Friday, November 05, 2004
Good news for workers
U.S. job growth surged in October as builders, temporary agencies and other employers boosted their payrolls, partly to repair widespread hurricane damage in the Southeast, the government reported today.
Employers added 337,000 nonfarm payroll jobs last month, the biggest jump since March, according to the Labor Department, which also increased by 113,000 its estimates of the totals for August and September.
Story.
posted by chris at 5:02 PM
Why are corporations counting your vote?
The hot story in the Blogosphere is that the "erroneous" exit polls that showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states) weren't erroneous at all - it was the numbers produced by paperless voting machines that were wrong, and Kerry actually won. As more and more analysis is done of what may (or may not) be the most massive election fraud in the history of the world, however, it's critical that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability, to handle our votes?
Maybe Florida went for Kerry, maybe for Bush. Over time - and through the efforts of some very motivated investigative reporters - we may well find out (Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org just filed what may be the largest Freedom of Information Act [FOIA} filing in history), and bloggers and investigative reporters are discovering an odd discrepancy in exit polls being largely accurate in paper-ballot states and oddly inaccurate in touch-screen electronic voting states Even raw voter analyses are showing extreme oddities in touch-screen-run Florida, and eagle-eyed bloggers are finding that news organizations are retroactively altering their exit polls to coincide with what the machines ultimately said.
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Why have we let corporations into our polling places, locations so sacred to democracy that in many states even international election monitors and reporters are banned? Why are we allowing corporations to exclusively handle our vote, in a secret and totally invisible way? Particularly a private corporation founded, in one case, by a family that believes the Bible should replace the Constitution; in another case run by one of Ohio's top Republicans; and in another case partly owned by Saudi investors?
Of all the violations of the commons - all of the crimes against We The People and against democracy in our great and historic republic - this is the greatest. Our vote is too important to outsource to private corporations.
Story here and more on the voter analysis at Bob's site, at Kos' site, Wired magazine, and Salon.
I'm not saying that there was a grand conspiracy to elect Bush, although the more I think about it, the more the whole thing kinda played out like a well-rehearsed drama. Early expectations for Kerry based on exit polls, the TV pundits blathering on all night, FOX News again calling it first for Bush, calling the election in Ohio before the state had even finished counting all its ballots, Andrew Card bluffing that Bush had won at 6am Wednesday morning, Kerry's concession, Bush's win and then instant dialogue in the media that the Republicans turned out the evangelical vote and that people voted on "moral values," conveniently drawing the attention and discussion away from electronic voting or any kind of voter fraud.
Still, the point bears repeating: why are for-profit corporations controlling our voting system; corporations who have a definate interest in electing a pro-business Republican administration?
posted by chris at 4:15 PM
The stuff dreams are made of
Analysts are saying that Bush's big plans for the budget, the tax code and social security may not be possible.
Given the challenges of the president's Social Security plan amid record budget deficits, some budget analysts had hoped Bush's simultaneous call to simplify the tax code could be used to raise revenue. They reasoned that taxpayers may be willing to dig a little deeper in exchange for a tax system they see as simpler and fairer.
But Bush made it clear yesterday that was not his intention. Any tax code changes would have to bring in the same amount of revenue as the tax code they would replace, he said.
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To cope with the cost of his agenda, Bush said he would impose "spending discipline" on Congress and spur economic growth to boost tax revenue. But he has also made it clear he would not cut defense or homeland security spending, and he has promised more spending for education.
The remaining spending at Congress's discretion -- transportation, law enforcement, veterans, agriculture, housing, health research, space exploration and national parks -- totaled $346.5 billion in 2004, not much less than the budget deficit. Eliminating all nondefense, non-homeland security spending may not be enough to balance the budget and cover the cost of the president's Social Security plan.
posted by chris at 2:00 PM
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Thursday, November 04, 2004
Enough of that unity crap
A day after declaring victory in an especially divisive election, President Bush said at a news conference that "I'll reach out to everyone who shares our goals,'' adding that "I earned capital in this election, and I'm going to spend it.''
That doesn't sound like someone who's gonna play well with others, does it? Ah well, Bush got away with blaming Clinton and 9/11 for everything that went wrong in his first term. This second term is all him. He talked about an "ownership society?" He's got it. Everything that gets horribly screwed up this time should be laid directly in his lap.
posted by chris at 4:13 PM
Leftovers become compost
Haute cuisine is going green in a program that recycles restaurant and household food scraps into high-grade compost for Northern California farms and vineyards.
More than 2,200 restaurants and food businesses and 75,000 households in San Francisco take part in the clean-plate, clean-environment project, which began on an experimental basis in the late 1990s and has since become a national model for food recycling.
From Candlestick Park to Fisherman's Wharf, table scraps are deposited in green plastic cans and then converted into Four Course Compost.
The result is less waste in landfills, lower garbage pickup costs, vibrant vines and vegetables - and a cheerful sense of completing a circle.
Story.
posted by chris at 2:05 PM
On the road to privatization
President Bush said on Thursday he planned to start work immediately on reforming America's ailing Social Security retirement system and predicted a long slog ahead
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Bush said reforming Social Security would be a priority during his second term and he predicted it would be very tough and costly.
"But the cost of doing nothing ... is much greater than the cost of reforming the system today," he added.
Funny, that sounds like his reasoning for invading Iraq. Is this the logic he's going to use for everything?
posted by chris at 1:41 PM
Witnesses to the looting
In the weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi looters loaded powerful explosives into pickup trucks and drove the material away from the Al Qaqaa ammunition site, according to a group of U.S. Army reservists and National Guardsmen who said they witnessed the looting.
The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft because they were outnumbered by looters. Soldiers with one unit — the 317th Support Center based in Wiesbaden, Germany — said they sent a message to commanders in Baghdad requesting help to secure the site but received no reply.
The witnesses' accounts of the looting, the first provided by U.S. soldiers, support claims that the American military failed to safeguard the munitions. Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency — the U.N. nuclear watchdog — and the interim Iraqi government reported that about 380 tons of high-grade explosives had been taken from the Al Qaqaa facility after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003. The explosives are powerful enough to detonate a nuclear weapon.
Now that the election's over, can we maybe start investigating this a little more?
posted by chris at 1:38 PM
An unholy mix
The two things you're not supposed to discuss in polite conversation: religion and politics. And this election (and future elections to come, perhaps) have mashed those two together in a frightening way for a country that was founded on the separation of church and state.
But in this election, evangelicals said they were motivated to turn out because of Mr. Bush's support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, prompted by a decision a year ago by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court allowing such marriages in the state. In addition, Republicans said evangelical voters had an extra incentive because 11 states had amendments to ban same-sex marriage on the ballot…
…Mr. Minnery said that evangelicals turned out in large numbers for Mr. Bush in 2004 because they knew him better than they did in 2000 and recognized the biblical phrasing in many of his speeches. "In his first term, he was the most openly Christian president we have had in our lifetime," Mr. Minnery said. "And that endeared many Christian people to him."'
…Significantly, polls on Election Day showed that the number of voters who said they were concerned about moral values - who voted in overwhelming numbers for Mr. Bush - was higher than those who said they were worried about the war, terrorism, the economy or jobs.
posted by chris at 9:27 AM
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Wednesday, November 03, 2004
The roundup: from despair to hope
Tbogg
SF Gate
Tony
Tony #2
Chris
John Marshall
Kos
Atrios
Obama
Deep breath. . . . And move on.
posted by chris at 4:12 PM
Have a pesticide and a smile!
Instead of paying hefty fees to international chemical companies for patented pesticides, [Indian farmers] are reportedly spraying their cotton and chilli fields with Coca-Cola.
In the past month there have been reports of hundreds of farmers turning to Coke in Andhra Pradesh and Chattisgarh states.
But as word gets out that soft drinks may be bad for bugs and a lot cheaper than anything that Messrs Monsanto, Shell and Dow can offer, thousands of others are expected to switch.
Gotu Laxmaiah, a farmer from Ramakrishnapuram in Andra Pradesh, said he was delighted with his new cola spray, which he applied this year to several hectares of cotton. "I observed that the pests began to die after the soft drink was sprayed on my cotton," he told the Deccan Herald newspaper.
Story.
posted by chris at 3:41 PM
The market takes care of its own
Wall Street threw a victory rally for President Bush today, driving up the entire market -- especially the stocks that investors believe will benefit from even more dominant Republican control of the federal government.
While Wall Street had insisted before that it didn't matter to the market who won, so long as there was a clear winner, today's rally was a public observance of the economic winners and losers resulting from four more years of Bush policies.
The stock market may have been cheering, but the money markets were busily driving down the value of the dollar and pushing up interest rates in response to the prospect that Bush's economic policies will continue.
With Republicans in ever stronger control of the House and Senate, tax cuts will not be rolled back and record budget deficits will continue, the traders believe. Currency traders were predicting the dollar will continue to fall and interest rates will rise rapidly.
And the rich get richer.
posted by chris at 3:38 PM
Wallow in Chaos
From the San Francisco Gate:
It simply boggles the mind: we've already had four years of some of the most appalling and abusive foreign and domestic policy in American history, some of the most well-documented atrocities ever wrought on the American populace and it's all combined with the biggest and most violently botched and grossly mismanaged war since Vietnam, and much of the nation still insists in living in a giant vat of utter blind faith, still insists on believing the man in the White House couldn't possibly be treating them like a dog treats a fire hydrant.
Inexplicable? Not really. People want to believe. They want to trust their leaders, even against all screaming, neon-lit evidence and stack upon stack of flagrant, impeachment-grade lie. They simply cannot allow that Dubya might really be an utter boob and that they are being treated like an abused, beaten housewife who keeps coming back for more, insisting her drunk husband didn't mean it, that she probably had it coming, that the cuts and bruises and blood and broken bones are all for her own good. . .
This election's outcome, this heartbreaking proof of a nation split more deeply and decisively than ever, it simply reinforces the feeling among much of the educated populace: It is a weirdly embarrassing time to be an American. It is jarring and oddly shattering and makes you rethink what it really means to be a part of this country. The answer: It doesn't mean much at all. Not really. Not anymore.
This is the common wisdom on the progressive Left. Those first four toxic Bush years? A fluke. A phantasm. A stolen election. A gaff, a mugging, a crime. But this? An election this close makes you reconsider. Maybe, after all, we aren't nearly as far along as we think. Maybe we're not all that sophisticated or nuanced or respectable a nation as we sometimes dare to dream.
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Apparently, there are lessons yet to be learned. Apparently, we must hit some sort of new low between now and 2008, attain some sort of seriously vicious status in the world before we will snap out of it. You think?
This much is clear: We are not, with a grim Bush victory, headed for buoyancy and friendship and sincere hope for something new and refreshing. We are not, with another four years of what we just endured, headed toward any sort of easing of bitter tension, a sense of levity, or sexual openness, or true education, or gender respect, or a lightness of spirit and of step.
Maybe the best we can hope for, at this ominous and slightly sickening moment, is one hell of a lot more patience.
(Thanks, Caroline.)
posted by chris at 2:42 PM
A rant
I simply cannot understand how this man could screw up so many things in this country and the world and still be re-elected. And win the popular vote. How do you destroy the economy, lose millions of jobs, run up the largest deficit in history, plunge the US into an illegitimate war, constantly and continually lie to the American people, make the US and the world LESS safe and still win the support of a majority of the country? Is it fear? Is it playing to the base? Is it dirty tricks? I just don’t get it.
Bush will take this as a mandate – he got the popular vote, Kerry conceded the electoral votes, and the House and Senate both gained Republican seats. I’m sure they’ll take this and run with it. Republicans have been waiting for this; they’ve spent decades perfecting their skills, polishing a right-wing echo chamber, utilizing language to their advantage, massaging their base. And they’ll lead this country down a dark and dangerous path to a few places we probably can’t yet imagine, but many more we can guess: more war, less taxes for the rich, more fear, less freedoms, more privatization, less regulation, more for business, less for the poor, more conservatism, less compassion.
But this wasn’t an overwhelming victory. Bush still won by a bare margin. Nearly half of the people in this country did not condone Bush’s last four years of “catastrophic success.” And those people aren’t going to suddenly come under his spell. Republicans have been working towards this for decades. The Democrats just got their shit together in the past couple years. And that was with the help of people who probably don’t consider themselves Democrats but were adamantly opposed to Bush.
So go ahead, Mr. President, claim your mandate. Continue on your destructive path of lies, greed and fear-mongering. Things have to get worse before they can get better. And after four more years of this shit, I can’t imagine that this country is going to be better off. And at some point, the people are going to push back.
posted by chris at 2:14 PM
Everyone’s a uniter
Mr. Kerry called Mr. Bush at 11 a.m. this morning at the White House, aides said.
"He said, 'Congratulations, Mr. President,' '' Mr. Kerry's press secretary, Stephanie Cutter said. She said Mr. Kerry, in what she described as a "courteous conversation," told the president that he thought it was time to "unify this country.'
Yeah, cause that worked so well last time.
Story.
posted by chris at 2:05 PM
Damn
damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damd damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn
(And damn blogger for not letting me post this sooner.)
posted by chris at 2:03 PM
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Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Wal-Mart and Fox team up to root for their man
Dick Cheney's favorite news outlet will be broadcasting live coverage of the election results tonight at Wal-Mart stores across the country. So you can still buy your made-in-China merchandise and not miss any of the hot election action.
posted by chris at 2:32 PM
Bribes for guinea pigs
An Environmental Protection Agency proposal to study young children's exposure to pesticides has sparked a flurry of internal agency protests, with several career officials questioning whether the survey will harm vulnerable infants and toddlers.
The EPA announced this month that it was beginning a two-year investigation, partially funded by the American Chemical Council, of how 60 children in Duval County, Fla., absorb pesticides and other household chemicals. The chemical industry funding initially prompted some environmentalists to question whether the study would be biased, and some rank- and-file agency scientists are now questioning whether the plan will exploit financially strapped families.
In exchange for participating for two years in the Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study, which involves infants and children up to age 3, the EPA will give each family using pesticides in their home $970, some children's clothing and a camcorder that parents can keep.
EPA officials in states such as Georgia and Colorado sent e-mail messages to each other last week suggesting the study lacked safeguards to ensure that low-income families would not be swayed into exposing their children to hazardous chemicals in exchange for money and high-tech gadgetry. Pesticide exposure has been linked to neurological problems, lung damage and birth defects.
More.
posted by chris at 2:31 PM
These guys can't be happy
The Army has extended by two months the Iraq tours of about 6,500 soldiers, citing a need for experienced troops through the Iraqi elections scheduled for late January.
No official statement was released, but the Pentagon’s public affairs office posted an article on its Web site Saturday that said 3,500 soldiers of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, and 3,000 from the 1st Infantry Division headquarters will remain in Iraq at least two months longer than planned.
The Army had scheduled those units for 10-month deployments, rather than the usual 12-month tours, to stagger the rotation of forces in and out of Iraq this winter to avoid overburdening transportation systems. Instead they will remain to provide security through the elections.
The Pentagon article spoke of “the troops’ frustration” over having their tours extended. It said some of the soldiers had been told they would be leaving Iraq as early as November. Instead they will stay through January.
Story, via Tbogg.
posted by chris at 2:30 PM
Wal-Mart not so big on employee health care
[Wal-Mart], despite its popularity with consumers, has grown accustomed to being accused of crushing Main Street merchants with its sprawling stores and low prices and of driving down wages for workers across the retail industry. And more than a million former and current female Wal-Mart employees are part of a sex discrimination lawsuit that the company is fighting.
Now, Wal-Mart finds itself under attack for what critics see as its miserly approach to employee health care, which they say is forcing too many of its workers and their families into state insurance programs or making them rely on charity care by hospitals.
Wal-Mart vigorously defends its health care policies, saying it offers affordable coverage for all employees.
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A survey by Georgia officials found that more than 10,000 children of Wal-Mart employees were in the state's health program for children at an annual cost of nearly $10 million to taxpayers. A North Carolina hospital found that 31 percent of 1,900 patients who described themselves as Wal-Mart employees were on Medicaid, while an additional 16 percent had no insurance at all.
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The company says it spent about $1.3 billion of its $256 billion in revenue last year on employee health care to insure about 537,000 people, or about 45 percent of its work force. Wal-Mart says that 23 percent of its employees are not eligible for coverage, but that it covers 58 percent of those who are.
That compares with an insured rate of 96 percent of eligible full-time or part-time employees of Costco Wholesale, the discount retailer that is Wal-Mart's closest competitor nationwide. Costco employees - most of whom are not represented by a union - become eligible for health insurance after three months working full time, or six months part time.
At Wal-Mart, which has no union employees, many who work full time must wait six months to become eligible. Part-time workers are not eligible for at least two years. Because of turnover, some employees never work long enough to become eligible.
If there is any place where Wal-Mart's labor costs find support, it is Wall Street, where Costco has taken a drubbing from analysts who say its labor costs are too high. Costco's pretax profit margin is only 2.7 percent of revenue, less than half Wal-Mart's margin of 5.5 percent.
Wal-Mart now asks employees to pay 33 percent of the company's cost of providing insurance, but says it plans to reduce that to 30 percent. So far, Costco has resisted pressure to increase employees' share of health care premiums beyond a planned target of 8 percent in 2007, reasoning that too many of their workers would be forced to drop coverage.
Story.
posted by chris at 2:27 PM
May the Force be with us
posted by chris at 10:54 AM
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Monday, November 01, 2004
One thing before you go
As much as this election season has been focused on Bush vs. Kerry, there’s something bigger at stake here than the differences between two politicians. This election is really a referendum on the past four years. The rest of the world is watching us to see if the American people truly condone all that Bush has done to us and the world since he was elected appointed President in 2000.
Do we condone lying to the American people and the world to attack a country that had nothing to do with the war on terror?
Do we condone the killing of thousands of American soldiers and thousands more Iraqi civilians for an illegitimate war?
Do we condone torture of prisoners in our secret camps in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay?
Do we condone the bombing of innocent civilians?
Do we condone stubborn arrogance as a way to interact with the world?
Do we condone under-funding social programs in order to pay for an illegal war and give tax breaks to the rich?
Do we condone the destruction and/or disregard for our environment?
It's up to us to send a clear message to these people who think they can trample our civil liberties, our freedoms, and our dignity in the name of fear and greed. VOTE.
UPDATE: Bob gives us nine more reasons why this election is so important.
posted by chris at 2:57 PM
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