Psychopolitik 2.0

$4 gasoline.  People in other countries have dealt with it for years.  People in the US are now threatening to kill each other to avoid paying it.  Think about that for a moment.

Props.

Blargh:

It pained me to see Senator Obama miss a big opportunity at Wesleyan. A few days before Memorial Day he delivered the commencement speech filling in for Senator Kennedy. Senator Obama mentioned serving our country and used the word service many times. He spoke of joining the Peace Corps. He talked about the good it does one’s soul to be part of “something bigger than one’s self.” However, Senator Obama never said — even once — that one good option for service — and for being part of something bigger than ourselves — includes volunteering to serve in our military. Why? (emphasis mine)

Shit like this is a prime example of why rather than accept and work within the nuts & bolts of the US political system I hurl bricks at it from outside. Obama makes the typical politician error of portraying any sense of civic mindedness as inherently meaning government involvement & allegiance, and instead of pointing that out, this moron — a writer on Huffington Post, a supposed “left-wing/progressive” site as popularly described — barks about leaving the military out of the equation. The US Military, seriously.

Oh, it gets worse folks…

If Obama becomes commander-in-chief he’ll need our military to fight in Afghanistan, which he’s said he’ll order the military to do, and/or to withdraw from Iraq. It won’t be “Bush’s war” then. Whose military will it be?

Did my son make the wrong choice when he volunteered for the Marine Corps in 1999? I was ambivalent about the idea of my son volunteering, and that was before Bush and 9/11 let alone Iraq. I learned that it was the best thing that ever happened to him or to me for the very reasons Obama mentioned at Wesleyan — our family learned that we were part of something bigger than ourselves, and my son learned to see the Marine standing nexxt to him as more important than him. [...]

All too often Progressives act and speak as if military service is service to George Bush. My son volunteered when Clinton was president. My son wasn’t Bush’s Marine, he was your Marine. He regarded his time in the military as service to America, not for the Republicans, far less for one president.

Military service as for “America”, and not for the elite that happens to run it. Please, this is a load of idealist After-School Special ahistorical pseudo-patriotic claptrap propaganda, and it amazes me how one can believe it yet still be considered “left” on ANY measure. Even if you don’t point out the track record of military action for “interests” as opposed to any realistic sense of defense, it falls apart when you consider how these wars start. If it were seriously about the public government school We The People bullshit, then instead of the misinformation campaigns ran by the administration with the mainstream media in lockstep, threats to skeptics of being painted as unAmerican, and the dog & pony show of a congressional vote, every engagement seen as being beyond a certain scale would be honestly and exhaustively aired out, both pro & con, to the general public, which would then vote like it were a constitutional amendment. Never mind the details of how such a thing would work, the difficulty of the ideal actually proves just how deeply bullshit the oft-romanticized actual process is.

Real talk: no, serving in the military is not a good idea for being part of something bigger than yourself. Yes, your son did make the wrong choice, in that it was based upon falling for a lie. Rather than go your direction and wave the flag some more, Obama was closer to the right idea back when he said the American lives lost in Iraq were wasted — to which he then promptly apologized instead of saying “yeah you’re damn right I said that”. Your approach to such important matters amounts to a pig challenging a wolf to a fight & letting the wolf set the rules, which is why I don’t bother. If it takes holding to such narrow parameters for public discourse to have any shot at all, then fuck it.

The type of people who seriously have this much fear about him don’t know how lucky they have it. Could be worse: “B-psycho 2016″?

When it comes to the current churning of the economy affecting the livelihood of various people, about this group I have three words: Took long enough…

CEO compensation at the biggest U.S. corporations dropped sharply last year, reflecting in part the rough business conditions at top-tier banks and other large financial firms, a study has found.

The study, released Thursday by consulting firm Mercer, a unit of Marsh & McLennan Cos Inc, is one of the most comprehensive reports to date analyzing chief executive pay data for companies’ most recently completed fiscal year.

The study looked at pay data in annual proxy filings for 350 companies of varying sizes and industries in the Fortune 1000. [...]

The study found that the CEOs of 50 large U.S. companies — companies with median annual revenue of $66.2 billion — took the sharpest cut in total direct compensation in the last fiscal year on a percentage basis, down 15.8 percent from the previous year.

This group of companies includes many big financial firms such as American International Group, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch & Co Inc that have been hurt by woes in the mortgage and credit markets.

“Companies are correlating their payouts more closely to performance,” said Diane Doubleday, global leader of Mercer’s executive compensation group in San Francisco. “I think we will see that play out in 2008 again.”

Median total direct compensation for CEOs in this group was nearly $14 million in the fiscal year covered by the proxy, Mercer said.

It should’ve been tied to performance all along anyway. If they aren’t serving a purpose to the company then honestly WTF are they there for? Only on corporate boards do you get this sense of amazement at the concept of not showering people with money for half-assed effort, meanwhile the people doing the actual work are seen as little more than walking cost.

The response? Panic:

With business leaders facing rising scrutiny from shareholders and lawmakers about their compensation, a new organization wants to tell corporate America’s side of the executive pay story.

Leaders of the Center on Executive Compensation, an industry-backed group based in Washington, say they want to offer a reasoned view about how to create good pay practices. [...]

Great, yet another interest group. How much representation do they need?

CEOs themselves play no direct role at the new center, an offshoot of the HR Policy Association, which represents human resources officers at big U.S. companies.

The center has a 16-member advisory board made up of chief HR officials at companies such as American Airlines, International Business Machines and Lockheed Martin Corp.

So the new organization saying “not so fast!” about CEO compensation is made up of people whose job is to keep everything below the board whittled down enough to maintain the boss’ unjustified high life. Operationally, the difference is moot.

Shareholder rights activists say they do not have high hopes that the executive compensation center will advocate for investors.

“This is part of the effort of the business community to protect the status quo from angry shareholders and a concerned Congress,” said Richard Ferlauto, director of pension and benefit policy at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a frequent critic of executive pay plans. “It just shows that the business community is mobilizing, rather than reforming pay,” he said.

Well no screaming eagle shit, Sherlock…

The center was formed at a time when union pension funds and other activist investors have proposed pay reforms, such as measures to give shareholders nonbinding votes on top managers’ pay plans. These measures won majority votes at annual meetings of some companies this year, such as at Motorola Inc, but have failed to pass elsewhere, including at Citigroup.

The executive compensation center opposes the “say-on-pay” investor proposals and a bill pending in Congress calling for a mandatory shareholder vote on executive pay, saying they could end up forcing companies to adopt “cookie-cutter” pay plans aimed at winning shareholder support rather than be in the corporations’ best strategic interests.

“People, what are you doing? I can barely keep my private jet fueled these days! It feels like you’re snatching the lobster from my kids mouths! What are they supposed to have for breakfast, eggs?”

They claim that popular proposals from the shareholders that just happen to thin their obese wallets and limit their potential for self-aggrandizement hurt the interests of the company, and should thus be blocked. Yet the entire reason these things are so popular is the rampant abuse of trust in the corporate world. This is basically the same argument that politicians make when people criticize their power: “you don’t understand! You’ll just weaken us!”. In the long run, even when the ones involved don’t realize it, that’s the point.

Considering the illegitimacy of corporate structure, and the similarity to the design of the modern State, these kind of internal fights can be seen as cracks in the wall. The purpose, then, of radicals is to encourage questioning of the point of the wall itself, and to hand out increasingly more effective chisels and mallets until it all comes down.

I notice some bloggers have links to their Amazon.com wishlist on the sidebar. Apparently some people actually do buy their favorite writers stuff. Even if people don’t you might be curious to know what I want, for brain-picking purposes, so…

^^^^When I next run across my admin, that’ll be somewhere on the side.  Most recent one I added to it is this book on home-brewing beer.

If it makes it feel less crass, my birthday was this month.

Submitted with minimal comment:

Sales of new homes rose in April for the first time in six months although the unexpected increase still left activity near the lowest level in 17 years.

The Commerce Department reported Tuesday that sales of new homes rose 3.3 percent in April to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 526,000 units.

But the government revised March activity lower to show an even bigger drop of 11 percent to an annual rate of 509,000, which was the weakest pace for sales since April 1991. Economists believe that new home sales will remain weak for some time as the housing industry struggles with falling prices and rising mortgage foreclosures, which are dumping even more homes on an already glutted market.

The Commerce report showed that the median price of a new home sold in April dropped to $246,100 in April, down 4.2 percent from April 2007. (emphasis mine)

Cause & effect?  Nah…

Over on Hit’n'Run there’s a post about the Libertarian Party convention. In the comments someone quoted a bit about Mike Gravel re: public government education, which exploded into a purity fight of sorts. I had a comment to add there, but the server squirrels are still pissed about the possibility of yet another Spurs finals appearance so I’m sharing it here:

Can’t we just agree that, while for anything beyond basic reading & math government schools suck ass on average, the real problem is parents who don’t give a fuck, and a huge reason private schools tend to do better is sending your kid to one tends to be a sign of giving a fuck?

I went to shitty public schools during most of my childhood. However, my parents encouraged me to learn on my own, so I did. A lot of old friends of mine didn’t have that. One can believe government-run education fails a cost/benefit analysis without automatically believing private schools are a miracle cure-all. Hell, IMO the belief that it’s that simple smacks of the same type of utopianism that’s driving the current education establishment to gradually seize power and responsibility from parents.

Explanation of post title here.

Here’s a little exercise in perspective.  Consider the following article about “record oil prices“:

Crude oil rose to a record above $135 a barrel as OPEC ministers said they could do nothing to stop the rally that has more than doubled prices over the past year.

Oil has risen 18 percent this month as banks increased price forecasts because of limited supply and demand growth. OPEC has “no magic solution” to high prices, Qatar’s oil minister said. The IEA, energy adviser to 27 nations, said it plans to reduce its long-term projection for oil supply.

“OPEC is impotent” said Nauman Barakat, senior vice president of global energy futures at Macquarie Futures USA Inc. in New York. “The only member with the power to do anything is Saudi Arabia and they are laughing all the way to the bank. They have no incentive to spoil the party as long there is no major demand destruction.”

This is presented as if the entire reason the prices are going up is pure demand increase.  It is a factor, yet clearly not the only one.  Mentioning that, since oil is priced in dollars, the price inherently must go up over time as the purchasing power of a dollar goes down is quite rare, to the point where it’s almost seen as a “gaffe” when anyone in the media remotely suggests it.

I asked myself after seeing some articles like this “how much oil is actually IN a barrel?”, and looked it up.  The “barrel” referred to in oil pricing is apparently 42 gallons, based on a standard established over a century ago.  Take 42 & divide it by the latest “record high” of 135, and you have 31/100ths.  Now, imagine the first line of that article rewritten:

US dollars dropped to a record below 1/3rd of a gallon as the Federal Reserve said they could do nothing to stop the bleeding…

One problem with that: unlike in the original, the Fed caused the bleeding themselves.

It’s funny how we interpret the actions of other countries so differently from if we were in the same situation.  Imagine if the US were a Saudi level oil exporter, & Saudi Arabia were a US level oil consumer.  You think we’d be portrayed as “laughing all the way to the bank” as people suffer in the US media?

Feel free to draw your own conclusions…

Looking at TPM Cafe, stumbled across a discussion involving Eric Alterman, Brink Lindsay, & two other people.  Brink’s comment about modern liberalism losing its moorings via embrace of centralization as a virtue — an analysis I mostly agree with, save for the inaccurate labeling of this as “socialism” when it was managerialist corporatism with a drawn on smiley face — prompted a response from Eric including this thoroughly beaten dead horse:

I share the libertarian concern with the growth of bureaucracy and as Brink was kind enough to mention, also locate the core of liberal thought in the experiences and insights of the Enlightenment–and focus on their implications for the rights of the individual. But as John Dewey argued, “liberty” should be imagined not as an abstract principle merely to be admired but as “the effective power to do specific things”–things that could not be done by people enjoying only the theoretical ability to act on their freedoms. No longer could the slogan of political liberals be “Let the government keep its hands off industry and commerce,” as the government became necessary to protect the individual’s freedom from the growing power of just those forces. “There is no such thing as the liberty or effective power of an individual, group, or class,” Dewey explained, “except in relation to the liberties, the effective powers, of other individuals, groups or classes.”

I feel that libertarianism, as I understand it, is overly concerned with theoretical liberty at the expense of its actual practice. The freedom to starve, to see one’s labor unfairly exploited, to drink polluted water or breath polluted air, are not freedoms I strongly value. And to battle these and others like them, society requires collective institutional action and in many cases, government (or labor union) protection. I’m no fan of “big government” per se–and neither was Dewey. It’s merely that powerful forces like global corporations require powerful forces to balance them. (emphasis mine)

The next book Eric reads should be this one.

Libertarians who’re intellectually honest with themselves don’t support “the freedom to starve” any more than mainstream liberals do, they just differ on how to deal with it, tending to point out that much of the power corporations hold is state-based in and of itself, and thus expecting the State to seriously deal with it is ridiculous.  Also, no libertarian with any sense about them opposes labor organizing any further than to the degree that it is now government regulated, which has resulted in its neutering.  We know that big business never seriously wants the free-for-all their egomaniacal CEOs tend to fantasize about, that what they really mean is a market where capital is pampered and fluffed behind the scenes like now, only the more visible crutches handed out from the national leg-breakers are removed — while leg-breaking still goes on undeterred.  In short, to the following quote from Syvanen in the comments for Brink, we’d say “damn right!”:

One of big issues of disagreement is clearly on the efficacy of the free market. I think the issue is moot however, since free markets seem to be non-existent. If we had a free market in financial services there would be blood all over wall street, instead billions in federal money is going into bail outs.

Eric wrote a book called “what liberal media?” awhile back.  Some left-libertarian needs to write one called “what free market?”, pointing this kind of contradictory bullshit out.

Despite the best efforts of the RIAA, Comcast and the anti-squirter lobby, no one can really say they control the internet. The possibilities behind the technology involved make even controlling a small piece akin to herding cats, and only the most detached, ignorant people even WANT to anyway.

…and right on cue, here’s the most detached member of the most detached organization on the face of the earth, flappin’ gums:

A U.S. senator has asked Google to remove videos — produced by Islamist terrorists — from YouTube.

In a letter to Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., said, “A great majority of these videos document horrific attacks on American soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

Other videos, Lieberman said, “provide weapons training, speeches by al-Qaeda leadership, and general material intended to radicalize potential recruits.”

Figures it’d be Lieberman who’d find a gap in the usual barking big enough to fit Teh Terrorpanick in.

His demand (that is what this is, a demand. He is a congressman, his communication in this regard inherently carries with it an implicit threat) shows that he couldn’t possibly understand just how YouTube works. It’s not like a few videos go up and the admins hand pick each one to go public, the volume of that site is impossible to watch so closely. Besides, common sense says the amount of jihadi propaganda videos compared to the whole isn’t even a needle in a haystack, it’s a single molecule of metal in one, and it’s not like the few who put up that kind of crap are uploading their videos with tags like “jihad”, “american death”, “suicide bomber” or “infidels”, if the point of them isn’t to preach to the converted.

Way I see it, putting them up on YouTube in the first place doesn’t even make sense from their perspective. If according to Lieberman and his fellow warmongers they hate us because, among other things, if I wanted to I could open a tab in Firefox right now & within seconds navigate to a virtual buffet of images ranging from video models tastefully semi-nude to the smuttiest smut ever smutted, w/o getting whipped for it, then I’d say if your recruitment pool is surfing YouTube…

Putting aside all that, let’s humor him: suppose they could reliably remove these videos?

According to terrorism analyst Ben Venzke, removing terrorist videos from YouTube would have little effect.

“The core underlying issue is that, whether you take the videos off of YouTube or not, they will always be available at numerous other locations online,” Venzke told ABC News.

“New outlets are popping up constantly, and when you take one down, 10 more simply appear to fill the gap. The problem is the very nature of the Internet itself. It makes controlling and denying access to information simply impossible,” Venzke added.

Case in point: Earlier this month, the Senate Homeland Security and Government Reform Committee, which Lieberman chairs, issued a staff report entitled, “Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and Home Grown Terrorist Threat.”

At a press conference on May 8, Lieberman played a video compilation that included beheadings and bomb and rocket attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq.

That video, which was posted on YouTube, has since been taken down. But after showing the clip at his press conference, the video was linked and posted on other Web sites and remains available. (emphasis mine)

And then, even in the cases where the jihadis identify themselves in the videos that rubs up against another problem:

Many terrorist videos are branded with logos and icons identifying the source of the videos. Lieberman suggests this branding by Islamist groups could be used to identify videos that should be removed from YouTube.

Venzke, who runs the IntelCenter, a counterterrorism contractor that works with military, intelligence and law enforcement clients, says that could have some unintended consequences.

“If automated means were used to identify material, would a news report or documentary containing the same material, but produced by a reputable news outlet, also be blocked or removed simply because the logo appeared?” Venzke asked.

Here’s an idea: don’t like it? Then don’t watch it. If you’re on YouTube and you somehow accidentally come across such a video, report it. If you’re a fan of those type of videos, you’re probably not on YouTube. If you’re Joe Lieberman, you might wanna seek medical help for that bed-wetting issue…

LOL…Remember that fence they were talking about building on the Mexican border?

Texas mayors and business leaders filed a class-action lawsuit Friday alleging Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff hoodwinked landowners into waiving their property rights for construction of a fence along the Mexican border.

Members of the Texas Border Coalition said Chertoff did not fairly negotiate compensation with landowners for access to their land for six-month surveys to choose fence sites. The coalition of mayors and business and community leaders is seeking an injunction to block work on the fence.

They also want a federal judge to rescind all the agreements with landowners and to order Chertoff to start again. The department has sought and won access from hundreds of landowners to determine where to build the fence and other barriers to illegal border crossings.

I don’t think this type of info spreads enough. People outside of border states act as if there’s some kind of buffer zone between the US & Mexico where there’s nothing, when in fact there’s a lot of cultural and economic straddle there — which the US government is promising to hack at with an ax. Hence the following:

Brownsville Mayor Pat Ahumada said the mayors are willing to work with Homeland Security to devise alternatives to the border fence.

“They are determined to build a wall to appease mid-America,” Ahumada said. “This is a political problem that’s being addressed at the expense of all the border communities.” (emphasis mine)

For another angle on this, check out the bonuses the Brits added to their coverage:

The border group echoed questions that Democrats have raised about Texas oil magnate Ray Hunt, whose land the fence is scheduled to bypass. Hunt recently gave $35m to help his friend George Bush build a presidential library at a Texas university. [...]

About half of the planned border fence will be made of reinforced concrete, with vehicle barriers comprising the rest of its length. The Berlin wall, by contrast, was 96 miles long, while the security fence on the border between Israel and Palestine will measure about 430 miles when completed.

Note that the Berlin Wall was meant to keep people IN, and was protected by people ordered to shoot even if women and children were involved. Also, commerce wasn’t expected to still go back and forth over such a border, for obvious reason.