Category: corporatism

President Hopey promises middle class exciting new changiness

~ Bob Morris ~ 2 Comments

hopeandchange

Obama is rushing to offer a ‘grand bargain for middle-class jobs.’ He starting ignored the middle class about three seconds after being elected in 2008. The rabble now is getting a bit cranky so he needs to pretend to do something.

And how will Obama create jobs, you ask? Wait for it… By cutting the US corporate tax rate, that’s how! And then spending on infrastructure and education in some vague and unspecified way. Woo-hoo, I can see all that money trickling down to us. Oh wait, maybe’s that a urine stream that’s trickling down. Hmm.

Last week Obama gave a speech at Knox College in Illinois on the economic situation that like his remarks on Trayvon Martin a few days earlier was filled with the number of bromides calculated to give his MSNBC posse just enough to rally around. To give you a sense of the shallowness of it all, he uses the term “folks” 26 times. One supposes that with people like Al Sharpton and Ed Schultz, the only thing that would cause a breach with the President is a Swiftian modest proposal that hungry folks eat their children.

Sickening corporatism. The merger of Silicon Valley and US govt

~ Bob Morris
Credit: dorhaemet.co.il
Credit: dorhaemet.co.il

If corporatism is the merger of government and business, then Silicon Valley and Microsoft deserve special awards for doing everything they could to make it happen, all the while pretending to be squeaky clean, “different” from all those nasty bricks and mortar companies, and deeply concerned with you, the user.

Microsoft spent months working with FBI and NSA to insure they would have unfettered access to data you thought was private. This includes Skydrive, which NSA no longer even has to ask permission to peek at. How thoughtful of Microsoft to do that. Not to be outdone, Google gave NSA a back door into Android.  This is sickening and shows corruption at the highest levels of Silicon Valley and Redmond.

None of this is any surprise: that America’s electronic communication sector is in bed with Uncle Bush and Uncle Obama was made abundantly clear in ““You Should Use Both” – How America’s Internet Companies Are Handing Over Your Data To Uncle Sam.” Still, prima facie proof that corporations systematically betray the privacy of their clients in order to curry favor with the government should be troubling if only to those who are not in the same state of completely symbiotic relationship with the government and whose sustenance depends on preserving Big Government at all costs, which as we will shows in a post shortly is just over 110 million Americans.

More from the Guardian explaining how anyone using MSFT products should be aware that the NSA logs every single keystroke:

Driverless cars could save USPS by eliminating employees. Woo-hoo!

~ Bob Morris ~ 2 Comments
I have come to replace your job
I have come to replace your job

Articles perkily highlighting how all those stupid employees can be replaced with the latest technological whizz-bang gizmo are nasty and vicious at heart. A Next Gov article gushes about about the US Postal Service could replace employees with driverless cars, and won’t that be grand!

How a self-driving car will be able to walk up the steps to my condo building, unlock the door, and put mail in my mailbox is unexplained. Instead, the authors gush about fuel savings, lower maintenance costs, and most especially getting rid of those pesky employees. So does Google with their self-driving car. It’s not self-driving car technology that I’m opposed to but the deliberate ignoring of its economic ramifications by companies like Google and the Next Gov article. They simply don’t care that self-driving cars will put millions of out work. All they care about is cost savings. And some of their suppositions are simply wrong.

Google reported that after driving 300,000 miles, its driverless cars were not involved in any accidents. Computer control of cars mitigates against human error, such as fatigue or distraction, leading to greater safety.

I’ve gone 300,000 miles without an accident too. Basing safety estimates on a tiny amount of miles like 300,000 is meaningless. And I guarantee that, sooner or later, a self-driving car will malfunction, people will be killed, and the whole concept will suddenly seem very dicey indeed.

But hey, as long as workers can be eliminated, they will be, under guise of techno-perkiness. And that is doing evil.

Big media uses gangster hip hop to funnel people into private prisons?

~ Bob Morris

warondrugs600

Davey D, in a well-documented and explosive piece, details how ownership and control of big entertainment companies correlates strongly with that of private prisons. Yeah, let’s push that gangster rap hard and fill up private prisons in the process, making money on both ends.

When ownership of these media conglomerates is cross checked with ownership of the biggest names in prison privatization, interesting new facts emerge.

The largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America is Vanguard Group Incorporated

The number-one holder of both Viacom and Time Warner is a company called Blackrock. Blackrock is the second largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America.

The people who own the media are the same people who own private prisons, the EXACT same people, and using one to promote the other is (or “would be,” depending on your analysis) very lucrative.

Such a scheme would mean some very greedy, very racist people.

Indeed, privatized prisons need large numbers of prisoners. Now where do you suppose they might from?

Andre Douglas Pond Cummings documents the obvious truth that “the vast majority of the prisoner increase in the United States has come from African-American and Latino citizen drug arrests.”

Now, let’s connect the dots.

Finally, let us not forget the wealth of evidence to support the notion that crime-, drug- and prison-glorifying hip-hop only outsells other hip-hop because it receives so much more exposure and financial backing.

We already know our major banks are filled with amoral parasites who get free passes from criminal behavior from the government. So, is it really that conspiratorial to think that big corporations would deliberately push music that glorifies crime in hopes of filling up their prisons too?

Democratic Party corporatists triumph by losing in Wisconsin

~ Bob Morris

Mission accomplished. Genuine revolt and dissent was channeled into the Democratic Party and neutralized.

Matt Stoller

By calling for a recall instead of a general strike after Walker stripped collective bargaining rights and cut benefits for workers, labor and Democratic leadership in the state diverted and then subverted populist energy, channeling it into an electoral process.

A prime function of the Democratic Party for decades has been to siphon real protest into itself where it then renders it inert. The Democratic Party pretends to be the friend of social movements before trying to co-opt and neutralize them. Peter Camejo explains this eloquently in his 2004 Avocado Declaration. This is exactly what happened in Wisconsin. Rather than pushing for a general strike, Democrats forced the dissent into a recall election which they then lost.

Then, Barrett, an anti-labor centrist, won the Democratic primary by crushing his labor-backed opponent, Kathleen Falk. Finally, Barrett himself was destroyed by Scott Walker, who outspent Barrett 7-1 with corporate money. In other words, first, liberals lost a policy battle, then they failed to strike, then they lost a primary election, then they lost a general election to the most high-profile effective reactionary policy-maker in the country. The conservative beat the moderate who beat the liberal. And had Barrett won, he wouldn’t even have rolled back Walker’s agenda. Somehow, in a no-win electoral situation, Democrats and labor managed to lose as badly as they possibly could.

Peter Camejo, emphasis added

[The Democratic Party acts] a “broker” negotiating and selling influence among broad layers of the people to support the objectives of corporate rule. The Democratic Party’s core group of elected officials is rooted in careerists seeking self-promotion by offering to the corporate rulers their ability to control and deliver mass support. And to the people they offer some concessions, modifications on the platform of the Republican Party. One important value of the Democratic Party to the corporate world is that it makes the Republican Party possible through the maintenance of the stability that is essential for “business as usual.” It does this by preventing a genuine mass opposition from developing. Together the two parties offer one of the best frameworks possible with which to rule a people that otherwise would begin to move society towards the rule of the people (i.e. democracy).

Editorial cartoon sympathetic to the Populists. The Democratic Party pretended to befriend the Populist Party of the 1890’s, diffused its impact, then backstabbed it.