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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.