Irony, British (Petroleum) Style

Here's my entry for Rachel Maddow's BP poster contest:
Rachel Maddow, on her nightly MSNBC show, has been asking viewers to take this photo of a BP gas station, where BP sternly warns its customers that they "are responsible for spills", and combine it with some appropriately ironic pseudo-motivational commentary on BP's absence of clarity about cleanup responsibility when they're the ones doing the spillage.

You can find all the necessary links and instructions to create your own BP poster on Rachel's blog here.

Year Of The (Rich) Woman

This past Tuesday's primary wins by Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina in California, along with other high-profile campaigns by women for federal and state offices, has many pundits declaring the 2010 election to be "The Year Of The Woman". A closer look at some of these candidates, however, indicates that their personal wealth, and their willingness to use that wealth to finance their campaigns, may have more to do with their electoral success than gender.

Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, spent about $71 million of her personal wealth, estimated to be in the billions, to win the Republican primary for Governor of California.

Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, spent $5.5 million from her own pocket to become the Republican candidate for Senate from California. Some of that money may have come from the $21 million severance pay she received when HP fired her in 2005.

Linda McMahon (no relation to me, thank goodness), the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), spent $14 million of her own money to win the endorsement of the Connecticut state Republican convention last month as that party's candidate for the U.S. Senate. Yes, the person who brought us "professional wrestlers" Hulk Hogan and The Rock on TV shows like "Raw" and "Smackdown" now wants to help run the federal government.

The irony is that all of these free-spending Republican candidates are running on a platform of "fiscal conservatism". Go figure.

Instead of examining how these candidates made their fortunes, or questioning the wide pay disparities between CEOs and average workers at these corporations, the media is instead focusing on Alvin Greene, who won Tuesday's primary in South Carolina to become the Democratic candidate for Senate, and asking how an unemployed vet got the $10,400 filing fee to get on the ballot. Perhaps the fact that media corporations receive millions of dollars from candidates like Whitman, Fiorina, and McMahon for TV and radio ads, while Greene did not buy any media advertising time, has something to do with it?

Class, rather than gender or ethnicity, is still the strongest dividing line in our society. Individuals and corporations with a great deal of money have far more influence in the decisions which affect our lives than the average citizen. Citigroup even acknowledged this situation in their infamous 2005 report by calling the U.S. a "plutonomy". Electing a female millionaire, who made her fortune in the corporate world, will be no more liberating than electing male millionaires has ever been.

In 1973, Pink Floyd's song "Money" has the rich narrator saying "Think I'll buy me a football team" as a fun way to spend some excess cash. Today, the preferred form of recreational spending for the rich seems to be buying a Senate seat or governorship (former Goldman Sachs partner Jon Corzine managed to buy both in New Jersey before the voters finally got sick of him), but sometimes they'll settle for a mayor's office (Michael Bloomberg in New York City).

Money, so they say,

Is the root of all evil today

Memorial Day Layoff By Defense Contractor

On Tuesday, June 1, upon returning to work following the long Memorial Day weekend, 45 engineers at the L-3 Communications facility in Camden, New Jersey were told by the company they were being laid off.

Meanwhile, TheStockAdvisors.com recommends investing in L-3, "a leader in a fast-growth niche of homeland security and defense: Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, often abbreviated C4ISR or ISR."

The investment advice article goes on to say that "We see L-3 Communications as one of the best companies in the robust defense sector."

There are at least 45 engineers out there who might disagree with that statement.

The Defense Industry Racket

You fasten all the triggers for the others to fire

Then you set back and watch when the death count gets higher

You hide in your mansion as young people's blood

Flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud.

- "Masters of War", Bob Dylan, 1963

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest,

easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious...It is the only

one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

- "War Is A Racket", General Smedley Butler, 1935

Memorial Day is supposed to be a time for remembering our soldiers who have died fighting in wars. While we pay respect to the memory of these men and women who volunteered to serve their country and sacrificed their lives, let's also remember the segment of our society which actually profits from war - the defense contractors. These corporations have appeared to be largely recession-proof, continuing to post profits and pay out bonuses to their executives, although some are now beginning to lay off their non-executive workers.

Bob Dylan called them "masters of war" in his 1963 song, but Smedley Butler called them racketeers nearly thirty years earlier. Butler spent 33 years in the U.S. Marines, earning the Medal of Honor twice and rising to the rank of Major General before retiring in 1931 as the most decorated Marine at that time. After leaving the Marines, he became extremely critical of companies which profited from selling to the military, as well as those which he believed persuaded our government to use the Marines to stabilize countries for the purposes of business investments. In his 1935 book "War Is A Racket", he detailed how the profits of companies such as DuPont, Bethlehem Steel, and Anaconda Copper increased an average of 200 percent during World War I, and proposed paying "the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories...the same wage as the lads in the trenches get."

In 1961 another retired general, Dwight Eisenhower, gave his farewell address as President and explained how the relationship between the military and corporations had changed: "Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions." Eisenhower went on to warn us that, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Today, Eisenhower's "permanent armaments industry" is so well ensconced that it apparently doesn't have to worry about minor things like obeying the law. The nonprofit Project On Government Oversight (POGO) maintains a Federal Contractor Misconduct Database showing companies which continue to win government contracts despite their histories of misconduct, including contract fraud and environmental, ethics, and labor violations. It should come as no surprise that the top 9 companies on the current list, sorted by amount of federal dollars, are defense contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, L-3 Communications, United Technologies, BAE, and SAIC. Lockheed Martin is in first place, receiving over $38 billion in federal dollars during fiscal year 2009 despite 50 reported instances of misconduct since 1995. Their reported profit for that period was $3 billion. Of these 9 defense contractors, the one with the smallest number of violations is L-3, with 6; they made $901 million in profit on $7 billion of FY2009 federal contracts.

One reason, perhaps, that our government is reluctant to punish these corporations is the jobs they're supposed to provide as a form of military Keynesianism. John Maynard Keynes was a British economist who proposed using government spending to stimulate demand during times of high unemployment. The application of his policies in both FDR's New Deal and the military spending of World War II is widely believed to have pulled the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Following that war, government spending in the form of contracts to military suppliers (now euphemistically renamed "defense contractors") was seen as a way to continue job creation and prevent the return of a depression. The recent use of stimulus packages to counter our current recession has been called a return to Keynesian economics, but defense contracts have represented a system of permanent stimulus spending since the 1940s.

Unfortunately for the employees of those defense contractors, the continuation of two active wars and large Department of Defense budgets may no longer translate into job stability. A recent article in The Hill reports that some of the same profitable defense contractors in the POGO list are now laying off large numbers of employees. Lockheed Martin's Mission Systems & Sensors (MS2) division recently reduced its workforce by about 972 employees through a combination of voluntary packages and involuntary layoffs; a spokesman said they needed to "size its workforce to meet projected workload and remove redundancies." Raytheon says it needs to lay off 225 workers in Arizona to "achieve the right mix of talent to remain competitive in the marketplace." BAE is laying off 610 workers in Ohio and 373 in Tennessee because the "major spike" in military contracts due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan "has now passed and we are adjusting our workforce levels." The L-3 Communications division in impoverished Camden, NJ announced a layoff of 65 workers in April "to make our products and services more affordable in today's competitive environment."

However, the Hill article also quotes David Berteau of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who points to another reason behind these layoffs; "defense companies, responsible to their stockholders, must keep profits high enough to compete for capital as they anticipate reductions in the defense budget." It's not that these corporations are at risk of not turning a profit; it's that the profits must be "high enough" to satisfy investors on Wall Street, even if that means cutting jobs at a time when the federal government, which provides the money for those profits, is trying to create jobs to bring the country out of recession.

These jobs being cut are some of the relatively few remaining for skilled workers such as scientists and engineers that are somewhat immune to overseas outsourcing. Most defense contracts require employees to hold security clearances, which are only available to U.S. citizens.

This Memorial Day, as we honor the patriotic sacrifices of our soldiers during times of war, perhaps we need to begin demanding some patriotic sacrifices by the executives of our defense contractors. Have they started looking in the mirror to see if they can "remove redundancies", or considered reducing their multimillion dollar compensation packages to make their companies' products "more affordable"? If they're not willing to do so, then perhaps taxpayers should begin questioning why their money is used to subsidize for-profit corporations which are no longer willing to hold up their end of the bargain by providing stable jobs for the middle class. The public rage at "government bailouts" of banks and auto makers could pale compared to what should be an even larger rage at the decades-old government subsidy of the defense industry. It's time to look closely at "too big to fail" corporations like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and consider either breaking them up into smaller, less powerful companies or nationalizing them so that the taxpayers can purchase what the military truly needs at cost, without paying the additional cost of executive bonuses, profits to Wall Street investors, and layoffs aimed at keeping those profits as high as possible.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Zimmerman

In honor of Bob Dylan's birthday today (born May 24, 1941 as Robert Zimmerman), I listened to a healthy cross-section of his songs in my collection, ranging from his early protest folk songs up through the Traveling Wilburys supergroup, and marveled again at how well his lyrics perfectly captured whatever mood and imagery he was targeting.

His "Blowin' In The Wind" put the question of civil rights before us all:

"How many years can some people exist,

before they're allowed to be free?"

In "Masters of War", he denounced the military-industrial complex only two years after President Eisenhower had coined the term:

"Come you masters of war, you that build all the guns

You that build the death planes, you that build all the bombs

You that hide behind walls, you that hide behind desks,

I just want you to know I can see through your masks."

His "Subterranean Homesick Blues" contained the lyric that inspired the name of the Weathermen faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS):

"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"

Even when Dylan turned his rage on personal relationships rather than social injustice, his lyrics captured things perfectly. How many of us have found ourselves in situations where these parting words seem all too fitting:

"You just kinda wasted my precious time,

Don't think twice, it's all right."

My personal favorite, though, is from "Positively 4th Street":

"You've got a lot of nerve, to say you are my friend

When I was down, you just stood there grinning...

I wish that for just one time, you could stand inside my shoes

You'd know what a drag it is to see you"

Thank you, Mr. Zimmerman, for giving us so many great lyrics. As you said in "My Back Pages", you were so much older then, you're younger than that now.

Another World Is Possible

The main theme underlying this blog is that groups of people working together can challenge entrenched interests, not only to block or reverse harmful actions but to imagine new approaches and new ways of doing things that are more positive, healthy, and sustainable.

Many like-minded people are making plans to attend the US Social Forum June 22-26 in Detroit, MI. The theme of this event is "Another World Is Possible - Another US Is Necessary." This will be the second US Social Forum (the first was in 2007), and is one of many regional gatherings which grew out of the World Social Forum, an alternative to the annual gathering of the world's economic elite in Davos, Switzerland. Rather than accept the label of "anti-globalization" assigned to these activities by the media, participants instead stress their vision of a different kind of globalization - one driven by the people of different communities working together on shared goals, rather than the agendas of for-profit corporations.

One group which will be represented at the US Social Forum is Healthcare NOW!, the single-payer advocacy group which held a "house-warming" event at its new Philadelphia office today to raise funds for the trip to Detroit. National Organizer Katie Robbins spoke with the group of 30 supporters, as did Donna and Larry Smith, who were featured in the Michael Moore film "Sicko". Donna now works for National Nurses United, and both she and Katie certainly offer the possibility of a different way of delivering healthcare in the United States; one in which all people have access to the care they need, without regard to their ability to pay, and that access cannot be lost due to job loss or graduation from school. That vision has been hard to communicate in the face of the corporate-driven healthcare "debate" which only permits discussion of minor tinkering within the existing employment-based private health insurance system, but it's a vision we must keep discussing.

These single-payer supporters enjoyed some laughs while watching the film "The Yes Men Fix The World", in which a pair of pranksters who pose as corporate executives or government officials help us imagine a world where Dow Chemical accepts full responsibility for the 1984 pesticide plant accident in Bhopal, India and sets up a fund for the medical needs of its victims, or the New York Times publishes articles on the passage of Maximum Wage legislation.

Challenging corporate power, as well as the paradigms they've encouraged us all to accept as unchangeable, is an essential step towards building a better world. People like Katie Robbins, Donna Smith, and the Yes Men are all helping us to think of creative ways to do this. As Donna said today, the balance of power is currently badly tipped away from the people, but each of us has to do our part to restore the balance, and we can never know which action will be the one that finally does so.

Or as John Lennon sang:
"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one."

Pennsylvania Democrats Reject Specter

In a historic upset, Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) has defeated incumbent Senator Arlen Specter (?-PA) in today's Democratic primary. Sestak will now move on to the general election in November as the Democratic candidate, facing Republican candidate Pat Toomey.

Specter, to his credit, conceded shortly after 10:00 p.m. and has so far not pulled a "Lieberman", i.e., declared a run as an independent after losing a party primary.

Considering the effort expended by national and local party officials, from President Obama and Vice-President Biden to Governor Ed Rendell and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, on Specter's behalf once this longtime Republican rebranded himself as a Democrat, the choice of Sestak by a majority of the state's Democratic voters should be seen as a strong rebuke to the party establishment.

After all, isn't the point of a primary to let the voters choose their candidates? Wasn't the primary supposed to be a reform to move away from the old "smoke-filled room", where the party's power brokers met in secret to choose their official slate of candidates?

It seems the establishment of the Democratic Party has forgotten about small-d democracy.

As Sestak said tonight, "This is what democracy looks like: a win for the people."