Month: March 2012

Wanted: disgruntled employee

CEOs may think twice before making what they intend to be secret campaign donations from their corporate treasuries, now that a progressive reform group is offering a $25,000 reward to the first employee who rats one of them out.

“We think there are a lot of big corporations on the bubble about whether they’re going to use corporate funds to try to affect the outcome of the election,” said Bob Creamer, a consultant with Americans United for Change, the group offering the bounty.

“And we want to make it clear that they cannot take that kind of action without the risk of economic consequences.”

A key factor for CEOs, Creamer said, will be whether or not they are confident that their corporate contribution will remain secret.

The Target Corporation famously faced a boycott threat in the summer of 2010 until it apologized for one of its political donations that became public.

“The message is: In the digital age, nothing is secret,” Creamer said. “The $25,000 is intended to make those CEOs wonder if the person down the hall — who may look at an email or have some direct knowledge of the corporation’s activity — may decide that $25,000 is worth more than their loyalty to that corporation.”

Yes indeed. Some of them may need that 25k because their greedy bosses refuse to give their employees raises even as they pile money into political campaigns.

This is a good idea. The one thing these guys are afraid of is being publicly exposed. Even that cretinous billionaire wingnut Kenneth Griffin said as much in his notorious interview with the Chicago Tribune:

Just don’t be different

by digby

Young people who identify themselves as so-called Emos are being brutally killed at an alarming rate in Iraq, where militias have distributed hit lists of victims and security forces say they are unable to stop crimes against the subculture that is widely perceived in Iraq as being gay.

Officials and human rights groups estimated as many as 58 Iraqis who are either gay or believed to be gay have been killed in the last six weeks alone — forecasting what experts fear is a return to the rampant hate crimes against homosexuals in 2009. This year, eyewitnesses and human rights groups say some of the victims have been bludgeoned to death by militiamen smashing in their skulls with heavy cement blocks.

A recent list distributed by militants in Baghdad’s Shiite Sadr City neighborhood gives the names or nicknames of 33 people and their home addresses. At the top of the paper are a drawing of two handguns flanking a Quranic greeting that extolls God as merciful and compassionate.

Then follows a chilling warning.

“We warn in the strongest terms to every male and female debauchee,” the Shiite militia hit list says. “If you do not stop this dirty act within four days, then the punishment of God will fall on you at the hands of Mujahideen.”

At least they aren’t gassing their own people.

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Trust

The fact is that deep down, many Americans really want to be subjects.

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Welfare queens and college sluts

by digby

CNN, you really need to examine your hiring policies. Your “analyst” Dana Loesch wrote this piece of drivel on her site yesterday:

Maybe Fluke’s boyfriend, the son of entrenched Democrat William Mutterperl, can pay for her contraception. His father donates heavily to Democrat candidates. The couple is currently enjoying spring break in California, which poses the question of how Fluke can afford a trip across the country when she can’t afford birth control pills.

I assume that CNN knows that Fluke wasn’t testifying about herself and they know that she wasn’t talking about her own sex life, her boyfriend or indeed, anything about her personal life. Rush Limbaugh and his band of misogynist media puppets all pretended like she did and spent days calling her a slut, saying that she had so much sex, “It’s amazing she can even walk” but the fact remains that she never said she could not afford birth control.

Here is what she said, in case CNN thinks its lovely “contributor” might have even the slightest bit of journalistic integrity:

On a daily basis, I hear from yet another woman…who has suffered financial, emotional, and medical burdens because of this lack of contraceptive coverage….

Without insurance coverage, contraception can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary. Forty percent of female students at Georgetown Law report struggling financially as a result of this policy.One told us of how embarrassed and powerless she felt when she was standing at the pharmacy counter, learning for the first time that contraception wasn’t covered, and had to walk away because she couldn’t afford it. Women like her have no choice but to go without contraception. Just last week, a married female student told me she had to stop using contraception because she couldn’t afford it any longer. Women employed in low wage jobs without contraceptive coverage face the same choice.

Not that it matters. Even if Fluke had testified that she personally couldn’t afford birth control, it would still not be Dana Loesch’s business whether her boyfriend’s father has money not is it a license for her to question whether Fluke could afford a trip. (That particular gambit was perfected by another lovely right winger, Michele Malkin who stalked the Frost family and determined that they had no right to health care subsidies for their two sick kids because they had granite countertops in their kitchen.) Contrary to right wingers’ contention, you don’t give up your right to personal privacy if you receive government assistance — you certainly don’t give up your right to be left alone by screeching fascists who insist that their tax dollars entitle them to tell other people how to spend their money.

But that isn’t the point here at all. First of all, nobody’s asking the taxpayers to pay for Georgetown students’ birth control. The government is requiring insurance companies to offer coverage for birth control at no cost, just as they are required to offer other cost saving preventive health care. The only reason this has gotten turned into some sort of tax payer subsidy is because professional liars like Limbaugh and Loesch purposefully made this issue into one of “welfare sluts”.

And they did this for a reason. The hard core right wing in America is largely driven by this idea that the government is taking money from hard earned tax paying Real Americans and giving it to “welfare queens” to pay the consequences of their wanton sex lives. Traditionally, this applied to women of color who were allegedly sex crazed and ended up having too many babies. Now it’s applied to college women who are allegedly sex crazed and using birth control. The latter lacks the extra frisson of race but it easily falls into the same grooves. Bitches are taking hard earned money from the earners and screwing everything in sight. All these professional liars have to do is tickle that little corner of the lizard brain and it all makes sense.

It also makes sense that the right wing noise machine would activate their troops with this. It’s a bit more of a mystery as to why an alleged mainstream news organization would employ someone who does it.

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Leaving the quagmire

by David Atkins

There’s little to say about the horrific massacre of of 16 Afghan civilians by an unnamed American soldier that others haven’t said better than myself. It’s another demonstration of the enormous peril of foreign intervention in largely intractable situations. Stick enough armed men in war zones for long enough and people start to become dehumanized. These sorts of incidents are almost inevitable, which is why prolonged occupations anywhere are a terrible idea. Nothing the President can say to Hamid Karzai will make up for what happened. Nothing Karzai can say to the Afghan people will make up for it or bring back the dead, pointlessly killed. It’s just another in a long line of reasons why America needs to get out of Afghanistan.

And this isn’t the only massacre in recent days, either. There’s also the Kapisa incident:

Adding to the sense of concern, the killings occurred two days after an episode in Kapisa Province, in eastern Afghanistan, in which NATO helicopters apparently hunting Taliban insurgents instead fired on civilians, killing four and wounding three others, Afghan officials said. About 1,200 demonstrators marched in protest in Kapisa on Saturday.

This simply cannot continue indefinitely. It has to stop.

The darker side of all this, of course, is that the hardline theocratic conservatives in Afghanistan are primed to take power back after our departure, continuing the reign of terror they exercised for years. The methodical destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was a crime not only against humanity but against history and civilization itself. I was in New York recently and walked by an Afghan restaurant, where a painting of the Buddhas lay fixed in the window. I stood and stared as the tears welled in my eyes. Just thinking about it drives me into a furious rage.

The Taliban treatment of women was without question the most horrific in the modern world. And there’s no reason to imagine it won’t be just as bad after we leave. Karzai himself is no angel, but he’s better on human rights than the warlords he replaced. He won’t likely last long after American forces leave unless he becomes just as bloodthirsty and brutal as the warlords he replaced.

Even now, women who do work outside the home are subject to awful abuse, as NPR reported:

Protection of women’s rights in Afghanistan remains a focal point for the West — and American officials regularly tout the fact that the Afghan security forces now include hundreds of women. In northern Afghanistan alone, about 300 women are serving in the police force.

But in a culture that is not fully comfortable with women working outside the home, these women face significant risks. An NPR investigation in the city discovered disturbing allegations of systematic sexual coercion and even rape of female police officers by their male colleagues.

The women at the recent training session at a huge base outside Mazar-e-Sharif hardly looked like victims as they assembled and loaded assault rifles. But none dared to give their names as they alluded to what is an open secret in the city.

“Some women are being promoted only if they agree to give sexual favors,” said one female officer…

But privately, several told of terrifying experiences. The women agreed to speak on the condition that their names be withheld, and the only place they felt safe enough to talk with a reporter was in a car moving around the city.

“It’s a fact. Women in the police are being used for sex and as prostitutes,” said Ann — not her real name — who is in her mid-30s.

“It’s happened to me. Male cops ask for sex openly because they think women join the police just to work as prostitutes,” she said.

In Afghanistan, even in modern cities like Mazar-e-Sharif or Kabul, the capital, a wide array of supposedly “immoral” conduct can get a woman called a prostitute. Anything from wearing the wrong clothes to sitting in the front seat of a car, or simply working outside the home can cause dangerous rumors.

The law reflects that. With sexual assault, the woman is as often sent to jail as the man, the assumption being that any woman who puts herself in a situation to be vulnerable to rape must be immoral.

And that’s the enlightened part of Afghanistan, where women have more rights. Seriously. Under the Taliban, it’s far worse.

While I understand that many progressives are have no problem at all with paying fervent attention to women’s rights within our own arbitrary national borders and closing their eyes with insouciance to what goes on in distant lands, I find it far more difficult. Rick Santorum and the Taliban are of a single mindset, symptoms of the same theocratic, patriarchal disease. It’s the sort of perverse morality that freaks out at the burning of a religious “moral” text, but has no problem with institutional rape, be it in the traditional mode or with a newfangled ultrasound device. I find it much harder than most to obsess over minor changes to abortion laws in Virginia while utterly ignoring far worse declines in the rights of women elsewhere in the world. What happens there is just as much our business as what happens here–and vice versa. It’s all our business, collectively, as an interconnected human species in an interconnected world.

But continuing this awful, endless occupation replete with civilian massacre after civilian massacre is no answer at all. It’s long past time to go.

Still, weep for the people we will be leaving behind. Weep for the Shi’ite ethnic hazara who will likely be doomed upon our departure:

The ruling Taliban—mostly fundamentalist Sunni, ethnic Pashtuns—saw Hazaras as infidels, animals, other. They didn’t look the way Afghans should look and didn’t worship the way Muslims should worship. A Taliban saying about Afghanistan’s non-Pashtun ethnic groups went: “Tajiks to Tajikistan, Uzbeks to Uzbekistan, and Hazaras to goristan,” the graveyard. And in fact, when the Buddhas fell, Taliban forces were besieging Hazarajat, burning down villages to render the region uninhabitable. As autumn began, the people of Hazarajat wondered if they’d survive winter. Then came September 11, a tragedy elsewhere that appeared to deliver salvation to the Hazara people.

And mourn the fate of a people who once had hope for a better future, and now have none because America ended up doing more harm than good when all was said and done. It didn’t have to be thus.

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Virtually Speaking Sunday

by digby

Digby & Dave Dayen Virtually Speaking Sundays
by Jay Ackroyd Featured Host

Call in to speak with the host
(646) 200-3440

From the VS Sundays media panel: digby and Dave Dayen compare their work of the past week to coverage from the corporate media’s Sunday morning talk shows. In a pre-recorded segment, Culture of Truth comments on the most ridiculous moment of this Sunday morning. Follow @DDayen @digby56 @bobblespeak

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Mississippi Mudslinging

by digby

The liberals are “indoctrinating” Mississippi children:

Some House members want to ban Mississippi school history courses from promoting “any partisan agenda or philosophy.”

A measure, sponsored by House Speaker Philip Gunn, R-Clinton, is supposed to keep history teachers or textbooks from indoctrinating students according to a particular partisan viewpoint.

“We’re trying to protect the history of our nation in its purest form,” said House Education Committee Chairman John Moore, R-Brandon.

The measure says in part that “public school history courses may not promote any partisan agenda or philosophy and may not be revised for the purpose of significantly changing generally accepted history to create a bias toward an ideological position.”

House Bill 1384 moves to the full House after being approved Monday by the House Education Committee on a 10-5 vote.

Republicans introduced the bill in previous years, Gunn said, adding that it’s a reaction to Texas disputes over what should be included in textbooks. He said he’s not aware of any similar problem that currently exists in Mississippi.

“We want to make sure our textbooks convey accurate historical information, not slanted on one or another position,” said Gunn, who did not attend the committee meeting.

Rep. Becky Currie, R-Brookhaven, a committee member, said she was aware of problems at her daughter’s school. Currie said a teacher took liberal viewpoints when discussing current events assignments, leading her to demand a conference with school authorities.

“No matter which side of the coin you’re on, her teacher ended up going toward the liberal end,” Currie told the committee. “I was surprised she made it out of there, still believing the way she was taught at my house.”

Let me guess: she taught that slavery was wrong.

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Stepping Out of the Soviet Shadow

by David Atkins

I was going to cover billionaire Ken Griffin’s repulsive comments today, but it seems digby has already beaten me to the punch, and admirably so. There’s just one aspect to Griffin’s defense of his Objectivist worldview that bears closer scrutiny, and it’s this:

This belief that a larger government is what creates prosperity, that a larger government is what creates good (is wrong). We’ve seen that experiment. The Soviet Union collapsed. China has run away from its state-controlled system over the last 20 years and has pulled more people up from poverty by doing so than we’ve ever seen in the history of humanity. Why the U.S. is drifting toward a direction that has been the failed of experiment of the last century, I don’t understand. I don’t understand.

Russia and China have made a positive move away from suffocating totalitarian states and toward more market-based approaches, true. But they’re hardly free democracies at this point; they’re kleptocratic plutocracies where the vast majority are deeply impoverished, with a few princes and robber barons at the top. Sort of like late 19th century America, but even worse. It’s Griffin’s ideal system, one that serves men like him very well. Which is precisely why men like him shouldn’t be able to spend unlimited sums of money to buy off politicians.

But more importantly, I suspect this sort of rhetoric–where it works at all–only works for people over the age of 30 who grew up in the shadow of the Cold War and the Soviet Union.

The Cold War did a lot of damage to this country in myriad ways. But one of its most damaging legacies has been a conservative rhetoric of policy dualism. It fostered the idea that there are two ways of doing things: 1) the American Way, and 2) the Commie Way. Socialism was lumped in with Communism, and anyone in America who pointed to the successes of the European or East Asian social democracies was drowned out with red baiting market triumphalism.

The entire infrastructure of the Left got beaten with that rhetorical stick so long and so often that it has become reflexively defensive. Perhaps behind only the power of race resentment and the need to get corporate contributions to match the right wing’s spending prowess, fear of being labeled as Communists has been the single biggest reason for the long-standing rhetorical cowardice of most of the institutional American Left.

And I think this is one of the reasons the Millennial generation holds such promise. Millennials have no direct memory of Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin and Kruschev. There is only the faintest memory of the Reagan presidency, if any. Red-baiting appeals of the kind that Griffin is making fall on completely deaf ears to the under-30 crowd. When we think of socialism, we don’t think of Soviets and Red China; we think of France, England and Germany. When we hear about “universal healthcare”, our minds turn toward Sweden and Japan. They aren’t couched in automatically hostile territory, and we don’t feel the need to apologize automatically to jingoistic brethren for supporting them.

As a 31-year-old, I read Griffin’s remarks and laugh not just at how wrong and self-serving they are, but also at their tone-deafness and appeal to ancient irrelevant bogeymen. But then I realize that it’s tone deaf to me, but not necessarily to a 59-year-old swing voter in Missouri. And it occurs to me that while the future is bright, we’re going to be working through a lot of the legacy of Cold War rhetoric for at least another generation.

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Selective Indignation

by digby

From Kathleen Geier over at Political Animal, I see that the newspapers are getting all antsy over Doonesbury again:

From Romenesko’s description of the cartoons, it doesn’t appear that they’re sexually explicit. But politically, Gary Trudeau is not pulling any punches. To wit, here’s how one cartoon is described:

In the stirrups, she is telling a nurse that she doesn’t want a transvaginal exam. Doctor says “Sorry miss, you’re first trimester. The male Republicans who run Texas require that all abortion seekers be examined with a 10″ shaming wand.” She asks “Will it hurt?” Nurse says, “Well, it’s not comfortable, honey. But Texas feels you should have thought of that.” Doctor says, “By the authority invested in me by the GOP base, I thee rape.”

Lawd have mercy Miss Mellie, bring me the smellin’ salts.

Geier archly notes:

Spokespeople for the newspapers which are banning the strips say their reason is that the material is “over the line” and “inappropriate.”

I wonder when the day will come when these extraordinarily nasty examples of unadulteratedly racist and misogynist (not to mention witless) political cartoons are also considered “over the line” and “inappropriate.”

Yeah, me too.

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Begging for pitchforks Part XXIV

by digby

Via Michael Moore:

“We have helped to create real social value in the U.S. economy. … I am proud to
be an American. But if the tax became too high, as a matter of principle I would
not be working this hard.” – Ken Griffin in 2007, just before he and his
friends destroyed the world economy and just after paying himself $1 billion for a year of work

Here is Ken Griffin today:

Q. I’m going to come back to this. But I want to touch on two more areas first. What do you think in general about the influence of people with your means on the political process? You said shame on the politicians for listening to the CEOs. Do you think the ultrawealthy have an inordinate or inappropriate amount of influence on the political process?

A. I think they actually have an insufficient influence. Those who have enjoyed the benefits of our system more than ever now owe a duty to protect the system that has created the greatest nation on this planet. And so I hope that other individuals who have really enjoyed growing up in a country that believes in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – and economic freedom is part of the pursuit of happiness – (I hope they realize) they have a duty now to step up and protect that. Not for themselves, but for their kids and for their grandchildren and for the person down the street that they don’t even know …

At this moment in time, these values are under attack. This belief that a larger government is what creates prosperity, that a larger government is what creates good (is wrong). We’ve seen that experiment. The Soviet Union collapsed. China has run away from its state-controlled system over the last 20 years and has pulled more people up from poverty by doing so than we’ve ever seen in the history of humanity. Why the U.S. is drifting toward a direction that has been the failed of experiment of the last century, I don’t understand. I don’t understand.
He also complained that this is a “very sad moment in [his] lifetime,” citing the now-familiar Republican charge that the Obama administration has “embraced class warfare.”

This man is proof that one needn’t be brilliant to become a billionaire. He sounds as if his political views were shaped by reading a couple of chapters of Atlas Shrugged in high school and multiple viewings of Red Dawn. In that respect I suppose he does personify the idea that absolutely anyone can become a billionaire no matter how little they know. Read the whole interview for some ignorant Panilesque gobbledygook of epic proportions. Let’s just say I’m not surprised these guys tanked the financial system:

[T]his is a very sad moment in my lifetime. This is the first time class warfare has really been embraced as a political tool. Because we are looking at an administration that has embraced class warfare as being politically expedient, I do worry about the publicity that comes with being willing to both with my dollars and, more importantly, with my voice to stand for what I believe in.

As government gets bigger every single day, how does my willingness to stand up for what I believe is right become eclipsed by my dependency on institutions that are ultimately controlled by the government? Remember I live in financial services, and every bank in the United States is really under the thumb of the government in a way it’s never been before. And that’s really worrisome to me, as someone who’s willing to say, ‘Wait, we need to step back and try to push government outside the realm of every dimension of our lives.’

He is a fervent supporter of Mitt Romney, by the way, and a major funder of American Crossroads.

I assume he owns an island somewhere. He’d better because if the working stiffs ever wake up to what these people have done, he’s going to need one.

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