in the world can discover is no longer a national security secret. We should not pretend otherwise.???
The President, angry and rattled that his capitulation has not been warmly received, is giving his “Peace In Our Time” speech. I’m watching it on Fox. Where the previous thirty minutes were devoted to calling him a socialist and saying he needed to give even more to the wealthy and corporate America.
Extended repetitive rationalization of giving in to blackmailers.
Updated
Fox notes the president calling the left “sanctimonious.” Juan Williams, the guy kicked off NPR, cites someone else saying this was the President’s “Gettysburg … but he didn’t withstand Pickett’s charge.”
Shep Smith: “He said to the Democrats, ‘It’s your fault.'”
The truth is that America’s long-run deficit problem has nothing at all to do with overpaid federal workers. For one thing, those workers aren’t overpaid. Federal salaries are, on average, somewhat less than those of private-sector workers with equivalent qualifications …
Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,??? although he might as well have.
It wasn’t too long ago — late spring, actually — that the president looked hopefully at the unemployment numbers, which had dipped. Due to mass hiring of census workers, of which I was one.
He learned nothing from that. The jobs were temporary. But they did pay and pump money into local economies. Census hiring showed how the government could immediately put people to work doing a very productive task. And that it had good effects.
In the meaningless whacking of middle class job pay under his command, he’s signaled he believes those with the generosity of spirit of Ted Nugent are just and virtuous. In the process, he’s destroyed any belief his supporters might have still had in him.
That you could actually lose an argument over giving tax cuts to the wealthiest, who have benefited the most after the economic collapse, while unemployment benefits to those who lost the most are stifled, is stupefying.
Astonishingly, today’s e-mail brought a despicable missive from barackobama.com’s honcho, Mitch Stewart. It was a blandishment to astro-turf for the rightness of freezing the pay of middle class federal government workers.
Here:
Will you take a few minutes and write a letter to the editor today to set the record straight?
Using our letter-to-the-editor tool is easy, and we’ll provide tips and talking points to get you started.
Yesterday’s announcement is simply the latest in a series of steps taken by this administration to cut costs and stretch federal dollars.
On his first day in office, President Obama froze the salaries of all senior White House officials — a freeze he later extended to other political appointees. And, in his 2011 budget, he put forward more than $1 trillion in deficit reduction, including a three-year freeze in non-security, discretionary spending.
But if we’re going to tackle the deficit and continue to keep the economy moving in the right direction, we’re far from finished.
As the President said, yesterday’s announcement is not a decision he made lightly. He knows firsthand that the people affected by this pay freeze work hard and sacrifice out of love for their country and in the name of serving their fellow Americans. They are doctors and nurses who care for our veterans. They are scientists researching better treatments and cures for disease.
But if we’re serious about cutting costs, it will require a shared sacrifice from all Americans. It is going to require both sides of the aisle working together. And it is going to require an open, honest debate — one in which partisan politics takes a back seat to the task at hand.
So the next time a friend or family member repeats the untruths about “reckless spending and big government,” tell them the truth about the President’s fiscal leadership and his decision to freeze federal pay for two years.
You can start helping get out the facts by writing a letter to the editor of your local paper today …
It’s eye-watering in its pure evil. Write a letter to your editor saying what a swell guy the prez is for freezing pay to average Joe’s while Wall Street and corporate America enjoy the best year, ever.
The organization formerly known as Obama for America is asking supporters to write letters in support of a federal pay freeze.
“Obama Runs Play from the GOP Book” read the headline on the frontpage of today’s LA Times.
Could have added as subhed: “Adopts policy of sworn enemies, gets kicked in teeth, anyway. Loses even more supporters.”
If there’s a website that’s asked for a DDoS attack today, it’s barackobama.com
Ted Nugent, before Thanksgiving, from the Detroit News:
Far more belt-tightening is in order. We need to make the belt-tightening painful if we are going to climb out of this deep financial hole and save America …
Fedzilla must be put on a strict diet. With the exception of the Defense Department, all federal departments, agencies and organizations should receive 6 1/2 percent less in their budgets for the next four years …
Because Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, comes from the hacker underground, its actions often look taken from the POV of a desire to expose stuff just for the sake of exposing it.
This was always part of the mindset of the hacker fraternity.
And it really wasn’t of tantamount importance to consider fine ramifications. So any tonnage of quote from the US government on how security was about to be greatly harmed — true, disingenuous, sincere or evil — was never going to be an impediment to action.
Wikileaks is proof of adherence to the old slogan favored by hackers: Information wants to be free.
And Bradley Manning — because he was vain and kept poor company, the result of which was his being turned over — doesn’t seem much of a Daniel Ellsberg.
There is a perceptible element of wanting to be famous, a not uncommon trait. And so the young man apparently vacuumed up everything at his disposal. This everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink approach has certainly worked, creating a great sensation, even when most of the material is gossip — State Department employees and foreign leaders being just how you might expect.
Because of what we have come to — the US frequently considered a bad actor — the Dept. of Defense and the State Department, the entire foreign face of the US government, has a problem it cannot solve. Its exposure is thought by lots of people to be well deserved, come-uppance because it has been on the wrong side of so many issues in recent history and been proven unaccountable.
Thus, there is now no defense that can be mounted against the swarm of those willing to perpetrate a Wikileaks-type operation.
It stands to reason that going forward there will always be at least one person like Bradley Manning in the service of the US government or military. Or even a couple.
Not someone who will just blow the whistle or leak a couple things of critical interest.
But someone who will mindlessly divulge everything they can get their hands on. Good, bad or indifferent — even material they could not humanly have taken the time to read and understand.
It is not so remarkable that Bradley Manning copied a staggering volume of material.
What’s remarkable is the collision of technology, an idiotically official American process of universally networking everything and labeling it secret — whether antagonistic, stupefying, mundane, understandably human or legitimately so, and someone like Manning, one person of small means who spills the beans. And then that absolutely nothing changes until the next mega-release and the cycle continues.
The act of disclosure has turned into an exercise in a type of extremism, a reaction — often unthinking — to what we are now. That’s the way it is.
And it’s impossible to secure against. Now that Wikileaks is an outlet the problem cannot be remedied from such a standpoint.
Does it merit the play-acting of someone like Hillary Clinton, asserting that it tears at the fabric of responsible government one moment, making a joke referral to what’s said about her behind closed doors, the next? No.
What passes for responsible government now? Who in the glass house is going to throw the first stone?
Chalmers Johnson might have had something interesting to say on the matter and its relationship to the maintenance of a worldwide empire. But we can’t ask him because he died.
At the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy blog, Steve Aftergood — who has regularly been critical of Wikileaks — had this to say, yesterday:
The Wikileaks project seems to be, more than anything else, an assault on secrecy. If Wikileaks were most concerned about whistleblowing, it would focus on revealing corruption. If it were concerned with historical truth, it would emphasize the discovery of verifiably true facts. If it were anti-war, it would safeguard, not disrupt, the conduct of diplomatic communications. But instead, what Wikileaks has done is to publish a vast potpourri of records — dazzling, revelatory, true, questionable, embarrassing, or routine — whose only common feature is that they are classified or otherwise restricted.
This may be understood as a reaction to a real problem, namely the fact that by all accounts, the scope of government secrecy in the U.S. (not to mention other countries) has exceeded rational boundaries. Disabling secrecy in the name of transparency would be a sensible goal — if it were true that all secrecy is wrong. But if there is a legitimate role for secrecy in military operations, in intelligence gathering or in diplomatic negotiations, as seems self-evident, then a different approach is called for.
“It’s impossible to say whether the race to fix the classification system can be won through our kind of advocacy from the outside and by enlightened self-interest within government,” concludes Aftergood. “Before that happens, classification itself could be rendered moot and ineffective by leaks, abuse or internal collapse. Or, in a reflexive response to continuing leaks, officials might seek to expand the scope of secrecy rather than focusing it narrowly, while increasing penalties for unauthorized disclosures.”
To wit, it is not at clear yet that Wikileaks is a universal solvent. And Aftergood, over all, is singularly positioned to know.
“Assault on secrecy,” when you think about it for a moment, sounds suspiciously similar to things like “war on drugs” and “war on terror.”
Anyway, initial reports from the government indicate the opposite of a break in the official barricades.
A more pressing desire to get after the leakers, tighter controls on information, new restrictions on portable data storage — none of which can protect from Bradley Mannings.
Maybe it will sort out in some favorable manner. I doubt it, though. There will just be more releases of information, more frenzied measures to bring a halt to it, bigger punishments demanded and ever louder cries for violent solutions.
The U.S. Commerce Department reports today that corporate profits are at a record high, at a time when corporations are sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash reserves. At the same time, 15 million Americans are still looking for work.
Two years after the financial collapse caused by right-wing deregulation and corporate greed, Wall Street is handing out its biggest bonuses in history — more than $144 billion. At the same time, millions of working Americans are struggling to feed their families, pay their bills and keep a roof over their heads.
And the situation is set to get even more painful in the months ahead. Millions of Americans — 2 million in December alone — will be cut off from unemployment insurance. Republicans in Congress blocked an extension of this emergency lifeline just before leaving Washington, DC, for their Thanksgiving recess.
One of the president’s, and the Democratic party’s, faults — is that they never grasped the need for lynchings.
The Republicans know the value of burning people at the stake. At least they get the concept of revenge.