But I think it may have some baring on it. Came across this article
in the Guardian and began to think about it some.

The truth is that you're probably right to hate being back
in harness. It's not just that, from here, the days get
wetter and shorter, that there are no more bank holidays
till Christmas or that sacrificing the surplus value of your
labour to The Man is really no fun (although that last point
alone surely justifies more than one sharp kick to the
office LaserJet). Those are all-important, but something
more specific is going on. Our jobs are getting worse.

It used to be easy to divvy up the labour market: there were
the McJobs, and the rest. The task of politicians was to
keep the number of tedious, routine occupations down, and to
enable as many good jobs to be created as possible. Except
that the reverse appears to be happening. More and more
prized careers are becoming McDonaldised - more routine,
less skilled, and with the workers subject to greater
control from above.

Take supermarkets. Jobs there could traditionally be split
between the unskilled, low-paid drudgery of stacking shelves
and sitting on tills - and the trained butchers and
fishmongers and store managers. But when the sociologist
Irena Grugulis and a team of researchers recently studied
two of Britain's largest supermarket chains, even the
managers reported that they had little room for manoeuvre.

A trained butcher revealed that most meats were now sliced
and packaged before they arrived in store; bakers in smaller
shops now just reheated frozen loaves. In their paper,
published this summer, Grugulis and her colleagues note that
"almost every aspect of work for every kind of employee,
from shopfloor worker . . . to the general store manager,
was set out, standardised and occasionally scripted by the
experts at head office". Or, as one senior manager put it:
"Every little thing is monitored so there is no place to
hide."

And all this was enabled by technology. The modern
supermarket - with its electronic scanning and inventory
controls and price reductions decided by a software program
run out of head office - is probably more hi-tech than any
web-design firm. The result is that the man or woman in
charge of your typical supermarket (or other chain shop) now
has little to do with the selling or arrangement of goods:
nowadays they concentrate on driving their staff to meet the
targets set by head office. Their job is not so much
retail-management as rowing cox.

And this is not just happening to the traditional skilled jobs but to
a lot of high tech works as well. I posted a while ago how engineers
had to not only know how to design but also had to be able to
build the prototypes of what they designed. They had to be
craftsmen as well. Now most (if not all) of this is done on computer.
In fact even engineers have less leeway in what they design and
how the design it as most of this work is not finding the chips
and appropriate packaging. The computer even dose the electronics
necessary and spits out a board design which is then shipped
to a board house that makes the board by computer and sends it back.

I was a systems programmer for may years on IBM mainframe computers.
I had to be able to program in IBM machine language as well as a number
of higher level languages. These days I do little of this and am probably
one of the few left at my place of employment that can still program in C.
Nearly everything else is done on packaged applications where you simply
adjust the configuration to suite your needs.

And most of the jobs in the future will consist of even less skilled occupations
than the ones mentioned in the above article. And I do not see this as a good
thing.

C 
  

First let me say that this may be my last reader blog as Josh
may discontinue this service in the immediate future.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I barely remember watching television when I was very young
around 4 or 5 years old. It was Ding Dong School  hosted by
Miss Frances (Dr. Frances Horwich). I also remember watching
Kukla, Fran and Olie and The Little Rascals. There were three
stations we could get living outside Cleveland Ohio. And it was
a major big deal when the local channel 9 switched to become
channel 8. Even Wally Cox did the announcement.

I do not remember the news much except for CBS which had a
10 minute segment with Douglas Edwards which consisted of
him reading it and maybe a few still pictures or a map or something.
I do not remember there being much local news until the late
1950s and the 15 min Huntley Brinkley Report was very big
when it first aired in 1956.  It also had very little additional
media as well.

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 this was BIG.
Not just because the Russians did but because anyone did it.
A metal ball the size of a basketball that was orbiting the planet
and transmitting a very simple message on short wave and
everyone with a shortwave radio would try to hear it.

And when Telstar was launched in 1962 and the first live
transatlantic broadcast was made shortly there after, this was
considered miraculous.

Radio news was even more sparse since the networks all
but abandoned that mode in favor of television. Oh on the
hour or so they would have a 5 min feed from the network or
somebody would ready the wire copy. But that was it.

News broadcasts up until the advent of video tape in 1956 -
consisted primarily of the anchors reading some copy, maybe
a few stills or a map and for important stuff an audio feed.
If there was any other media it was generally on film and after
the fact. Video cameras were big, bulky, required lots and lots
of vacuum tube equipment to use. Color even more so. So
live on the spot reporting was for big news events only.

With the advent of the transistor this all began to change very
rapidly. With smaller cameras and video records and eventually
camcorders and what not.

What I am trying to lead up to is, that for a very, very long time
communication was sparse,  late and often incomplete. News of
events, even local consisted mainly of what was of interest to
the vast majority of people and only that which was important
enough to cover.  If you lived in Boston you generally did not hear
of the events in Pittsburgh or Chicago unless they were big. In fact
you rarely heard of small events in you local town unless they
had a local news paper since the radio did not cover much locally
except maybe a remote from the county fair or some such. If you
did not hear the gossip, you did know know about it.

And here is the major point I want to make. Not only did most
people not hear of the fringe groups, they generally did not
know of each other as well. If you were one of a dozen libertarians
in your town, unless you went to the same Church or Lodge
meeting or some such and actually talked about it - which people
did not do so much - you most likely did not know one another.
Stuff like that was not reported. It wasn't important enough to
cover.

It wasn't that civil rights or minor political movements were some
how suppressed by the media, they simply did not see spending
the money and resources on them since it was not main stream.

This has all changed. Now anyone with any idea, belief, opinion
or grudge can tell the whole world about it. And in the process
attract those of like minds. In the 1960s unless you happened
to live where there was going to be a protest march or new somebody
who was going to be in a protest march or got some underground
newspaper that reported that there was going to be a protest
march - you most likely would not know about it. And unless it
was large or had some big incident happen, it was not covered on
any news outlet.

Now we even know what the speaker of the house had for dinner on
Thursday.

So all the apparently crazy stuff we are hearing about seems to be
new - it in fact is not. What is new is our ability to find out about it
and it about itself.

C 
 

It seems that McCain, Lieberman and a number of republicans would
like to institute Gestapo tactics here.

Last week, John McCain introduced a bill into the U.S.
Senate which, if passed, would actually allow U.S. citizens
to be arrested and detained indefinitely, all without
Miranda rights or ever being charged with a crime.

The stated purpose of S. 3081 (The Enemy Belligerent
Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act) reads: "To
provide for the interrogation and detention of enemy
belligerents who commit hostile acts against the United
States, to establish certain limitations on the prosecution
of such belligerents for such acts, and for other
purposes."

The bill has nine co-sponsors including Sen. Joe Lieberman
(I-CT) and Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA).

And the rabid bat shit crazy right has the unmitigated gall to
accuse the left of restricting personal freedoms.

C

Just a test of the new comments thing here at TPM.

C

Germany where their economy is doing just fine.

One day after Germany's business confidence index rose for
the third straight month, a new report says the optimism has
spread to consumers as well. The rise is largely due to
Germany's strong economic performance.

And France where even the farmers have some clout.

France's dairy farmers have struck a deal with large dairy
brands for a 10 percent increase in wholesale prices for the
third quarter over the same period last year, narrowly
avoiding a proposed nationwide farmers' strike.

Farmers argued that their produce was undervalued, and went
so far as to accuse some big dairy farms of ''stealing''
from them. Unions demanded that pricing levels agreed in
June 2009 be stuck to.

And they are coming out of the recession.

The number of people seeking work in France fell for the
second straight month in July.

It was the first time that has happened since 2007.

The total was down by 0.5 percent from June, with the number
falling by 14,400.

Year-on-year there was a 5.4 percent rise in jobseekers as
France's economy emerges slowly from recession.

And Switzerland seems to be doing OK as well.

Switzerland's economy grew at a much faster pace in the
first three months of this year than had been previously
calculated.

The State Secretariat for Economic Affairs said real gross
domestic product expanded by one percent from the previous
quarter and 2.3 percent year-on-year.

The numbers make it more likely the Swiss National Bank will
raise interest rates before the European Central Bank.

And the Swedes are doing real well too. Their pensioners especially
so.

Even without the tax cuts, the situation for pensioner
groups is improving with them suffering lower rates of
financial deprivation than other groups in society.

The proportion of pensioners with low economic standards has
fallen steadily since 2000, when it was about 7 percent. By
2007, the figure had fallen sharply to only 2 percent.

In the same time period, among the general population, the
figure increased over the years from 8 percent to just under
15 percent, according to the Ministry of Health and Social
Affairs.

"The group of pensioners is not so easy to describe," said
Gunilla Nyström, private economist at SEB. "Among them are
older women who have not worked full-time and now live on
social security and housing supplements."

"At the same time, pensioners own a very large proportion of
the Swedish people's total wealth. As such, there are
pensioners who in principle do not own anything and have
very low incomes and there are pensioners who have a very
good pension and significant assets."

So why am I linking all this ? Well with all the talk of ditching Social
Security (and probably Medicare and Medicade as well) and giving
huge tax breaks to the top 1% in this economy, we may as well get
ready to become some slimy, dirt poor South American Dictatorship
with military patrolling the streets and taking out anyone who dares
to bad mouth the elites.  An Augusto Pinochet state with all it's
rewards.

Now don't you wonder why all these European countries have no
desire what so ever to copy our form of capitalistic, imperialistic
government ?

Maybe because IT AIN'T FUCKING WORTH A SHIT !

C 
 

You can even play Pac-Man while waiting to vote.

Sequoia's voting machines, used in some 20% of U.S.
elections, employ Intellectual Property (IP) still owned by
a Venezuelan firm tied to Hugo Chavez. Sequoia itself is now
owned by a Canadian firm called Dominion. (Though Dominion,
like Sequoia itself before them, lied about the continuing
Venezuelan/Chavez ties in their recent announcement of the
acquisition, as detailed exclusively by The BRAD BLOG, to
little notice, in June.)

The Pac-Man hack onto the Sequoia/Dominion voting machine
was revealed this week. It was accomplished without breaking
any of the "tamper-evident" seals that voting machine
companies and election officials claim are used to ensure
nobody can physically hack into them without being
discovered.

"We received the machine with the original tamper-evident
seals intact," the hackers from Princeton and University of
Michigan report. "The software can be replaced without
breaking any of these seals, simply by removing screws and
opening the case."

Fun...Hah.

C

According to Gerald Celente - the economist who predicted the
1987 stock market crash, the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the subprime mortgage crisis - things are going to get much, much
worse.

The fake "recovery" was nice while it lasted, says famous
apocalyptic forecaster Gerald Celente, founder of the Trends
Research Institute. But now the fun's over, and we're headed
for what Celente describes as the "Greatest Depression."

Specifically, the always startling Celente says the country
is headed for rising unemployment, poverty, and violent
class warfare as the government efforts to keep the economy
going begin to fail.

Watch the video on the left hand side. It is very good and very
reveling.  I wish I could link the video  here, but cannot for some
reason.

C

Has anyone ever though of how big and bureaucratic and bloated
and entrenched our government has really become ? And I don't
just mean the federal government. A lot of state and local
governments have as well. I mean the shear number of departments
and agencies involved. It's enough to give you an Excedrin Headache.

Well Barbara Ehrenreich has.  And she has some thoughts on how
progressives need to deal with this obese elephant in the room.

So a black man finally wins the presidency, only to
discover that it's about as useful as a 32 cent stamp.
According to Eric Alterman, the federal government,
avatar of liberal hope for at least a century, has become
hopelessly undemocratic, poisoned by corruption and
structurally snarled by partisan divisions. Poor Barack
Obama, who steps up to the plate and gets handed a foam
bat!

The government, as Alterman convincingly describes it, is
not only expensive, "bloated" and all the rest. It has
become a handmaid to corporate power - a hiring hall
from which compliant officials are selected for vastly
more lucrative private-sector jobs, as well as an
emergency cash reserve for companies that fall on hard
times. No wonder so many Americans unthinkingly conflate
"big government" and "big corporations." This is not the
kind of government that hires unemployed people to paint
murals on post office walls. And, as everyone knows, when
the bank decides to repossess your home, it's a public
employee who will kick in the door.

All that should be enough to sour liberals' trust in
government as a tool for progressive social change. But
the situation is much worse than Alterman acknowledges.
In the years since government- state and local as
well as federal -has shed its role as a kindly change
agent, it has assumed a new one as über-cop: building
more penitentiaries, snapping up stoners, harassing
blacks and Latino-looking people on the streets.
Nonviolent protests have dwindled, not only because of
activists' lingering deference toward Obama but because
the police response to any outdoor gathering so resembles
the assault on Falluja.

We have all heard the mime that the Democrats are the same
as Republicans. Well maybe...maybe...it's not that they are the
same. Maybe it's because neither party can be really be effectual
in DC anymore. I mean the repubs have had enumerable chances
to carry out the biggest wet dream, but have had no luck doing so.
And that is to shrink down government.

Maybe the government has become so big and entrenched that no
one can really get their agenda enacted. And we keep wishing for
another FDR or JFK to get things done but maybe even if we did
have such a person and a vast majority of truly progressive
senators and representatives, they would still be ham strung.

Look at the EPA and SEC and Justice all apparently falling
down on the job. Maybe this is because these departments
themselves have become so bureaucratic and corrupt that they
just don't care anymore.

The tea party folks do come off as more than a little squirrelly,
but they could be right on one thing. That the government is just
to damn big to be responsive and we need to look else where for
change.

And what is a liberal to make of the city of Maywood,
California, which more or less disbanded itself in June,
outsourcing all municipal functions\u2014sounds like a
liberal nightmare, right? Until you read that the
now-defunct police department was found by the state in
2009 to be "permeated with sexual innuendo, harassment,
vulgarity...and a lack of cultural, racial and ethnic
sensitivity and respect.''

Alterman acknowledges the problem only tentatively,
observing that "one might argue that this [Democratic]
faith in government's ability to improve people's lives
is misplaced." You betcha. The role of the left should
not be to uphold or defend the government, meaning, for
now, the corpo-Obama-Geithner-Petraeus state, but to
change it, drastically and from the ground up. That may
sound overly radical to Alterman, who seems to want
"progressives who think of themselves as left of liberal"
to abandon even that tiny distinction. But as the Tea
Partyers keep reminding us in their nasty and demented
ways, these are revolutionary times.

These are indeed revolutionary times and we do need to think
out of the box.


C

Courtesy of Sam Smith of Progressive Review. And Counter Punch.

In an amazing piece of masochism and anti-historical
argument, The Center for American Progress has dubbed those
who support the Tenth Amendment "Tenthers," an obvious play
on "birthers."

Empirically, it is fair to say that liberals now oppose the
Second and Tenth Amendments of the Constitution and don't
give a damn about the Fourth Amendment as long as a
Democratic president is dismantling it.

Dumping two thirds of the Bill of Rights hasn't saved the
liberals, however. They have become futile complainers under
a Republican administration, and indentured servants of a
conservative Democratic one. They regard themselves as wiser
and smarter than most Americans, but are unable to tell the
difference between being elite and becoming extinct.

The latest attack is written by CAP's Ian Millhiser who
compares those who support the Tenth Amendment as Tea
Partiers. While there is indeed a strong anti-federalism
abroad in the land these days, it ranges from the extreme
right to the devolutionary left to people who just believe
in the Constitution. To lump these together is either
dishonest or dumb.

The Tenth Amendment states that the "the powers not
delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States
respectively, or to the people."

It is one of the most important provisions in the
Constitution but one that has become routinely ignored as
both Democratic and Republican centralists have demanded
ever more federal power - not for the common good of all
Americans, as with civil rights legislation - but to extend
a Washington bureaucracy that mainly serves the grad school
drones it increasingly employs.

Millhiser, however, apparently doesn't understand the
difference between passing civil rights legislation and
subsidizing huge health insurance companies by requiring
Americans to buy policies from them. Or a health care bill
with so many new federal boards, commissions and committees
that the Congressional Research Service admitted that it
can't even count them.

As liberals love to do these days, he finds a haven in the
commerce clause, a device cleverly used to get some good and
important legislation passed but hardly a constitutional
principle equal to the Bill of Rights. But Millhiser doesn't
understand this difference, either.

He writes:

     "A provision of the Constitution known as the 'commerce
     clause' gives Congress power to 'regulate commerce with
     foreign nations, and among the several states, and with
     the Indian tribes.' There is a long line of cases
     holding that this provision gives Congress broad power
     to enact laws that substantially affect prices,
     marketplaces, commercial transactions, and other
     economic activity."

Apparently his view of constitutional government might also
require you to buy a new car or TV every two years. That
would fit nicely into the commerce clauses as well.

The sad thing is it's not only bad law, it's lousy politics.
And one more reason to ditch conventional liberalism in
favor of a new progressive politics that still cares about
people more than it does about legislative sub paragraphs.

Sam Smith is the editor of the Progressive Review, where
this column originally appeared.

Sad but true.

C

Need I say more !!!!

C

The last time the White House unloaded on the Left, Ronald Reagan
got elected. Ant the time before that it was Richard Nixon.  Because
the Left just stayed home.

The press secretary dismissed the "professional left" in
terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the
ideological right, saying, "They will be satisfied when we
have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon.
That's not reality."

But constantly cozying up Wall Street and those on the right is not
good for your image either. So far the White House approach to
their programs come off more like the umpire at the All Star game
than the coaches. Boring at best and frustrating at worst. Getting
both sides pissed.

They need to remember that the man who stands in the middle
of the road gets hit by traffic going both ways.


C

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VOTE !

C

This is positively outrageous. Somebody needs to challenge these
laws big time.

Many of the freedoms we enjoy here in the U.S. are quickly
eroding as the nation transforms from the land of the free
into the land of the enslaved, but what I'm about to share
with you takes the assault on our freedoms to a whole new
level. You may not be aware of this, but many Western
states, including Utah, Washington and Colorado, have long
outlawed individuals from collecting rainwater on their own
properties because, according to officials, that rain
belongs to someone else.

As bizarre as it sounds, laws restricting property owners
from "diverting" water that falls on their own homes and
land have been on the books for quite some time in many
Western states. Only recently, as droughts and renewed
interest in water conservation methods have become more
common, have individuals and business owners started butting
heads with law enforcement over the practice of collecting
rainwater for personal use.

Someone else ??? To hell you say !!!
I also have some thoughts as to what should be done to those who
enacted them as well.

C