Corporations @ MindSay

Why aren't you capitalists outraged over this?

The Fed stepping in to help out these corporations and financial firms is despicable. They should just let those bastards fall through. And why aren't the uber capitalists in uproar over this? Many would say that capitalism and democracy instructs to let them fall. Well, IMO, I would love to see the bottom fall out from this rotting country.

Apparently we have enough tax-payer dollars to help corporations who exploit the poor but can't spend a dime to help struggling men and women have a better quality of life.

Here's a chilling thought: Wrigley Field may not be "Wrigley Field" for much longer.

Sam Zell, Chief Executive Officer of the Tribune Company, is planning to sell the Chicago Cubs and the stadium separately.  Whoever buys the stadium will have naming rights; a handful of potential buyers have already been approved by Major League Baseball.

I think any baseball fan out there would agree that this is beyond upsetting.

By now you all probably know about Wikiscanner, created by Virgil Griffith. It is a very impressive piece of software that cross-references wikipedia edits with data on the owners of the associated block of IP addresses. Basically, it tells you who owns the I.P. Addresses that are editing the information you are looking at. The results are interesting. According to Virgil, there are three common types of interesting vanadlism  and disinformation he has found:

Without naming any names, I've found three common kinds of vandalism.

1. Wholesale removal of entire paragraphs of critical information. (common for both political figures and corporations)
2. White-washing -- replacing negative/neutral adjectives with positive adjectives that mean something similar. (common for political figures)
3. Adding negative information to a competitor's page. (common for corporations)

This vandalism is usually fixed before most of us will see it, but it is interesting to see what a certain computer network is up to. Click here to see some examples.

Such as:

Pepsi deletes all long-term health effects

Of course Pepsi doesn't want this stuff known, and powerful corporations tend to go to great lengths to diminish the effects of bad publicity... that's why someone decided to delete all the long-term health effects associated with its product.

Republican Party Spills Harry Potter Spoiler

This just goes to show how evil Republicans can be.

US Department of Justice/ ATF suggesting Bush stole the 2000 election

Who knows? May be true... haha.

dems think Rush is a racist, bigot, jerkoff

Probably true as well.

someone in benny hinn ministries with a grudge?

Ditto.

While these edits are not necessarily official, nor definite edits from officials on the networks, it is from people with access to the network, which could come with inside access or some intimacy with the associated person/group. It shows the lengths that certain groups of people, in corporations or surrounding a political figure, will go to spread their biases. They want to control what you know about them, or change your perception, rather than changing themselves and proving they are good. Truth is not always a bad thing, and you can always accept the past as unchangeable and embrace the future as a chance to make a positive change.

Then again, some of these things are just in good(?) fun.

Well, election day has come and gone and what have we learned?

First, how did I do in my random predictions.

Connecticut - Lieberman ----Correct
Missouri - McCaskill -----Correct
Montana - Burns ----Uncertain (but probably wrong)
Pennsylvania - Casey ----Correct
Ohio - Brown ----Correct
Virginia - Webb ----Uncertain (but probably right)
Tennessee - Corker----Correct
Rhode Island - Chafee----Wrong
Maryland - Cardin----Correct

I had 6 out of 9 correct outright.  I called Rhode Island wrong.  Out of the two uncertain races, if things stand as they currently are, I will have 1 more correct and 1 more incorrect.  If that happens, my final score will be 7 correct and 2 wrong.  I feel pretty good about that.  I think I counted on Chafee's name recognition and history a little too much.  It would be tempted to say that I barely missed Montana if things stand, because it was so close, but it would be unfair unless I also said I barely got Virginia correct.  So it's a wash in my opinion.  Still, I wonder how many so-called political experts and pundits would have gotten as good or better results on such close contests?

Enough of pulling my own chain. 

I watched part of a PBS Frontline special about retirement plans and pensions last night and it seemed especially timely in light of my recent post about bootstrap conservatism.  The 401(k) plans that are so prominent were highlighted in the show.  It turns out that there is a large disparity in return on these plans.  The bottom 20% receive about a 4% return on their investment, while the top 20% receive as much as a 30% return on their investment.  And guess what?  The top 20% correllate with the highest salary contributors, while the bottom 20% correllate with the lowest salary contributors.  The rich get richer.  Another point was that the switch from traditional pensions to 401(k) plans was a boom to corporations.  In the 1970's, expenses associated with managing and establishing retirement plans were paid for at the rate of about 13% for employees and 87% for employers.  In the 1990's, when 401(k) programs became the latest craze, the burden had switched to about 60% for employees and 40% for employers. 

The program also discussed the use of bankruptcy by corporations to "reorganize".  They are able to cut benefits, salary, and pensions and there is nothing the employees can do.  CEO's often keep their salary and even receive bonuses.  In the case of United Airlines, the CEO was even able to keep his pension since he mandated in his contract to remain CEO that it be placed in a special trust set aside just for him rather than included with the deeply red fund for all other employees.  Another case of the already wealthy coming through a difficult situation smelling like roses, while the average worker is struggling, working longer hours for less pay, fewer benefits, and vanishing retirement security.

Here's an idea.  Since the rich will most likely bellyache and moan if the new Democratic Congress wants to reinstate taxes on the wealthiest 1%, and will most likely use the standard argument that taxes on corporations and the wealthy discourage investment and therefore will hurt the economy rather than create jobs, etc... I have a proposal.  How about a sliding tax scale for corporations and wealthy executives?  Let's base it on the disparity between the value of CEO compensation or coporate profit and the average (median) yearly salary for the lower quartile of employees.  The greater the disparity, the higher the tax, to help cover the social costs that corporate and executive greed are just shifting to the public sector in any case.

...have a vested interest against technologies that would make your life easier. The current debate in Congress about net neutrality is a perfect example. The internet is the definitive level playing ground, John Roberts' "just callin' the balls and strikes" dream, where Microsoft's search engine can get its ass handed to it by a used-to-be upstart like Google.

But the MSNBCs and other mainstream media outlets want to change all that -- they want to use Congress's authority to abolish net neutrality, so that their websites will have a distinct advantage against an upstart. The advantage would be preferential treatment in terms of internet speed. Imagine a just-started website that uses a lot of streamed video using a 28.8 modem while a corporate-backed site, which actually sucks, has a T1 in its control. Obviously, the latter would succeed, despite its product being inferior. Corporations want to recreate the internet as an unequal playing field, so that they can extract consumers' money from this cash cow that is the internet, without having to do the hard work of "creativity."

The wild card in this is Big Porn, the guys who make a brick-ton of money off the privacy that individual internet connections allow. As my amigo Jeremy G. pointed out, the current debate is centering around "free speech," which doesn't play well with the demos, who don't think "anybody can say anything" is a good idea -- makes them think of Nazis and child pornographers. Obviously, Big Porn would want to have the speedy connections given to them by the "little Bells" (Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc. -- the ones working to end net neutrality), especially since they have the cash on hand to pay for it. So that's part of the issue.

Of course, I want the internet to continue to be a democratizing force for our Western civilization, much like the Gutenberg press was. A few people don't want this, because although they don't hate freedom, they prefer their own profits over the First Amendment. Anyway, check out http://www.savetheinternet.com/ for more on this issue, and pray that you don't have a Senator like Jon Kyl that hates you, and voted to make it harder for US citizens to get loans to go to college.

Imaginative sidebar

Imagine a world where the technology that runs your music and stereo, video games, DVD, TV, internet and computer, and phone work synergistically, that is, together. You pick out a TV show you want to watch like you upload a song you want to hear, and you upload a whole movie that way, too, and it all runs through high-speed information wires. Imagine the ease of media and the consumer control this would allow. In fact, this is the obvious trend: dee-jays burning their own discs to make specific ones instead of clicking around different discs to find the song they want, me DVR recording the shows I want to see but aren't at home for. I could come up with more hypotheticals, but the important point is that this type of infrastructure would be awesome for you and me, and the technology is there, yet corporations and Congress are standing in the way simply because they haven't figured out a way to extract the maximum amount of money from you with a system like this. In the absence of that, they're forcing outdated technologies on you. There's no reason for the music industry to continue selling music on a CD-only model other than the fact that they can't make as much money off of MP3s.

Which reminds me of another thing. My generation and those younger than me are getting totally f'ed over by current politicians, who are passing on to us an unimaginably gargantuan national debt/deficit without a working infrastructure to inherit. It's like what happened in New Orleans, but everywhere! In the future, we'll need dirty, boring stuff like working sewers, electric systems, natural gas, tap water stations, roads, and on and on. And the current corporations are actually working against making that infrastructure better, because that would cut into profits -- a good example is how gasoline companies shut down US refineries and steeply dropped intra-US gasoline capacity so they could artificially lower supply while, surprise, demand went up significantly. Ding ding! Yes, Mr. Exxon-Mobil, I would like to pay $4.00 a gallon for gas!

Need it be said that monopolies are really bad for countries in the long term, which is why in the past government has intervened in the interest of the people, and good for "legacy" families, where one ancestor has created a brood of spoiled children, with the money to be in power but profoundly lacking the understanding that power requires.

That's why there's the estate tax, so that our country can actually be a meritocracy instead of a plutocracy. And, no surprise, we know there's a debate about this today.

To conclude, I want to point out two ways of being pessimistic today. There's people killing one another needlessly, which is just total and utter ignorance, and there's our leadership failing to act in our best interests, which is not necessarily as bad, but is still really bad. Philosophical and specific veiwpoints.