On 2002-06-05 14:32, cbailey wrote:
Come on.

The Bush administration went no further than allowing the EPA to issue a report to the UN that warned of "signifigant effects on the environment from climate change." The report suggests NOTHING to deal with heat-trapping greenhouse pollution beyond VOLUNTARY action by industry.

I'm so excited and I just can't hide it.

No, the report specifically held the actions of man responsible for global climate change. This is the first time that the alleged enivronmental opposition has "honored" such a controversial and ridiculous charge (i.e. that global warming is "manmade"). The Bush administration just moved the ball about 30 yards down the field for the Greens, etc. and, from here on out, Bush Republican Kool-Aid drinkers will no doubt honor this claim as well in debate (even though they still do not believe it) in order to continue to back their supposed "opposition" man in his "life and death struggle" with those "evil Democrats." (Oh, yeah, the two parties are night and day, man...night and day!)

Yes, George W. Bush distanced himself from the report the next day. He wishes that we do not hold the captain responsible for the actions of his crew. Predictably, the Bush people are going after both sides of the debate. Regardless, the so-called environmental "opposition" is now on record as claiming that man is responsible for global warming and the captain shall not be relieved of the responsibility for his crew. This is a tremendous gain for environmentalists because the action is now taking place solely on one side of the 50-yard line and the ball is far closer to the goal line than it has ever been before...all thanks to those pesky Bush people, so consumed with power and buying voters off in blocs.

"The Bush administration went no further than allowing the EPA to issue a report to the UN that warned of "signifigant effects on the environment from climate change." The report suggests NOTHING to deal with heat-trapping greenhouse pollution beyond VOLUNTARY action by industry."

Say It Ain't So, George shows that you're missing the real point. Bush actually thinks this kind of stuff is going to make you want to vote for him and the GOP! And that's really stupid, isn't it?

Right after 9/11, polling data showed that, for the first time since Nixon, Americans suddenly "trusted" that government would do "what is right." And, of course, Dubya's job approval numbers went through the roof as well. Well, with recent revelations that the FBI and CIA really screwed things up on 9/11, those "trust to do whats right" numbers have fallen back down to nearly pre-9/11 levels.

But Bush's numbers are still up there in the stratosphere! In fact, among the GOP voters he's up to ninety percent approval!

But that could still spell trouble for Bush. Why? Simple, those falling "trust" numbers point out an old truth uttered long ago: You can fool some of the people all of the time. And all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the folks all of the time. And pretty soon the folks like me are going to wise up to all this cynical left-wing crap Bush is pulling (trying to woo you libs that won't be wooed ) and we'll say amongst ourselves, I think I'll just stay home of election day.

Yep, it's 1992 all over again! Is this a great country or what? :smile:

p.s. More on why Bush is making a huge political mi$calculation trying to appeal to you liberals out there...

[ This Message was edited by: Marc Lamb on 2002-06-05 21:32 ]

On 2002-06-05 22:14, Xer of Evil wrote:

We're having a presidential election this year? Cool!

XoE

Mid term elections actually, I am expecting anything suprising.

On 2002-06-05 21:16, Marc Lamb wrote

Yep, it's 1992 all over again! Is this a great country or what? :smile:

It might be 1968, Mr. Lamb. I do not know if you remember: NIXON'S THE ONE.

We might have in several years: DUBYA'S ANOTHER (on CD-we do have Progress after all).

[ This Message was edited by: Virgil K. Saari on 2002-06-06 05:26 ]

MISSING IN ACTION seems to be going about these days.

Two fellow posters who I hold in some high regard from T4T have lately charged me with failure to become involved (ie. take up a cause they believe to be just) and thus heading for the tall grass.

Where Have All the Men Gone?

Where have all the Conservatives gone?

Was the Moral Philosopher, Ms. D. Harry, on to something as to the disappearances when she intones It's Rapture? Is it 3T or 4T this imploring Uncle ______insert cause leader here (or T4T poster)_______ Wants You! ?

Have others been offered enlistment or even conscription? Perhaps, this is a "right-wing" thing. Do advise.

On 2002-06-06 06:02, Virgil K. Saari wrote:

Where Have All the Men Gone?

The men are here. It is just time to put the damn beer down and pull the cranium out of the rectum. For example, Mr. Mueller of the FBI has gleefully announced that his henchmen (whose salaries we are forced to pay at gunpoint) will now invade chatrooms such as this making "lists" of "undesirables"...in no way limited to swarthy foreigners with with strange flying and/or munitions interests. And I for one notified Mr. Mueller via this board that he just got his own damn name placed on a "list" if it was not on there already, thanks to his arrogance and insolence. When We The People finally hold this sort of vile human garbage accountable for failing to hold itself accountable to us in the first place (for example, by strictly observing explicit and unambiguous Constitutional limitations on power), Mr. Mueller and many others (whose salaries again are taken from us at gunpoint) will find themselves charged at Nuremburg Trials and they will pay for their Crimes Against Humanity. I as a man have stood and informed Mr. Mueller of his fate here. Other men will soon follow me. This faction of vile human garbage in federal law enforcement is going to start to get the point and begin to disobey the orders of their superiors in order to save their own skins. And finally our goverment will once again serve us as sovereigns as originally intended. But first enough men have to stand up such that this vile human garbage begins to get nervous...as it should have been all along.

Was the Moral Philosopher, Ms. D. Harry, on to something as to the disappearances when she intones It's Rapture? Is it 3T or 4T this imploring Uncle ______insert cause leader here (or T4T poster)_______ Wants You! ?

Have others been offered enlistment or even conscription? Perhaps, this is a "right-wing" thing. Do advise.

Mr. Saari, I guess I need another cup of coffee because I feel like I am translating Latin verse here. Could you restate this such that a more fatigued mind might comprehend?

It's a Blondie reference, Stonewall. I had to read it a couple of times myself before I got it. :smile:

On 2002-06-06 10:12, Kiff '61 wrote:

It's a Blondie reference, Stonewall. I had to read it a couple of times myself before I got it. :smile:

Kiff, I picked up on that much! It is just that it is too cryptic for my fatigued mind to decipher this morning.

"Where have all the Conservatives gone?" wonders Harry Browne, former Libertarian Party presidential candidate (with a little gleam in his eye).

"Where have all the progressives gone?" wonders Marc Lamb with a little

Hoop dreams, anyone?

On 2002-06-06 09:25, Stonewall Patton wrote:
will now invade chatrooms such as this

Not that I'm not as concerned about privacy as the next guy, but this is a PUBLIC forum. Anyone can read this stuff.

Constitutionally, this is the equivalent of people arguing on a street corner.

If the Feds waste their time on this board, I would be mad about it, but not because they are overstepping their authority, but because they are wasting their time, that is, our money.

On 2002-06-06 11:06, Marc Lamb wrote:
"Where have all the progressives gone?" wonders Marc Lamb with a little

Hoop dreams, anyone?

That kind of nonsense is exactly why I didn't vote for Mr. Nader in the last election.

On 2002-06-06 12:40, firemind wrote:

On 2002-06-06 09:25, Stonewall Patton wrote:
will now invade chatrooms such as this

Not that I'm not as concerned about privacy as the next guy, but this is a PUBLIC forum. Anyone can read this stuff.

Constitutionally, this is the equivalent of people arguing on a street corner.

If the Feds waste their time on this board, I would be mad about it, but not because they are overstepping their authority, but because they are wasting their time, that is, our money.

It's commonly called a "fishing expedition," Firemind. Our thousand year Anglo-Saxon legal heritage is aimed at a few key points, among them preventing "fishing expeditions" on the part of law enforcement. Mr. Mueller specifically stated that they will be looking not only for Arab terrorists online, but also "neo-Nazis" and "others." Already, "neo-Nazis" take us to non-Arabs and "others" encompasses every non-Arab who is not a Nazi. So they just plan to fish and catch anything they feel like.

Like I said...vile, disguting, rotting, stinking human garbage. They want to put American citizens (THEIR DAMN BOSSES AND SOURCES OF THEIR SALARIES) on "LISTS"? Well, I just informed Mr. Mueller et al, that their names are all going on "LISTS" for future use by WE THE PEOPLE. And, BY GOD, the People's lists shall be used!

On 2002-06-05 21:16, Marc Lamb wrote:
"The Bush administration went no further than allowing the EPA to issue a report to the UN that warned of "signifigant effects on the environment from climate change." The report suggests NOTHING to deal with heat-trapping greenhouse pollution beyond VOLUNTARY action by industry."

Say It Ain't So, George shows that you're missing the real point. Bush actually thinks this kind of stuff is going to make you want to vote for him and the GOP! And that's really stupid, isn't it?

Right after 9/11, polling data showed that, for the first time since Nixon, Americans suddenly "trusted" that government would do "what is right." And, of course, Dubya's job approval numbers went through the roof as well. Well, with recent revelations that the FBI and CIA really screwed things up on 9/11, those "trust to do whats right" numbers have fallen back down to nearly pre-9/11 levels.

But Bush's numbers are still up there in the stratosphere! In fact, among the GOP voters he's up to ninety percent approval!

But that could still spell trouble for Bush. Why? Simple, those falling "trust" numbers point out an old truth uttered long ago: You can fool some of the people all of the time. And all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the folks all of the time. And pretty soon the folks like me are going to wise up to all this cynical left-wing crap Bush is pulling (trying to woo you libs that won't be wooed ) and we'll say amongst ourselves, I think I'll just stay home of election day.

Yep, it's 1992 all over again! Is this a great country or what? :smile:

p.s. More on why Bush is making a huge political mi$calculation trying to appeal to you liberals out there...

Hoo haw! Marc brings us the James and Larry show.

And now for the Stan, James and Bobby show...

It's not the economy, stupid!

"Democrats saying the economy is no longer a major issue is nearly the political equivalent of giving up in the 2002 congressional elections.

With many polls showing that the economy and jobs ? even in the midst of the recovery ? are among the top five major concerns of most Americans, you would think that top Democratic leaders would be flogging this issue for everything it's worth. Not only are Democratic leaders rarely talking about the economy these days, three top party advisers are telling them that it is now a non-issue.

That's what Democratic strategists Stan Greenberg, James Carville and Bob Shrum told House and Senate Democratic leaders in a recent confidential memo I acquired titled 'Defining The 2002 Election.'"

On 2002-06-06 17:20, Marc Lamb wrote:

And now for the Stan, James and Bobby show...

Oops, I guess I was too obscure. Jim Glassman is the Irving Fischer of the 1990's with his "Dow 36,000" book. Larry Kudlow was big cheerleader during the tech bubble

James Cramer wrote (and still writes) a column for TheStreet.com, the official net chronicle of the bubble years. "Hoo-Haw" is a Cramerism. Jim Cramer and Larry Kudlow have a new TV show on CBNC called Kudlow/Cramer, which I was referring to as the "James and Larry" show as a play on words.

I found it hilarious when you happened to link the two in a single post.

"Hoo-Haw" is a Cramerism.

Actually, I thought "Hoo-Haw" was coming from It's a Wonderful Life. Donna Reed's former flame always used the expression when he got excited about getting in on the "groundfloor in plastics." I'll bet that's where Jim Cramer picked it off. :smile:

While the markets look pretty bearish lately, would you stress that the Democats should plan on making the economy an issue, Mike? Or is Carvell blowing smoke?

That was Hee-Haw.

Actually the *economy* per se looks pretty good. The *market*, that's another story.

The story the market is having so much trouble with is if the recession was so mild, why did earnings absolutely COLLAPSE? It's almost like they weren't there in the first place....

Then with Enron and Global Crossing and who know what else lurks yet uncovered.. and you get the point. Lot's of fear out there. But not much blood in the streets, I've been buying a little selectively. Still have loads of ammo.

The problem is that if this market doesn't pick up fairly soon we aren't going to see any pickup in capital spending and we are going to get the double-dip recession the bears are salivating over and Bob Bronson is going to be right (ugh).

But I still hold out the hope of no new sub-Sept 21 lows on the S&P500 and higher prices by summer's end. Then a false scare in the fall and off to the races late this year and into the next.

Time will tell I suppose.

I'm actually sort of hoping for a double-whammy stock market crash and real-estate plummet. Then I can move back to Seattle, buy my old house back (or one just like it) for substantially less than the ridiculous sum I sold it for last year, and sit pretty until things pick up again.

After all the bullshit I've had to deal with the past two years, I'd say it's time for a few changes. 4T? Bring it on!!!

[ This Message was edited by: Kevin Parker '59 on 2002-06-06 20:40 ]

Here is a post from the Spiral Dynamics Yahoo group which seems to show a 4T backlash aganist the empower the indivdual ideas of the unravelling.

From: "Samuel Rose"
Date: Fri Jun 7, 2002 1:06 pm
Subject: "The Market"

I'd like to to play "peanut gallery" here:

Now, both have addressed key points. That the "market" itself is not the root
of evil, and the market place and money are only tools, as Bill has pinted out.
Shane is alluding that the system of markets itself is so prone to corruption
that the world cannot continue under this system, and that it should switch to
a "sharing" system. Shane quotes Benjamin Creme. In part of the quote, Benjamin
shares something important:

"There is no recipe I can give you except a recognition by the
people, of this country and all countries, that blindly to follow a
government which blindly follows market forces is the blind leading
the blind to inevitable destruction."

Above, Creme says he has no practicle way of implementing a system of sharing.
Right now, with the system of national sovreignity as it is recognized
worldwide, Creme's system wouldn't work, as every nation in the world
recognizes that the resources within it's borders are either the property of
the nation, of citizens within the nation. This is clearly a Utopian vision by
Creme, and is as such impossible to implement now,in my opinion.

There are real problems with the current world market situation, and I'd like
to dig into them:

1. CORRUPTION

No matter what system you implement (sharing, free market, etc.) you will have
to battle against corruption, or more precisely against people who take the
system and use it as a mask for their own gain, even more precisely, against
human nature itself! Each nation needs laws that deal with corruption from
without and within. This is the real, non utopian change that needs to take
place. From the pump and dump tactics of global finacial institutions to the
lying on accounting ledgers, shifting of funds, etc. Accountability to the
citizens of nations where a business is operating are essential to prevent
this, for starters. All International Institutions must also be accountable to
the people of all nations involved. Democracy should be extended to the UN, the
IMF the World Bank, to and to corporations themselves. Being that corporations
are not indiviuals, but legal "entities" managed by individuals, the citizens
of nations should now have the right to force their dissolution if they break
the laws of the nation.

2.Cultural Engineering

The people behind large corporations have been busy working on the public ever
since the corporations themselves came into being. People need to recognize
these tactics, their real history, and work to eradicate the institutions that
they have spawned. This would include corporate "lobbying" forced "education",
advertising, "management theory" etc. It all has it's roots in a Utopian vision
founded by people like JP Morgan, Henry Ford, Rockefeller, and others at the
turn of the last century. Their vision wa of a society that was rigid and
systematic, where people would willingly accept their preordained place in a
class/caste system so easily that they would not even need to be supervised. Or
whole system is a grand attempt to give life to their vision. They even
suggested that people might be selectively breed to achieve these goals.
Indeed, the University if Indiana even had a dept of "Bionomics" which studied
this subject (see:http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/2k.htm). It is this
vision that corporate culture uses to perpetuate class warfare upon the rest of
society. A new vision in our time that refreshes the power of the corporation
in a new generation's minds is the "all powerful market." And calls to
"embrace" the market as the ultimate force of human democracy. That people
speak, not with votes, but rather with dollars. The critics of this new
corporate culture have found themselves labelled by the corporatists as
"eltists" (or perhpas even "MGM" :0). Read what Thomas Frank has to say about
"who is doing what to who.":

from http://www.thebaffler.com/gts.html

The God That Sucked

Thomas Frank

Despite this, many economists still think that electricity deregulation will
work. A product is a product, they say, and competition always works better
than state control.
"I believe in that premise as a matter of religious faith," said Philip J.
Romero, dean of the business school at the University of Oregon and one of the
architects of California's deregulation plan.

--New York Times, February 4, 2001

"Time was, the only place a guy could expound the mumbo jumbo of the free
market was in the country club locker room or the pages of Reader's Digest.
Spout off about it anywhere else and you'd be taken for a Bircher or some new
strain of Jehovah's Witness. After all, in the America of 1968, when the great
backlash began, the average citizen, whether housewife or hardhat or
salary-man, still had an all-too-vivid recollection of the Depression. Not to
mention a fairly clear understanding of what social class was all about.
Pushing laissez-faire ideology back then had all the prestige and credibility
of hosting a Tupperware party.

But thirty-odd years of culture war have changed all that. Mention "elites"
these days and nobody thinks of factory owners or gated-community dwellers.
Instead they assume that what you're mad as hell about is the liberal media, or
the pro-criminal judiciary, or the tenured radicals, or the know-it-all
bureaucrats.

For the guys down at the country club all these inverted forms of class war
worked spectacularly well. This is not to say that the right-wing culture
warriors ever outsmarted the liberal college professors or shut down the
Hollywood studios or repealed rock 'n' roll. Shout though they might, they
never quite got cultural history to stop. But what they did win was far more
important: political power, a free hand to turn back the clock on such
non-glamorous issues as welfare, taxes, OSHA, even the bankruptcy laws, for
chrissake. Assuring their millionaire clients that culture war got the
deregulatory job done, they simply averted their eyes as bizarre backlash
variants flowered in the burned-over districts of conservatism: Posses
Comitatus, backyard Confederacies mounting mini-secessions, crusades against
Darwin.

For most of the duration of the thirty-year backlash, the free-market faiths of
the economists and the bosses were kept discreetly in the background. To be
sure, market worship was always the established church in the halls of
Republican power, but in public the chant was usually States' Rights, or Down
with Big Gummint, or Watch out for Commies, or Speak English Goddammit. All
Power to the Markets has never been too persuasive as a rallying cry.

So confidently did the right proceed from triumph to triumph, though, that
eventually they forgot this. Inspired by a generous bull market and puffed up
by a sense of historical righteousness so cocksure that it might have been
lifted from The God That Failed, that old book in which ex-Communists disavowed
their former convictions, the right evidently decided in the Nineties that the
time had come to tell the world about the wonders of the market.

Dinesh D'Souza, pedagogical product of the Jesuits, these days can be found
swinging the censer for Mammon and thrilling to the mayhem his ruthless "god of
the market" visits on the undeserving poor. George Gilder, erstwhile elder of
the Christian right, is now the Thirty-Third Degree Poobah in the Temple of
Telecosm, where he channels the libertarian commandments of his digital
Juggernaut in the language of the angels.

A host of awesome myths attest to the power of this new god. Markets must rule,
some right-wing prophets tell us, because of "globalization," because the moral
weight of the entire world somehow demands it. Others bear tidings of a "New
Economy," a spontaneous recombination of the DNA of social life according to
which, again, markets simply must rule. The papers fill with rapturous talk of
historical corners turned, of old structures abandoned, of endless booms and
weightless work.

The new god makes great demands on us, and its demands must be appeased. None
can be shielded from its will. The welfare of AFDC mothers must be entrusted
unhesitatingly to its mercies. Workers of every description must learn its
discipline, must sacrifice all to achieve flexibility, to create shareholder
value. The professional, the intellectual, the manager must each shed their
pride and own up to their flawed, lowly natures, must acknowledge their
impotence and insensibility before its divine logic. We put our health care
system in its invisible hands, and to all appearances it botches the job. Yet
the faith of the believers is not shaken. We deregulate the banking industry.
Deregulate the broadcasters. Deregulate electricity. Halt antitrust. Make plans
to privatize Social Security and to privatize the public schools.

And to those who worry about the cost of all this, the market's disciples speak
of mutual funds, of IPOs, of online trading, of early retirement. All we have
to do is believe, take our little pile of treasure down to the god's house on
Wall Street, and the market rewards us with riches undreamed of in human
history. It gives us a Nasdaq that is the envy of the world and a 401(k) for
each of us to call his own.

Then, one fine day, you check in at Ameritrade and find that your tech
portfolio is off 90 percent. Your department at work has been right-sized,
meaning you spend a lot more time at the office-without getting a raise. You
have one kid in college to the tune of $30,000 a year, another with no health
insurance because she's working as a temp. Or maybe you lost your job because
they can do it cheaper in Alabama or Mexico. Your daughter's got a disease that
requires $400 a month in drugs, and your COBRA insurance benefits are due to
run out in two months. Or maybe you're the Mexican worker who just got a new
maquiladora job. You have no electricity, no running water, no school for your
children, no health care, and your wage is below subsistence level. And should
you make any effort to change these conditions-say, by organizing a union not
aligned with the corrupt PRI-you're likely to get blacklisted by local factory
managers.

That's when it dawns on you: The market is a god that sucks. Yes, it cashed a
few out at the tippy top, piled up the loot of the world at their feet,
delivered shiny Lexuses into the driveways of their ten-bedroom suburban
chateaux. But for the rest of us the very principles that make the market the
object of D'Souza's worship, of Gilder's awestruck piety, are the forces that
conspire to make life shitty in a million ways great and small. The market is
the reason our housing is so expensive. It is the reason our public
transportation is lousy. It is the reason our cities sprawl idiotically all
across the map. It is the reason our word processing programs stink and our
prescription drugs cost more than anywhere else. In order that a fortunate few
might enjoy a kind of prosperity unequaled in human history, the rest of us
have had to abandon ourselves to a lifetime of casual employment, to
unquestioning obedience within an ever-more arbitrary and despotic corporate
regime, to medical care available on a maybe/maybe-not basis, to a housing
market interested in catering only to the fortunate. In order for the
libertarians of Orange County to enjoy the smug sleep of the true believer, the
thirty millions among whom they live must join them in the dark.

But it is not enough to count the ways in which the market sucks. This is a
deity of spectacular theological agility, supported by a priesthood of
millions: journalists, admen, politicians, Op-Ed writers, think-tankers,
cyberspace scrawlers, Sunday morning talk-show libertarians, and, of course,
bosses, all of them united in the conviction that, no matter what, the market
can't be held responsible. When things go wrong only we are to blame. After
all, they remind us, every step in the economic process is a matter of choice.
We choose Ford over Dodge and Colgate Total over Colgate Ultra-Whitening; we
choose to take that temp job at Microsoft, to live in those suburbs, to watch
Channel 4 rather than Channel 5. We participate in markets; we build markets;
markets, in fact, are us. Markets are a straightforward expression of the
popular will. Since markets are the product of our choices, we have essentially
authorized whatever the market does to us. This is the world that we have made,
let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Virtually any deed can be excused by this logic. The stock market, in recent
years a scene of no small amount of deceit, misinformation, and manipulation,
can be made to seem quite benign when the high priests roll up their sleeves.
In October 1999, a heady time for small investors, Andy Serwer of Fortune could
be heard telling the inspiring story of an investment "revolution" in which the
financial power of "a few thousand white males" in New York was "being seized
by Everyman and Everywoman." We the people had great, unquestionable power:
Serwer's article was even illustrated with clenched fists. We had built this
market, and it was rewarding us accordingly.
But these days Serwer is pondering the problem of "stock market rage" as those
same Everyman investors are turned inside out by the destruction of $4 trillion
of Nasdaq value. Now that the country is in the sort of situation where brokers
and bankers might find themselves in deep political shit, Serwer observes that
we have become quite powerless. Investors are "mad as hell," Serwer notes, but
"there isn't much [they] can do about it." The explanation for this supposed
impotence is, strangely, a moral one: Choice. Since those lovable little guys
acted of their own free will when they invested in Lucent, PMC Sierra, and
Cisco, today there is no claim they can make that deserves a hearing. What has
happened is their fault and theirs alone.

The market only fails us, it seems, when we fail it-when our piety is somehow
incomplete, when we don't give the market enough power, when we balk at
entrusting it with our last dime. Electricity deregulation didn't work in
California, the true believers chant, because the scheming elitist political
class of that state betrayed the people, refusing to give them enough choice,
to deregulate all the way.

Free to choose is a painfully ironic slogan for the market order. While markets
do indeed sometimes provide a great array of consumer choices, the clear
intention of much of the chatter about technology, "globalization," and the
"New Economy" is, in fact, to deny us any choice at all. Moving from rhetoric
to the world of financial politics the same logic holds true: Markets show a
clear preference for the shutting down of intellectual dissent and political
choice. Markets romp joyfully when word arrives that the vote-counting has been
halted. Markets punish the bond prices of countries where substantial left
parties still flourish. Markets reward those lands-like Bill Clinton's
USA-where left parties have been triangulated into impotence. So predictably do
markets celebrate the suppression of political difference that Thomas Friedman,
the highly respected New York Times columnist, has actually come up with a term
for the trade-off: "the golden straitjacket." Since all alternatives to
laissez-faire are now historically discredited, Friedman maintains, all
countries must now adopt the same rigidly pro-business stance. When they do,
"your economy grows and your politics shrink." The pseudodemocracy of markets
replaces the real democracy of democracy; the great multinational corporations
nod their approval; and the way is clear for (some) people to get fantastically
rich.

Friedman has a point. Consider the case of Singapore, long the inamorata of
market heavies and their press agents. As we all know by now, Singapore is an
economic miracle, a land arisen from Third World to First in a handful of
decades. Singapore is the land with the most economic freedom in the world.
Singapore is more comprehensively wired than anywhere else. Singapore is the
best place to do business in all the earth. And as proof you need look no
further than a postcard of Singapore's glittering downtown, at all the spanking
new skyscrapers erupting from the earth in stern testimony to the market's
approval.

And what the market loves best about Singapore is what is absent: Politics.
Singapore's shopping malls-heavenly landscapes of chrome and polished granite,
of flashing jumbotrons and free floor shows for the kids-trump those of our own
land. But politically the country is a dull monotone. Here there is little
danger that opposition parties will come to power or that crusading journalists
will violate the rules of what Singaporeans call "self-censorship."

So what replaces politics? What fills the blank space left when a country has
sacrificed dissent on the altar of the market? In Singapore, the answer seems
to be management theory. Settling down one Sunday afternoon in that country
with a copy of the Straits-Times, the more or less official newspaper, I turned
to the section most American newspapers reserve for book reviews and
think-pieces and found instead: a profile of the management guru who co-wrote
the One to One series of marketing books; a column about the urgent need to
adapt to waves of workplace "change" (you know, like "outsourcing"); an
enthusiastic story about the new president of PepsiCo, a native of India who
reportedly studies videotapes of Michael Jordan's greatest basketball moments
in order to "catch insights about the value of teamwork"; a profile of the
management guru who co-wrote The Individualized Corporation ("Power to the
people is [his] motto"); a profile of one of the paper's writers in which the
concept of "the journalist as a brand" is the point of departure; and a review
of one of those sweeping, pseudo-historical books so beloved of business
readers that start out with the Neanderthals and end up affirming various
contemporary management homilies about creativity and entrepreneurship.

Management theory has become so variegated in recent years that, for some, it
now constitutes a perfectly viable replacement for old-fashioned intellectual
life. There's so much to choose from! So many deep thinkers, so many flashy
popularizers, so many schools of thought, so many bold predictions, so many
controversies!

For all this vast and sparkling intellectual production, though, we hear
surprisingly little about what it's like to be managed. Perhaps the reason for
this is because, when viewed from below, all the glittering, dazzling theories
of management seem to come down to the same ugly thing. This is the lesson that
Barbara Ehrenreich learns from the series of low-wage jobs that she works and
then describes in all their bitter detail in her new book, Nickel and Dimed.
Pious chatter about "free agents" and "empowered workers" may illuminate the
covers of Fast Company and Business 2.0, but what strikes one most forcefully
about the world of waitresses, maids, and Wal-Mart workers that Ehrenreich
enters is the overwhelming power of management, the intimidating array of
advantages it holds in its endless war on wages. This is a place where even
jobs like housecleaning have been Taylorized to extract maximum output from
workers ("You know, all this was figured out with a stopwatch," Ehrenreich is
told by a proud manager at a maid service), where omnipresent personality and
drug tests screen out those of assertive nature, where even the lowliest of
employees are overseen by professional-grade hierarchs who crack the whip
without remorse or relent, where workers are cautioned against "stealing time"
from their employer by thinking about anything other than their immediate task,
and where every bit of legal, moral, psychological, and anthropological guile
available to advanced civilization is deployed to prevent the problem of pay
from ever impeding the upward curve of profitability. This is the real story of
life under markets.
But the point where all the "New Economy" glory and promise really start to
suck, where all the vaunted choice and empowerment of free markets are revealed
as so many creaking stage devices, is when Ehrenreich takes on the shiniest of
all the Nineties myths-productivity. With the country as close to full
employment as it has ever been in 1999 and 2000, wages did not increase as much
as standard economic theory held they ought. Among the devout this was cause
for great rejoicing: Through a titanic national effort we had detached
productivity from wages, handing the gains over to owners and shareholders
instead. But this was less a "choice" that Americans consciously made than it
was, as Ehrenreich makes undeniably evident, the simple triumph of the nation's
managers, always encouraging employees to think of themselves as stakeholders
or team members even as they unilaterally dictate every aspect of the work
experience.

The social panorama that Ehrenreich describes should stand as an eternal shrine
to the god that sucked: Slum housing that is only affordable if workers take on
two jobs at once; exhausted maids eating packages of hot-dog buns for their
meals; women in their twenties so enfeebled by this regimen that they can no
longer lift the vacuum cleaners that the maid service demands they carry about
on their backs; purse searches, drug tests, personality tests, corporate pep
rallies. Were we not so determined to worship the market and its
boogie-boarding billionaires, Ehrenreich suggests, we might even view their
desperate, spent employees as philanthropists of a sort, giving selflessly of
their well-being so that the comfortable might live even more comfortably.
"They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared
for," she writes; "they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be
shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and
stock prices high."

These are the fruits of thirty years of culture war. Hell-bent to get
government off our backs, you installed a tyrant infinitely better equipped to
suck the joy out of life. Cuckoo to get God back in the schools, you enshrined
a god of unappeasable malice. Raging against the snobs, you enthroned a rum
bunch of two-fisted boodlers, upper-class twits, and hang-em-high moralists.
Ain't irony grand. "

Matthew Duss, you're on THE LIST. We are watching you.

Last night, I ran into an item in our local paper about an all-female country group who's having difficulty getting one of their new songs much radio play time, due to alleged male-bashing lyrics in the song. Given that on page 3 of the 'Why Does This Saeculum Suck?' thread, 3T's were described as the time that women get their revenge for the way their mothers were treated during the prior 1T, and given that even the slightest hint of criticism of (much less opposition against) male-bashing by anyone would have been considered TOTALLY unacceptable behavior only a few years ago, could this new development be considered as evidence of an impending or perhaps even a beginning 4T?

[ This Message was edited by: jds1958xg on 2002-06-07 07:36 ]

"So confidently did the right proceed from triumph to triumph, though, that eventually they forgot this. Inspired by a generous bull market and puffed up by a sense of historical righteousness so cocksure that it might have been lifted from The God That Failed, that old book in which ex-Communists disavowed their former convictions, the right evidently decided in the Nineties that the time had come to tell the world about the wonders of the market." --Thomas Frank, The God That Sucked

Dateline: 1938 The Forgotten Depression by, John T. Flynn

"Actually Henry [Morgenthau] didn't know the half of it. The country had now really reached a greater crisis than in 1933. The public debt, which was 22 billion when Roosevelt took office ? almost all a heritage of World War I ? was now 37 billion. Taxes were more than doubled. The President had a war on against the conservatives in his party and his own cabinet was split and angry. Unemployment was several thousand more than it was in October, 1932. Roosevelt knew now he was in a crisis. And he had at his disposal nothing to fight it with save a weapon ? government spending ? which had failed and which he felt now was a palliative and not a cure. He knew that the means of spending open to him, for the reasons explained above, were hopelessly inadequate. Yet he was now convinced for reasons which we shall see soon that he must not merely spend, but must spend two and three times as much as he had been spending. Would the country take it? He believed that the alternative was a crash of as great proportions as in 1933 and this meant, after all the wreaths that had been put upon his brow, he would go out of office in disgrace."

I don't understand the media reaction to the Chandra Levy murders. The media's take on Osama became so 3T "the created-evil-celebrity" in style and Jihad Johnny was hyped too. Even the skating scandals were played up to sound as "sizzling" as possible. But now that they've found Chandra's body decayed for a long time everyone's just sad. This is really somber and not like the take on the other phenonema. Why are they treating this differently?

On 2002-06-07 16:18, voltronx wrote:
I don't understand the media reaction to the Chandra Levy murders. The media's take on Osama became so 3T "the created-evil-celebrity" in style and Jihad Johnny was hyped too. Even the skating scandals were played up to sound as "sizzling" as possible. But now that they've found Chandra's body decayed for a long time everyone's just sad. This is really somber and not like the take on the other phenonema. Why are they treating this differently?

Sounds like we have turned the corner into the 4T. Then again, maybe it is just because the media sucks :razz:

[ This Message was edited by: Earthshine on 2002-06-07 20:10 ]

On 2002-06-07 16:18, voltronx wrote:
I don't understand the media reaction to the Chandra Levy murders. The media's take on Osama became so 3T "the created-evil-celebrity" in style and Jihad Johnny was hyped too. Even the skating scandals were played up to sound as "sizzling" as possible. But now that they've found Chandra's body decayed for a long time everyone's just sad. This is really somber and not like the take on the other phenonema. Why are they treating this differently?

because we've entered the Fourth Turning, i think. If Chandra had been found before 911, there'd have been a media circus not seen since the OJ debacle. Gary Condit would have been practically lynched, even though it is not likely that he is Chandra's killer. The interviews i've seen with the Levy family have been most somber and respectful; pre-911 there would have been absurd crap like "Dr. and Mrs. Levy, how do you FEEL now that they've found your daughter's body???!!!". Not now.