Performance-based

The Chicago Tribune had an editorial yesterday or today (I don't know anymore, since I stopped subscribing) praising the new law in Florida that ties teachers' job security and pay to test scores. Of course the Trib, true to their traditional Colonel McCormick stance on such matters, thinks Illinois should do the same thing. They don't quite come out and say that teachers' unions are making our kids suffer so they can get rich, but they mention the unions in the last sentence as being among those who would oppose such "reasonable" measures to improve our educational system. The Tribune is good at sounding "reasonable." Collective bargaining is so 1950's. It's outlived its usefulness.

A blog called "Crooks and Liars" featured this story and pointed out that a job where your performance is judged on factors outside of your control is a recipe for burnout and failure. (That's why I always identified myself as an "angry operations guy" whose life was being made impossible by those people in marketing!) In this case, some tiny little things like poverty, hunger, and lack of community stability might be considered to be outside the teachers' control. Not to mention things like school boards making them teach creationism and other crap.

But one of the commenters who calls himself "cafeenman" made an even better point, saying that he works in mental health, and wonders if the next step will be to base his salary and job security on whether the mentally ill people he works with get better. He then adds, why not pay police based on the incidence of crime? But his last rhetorical question was the best: "And politicians don't get paid until the country has a booming economy and there is no war."

Why not? Let's propose to all the newly minted angry young Tea Partiers that their job security and pay should depend on whether most people in their district are actually better off in terms of quality of life, freedom from fear, and other real measures. Not, mind you, whether they're "better off than four years ago," because that really means whether Joe can buy a new flat screen TV, which the early 2000's showed us is fairly easy to manipulate by making EZ credit and Chinese goods available. We need to measure quality of life in the community by factors that make sense: freedom from anxiety, hopelessness, incivility, violence, fear, hatred, and ignorance. While we're at it, let's reward those elected representatives that have demonstrated a track record that shows they respect human rights (which, as of 1948 and the UN statement on Human Rights, included the right to organize for better working conditions).

Let's show them some of that "performance based pay and promotion" instead of letting our elections be dominated by who can smear their opponents the loudest, the most often, and the most brainlessly.

Well, guess what? We can already do that. All we have to do is, as John Prine said, "Blow up your TV, throw away your paper," and stop listening to campaign ads and editorials. Instead, look online or in your library and see what you can learn about what the issues really mean and what the candidates actually stand for. League of Women Voters is a good start. WorkingAmerica is good. Don't forget FactCheck.org.

I used to trust the Tribune to be fairly impartial, but as they get broker, they seem to get stupider. Maybe they, like the politicians, have concluded that the way to succeed in 21st century America is to cater to the lowest common denominator.

We need people to point out when politicians are gaming the system so democracy is actually impossible Lke the trick of counting a lack of a vote as a "no" vote, as Delta Airlines wants to do, or the shenanigans of the Wisconsin Tea Party crew last month. Which they are now following up on by trying to stack the state Supreme Court. I love how conservatives can hijack a narrative. Aren't they the ones who railed against "Activist judges"?  Well, I guess they think that no one will notice.

We need to retrain our politcal candidates to actually think for themselves and not be afraid to depart from the party lines. We need to reward problem-solving and pragmatism, and punish ideological rigidity. We need to shame blaming, and blow the whistle at ad hominem attacks. We need to dust off our logic books, and take a refresher course in critical thinking. I believe we can do this. I don't think society is sliding down a greased chute to oblivion. There are plenty of caring, thinking people out there. We can do something.

Something's not right...

The earthquake and tsunami that devastated large areas of Japan and killed thousands are terrible events. They're still unfolding, and the situation in Japan's financial markets is understandably chaotic, I'm sure.

But what is going on in the United States? The markets have now lost everything that they gained in the year so far - in less than a week. The experts blame the usual suspects in addition to Japan's markets: the crisis in Libya which threatens the oil supply, the stubborn rate of unemployment, the fact that housing prices are still not coming back (gee, do ya think it might be because the banks are sitting on tons of that cash we had to give them, instead of lending?). Blah blah, woof woof, as Jimi said.

But one line in the story yesterday about the stock market caught my eye and kind of got me a tiny bit upset. They said that the traders were "taking profits" while they could, driving the market down further.

Now, I'm not an economic expert. I tend to think of money in terms of the checkbook, where you either have it or you don't. I don't get derivatives, and hedges, and credit default swaps, and all that stuff. To me, those are bets. And currency trading and all that stuff - Treasury bonds and all - is like vapor. It seems to be at least half illusion, as things vary and drive other things up or down. I'm sure it's a lot of fun for those guys with sixteen computer monitors on their desk and a nose full of cocaine, but for me, it's not real.

But I come back to one thing. A lot of the hard-earned money I made over the past ten years went into a 401(k) and a 403(b). That was real money. I worked an hour for each hour's pay. So when the stock market goes down, it isn't like I can see it as "unrealized gains or losses." That money disappears as far as I'm concerned. My money. Gone.

And someone took it. Anyone who "took profits" yesterday and in any way helped the stock market fall is a thief, as far as me and my retirement savings are concerned. Same for the guys who bet on the decline, And the guys who bet on the volatility of the market and happened to profit on the decline. The short-sellers. The option putters. All those guys. You know why?

Because they have a lot of money to begin with, and they are doing this because they choose to. I put my money into a 401(k) and a 403(b) because I had to. It was either that or pay taxes on it. Savings? You can't get a frickin' toaster these days, much less keep up with inflation. The banks forgot what their job used to be in the 1950's and 60's: Keep my money safe and have the benefit of using it to loan to other people who need it, for a price, which they'd split with me. Now they want to charge me ten dollars a month just to keep my savings that earns a few pennies a year.

And pensions, which were supposed to be our reward and security for a lifetime of hard work, and which our government vowed to keep safe, became ridiculous antiques, like black-and-white tube TV's. That was part of the plan, see? They brainwashed us into believing that defined-contribution plans would be better for us in the long run, because we could control our investments! And they would benefit from the booming markets! Why settle for a lousy 3% on a CD when you could make 30, 40, or even 200%, especially if you were a savvy playah?!

And we frickin' fell for it! We sat there and picked out those stupid funds from the little charts and graphs while the guy from MetLife or the Hartford sat and nodded wisely and showed us our nifty "risk tolerance" profiles. Well, guess what? We shouldn't have been doing that! ZERO risk is the only risk that's acceptable when you're talking about your old age!! So what did we get to "control?" We got to "control" whether we got cheap lousy aluminum siding or cheap lousy vinyl siding! Whatever we chose, we got cheap lousy siding!! The only reason we took 401(k)'s was because that's the only way we could do ANYTHING to save for our retirments without getting screwed on taxes and fees.

So we had this little recession thing in 2008 when the house of cards the big boys built collapsed like most people knew it had to. And suddenly our money was GONE. Not just "lessening its return." Fuckin' disappeared. Two-thirds of it. WE watched and hoped and started to feel a little bettwe when it clawed its way back, even though the value of our houses kept free-falling until even those of us who'd been paying for 25 years on our houses were heading underwater. Everything that they told us to feel good about - our "net worth" - was revealed to be so much particle board furniture.

So now when we hear about a teacher or cop who still has a defined benefit plan - especially one that wasn't properly and lawfully funded by politicians who loved to play "turn out the lights and scream" every election - now we're all supposed to feel like they're on "the gravy train," or they're "freeloaders."

This is unethical, sinful, and if you want my opinion, a violation of human rights. Just because I get a statement every quarter doesn't mean I'm not being economically exploited, just as surely as some poor guy in Bahrain who has to live in a cardboard house while the big boys have gold toilets.

So now they want to do the same thing with Social Security. It's been coming for years. Now the politicians will play another round of "turn out the lights and scream" so they can scare people or con people or just wear people down into agreeing to this scam too. The Charles Krauthammers of the world; the guys who suck up to the Rupert Murdochs and David Kochs of the world. They keep screaming that "We're broke!" and "We have no other choice!"

Listen, assholes. That is MY MONEY just as much as the hard-earned money I paid into these tinshit 401(k)s was MY MONEY. You take it from me to play with AT YOUR PERIL. (I am talking about at the voting booth, lest you think I'm threatening someone.)

The system was set up to work properly, and if the politicians hadn't played games with it, it would be just fine. So instead of scrapping the system or squeezing retirees into working longer and getting less, they should CORRECT THE PROBLEMS they caused by using the Social Security fund as a cookie jar for their friends. They need to do what they should have done with the pensions: FIX IT and LEAVE IT ALONE. Play by the rules. Go gamble with your own money.

The only consolation I have is that not too many people these days are likely to fall for the pitch that they'll be better off putting their Social Security into the markets. The big boys pretty much killed that illusion. But I fear that they're going to operate on fear instead of greed.

"Solidarity Forever" - Read it and think about it.

I looked up the Wikipedia article about the song. "Solidarity Forever" which was written by Ralph Chaplin in 1915 and sung to the tune of "Battle Hymn of the Republic." I expected that it would be a dated, embarrassing bit of historical anachronism with little application to our modern situation. Well, guess what. It's pretty damn timely. Especially the line, "They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn / But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn."

Kind of makes you think about the rich getting richer and everyone else getting poorer... about derivatives, subprime mortgages, bailouts, and broken promises to help distressed homeowners in the midst of a staggering unemployment rate caused by Wall Street greed and maintained by browbeating our lawmakers to avoid reform.

Reform is Big Government. We can't have that. That's Communism, you know. It "kills jobs" (as if making thousands of federal and state employees lose their jobs is all right).

Meanwhile the consumer is blamed for the sluggish economy. We need to get our "confidence" back. Well, recall that "confidence" is the basis of the word "con."

Maybe we ought to add a few more verses to cover our current situation. I'll suggest a line: "They tell us it's our job to spend to keep us all afloat, while they take the wealth to buy themselves another fancy boat."

Bradley Manning...

Much digital ink is being spent on the topic of Bradley Manning, but let me just put in my two cents.

1. Bradley Manning is a political prisoner, that much is pretty clear to me. Of course, that's just, like, my opinion, man.
2. From what we've been told, he did not give any help to the "enemy," except to the extent that the enemy is us. Let's assume he did give classified military information to Wikileaks. The stated mission of Wikileaks is to expose the truth, not to give anyone a military advantage. (in fact, quite the opposite. They believe that information needs to be shared in order to prevent abuses). It may be that someone in the military was put at increased risk by some of the information that Manning transferred. Then again, that may be purely guesswork. The most striking thing we did learn was that the US military was revealed to be killing civilans and laughing about it.
3. Any assumption that Manning's actions gave someone (some "enemy", which we haven't yet defined in a way that satisfactorily justifies all the loss of life and expense of two wars) a military advantage over us therefore contains the further assumption that the US military should be able to kill civilians and keep it hidden. What that says to me is that he mainly embarrassed the brass and let the American people know that we're not always noble, ethical, humane, or right. As if Abu Ghraib didn't tell us that already.
4. His treatment in detention had better conform to the Geneva Conventions, or else we're sending a pretty bad message to the rest of the world.
5. His reported treatment in detention sounds like torture to me. At least psychologically. If he was suicidal, this kind of treatment certainly doesn't appear to serve the purpose of making him less so.
6. Obama's acquiescence on this is instructive, in that it indicates the extent to which the military still wields a big stick in this government.
7. All of this is extremely unsettling when it comes to our country and its conduct. And it should make us extremely ashamed. Especially when a State Department official has the courage to call it what it is, and then has to be fired for it. Although I suppose we should be glad he wasn't "disappeared" instead.

All of this is just my armchair opinionating. But I would like to think I'm not stupid, and I've seen enough in my years on this planet to think I'm not likely to be too far off the mark.

A comment I placed on a Mother Jones article

I was reading a great piece by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones online, about the long and dreary rise of the plutocracy (and the decline of the labor movement) in America. It draws from another piece ("It's the Inequality, Stupid") about the growing and almost ludicrous disparity between the ever-smaller few people controlling the ever-larger share of wealth in America.

So I was prompted to write the following comment, which I feel bears repeating on its own:
Old doc 15 minutes ago


The funny thing is how the conservatives use a false fear of "government" to influence people to allow them to have their way with us. But hey... Government is us. Didn't they teach us that in grammar school?

People in this country have the numbers. The AARP showed how a group with a huge footprint can exert huge influence, whether you always agree with their positions or not. We need something similar for working Americans. The AFL-CIO affilaited group (workingamerica.org) that's set out to do that doesn't seem to have gained any steam, possibly because it's so tarnished by its connection with organized labor. But we need to give people hope that the system is NOT rigged for evermore against them.

Sure. The hippie movement didn't play well with organized labor, and that's too bad in hindsight, but now those people are grown up and the old union folks are retired. Let's pool our wisdom, figure out our goals, and start to build some unshakeable alliances that can stand up to lies and pessimism. We're smart people, and our kids and grandkids expect and deserve better from us than sitting passively while the wealth stagnates like bad blood, the power is left to the people with personality disorders, and we watch "Survivor."

We need to reform the way we elect our politicians at all levels, and to stop accepting the excuse that we can't change anything, because it's politics as usual and they're all the same. We had a false populism with the Tea Party; how about a real populism? A decent fair shake for working people would be a very attainable goal. We must get people to feel a sense of self-efficacy again, and we can do that, if we can start to let the wealthy know that we will hold them to their side of the social contract of a civilized society. And we need to mean it, and we need to make it clear that won't be intimidated, lied to, pacified with big screen TV's and Angry Birds, or turned against each other. Esepcially not turned against each other.

Head Start revealed as hotbed of socialist indoctrination: Conservative activist

March 11, 2011 (New York): In the midst of a debate on continued federal funding of the Head Start program, conservative activist muckraker James O'Keefe has released an undercover video shot at a Head Start program in New York, in which teachers are heard allegedly teaching children "radical leftist thinking" and, in the words of former Rep. Newt Gingrich, "Running a socialist boot camp for preschoolers."

Gingrich added, "I can't see how the American people would sit still if they knew that their tax dollars were going to train kids in Un-American ways of thinking and acting. This is just another example of the nanny state run amok."

Added Speaker John Boehner, "You know what this is about... This is how they plan to get their voter base for 2028 - by starting when the kids are too young to know when they're being radicalized against the American Way."

In the video, a preschool teacher can be heard talking about how Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted all people treated as equals, leading the children in singing "This Land is Your Land," and talking about "Community helpers" like the mailman and the policeman.

"Have you read those verses to that song?!" demanded Gingrich. "They sang ALL the verses! It's all about disparaging free enterprise and private property, and leading kids to believe in redistribution of wealth." Added Boehner, "The mailman and the policeman - you can see where THAT's going, can't you? They're grooming their future public union base, and taking money from the rest of us to do it, when this country is BROKE!"

In response, President Obama has accepted the resignation of the national director of the Head Start program. A vote on defunding the program completely is expected in the House this week.

Death threats? Do you believe that? Never mind, just give 'em The Hook.

Spotted a story after Walker and his boys pulled their little frat prank on Wisconsin today; it says that now the Republicans are reporting getting "death threats."

Oh, and did that light up the rantosphere!! "Union thugocracy," "Obamites issue death threats," blah blah blah. Google "Death Threats Wisconsin" today, and you'll get at least 500 hits of right-wing news stories, punditry, posts and blogs by gleefully crowing righties and assorted fonkies sitting at home with nothing better to do than watch Fox News, drink beer, and post hate speech saying essentially, "See? We were right about these union thugs! They want to destroy our Gawd-given standard of living and our flat screen TV-lovin' lives. They're probably Muslim terrorists, too. And that Hussein Obama is behind it all."

First of all, these Republicans in Wisconsin lie, as they demonstrated when they claimed they were in "discussions" with Democrats while they plotted their closed-door trickery. So I wouldn't be surprised if they're either making this up, or (more likely knowing their high school bully tactics) found some poor mentally ill person and had one of their James O'Keefe types play-act righteous indignation to egg him (or her) on until they got something that sounded like a "death threat." Oh, must be those "Union thugs" again. You know. foreign agitators... like the ones that caused all the trouble in Libya and Egypt. According to the dictators, anyway.

But whatever the credibility of these reports (or lack of it), this story raises the larger question of how to frame the conversation about recalling those Republican state legislators who voted for this.

My advice: Be very careful to talk peacefully. No talk of "targeting" those officials or their districts. No bulls-eyes. No wartime metaphors or battle language.

Instead, let's treat this as the vaudeville show it is.

Give 'em "The Hook."

Another one comes crashing down...

NPR starts to implode. Well, it’s becoming another predictable sequence of events. All you need to do is read the headlines. First, Republican politicians demand that NPR lose its federal funding, on the basis that the government has no business subsidizing (left-wing socialist liberal) broadcasting (when Rupert Murdoch is doing such a great job of providing fair and balanced journalism to the citizens of this fine country).

Next, NPR pleads not to have the finding cut, arguing that if they were gone, Americans would not be able to freely support factual, intelligent journalism; and arguing that citizens need some help (a nanny state) to help protect their ability to really have a choice (yeah, like Michelle Obama wants to tell you what to eat).

Next, you know who shows up... That guy James O’Keefe, the anti-Michael Moore, the guy with the timeworn tactics of Allan Funt and the ethics of Bernie Madoff. He proceeds to set up another one of those absurdly improbable stings, in which some flunky of the target organization is cajoled (or "creatively" edited, as we found out later)into making embarrassing secretly recorded statements that allow the right-wing pundits to absolutely vilify the entire organization, thereby initiating the destruct sequence. They can fire the people involved, the CEO can resign, but you and I know when the writing is on the wall.

These guys do have talent, you have to admit. They seem to know exactly whom to pick on and when, to insure that the air is completely let out of an organization. They aren’t happy just pulling the funding plug. They are scorched earth warriors. They will disappear that organization.

And so another worthy but troubled public service organization bites the dust. Well, pledge drives can be so annoying anyway, right? At least Glenn Beck and “Celebrity Apprentice” should keep our thirst for enlightenment and diversion satisfied.

Next target, by my prediction: The AFL-CIO. Yeah! Americans don’t need some union thugs interfering with their Gawd-given right to spend their lives driving 60 miles each way on $5.00 gas, getting those great below-minimum-wage piecework jobs in the Wal-Mart warehouses in the far-flung suburbs.

These guys wouldn’t go after something like AFSCME; nah, that’s too small a target; and anyway Scott Walker is doing pretty well demonizing them without the Big Sting. These guys have bigger goals, like destroying the entire union presence in this country.

After that, privatizing Social Security will be a snap.

The Brawny Man and his friends

Let's take a break from killing the environment, and

Let's Go Bust Some Unions!!