May 5th. That is the day I turn my money over from direct deposit on bank of america over to onpoint in portland oregon. A Credit union.
I have been watching the headlines. I was tempted when twinkies went bust to nab them up and ebay them seeing them go for 100s of dollars. I'm enraged. I'm enraged for a lot of reasons but one of the key ones is that almost all of the headlines blamed the unions and not management. How could the unions be at fault when executives walked home with million dollars severance packages and twinkies were an all time american past time. More over how could the teamsters union simply sit back and stare at things. See I've been listening. I've listening to politicans I'd rather not and while I disagree vehemently with them what they've said has given me a lot of thoughts, join with me after the fold because I'm going to show you how I feel and why big labor needs to change tactics
My father, God bless him, still alive, and still a pain in my ass quiet frequently (he resents my former uploads. I'm sorry dad we all have emotional moments) is also among other things the number 3 best REXX programmer in the country roughly as is friends on linkin with the most profilic programmer. He was hired onto bank of america for a 18 month contract and let go at 7 months. Needless to say that since we banking with BOA and I know about their fractional reserve and compouding interest advantage it feels like sweet victory to pull my money out and put it into the local portland economy. I realize this is rambling but my father has lost so many jobs and switched around so much lately due to the globalization chaos that I think it would behoove me to tell you that big labor needs to embrace internationalism.
Every aspect of our international trade system has left me baffled and feeling like "Who benefits from this?" see just today alone we found out a vehicle we secured for this received a good car fax report and was certified by the toyota company who missed a critical detail. Over the last 7 weeks the car has fried 3 separate batteries and seeing this we knew there were deeper problems. Today Toyota looked, in spite of having investigated it before and found out that it seems a previous owner had spliced into the lines... Who is going to be held accountable is anyones guess but the dealer says it's the manufacturer and that the warranty on the repair is expired because of the aftermarket destruction to our vehicle by what appears to be a previous owner. we're behind held to account for something someone else did and I'm sitting here and all I can think in all of it is that Businesses in this country are set up for short term gain and long term loss. Keep on polluting, keep on triggering global warming, keep on chugging along . I don't expect global warming to end life on the planet. maybe i'm misguided and i'm not reading the signs but the more dire it looks the more i think that it will kill some of the worst polluters and because they die Co2 levels will go down. Maybe i'm a cynic in this. I want to save them but they don't listen. our WHOLE trade system si based on a credit card like model. Benefit today: pay like hell tomorrow, even the most conservative elements of it seem to operate on this principle, the suppliers themselves don't seem to forecast beyond a couple of days if they did they've be throwing untold billions at stopping co2 emissions and greening faster then you can count. They'd look at what china is doing and why china is greening and they wouldn't even think twice. They wouldn't have to "Doubt it" because they could see the desertification in china with their right brains. Also jesus in the bible said to be stewarts of the planet, not trash it to fulfill the prophecies faster so if they're right they're comitting a sin by using the bible as justificaiton. Jesus does not endorse the idea of spurring the apopacalypse faster. He doesn't even endorse doing nothing which he'd ALSO consider a sin. he was very explicit about bneing stewarts. Stewarts are not passive.
so you have to behold my bafflement and stuff when teamsters are blamed for the catastrophe at twinkies when i've watched ENRON fail due to kenneth lay, one of the defining moments of my 14 year old youth when the "Smartest men in the room" washed up on the river dead, and then bush. Oh sweet mercy bush, who was about as dumb as they come and Dick cheney who had had a heart attack at 30 and irrationally feared death becaues it had been chasing him almost his whole life
Bush proved to be yet another village idiot. And romney? oh god.
So you have to bear with me when I don't believe that executives behind twinkies were actually competently managing the factory and I really don't care what the headlines say when the conventional wisdom has been so consistently misguided my whole life. I've had all of the experts i've ever been told I should defer to make a big speech and then fall on their own swords my whole life starting at 13 and It's become my dawning realization that incompetence is relatively common and incompetent people have a tendency to get into high positions in society.
quiet naturally I realize I'm not the smartest myself but I hold myself as sharper the the average knife in the draw and certainly smarter then those merely think they are smarter then average and don't know about that cognative bias.
naturally I drifted towards philosophers like Noami klein by the tender age of 22 and Had read the shock doctorine very early into my life... I've been a kossack sense I was 17 and that roughly 10 years ago.
I've read so much of your stuff that it's kind of hard to believe it or how much smarter this community is.
enough with the flattery however because I've been rambling.
but Klein put forward in her next documentary a movie gottze called the TAKE and it starts to document the workers take over of shut down factories after the 2001 mini recesion that was to us a sneeze and to argentina a full blown pnunomic crisis, anyways, Argentina had quiet a bit of an uprisng and a run on the banks after wards and suffice to say we 1st world problems that are becoming more 3rd world by the day.
So here's my thing. The teamsters are so locked into the US VS THEM mentality that it never even OCCURED to them to put in a competitive bid for Twinkies, or Ford for that matter.
if we hadn't have bailed out Ford or Twinkies the unions might have gotten the brilliant idea to buy the companies out from their incompetent and blamestorming centric managers
but it hasn't occured to them. And this makes 2. and I won't sit through a 3rd knowing what I know and not say what I feel.
John Galt is a figment of our imaginations. There is a myth going around of worker's being unable to do what management has done. but John galt is the bogeyman in the room. He might have invented the train but he died a olong time ago and even if he protested these days we know enough to pick the train up while he ties himself to the tracks and tries to gummy up the works to ungummy them run his train and run him straight over with his own train. I say this kind of rhetoric not because I suggest it's what we should do. it's a metaphor and I don't endorse violence but the thing is that "going galt" isn't a threat. These people are elitist who imagine themselves as so central to the universe the world is unable to go on without them. how it art not so.
Politely speaking if John galt will not pay us a decent wage we can run the factory without him, but he can't run it without us.
http://www.youtube.com/...
thus if you work for a unionized company that is going under I have some words of wisdom for you. Save. Organize people that are saving money and be prepared to buy the company out from under your incompetent management.
The SECOND thing I need to say about the global labor structure as someone that is free enough from it to reflect on it is that with the recent factory collapses in Bangadelsh and the horror stories in china like Foxx conn which for all their communist rhetoric are hostile to unions the way to deal with these cocksuckers is to find a way to organize in these third world countries and embrace internationalist globalist labor tactics because a s labor rights evolve here people will be pushing to get their manufacturing over seas and their programing over seas and how you deal with that is to work to raise wages in forgein countries and organize for a Global tax policy that charges all countries the same way.
This would mean finally that businesses could go nowhere. they could not threaten us with leaving the country, they couldn't find cheaper labor elsewhere and we'd finally have them right where the left needs them....