Yes, Twinkies Lovers, that means you are likely to feel the disaster first and foremost, and there’s no telling how long it will last. It may last forever.
But this time? This time it’s going to be worse. Much worse.
When “normal” returns, it may not be the same “normal” we know and love. Like Bill O’Reilly lamenting the loss of the normal United States populated by Ward, June, Wally and the Beave, the new normal may be damn near unrecognizable.
Fine, so I had to insert a tiny smidgeon of political commentary. Nevertheless, dammit, Hostess is depriving Traditional America of Twinkies on a timetable that resembles greased lightning.
There is no time to waste.
Stop reading this blog immediately and get thee to thy local Twinkies Distribution Point post haste. It is expected that on Monday – just three days hence – the bankruptcy court will let Hostess shut down operations.
I’m just going to use this graphic for them from now on. They’ve earned it.
If I could adorn it with sparkly glitter and blinky neon lights without risking an epileptic seizure or a migraine, I’d probably do it.
Yesterday, FFRF sued the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. No shit. And yes, they sued because the IRS won’t friggin’ enforce the rule about churches electioneering. Basically, this is a claim of a sort of nonfeasance or dereliction of duty, something that isn’t very common. By not doing his job – by not enforcing the law – FFRF says that the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service has violated the Equal Protection Clauses of the Constitution.
FFRF wants a declaratory judgment against the Commissioner – in other words, a judgment that says that the Commissioner has done wrong. It has asked for an injunction against the Commissioner’s refusal to enforce the law, which is a convoluted way of saying that it wants the court to issue an order requiring the Commissioner to enforce the law. (I know – why couldn’t they just say that?) FFRF also wants the court to order the Commissioner of the IRS to designate someone as a high-level official who can take the complaints from IRS Form 13909 and investigate them.
The lawsuit asserts that under the administration of Commissioner Shulman, the Internal Revenue Service, under the direction of the IRS “has followed and continues to follow a policy of non-enforcement of the electioneering restrictions of §501(c)(3) against churches and other religious organizations.” You tell ’em, FFRF!
And the complaint continues: “As a result, in recent years, churches and religious organizations have been blatantly and deliberately flaunting the electioneering restrictions of §501(c)(3), including during the presidential election year of 2012.” Ya think? Just to be certain that the court is aware of the kinds of things that are going on, FFRF lists a few of them:
Illinois Bishop Daniel Jenky required that a partisan letter be read by every celebrating priest in the diocese to congregants the weekend before the recent Presidential election;
On October 7, 2012, more than 1500 clergy, in a deliberate and coordinated display of noncompliance with the electioneering restrictions of §501(c)(3), including prominent megachurches, flagrantly violated the law against churches electioneering;
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, one of the most prominent and respected religious ministries in the country, ran blatantly partisan full-page ads in October of 2012 in the Wisconsin State Journal;
Just prior to the November 6, 2012 election, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association also ran blatantly partisan ads in the the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and more than a dozen national and battle ground state newspapers
The Association also published expressly partisanship on its website just prior to the election;
Open and notorious violations of the electioneering restrictions of §501(c)(3) by churches and other religious organizations have been occurring since at least 2008, with churches recording their own partisan activities and sending the evidence to the IRS.
Did you catch that last bit? In case you hadn’t heard, the churches are violating the law and taunting the IRS by sending proof of their blatant disregard for the law to the IRS themselves! And the IRS sits there with its thumb up its ass and does nothing but admire the wallpaper.
Understandably, FFRF, which itself is a 501(c)(3) organization, is somewhat miffed by this, and in the lawsuit it said so. Why does FFRF have to obey the law but these religious organizations do not? This is religious discrimination. Selective non-enforcement of the law based on religious criteria violates the Establishment Clause and the Equal Protection Clause, and, to add insult to injury,
The preferential tax-exemption that churches and other religious organizations obtain, despite noncompliance with electioneering restrictions, amounts to more than $100,000,000,000 annually in tax-free contributions made to churches and religious organizations in the United States.
I don’t know how or where FFRF came up with that number, but if it’s true, that’s about thirty-five billion – with a B – dollars in lost tax revenue. Money that we owe China. Money that would sure help with deficit reduction.
FFRF wants a level playing field and an end to the preferential treatment. It demands that the law is enforced. By not enforcing the law with respect to religious institutions, the government is effectively giving religion a $35,000,000,000 tax subsidy. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is establishment of religion.
A private attorney, Richard Bolton, is representing FFRF on this one. Bolton is a respected civil rights lawyer in Madison, Wisconsin, where FFRF is located. I would imagine he’s going to be getting a lot of hate mail in the near future, so let’s give him some love, shall we? Thanksgiving is coming next week, and he’s someone we might just want to thank.
You can read FFRF’s own press release and the complaint against the IRS on the FFRF website. If you aren’t a member of FFRF already, it’s time to join. Even if you don’t join, please donate. FFRF isn’t electioneering, so contributions to it will remain tax-deductible. The Freedom From Religion Foundation works tirelessly to protect our rights. They deserve some love, too.
Last week I went to the Market Street Cinema to see the free screening of West of Memphis, the newest offering among the documentaries about the West Memphis Three. (It’s offered again later this month for anyone interested, and will be back again later in the fall.)
In the event that anyone reading this has lived under a rock for the last couple of decades and isn’t aware of the case, the West Memphis Three are Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley. They were teenagers when they were convicted of the capital murder of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas.
In 1993 and 1994, there was a media circus surrounding the arrests and the trials. The West Memphis police, ignorant and superstitious, claimed that Echols, who was a weird kid who dressed funny, liked magic, and listened to heavy metal music, was the leader of a Satanic cult that ritualistically killed the little boys. After a nine hour interrogation, the West Memphis Police coached a confession out of Misskelley, a mentally handicapped high school dropout. All three were convicted. Echols was sentenced to death; Misskelley and Baldwin were sentenced to life without parole.
After nearly two decades of legal wrangling, the WM3 were freed from prison about a year ago, when, rather than go through a new trial, they entered pleas pursuant to North Carolina v. Alford,pleading guilty but simultaneously declaring their innocence. It was a long road getting there – 18 years long. That’s half again as long as the Millennium Falcon’s Kessel Run. They took the whole 18 parsecs to get there.
In the film, Prosecutor Scott Ellington repeated his assertion that, despite not having reviewed the evidence in the case, he believes the West Memphis Three are guilty. He was not the original prosecutor. That dubious honor went to John Fogelman and Brent Davis, a pair to whom I have no problem assigning contempt.
Likewise, the judge was not the one who had presided over the case for 18 years. Judge David Burnett repeatedly ruled against the defense at the pretrial, trial, and post-trial proceedings. Had he still been on the bench when this offer was extended, we cannot be assured of the same outcome.
A week before the murders happened, I hung out my shingle and opened my solo law practice. Even though I had been out of law school for five years, I felt like a neophyte when it came to actually practicing law. Oh, there are stories, some of which I’ve told and some of which I will never tell, about how I groped my way to a successful practice. But in 1993 I was uncertain and confused about the practice of law. And like most of the rest of the state, I was riveted by the unfolding case. By the time of the trials eight months later, I was appalled at the travesty of justice I saw. I felt completely impotent. I had no idea that I might have helped, and boy, I wanted to help. I had gotten into the business of law to help the underdogs of the world, and the West Memphis Three defendants were underdogs from the day they were conceived.
When the first appeals were being pursued, Arkansas’s Death Penalty Resource Center, a state agency that provided litigation support and appellate representation in death penalty cases, was defunded and disbanded. One of its attorneys, Al Schay, sublet office space from me. The day he trundled in the boxes that held the transcripts of the Echols-Baldwin trial, he said I could read them. I had read countless transcripts as a law clerk for an appellate judge, and was undaunted by the thousands of pages of testimony and exhibits. I sat on the floor of Al’s office after hours and I read. And read. And became enraged at the prosecutors and the judge who presided over the cases. The fact that those three young men were convicted of capital murder on such flimsy evidence was appalling. What’s worse, I don’t remember a single motion that went in the defense’s favor – except one. That one favorable ruling was ultimately undermined by juror misconduct. The ruling should have prevented Jessie Miskelley’s coached confession from coming into evidence against his co-defendants. However, the jury foreman in the Baldwin-Echols trial made a special effort to ensure that the jurors were aware of it.
Courtroom Rotunda at the Arkansas Justice Building (source)
The day the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the convictions, I realized that the court was nothing more than a calculating political beast. The majority reached its conclusion because that was the conclusion they felt they politically had to make. Three devil-worshipping teenagers had ritually murdered three little cub scouts. It was sensationalism that sold papers. It was sensationalism that provided job security even in the august halls of the Supreme Court, where I had been so proud to work not long before. It sickened me.
Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols should never have been convicted. They did not receive a fair trial. Did Jessie Miskelley? I don’t know. I’ve never read the transcript of his trial. My guess is that with the same people in positions of power, and the same facts, he did not. I know that Dan Stidham, Misskelley’s lawyer, believes he did not.
I met Dan Stidham at a seminar recently. For fifteen years, Dan Stidham was an active hero in the West Memphis Three case. He was appointed to serve as Jessie Misskelley’s attorney at trial, and was the only attorney who stuck with his client after the trials, even to the point of preparing Jason Baldwin’s appellate paperwork when Jason had no lawyer. Stidham is now a circuit judge, but he was Jessie Misskelley’s lawyer throughout the trial and appellate process until 2008, when he assumed the bench. I told him that I wished I had reached out back in those days. I didn’t because I thought I had nothing to contribute. I realize now that I could have offered my time. I told him that when the trials were ongoing, I had wanted to do something – anything – because I saw what a miscarriage of justice was happening. He gave me a look that said, “Why didn’t you?” and I felt more impotent than ever. I regret not doing something back then, even though I didn’t think I was competent to do anything.
(source)
In the years between their convictions and their release, I was peripherally aware of the movement to free the West Memphis Three. I had seen the billboard in West Memphis with its tipline phone number. I read each court’s decision denying any relief at all to the convicted men. I never forgot them, but I believed their case was hopeless. A results-oriented judicial process was at work, one I knew intimately from the inside. It didn’t matter how the judges reached their decision, only that they reached the one most politically appropriate. They had constituents to answer to each election cycle. A case as notorious as the West Memphis Three had to be controlled with an iron fist.
I never saw Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills or Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, the HBO documentaries about the West Memphis Three. I never read Devil’s Knot, investigative reporter Mara Leveritt’s book about the case. I had read news articles about the case, though, and read each judicial opinion at every level, both state and federal, as the fruitless appellate process lumbered on over the years.
Then, in the spring of 2011 I heard from Ken Swindle, an attorney in the northwest part of the state, whose contributions to a listserv for trial lawyers I had admired for several years. Would I sign a petition asking for a new trial for the West Memphis Three? I didn’t have to think about it. Hell, yes, I would! The West Memphis Three case exemplifies for me what is wrong with the criminal justice system on so many levels: cronyism among law enforcement officials and the State Crime Lab, results-oriented judicial decision-making, religious bigotry, a lack of critical thinking skills among the population at large (which make up our juries), prejudice, bad science, superstitious ignorance, the lack of resources available to all but the wealthiest criminal defendants, and the complete failure of standards of reasonable doubt and the assumption of innocence.
There’s no way I could ever practice criminal law. I would stroke out in very short order from the stress caused by the rampant injustice. The assembly-line attitudes I have encountered in family court and in juvenile court are bad enough without compounding it with the inequities of the adult criminal justice system.
But finally, the Arkansas Supreme Court did the right thing. Finally, it agreed that DNA evidence had to be considered in light of all the rest of the evidence – including evidence that at least four trial witnesses had recanted in the intervening years, and possibly including evidence that the Echols-Baldwin jury was tainted by the published confession they were never supposed to consider – and which the jury foreman made sure they did. And when the Arkansas Supreme Court sent the case back to the trial court this time, there was a new judge in town.
Judge David Laser acknowledged in open court that the release of the West Memphis Three pursuant to the Alford pleas wasn’t justice for anyone – not for the defendants, and not for the victims – because innocent men remained convicted, and were robbed by the State of nearly two decades of their lives. The terms of the plea agreement allowed three victims of a miscarriage of justice to finally go free, albeit under the burden and stigma of probation. Judge Laser said,
I don’t think it will make the pain go away to the victim families. I don’t think it will make the pain go away to the defendant families. I don’t think it will take away a minute of the eighteen years that these three young men served in the Arkansas Department of Corrections.
WM3 at the Press Conference After Their Release Hearing (source)
Since their release, I have seen the first two Paradise Lost documentaries as well as the third one, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which was being made just as the WM3 were freed. I have read Devil’s Knot. The thing is, it didn’t take any of these efforts to convince me that justice was not served. While they told me more than I knew before, I knew when I read the transcripts and looked at the evidence on the first appeal that the West Memphis Three were innocent. Not just “not guilty,” which can mean that they probably did it but the state didn’t prove the case, but innocent.
And that leads us to the real question: who killed Chris Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore?
West of Memphis left me with more questions than ever before. In December 2011, three new witnesses came forward with hearsay evidence that Terry Hobbs, Stevie Branch’s stepfather, has admitted guilt to members of his family. It’s my understanding that, despite his strong assertion that he would look into anything the defense brought him, Ellington has not done a single thing in the last nine months to look into those allegations. Hearsay is plenty good enough for investigators to launch investigations in much less serious crimes. If it is true that the “Hobbs Family Secret” is that Terry killed those boys, Arkansas is denying justice not only to the WM3, but to the victims and their families.
That having been said, West of Memphis did not show conclusive evidence of Terry Hobbs’s guilt. I don’t think it intended to. It raised serious, valid questions that need investigation, though. Someone killed those kids, and that someone has never done a single day’s worth of prison time for their murders.
Also disconcerting to me were David Jacoby’s on-camera statements and his willingness to allow recordings of his telephone conversations with Terry Hobbs about the night the boys disappeared. Jacoby is a friend of Terry Hobbs, and was with Hobbs for part of the evening and night when the families and police searched for the missing children. He stopped short of saying outright that he wasn’t with Hobbs during the time Hobbs claims. Since he is Hobbs’ alibi, I wish Jacoby had been asked that tough question directly, and I wish he had given a straight answer. The implied answer is there, but the lawyer in me wants it airtight.
I don’t know if Terry Hobbs did it. I don’t know if there was someone else in those woods who killed the children. But “beyond a reasonable doubt” and “innocent until proven guilty” have to mean something. They just HAVE to. And despite two juries, and despite the affirmed decisions of the appellate courts, the West Memphis Three were not proven guilty.
As a postscript, my hat goes off to Ken Swindle, who didn’t stop working on the case when the West Memphis Three walked out of that courtroom last August. Ken has filed requests for disclosure of evidence under the Freedom of Information Act on behalf of two of the victims’ parents. The West Memphis Police Department maintains that the case is closed, so the information is fair game under FOIA. The problem is, they won’t deliver. The plaintiff parents, Pam Hobbs, ex-wife of Terry Hobbs and mother of Stevie Branch, and Mark Byers, adoptive father of Chris Byers, are both very outspoken supporters of the West Memphis Three. Today, Ken requested a hearing on the FOIA request, which has been resisted by both the West Memphis PD and Scott Ellington, the current prosecuting attorney.
One of the pleasures of living in a world where anti-intellectualism rules a major political party is that it’s fairly easy to spot the political leanings of the shockingly ignorant.
These are the people who consistently vote against their best interest, and are completely immune to the cognitive dissonance that rational people encounter when they attempt to hold diametrically opposed opinions in the same brain. They want to repeal Obamacare because socialized medicine is bad, while protecting Medicare because socialized medicine is good. They want the incredibly rich to get ever larger tax breaks, even though the very rich pay proportionately less than they – the working and middle class – do. They actually believe the obvious bullshit of the ultra-rich Romneys and Koch brothers of the world, who promise they would be creating oodles of jobs (Really!) if not for the unduly burdensome 13% or less that they now pay in taxes. They are the same people who are completely in favor of the death penalty, but anti-abortion no matter what the reason.
They support defunding government grants for poor students since only snobs want their kids to be educated. The budget proposal put forth by Paul Ryan, the new star of Mitt Romney’s presidential ticket, would not only reduce the size of Pell grants and even eliminate access to them for tens of thousands of students but would have cut the Head Start program to ribbons, too. Education? Our kids don’t need no stinkin’ education! We can compete with the educated workforce of countries like Sweden, Japan, and Germany without all that schooling. It doesn’t take education to know stuff.
Just ask U.S. Senate candidate, and current U.S. Congressman, Todd Akin (R-Mo). He knows stuff. Akin is the guy who has been all over the news in the last couple of days because of his cocksure knowledge that “legitimate rape” doesn’t result in pregnancy. He knows this because “doctors” told him. In his interview with Charles Jaco on a St. Louis television broadcast, Akin said, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole [conception] thing down.” (If you want the full context, watch the full interview. The abortion comments are in the second video, and start at 1:54.)
There are about 32,000 women in America who are now relieved to know that the rape by which they were impregnated last year wasn’t “legitimate” rape. They can now conclude that despite the non-consensual nature of that sexual congress, they actually enjoyed it. And that’s good news for this year’s approximately 32,000 impregnated victims of non-consensual sex, too. Thank you, Congressman Akin, for your words of comfort. All those women can stop going to therapy now that they realize that they weren’t really traumatized at all. That’ll save a bundle on their health care costs, seeing as how your party would prefer not to insure these women’s health, either.
To be fair, Akin did say that he misspoke. He meant to say “forcible” rape, not “legitimate” rape. Because non-consensual sex with a drunk college student isn’t really rape, whether or not she’s cognizant of what’s happening. And it’s totally not rape if the parties are married, even if they happen to be going through a divorce. It’s not rape if one partner is under the age of consent, because children who have sex know what they are getting into and are making intelligent, informed decisions about it. Especially children who have had abstinence-only sex education.
Life starts at conception, according to Akin. (It’s right there on his website, so it must be true.) Or maybe it starts two weeks before conception, like Arizona recently legislated, which means that women are in a perpetual state of “pregnancy” because conception could happen two weeks in the future at any time. Akin must be right, because he knows this stuff. He sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and pregnancy is sciencey, right?
Oops. No. I’m wrong. It’s God stuff, not science stuff. Totally my bad. Sorry.
Where better to look than to God for guidance on, well, everything? Now, God doesn’t speak out loud, or even very clearly, but fortunately he wrote his completely unclear directions down for us. Reading the Bible for instruction on life is tantamount to reading the instructions from Ikea, except that once you’re done with the Ikea instructions you have a piece of furniture that either wobbles, or doesn’t. Reading the Bible is tougher, so fortunately we have crowds of really, really smart preachers to tell us exactly what God actually meant when he dictated those mystifying instructions. Now, a disturbing number of those really, really smart preachers, especially the fundamentalist ones, haven’t been to college, much less seminary, but they can read Elizabethan English and understand it just fine because they’re touched by God. Yes, we’re back to the refrain of “We don’t need no education.” Thank you, Pink Floyd.
The Bible is crystal clear about when life begins, if by “crystal” you mean “obsidian.” If you don’t believe me, check out the Open Bible site, which has all the references its author deems relevant gathered carefully in one place. You can even vote for which verses make things clearest for you. Of the 40 or so verses excerpted from various English translations of the Bible (we know God meant the Bible to be in English), I found two that were absolutely on point and helpful. Oddly, they were the same verse, just in slightly different translation: Exodus 21:22-24, which says that if a bunch of men get together and hit a pregnant woman so that she has a miscarriage, then they either get fined as the husband sees fit, or they get punished to the same extent that the woman was injured. Go ahead and click the link on that verse. Read it in multiple English translations. If you know other languages, read the translation in other languages, too. Now you tell me which one is the best translation, given your expertise in ancient Hebrew.
Now, just for funsies, look at the rest of Chapter 21 of Exodus. It’s all relevant and pertinent to life today, isn’t it? So it makes perfect sense to use it as our go-by.
The homepage of Akin’s campaign website opens with a religious statement that puts the cart before the horse:
First, I want to give thanks to God our Creator who has blessed this campaign, heard your prayers, and answered them with victory. Through the months we have seen frequent instances of His blessing and are reminded that with Him all things are possible!
Evidently he credits prayer and divine intervention with his success in the Republican primary rather than the hard work of his supporters. I suppose that makes sense, seeing as how his list of endorsers lean heavily toward leaders of conservative Christian religious institutions. (Surely there’s no impermissible politicking going on in the churches those endorsers represent. Surely. Because that would jeopardize the tax-exempt status of those churches.)
This situation with Rep. Akin demonstrates exactly why I have a huge problem with politicians using an inconsistently translated collection of Bronze Age “wisdom” to guide modern government policy. This situation, among others, is why I advocate, agitate, and get politically active – not to mention write passionate blog posts – when elected officials decide it’s okay to blur the lines between church and state. It’s also why I get cheesed off when people want to base their lives on a book of superstitious tales and ancient customs we no longer observe.
When we allow our leaders to cherry-pick verses of this collection of ancient manuscripts, we set ourselves up to go back to that time. Me, I’d rather live in a world of universal health care than a world of leper colonies and plagues. And if that makes me a socialist, then I am a proud socialist.
Furthermore, when a page of platitudes masquerades as “clearly the Bible says life starts at conception,” then I think it’s way beyond time our elementary schools taught critical thinking and logic to children – because if their parents buy the crap on that page as “proof” of anything, they won’t teach their kids to think at home or anywhere else.
Apparently what makes a human different from other living creatures is that we have a soul. How religious people can tell whether we have a soul, and how they know animals do not, remains an insurmountable mystery. Science cannot say when the soul comes into existence, since there is no evidence that such a thing as a “soul” even exists. But ignoramuses like Todd Akin want to legislate matters pertaining to women’s health based on their Bronze Age “wisdom” without any proof whatsoever. If we permit this to happen, we will get the same draconian laws as places like the Dominican Republic, where pregnant teenagers are denied chemotherapy because the life-saving treatment might harm a 13-week old fetus. Yeah, that happened.
The problem is ignorance, lack of education, and reliance on “facts” gleaned from questionable translations of Bronze Age texts.
The problem is that people with no more background in science that this Akin clown sit on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Presumably he would know something about science if he’s sitting on a major legislative committee devoted to it. Of course, his Bible-based philosophies are contravened by science, so he cannot possibly wrap his head around them. Like that other ignorant politician who attempted to speak about a subject he knew nothing about, Akin apparently believes that women are a series of tubes, tubes that can easily be rerouted just by the nature of forced intercourse, to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
I had an interesting conversation with a pair of one-percenters last week. I specifically asked them whether lowering their taxes would result in them creating jobs. Neither one hesitated to answer.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said one.
“Nope,” said the other.
Why not? I wanted to know. The Republican party has been telling us for years that the way to create jobs is by lowering the taxes on the wealthy. Where’s the fault in the position?
Both of my one-percenters agreed that established companies don’t create new jobs unless they are also expanding, something they do when their business model and business plan indicate the time is right, not when the amount of taxes they pay changes. Tax savings amounts to larger profits remaining with the company, not expansion plans. Every corporation’s main priority is its bottom line. The large business interests and high-income individuals who will benefit from this tax deduction definitely want to improve their bottom line – who wouldn’t? – but they aren’t so altruistic that they are going to hire people they don’t need to do jobs that don’t need doing.
Payroll is the single largest expense of any company. It seems that people who own businesses want to get more done with fewer employees, not with more, because getting more done with a smaller payroll increases profits. That’s why outsourcing is so popular among the most profitable companies.
So who are the real job creators?
According to 2007 and 2008 economic census figures, “nonemployer” firms account for a vast number of businesses in the country – more than 78%. The Census Bureau defines nonemployer businesses as those that have no paid employees and are subject to federal income tax. Nonemployers include self-employed individuals operating unincorporated businesses, which may or may not be the owner’s principal source of income.
Of the remaining 22% of businesses, 89% are companies employing less than 20 people. That means more than 97% of the businesses in this country are small businesses, not large corporations.
Looking even more closely at the numbers, we see that businesses with more than 500 employees employ about half of all Americans who work for someone else. Even though they account for only 0.0036% of all firms, truly giant megacompanies with more than 10,000 employees put 27% of Americans to work.
More than 17% of people in America work for companies that employ between 20 and 100 employees. These are medium-sized companies, and constitute about 9% of the businesses out there. The next jump in statistical size is the large companies, which employ between 100 and 500 workers. These large companies put 14.5% of Americans to work.
So, although 97% of the companies in the US are small businesses, 82% of employed Americans work for large, very large, and mega-sized companies. Eighteen percent work for small businesses. Those figures add up to about 121 million people who earn income in the United States, not counting the 21 million whose self-employment provides them with some or all of their income.
If the big companies get the tax breaks, which apparently have no impact on whether or not they create jobs, who benefits? The big companies, of course.
If you aren’t familiar with TED Talks yet, I am about to change that.
TED started in 1984, the year I graduated from college, as a conference to bring together people from the fields of Technology, Entertainment, and Design. It is a nonprofit that holds annual conferences in both Long Beach and in Palm Springs each spring, and has grown to hold the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer. The TED Talks are published on the TED Talks video site, which has the capability of translating the talks into up to 27 different languages at this point. More are planned. TED does much more each year to facilitate advancement of the arts and sciences.
The video site on the web offers hundreds of 18 minute talks – not lectures – on subjects as diverse as Cassini’s discovery of the surface tectonics on Saturn’s moon Titan to Sam Harris’s explanation of how morality is hardwired into humans and other animals. The speakers are challenged to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
The spelunker who plans to lead the expedition to mine moon ice is absolutely riveting. Watch him. How can cave exploration and space exploration be related? How can a spelunker think that he can go into space and mine water on the moon as a propellant for space vehicles to then go to Europa? Is this science fiction? Not the way he tells it. Watch the video. If it doesn’t make your jaw drop, you aren’t paying attention.
TED is on the edge of what is happening in the world. In July 2010. Chris Anderson of TED interviewed Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks had just released the documents related to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and there were rumors that it had still more documents that would set the US government on its ear.
Consider what Julian Assange says in this interview. He explains how the site operates, what it has accomplished, and what drives him. The interview includes graphic footage of a recent US airstrike in Baghdad in which a number of civilians and two Reuters reporters were killed.
Did you note that Assange specifically denies having the embassy cables? In the same breath he said assertively that if WikiLeaks had them, it has a duty to release them so that the world knows.
Assange asserted that “it’s a worry that the rest of the world’s media is doing such a bad job that a little group of activists is able to release more of that type of information than the rest of the world press combined”? Mainstream media does not release documents like these – not since the Pentagon Papers, that is. One has to wonder if our corporate media even would release such explosive news in this day and age. The news we do get is slanted in such a way as to suit the editorial desires of the publisher, and so often one publisher publishes numerous large newspapers, owns numerous television stations, and even owns radio stations. The news is the same on each one. We no longer have news. We have propaganda. The days of Walter Cronkite are gone.
Photograph by Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
What does WikiLeaks seek to publish? According to Assange, anything that an organization wants to keep secret. If there is an economic reason for keeping a secret, then it is in the best interest of the world to expose that secret in order to level the playing field. That, he says, is what journalism is.
That is what investigative journalism should be.
Assange pointed out that releasing the video of the Apache helicopter firing on the group of civilians that included the Reuters reporters was not done to inform the Afghans or the Iraqis. They see it every day,” he claimed. “But it will change the perception and opinion of the people who are paying for it all. And that is our hope.” Knowing in advance that innocents were killed in that incident may color our perception of what happened. We hear the soldiers in the helicopter talking and laughing, but to know that the firing was indiscriminate changed how we feel about their demeanor. Is this incident isolated? Or is it typical? We do not know We know this incident happened. We saw it; We do not know if more, similar incidents have happened. We hope not; we fear so.
WikiLeaks’s activities around the globe have resulted in major changes for the better, and for human rights and freedom. The Kenyan election was one example, and recently the Iceland legislature’s passage of a law allowing freedom of speech for journalists that is perhaps the broadest in the world is another.
Americans are divided on the issue of the Embassy documents, and on the war documents. WikiLeaks released them to show abuses. Our country is committing those abuses. It is natural to defend our country, but at the same time, we should not be committing the abuses. We have been caught, Our misdeeds have been exposed by our own words. Yes, it is embarrassing. Yes, we have lost face on the world stage.
Perhaps had we not committed those abuses, our faces would not be so red right now.
U.S. Congressman -wannabe Tim Griffin wants to create jobs here in the US “like China does.”
Child labor. Prison labor. Virtual slave labor. Sweatshops. Lack of regulations maintaining worker safety. Low pay. Unsanitary work sites. Industrial pollution rivaled by none. Staggering environmental damage perpetrated unchecked by industry as well as smaller employers.
Gosh, Tim, I don’t agree. I just can’t see creating jobs like China does.
In response to the blog post of a friend who is understandably bemoaning the state of the nation, I got a wee bit windy.
I know, I know – it’s hard for anyone to believe that I – moi – would spew opinions unrestrained against the drums of ears attached to mouths that were asking rhetoricals, not practicals. Nevertheless, I have the answer, and if the president would only sit down and pay attention to me, all the country’s problems – yea, even all the world’s! – would be solved.
The economy is not going to be fixed overnight, and right now Obama is listening to the experts who advise throwing more money at the economy in all the wrong places – at least IMHO. But, in response to those who are nodding sagely, saying “We told you that Obama would bring socialism and liberalism to the country, but did you listen? Nooooo,” I say that (ahem) this started on the Republican watch. Obama inherited this disaster; he did not create it. And since no one has ever dealt with such a staggering world-wide economic crisis before, that means he is inventing this wheel as he goes along. Will he get it all right? Of course not. But he won’t be likely to get it all wrong, either.
From what I hear and read, the economy isn’t going to start upward on any consistent basis until at least next year, and maybe not until 2011. Whenever in history the economy has tanked as suddenly and as severely as it did last summer and fall, the recovery has always been slow. That’s why they call them “depressions.”
Consumer confidence is badly shaken, and as more and more jobs are lost and more and more foreclosure notices are mailed, it’s not as if Dick and Jane are suddenly going to decide to splurge on that vacation home, lavish gifts for their status-conscious kids, or a pricey new automobile. Their businesses aren’t going to be hell-bent to hire new employees, either, because if sales are down, and no one is getting the services they offer, the employers simply can’t justify it.
The economy is, believe it or not, depressed. And Economic Abilify has not yet been invented.
My opinion (and one or two of you might possibly be aware that I have one or two opinions, even though I rarely mention them in polite company) is that Obama would be better off to give stimulus money to the people and entities that are best in a position to turn this thing around, i.e., all of us, but in different ways.
Money should go to the homeowners trying to stave off foreclosure as a condition of and part of the debt renegotiation with the lenders – that way the lenders get paid directly by the government on behalf of the homeowners, the homeowners and their children aren’t sleeping on the streets, and the banks don’t own homes they can’t sell.
If a home is undervalued for the debt the homeowner has against it, the government should pay the difference as soon as new terms for the remainder are worked out between the borrower and the lender. If the borrower can’t afford to continue making the original payments – not the juiced-up interest payments – then there can be a second tier of incentives for the lenders to extend the debts to a 40 year amortization as opposed to the customary 30 year schedule.
And NO MORE INTEREST-ONLY long term debt! Whose idiotic notion was that, anyway? “Here, Joe Bob and Sally Sue, take this money that you never have to pay back. Just pay us interest and we’ll all be happy.” The hell, they say! Morons.
Next, apply stimulus funds to the remaking of the American infrastructure, especially rural and smaller urban areas without reasonable public transit. Make light rail, high speed rail, and buses reach more places and serve more people on better schedules. One of the worst things we ever did was allow our railroads to be dismantled in favor of three cars in every driveway and five lanes on every freeway. Refurbishing and improving our infrastructure will employ hundreds of thousands of people in various positions throughout the country. From engineers to draftsmen to laborers to porters, we can get this country moving at a much more economical rate, and faster, if we’ll commit the funds to do it. And those jobs won’t go away when the projects are complete – they will need to be maintained, too.
Simultaneously, pour money into scientific research and development of alternative energy as well as into to cleaning up and maintain the environment. I’m not talking about just reducing greenhouse gases, although that is certainly a big concern, but (for example) about making reasonable accommodations for heavy metals that are the by-product of mining and drilling. A rocket laden with nuclear waste, arsenic, mercury and lead headed for the dark side of the moon might not be a bad use of NASA’s funding.
Put people to work cleaning up the environmental damage we’ve done to the planet, and making sure we’ve still got a planet to leave to our great-grandchildren. Clean water, clean air, and fewer chemicals artificially enhancing the soil and crops will go a long way toward making us all healthier – not to mention the possibility that our grandchildren might be able to play with frogs in their back yards some day.
And while we’re at it, quit giving chickens and cows all those damn hormones! I have yet to meet a teenage girl whose double-D’s don’t put my paltry gifts to shame. Why are their adolescent mammaries the size of a Holstein’s udders? Hormones!
Reduce the employer’s share of employment taxes. With the matching amounts that employers pay for health insurance, medicaid, unemployment, and social security, the cost of hiring an employee is a lot more than just what the employee sees in his check. This would be a real, dollar amount of savings for employers and would probably allow businesses to hire more workers across the board and at all levels.
Nationalized health care? Bring it on. Insurance companies will always provide coverage to people who choose to pay more for less care. Those of us who have survived cancer (twice, thankyouverymuch) or who are on certain costly medications can’t get health insurance without staggering pre-existing conditions clauses that make our health insurance worthless and excruciatingly expensive – if we can get it at all.
When health insurance benefits dictate whether a parent can open a business of his or her own or must stay with an employer who provides health coverage the family can’t get elsewhere, entrepreneurialism is stifled. This country is dependent on small business and entrepreneurs. We absolutely must break down the barriers that prevent people from making an attempt to achieve their dreams. I don’t know about you, but I work a lot harder for myself than I do for someone else. I don’t think failed businesses should be propped up by the government (Detroit, are you listening?), but when something like paying for childbirth determines whether a family can start a small business, there’s something desperately wrong.
Where, O Where will the money come from to do all this?
(clearing my throat)
The same place the last two trillion dollars came from. And the next trillion will actually make a difference. It will put people to work, shore up the foundation of the country, and stabilize the economy. It will also have the added benefit of making the world a better place. And if any of you out there are thinking there won’t be more stimulus money forthcoming, you just hide and watch. It’ll come, I promise, whether the president takes my incontrovertible advice or not.
Now that I have solved the problems of the environment, the economy, health care, and reliance on fossil fuels, are there any other problems you’d like me to take a look at? My rates are reasonable, and I’m in a spewing mood.
At cocktail parties and in the small talk before business meetings, we’re all talking about that certain Russian prediction of the breakup of the American union and the new countries that will take its place.
With Governor Perry in Texas talking secession, and Japanese having bought up Hawaii, and the Northwest’s own secessionist movement, maybe professor Igor Panarin’s prediction isn’t all that far fetched.
In case you haven’t heard, the Wall Street Journal ran an article in late December 2008 in which Professor Panarin was quoted as saying that there was about a fifty percent chance that the United States of America would break up by July of 2010. That’s fourteen months from now.
According to him, we won’t be able to hold together as a nation until the end of the world – or the new era – predicted by the Maya. Brash and impulsive, we’ll disintegrate into six different countries, each under the influence of a different foreign power. The economy and unimpeded immigration will be major causes of our downfall. Being Russian, Panarin also attributes the coming civil war to our “moral degradation.”
But those two words, “moral degradation,” are awfully subjective. Our morals, which the Soviets never thought we had in the first place, have actually gotten worse? This is the result of the rabidly conservative administration we had until January? George Bush’s administration was closer to Putin’s than any other administration in history – yet our morals are fatally degraded?
I’m just glad that Putin’s Evil Twin is no longer in the highest office in the land. That man scared me. He left us with a constitution in tatters and a reputation sullied worldwide. He left us with an economic disaster of pestilential proportions. Under his watch an unnecessary war was started and a war that maybe should have been over by now may never be. We are indeed following in the footsteps of the Soviets in Afghanistan. There’s a reason that country cannot stay conquered.
Russia’s economy tanked – a solitary tank, by the way, and not as part of a worldwide economic downturn – because communism, while perhaps a lofty ideal, is just an ideal. In practice it can never work because of the avarice of humans and the specialization of society. Like it or not, capitalism started with the rise of the medieval merchant class, and capitalism is here to stay. China’s gradual embrace of capitalism is much better than the free-for-all Russia and its satellites endured, but that embrace is tantamount to an admission that as much as we might all like to be equal, some will always be more equal than others.
I don’t see the US breaking up. I see a future in which some secessionist movements might succeed. Perhaps in the Northwest, where politics and civil rights are far more liberal than in, say, Arkansas, a new country could rise. I don’t see it becoming part of Russia or Japan or China. The cultures are just too different, and the survivalists are just too adamant. Instead of this secessionist entity clinging to the coast like in Panarin’s notion, Montana will allow it to flex its muscle eastward.
Now, Texas has been an independent country before and, as a former resident of the only state with a school in the Southwest Conference that wasn’t located in Texas, I say let ’em be again. (My ex-husband never mentions the University of Texas at Austin without an exaggerated spit of disgust.) We don’t need Texas. If we built a fence around its borders, it might help a great deal with the illegal immigration issue. In fact, give Texas New Mexico and Arizona, too.
The South, as they have always said, will rise again. The Southern economy, lifestyle, and outlook just doesn’t quite mesh with that of those folks up East. Atlanta can be our capital, or New Orleans, at least until it washes away again. Now, despite Panarin’s model, I just don’t see West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Carolinas joining some urban Atlantic nation-state. We’ll keep them in the South, as well as the Southern two-thirds of Virginia. Washington D.C. is not a Southern city, and Maryland, despite its location south of the Mason-Dixon line, just doesn’t feel Southern. The damn Yankees can have them both. The South will also take the Florida panhandle, because we need our “Redneck Riviera.” Disney can have the rest of the state and no one will miss it.
That city that stretches from the Chesapeake to Boston Harbor will become a country unto itself. To give it arable farmland we’ll donate western Pennsylvania and Ohio to its holdings. It’ll eventually sort of have that “Escape From New York” feel to it. With any luck it’ll turn into “I am Legend” and we can build a fence around it, too, to keep the zombies corralled.
New England will revert to its colonial status, with the exception of Western Massachusetts, which is part of that Atlantic city-state. Its capitol will be Hanover, New Hampshire, that venerable seat of learning that is crowned by Dartmouth University.
The twin capitals of the landlocked Midwest will be Chicago and port city of St. Louis. With the fall of the Atlantic city-state to zombies, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan will become the industrial hub of the continent.
Wisconsin, the Dakotas, and Minnesota will join Canada. People there sound like Canadians already, so the cultural assimilation won’t be difficult for them. Likewise Alaska will become Canadian, just because Canada needs more tundra. Although, come to think of it, with global warming, that tundra will turn into bog by the next century.
That takes care of every place except Hawaii. Since Japan already owns Hawaii, we won’t be able to do much with it. Vulcanism will render the Hawaii question moot in another few thousand years, anyway.
So, I guess I can see the US breaking up, but not the way that Russian Panarin conceives of it. I have to take the cultural inclinations into consideration, whereas he just looked at state lines. And other than those northern states that defect to Canada, Japanese Hawaii, and maybe a Cuban or Bahamian Florida, I just don’t see any other country taking control of the nations that result.
And now that I have frittered away a couple of otherwise billable hours on these mental gymnastics, I really should get back to work.
It seems, despite Dick Cheney’s assertion that all that are left in Guantánamo are the “worst of the worst,” there was at least one completely innocent guy detained there until three days ago as an “enemy combatant.” Haji Bismullah was so innocent, in fact, that that he actually fought against the Taliban andwas a member of the post-Taliban government in Afghanistan. Thanks to George Bush’s suspension of habeas corpus, Haji Bismullah has spent the last six years locked up in that wretched concentration camp anyway.
A military panel, not a habeas proceeding, cleared Bismullah of his status as an “enemy combatant” last week, and over the weekend he was flown back to Afghanistan.
I’m sure he’s not bitter. It was an honest mistake, right? They all look alike under those turbans.
Between January 2002 and May 2006, 759 individuals classified as “enemy combatants” were treated to an all-expense-paid vacation to balmy Cuba, courtesy of the U.S. Government.
The Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants has now done two annual reviews. It took several years to get the Administrative Review Board in place. When the Combatant Status Review Tribunals geared up July 30, 2004, nearly every detainee was designated a “keeper.” In less than six months, 558 detainees had had their cases heard before the tribunal. Assuming a five-day, forty-hour work week for the 25 weeks between Friday, July 30, 2004, and Thursday, January 20, 2005 (and assuming that no holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year’s were observed and work just continued), that’s less than two hours per case.
Two hours is plenty of time to review whether someone needs to be held as an enemy combatant when the detainee is not permitted to know the evidence against him, or to have the help of a legal professional, or otherwise to defend himself.
As one Washington Times commentator put it, “Detentions of alleged enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo) and extraordinary renditions smack more of Franz Kafka’s The Trial than of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.” I would expect that the men imprisoned there without any recourse and without notice of what they did wrong might feel a surreal quality to their experience. Haji Bismullah is not the only one.
Only thirty-eight men were freed by that first round of reviews by the Office of Administrative Review, and 520 continued to be held as “enemy combatants.” It’s no surprise to me that these 520 men continued to be held at Guantánamo when one considers that they were not permitted access to all of the allegations that initially gave rise to their status as enemy combatants, and that they were not given the benefit of legal representation. What’s equally bad, though, is that only 37 of those first 558 tribunals were attended by the media.
The media weren’t turned away from any of the reviews, insisted a spokesman for the Office of Administrative Review. All the media had to do if they wanted to attend a review hearing was 1) be on the island the day the review happened and 2) ask to go. Of course, the Office of Administrative review didn’t tell anyone in advance when the hearings were. Dumb luck seems to be the device by which those 37 hearings were attended. Even when the transcripts of the hearings are released, the names are redacted from them – the public has no way of knowing who the detainees were or who any of the other players are in the decision to hold or release them.
In 2005, there were 463 recommendations that resulted in 14 releases, 119 transfers of prisoners to other facilities. The Administrative Review Board decided to continue to detain 330 of the prisoners remaining in Guantánamo. In 2006, two prisoners were released, 55 became eligible for transfer, and 273 continued to be detained at Guantánamo.
Since a Supreme Court decision in June 2008 gave detainees the right to have their detentions reviewed by federal judges in habeas cases, the government has won only three of them. Three! Not surprisingly, Bush’s Department of Justice has appealed some of the rulings it lost.
As The Decider and his waterboarding cronies prepared leave Washington, they speeded up the release of many men held at Guantánamo over the last seven years.
Nearly ten percent of the “worst of the worst” have been released in the last three months. One of them, a poor kid from Chad, who spent the first two thirds of his life in Saudi Arabia with his parents, was accused of being a member of an Al-Qaeda cell in London when he was 11. He was sent to Guantánamo when he was 14, where he stayed until last week. He says that he was tortured during his imprisonment there.
If young Muhammad Hamid Al Qarani was not an enemy of the United States before his capture and designation as an enemy combatant, you can bet he’s one now, having grown up subject to the loving nurture of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay. He spent nearly one third of his life being held indefinitely there. Do you think that might give a kid some issues?
In September, the Department of Defense admitted that a dozen teenagers had been held at Guantánamo over the last six years, four of whom were still there. Five of these kids were released, but one commited suicide. If my own child were held in a foreign prison, not even as a Prisoner of War but under a nebulous designation that prevents any treaties from applying to him, I would be advocating strongly for the war crimes of the country holding him to be punished – and punished severely.
There’s still another problem, though. About 50 of the detainees who have been cleared for release have no place to go. Either their homelands won’t accept them or they don’t have a homeland. Some who fall under the latter status are Palestinian. Yemen won’t accept its natives back. And even as the numbers in Gitmo dwindle, there are still thousands of detainees held in military prisons in other countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Ethiopia, and the joint US/UK base on the Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia.
President Barack Obama has said consistently over the last two years that he intends to close the Guantánamo Bay as a detention center. Last week it was reported that he might issue the executive order closing the prison camp as soon as today, although other reports are that closing the prison might not be accomplished even within the first 100 days that he is in office.
I hope he does more than just close the prison camp. I hope he repatriates each and every person held there. If they are terrorists, their own countries can deal with them. The United States government has refused to do anything but warehouse them.
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