Highway 99
Monday, October 31, 2005
If you wonder why the American auto industry is in bad shape, check out the pay and benefits package that went to employees of the now-bankrupt Delphi auto-parts giant:
WHEN THE LARGEST INDUSTRIAL BANKRUPTCY in American history happened more than a week ago, Washington barely noticed. But the fight between the automotive parts giant Delphi Corporation and its unions could take a big bite out of taxpayers' wallets.
The rhubarb started when Delphi, the former in-house parts supplier for General Motors, warned that it was near financial collapse. It couldn't afford to keep paying its workers $25 to $31 an hour, about $52,000 to $64,500 a year--plus benefits. Delphi Chairman Robert "Steve" Miller wanted the union to agree to a 60 percent wage cut to $10 to $12 an hour and other concessions. He also sought a bailout from GM, which provides most of Delphi's business. Both GM and the UAW balked, so Delphi filed for bankruptcy.
No one likes to see workers lose their jobs or see their pay and benefits cut. But the industrial welfare state that the union created with the automakers' blessings no longer makes economic sense, if it ever did.
DOMESTIC AUTOMAKERS have had to pay off the UAW for productivity improvements--more automation, flexible job rules and job cuts--which were needed to compete with foreign competitors. This invariably required putting more people on the private dole. For example:
Get paid for no work. More than 12,000 auto workers, including 4,000 from Delphi, are put in a "jobs bank," meaning that they show up at a plant and spend the day doing no work. Others do community service. Including healthcare and pension benefits, the cost runs from $65 to $71 an hour per worker--$135,000 to almost $150,000 a year. This program comes after a worker is laid off and has exhausted their company-financed unemployment benefits, which are equal to 95 percent of their former pay. The total cost to the industry is $4.5 billion a year and growing.
Retire early with full benefits. A "30 years and out" rule lets workers who are hired as early as 18 retire before they turn 50. If their health is good, they collect a pension and fully paid healthcare for another 35 years or more. By contrast, Miller says, at Delphi salaried staffers have to go on Medicare after they turn 65.
Work nine and a half months, take off two and a half months. Workers annually receive six weeks of vacation and 16 holidays. Every two years, they add a holiday for state or federal Election Days--a de facto political contribution to the Democratic party.
This kind of welfare was tolerable when the Big Three automakers dominated the market. But GM, which once claimed 50 percent of the American market, is clinging to about 26 percent today. Even during what is supposed to be an economic recovery, automakers and their suppliers are struggling; GM lost $1.6 billion in the third quarter alone. Ford lost $284 million overall in the third quarter, with its North American auto operations losing $1.3 billion. And both Ford and GM say they plan to cut more factories.
GENERAL MOTORS has a more perilous situation than Social Security. At least that federal program can claim three workers for every retiree. GM has more than three times as many retirees and dependents as it has workers. Delphi's Miller and the Bank of America warn that GM eventually could go bankrupt.
It doesn't help matters that salaried workers pay more for healthcare benefits--about 27 percent of costs--than union workers do.
"Paying $65 an hour for someone mowing the lawn at one of our plants is just not going to cut it anywhere in industrial America for very long," Miller said at a press conference last week.
The feeling is shared. When U.S. Rep. David Camp visited farmers in his Michigan district last week, says spokesman Sage Eastman, one of them said about the auto pay package: "(Expletive), what am I doing farming?"
The UAW grudgingly recognizes the problem. Its most recent contract included modest healthcare co-payments for workers. On Monday it opened an agreement with General Motors to give $1 billion a year worth of healthcare relief (GM spends almost $6 billion annually on healthcare).
But Delphi will remain a sore point because factories can be closed and labor contracts torn up in bankruptcy. To complicate matters, the company gave its top managers an 18-month severance package a day before the filing as a way to keep them around through the restructuring.
UAW President Ron Gettelfinger called the severance package "a disgusting spectacle." An "angry" Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm lashed out at "an apparent indifference in Washington to the human pain that so-called free trade has brought to average, patriotic, hard-working citizens who believe in keeping promises."
And UAW leaders say they aren't ruling out a strike if the bankruptcy court nullifies its Delphi contract. That would shut down an important part of the national economy, since automakers rely on daily parts shipments to make vehicles. Delphi's Miller says a strike would escalate the number of plant closings and job cuts. But a walkout would cost GM business and pressure it to cave--a course the company has traditionally chosen.
A strike would also create a public spectacle which could pressure the Bush administration and Congress to step in with a bailout. Don't be surprised if Michigan's governor and Democratic congressional delegation propose a federal worker-focused package of subsidy and trade protectionism. They put together a similar wish list two years ago when "offshoring" or the outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries became popular.
And they may have a powerful ally in Sen. Hillary Clinton, who has a Delphi plant in New York. Clinton called Miller last week to chat about the factory, as well as pension and healthcare issues.
ANY BAILOUT SUBSIDIES of workers or companies should be a tough sell. Delphi isn't a saint. The federal government has found accounting misconduct in the company and a criminal investigation is ongoing.
Besides, the automakers and their workers made their welfare pact and now need to wean themselves from it. Congress is besieged with spending requests for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is $23 billion in the hole and growing. Domestic automakers would love to have taxpayers subsidize their healthcare costs, but Americans may begrudge financing gold-plated benefits that many don't have themselves.
The UAW and mismanagement have already bankrupted one company. The industrial welfare state shouldn't drag Uncle Sam down with it.
In all the hubbub over the Valerie Plame/CIA leak investigation, why is no attention being paid to the New York Times' May 31 outing of an entire CIA airline?
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Not sure what to make of this.
On the one hand, if there's any truth to the allegations, I assume the British know what they're doing and have damn good reason for doing it. On the other hand, we're talking about allegations made by a government composed of crazy mullahs and reported by Agence Frog-Presse, which means their credibility is on a par with graffiti you'd find in your local public toilet. Be interesting to see if this turns out to be merely the accusation du jour, or if it keeps developing into a major diplomatic explosion.Iran 'has proof' of British role in bombings
TEHRAN (AFP) - Iran said it has proof that Britain was involved in a double bomb attack last week that killed six people and injured more than 100 in the restive southwestern city of Ahvaz.
The British embassy in Tehran immediately rejected the allegations, which came amid mounting tensions between Tehran and London over suspected Iranian meddling in Iraq and the Islamic republic's nuclear programme.
"Information obtained by the concerned organs show that Britain is the main accused in the recent events," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told state television.
"The information shows that Britain is seeking to create insecurity in our country by interfering in our internal affairs," he added, warning that the consequences "could be worrying for the British."
Britain said the allegations were baseless.
"We reiterate our total rejection of these accusations as well as our condemnation of these terrorist attacks," a senior british diplomat told AFP.
"We have made it clear to the Iranian authorities that the British government and British forces in Iraq stand ready to assist in preventing attacks of this kind."
The bomb attacks Saturday killed six people and injured more than 100 in Ahvaz, the capital of the oil-rich Khuzestan province, and on Tuesday police said they had defused a large bomb planted under a bridge in the city.
Several Iranian officials, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have already said that Britain was a suspect -- but had generally stopped short of claiming they possessed evidence directly implicating Britain.
Ahvaz, dominated by ethnic minority Arabs, has been hit by a wave of unrest this year, including riots in April and a series of car bombings prior to Iran's presidential election in June.
After these incidents, the finger was also pointed at Britain, which has troops based just across the border in Iraq.
The Iranian allegations against Britain come in the wake of similar allegations made by Britain concerning Iran's alleged interference in Iraq.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other senior officials have said there is evidence of an Iranian connection to a series of deadly attacks on British troops in southern Iraq.
Britain is also playing a leading role in efforts to force Iran to limit its nuclear fuel activities, seen by the West as a cover for weapons development.
Last month the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency warned Iran it faced being hauled before the UN Security Council if it persisted with its uranium enrichment activities in violation of an agreement with Britain, France and Germany.
Iran has said it is willing to resume talks with the EU-3, but has refused to return to a full freeze of enrichment-related work -- the source of widespread concerns that Iran could acquire atomic arms.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
I was riveted, too.
This trial had better get at least as much coverage as the O.J. trial. But I won't hold my breath.Iraqis Riveted by Televised Saddam Trial
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The moment Saddam Hussein appeared, a Shiite housewife spat on the screen and then sat gnawing her fingers, seething, as her family crowded around the television. When the judge addressed the ousted dictator as "Mr. Saddam," she burst: "The beast Saddam, you mean!"
[. . .] Some Iraqis watched with visceral hatred or fear, some with joy, others with bitterness or even nostalgia. But above all they watched enthralled, unable to remove their eyes from the image of their once all-powerful leader reduced to a defendant on trial Wednesday. [. . .]
I can't figure out why the blogosphere isn't making a big deal of this. It sure seems like a big deal to me.
This deserves to be publicized as much as possible. It's from what sounds like a great new book, "Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy," by way of Tech Central Station. I'm already planning to buy the book.One of the most persistent themes in Chomsky's work has been class warfare. He has frequently lashed out against the "massive use of tax havens to shift the burden to the general population and away from the rich" and criticized the concentration of wealth in "trusts" by the wealthiest one percent. The American tax code is rigged with "complicated devices for ensuring that the poor -- like eighty percent of the population -- pay off the rich."
But trusts can't be all bad. After all, Chomsky, with a net worth north of $2,000,000, decided to create one for himself. A few years back he went to Boston's venerable white-shoe law firm, Palmer and Dodge, and with the help of a tax attorney specializing in "income-tax planning" set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets from Uncle Sam. He named his tax attorney (every socialist radical needs one!) and a daughter as trustees. To the Diane Chomsky Irrevocable Trust (named for another daughter) he has assigned the copyright of several of his books, including multiple international editions.
Chomsky favors the estate tax and massive income redistribution -- just not the redistribution of his income. No reason to let radical politics get in the way of sound estate planning.
When I challenged Chomsky about his trust, he suddenly started to sound very bourgeois: "I don't apologize for putting aside money for my children and grandchildren," he wrote in one email. Chomsky offered no explanation for why he condemns others who are equally proud of their provision for their children and who try to protect their assets from Uncle Sam. Although he did say that the tax shelter is okay because he and his family are "trying to help suffering people."
Indeed, Chomsky is rich precisely because he has been such an enormously successful capitalist. Despite the anti-profit rhetoric, like any other corporate capitalist he has turned himself into a brand name. As John Lloyd puts it, writing critically in the lefty New Statesman, Chomsky is among those "open to being 'commodified' -- that is, to being simply one of the many wares of a capitalist media market place, in a way that the badly paid and overworked writers and journalists for the revolutionary parties could rarely be."
Chomsky's business works something like this. He gives speeches on college campuses around the country at $12,000 a pop, often dozens of times a year.
Can't go and hear him in person? No problem: you can go online and download clips from earlier speeches-for a fee. You can hear Chomsky talk for one minute about "Property Rights"; it will cost you seventy-nine cents. You can also by a CD with clips from previous speeches for $12.99.
But books are Chomsky's mainstay, and on the international market he has become a publishing phenomenon. The Chomsky brand means instant sales.
As publicist Dana O'Hare of Pluto Press explains: "All we have to do is put Chomsky's name on a book and it sells out immediately!"
Putting his name on a book should not be confused with writing a book, because his most recent volumes are mainly transcriptions of speeches, or interviews that he has conducted over the years, put between covers and sold to the general public. You might call it multi-level marketing for radicals. Chomsky has admitted as much: "If you look at the things I write -- articles for Z Magazine, or books for South End Press, or whatever -- they are mostly based on talks and meetings and that kind of thing. But I'm kind of a parasite. I mean, I'm living off the activism of others. I'm happy to do it."
Chomsky's marketing efforts shortly after September 11 give new meaning to the term "war profiteer." In the days after the tragedy, he raised his speaking fee from $9,000 to $12,000 because he was suddenly in greater demand. He also cashed in by producing another instant book. Seven Stories Press, a small publisher, pulled together interviews conducted via email that Chomsky gave in the three weeks following the attack on the Twin Towers and rushed the book to press. His controversial views were hot, particularly overseas. By early December 2001, they had sold the foreign rights in nineteen different languages. The book made the bestseller list in the United States, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand. It is safe to assume that he netted hundreds of thousands of dollars from this book alone.
Over the years, Chomsky has been particularly critical of private property rights, which he considers simply a tool of the rich, of no benefit to ordinary people. "When property rights are granted to power and privilege, it can be expected to be harmful to most," Chomsky wrote on a discussion board for the Washington Post. Intellectual property rights are equally despicable. According to Chomsky, for example, drug companies who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing drugs shouldn't have ownership rights to patents. Intellectual property rights, he argues, "have to do with protectionism."
Protectionism is a bad thing -- especially when it relates to other people. But when it comes to Chomsky's own published work, this advocate of open intellectual property suddenly becomes very selfish. It would not be advisable to download the audio from one of his speeches without paying the fee, warns his record company, Alternative Tentacles. (Did Andrei Sakharov have a licensing agreement with a record company?) And when it comes to his articles, you'd better keep your hands off. Go to the official Noam Chomsky website and the warning is clear: "Material on this site is copyrighted by Noam Chomsky and/or Noam Chomsky and his collaborators. No material on this site may be reprinted or posted on other web sites without written permission." However, the website does give you the opportunity to "sublicense" the material if you are interested.
Radicals used to think of their ideas as weapons; Chomsky sees them as a licensing opportunity.
Chomsky has even gone the extra mile to protect the copyright to some of his material by transferring ownership to his children. Profits from those works will thus be taxed at his children's lower rate. He also extends the length of time that the family is able to hold onto the copyright and protect his intellectual assets.
In October 2002, radicals gathered in Philadelphia for a benefit entitled "Noam Chomsky: Media and Democracy." Sponsored by the Greater Philadelphia Democratic Left, for a fee of $15 you could attend the speech and hear the great man ruminate on the evils of capitalism. For another $35, you could attend a post-talk reception and he would speak directly with you.
During the speech, Chomsky told the assembled crowd, "A democracy requires a free, independent, and inquiring media." After the speech, Deborah Bolling, a writer for the lefty Philadelphia City Paper, tried to get an interview with Chomsky. She was turned away. To talk to Chomsky, she was told, this "free, independent, and inquiring" reporter needed to pay $35 to get into the private reception.
Corporate America is one of Chomsky's demons. It's hard to find anything positive he might say about American business. He paints an ominous vision of America suffering under the "unaccountable and deadly rule of corporations." He has called corporations "private tyrannies" and declared that they are "just as totalitarian as Bolshevism and fascism." Capitalism, in his words, is a "grotesque catastrophe."
But a funny thing happened on the way to the retirement portfolio.
Chomsky, for all of his moral dudgeon against American corporations, finds that they make a pretty good investment. When he made investment decisions for his retirement plan at MIT, he chose not to go with a money market fund, or even a government bond fund. Instead, he threw the money into blue chips and invested in the TIAA-CREF stock fund. A look at the stock fund portfolio quickly reveals that it invests in all sorts of businesses that Chomsky says he finds abhorrent: oil companies, military contractors, pharmaceuticals, you name it.
When I asked Chomsky about his investment portfolio he reverted to a "what else can I do" defense: "Should I live in a cabin in Montana?" he asked. It was a clever rhetorical dodge. Chomsky was declaring that there is simply no way to avoid getting involved in the stock market short of complete withdrawal from the capitalist system. He certainly knows better. There are many alternative funds these days that allow you to invest your money in "green" or "socially responsible" enterprises. They just don't yield the maximum available return.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
This is actually pretty funny.
Funny or not, however, it also illustrates the real dangers of politically correct speech codes run amok.BLAIR FACING F-WORD PROBE
Tony Blair is facing a possible police investigation over an alleged slur against the Welsh.
Former Downing Street spin doctor Lance Price claimed in his diaries the Prime Minister repeatedly referred to them as "f****** Welsh".
It is said to have happened while he was watching the disappointing results of the Welsh Assembly elections in 1999.
The claim came in a draft version of the diaries, although the text in the published version read: "TB f-ing and blinding about the whole thing."
North Wales Police said: "A complaint has been received and is being reviewed.
"We will be seeking the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service in relation to the content of the statement of complaint."
The CPS is expected to apply standard tests before deciding whether an investigation is viable and worthwhile.
The tests include whether an investigation would be in the public interest and whether there would be a reasonable chance of conviction.
A Downing Street spokeswoman declined to comment.
Friday, October 14, 2005
Today C-SPAN aired live what its website billed as a "forum" on "Hurricane Katrina News Coverage" sponsored by the Millions More Movement. It was a symposium of black media people taking place at Howard University School of Law, and presumably C-SPAN included it as part of its coverage of Farrakhan's march tomorrow.
It is difficult to convey the craziness and paranoia of the proceedings at the Howard University forum. There was a Dr. Whitaker (though I would be willing to bet he is not a regular M.D. -- possibly this guy?) who told those assembled not to accept any future avian flu vaccinations because the government was going to put microchips in the vaccinations and thereby put a computer chip inside each person. It was unclear whether he meant that the entire population or just the black population would be targeted. (Of course, if blacks actually stay away from vaccinations because of this conspiracy theory, and if this avoidance causes them to die in greater proportions in any bird flu epidemic that might take place, they will immediately blame George Bush and say that the government was "sluggish" in its response because "George Bush hates black people" and that America "left them to die" and that the government is somehow waging genocide against blacks. And the mainstream media will concur.)
But that was not the worst part of it. There was another guy, in a freaky outfit and wearing long gray dreadlocks with some kind of shell decorations in them, who was described as "Author & Owner, Blacknificent Books." He was Dr. Kamau Kambon (another doctor! what a classy gathering!), and toward the beginning of the program he described some books he'd written: "Black Guerrilla Warfare in Amerika: A People's Manual and Manifesto on Resistance and Survival" (that "Amerika" spelling I got from Amazon.com); "The Last Book," a futuristic novel that features a character called The Last Black Man Standing, the last surviving black person on earth, who looks back and narrates the story of how blacks were all killed off; and Kambon's latest opus, "A Secret Letter Smuggled Out of Amerika to the Chairman of North Korea" (this one wasn't on Amazon, so I'm taking a guess on the "Amerika" spelling). Kambon went on to talk about how American blacks have to develop ties with an "external ally outside the shores of this country" that possesses "supreme power in nuclear capability," "an external ally that can put heat on the people that are trying to kill us." Does the FBI know about this guy?
During the course of the program Kambon mentioned that his wife was "the President of the Association of Black Psychologists a couple years back." He also said he had taught at a black college (unnamed) "for a number of years."
Then, a few minutes short of the end of the four-hour-long program, Kambon stated that the goal toward which black people had to be moving was total white genocide. He put it as bluntly as it could be put: "The problem on the planet is white people;" however, there is a "solution to the problem" (a phrase he repeated several times. Wannsee Conference, anyone?), "the one idea" that would provide the "solution," "and the one idea is, how we are going to exterminate white people." "We have to exterminate white people off of the face of the planet to solve this problem." Those are word-for-word quotes. And he was not joking.
The audience applauded. It was not heavy applause, so perhaps not every individual joined in. Maybe some were startled at what they had just heard. But there was applause.
Opio Sokoni, who was moderating, came to the microphone and said, "Hard to follow that one. You can get as black as you want. I don't know if you can get that --" and the rest of what he said was outside the range of the microphone, and so inaudible, but he did bring panelist Lawrence Guyot to the microphone to speak.
No one raised a single word of objection. As I said, this was taking place at Howard University School of Law; while all this was going on, a banner was hanging in the background that read "Howard University School of Law;" the organizer of the symposium was Opio Sokoni, a radio talk show host who was described as a Howard University School of Law graduate. The main emcee of the event was Nkechi Taifa, Adjunct Professor at Howard University School of Law, whose bio on the Howard University School of Law website states, "Her teaching and research agenda centers around race and criminal justice, civil and human rights, and lawyering in the public interest." I wonder whether she considers white people to have civil and human rights. Perhaps she does not consider white people quite human. Judging from the overall tone of the symposium, I wouldn't put it past her.
(By the way, throughout the whole discussion, Bill Bennett was repeatedly castigated as having genocidal intentions toward blacks.)
One of the panelists was Soffiyah Elijah, described by C-SPAN as being from Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Institute (director: Charles Ogletree), whose website gives her bio here. (Oh, and here's a site called the AfroCubaWeb that features an article by Soffiyah Elijah: "By aiming the spotlight on the criminal justice system in the United States, President Castro exposed a tender nerve for Washington. My more than 20 years as a criminal defense lawyer and professor of criminal defense advocacy confirm the widely known assessment that every aspect of the criminal justice system is ripe for criticism and laden with hypocrisy. . . .") Elijah was definitely present when the call for white genocide was made. She appeared entirely nonchalant. She was the last panelist to speak; when she made her final comments, just few minutes after Kambon stated that blacks' goal must be the murder of the entire white race, Elijah was completely casual and unruffled. You would have thought he had said that blacks' goal must be to earn good grades in school.
Not one indication of dissent from anyone. And the audience applauded.
Tell me, isn't it a violation of some code of legal ethics for a law school professor to sit by silently, and apparently quite approvingly, when a speaker says that blacks must annihilate whites off the face of the earth, and the audience applauds? Does the American Bar Association have a position on this? Do Harvard and Howard Universities have any problem with faculty members taking part in conferences at which genocide is advocated and applauded? Or do the universities and their law schools not give a damn, as long as the genocide being advocated and applauded is against white people?
Update, 10/17/05. The video of this show is currently posted on C-SPAN's website, but I have had trouble accessing it. I started to run it this past weekend. It worked fine for the first five and a half minutes or so; then it froze, both the sound and the picture, and I couldn't get it to go past that point. I tried again earlier today and only got an error message.
If you want to have a try, go to the queue of programs you can reach from C-SPAN's home page, then look for the following entry for October 14th:
I hope C-SPAN fixes the link soon. You really do need to see this video to believe it.Black Media Forum on Image of Black Americans in Mainstream Media
On the eve of the Million Man March 10th anniversary, activist and radio personality Joe Madison joins a forum on the image of Blacks in American media. Black writers and media professionals discuss media coverage of race during Hurricane Katrina. The event takes place at the Howard Univ. School of Law, in Washington, DC.
10/14/2005: WASHINGTON, DC: 4 hr.
Update, 10/18/05. Here's the great man himself.
