The new economic model

Anyone who is paying any attention know that the recent attacks on Planned Parenthood have nothing to do with abortion and the sanctity of human life.  Abortions are not the main purpose of Planned Parenthood.  The main purpose is women's health and birth control.  But taken in context will all of the other actions of the right, it makes perfect sense.

Let's try to summarize the current Republican agenda.

• Implement laws to make it harder for the poor to vote, as evidenced by a spate of voter suppression laws being passed in Republican controlled states.
• Under the guise of 'torte reform', make it harder for individuals to hold businesses accountable for their actions.
• Attack public education, stripping both primary and secondary education of funding, demonize underpaid teachers, resulting in less educational opportunity for all but the wealthy.
• De-fund organizations that provide birth control, and cancer screenings for women.
• Remove 'restrictive' regulations on business, like child labor laws, or those that protect worker safety, food safety, or the air you breath, the water you drink.
• Strip workers of their rights to collectively bargain.

 But if you think about it, this all makes sense.  In a feudalistic society, the purpose of the peasants are to supply labor and soldiers.  The value of women is to produce children and then hurry up and die so that your workers do not waste time caring for them in their old age.  The more children they produce, the cheaper your labor costs are.  And if you disenfranchise them, both by taking away their vote, and their rights to organize, they will not be able to do anything about it.

And if you have plenty of them, you don't have to worry if too many of them are poisoned on the job or die in the mines.  There are plenty more where they came from.

Of course, you will still need a tiny middle class.  Someone has to be the physicians and the engineers and scientists who take care of the needs of the landed gentry.  But you don't need many of them.  And knowing they could be tossed back into the pile of peasantry at any moment should make them easy to control.

This model has worked for the benefit of the ruling class in one form or another for thousands of years.  You think our little 200+ year experiment is viewed as anything except a fluke by those on the right?  Think again.  You have a front row seat to what has happened to other social experiments of the past, when the old guard decides that enough is enough.

Unless you decide to do something about it.

A small jab at hypocrisy

I am sure it came as no surprise when it was revealed that Teahaddist darling and stimulus critic Michele Bachmann sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack thanking him for the use of stimulus money to help support the Minnesota pork industry, and encouraging him to spend more.  After all, who doesn't expect hypocrisy from a politician?

Now it is my understanding, that in many cases, exactly where money will be spent is not in the legislation itself, there is considerable flexibility by the federal agencies that are disbursing the money.  So how about this?

If you as a congressman voted against it, then none of the money goes to your district.  If both of the state's senators voted against it, skip that state.   You want to take credit for bringing home the bacon, then actually help bring it home.  Time to play a little hardball.

When Dell's mistake is your problem

My wife's printer is running low on ink, so I went onto the Dell website to order more. Yeah, their ink is over-priced but it is convenient.  We had checked a couple of local stores, and none of them carried the specific size cartridges (do they make so many different types to discourage after-market ink?) that we needed.

The following week I received this in an email from Dell:

Dear Customer,We're sorry but your order will take longer to fulfill than previously communicated and is now scheduled to be delivered on or before 6/8/2011

Because we did not meet the date previously communicated to you, we need your permission today to continue your order with this new date. If we do not receive your permission, the Federal Trade Commission requires that we cancel your order.
I also received several robo-calls repeating the same message. 

Well my wife has a lot of stuff to print between now and when she is leaving on a trip, so I decided to look around online and see if I could find someone else that would have compatible ink.  I found some and ordered it.  It was cheaper and faster too.

So just to be sure, I went online to Dell, to 'Order Status', and selected the 'Cancel' link.  After all, I had just bought enough ink for the next year, who knows if the printer will even live past that.

Two days later, on the same day my ink arrived from the alternative supplier, an email came from Dell saying they had shipped my order.

Needless to say, I was pissed.  I called them and they started to tell me how I could return it for a full refund.  My response was essentially this.  This is your mistake, not mine, your problem, not mine.  You fix it.  Call FedEx and tell them to cancel the shipment, or don't, but I'm not paying for it.  I called my credit card company, and they had not billed me.  I figured I would be nice and leave a note on the door to tell FedEx that I was refusing the shipment, and that would be the end of the it.

Last night my wife noticed that they had billed us.  She goes online to check the credit cards regularly.  I called the credit card company and told them that this was a fraudulent charge, and I am disputing it.  Their response was "Have you returned the merchandise yet?".  They are essentially siding with Dell, that is is my problem not Dell's.  This is what the FTC Website says about this:

Whether or not the Rule is involved, in any approval or other sale you must obtain the customer’s prior express agreement to receive the merchandise. Otherwise the merchandise may be treated as unordered merchandise. It is unlawful to:

1. Send any merchandise by any means without the express request of the recipient (unless the merchandise is clearly identified as a gift, free sample, or the like); or,
2. Try to obtain payment for or the return of the unordered merchandise.

I run a business.  Sometimes I make a mistake.  But here is the difference.  If it is my mistake, I own it.  My customer will not pay for my mistakes, I will.

Missed opportunity

A lot of people, left and right will disagree with me, but the killing of Osama bin Laden was the loss of a tremendous opportunity.  We lost the opportunity to demonstrate to the world not only that we are strong enough to win, but that we deserve to win.

Returning him to the United States in shackles, making him stand trial in the full public eye, would have demonstrated to the world that we are not only strong, but just.  Yes, it would have been a magnet for trouble.  His presence would have incited radical Muslims to try and free him, prolonged the ordeal not only for him but for all of us,  It would have been messy and a pain in the ass.  But guess what, that is what justice is.

He would have been exposed to the world for what he is, in the way releasing home videos never will.  And our insistence that he stand trail would have been a demonstration to the world that we are a nation of laws, even when those laws are inconvenient.  Essentially, we would be telling the world that George Bush and Dick Chaney do not represent the United States, that we are better than that.

Now having said that, I do not fault the military who carried out the execution.  I don't know what their real order were, but given the circumstances, a covert mission in a fortified facility, I believe that they are justified at the slightest hint of danger to open fire.  They found weapons caches and barricades inside the compound, it is not unreasonable to expect Resistance.  So if somebody has to leave in a body bag, I would rather it be Bin Laden than one of our troops.


Still, if Bin Laden had been arraigned on Tuesday morning in front of a judge, that would have sent a powerful message to the whole world.  It would have told them that although we are the most powerful military force in the world, we are not a lynch mob.  We practice what we preach.

But it will never happen

I was reading an article online today. about the passengers that airline employees most dislike.  One of them was people who shout and complain, who become belligerent, when they are getting bumped.  As those it was perfectly OK for the airline to sell something they don't actually own (a seat they have sold to someone else) even though if you or I did the same thing that would be fraud.

Now it is in the airline's best interest to leave the airport full.  Actually, that is not completely true.  I have read that for many types of aircraft, they actually make more money with a couple of empty seats. The amount of additional fuel they use flying completely full is not paid for by the fares paid by those last few passengers.  But for arguments sake, let's just say full.

So they want to leave full, and they done want last minute cancellation cause them to leave half empty.  So they sell more seats than they have, and somebody gets screwed.  But let's look at it a different was.  Not completely one-sided, just different.

Have you ever bought a non-refundable airline ticket?  The airline is requiring that your travel plans be cast in stone, or you forfeit your money.  So that should work both ways.  It is simple.

If the ticket is non-refundable, then you own that seat.  If you miss the plane, the airline cannot sell it to someone else unless they are going to give you back your money.  If they only get half what you paid, you get half back.  If they get twice what you paid, you get all your money back, and the airline gets to keep the difference.  And if they can't sell it, you lose all your money and they use a little less fuel.  Isn't that fair for everyone?


And since you own the rights to that seat, you cannot be bumped.  They want to overbook, they do it only with seats that are refundable.  You buy a refundable seat, you do so knowing the risks.


How about some of the airlines that don't treat you like shit?  Even if a Southwest ticket is non-refundable, they let you change it for a different flight.  You only pay the different in the cost between the old and new ticket.  You do not want to punish a company for treating you fairly.  So let's add a couple more caveats.

Say even a refundable ticket becomes non-refundable 48 hours before your flight is due to depart.  Maybe 5 days for international flights.  And after that point, you have to pay for the ticket if you cancel and the airline does not re-sell it, and you cannot be bumped.

Yes the airlines have been screwing their customers forever, but that doesn't mean the rules should be revised to screw them.  We just need a little balance.

A modest proposal

As I was driving in to work this morning, one of the radio shows I listen to was talking about a caller who had said that $250,000 a year is not really all that much.  This from the same people that say a teacher making $50,000 is greedy and overpaid.  It is time for a small dose of reality, and I think I know how it can be accomplished.

• Members of congress and the senate would no longer be paid by the federal government, but by the states they represent.
• The salaries of U.S. Representatives would be fixed at the median income for a K-12 public school teacher in their home state.  Their benefit packages would also be the same.
• The salaries of U.S. Senators would be fixed at the median income for public high school principals in their home state.  They too would recieve the same benefit packages.
• There would be no federal retirement for members of congress or the senate, rather they would participate in the same plan as the teachers in their home state.
• In recognition of the cost of maintaining two residences, the elected representatives would qualify for Section 8 housing in our nation's capital.

OK, it will never happen.  Because if it did, then our elected representatives would have to find someone else to demonize other than teachers and the working poor.

Another take on "freedom isn't free"

You hear that a lot, "Freedom isn't free".  That is the excuse you hear all the time for letting the government listen in on your phone calls, torture suspects, and arrest and threaten people without a warrant, and lie to you every day.

But that is not what I think about when I hear that.  When I hear that phrase, a completely different thought comes into my mind.

Freedom is not for the timid.  By that I do not mean that a timid individual has no place in a free society, but that society as a whole cannot be timid.  Freedom is dangerous.  In a free society, bad people will do bad things, and it is the responsibility of society to punish them for those bad things.  But until they have actually done something bad, they are just free people in a free society.

But what about....there are a whole lot of those.  And the answer is the same.  You want to be free, you have to give that freedom to everyone else.  And that means big brother is not constantly stepping in to prevent someone from hurting you.

Does that mean they government cannot tap the phones of organized crime or suspected terrorists?  Of course not.  But it does mean they have to stand up in front of a judge and lay out a real reason why they should be allowed to.

Would we miss some threats, if the government could not be constantly mining all of your cell phone calls and emails for key words and patterns?  Probably yes, although not as many as the government would like you to believe.  But you know what?  That is the price of freedom.  That is what freedom not being free really means.

There really are only two choices.  A free society, or a police state.  Yeah, you can put a pretty face on a police state, make most people feel like they are mostly free, but it is all a facade.  You are free or you are not.  And it takes courage to be free.  The politicians who write things like the Patriot Act are counting on you been too much of a coward to object.