The SoapBoxers

I was mildly amused at Dilbert when it came out and started to get popular back in the early 90’s. I was just finishing high school and starting college, and I couldn’t really fathom how such scenarios could possibly exist in a professional IT environment. Despite my having a degree in music, the vast bulk of my adult life has been spent with me having a job in IT, the result of me and student teaching not really getting along. Many, many times over has Dilbert proven that yes, such ridiculous scenarios and characters do have a basis in real life.

You say Dilbert’s iconic “pointy-haired” boss couldn’t possibly exist in real life, right? Well, I’ve had just about every kind of boss – amazing ones, highly technical ones, ones with no technical skill, and horrible ones. Yes, I’ve even had a boss with minimal technical skill and almost no concept of managing people in a professional environment. As I’ve been told (but was always too apprehensive to ask him directly) he was a clerk in the US Army and then got a degree in library science. You’d think this would lead him to have good organizational skills, something like Radar from M.A.S.H. Not even close.

On my first day of work with this boss, I was busy customizing my PC – you know, adding useful utilities and widgets that systems admin types like me find handy. New boss – we’ll call him “Boss G” – comes over and sets 2 pieces of printed paper on my desk, stapled neatly in the upper left hand corner. Thinking that it’s more paperwork for me to sign or work policy that I need to review I looked up at him and asked, “what’s this?”

“That’s a Magic ticket,” he replied, referring to Support Magic, our helpdesk incident management tracking system. I had used that exact system at my previous job for over 4 years and had not once seen a printout of it – it runs off an SQL database that meticulously tracks all aspects of incidents/tickets and has a nice web interface so that any level of support staff could enter in work details, asset tracking, work flow, etc.

He must have seen the bewildered look on my face as I glanced over the two stapled pieces of paper, because he then gave me rudimentary instructions on what to do: “Finish the work, then write your solution down on the back page and bring it back to me.”

I was completely dumbfounded. The whole purpose of a $50,000 plus software package like Support Magic or Remedy was to allow all level of tech staff to access and share information as they perform work. Printing the tickets and then giving them to your tech staff so they can hand write the steps they took in troubleshooting/solving an issue is like buying a really nice new car so you and your friends can push it around the block. I said to him, “I’ve used Support Magic extensively, I helped test and implement it at my last job. I’m used to accessing the system directly and managing any tickets assigned to me.” I didn’t even add this was at my job at a Wall Street firm where I worked for 5 years, where every last thing needs to be completed 10 minutes ago and seconds can literally translate into thousands of dollars lost.

Boss G’s normally stoic expression was marred by just a slight twitch of his mouth, and following a pause of 4 or 5 seconds he replied sternly, “I’m the only one in the group who accesses it here and that’s how we do things.” Immediately after the last word left his mouth he had turned and walked away from me.

I could hear snickering in the cubical behind me, and a co-worker stepped out and said, “Dude, you just got your first dose of Boss G.” I wanted to say something, but was so befuddled at this complete new level of inefficiency that my mouth just hung there, slightly open. My co-worker continued, “The real kicker is after you write everything out on that paper and bring it back to him, he reads it and tosses it in recycling. He doesn’t even enter anything you wrote in the Support Magic database.”

If confused exasperation were explosive force, my head would have burst at a megaton level. Over the next 8 and 1/2 years I would learn that barely scratched the surface of the dysfunctionality of where I worked. My torment is your gain, dear readers, I hope writing about it is as cathartic for me as it is amusing for you.

We’ve all heard the age-old axiom that “Actions speak louder than words,” right?  What would you think of the following actions based on that?  In a country where corporations are already paying the lowest amount (by percentage) of taxes in that nation’s history, a group politicians is trying to lower the corporate income tax.  In that same country where lower and middle class incomes have been virtually stagnant the past 10 years and the top .5% of people own over 40% of the wealth that same group of politicians is trying to reduce taxes for the wealthiest and reduce medical benefits for the poorest.  What do those actions tell you?

Yes, that country is the United States and that group of politicians is the Republicans.  They’re trying to do those things while saying they understand what the common person is going through.  In a recent discussion with a very conservative friend he told me people need to stop complaining and “just buckle down and work harder.”  I’m no stranger to hard work, I worked at a Burger King in high school to help get money for college.  I worked 20+ hours a week in college for the same reason as well, while attending classes full-time.  While lucky enough to be working in an IT department on Wall Street I would do 60-70 hours a week and think nothing of it, mostly so I could pay off my student loans early.  I’m sure there are plenty of lazy people out there and I have no sympathy for them, but there are also plenty of hard-working people who are out of work because some banks decided to use some not so scrupulous methods back in the run-up to 2008’s crash and recession.  We all know what happened after that … the banks got bailed out and the average joe didn’t.  Now the banks are back to making their usual record profits and many people are still struggling … and a certain group of politicians once again wants to tell us that “Trickle-Down” will work.  We give breaks to the rich, and they’re supposed to pass some of that on.

It has been proven time and time again that “Trickle Down Economics” (or as the modern conservatives call it “Supply Side Economics”) doesn’t work – The CBO has stated when you have to give away money, money given to lower and middle class people has an almost 3-fold effect on economic returns because these people tend to spend money on necessities.  Money given to corporations or the wealthiest (generally through tax breaks/loopholes/reductions) tends to stay with just a few people and thus has little return.  If there is hard math on why it doesn’t work, why would any politician champion refusing to repeal ill-advised Bush tax cuts to the wealthy while at the same time proposing cuts to services for the poor?  With the income gap getting wider every year since the 80’s wouldn’t this just do the same thing?

One of the things that should happen is a revision to the tax code, cut the loopholes, garbage, tax shelters, etc.  When companies like GE are not paying any taxes at all despite billions in profit, millions in tax credits, and who knows how much in no-bid contracts, how can you argue against a revision?  That’s right, GE spent millions of dollars on lobbying for laws and loopholes so they wouldn’t have to pay any US taxes despite making 5.1 billion dollars in the US.  If corporations are now people, thanks to Citizens United, why can’t I do the same?  Oh, that’s right, because politicians are no longer politicians in this country, they’re simply wage slaves to the highest bidder.

Tax codes change every 25-30 years (1926, 1954, 1985), the reason is because in these occasional years there are complete overhauls, getting rid of the loopholes, tax breaks, ways for rich people to pay less money and the government to make it up by sucking more money out of the middle and lower class.  They need to be fixed on these occasional years because as soon as it’s finished, the corporate lobbyists move in and start to throw money at politicians to re-add loopholes and tax breaks.  Maybe the 2012 tax code revision needs to include a law that prohibits politicians from becoming lobbyists for a minimum of 5 years after leaving any political office?

 

Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin … he’s been in the news lately, hasn’t he?  There was an interesting tidbit that a lot of people missed back in January 31st, before this whole shebang started.  Governor Walker signed into law a little provision that says companies moving to Wisconsin will not have to pay corporate tax for 2 years.  In addition, he pushed through $140 million in special interest group spending in January.  He was busy his first few weeks!  Well this is strange, the $137 million dollar shortfall that he claims is why he’s going after the public employee unions is almost the same amount as the $140 million in spending he rammed through in his first few weeks in office.  I’m sure that’s just a coincidence, though – right?

Well, there’s a bit of very public evidence that a lot of people have laughed at but I feel not as many looked into – the “prank” phone call with Scott Walker and a journalist claiming to be David Koch.  In this phone call there is zero talk of tight budgets, a dire need to cut $130+ million, or really any significant discussion on fiscal issues.  The discussion at hand was all about the “us vs. them” philosophy and crushing the whole idea or unions.  One might even say that Scott Walker created a tense environment for the express purpose reducing or even stopping union power.  Heck, why stop there, why not just give your corporate overlords state utilities for pennies on the dollar?  A “loophole” in a proposed bill could do just that. 

I know, some of you are on the governor’s side on this.  The unions are antiquated, they don’t need power, heck, those overpaid state employees are just being greedy, right?  Well, on average public sector employees earn about 10% less than their counterparts in the private sector.  In addition many states have a mandatory minimum amount that gets put into a retirement fund.  Finally with so many recent state’s financial woes many state employees are now paying more money for the same or sometimes lesser health plans.  Very often state health plans are built using no or few bid contracts and the administer of that health plan is simply raking in the money with little reason to care for the wellbeing of the person at the other end of the plan – denial of benefits would look great on a bottom line if/when those health plan contracts go up for renewal, right?  In one state, North Carolina, the health plan was no-bid and the details are known only to a few. 

Still not convinced about unions?  How about this quote then:  ” … one of the most elemental human rights – the right to belong to a free trade union.”  Surely some liberal nutbag must have said something like that, right?  Dennis Kucinich, or Franklin Roosevelt?  It was Ronald Reagan.  He himself belonged to a union, in fact.  In a world where money is power unions allow those who don’t have as much to group together and argue and barter on equal footing with those who do have a lot.  In fact, a large majority of people say every American has a right to join or form a union, over 60%. 

Put all these things together, and what do we get?  A governor in Wisconsin who had $43,000 in direct donations from the Koch brothers and a multi-million dollar ad campaign paid for by Koch money that helped him get elected, and now he’s seeking to crush union power under the guise of financial woes he created and set his corporate masters up take over state utilities, probably under the guise of “if things get worse we’ll have to privatize our utilities” and suddenly things will be worse.  This and the North Carolina health plan are just two examples where corporate money flows to the politicians only to have taxpayer money – almost invariably from the middle class – flow back to the corporations.  Once again, another reason why we need complete transparency and a cap on any kind of corporate political contributions.  “We the people” is rapidly turning into “We the corporate rich people” and that ideal leaves a lot of poor huddling masses out in the cold.

Like most young children growing up, at some point I learned about government.  I learned about the three branches of government – executive, legislative and judicial.  I learned that the role of the judicial branch is to interpret the law and apply facts and the law to each case that comes before it.  Sometimes there comes a case before a judge where the judge or a direct relation or friend of that judge has a stake in the outcome.  To avoid favoritism a judge will normally disqualify themselves from a case where there is a conflict of interest and this is called recusal.  Sandra Day O’Connor routinely recused herself from cases involving telecommunication industries because she owned large amounts of stock in those firms.

I figure that it’s fairly routine to do this; Elana Kagan did so in a recent case involving workplace law and harassment due to her previous work as Solicitor General and the law in question on that case wasn’t even signed when she held that job.  So here’s a little scenario for you:  You’re a supreme court judge, and your spouse has accepted almost $700,000 from firms standing to gain quite a bit by the Citizens United ruling, do you recuse yourself from the case?  Not only did Clarence Thomas not recuse himself from that case, he had routinely checked “no” on ethics forms that require him to disclose if his spouse received noninvestment money.  Is he required by law to disclose this?  No, but what’s the point of having ethics forms if you lie on them?  Heck, if we have Supreme Court Judges lying on ethics forms, why bother even having a court?

Well, there’s a case on the horizon looming, pretty much everyone knows it’s coming:  Obamacare vs. Virginia and Florida will be in the supreme court before too long, possibly scheduled by the end of this year.  Virginia Thomas, Clarence’s wife, has done quite a bit of work the past decade for companies that have been outspoken against the new health care law, and there is already a movement going to demand Thomas’ recusal for when this case finally comes about.  Don’t hold your breath on that one.

The last few decades have seen Supreme Court justices acting more and more like they’re Teflon, like they can get away with anything and as long as they claim impartiality they’re fine.  Antonin Scalia has his own list:  going on a hunting trip with Dick Cheney weeks before a case involving Cheney was heard in the Supreme Court, speaking at a Tea Party rally organized by Michelle Bachmann, and most recently Scalia and Thomas were guests at an invitation-only gathering fully paid for by the Koch brothers.

How do we solve a problem like Scalia?  Once again, transparency.  The Supreme Court is not a get-away-with-whatever club where once you join you get to toss your code of ethics (if you ever had one) out the window.  The whole point of that office in the first place was to interpret the law with as much impartiality as is humanly possible and two members in particular are turning it into their own personal gain machine.  Second, we need to start limiting the terms of justices, or at the very least have some sort of re-confirmation every number of years.  If it’s ludicrously rare for anything more than a slap on the wrist to come down on Supreme Court justices in terms of punishment and they’re starting to show themselves as not being ethical enough to be above greed or partisanship we need to show them that they’re replaceable.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and the events of January 8th solidified it for me:

The United States is too divided.  We are, as a nation, scared.

Yes, I’ve written about this before, but it’s getting worse every day.  We’re too divided to prosper.  Too divided to revolutionize.  So divided we’re scared.  Partisan politics has reached a fervor beyond anything the Yankees/Red Sox, Lakers/Celtics, UNC/Duke, or any other sports rivalry has seen.  A large portion of the people we elect to office not only seem to care about making “the other side” look bad more than they care about serving their constituants, they’ve flat out said as much.  Mitch McConnell has said “the most important thing we (Republicans) want to achieve is to make Obama a one-term president.” 

He didn’t say we need to get out of this economic turmoil.  He didn’t say need to come together as people.  His primary concern doesn’t even seem to be that his party wins, but that the other guys lose.  With that kind of attitude, everyone loses.  Project fear that the government or economy will collapse if the other side stays in power and you increase their chance of losing.

Think about it, who has more say in how this country is run, your congressperson or the CEO of Goldman Sachs?  Who has more say in where the military is deployed, the average army captain or Exxon?  I’m not saying capitalism isn’t the least of all evils in terms of social policies, I’m saying that unless it’s on a tight leash if you give it an inch it will take a mile.  What better way to get the government to give you billions of dollars than to make everyone fear an economic collapse?

It’s not just fear (and greed) that’s ruining us, it’s an acceptance of violence.  Say what you want about Michael Moore, but on the issue of America and violence and fear he hit the nail on the head in his movie Bowling for Columbine – we can’t explain why we have a similar ratio of people-to-guns as Canada but they have literally a fraction of the firearm murder rate.  Why are we, the leader of the “civilized” world, so violent, so afraid?

Part of it is the media and the sensationalization of violence.  The expansion of coverage of violence in the media has certainly exploded, but aren’t they just giving us what we want?  What is it about violence that keeps us as a society couchbound and captivated?  I think a big part of it is fear.  Fear has always been used as a tool for control, and it’s being used more and more often now by both the media and the government.  What better way to drum up ratings than by scaring people so much that they have to tune in for more coverage?  What better way to keep the populous passive and your corporate overlords placated than by scaring the people with the TSA or the DEA and then broadcast it on the nightly news?

 So what can be done?  Small steps aren’t going to solve this problem, not even close.  I’ve heard it said that we need a 3rd political party to change things, well, I disagree:  we need a 2nd party.  The two we have now are just minor variations on the same beast sucking at the corporate teat, content to let fear keep us in line.  I’m sure some people will say my ideas are way too extreme, but we need to stop corporations from running this country and to do that complete overhauls of both the campaign finance system and lobbyist system are needed.  No more corporate donations.  Caps on personal donations.  100% transparency in all political donations.  A lockout period of at least 5 years on any ex-politician before they can become a lobbyist.  Complete disclosures on any politician/lobbyist meeting – yes, complete.  That means any and all politician/lobbyist meetings are recorded and publically available.  If you want to help run this country, you’re going to do it for the people, dammit, not for your own or your friend’s own personal gain.

Transparency.  Truth.  Information.  They will show us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and that we can once again come back as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

This will be my final article for 2010, and I’ve been pretty darn moderate my last few articles so rather than focusing on one specific issue here I’m going to give my opinions on a bunch of different issues that are making news the past few weeks.  I apologize in advance if I get a little too stream-of-consciousness.

Within the past few days it has been announced both that astronomers found an extra-solar system planet that has water vapor and a lifeform that uses arsenic instead of phosphorus for basic life processes.  This opens up the possibility of there being life in a lot more places out there (including outside of Earth) than we thought previously.  I already know the one question on every Republican’s mind:  Are these lifeforms willing to put a hold on everything just to keep an unnessessary tax cut for the richest of the rich?  (and if so let’s spin that to our advantage)

Ok, about that whole tax issue …

I’m going to break into a little comparison here.  Ok, a big comparison.  Pretend that you work for a big company that has a board of directors that chooses the CEO.  For some strange reason a new CEO gets chosen every 4 years and can only be CEO for a total of 8 years.  Anyway, your CEO announces that he’s giving an across-the-board temporary raise to everyone in the company, and he has it done in contract form so everyone knows it’s temporary.  He’s not entirely sure the company can afford it, but what the heck, it’ll raise company morale, right?  Besides that, it’s temporary and he’s set it to expire while on the next CEO’s watch, so even if it is a problem it will be somebody else’s problem.  Some years later there’s a whole lot of water-cooler gossip because those temporary raises are set to expire.  It’s a new CEO now and he’d like to continue the raise for everyone but the absolute top earners in the company, and those top earners have salaries absolutely dwarf yours (we’re talking quite a few magnitudes of order) scream to the point of holding up any plans to continue that raise and it all falls through.  Do you think it’s dishonest to call that temporary raise expiring, with all the circumstances, a pay cut? 

Welcome to the United States of Goldman Sachs.  I just don’t get how extreme right-wingers can act like Bush’s brand of capitalism is fair when everyone but the top 1% starts at a massive disadvantage.  It is a proven fact that one of the worst ways to improve the economy and create jobs is to cut taxes, and one of the best ways is to keep those without jobs on unemployment.  Why?  Virtually 100% of unemployment money is spent (the jobless don’t save, they barely survive) while the super-rich continually invest/save outside of America.

[Editor’s note: for a primer on income distribution in the US, check out this article – How many people make more than $250,000].

Every Republican and even a few Democrats have swallowed the cool-aid, though, and are calling what’s gong on here a tax raise.  Heck, what the taxes are going back up to aren’t even at Reagan tax levels and people were doing just fine, then.  Finally, why is no one pointing out that this is yet another mess Bush created and will have no hand in solving?  I sure didn’t see Republicans screaming about the debt or deficit when he was starting wars and not using correct accounting methods for their costs, and 1 of those wars was started based on information Dick Cheney knew was false.  I bet South Korea is wishing we invaded the real nuclear threat rogue state right about now.

Speaking of the military, I wonder where John McCain will move his goalposts to next.  2006 he said he’d be fine with repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell if the military was ok with it.  In 2008 he said he’d need a thorough study from the Pentagon saying it wouldn’t cause major impact and he’d be ok with it.  Now that the thorough study is out McCain is insulting the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and our Commander in Chief by saying they don’t really lead military men so this study is invalid.  I bet if by some miracle he had won the presidential election in 2008 he’d say he led troops as Commander in Chief.  Homophobia, like John McCain, is really old.  He froths at the mouth defending positions that not even 50% of Americans want, and then flip-flips on DADT when over 75% of Americans would be OK with gays serving openly.

About Wikileaks …  I’m still not quite sure what to think about Jullian Assange.  It is unclear to me if he is breaking the law or not, or even morally wrong or not.  On the one hand, I understand that government secrets are sometimes a necessary evil but on the other hand I feel like someone has to watch the watchman.  The US Justice Department is going all-out to try and charge him with something, anything – that feels like to me he might just be innocent.  We’re talking about a US espionage service that was able to infect Iranian nuclear processing centrifuges with a virus – and don’t think for a minute that the US didn’t have a hand in it, even if it was just helping Israel do the dirty deed.  If they really had some dirt on Assange, don’t you think they would have him being waterboarded at Quantico right now?

[Editor’s note: check our Squeaky’s article, What should we do about Wikileaks, for more commentary on Wikileaks and Julian Assange.]

Finally, I’d like to give a big middle finger to political correctness and say Merry Chrismas, Happy Hanukkah, and a joyful whatever else you celebrate.  Most of what we celebrate these days has Pagan roots anyway, and it’s all capitalistic.  I wish the world would stop being so greedy and just learn to love their fellow man.

The elections are over, “the people have spoken,” and as far as I can tell, we’re still a heavily divided country.  Partisanship has reached a fervor not seen in US politics before.  It’s beginning to match the rivalry you normally see reserved for Yankees vs. Red Sox or Duke vs UNC.  Remember the bank bailouts?  They’re once again making near-record profits, and all indications point to them still not making small business loans.  For the last 2 years the Republicans have whined about how the Democrats haven’t been bi-partisan, haven’t reached across the aisle, yet they’ll be even less accommodating in the house for the next 2 years.  Who are the ultimate losers in all this?

We are.

Not the politicians.  Not the corporations.  The average Joe and Jill.

Partisan politics is great for stump speeches, to rally your base, and to be able to point to your record the next time you’re up for re-election, but in the vast majority of elections 40% still voted for the other guy.  When someone is voted into office, they take an oath to serve the whole city, state, or country they serve, not just the people who just happened to vote for them.  It’s gotten to such a level of “us vs. them” that it’s not even an extreme ideology to claim “he’s not MY president” – I’m certainly guilty about saying that of Bush, although that’s as much from me thinking Cheney really ran the country as anything else.  There’s been so much joking about certain southwest states seceding it’s not even a joke any more, and you’d probably get support in the thousands of people in those states (and a larger number in the other 48) of those who would truly and actually want to see it happen.

So what can solve this problem of division?  Well, throughout history a common enemy was always a good rallying tool, but this “war on terrorism” is just another point of contention.  Your average Republican just wants to throw more money at the Pentagon and use fear to get votes.  Your average Democrat is spineless enough to cave into the fear to not lose votes.  Meanwhile anyone perceived as having any kind of ties to anything middle-eastern is seen as an enemy and if they weren’t an enemy before we’re well on the way to making them a new one.  Besides, war should always be the absolute last option, the option you try when you’ve exhausted every other one.  If any politician wants to get my vote on national defense they’d have to outline a solid plan of upgrading the power grid, safeguarding our ports, and setting up a new government agency to deal with cyber-attacks.  I’m sure your average Tea Partier or conservative would decry that as simply more government spending, though, but while making those claims the military would continue to throw billions at aircraft carriers, tanks, and jet fighters.  Because those are so useful against Al-Qaeda. 

Heck, on the subject of “the party of small government” here’s a nice little factoid:  under the modern Republican demi-god, Reagan, the government grew at a faster rate than the Carter administration.  The G.W. Bush administration created one of the largest government departments our country has ever seen.  I guess when you combine that with not putting the cost of Iraq or Afghanistan on the books, they should change that slogan to “the party of small government, except in times of war.”  Oh, wait, they’re the hawkish party too, aren’t they?

The 2 party system is certainly part of the problem.  I sometimes doubt we even have 2 parties, just 1 group of politicians who join one club or the other to help move their career.  We need a viable 3rd party, or even a 4th one but that’s not likely to happen with the way Washington is currently run.  Politics is without a doubt an insiders game, and one of the biggest promises Obama gave was to change that, but it certainly hasn’t happened and won’t as long as campaign funding is allowed in the current form.  The solution?  Make corporate political donations illegal and have a manditory public fund for legitimate candidates.  Lower the cap on individual donations so politics doesn’t remain a rich-people-only club.  Make any kind of political media 100% transparent in terms of finance.

When politics is so partisan that Republican leaders are saying their primary goal is to make Obama a 1 term president, we’re all losers.  We the people should be their primary goal, and we’re all in this together.  When our country is divided, the only winners are the corporations, and as time marches on more and more of them are owned by non-Americans or ship their money overseas.

I don’t hide the fact that I find the Republican party disgusting for giving massive gifts to corporate America, but I find the Democratic party at least as culpable for having no spine and allowing it to happen. With the Citizen’s United ruling on January 21st of this year, the floodgates opened completely in terms of buying elections. At this point in time political ads can now be paid for by any corporation and the ad itself does not have to disclose where that money came from. That doesn’t seem so bad, does it? Picture this: Imagine a television ad that shows police brutalizing people, or overbearing and threatening border guards harassing people. The ad says to vote for candidate X who will reign in police and border guard power, and slash spending on those things. Now picture that same ad paid for by North Korean or Chinese corporations, or even holding companies with terrorist sponsors. How about ads secretly paid for by the Westboro Baptist Church that wants guarantees of free speech rights at funerals regardless of state or local laws? (my simple solution for Fred Phelps is to have local laws that allow privacy in an certain radius for military funerals, as if the funeral were private property for that specific event only).

Those are just extreme examples, don’t worry, I’m not advocating those things.

The Republican butt-kissing of corporate power is so ingrained at this point that they actually have voted down The DISCLOSE Act, which would require the source of any money spent on all on political ads to be known and public. That’s corporate dollars, union dollars, and private dollars – DISCLOSE doesn’t discriminate. Seems like a no-brainer, right? I wonder what republicans have to hide – shady corporate money, maybe?

Ahh yes, those Republicans. The champions of small business. Small business like Bechtel and Koch Industries.

… wait, what?

That’s right, thanks to government business classifications, those companies and many more are called “S Corporations“. This means that they may have revenues well into the billions, but because that money is passed directly on to owners who then pay taxes, they are considered small business. What is a big business, then? One that takes in profits that are taxed and then passes those profits on to shareholders. John Boehner recently claimed that under the current Democrat tax proposal “about half of all small business income will be taxed [at a higher rate]. ” Well, if you take the actual number of businesses only 3% of REAL small business will be taxed at a higher rate. Boehner can only claim that 50% of small business income would be taxed at a higher rate when he includes multibillion dollar companies like Bechtel and Koch. These companies fit Boehner’s definition of a small business – being non-shareholder (private) companies – but have very little in common with the small business that used to line main street in your home town.

In other words, he’s holding up continuing tax breaks for Mom-and-Pop businesses because he wants to pass off Bechtel and Koch as small business without the average person knowing about it.  This is the same John Boehner who blamed the current financial crisis on “3 things – Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, and subprime lending” without saying that it was de-regulation and laws pushed through by Republican majority congresses that allowed those things to happen. They call it freedom for business, I call it corporate power screwing people over because government allowed it.

What are the Democrats doing about it? Well, once again they’re looking for their spine. At least they have their heart in the right place; the current administration wants the George W. Bush tax cuts to be extended only for the first $200,000 of a person’s income, or $250,000 for families. While Republicans claim those tax breaks would affect us all because they keep pushing the trickle-down economy lie, the real numbers tell a different story: fewer than 750,000 people, less than .25% would be affected by the top tax rate under the Democrat proposal.  Trickle-down does not work. It is simply an expression created to hide the fact that big business is allowed to feed on the average Joe and legal loopholes and laws are created every year to favor corporations and the rich. Data simply does not support any claim that trickle-down does work.

With massive evidence that the disparity between income classes only continues to grow bigger, the Republican Party of No is just pushing for more laws to make the rich richer at everyone else’s expense. Hooray for the Corporate States of America – would you trust BP, Dow Chemical, or Toyota with unchecked power?

It was 9 years ago on a Tuesday morning, the weather not unlike it was for me here this morning in central NC – high 70’s, not a cloud in the sky. I awoke to my cat, Madison, nudging me that it was time for breakfast. I sat up quickly from my half-sleep and noticed it was 8:20. I was going to be late. Normally on such a beautiful day I’d get my cycling clothes on and bike down Smith Street to downtown Brooklyn where I’d catch the Brooklyn Bridge footpath and ride over to Manhattan, usually crossing the City Hall complex through the gardens and then riding down Broadway to work at 1 NY Plaza.

But not today, I was late. I fed Madison, scrambled to get some clothes on and half walked, half jogged to the F-line subway station at Smith and 9th, about 2 blocks from where I worked. I figured I’d be about 5-10 minutes past my normal arrival time of 9:00. The subway went underground after the next stop and I fell into my normal routine of staring at the NYC subway map on wall so as to not make eye contact with anyone. About 10 minutes later the train pulled into Borough Hall station and I quickly exited and climbed the stairs to transfer over to the N/R Borough Hall station (they are not connected underground, but because I used a MetroCard the transfer was free). Another subway trip, this time the N/R line to Whitehall Street station which was right on One NY Plaza, where I worked. It was just a few minutes after 9:00 when the train pulled into the station, I got out and did my usual rush to get ahead of the crowd and started going up the stairs 2 at a time. I was about halfway up the last staircase when it happened.

New York City, especially lower Manhattan during the day, is a noisy place. Living there for a while you get acclimated to strange and loud noises. I don’t think my mind first noticed the extremely loud jet airliner noise but I do remember focusing and pondering for a second or so when I heard a massive boom that sounded not unlike a piano soundboard breaking. Yes, a piano soundboard. It’s a pretty unique noise, because all the strings snap at once and create this massive cacophony of both resonance and dissonance at the same time. A second after that, just as I was coming up to street level I heard what was clearly the sound of people screaming – not just a few people, tens of thousands of people screaming. I looked north, where the noise was coming from, and saw hundreds of people in the streets, moving south. I looked eastward toward the large, open plaza part of One NY Plaza and almost immediately saw a co-worker; Myung, and he looked scared. I can honestly say in the 4 years I had known him while working with him he had never appeared scared before. I quickly walked up to him and asked, “What’s going on?”

“F*cking terrorists, it had to be. They crashed a small Cessna into the North Twin Tower to get everyone’s attention, and then just now crashed an airliner into the South tower.”

I took that bit of news with about as much grace as anyone else would; my jaw probably dropped and I said, “What?!”

“Yeah, just now. 767 or something. It came from that way and slammed right into the twin towers.” He pointed South and drew a line through the air from the direction of Staten Island toward where the WTC would be if we had clear sight lines to it. I started walking toward Broad Street where I’d be able to look north and see the WTC. I didn’t get halfway across the plaza when I saw my boss and the other 5 members of my group. They had spotted me and were walking towards me.

Jim was my boss. He was only a few years older than me and was at first glance the perfect California surfer dude. He was tall, had perfectly spiked blonde hair, good looks, and was well tanned. I didn’t even have time to ask what was going on, when we were all within a few feet of each other he said, “We’re getting out of here, all of us, back to my place. We’re taking the ferry – it’ll be safer over in Jersey. I don’t think we should stay here or take bridges out of Manhattan. In fact, everyone in my group but myself and the other Netware/Windows guy, Phil, lived in central Jersey so it made sense that they’d all want to head back there. I thought about it for a moment and then told them that I had to get home to my roommates and to make sure my cat was safe if things got worse. I expected protest, even being ordered to go with them on the ferry to Hoboken, but Jim just nodded and said, “Ok, man, good luck. Keep in touch with the pagers.” Everyone in my department had two-way pagers with mini qwerty keyboards. Jason, my best friend at work, extended his hand, shook my hand and said simply, “good luck.”

I made my way through the crowd on the plaza to Broad Street and that’s finally when I looked up and saw the Twin Towers. The south tower almost completely obscured the view of the north tower, but I could clearly see the massive, smoldering hole where the 2nd airliner had hit. With the way winds are in lower Manhattan, this was the first time I could smell it too. Ever smell burnt electronics? It was pretty close to that, with a bit more of a sharp smell of metal burning. It was absolutely surreal to see a massive hole in what was the most iconic view of NYC for me. Jason had taken a few pictures of it before they left the 31st floor where I worked:

I continued on up South Street, walking at a pace just slow enough that I could stare in disbelief at the WTC without bumping into anyone else. My plan was to take the Brooklyn Bridge footpath across and then walk down Court Street all the way home. It was about at South Street Seaport that I noticed a lot more than the normal clutter and mess on the street. The street was teeming with fairly fresh paper. I looked down and picked one up – it was a resume. I folded it up, put it in my pocket, and wondered if that particular person were still alive or not, or if they were even there. It could have been someone scheduled to interview next week. It could have been someone there for an interview that day. For all I knew in my state of disbelief and shock it could have been someone on one of the planes – I was always too scared to go back and look at that resume and see if the owner of it had died, and now I can’t find it after having moved from NYC. At this point police had started to organize the chaos a bit and there were more than a few of them directing pedestrian and vehicle traffic. I think it was at Beekman Street that I turned north-west and started to move toward the entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge footpath. I moved up Beekman for a few blocks, past Pace University and toward Park Row. I was just going past the Downtown Hospital where there were quite a few police officers gathered and I overheard one of them saying to someone else that emergency crews were using the Brooklyn Bridge and all civilian traffic was being routed up to the Manhattan Bridge. I decided to double-time it at that point. I also realized at that point that my family and my girlfriend would be worried about me. My parents were in England on a long overdue second honeymoon so they had almost no way of getting in touch with me.

While on the few blocks from St. James Place to the Manhattan Bridge I pulled out my phone and tried a few times to reach my girlfriend, getting nothing but busy signals. I pulled out my pager and wrote up a simple text message – “I’m ok, walking home to Brooklyn right now” and sent it to her e-mail. She’d later tell me that despite the initial panic and dread of hearing the news and getting nothing but busy signals trying to call me, she almost immediately thought of checking her e-mail. My sister wasn’t so level-headed or lucky. She didn’t have an e-mail address that I knew of or remembered back then, so I sent her a text-to-speech message that would prompt her to press “1” to listen as a computerized voice read off what I put in my pager. I would find out later that she must have thought it was some sort of automatic warning/emergency response and that they were calling her because I was injured or dead. I may be a pretty technical person, but apparently my sister isn’t.

It was almost 10:00 and I was a few hundred feet from the Manhattan Bridge on Bowery Street by that point and the smell was already making it uncomfortable but not hard to breathe. I had been pausing to look up at the towers every so often and did so right then. With Columbus Park and City Hall Park being a majority of the land between where I was and the WTC, I had a clear view right at that point, and was staring right at the South Tower as it began to fall. From my vantage point I could more feel than hear the rumble of the collapse and the steel girders rattling around sounded not unlike a massive set of wind chimes. It was such an unexpected noise that I remember specifically thinking that exact thought: “wow, that sounds like a giant set of wind chimes.” A large woman in her 40’s next to me screamed, “oh, God!” and stumbled as she tried running toward the bridge in shoes clearly not meant for running. The white cloud of pulverized concrete, dust, ash, etc came rushing out in all directions and while it certainly reached where I was standing it wasn’t nearly as bad as what many saw and videotaped. One of my co-workers still in One NY Plaza managed to look down and take a few pictures of what that looked like:

I moved across the Manhattan Bridge footpath at a brisk pace at that point. About the middle of the bridge my pager went off, it was a message from Jason saying that he had seen the tower collapse and heard reports that the Pentagon and a State Department building had been hit as well. I thought the same thing he did: that it was raining airplanes and someone had declared war on us. I think I broke into a full-fledged run at that point to reach the Brooklyn side. I was thinking the worst: there would be more planes crashing and a lot more panic would devolve into looting and riots. I was going over a mental list in my head of things to do when I got home: break out the cat-carrier and get Madison into it, get some bottles of water together, get my baseball bat and pepper spray easily available, and then bunker down and prepare for armageddon.

I didn’t know what kind of chemicals I was breathing in at that point, having been in the dust cloud that spread when the south tower collapsed. The smell of burnt metal/electronics was even more pungent at that point, so as soon as I got to the Brooklyn side of the bridge I went into the first corner store I found and went to buy a bottle of water; I was going to get my bandana out of my backpack and soak it in the water and put it over my nose and mouth so I could at least have a bit of a filter from the stench. I went to the cash register to buy the bottle and a very rotund man with a thick Brooklyn accent turned to me and pointed to a small TV in the corner and said, “Didja see that sh*t? It just fell. Crazy.” He saw me getting out my wallet to pay and said, “Don’t worry about it. Pass on the good deed to someone else who might need it. We gotta all stick together with sh*t like this happening.” I gave him as heartfelt a smile as I could manage and was able to say thank you without my voice cracking too much at the really kind gesture he had just made. I went back outside and started for home, just about 2 miles straight down Court Street. I walked fast. I was in my late 20’s and in good shape but was still walking fast enough that my legs were burning a bit. All over there were police with traffic stopped letting various vehicles through. At the corner of Court and Atlantic there were police cars all over and they had quite obviously commandeered a bus and were loading it with police to drive across to Manhattan.

I don’t quite remember when I got home, I have to guess just after 10:30, because when I walked upstairs to our third floor walkup my roommate Andy was there – I hadn’t heard a peep from him before I left that morning so I thought he had gone to work. Turns out he was taking a mental health day and had only woken up around 10:00, not having any idea what had happened. He told me he kept hearing sirens go by (we lived a block from the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn/Battery tunnel) and had half-slept through most of it, only turning on the TV to CNN when he saw the smoke coming from the direction of lower Manhattan out our back window.

“I saw the south tower fall. Collapsed.” I said to him.

“Both of them,” he said somberly. “North one just a few minutes ago.”

I got out both of my pepper spray canisters and set them on the kitchen counter. Andy didn’t seem too concerned, so I held off on my plan to get my baseball bat out, and picked up Madison and sat down on the couch to watch the news. Every few minutes I’d try calling my girlfriend and my sister. At some point that morning I sent a page to my co-worker Mohammed, a fairly devout Muslim, that said, “There’s going to be a lot of angry people today, and I’m praying that you and your family will be safe. I know that who you call Allah and who I call God are one and the same.” I was already angry that this had happened and I considered myself fairly rational and not the slightest bit hawkish – I could only imagine the epitaphs of “glass parking lot!” and “nuke ’em all!” that were being muttered all across our country right now out of anger in the direction of Mecca.

The rest of my day was a lot less exciting. I got a response from my girlfriend telling me she’d call when she could get through. I got a tearful call from my sister saying that she finally figured out I was ok and would tell my parents I was ok. My other roommate Louis came home ok – he had been working on a construction crew that would have been driving past the WTC a few times that day. Andy’s girlfriend Penny came home from her teaching job looking like she had suffered at least 1 nervous breakdown. I sent a pager message to my immediate co-workers that I was home safe and got replies from all of them that they were safe as well. I personally knew at least a dozen people that worked in and around the World Trade Center and all of them were ok. A co-worker of mine had an uncle who died at the WTC, you might have heard of him. There was a man in a wheelchair in the North Tower who was being helped down the many flights of stairs by a few kind souls who ignored emergency responder advice to get out ASAP. One of the people helping him down who did not make it out was my co-worker Henry’s uncle.

Late Wednesday night I took my girlfriend’s parent’s car from NYC to North Carolina (where I live today). I drove through the night and ended up taking the long way through Maryland and West Virginia because I had heard DC would be near impossible to drive through. I had been planning that trip for a few weeks later anyway, but it seemed as good a time as any with everything that went on. We discussed seriously what had been discussed in passing many times before: we loved each other enough to want to (eventually) get married.

Funny that 9 years later and hundreds of miles away the weather would be almost identical.

[Editor’s note: Photos courtesy of Jason Consorti. Check out Jason’s WTC page. Click on images to see an enlarged version.]

Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.

-Ambrose Bierce

When I hear the phrase “we the people” I think of your average Joe Citizen. I think of people down on their luck in the inner city, struggling to make ends meet. I think of a guy living in Westchester county with an acre of land and a beautifully manicured lawn. I don’t think of Exxon. Or Pfizer. Or Halliburton. Strangely enough, though, the Supreme Court of the United States thinks of those corporations – all corporations, really – in the same category as “we the people.”

Earlier this year in January with the ruling of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, when the John Roberts led supreme court ruled that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts could not be limited under the First Amendment. This ruling was absolutely unprecedented, but was yet another small step in giving corporations power at the expense of the people. This was an absolutely partisan ruling that struck down the previous bi-partisan McCain-Feingold act that prohibited all corporations from broadcasting “electioneering communications.” In very simple terms the Supreme Court ruled that anyone is essentially “an individual” in terms of campaign donations and political broadcasts. The First Amendment, one of the few things that still separated people from corporations, was now declared by the majority opinion (5-4 almost strictly along party lines) to apply to corporations too.

Since that ruling any group whatsoever can now spend any amount of money on political advertisements that they so wish and do so in a fashion that allows them to obfuscate where the money is coming from. Combine this with the Florida court ruling that says media agencies – even ones specifically devoted toward broadcasting “the news” – are allowed to lie under the first amendment, and you have an environment perfectly set to have corporate shills and puppets running our country.

Not that they don’t already.

One of my favorite authors, William Gibson, often writes about a dystopian future where corporations rule the world by propping up cardboard cutout governments that are technically legal but amount to nothing. In these books no one thinks twice about the fact that these corporations field standing armies, assassinate anyone they deem a threat, and produce products that are known to be harmful to humans simply because they make a profit. We’re not too far from that today. This country was originally set up to be run for the people by the people – a vote by the masses would ensure the brightest would lead this country and have only the best interests in mind for the people. There already are politicians associated with certain high-power corporate entities. Joe Lieberman is widely known for being the senator from Etna, not Connecticut. The Cheney administration seemed to have the best interests of Haliburton and the military-industrial complex in mind rather than those of the country. Now that donation money can flow even more freely you’re going to see a lot more political attack ads against people the corporations don’t want in power and the people they do want in power winning more offices.

What’s one of the biggest ways a corporation gains money and power? At your expense. When Major League Baseball’s Expos were shown to be floundering economically it was decided by a consortium of MLB owners to move the team. They already had the buyer picked out, and through tax breaks, outright grants, and local government donations the Lerner Group effectively purchased the team for no money. Based on the value of the Nationals compared to the Expos it can even be argued that they were paid to take the team. Taxpayers in DC were told a stadium would boost income and revenue for the local economy, they were repeatedly told a popular lie the money would “trickle down.” from the rich to the poor. Yet here we are years later and the income gap between the poor and rich has widened, even more so in Washington DC than other areas.  [Read David Cay Johnston’s book A Free Lunch for more background on the Nationals sale].

In the 1940’s, corporations typically paid around 33% of our government’s tax income. This had failed to 15 percent in the 1990s. On the flip side, the individual tax burden has risen from 44% to over 70% in that same time frame. Corporations feel no remorse, feel no pain, don’t age, don’t worry about the environment, don’t care about the quality of food, and have only one goal: to gain as much money as possible for the few that run it. Corporations are considered people and have all those advantages, yet they don’t have the built-in regulation that most people have: a conscience. A sense of what is right and wrong. How many times can you think of a corporate disaster that cost lives or greatly damaged lives where before any government interaction that corporation jumped to do the right thing and fixed their damage. I honestly can’t think of any. Now how many times can you think of where the reverse happened, where a corporation caused massage damage or death and then dragged their feet doing the right thing and in the end never did make things whole? The Deep Horizon oil spill, the Exxon Valdez, Toyota’s acceleration/brake problem, Union Carbide’s Bopa disaster. In each of those situations I clearly remember more effort and possibly more money going into telling us they were working on fixing the problem than actually fixing the problem.

Think of how scary a world we already live in, in terms of corporate power.

Now think that the vast majority of politicians get the vast majority of their money from corporations with the express intent that the money given is to sway political decisions in corporate favor.

William Gibson, we’re not far from the ethics of Neuromancer while still being pretty far away from the technology that makes that world a wonder. I’d call that a horror book.