I’ve written repeatedly that the Cult of EMP Crazy is notoriously manipulative.
It plays to the extremist crank, as if craziness and fractured ideas need to be encouraged and amplified in American society. It captivates fundamentalist religious zealots who welcome the end times because of the punishments they think will be meted out to everyone not on their “to-be-saved” lists.
In fact, if you’ve followed Cult of EMP Crazy videos and newspaper claims on this blog, you’ll have sensed the undercurrent.
The Paul Reveres, the proper followers of Jesus Christ, the survivalists and the stalwart GOP rump are kind of hoping for an electromagnetic pulse attack so they’re vindicated and the unbelievers are struck down in one blow. And they won’t share their stash of pemmican with such scum when civilization fails
Anyway, it also hypnotizes stupid white guys in baseball caps. Guys training to work in homeland security.
DD knows the next video is hard to endure.
Our Paul Revere in a Guinness cap waves around the book of William Forstchen. He has the script memorized although his delivery is stumbling. And then the good parts: Our enemies will pounce. Al Qaeda will get the EMP scud in a tub. The Russians will come out of Venezuela. The Chinese will come out of Panama.
Heck, the Chinese will storm out of the port of Los Angeles or the yards in Long Beach! He knows, he grew up on southern California. Boy, are there lots of Chinese people here.
And here are the grinning fundamentalists, Jack and Rexelle van Impe, their smiles revealing they’d be pretty tickled if 90 percent — all the heathen — were killed off after an electromagnetic pulse disaster.
Naturally, one expects exploitation from the Heritage Foundation and the GOP. It’s called inspiring the base.
Here National Geographic gets into the game, massaging its ratings for the last couple of weeks, hoping to pick up the viewers who fall into the baseball cap man demographic.
Coming from what used to be regarded as an august source, it’s more mainstreaming of extremism in 2010 America.
This blog has devoted some time to the biodefense industry lobby formerly called the Graham-Talent Commission. And what a nuisance it was.
For most of its tenure Graham-Talent existed only as an appendage/p.r firm for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center/Center for Biosecurity and the bioterror defense industry group, the Alliance for Biosecurity.
The US government eventually stopped underwriting it.
And although defunded, last week DD wrote of its latest piece of mischief, political legislation as advertising for the alleged wisdom of itself here.
One of the commission’s co-chairmen is none other than Bob Graham, THE Bob Graham of Graham-Talent.
It’s an atrocious choice.
Either the President never actually paid attention to what Graham-Talent did under Bob Graham, quite possible, because it existed only to plant news stories and opinion pieces busting his chops on bioterror defense. Or the President took counter-intuititive advice from the usual Whitehouse staffers, advice to appoint what amounts to a very bad penny, an infamous political hack always turning up. Someone who has established a set of dubious skills as a “commission chairman” when it’s important the commission so chaired will be friendly to whatever industry is connected to the problem it is charged with investigating.
Let me paint the unpretty picture for you.
If Bob Graham runs the BP Deepwater Horizon Commission the way he ran the WMD Commission, within about a year — or less — its staffers, advisers and consultants will all be stealth choices from BP, companies that worked with BP or other oil industry firms.
And that is because Bob Graham, and his compadre Jim Talent, allowed the WMD Commission to be taken over by staffers from the biodefense industry. And when this happened, it began issuing reports and press releases with only one purpose — to disguise calls for greater funding to the biodefense industry it represented behind an argument that the Obama administration was leaving the country unprepared for catastrophic bioterrorism.
Because no one really paid any attention to Graham-Talent except newspaper op-ed assigning editors and minor Congressional politicians willing to indulge their regular bashing of the Obama administration on bioterror preparedness, few have noticed how rancid and/or impressively cynical an excercise in national leadershig choosing Bob Graham is.
If you wanted to pick one of the worst people to head an independent commission on a catastrophe and national trauma that’s front page news everyday, one who — judging by his track record — would work to stuff his commission full of staff and advice from the industry the agency is supposed to be looking into, Bob Graham is the absolute go-to guy.
It’s an astonishing, eye-rolling thing.
One asks, rhetorically: What in Sam Hill is wrong with President Obama? Does he have a subconscious desire to set himself up? Or is it just more political expedience and daily not-paying-attention except for what the usual partymen have to say?
“The bipartisan commission named by President Obama in May to study the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the future of American offshore drilling will hold its first formal meeting in mid-July at the earliest, most likely delaying the delivery of its final report into next year, a co-chairman of the panel said in an interview,” wrote the New York Times a few hours ago.
Potentially giving it and Bob Graham plenty of time how to figure out to make it surreptitiously BP and oil industry friendly.
Trudging toward the weekend in the United States of Epic Fail.
A majority of states saw their unemployment rates drop in May. But the widespread declines were mainly because people gave up looking for work and were no longer counted.
The unemployment rate fell in 37 states and the District of Columbia, the Labor Department said Friday. Six states had increases and seven experienced no change.
Forty-one states and the District of Columbia saw a net increase in jobs. But that reflected national data showing a huge gain because of government hiring of temporary census workers.
And the majority of census workers are now either finished with their work or on hold.
Suddenly, creating jobs is out, inflicting pain is in. Condemning deficits and refusing to help a still-struggling economy has become the new fashion everywhere, including the United States, where 52 senators voted against extending aid to the unemployed despite the highest rate of long-term joblessness since the 1930s.
The last thing someone who is unemployed needs to be told is that they shouldn’t even apply for the limited number of job openings that are available. But some companies and recruiters are doing just that.
Employment experts say they believe companies are increasingly interested only in applicants who already have a job.
It is not against the law for companies to exclude the unemployed when trying to fill positions, but Judy Conti, a lobbyist for the National Employment Law Project, said the practice is a bad one.
It’s the newest home and garden rage for upper middle class wads in New York, according to the Times. A story on ‘catios’ rises to the top of ‘most everything’ lists compiled by the newspaper.
This link sends you out to a photo of a luxurious chicken wire pen, one you can sit in with your cats, perhaps with a glass of wine, the pets and you safely protected from the wild savagery of your fenced back yard.
You really have to see it. So do click the link.
However, what I really wanted to see was a photo of the ninnies who made it, the McCormicks, sitting on the frou-frou garden seat behind the wire.
Here in soCal, DD calls it a big chicken coop. Or a cage. But ‘catio’ is a word only a schwantz would coin.
Wealthy Americans are such innovative people, dontcha know.
DD lived with five cats for many years. They were free to come and go from the house to the backyard as they pleased. They also enjoyed climbing a bottle brush tree and walking the roof of the garage.
In the blink of an eye the Huffington Post has established itself as another flugel horn for the Cult of EMP Crazy. As well as a place where posters couldn’t be bothered in the slightest to read what their compatriots are writing on the same subject. Just as long as it all gets into the Google News feed, pronto.
“Learn more about what would happen if an EMP bomb were ever detonated in the video below,” teases Bianca Bosker.
It’s the double opportunity for National Geographic-style info-adver-tainment and catastrophism.
Dig the title:
How an EMP Bomb Would Be a Deathblow to Life as We Know It
Posted in Bioterrorism at 10:21 am by George Smith
Plain and simple, the Graham-Talent bioterror defense lobbying group is a nuisance to good governance.
It began life as a commission to describe the risk of WMD’s and make policy recommendations. And it was funded by the US government.
However, it was quickly taken over by a small part of the bioterror defense industry lobby, its staffers and direction provided by people from Tara O’Toole’s Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
The Center for Biosecurity, along with its industry group, the Alliance for Biosecurity, existed to work the political levers to grease accelerated and expanded taxpayer funding of its bioterror defense initiatives and facilities.
Earlier this year, the US government stopped funding the Graham-Talent commission. While it existed as a government funded agency, it did only one thing. It bashed the Obama administration on a regular basis for unpreparedness and larded the mainstream media with opinion pieces and repetitive news stories which repeated the same script.
Graham-Talent has always worked the directive that the truth and certainty of a thing is determined by how many times you get to plant a frightening scenario pertaining to bioterrorism, one boosting your interests, in newspapers. The list of citations on it is here.
Now officially defunded, the Graham-Talent lobbying group has enlisted two minor congressmen in the House to put together what amounts to nuisance legislation, a bill that serves mostly as advertising for the alleged wisdom of Graham-Talent.
You really have to see it to believe it.
The summary is here and every graf in it directly references Graham-Talent’s World at Risk report. It’s an odious piece of work and again serves only a narrow purpose — to advance the agenda of the small Graham-Talent special interest group and afford an opportunity for its two congressional “authors,” one of whom is GOP extremist Peter King of New York, to put a blunt stick in the eye of the administration with what is the legislative process equivalent of vexatious litigation.
Most of the direction in the legislation are aimed at things already being done within DHS and DHHS, for example, implementing the BioWatch program, conducting a biennial bioterrorism risk assessment, assessing commercial emergency responder equipment, using hazard plume models for CBRN terrorism response, developing cleanliness standards, and so on …
I’m not against congressional interest in this area, but I am against Congress directing specific policy actions with inaccurate and limited policy analysis. And no, I don’t count the “World at Risk” report as adequate policy analysis.
A few other observations are worth making.
We must now change the definition of WMD to mean only biological weapons, since that what this legislation deals with specifically, to the exclusion of all else. That’s the clear mark of Graham-Talent lobby dictation lessons and journalists should recognize it as such.
The legislation also purports to compel the government to share informationwith biosecurity and biopreparedness ‘stakeholders.’ “Stakeholder’ is undefined. Presumbably, it can mean Graham-Talent cronies in the biodefense industry.
There is a call for creation of a ‘national forensic repository of biological organisms.” There are already plenty of places with sufficient repositories and the scientists who must know where they are, do.
It would be pointless to create yet another place for potential diversion, just because another agency — like the Department of Homeland Security, must have its own pile of pathogens. Indeed, there’s no compelling scientific argument to be made for it.
There is also a vague call to loosen up BARDA some more — which is a UPMC/Alliance for Biosecurity industry party favor.
The only other question that comes to mind is who took the dictation from Graham-Talent and whether they did it by phone, e-mail or in meeting. It’s such a piece of toady work, someone ought to fess up on the details, if only for the sake of taking proper credit for the political manipulation.
Again, it’s an example of really bad government — legislation solely for the agenda of a special interest, a special interest which has no measurable public support.
On the Graham-Talent bioteror defense industry lobbying group — from the archives.
You’re in the wrong place when you’re trying to argue ” ‘The Cyber War Threat Has Been Grossly Exaggerated'” before an audience at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.” — this from NPR here.
Marc Rotenberg and Bruce Schneier went up against Cult of Cyberwar chieftain Mike McConnell of Booz Allen Hamilton and Jonathan Zittrain.
Sez NPR:
Before the debate, the audience voted 24 percent in favor of the motion “The Cyber War Threat Has Been Grossly Exaggerated,” and 54 percent against, with 22 percent undecided. And the side arguing against the motion carried the day: After the debate, 71 percent of the audience voted to oppose the motion, 23 percent supported it and 6 percent remained undecided.
John Donvan, correspondent for ABC News’ Nightline, moderated the June 8 debate.
“What Mike McConnell didn’t mention is that grossly exaggerating a threat of cyberwar is grossly profitable,” argued Schneier, a point others have made — including me, many times.
“The last article I saw said there’s about $400 million in Booz Allen contracts on cyberwar. You don’t get those by saying, you know, this is kind of dumb. But it really is.”
McConnell did not respond — which was lame. It was a good challenge and Schneier made it twice, the second time in his closing statement. The moderator, a newsman, didn’t care to call the Booz Allen man out on it. And it was not something that resonated in the venue or with the audience. Bald-faced conflicts of interest often don’t raise the ire one thinks they should in polite American intellectual salons.
There was also a good bit of laughter and jokes about beer during the discussion, allegedly conducted to Oxford rules.
Readers may recall DD’s mention of Fox News singing the praises of the books of Ayn Rand yesterday.
It was during Glenn Beck’s show and came in connection with the host pushing his new book, The Overton Window. Rand, Beck — the same — both stalwart pushers against ubergovernments and philistines attempting to suppress truth, individuality and the creative genius that drives the productivity of America. John Galt strides the land.
Beck also went into a tizzy over a Washington Post book reviewer’s slag.
Today, Beck was absent but Fox ran a taped segment of him promoting The Overton Window again, linking it to rubbish I couldn’t follow, said concept of Overton Windowing having been allegedly invented by a think tank going by the name of Mackinac.
DD considers Glenn Beck an idiot. He immediately underlined it by mispronouncing the name of the joint he was promoting, calling it “Mack-in-Ack,” while the guest, who was actually from the place, used the customary parlance.
Since I couldn’t follow the logic of said Overton Window (discussion samples: if the socialist government continues on its current track, charity giving and private schools could be made illegal, Grover Cleveland was a great president because he hated the idea of government support, etc) except that it was invented by someone at “Mack-in-Ack,” I Googled Beck’s book and came up with this entry at the Post.
Wrote Steven Levingston:
Thriller author Glenn Beck attacked The Washington Post reviewer, er, me, personally on his Facebook page, saying he feels bad for Steve Levingston because “he soooo clearly wants to be an author, but, it seems, he just doesn’t have the talent.” He takes issue with a few other elements of the review.
Media Matters, which monitors and analyzes the conservative media, has assessed Beck’s criticism of my review, while Huffington Post reports that Beck’s book resembles a 2005 self-published techno-thriller by a computer programmer named Jack Henderson. Chris Kelly points out that “The Overton Window” is very much like Henderson’s “Circumference of Darkness,” except that “the villains planning the next 9/11 [in Henderson’s tale] are an ultra-right militia movement. In Overton Window, the right wing nuts are the heroes.” The piece notes another strange coincidence: Henderson turns up in Beck’s acknowledgements and is warmly praised “for pouring his heart and soul into this project.”
Coincidentally, Henderson asked me to provide a blurb for Circumference of Darkness a few years ago. I complied and it wound up on the back of the edition I have.
Henderson is a reader of DD blog and from time to time we’ve had friendly chats.
A year or so ago we spent some time discussing general breakdown in the US and why Americans never seemed to be up to bringing about any kind of beneficial change or improvement. Consdering the news on The Overton Window, it retrospectively generates a fairly decent “Hmmmm.”
Anyway, at the time, Henderson told me he was doing a writing gig for someone famous, a name he couldn’t disclose.
Given today’s news and what I remember about the conversation, and Jack’s comment that he hoped I wouldn’t think askance of it when I saw the eventual product, I infer he was actually the ghost-writer for Beck’s The Overton Window. Or something along those lines.
It’s no surprise.
Given what I’ve seen of Glenn Beck’s shows, the incoherent and/or
nonsensical arguments delivered daily, it would be a stretch to expect lucid print from Beck sans substantial propping up.
The final graf of Levingston’s review of Beck’s The Overton Window reads:
The danger of books like this is that radical readers may take the story’s fiction for fact, or interpret the fiction — which Beck encourages — as a reflection of a reality that they must fend off by any means necessary. “The Overton Window” risks falling into the tradition of other anti-government novels such as “The Turner Diaries” by William L. Pierce, which became a handbook of extremists and inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. As Beck tells his soldiers in the voice of Noah: “Put up or shut up . . . go hard or go home. Freedom is the rare exception . . . not the rule, and if you want it you’ve got to do your part to keep it.”
In February of 2009, I wrote briefly about Beck, his fascination with
encouraging revolution and his fondness for story lines similar to the arc of The Turner Dairies.
Regular readers will see the common themes, still touched upon weekly in the mainstreaming of extremist beliefs that the US will collapse, that the government will prove to be helpless or an enemy, that some manner of catastrophe is imminent and — ever more often — revolution, maybe violent, is the answer. (See here.)
“Maybe the Washington Post is out of line to compare it to ‘The Turner Diaries,'” wrote someone at Salon on Tuesday.
Media Matters, on Jack Henderson and Beck on the 14th, via admission in USA Today:
On the title page, Beck shares credit with three contributors. He calls the conspiracy novel “my story,” but he says Jack Henderson, one of his contributors, “went in and he put the words down.”
None of it makes Beck any less one of the bad guys in the current national narrative.
Jack, if you’re reading this, yep, I got your e-mail. And I was still dithering over a reply when this came up.
The new story which the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy now regularly shills is that of the angry sun.
The sun is waking up from a long period of quiet — which is true — and erupting solar storms and mass ejections may shatter advanced civilization, it goes.
Just like in “The Road,” the movie nobody went to see (or maybe “The Book of Eli,” another apocalypse-themed flop).
“Some of us read the book ‘The Road’ [a post-apocalyptic tale by Cormac McCarthy],??? said Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI). “Lots of different scenarios are out there. We need to be prepared.”
And Fox News has covered it, using the screen headline “Solar Flare Could Mean End of Life as We Know It.” All explained by the current dancing bear of ‘science’ as infortainment on cable TV, Michio Kaku.
It’s a new meme, a fresh piece of groupthink for non-thinkers.
You’ll see it everywhere because it panders to entrenched American extremist beliefs in tech superstitions and catastrophism. (Bubbling underneath are messages that white people will lose their piles to ravening hordes unleashed by the fall.) And the entertainment industry and parts of the corporate national security biz can monetize this by peddling titillation and fear, respectively.
Which brings us to the Huffington Post, a place where anyone can repeat what someone else said five minutes ago and get it in the Google News feed.
The sun is growing unquiet, writes D. K. Matai. This caused bad juju in lightning bolts:
1. BP temporarily suspended siphoning operations on its Gulf of Mexico oil gusher after a drill ship collecting the oil was hit by lightning;
2. A 62 feet — six storey [sic] — tall statue of Jesus Christ in Ohio came to a blazing end when it was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm and burned to the ground; and
3. A bolt of lightning struck a local gasoline storage tank in North Carolina, erupting into a wall of flames that leapt as high as 100 feet and belched a plume of smoke in the shape of an arch across eight lanes of US interstate highway.
To this stew is added the news of a ‘brown dwarf’ nearing or entering the solar system, the Nemesis object popular with fans of end-of-times tales set for 2012:
Some scientists believe an incoming brown dwarf star, several times the mass of Jupiter, is responsible for disrupting our solar system’s heliosphere. The brown dwarf has disturbed Pluto’s orbit. It is also disturbing the orbit of Jupiter and the rest of the celestial bodies in our solar system. The sun is emitting Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) during the last few months that are having a significant impact on the earth’s geomagnetic axis and electromagnetic field.
Matai runs a company called mi2g. And he used to be infamous for press releases warning about Y2K and cyberterror.
“The chief charge against mi2g is its regular predictions of withering cyber-assaults which, critics say, rarely seem to materialise,” wrote the Register a number of years ago in a piece entitled “Why is mi2g so unpopular?”
However, the disturbed angry sun story is now ascendant.
“Several causal factors are now in play that could bring life as we know it to a stand-still,” writes Nora Maccoby at something called the WIP.
“My husband and I are both extremely concerned about a catastrophic disruption to our electrical grid,” she adds. “Though the government and military have emergency plans in place, when you look at what happened with Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill response, it is egregiously naive to believe that the government will be able to handle the impacts of an event that will collapse the power grid.”
Iran might launch an electromagnetic strike via ballistic missile. This is the old and common overused story, beloved by the Heritage Foundation.
Or it could be much worse:
While details remain classified, some scientists believe an incoming brown dwarf star, several times the mass of Jupiter, is responsible for disrupting the solar system’s heliosphere, as well as celestial bodies throughout our solar system.
“We have bought property in the mountains, we are working out bartering arrangements with neighbors, and we are planting fruit trees and growing our own food,” asserts Maccoby.
“Deep in California’s Mojave Desert, about halfway between Barstow and Las Vegas, a real estate entrepreneur is counting on a big catastrophe,” reports one newspaper. “He’s building a string of luxury disaster shelters. Investors believe it’s their best hope in the event of natural disaster, terrorist attack or worse.”
“If your house burned down because of wildfires, you’ll have to find other accommodations,” the disaster bunker developer tells the newspaper reporter. “This is a mega-catastrophe facility … ”
“Think nuclear war. Or an electromagnetic pulse attack that knocks out electrical grids across the U.S.”
At $50,000 per person, the bunkers are marketed to those who can’t quite afford them — specifically, I’m talking about chumps. The rich, after all, can buy much more spacious disaster resorts.
Or as the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday, they buy contiguous and adjacent compounds in Bel-Air.
“The middle class may be able to buy Louis Vuitton bags and nice holidays but they can’t buy two mansions in Bel-Air,” reads one prime quote. “This is the way the global elite differentiate themselves.”
However, the newspaper story on the electromagnetic pulse doom bunker developer reveals a much more prosaic and overstretched class of buyer:
[A] 40-year-old former civilian military employee is married with three kids. [The man] says he wants to be ready, and more importantly he wants his family to be safe. Hodge is trying to pull together the $25,000 needed just to reserve spaces in the Terra Vivos bunker. It’ll cost another couple hundred thousand dollars to actually close the deal. He may dip into family savings, or seek a bank loan. If it sounds risky to put up your family savings for a piece of property you may never use, [the buyer] doesn’t think so.
It’s the stuff of science fiction. A strong blast of energy from outer space knocks out electricity over much of the planet, imperiling millions of lives.
But it’s not fiction.
The danger of geomagnetic storms and a human-produced electromagnetic pulse is the subject of “Electronic Armageddon,??? a show airing Tuesday on the National Geographic Channel. John Kappenman of Duluth is one of the experts featured in the program.
Common sense would seem to dictate that leaders of corporations ought not to be empowered by the US government to provide threat assessments which stand to directly enrich their interests.
—-
A report just issued by the Energy Department and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, known as Nerc, an industry group that polices the power grid, lists three categories of threats to the grid: coordinated cyber- and physical attacks, pandemic disease and electromagnetic damage.
—-
What [a New York Times reporter] does not mention, or perhaps has failed to notice, is the “report??? [had] essentially been written by the small interests which make up the Cult of EMP Crazy, with government workers as their staff.
Three of the report’s authors are part of the bomb Iran/ballistic missile defense lobby.
These include John Kappenman — billed as being part of something called Storm Analysis for the report, William Radasky of Metatech and Michael Frankel of Roscoe Bartlett’s old EMP Commission.
“Electronic Armageddon also looks at the damage caused by the high-altitude detonation of a nuclear device,” reads the Duluth newspaper. “The electromagnetic pulse would have effects beyond those of a geomagnetic storm, including gamma rays that would fry computer chips.”
DD has written about beliefs in catastrophism as it relates to the Cult of EMP Crazy previously. Most recently, here in “Scared Stupid.”
It read:
One of the more dubious ‘gifts’ of the Cult of EMP Crazy – a richly manipulative group, if there ever was one — is the cruel brain haircut it imposes on its lessers. Think of it as a cynical tax on the IQ reserve for the sake of the missile defense/Bomb Iran lobby.
It’s quite the accomplishment. Thanks to the Heritage Foundation’s press machine, GOP voters in a placid place like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, think they have to worry about national collapse.
Everybody’s used to dealing with daily parasites. It’s a feature of living in a country where it’s been decided that it’s proper to not make anything and instead have an economy based on services and the provision of non-essentials and s— from China.
However, every now and then you run into a daily parasite who really takes the cake.
For DD, this usually happens outside Ralphs on Lake. And I’m not pointing at the beggars. Increasing numbers of beggars are a natural product of American business and you should always be nice to people at the bottom for someday you might join them.
The standard Ralphs supermarket parasite is someone with a clipboard who wants you to sign a paper so that an initiative favorable to the wealthy or some big company and inimical to everyone else needs putting on the ballot. Like this one in which PG&E tried to schwick everyone in the state right down to the level of local government.
Yesterday’s parasite, however, was a woman with a clipboard, not asking for signatures, but allegedly conducting a ‘survey.’
The question: Do you think Americans work more or less than they did fifty years ago?
It’s a question only an organization full of assholes would sponsor in 2010.
And I was immediately suspicious it was to collect coached or cherry-picked answers for some political survey by a right wing business group, to be unleashed at some future press conference on FOX News, perhaps as incontrovertible proof the majority of Americans really think they have it a lot easier than folks did fifty years ago.
So the socialist Obama government should get off everyone’s back and stop trying to fix things, get back to fiscal austerity and not worry about mass unemployment.
Because mass unemployment naturally means many people are involuntarily working much less than their peers fifty years ago.
Coincidentally, it dovetailed with much of FOX News afternoon broadcast, which devoted itself to the books of Ayn Rand and warning that Obama better be nice to BP or the company would be forced out of business with thousands and thousands of jobs lost.
Anyway, I laughed at the woman holding the clipboard and said I thought Americans definitely had to work more now than fifty years ago.
It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She did not record my answer. So I watched her from the parking lot for a couple minutes as she approached others. And she hardly did any writing at all.
I wondered what she thought about the hardness of her work outside Ralphs and its daily compensation vis-a-vis what her dad or grandpap did for a living. By the way, there was no identification of who was actually doing the poll or why.
In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, it was a commonplace that Americans would soon devote their lives to leisure, not work. The number of hours the average American worked had fallen by almost twenty-five per cent between 1900 and 1950, and pundits saw no reason for the trend to stop. By the end of the twentieth century, the futurist Herman Kahn prophesied in 1967, Americans would enjoy thirteen weeks of vacation and a four-day work week. The challenge, it seemed, would be figuring out what to do with all our free time.
Kahn was wrong. Today, Americans work about as many hours each year as they did in 1970, and, instead of thirteen weeks of vacation, the average American now gets four (and that includes holidays).
This bit, from the paper of Ted Nugent — the WaTimes, in 2009, is also a laugh riot:
American workers who still have their jobs are laboring harder than ever, keeping their companies operating profitably following the biggest rounds of job cuts since the Great Depression …
Because hourly compensation, including wages and benefits, increased by only 0.2 percent, unit labor costs dipped 5.8 percent during the second quarter. It was the biggest drop in labor costs in more than eight years. Over the past year, labor costs have declined 0.6 percent as productivity has advanced by 1.8 percent.
Soaring productivity and plunging labor costs helped to bolster second-quarter corporate profits …
Remember what DD said about an agency of assholes at the top of the post? Who would commission something like the Ralphs survey?
Lots of groups in America, one imagines. Employees of Satan’s Bank — OneWest — right across the street, I should think, if they weren’t so busy capitalizing on foreclosures.
Americans work hard for their money. Too hard, according to CNN. Even worse than even grovelling medieval peasants scratching the land to survive.
That conclusion came from reporter Polly Labarre of CNN’s “In the Money.??? In the June 9 broadcast, Labarre argued that Americans are working too much, using her “favorite comparison??? to explain “we work more than medieval peasants used to work.???
The “peasant??? claim has grown common in media outlets …
But [no organization has] provided basis for the idea that peasants worked less than Americans do now.
