Hi.

I realize this has taken awhile to put together.  I won’t bore you with the whole story but what it boiled down to is that I couldn’t get into my PayPal account when my email address (I used the Verizon address) wasn’t operative, and I couldn’t give them a new address wiithout getting into my account. 

Catch-22.

It offered me the chance to phone them (which I couldn’t do because I don’t have a phone line which is why the email address didn’t work) or snail-mail them.  If they had offered me the choice of giving them a new email address for contact purposes, this would have been over 2 weeks ago.

Anyway, for those who may wish to help get me back online, all you have to do is go to PayPal’s main site, click “Send Money” and follow the instructions.  They will ask what email address you want the money sent to.  You reply,

mick(dot)arran@gmail(dot)com

That’s all there is to it.  Use that address and the money will be credited to my account.

There’s less to raise than there was.  After wrestling with them on the phone, I got them to reduce the ludicrous charge for the DSL router to $100, so the final tally I need to come up with to get the phone back is now under $400, about $200 of which I have.

Of course, by now you’ve probably either forgotten all about me or else realized how much better you get along without my constant interruptions.  I understand.  Frankly, tho I would like to get back online and contribute to the conversation occasionally, I’ve gotten a lot more of my own work done in the six weeks since I lost the phone line than I did in the last two years of blogging.  I kind of like the feeling of accomplishment, not to mention the potential returns, plus I really like where the two novels are going and enjoy writing them - something I could never have said before.  I used to hate writing, as much as I did it, because it was so much work.  But the books are flowing like never before and I don’t want to stop.

So, I’d like to come back.  I’d like to activate LitBlogs, tho finding new ones is getting difficult.  I’d like to finish what I started at The Rebellion, and I’d like to sound off here.  But it isn’t going to be like it was before.  I’m getting jealous of my book-time, and the deeper into them I get, the more time they’re going to take.  I don’t want you to contribute money to help me come back and then feel betrayed because I only show up once or twice a week.

Anyway, that’s the skinny.  Any and all help will be appreciated but I know how tough it is during the Bush Years for anybody not at least a millionaire, so take everything that may be relevant into consideration in making your decision.

And thanks for even wanting to help.  That alone is worth more to me than I can say.

After a process that resembled nothing so much as breaking into Fort Knox with a teaspoon, I have finally managed to straighten out my PayPal account. For those of you who wish to donate to help me get back on line, the new email address is mick.arran@gmail.com. You can, so I’m told, send money through that account by giving that address.

I’m running out of time, so a plea will have to wait.

Thanks in advance.

We’re getting closer.

Thanks to all of you who have offered to help. The Paypal link on the sidebar doesn’t work because it was on the Verizon server and access has been closed. I’m trying to get the account opened through the mail since the email address I used to open it is no longer active (that was Verizon, too). It’s going to take a week or so. When it happens, I’ll post the email address here and make a vibrant and abject plea for help.

I’ll say this for being offline - though I miss all of you and shooting my mouth off every day, I’ve gotten a helluva lot of work done this past month. Two novels are well on their way, and I finished the first draft of the first act of a play. I may not post as often once I come back - fair warning.

Meanwhile, many many thanks to Mark and Minnesota Observer, who know why.

It’s going to come as no surprise to anybody who’s been paying attention that Wal-Mart, Kathy Lee Gifford, and Nike all have something in common: they employ[ed] ‘contractors’ who use child labor to produce the products they sell sold.Wal-Mart is…being widely condemned for [a] Radio-Canada report last week showing that it is buying clothing from suppliers in Bangladesh who were using child labour to make products sold in Canada.

An investigative journalist, posing as an international buyer, visited factories…where garments are manufactured for Wal-Mart. The products included house brands such as Simply Basic, BUM, 725 and George, all sold in Canadian Wal-Mart stores.

Children who appeared to be under the age of 14 were filmed, using hidden cameras, working in the factories. Wal-Mart has said since that it has stopped buying from the factories filmed in the report.Sure it did. It got caught. Once. It usually does stop doing illegal or unethical things when it gets caught. For a while. Until it thinks nobody is looking. Of course, that was just one contractor. What about all the others that ‘keep their prices low’ by doing likewise? Well, they haven’t been filmed using child labor by an undercover documentary (which is now illegal in the US, did you know that?), so Wal-Mart hasn’t stopped buying from them.

Nor is there any evidence they’ve stopped using undercover guards to spy on unions trying to organize WM stores. Jonquiere, Quebec (4 Dec. 2005) - A documentary by Radio-Canada says Wal-Mart hired undercover security guards to spy on employees at a unionized store it closed here last April, contrary to the Quebec Labour Code. The law forbids spying on union organizers or sympathizers.

The documentary was aired Friday night. It was broadcast in the same week that another Radio-Canada exposed the use of child labour by Wal-Mart apparel manufacturers in Bangladesh.

Wal-Mart closed the Jonquiere store after it was successfully organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW Canada). The closure prevented the union from negotiating what would have been the first store-wide union contract with Wal-Mart anywhere in the world.

Wal-Mart claims that the closure took place for financial reasons. The union and the majority of Quebecers, believe that Wal-Mart’s real goal was to prevent organized labour from gaining a foothold in the company, and to send a message to Wal-Mart employees elsewhere.

A Wal-Mart spokesman has denied engaging in illegal spying tactics. “No, we wouldn’t tolerate the situation you mentioned,” Wal-Mart Canada president Mario Pilozzi told Radio Canada.

Guards quoted

However, the broadcaster quotes several guards as saying that spying was the job they were hired to perform by Wal-Mart at Jonquiere in early 2005. One guard said he patrolled the store in civilian clothes, watching employees. Another said store surveillance cameras were used to follow certain workers.

The National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) has signed a formal protocol with the UFCW, supporting its drive to organize Wal-Mart workers at outlets across Canada.They ‘wouldn’t tolerate it’, my Aunt Fanny’s fanny. It’s SOP. Wal-Mart’s Manager’s Handbook (published by Liza Featherstone [scroll down]) quite distinctly suggests just such ‘defenses’ against union formation in its stores. And that bullshit about closing the Jonquiere store for ‘financial reasons’? Gimme a break. Is that the best they can do? Or do they consider unionizing a store such a ‘financial’ burden that it just can’t survive? If they do, how the hell do they know? That’s the only store in Wal-Mart history that’s ever been successfully unionized and they closed it the day after the election. For all they know, they might have made more money in a unionized store. They don’t have a clue.

But like I said, these items are no surprise to anybody with half an eye on the way WM really operates. What is interesting is the way Canada is reacting to these two documentaries. Not only were those two shows highly-rated and covered by all of Canada’s news media but they’ve actually become an issue in the Canadian elections. Quebecois candidate Gilles Duceppe was positively livid.Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe reacted Thursday to a report which aired on Radio-Canada showing children under the age of 14 making clothes for Wal-Mart.

The report, which was a truncated version of the entire investigative report to air on the show Zone Libre, showed Bangladeshi children making clothes for a company that supplies Wal-Mart.

Duceppe took the opportunity to point the finger at Paul Martin’s Liberals.

“It is even more unacceptable that Health Canada has a deal with Wal-Mart to distribute tobacco-related pamphlets,” Duceppe said Thursday.

“We work with this company … while this company contravenes the rules of the International Labour Organization which Canada never signed on to,” Duceppe said.It’s hard to imagine this happening in the US. Wal-Mart was caught using child labor here and nobody thought anything of it. There was no outrage, no politicians went on tv to condemn the Bush Adminstration for letting them get away with it for so long and then slapping their wrist when they finally got nabbed, and when the unions tried to raise a stink, they were ignored. Canadians seems to care about how prices get lowered and who gets hurt. Americans apparently don’t give a damn.

Doesn’t say much for us, does it?

Chiquita recently acquired Fresh Express, an Australian company with farms and processing plants all over Southeast Asia, for more money than it could afford and probably more than it was worth—that’s the way corporate executives think these days, like they’ve got nothing to lose. They don’t, either. They’re not the ones being laid off because Chiquita is closing two plants in order to pay for this deal.Chiquita Brands International Inc. said Tuesday it will close processing plants in Manteno, Ill., and Kansas City, Mo., by February to cut costs, eliminating about 100 jobs from its fresh-cut fruit processing operations in the Midwest.

The closings are part of a previously announced plan to achieve $20 million in annual savings within three years of acquiring Fresh Express.

“This is an important step toward reaching profitability in this strategic value-added fruit category, which we believe holds significant long-term growth potential for Chiquita,” said Fernando Aguirre, chairman and chief executive.

Chiquita, which would maintain one plant in the Chicago area, said it would take a $5 million noncash charge in the fourth quarter and a $2 million charge, primarily for lease obligations, in the first quarter of 2006.I suppose 100 workers is small potatoes considering GM just laid off 30,000. Not if you’re one of the hundred, though.

SOP in Corporate America: Buy something you can’t afford and then fire workers to pay for it.

With his approval ratings at a historic low, President Bush decided to try to find a way to play to what he thinks is his strength: the economy. It is, after all, getting better, right? So, after some time spent looking for a ‘bright spot’, he finally headed for Kernersville, North Carolina. Here’s the headline, and before you ask, I don’t know if it’s funny on purpose.

Bush finds a friendly place to talk about the economy
He visits plant that makes excavators used in disaster aid

Did the anonymous headline writer have his/her tongue firmly in cheek when s/he suggested that disasters were that ‘bright spot’ in the economy? Or was s/he a Republican? When Republicans look at the mess of Katrina, they don’t see the death of thousands and the destruction of one of America’s most important cities, they see $$$ signs.

However that happened, the depth of Bush’s disconnect with reality is revealed every time he opens his mouth, in no area more so than the economy.Kernersville, N.C. — President Bush traveled to a bright spot in North Carolina’s manufacturing industry on Monday, a plant that makes excavators used in construction and disaster relief, to tell Americans that the economy was better than they thought and that his administration deserved some credit for it.

The trip was part of a White House offensive to try to pull Americans out of their gloom about the nation’s economy, which has improved in the past two years even though polls show that most people think it has gotten worse.

“This economy of ours is on the move,” Bush said in a warehouse of the Deere-Hitachi Construction Machinery Corp., where he appeared before two gleaming orange and yellow hydraulic excavators and a White House backdrop that proclaimed “Foundation for Growth.” (emphasis added)Let’s break this down a bit, shall we?

1. ‘…his administration deserved some credit for it…’: That’s just like a Republican. First he destroys a solid economy with a healthy surplus by giving a $$$TRILLION$$$ of the Treasury away to the investor class in tax cuts they promptly put in their pockets, then he wants ‘credit’ because not everybody lost their jobs. Last week they were crowing about a quarter that saw the creation of 215,000 jobns after a five year period in which millions had been lost, most of it overseas. This is a little like an axe-murderer cutting a victim in half and then demanding credit for not chopping his victim into three pieces instead.
2. ‘…which has improved in the past two years even though polls show that most people think it has gotten worse.’: This is probably the most profound of Bush’s many disconnects. The rich boy who never had to work and was bailed out of the financial disasters he caused by friends of his family thinks the economy is improving because his rich friends are raking it in and corporate profits are in double-digits. Like his father before him, he is completely unaware that all the goodies have stayed at the top of the food chain, and that while CEO pay has jumped 1000% in the last few years, most ordinary paychecks have remained stagnant or been cut. He’s totally clueless about any class below his own, and he thinks we don’t get it. Typical.
3. ‘This economy of ours is on the move…’: Uh, yeah. Down. We have a major disaster to recover from, a deteriorating situation in both the wars we’re fighting, a deficit nearing a half-trillion $$$ hanging over our heads, a globalized economy with corporations continuing to take our jobs offshore to low-wage countries, and an empty Treasury. Things sure do look ‘bright’, don’t they?

If there is anything that could showcase this administration’s total disregard for the economic troubles of the middle class and ordinary working stiffs, it’s their blind insistence on defining the economy according to how well the oligarchs are doing and leaving us out of the equation altogether, then running around saying they don’t understand why we’re so ‘gloomy’.

That pretty much says it all.

Evidence for the Bush Administration's determination to get martial law declared in New Orleans has surfaced this week. Louisiana Gov Kathleen Blanco, in response to requests from the Senate and House committees investigating the Katrina fiasco, has released some 100,000 pages of documents--memos, emails, letters--that show the administration was much more interested in getting troops instead of help into New Orleans during the first four days of the disaster. And it seems to have been Karl Rove himself who was in back of what the WaPo quoted a Blanco aide today as calling 'a full court press'.

Well, it's official. Matt Yglesias is now a full-fledged member of the Christopher Hitchens/Arianna Huffington/Bill O'Reilly/Ann Coulter/Brierney Borg School of Political Entertainment and can no longer be taken seriously by anybody with more brains than your average BushBaby. It's been coming for a while now. As Matt's numbers and rank grew in the small A-List community of blogging, he has more and more often abandoned thoughtful analysis for the easier, more eye-catching World of Outrage for Outrage's Sake. Like Billy Boy's 'They're Killing Christmas' Campaign, Matt's absurd defense of Wal-Mart's taxpayer rip-offs has no other purpose than to get him a lot of attention--which it did.

It's a shame, really. I didn't always agree with him but at least he wasn't writing out of ignorance or off the top of his head or for the fireworks he might generate. He used to be an interesting, sometimes iconoclastic voice, and he was usually worth reading. More important, what he said was worth thinking about.

Those days are over, I'm afraid.

As of last week, the comment program no longer reads HTML tags of any kind. This is annoying. Squarespace Tech tells me they’ll be instituting a new comment program ‘shortly’ (whatever that means) which will use a Textile platform. Textile uses diacritical marks (* for instance) instead of tags (surround a word with those stars and you’ve put it in italics). It’s easier to use than HTML but since no one else in blogging uses it, nobody’s going to know how and it’s going to throw people off.

Also, the ‘preview comment’ function now appears to erase break tags, so if you use it, your line breaks disappear and your comment turns into one long graf. There’s nothing I can do about it.

Squarespace still has the fastest and most reliable publishing mechanism in blogging, and is the only one that provides a real webspace (discussion threads, photo galleries, and specialized pages of all kinds) for the same money as a paid blog (Typepad or WordPress, for instance) without the injection of ads and promos. If the comment program is bare-bones or weird, that’s a price I’m willing to pay to get everything else…until you start complaining about it. If it becomes a real pain, let me know and I’ll pass your complaints along to Squarespace Tech. Maybe that will help hurry them up.

You can email me at mick.arran@gmail.com or mick_arran@yahoo.com. Even better, leave a comment on the ‘Gripes from the Troops’ page. That’s what it’s for.

Stacy Rosenbaum at Accept No Substitutes questions the term ‘investor class’.Talk of the “investor class” is a devious invention of the wealthy to get the middle class to vote against their own interests. Their hope is that if the middle class owns some tiny and insignificant share of American corporations, they will think their interests are the same as the real owners of those corporations and be duped into voting against their own interests.Good point. Considering how often I use that phrase around here, it’s worth re-examining.

There is an investor class and it is running the country—not just the economy, the country: foreign policy, environmental policy, medicine, the law, education, you name it. But you aren’t in it. None of you. Here’s my definition of the investor class:

That class of people whose income from their investments in stocks and bonds runs into 6 figures—minimum.

Actually, the real investor class—what they’d call ‘players’ on the Street—are the ones who clip coupons worth 7, 8, and 9 figures, and the power in Mover-and-Shakerville begins at $1B.

I’m betting that ain’t you.

Just so we’re clear.

(By the way, ANS is a great blog. Short posts, which means her ideas aren’t as developed as we might like, but thought-provoking.)

I’ve been toying with this for some time. As the site has grown (readership has quadrupled over the past year) and expanded its mission, I’ve become more and more focused on just how widespread is the attack on our society by the rich and powerful. Shortly after I started Trenches, I wrote that the poor were the ‘canary in the coal mine’—that the first victims were always the weakest and least able to fight back and that what was being done to them was a harbinger of what would later be done to everyone.

Sadly, that prediction has been amply borne out by the Republican agents of Corporate America in Congress and the White House. It isn’t just us any more. The last few months have seen the concerted and co-ordinated campaign to disembowel Social Security, the passage of the Bankruptcy Bill, the Energy Bill, and the Transportation Bill—all direct assaults on the middle class. The coming months promise more of the same as the Republican majority promises to take up the elimination of the mortgage deduction and the health insurance deduction even as they once again cut taxes for the wealthy.

The plan to make America a safe haven for oligarchs and plutocrats has reached the next stage in its development: the dismantling of democracy itself because it threatens the dominance of the ruling investor class. To all intents and purposes, corporate interests own all three branches of government and are using them to re-define America in their own image, not as an organ of public protection but as an arm of corporate power.

We began by wanting to connect the dots and document how and by whom this was being done, but it seems to me that the time has come for us to move to the next stage as well: active resistance to the destruction of our democratic ideals by the anti-democratic forces of Moloch. The new title reflects that change of mission.

I’ve been toying with this for some time. As the site has grown (readership has quadrupled over the past year) and expanded its mission, I’ve become more and more focused on just how widespread is the attack on our society by the rich and powerful. Shortly after I started Trenches, I wrote that the poor were the ‘canary in the coal mine’—that the first victims were always the weakest and least able to fight back and that what was being done to them was a harbinger of what would later be done to everyone.

Sadly, that prediction has been amply borne out by the Republican agents of Corporate America in Congress and the White House. It isn’t just us any more. The last few months have seen the concerted and co-ordinated campaign to disembowel Social Security, the passage of the Bankruptcy Bill, the Energy Bill, and the Transportation Bill—all direct assaults on the middle class. The coming months promise more of the same as the Republican majority promises to take up the elimination of the mortgage deduction and the health insurance deduction even as they once again cut taxes for the wealthy.

The plan to make America a safe haven for oligarchs and plutocrats has reached the next stage in its development: the dismantling of democracy itself because it threatens the dominance of the ruling investor class. To all intents and purposes, corporate interests own all three branches of government and are using them to re-define America in their own image, not as an organ of public protection but as an arm of corporate power.

We began by wanting to connect the dots and document how and by whom this was being done, but it seems to me that the time has come for us to move to the next stage as well: active resistance to the destruction of our democratic ideals by the anti-democratic forces of Moloch. The new title reflects that change of mission.

EJ Dionne takes up the story of what unions mean.Washington -- DECADES AGO, Walter Reuther, the storied head of the United Auto Workers union, was taken on a tour of an automated factory by a Ford Motor Company executive.

Somewhat gleefully, the Ford honcho told the legendary union leader: "You know, not one of these machines pays dues to the UAW."

To which Reuther snapped: "And not one of them buys new Ford cars, either."Reuther isn't one of my favorite people in the history of Labor but he was right about that: automation may be terribly attractive to Corporate America for reasons that have nothing to do with increased productivity (machines don't call in sick, they don't have families that need to be fed, they don't need lunch breaks, and they never complain about how they're treated) despite their drawbacks (in many case they actually cost more than live workers over the long haul, they need servicing more often than workers need breaks, repairing them can cost as much as buying them, and they have glitches nobody can find and make mistakes no one knows about until the product fails/falls apart/explodes) but this is undeniably true--machines don't buy stuff. Ever. Machines don't buy cars or toys or washing machines to clean their nuts and bolts. Nothing.Almost everybody right of center sees the job losses as inevitable, the result of the American auto industry's failure to meet foreign competition and the "excessively" generous wages, health benefits and, especially, retirement programs negotiated by Reuther's union.

The believers in inevitability inevitably cite the economist Joseph Schumpeter to the effect that capitalism "is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is, but never can be, stationary." It is capitalism's gift for "creative destruction," Schumpeter argued, that guaranteed new consumer goods, new methods of production and new forms of organization.

Andy Stern's Service Employees' International Union (SEIU) has been recruiting janitors in Texas with amazing success.Union organizers have obtained what they say is majority support in one of the biggest unionization drives in the South in decades, collecting the signatures of thousands of Houston janitors.

In an era when unions typically face frustration and failure in attracting workers in the private sector, the Service Employees International Union is bringing in 5,000 janitors from several companies at once. With work force experts saying that unions face a slow death unless they can figure out how to organize private-sector workers in big bunches, labor leaders are looking to the Houston campaign as a model.

Yesterday I noted that in all the hype over 'black Friday', not one news outlet had bothered to deal with a fairly important question behind the hopes for a finally recovering economy: With wages remaining depressed for the, what? 25th year in a row?--where's all this money supposed to be coming from? Regular commenter Steve Hill suggests that at least part of the answer may lie in our taking on increased debt. I still haven't found a media outlet that's tried to deal with this question directly but at least one, the LA Times, has seen fit to mention the disparity between healthy--not to say HUGE--corporate profits and the stagnation in employee pay.For the last few years, those trends have been dependable and soothing for many stock market bulls — if not for the average worker. It's a world in which share prices are underpinned by healthy earnings while inflation risks are muted because employee pay isn't in danger of an upward spiral.

The story continued in the third quarter ended Sept. 30. With nearly all of the companies in the blue-chip Standard & Poor's 500 index now having reported their earnings for the period, the year-over-year growth rate was once again in double digits.

As digby pointed out yesterday, the corporate press is plumping the Bush Administration line that the economy is soaring by hyperventilating over the heavy shopping that was supposedly ringing cash registers all over the nation yesterday.Reporting that people are shopping is a blatant attempt to prime the pump for retailers. It's not a news story, it's advertising. The story is whether the sales were any greater than last year, or greater than expected or whatever. And they can't know that for at least a little while. This is a made up news story with even less substance than the Runaway Bride, who did, after all actually run away.The champ, I think, is the Los Angeles Times which has had not one, not two, but three stories this week advertising what a great sales season this is going to be/is. From today's version:Across the country, merchants reported that day-after-Thanksgiving traffic was at least as strong as last year, when the day's sales jumped an estimated 11% from the previous year.

That was sure to buoy many retailers, which were unsure what to expect. Initially, industry analysts and economists said this holiday season would be one of the most difficult to predict. They feared that higher gasoline prices, home heating bills, rising interest rates and an outpouring of charitable giving after a season of devastating hurricanes might have left consumers tapped out.Maybe it did. As digby said, we won't really know for quite some time. Weeks, in fact. The figures generally show up in January. I don't know any more than anybody else, but I offer a couple of observations.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is willing to do what the Republican Congress and Bush aren't: he's shipping heating oil to needy families in America.Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez strengthened his Latin American ties with generous oil deals that he is now extending north to the United States, with plans to ship cheap heating oil to low-income people in New York and Massachusetts.

Venezuela's Citgo Petroleum Corp. made a symbolic first delivery to a Boston-area family this week. Shipments are due to reach tens of thousands families starting next month, and hospitals, homeless shelters and other facilities in needy communities also are in line to get oil.