It’s apparent that big American companies simply won’t do the right thing, even if it’s small.
Personally experiences, over the weekend, with the Washington Post and DD’s discovery of it running a banner ad for Chinese-made electric guitars specifically aimed at fraudulently trafficking on American products.
And it was still running the banner yesterday. Maybe today. I don’t check the place every day.
Do your part to destroy any American manufacturing, even if it’s only small. Every little bit helps.
The nut of is that the banner ad run by the Post was from some operation selling knock-offs of famous Gibson guitars. Gibson, an iconic guitar manufacturer, does have factories making electric guitars in China. But those guitars, sold in the American market as a cheaper alternative to domestically made instruments from Gibson’s Nashville facilities, are -specifically- recognizable as Epiphones.
Their headstocks, trademark names and various different choices in hardware mark them as such.
The instruments advertised through the banner running at the Washington Post do not fall into this category. They are either cheap knock-offs, counterfeits, advertised in some fraudulent way, or a combination of these.
The Washington Post does not need to help in the job of undercutting US business for the sake a few Internet advertising dollars. In this, it is on the side of the bad guys.
DD knows the line about capitalists willing to sell one the rope you’ll hang them with. But really now …
The President must surely now realize the Tea Party/GOP has him and the government in the equivalent of a Vulcan Death Grip/choke hold/full nelson.
This is their historical moment. As I’ve said before one can almost admire the purity of their desire to bring down Obama and the US government whatever the personal cost.
Knowing the psychology, it’s obvious they think of the president as the devil. When they have a shot at destroying his presidency, perhaps their only one, why would they stay the hand?
Here’s the mentality — at the LehighValleyConservative. It continues to startle me that very few in the media actually mention the obvious — that pure raging animosity is driving a lot of this.
How did the President not see that given a chance, they’d do this to him and everyone else? Historians might figure it out years from now.
I can’t figure out why the President thinks asking the public to launch what amounts to denial-of-service attacks on Congressional telephones and websites means anything.
Does anyone with a brain think anyone in the building even remotely cares if staffers have a hard day, inbound goes directly to voice mail and servers time out?
Why would you even waste time on television triggering it?
If I had the psychology of the GOP I’d see it as an indication to keep on, only even harder. You can almost admire the maniacal desire to bring down the enemy no matter the cost, the pure kamikaze nature of it.
And all the opposition can do is ring the phones? It’s pathetic.
Reminds me a little of the few books of fiction on nuclear conflict I read during the Cold War where the tit-for-tat limited escalations become unmanageable. Both sides found it impossible to avert total calamity because communication and control were swept away while they were caught thinking they still had enough time and maneuvering room to say “Stop.”
Worth a smirk, Wall Street and US big business’ alarm over the debt ceiling crisis.
The kings of the world went out of their way to put the extremists in power in 2010, all for fighting the “socialist/communist” in the White House. And it’s the people they bankrolled who are going to hurt them the most if it all goes very bad next week.
Law of unintended consequences, the plutocrats so busy recruiting and financing cats paws they neglected to apply reliability testing, winding up with General Jack D. Rippers in power, people who don’t care if the mansions get singed while they’re burning down the country for the sake of the jihad against Obama.
Yes, you can have my great and first official DD blog T-shirt. And I don’t even get a cut.
(As a general rule, and anyone who has tried to sell these types of goods through the Internet finds out, even without taking a cut buy-on-demand pricing is fairly bad. Buying one T-shirt is no bargain. In fact, they only become sort of reasonable when one agrees to purchase 100. Which cancels all the reason for publishing/manufacturing-on-demand, anyway. So don’t be thinking I don’t already know a single sale isn’t a particularly good deal. Even if I decline to make a single penny from it. Its only saving grace — besides my dark sense of humor in the design — is that you can have a T-shirt that exists in small enough numbers to be totally unique in your neighborhood. As for Internet business being empowering to little guys, that’s mostly mythic rubbish peddled by people in corporate tech America you should be paying no attention to.)
Now we are in the midst of a debt crisis that stems largely from Obama’s inability to accept the intransigence of his political opponents … I think if Obama had the sort of experience that Cold War presidents had in dealing with the Soviet Union or that corporate executives and union leaders had in negotiating labor contracts he wouldn’t have been so naïve about the Republicans, who have never hidden the fact that their only objective is defeating him next year regardless of the cost — Reaganite, Bruce Bartlett, now someone who couldn’t exist in the modern GOP
And the Obama appears recklessly unwilling to circumvent the debt ceiling, since it would eliminate his leverage for pushing through entitlement cuts.
Yet as we’ve discussed, the outcomes the players have committed themselves to are either shooting the economy or bleeding it to death..
Earlier in the month Bartlett explicitly painted the debt ceiling crisis as a security threat. Which, if you take it logically, means the GOP/Tea Party is a national security threat, a position I’ve held for months.
Extremists of all kinds, which I have an entire tab to here, often remain just annoying kooks for life. But some of them infrequently become very dangerous threats to national security. And a collection of them has now figured out how to render US government inoperable from a minority position.
Bartlett made the reasonable claim that the US military is an oil protection force. It’s not a historically unique argument. Nixon aide Kevin Phillips made a similar one in his book American Theocracy, now several years old.
(Phillips book’s observation was that American politics had become lethal and that the country was in danger of entering permanent decline. The book was not an easy read but it’s turned out to be fairly prescient. It preceded and did not foresee the arrival of the Tea Party but did spend about a third of its print space discussing the takeover of the GOP by rigid theocrats incompatible with working government. Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, who didn’t politically exist at the time of Phillips’ book, a person who believes the US should go into default, is a banner example of American Theocracy’s arguments taken to their final destination.)
But back to Bartlett. In making the brief claim that the military was an oil protection force aimed at maintaining American security by guaranteeing the nation’s economic well-being through preservation of the flow of oil, Bartlett extended the reasoning to the debt ceiling. He argued that raising the debt ceiling was inextricably tied to the economic health of the nation, like oil, and therefore a security matter.
This was followed by a demand (or suggestion) that the President take charge and raise the debt ceiling through the 14th Amendment, rescuing the nation from a security threat. (That argument, at the New York Times, is here.)
The standee is in here, too. “If you don’t lower the corporate tax rate and give us more subsidies — will shoot what’s left of this mutt!” it reads.
Wall Street’s leading chief executives intervened in the US debt debate on Thursday, writing to President Barack Obama and Congress to warn of “very grave??? consequences of a default and urging them to cut a deal “this week???.
Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase were among 14 chief executives of banks and insurers who signed the letter, along with Rob Nichols, the head of the Financial Services Forum, the umbrella association for the biggest financial groups in the US.
The Tea Party and GOP exhibit all the traits of an extremist cult. This isn’t much of a surprise if you’ve read DD blog, or even the old Crypt Newsletter.
One perfect example has been the mainstreaming of Ted Nugent.
There’s nothing reasonable or sane about him but he was perfectly fit just to be hard rock guitarist. However, he’s totally unfit for public discourse or informing about what might be good government and national policy in a reasonable society.
However, the latter is now one of his regular money gigs. Nugent is more famous as an irrational extremist portrayed as a normal, if slightly more colorful than usual, pundit.
[There] is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.
You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will …
And yes, I think this is a moral issue.
Yesterday, Krugman called John Boehner’s counter-Obama speech “vile.”
That’s a word one can usually use to describe all cults as well as their principals.
The news now fills up with pieces on another symptom of total decline — the hard scapegoating of the unemployed by the private sector, reclassifying them as total undesirables. Once unemployed, now to be permanently discarded as broken and diseased.
That is the message being broadcast by many of the nation’s employers, making it even more difficult for 14 million jobless Americans to get back to work.
[Them the qualifier.]
After all, there are legitimate reasons that many long-term unemployed workers may not be desirable job candidates. In some cases they may have been let go early in the recession, not just because business had slowed, but because they were incompetent.
Idle workers’ skills may atrophy, particularly in dynamic industries like technology. Beaten down by months of rejection and idleness, they may not interview well or easily return to a 9-to-5 schedule.
Yes, think of the mass economic slump as a good thing. It weeded out most of the incompetent people, all of whom deserve nothing for the rest of their natural lives.
Yes, think of how the skills have atrophied. In someone working fast food, or retail, or janitorial work or hospitality, corporate facility security, waiting tables and baggage handling. And the teachers who just automatically forget how to instruct and think because they’ve lost their link to a classroom.
It goes on.
The atrophy argument is risible. Particularly in the United States which has been relentlessly creating jobs which require virtually no skill at all during the last couple of decades.
The last one is best.
It’s the you’ve-turned-into-a-depressed-lazy-decrepit-person-who-smells-and-walks-around-in-his-underwear-all-day excuse dressed up as “[you] may not interview well or easily return to a 9-to-5 schedule.”
If the country’s current soul has its way, and I think it will, we’ll turn mass unemployment into a devil’s mark of criminal bent, mortal sin, and physical as well as mental deformity/inferiority.
The US government, in implementing the 2010 census, hired a few hundred thousand people (a multitude of whom were out of work) on the basis of a simple, honestly-filled out personal history and decent grades on an aptitude test.
