Fact-esque

The Right-Wing Media Conspiracy Continues

It's not a new thought but it's worth saying - and repeating so we aren't taken by surprise - that while Barack Obama's election is (hopefully) going to mean major changes (like undoing the Bush Regression to the Robber Baron Era of the late 19th century) in a lot of areas, the major media doesn't have much intention of doing likewise. Glenn Greenwald pointed out this week that despite all the mea culpas over the lousy job they did covering the Bush Regime, NBC (owned by General Electric) has just replaced Tim "Government Stenographers R Us" Russert with David "Government Stenographers R Us" Gregory.

Several months before he was named as moderator of Meet the Press, David Gregory went on MSNBC to categorically reject Scott McClellan's accusations that the American media failed to scrutinize the Bush administration's pre-war claims.  Gregory vigorously praised the job which he and his "journalistic" colleagues did in the run-up to the Iraq War -- the period which Salon's Gary Kamiya called "one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media."  Proclaimed Gregory, with a straight face:  "Questions were asked. I think we pushed.  I think we prodded.  I think we challenged the President.  Not only those of us in the White House Press Corps did that, but others in the media landscape did that."  Most revealingly of all, Gregory said:

I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn't do our job.  I respectfully disagree.  It's not our role.

Indeed.  Perish the thought that a reporter should point out when government officials are making "bogus" claims and are lying a country into a war. 

(emphasis in the original)

The pendulum is swinging (has swung) back and investigative journalism is, sort of, in fashion once again but the Beltway pundits have signaled very clearly that the press had better not go too far with it because they, the self-appointed arbiters of what America thinks despite the glaringly obvious fact that they never listen to Anericans who don't live in Georgetown, have decreed that we're "tired of scandals" and don't want to know about any more of them. Unless, of course, they're Democratic scandals, in which case they deserve round-the-clock coverage and acres of speculation and innuendo based on ultraconservative wishful thinking and paranoia.

pmoser's anti-EFCA Rant Misses the Target

The last time I wrote about the Employees' Free Choice Act (EFCA), I got into a colloquy with a commenter named pmoser who put forward all the usual right-wing assertions about how terrible EFCA is and how wrong I was about everything I said without offering any, you know, evidence to support them. I suspected he was a) a conservative pretending not to be (we've had them here before though not for a while) or b) a lawyer (he said he was) for management. So I challenged him to come up with an argument that attacked EFCA instead of me or, if he couldn't do that, links to other people's arguments.

To my surprise, he returned long enough to do the latter, leaving two links to pieces he apparently thought would help explain what he now claimed was his central point (you can read his original comment for yourself and decide if that's really what he said) that "neither the EFCA story, nor labor's decades long deline [sic], is as [sic] a simple story."

I never said it was.

Of the two links he left for my consideration (he seems to have meant to leave a third to a piece he himself wrote but forgot to), the first is to a .pdf file that is a copy of a legal handbook from the law firm of Hirsch Roberts Weinstein LLP and the title alone is pretty much a give-away. It's called "An Employers' Guide to the Employees Free Choice Act" and the heading is, in big black letters, CLIENT ALERT.

Well, um, golly gee. Imagine that from an opponent of EFCA. Quel shock.

A Penny for Your Thoughts

Sorry. This being BushAmerica, make that $100K.

Eric Lipton and David Kirkpatrick write in an NYT story today that the same players involved in the S & L bail-out of the Clinton years are playing both sides of the fence in the Bush bail-out, advising wealthy clients how to take advantage of the policies they've just advised the govt to design. Quite a scam if you can work it. As one of these comfortable sleeze artists, John Douglas, put it, "It is a good time to be me." I bet.

A tight-knit group of former senior government officials who were central players in the savings and loan bailout of the 1990s are seeking to capitalize on the latest economic meltdown, enjoying a surge in new business in their work now as private lawyers, investors and lobbyists.

With $700 billion in bailout money up for grabs, and billions of dollars worth of bad debt or failed bank assets most likely headed for sale or auction, these former officials are helping their clients get a piece of the bailout money or the chance to buy, at fire-sale prices, some of the bank assets taken over by the federal government.

“It is a good time to be me,” said John L. Douglas, a partner in Atlanta at the law firm Paul Hastings and a former lawyer for bank regulators who helped create the agency that administered the last federal bailout, the Resolution Trust Corporation.

Some of these former federal officials, like L. William Seidman, the first chairman of the R.T.C., are serving as advisers — sharing ideas with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and the transition team for President-elect Barack Obama — even while they are separately directing investors or banks on how to best profit from this advice.

“It is an enormous market,” said Mr. Seidman, who has already joined two such potential money-making efforts and is evaluating proposals to participate in a third. “I am enjoying this.”

This is, of course (or used to be), illegal or at least unethical. One wasn't allowed to advise both sides in a negotiation. It was considered, you know, a MASSIVE CONFLICT OF INTEREST. But in BushAmerica, it's how things get done...when they get done at all. What's disturbing is not that Bush is allowing and Henry Pauson encouraging the vultures to feed on the govt corpse - one expects them to do that, that's why they were put there with corporate $$$. What's disturbing is that Obama and his people are right there, acquiescing in illegal and unethical c of i's as if that were the most normal, banal, and common of everyday rituals.

After the Bush Decade and scandal after corporate scandal, we seem to have become so inured to corruption that we've apparently decided to quit worrying about it and accept it as a standard business practice. I shouldn't have to explain why this is a really Bad Idea. That I probably do have to explain it - to Obama's transition team if to no one else - is a signal of how far gone, how low sunk our values and belief in law and civilization are after 30 years of conservative rule.

No Child Left Behind Mark II

BushCo's education policy was all about busting the teachers unions and hiding it by pretending to care about closing the achievement gap.  To doubt their motives was to believe the bigotry of low expectations.  Now it looks like Obama's education policy will be all about busting the teachers unions and hiding it by claiming that what they really want to do is to end poverty.  From Truthout: (via Avedon)

  Without irony, Arne Duncan characterized the goal of Renaissance 2010 creating the new market in public education as a "movement for social justice." He invoked corporate investment terms to describe reforms explaining that the 100 new schools would leverage influence on the other 500 schools in Chicago. Redefining schools as stock investments he said, "I am not a manager of 600 schools. I'm a portfolio manager of 600 schools and I'm trying to improve the portfolio." He claimed that education can end poverty. He explained that having a sense of altruism is important, but that creating good workers is a prime goal of educational reform and that the business sector has to embrace public education. "We're trying to blur the lines between the public and the private," he said. He argued that a primary goal of educational reform is to get the private sector to play a huge role in school change in terms of both money and intellectual capital. He also attacked the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), positioning it as an obstacle to business-led reform. He also insisted that the CTU opposes charter schools (and, hence, change itself), despite the fact that the CTU runs ten such schools under Renaissance 2010. Despite the representation in the popular press of Duncan as conciliatory to the unions, his statements and those of others at the symposium belied a deep hostility to teachers unions and a desire to end them (all of the charters created under Ren2010 are deunionized). Thus, in Duncan's attempts to close and transform low-performing schools, he not only reinvents them as entrepreneurial schools, but, in many cases, frees "them from union contracts and some state regulations."[9] Duncan effusively praised one speaker, Michael Milkie, the founder of the Nobel Street charter schools, who openly called for the closing and reopening of every school in the district precisely to get rid of the unions. What became clear is that Duncan views Renaissance 2010 as a national blueprint for educational reform, but what is at stake in this vision is the end of schooling as a public good and a return to the discredited and tired neoliberal model of reform that conservatives love to embrace.

Something to watch.

Thinking Inside the Bubble: Laura Bush & George McClellan

There simply is no possibility that any Bush, apparently, will ever voluntarily relinguish the saving graces of living in a bubble no matter how much reality intrudes or how often the bubble is assaulted by facts. Leave us take for a moment Laura Bush's response in an interview when she was asked about the infamous shoe-throwing incident.

[S]he said the incident reflects change in Iraq.

"As bad as the incident is, in my view, it is a sign that Iraqis feel a lot freer to express themselves," she said.

Uh-huh. There's always a positive spin you can put on everything. Sure the insurrection and IED's are dangerous and people get hurt but on the other hand the Iraqis are feeling free to express themselves through explosives. There aren't many outside the Bush Bubble who would be likely to defend it in quite that way, but it's typical of Bubble Thinking.

Bubble Thinking is a particular mental process that's required first in order to construct a Bubble to begin with and then to maintain it in the face of numerous reality challenges. Clearly Mrs Bush has mastered this difficult art. So has Condi Rice who recently explained that the Bush presidency was a success if you look at its fight against corruption.

I heard your jaw hit the floor. Calm down. She's talking about foreign corruption.

"I think generations pretty soon are going to start to thank this president for what he's done. This generation will," [the Fabulous Condi] said.

"Because I think the fact that we have really made foreign assistance not just an issue of giving humanitarian aid or giving money to poor people, but really insisting on good governance and fighting corruption."

In these two statements you have the core of what it takes to build a Bubble and defend it from all comers: Denial, Rigid Ideology, Absolute Optimism, and a talent for Invention. If one of these four is lacking, the Bubble either cannot be constructed or it cannot survive Realism.

EFCA Raises Ire of US Chamber of Commerce

The undying antipathy of owners toward unions has never made much sense. Financially, unionized workers make more money but so do unionized companies. There's less absenteeism and fewer lawsuits. And it's a lot more peaceful. Non-unionized shops are breeding grounds for discontent, bitchin' and moanin', & the wailing and gnashing of teeth. Threats of reprisal for this or that employer insult are part of the air you breathe. Wouldn't you think they'd be happy if all that negative stuff went away?

The only basis for the level of hatred we see against unions is that some money goes into workers' pockets that would otherwise be going to investors, owners, and executives. But the relatively small amount (owners do well no matter what) is out of all proportion to the depth of loathing we see from, say, the Chamber of Commerce. The USCofC is prepared to spend $10Mil to defeat EFCA because Obama's new Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, is in favor of it.

It is labor's biggest priority for the new administration: changing federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize -- and win contracts with their employers.

***

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has vowed to spend $10 million to defeat the bill.

Obama's selection of union-friendly Rep. Hilda L. Solis (D-El Monte) as Labor secretary is seen as good news for the bill's advocates. She has called it "vital legislation."

***

Labor leaders say elections hurt unionization efforts because employers use the time leading up to the vote to harass, fire and threaten workers.

That's the problem, of course. EFCA allows workers to sign a card in secret before the employer can marshall his forces to scare the bejesus out of employees and intimidate them into voting against unionizing even when they want a union. And to the employer, make no mistake about it, keeping a union out is tantamount to fighting a war. They have convinced themselves that the company will disintegrate if the employees are union, that they are therefore fighting for their very lives. The fact that that has almost never been true and that to the contrary unionized shops tend to make more money than "right-to-work" shops isn't part of their worldview. They neither recognize it no acknowledge it.

This week I'm going to start highlighting the arguments corporate executives and managers will be using against EFCA straight from the horse's mouth: a company that specializes in helping companies keep unions out put me on their mailing list and I've been getting helpful anti-union hints for several weeks. It's been an...education.

The Myth of a Christian Christmas

Originally published 12.24.06 and reprinted now because O'Reilly won't quit. 

This would be the time to reflect on the meaning of Christmas but before we can do that to any purpose we need to clear away some of the dead wood by exploding a couple of the myths that have built up around it since the holiday became popular in the late 19th century. Chief among these is the legend that Christmas is Christian, or even religious.

Myth #1: That Christmas used to be a religious holiday but has been turned into a consumer carnival

It may seem obvious that Christmas is a Christian holiday. The very name of the day suggests a celebration of Christ, and certainly many have bemoaned the fact that Xmas seems to have lost its religious meaning under a barrage of commercialism. Back in the 1950’s the satirist Stan Freberg released a classic record called “$Green Christmas$” which savagely criticized what Christmas had become even then; its chief sound effect was the ringing of a cash register. Behind all the criticism was then - and is now - a belief that Christmas had once meant something it no longer means, that what was originally the celebration of a religious figure has been twisted into a callous, materialist frenzy of buying stuff.

The truth is somewhat different.

WaPo Notices a Fed Bank Regulator Was Too Busy Deregulating Banks to Notice Bank Failures Due to Bank Deregulation

A Federal agency that was supposed to function as a regulatory watchdog, didn't.

Not much news there, huh?

Well, maybe not for you but for the Washington Post and other until-lately-Bush-propaganda-outlets, this has come as profoundly unsettling information. Really.

Squealing Like Stuck Pigs: Bushies Respond to a Modicum of Truth

The Bushies are having a hysterical hissy-fit because the NYT, after giving Bush a free ride for 7 1/2 of his 8 years in the White House, finally decided to do some semi-legitimate reporting. I didn't have time to write about this yesterday but I intended to slap the reporters' wrists for going easy on him. For instance:

From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone.

He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.

It's true as far as it goes but it also puts the absolute best spin possible on a total fiasco by claiming - inaccurately - that it was Our Corporate Poster Boy-in-Chief's determination to put people into homes who'd never had them before that caused the "lax lending standards". In order to accept that thesis, you'd have to come up with completely different explanations of why he let corporate swindlers alone, why he left corporations alone who continually ignored safety regulations, pollution regulations, and health regulations, why he let corporations alone when they dodged taxes, cheated and/or gouged consumers, and so on.

The only Bush "philosophy" (kind of a high-falutin' word to use when what we're talking about is corruption, greed and laissez-faire blindness to the point of self-immolation) that's relevant here is the one that says "any form of restriction on capitalism is socialism and a Very Bad Thing". The Ownership Society Scam, which is what Becker, Stolberg, and Labaton are referring to, was never anything but a Heritage Foundation-born PR ploy to justify privatizing (and thus killing) Social Security while opening up a whole new cadre of suckers for Wall Street to fleece. The idea that Bush, the compassionate conservative humanitarian *gag*, turned his back on mortgage manipulations and fraud out of his concern for the "little people" would be laughable if it wasn't so monstrously and demonstrably a self-serving LIE.

Brother, Can You Spare a $Billion?

The Associated Press decided to look into just how much of the bail-out money went to pay the salaries, bonuses and benefits for bank executives who cried "Wolf!" and conned the govt out of $350Bil supposedly to be used to ease credit. The Good News is: a small percentage. The Bad News is: $1.6 Billion.