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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, March 20, 2009

What Playing Both Ends Against The Middle Looks Like 

...having received their marching orders from party leader Rush Limbaugh, Senate Republicans are embarking on an "all hands on deck" defense of the very AIG retention bonuses that they were expressing outrage about just a couple of days ago. It truly is a remarkable spectacle, if only because of the way their sudden opposition to doing something that they contend may be illegal stands in such stark contrast to their virtually simultaneous insistence that Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner should have have done...well, something...to stop these payments from being made. As has become glaringly apparent with regard to so many issues over the last couple of months, however, the Republican view of occupying the role of "loyal opposition" isn't actually accompanied by even a faint glimmer of an alternative solution...

Set aside for a moment the sudden fawning adoration that Senate Republicans have discovered for the Constitution and The Rule Of Law after the last eight destructive years. Set aside, for that matter, the sudden gripping Fear that that has swept over AIG employees as a result the death threats that are a direct manifestation of the wild eliminationist rhetoric that their amply compensated Republican scullions have been tolerating, if not encouraging, over the last several years. This is all about the dangerous game that Republicans have decided to play, one where they replace any faint resemblance of an idea with little more than a concerted effort to engage in a scorched-earth policy of simply criticizing and opposing in order to keep the economic crisis going and blow up public confidence in the Congressional Democratic majority and the Obama administration...

It has never been a Republican idea to be supportive of the little people when the chips are down, especially if to do so would run up against the interests of their corporate masters. That institutional history fits nicely with what appears to be the only game plan Republicans have in their effort to try to get back on the track of creating that "permanent majority" they were so happy to chitter on about just four short years ago. They have the opportunity to milk favorable media attention when it's time to express outrage about those AIG bonuses and then fire a brace of torpedoes into any effort to address that issue when they are hopeful that NCAA basketball March Madness is going to be occupying far more attention around the country when it actually comes time to do something about it...

I have to confess that, as far as the amount of these bonuses is concerned, I must hang my head in shame as I confess that I feel that the actual monetary value of the retention bonuses is meaningless. In itself, that particular pile of cash wouldn't get you one-third of the way across whatever body of water over which you wanted to build your own "Bridge To Nowhere". It's importance is mostly symbolic, representing the sort of 'Masters Of The Universe' largesse that the entitled expect to receive, whether as a result of performance or - as is insisted in this case - as a result of the need to have them fix the problems they caused because they are the only people who know where all the bodies are buried. After a week of Republican outrage about these bonus payments, we are now seeing a fall-back that is couched mostly in some sort of strange argument about bills of attainder being offered by people who over the first decade of the 21st Century never seemed to stumble across a Constitutional precept they that they felt a need to defend, all because any effort to actually reclaim that money is a challenge to their corporate masters and doesn't play into the destructive narrative they want to construct...


Expressions of outrage to appeal to us minions and legislative intransigence to appeal to their masters; that describes the full scope of the Republican plan. It's all about playing both ends against the middle without actually having to step out and offer some sort of solution, because a solution runs counter to Republican plans. Our own experience of failure, pain, and desperation - primarily as a result of that Republican intransigence - is the primary Republican waypoint back to majority leadership and command of the White House china. It doesn't matter what's happening to you because you have never really mattered beyond your acceptance of what was called the Bush agenda (or earlier was referred to as the Reagan Revolution). Senate Republican leaders are enacting - without exactly saying so - the "fail" strategy that their party leader espoused on his radio program, and cloaking that strategy in all sorts of verbiage intended to distract you from seeing that they are - in fact - engaging in simple political games and playing both ends against the middle...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:52 PM 0 comments

Thursday, March 19, 2009

What Passes For National News From The Oregon Outback 

...the two thirds of Oregon that lay east of the crest of the Cascade Mountains doesn't often make news that hits the national radar screen. All by itself, that's probably not surprising, given that the region, which is larger that several individual northeastern states (and maybe larger than a couple , can be generalized as vast unpopulated expanses of deserts and forested mountains with a few widely scattered population centers containing fewer residents than any single New York City borough and a number of small, frequently unincorporated communities. The unit of measure for distances between communities is usually 'hours' rather than 'miles' with that time unit being defined as "when traveling at 10-15 mph over the posted speed limit". We have issues out here, and we have the same sorts of problems and concerns that afflict the rest of the country and that are frequently featured in all those "person on the street" cultural stories that keep cropping up in the national media feed. For some strange reason, we don't get picked up for those stories...

What we get are racy mayor pictures, pregnant husbands, and now - courtesy of NPR - "The Biggest Loser" comes to Fossil...

Fossil is the quintessential small eastern Orygun town: the sort of place where a certain breed of people have put down deep roots in a part of the country where most other folks would never end up traveling through unless they had some real reason for doing so. Oddly enough, I have had reason to travel through Fossil many times through the 1990's while driving Oregon Route 19 from the John Day Valley to Interstate 84 along the Columbia River. The view of Main Street (credit: Howard Berkes, NPR) is a pretty accurate representation of the community. Whatcha see is whatca get. It is the sort of exceedingly small town that those of us who have spent our lives living "out in the middle of nowhere" would look at and say 'I could live here' because we long ago learned how to address the fact that there isn't a mall or Whole Foods Market or Home Depot/Lowes or SuperMegaHumongo Safeway/Fred Meyers/Walmart/Whatever Store right down the street. Not to go all "Prairie Home Companion", but patience is the ultimate virtue in places like Fossil or John Day or Burns or Mitchell because you end up relying on catalogs and the hope of some high-speed version of the intertubes rather than being able to take a short drive to buy the things you want or need...

The NPR story is respectful in its own way...but, still. Out here on the east side of the Orygun Cascades we have lots of issues going on. In the major Central Orygun center of Bend, there is an ongoing controversy about public funding of a transit system. In Central Orygun's Deschutes county, there is a building controversy over the electoral defeat of a "local rule" that would have required the installation of expensive septic systems in south county to achieve the county government's desire to protect ground water from a perceived threat by nitrate pollution. On the East Side of the Orygun Cascades, weeks of debate of how economic recovery stimulus money should be spent will address the mitigation of the sorts of fire risks that have over the last decade resulted in large wildfires that forced people from their homes and destroyed some of those homes but didn't make the news because this isn't California...

One of the variations of a famous Brendan Behan quote is "All publicity is good, except an obituary notice." That represents a snarky cynicism reflecting a mindset that most eastern Orygun residents wouldn't normally buy into in any case, but at least in this case the national story from Eastern Orygun is somewhat uplifting rather than simply prurient, so maybe progress is being made...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:36 PM 0 comments

Sunday, March 15, 2009

A Contract I Would LOVE To Have 

...clearly, I don't understand the concept of "the bonus". We don't have "bonuses" in my business; we have "Certificates of Merit" that are coupled with a cash award of varying amounts and an employee only gets one of these because somebody thinks the performance of some extraordinary work and the prospect of doing a bunch of paperwork to honor that performance is worth the effort and recognition. We also have "non-monetary" awards - ranging from coats to backpacks to hats to coffee cups and just about anything else you could imagine - that usually have some sort of 'company' logo that dictates that there are some places you can take those things and some logger bars where you probably shouldn't....

All of these "bonuses" are geared more toward recognition than anything else; while I don't have the numbers at hand, I would suspect that my 'company' hasn't given out the amount of money to which AIG claims to be contractually committed over the last 104 years of my 'company's' existence. It is interesting to note, in fact, that during the presentation of our monetary "Certificate of Merit" awards, which like the non-monetary awards are usually presented at some group meeting, the actually monetary value isn't even mentioned. It would be considered to be in poor taste to even think about doing so...

The ability to earn these awards is, I suppose, in our "contract", to the degree that we actually have one with our employer and to the degree that the existence of such an opportunity to receive an award is established in regulation and tradition. Unlike the employees of American International Group (AIG), though, the folks in my 'company' aren't guaranteed any sort of "bonus" as a result of passing the mirror-fogging test. Over there, where whole fleets of federal dump trucks have been backing up to the bailout dump chute and pouring in tons of tightly-bound packets of G-notes to keep AIG afloat after the revelation that in the last quarter it lost more money than any other corporation in the history of the world, the idea of 'earning' a bonus is apparently a matter of contract law rather than of performance...

As a person who has spent most of the last 30 years reading, preparing, and administering contracts, I'd love to get my hands on this one. I don't want it in my sweaty mitts so much to mine it for opportunities for criticism; the whole idea of a contract that apparently guarantees a "bonus" in the face of corporate performance that sets a new standard for failure across all of human history speaks loudly enough by itself to the criminal absurdity of such supposed contract language. No...oh NoNoNo...I want to see this contract so I can figure out how folks like me can set up such a sweet deal. Since actual job performance doesn't appear to have any bearing on finding a little something extra in the paycheck out there in the financial side of that private sector that Republicans are always touting as the solution to all of our nation's ills, I want to figure out how I and my coworkers can get in on some of this action...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:00 PM 0 comments

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