Is this the future for American workers?

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show looks at the working conditions at Foxconn, the Chinese mega-factory which manufactures so many of the electronic products that we use. The working conditions are so appalling that the company has to take suicide-prevention measures, all so that we can save about 25% on the prices of these gadgets.

There is no doubt that the US oligarchy would love to see American workers in the same situation, as can be seen by their union-busting efforts. Some of us may ridicule Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that we should replace each union janitorial job with 30 child laborers, but bear in mind that this is how the oligarchy thinks, that their goal is to maximize profits and their ideal of ‘efficiency’ is to drive wages down as low as they can go.

The members of the oligarchy live in a different world

In an earlier post, I discussed all the ways that wealthy people can reduce the rate at which they pay taxes, using measures that are not available to ordinary people, and which results of them paying at much lower rates than middle class people do.

Mitt Romney had for a long time refused to release his tax returns and suspicions were that this was because he was in fact paying at a lower rate than most people because of those above methods. Under pressure he has (sort of) agreed to release his returns around (maybe) April, and conceded that he does pay only about 15%, the same rate as the marginal rate on people whose income is in the range $8,375 to $34,000, which is even below the media income.

But the additional tidbit that was tucked away in his statement about his income was when he said, “And then I get speakers’ fees from time to time, but not very much.” It turns out that his total income from speaking fees for 2010 was $374,327.62, for an average of $41,592 per speech.

When your fees per speech is close to the median household income, and your total income from speeches alone put you in the top 2% of income earners, and you consider it ‘not very much’, then you really are living in a different world.

The blurring of the line between the police and military

The purpose of the military of any nation is purportedly to defend the nation from external attacks. But an important other function is to protect the oligarchy from its own people and time after time this has been the experience of many countries, with the military being used to crush its own people’s legitimate aspirations for freedom and democracy.

Sometime ago, I wrote about the dangerous trend of the paramilitarization of the police in the US so that they have begun to look more like the military and use military tactics against civilians. Via BoingBoing, I tried my hand at this quiz created by Radley Balko showing 21 photographs and asking the viewer to identify whether the people shown were police or the military. I got just 11 correct, which was what one would expect by random chance, which is not surprising since I was forced to guess on almost all of them, they look so alike.

In the US, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was enacted to prevent the government from using the military for civilian police work. The barriers in that act have been steadily eroded over the last three decades and the recently enacted National Defense Authorization Act that was rushed through Congress with no hearings and little debate and signed by president Obama on New Year’s eve pretty much gutted it.

Why do this now? I have my suspicions that the oligarchy has a real fear of mass unrest if the economic conditions for most Americans worsen and sees the Tea Party and Occupy movements as precursors to a major challenge to its rule. They want to have all the tools at their disposal if there is a danger of things spinning out of control.

How religion undermines reasoning abilities

Some time ago, P. Z. Myers made an important point. Atheists tend to find the beliefs of religions so incredible that we cannot believe that the people we know well personally, who seem to be perfectly rational in other areas of their lives, take those beliefs at face value. So we tend to delude ourselves that they consciously pay only lip service to the tenets of their religions and belong to religious institutions purely for the social benefits they get from belonging to the group. Hence we are surprised when we discover that we could not be more wrong. He says,

Many of us find it really hard to believe that Christians actually believe that nonsense about Jesus rising from the dead and insisting that faith is required to pass through the gates of a magical place in the sky after we’re dead; we struggle to find a rational reason why friends and family are clinging to these bizarre ideas, and we say to ourselves, “oh, all of her friends are at church” or “he uses church to make business contacts” or “it’s a comforting tradition from their childhood”, but no, it’s deeper than that: we have to take them at their word, and recognize that most people who go to church actually do so because they genuinely believe in all that stuff laid out in the Nicene Creed.

It makes the phenomenon of religion even scarier, doesn’t it?

Yes, it does, because [Read more…]

Religious intimidation

This is quite extraordinary. A talk at a UK University on “Sharia Law and Human Rights” was cancelled because of threats by some people of violence if anyone said anything that they considered offensive to Islam or prophet Mohammed.

This comes on the heels of a two other cases of intimidation in the UK, this time over the display of Jesus and Mo cartoons. Blag Hag has been covering those stories.

People who try to force others to be silent are people who know that their beliefs cannot stand up to scrutiny. It is as simple as that. And who better than Jesus and Mo to make that case?

Ratio of average CEO v. worker pay by country

I got this from The Progressive Review but since the site did not cite a source, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the data used to generate it.

Update: See the comment by savannahbarnett below that suggests that the data is unreliable and out of date, although the link to better supported data shows that the ratio in the US is still very high, in the 185 to 325 range.

Rational or irrational fear?

Some time ago I saw a comedy sketch by Richard Pryor in which he held a press conference to announce to the police and residents of Beverly Hills that early the next morning he would be going jogging along the streets. Like much of Pryor’s humor, it had a sharp edge, highlighting the fact that a black man running in a predominantly white neighborhood tends to alarm people.

Is such a reaction racist? The Crommunist Manifesto reflects on this question using his own personal experiences as a black man who also has to take precautions so that people are not alarmed by his presence. Most people do not realize that black men routinely make an extra effort to make those around them feel comfortable in their presence. You can imagine how unpleasant it must be for people to feel that they have to constantly prove to others that their presence is benign.

It reminded me of an experience that I had written about a couple of years ago about the role of race and class in society, and how people like me benefit from it. Here is a pertinent excerpt from that post.

I recall once a conference presentation in a hotel meeting room that I made together with my African-American female colleague. After our session, we cleared up and took our stuff out to make room for the next presenters. I picked up what I thought was my colleague’s expensive-looking coat (she is always well dressed) but it was only later after relaxing in the lobby and getting ready to go home that she said that the coat did not belong to her and I realized that it must belong to the people who had been setting up after us. Her boyfriend was also present and he started to take the coat back to the room to return it, but then stopped and asked if I could do it because he said that it would be awkward for him to do so as people ‘might not understand’. The problem was as clear as it was unspoken. It did not matter that he is a very distinguished-looking and impeccably dressed man who could easily be mistaken for an ambassador or college president, while I was my usual nondescript self. The basic fact was that he is black and I am not, and that made all the difference in whether we would be presumed guilty or innocent of theft.

Crommunist’s post is very thoughtful and well worth reading.

War propaganda against Iran

In response to my earlier post condemning the murder of the Iranian scientist as an act of terrorism, one commenter posed a serious objection that calls for a detailed response that I thought merited a new post in its own right.

To equate the Iranian weapons scientists assassinations with the equivalent against the US or Israel is silly. Neither the US nor Israel has threatened to destroy Iran simply because it exists. In addition, most of the world feels that Iran getting a nuclear weapon is A Really Bad Thing.

In short: If you were Israel (or the US, for that matter), what’s the alternative, assuming sanctions won’t work? This Administration has narrowed its demands on Iran to a much greater degree than the previous, drawing the line at a nuclear weapon (rather than previously with enrichment et al). Which is one of the reasons most of the rest is going along with the sanctions to one degree or another.

I assume that you would not have been opposed to assassinations against WWII Germany or Japan (and we conducted them, to be sure; the most noteworthy being Yamamoto). Yet when we’re talking nukes, you can’t wait until the war has started. So, again…..what’s your alternative?

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