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Libertarianism

May 21, 2010

Libertarianism is the belief that capitalists have a right to do to the rest of us whatever they please, and we are obligated to let them do it to us. It has nothing to do with any notions about personal liberty. Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senator from Kentucky and a self-professed libertarian, says that a business has the right to turn away Black customers. (Although he hastens to add that he personally disapproves of racial discrimination. How reassuring.) He is also opposed to a woman’s right to choose. Since a woman is not a corporation, she clearly has no right to discriminate against a fetus.

Here is what Paul says on his website about immigration:

    I do not support amnesty. Those who come here should respect our laws. I support legal immigration and recognize that the country has been enriched by those who seek the freedom to make a life for themselves.

    Immigrants should meet the current requirements, which should be enforced and updated. I realize that subsidizing something creates more of it, and do not think the taxpayer should be forced to pay for welfare, medical care and other expenses for illegal immigrants. Once the subsidies for illegal immigration are removed, the problem will likely become far less common.

If I’m reading that last paragraph correctly, Paul seems to think that some immigrants come to this country so they can receive welfare and free medical care. Since native-born Americans can’t get these things, immigrants clearly can’t get them either. This raises the question of whether or not Paul has any idea what he is talking about.

Ah, but there’s more:

    I support local solutions to illegal immigration as protected by the 10th amendment. I support making English the official language of all documents and contracts.

    Millions crossing our border without our knowledge constitutes a clear threat to our nation’s security. I will work to secure our borders immediately. My plans include an underground electric fence, with helicopter stations to respond quickly to breaches of the border. Instead of closing military bases at home and renting space in Europe, I am open to the construction of bases to protect our border.

An underground electric fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border! How libertarian! (By the way, this fence would be partially paid for by the income taxes of undocumented immigrants.) And won’t it be pleasant to observe the scenic vistas of the American Southwest with all those helicopters hovering overhead? By the way, why the hell should a libertarian care about whether or not the U.S. has an official language?

I can’t help but point out that many undocumented immigrants come from Asia and from Europe. (When I lived in Boston, I knew some Irishmen who were undocumented.) Paul says nothing about this. He treats the issue as being entirely about people crossing the Mexican border. I think we can assume then that Paul thinks the problem consists of Mexicans and Central Americans, and that therefore Paul is a racist.

People who think that leftists can make common cause with people like this are sadly deluded.

Posted in Capitalism, Immigration, Republicans | 1 Comment »

Stop the Racist Attack on Immigrants

May 1, 2010

Recently I was asked to give a talk on immigration. It’s been a long time since I’ve been asked to give a talk on any topic, and the first time I’ve been asked to talk about immigration. Below is the talk I gave at the University of Oregon campus on April 29th:

During the past decade, more than 3,000 people have died crossing the U.S.-Mexican border. These are people coming to look for work. They come here because the economies of Mexico and Central America have been devastated by NAFTA and other “free trade” agreements. These agreements are meant to under-develop these nations so they can serve as sources of raw materials and cheap labor. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has called these immigrants “criminal aliens”.

The state of Arizona recently passed a law making it a state crime for immigrants to not carry authorization papers. The bill also requires the police to ask anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant for papers, a sure-fire invitation to racial profiling. The bill makes it possible for people to sue police who refuse to do racial profiling. Meanwhile, in Maricopa County Arizona, Sheriff Arpaio keeps arrested undocumented immigrants in tents 110-degree heat. In 20009, thousands of workers at American Apparel, American Building Maintenance and Overhill Farms lost their jobs because they purportedly lacked proof that they were legally eligible to work in the U.S. When Obama was running for president, he promised to reform the country’s immigration system and offer undocumented workers a path to citizenship. (67 percent of Latino voters voted for Obama.) Instead, the Obama Administration has expanded the 287(g) program. This is part of the 1986 Immigration and Control Act (IRCA) that was passed under the Reagan Administration. This bill enabled three million undocumented immigrants to acquire legal residency. However, it also contained a clause, 287(g), which enabled the U.S. government to deputize local and state law enforcement officials to enforce immigration laws (something that previously only the federal government could do). As a result of this expansion, police have been able throw immigrants into jail after traffic stops. In 2009, immigration prosecutions were up 20 percent over the previous years.(1) A third of all filings in U.S. district courts are immigration cases.(2) Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON), has said:

    We’ve seen racial profiling practices that we haven’t seen in a generation, perhaps since Jim Crow. Obama ran on an agenda of inclusion… He wants equality. He said that we have to promote understanding. Well, guess what – the 287(g) program is not promoting that kind of understanding. It’s promoting division. It’s giving ammunition to all those anti-immigrant organizations, to all those groups with strong white supremacist ties. Day laborers all over the country have experienced it… the men and women who every day defy the odds to find a day of work – they’ve seen what hatred looks like.(3)

The Obama Administration has also announced that it will only award federal contracts to companies that use E-Verify to check employee work authorization. E-Verify is a program started by the Bush administration. It is on-line system by the government that allows companies to verify whether employees have work authorization. Journalist David Bacon has described the effect of this policy:

    Workplace immigration enforcement is filled with examples of employers who use audits and discrepancies as pretexts to discharge union militants or discourage worker organization… Overhill Farms has a union. American Apparel pays better than most garment factories. In Minneapolis, the 1,200 fired janitors at ABM get a higher wage than non-union workers–and they had to strike to win it… If anything, ICE seems intent on punishing undocumented workers who earn too much, or who become too visible by demanding higher wages and organizing unions.

    And despite Obama’s notion that sanctions enforcement will punish those employers who exploit immigrants, at American Apparel and ABM the employers were rewarded for cooperation by being immunized from prosecution… No one in the Obama or Bush administrations, or the Clinton administration before them, wants to stop migration to the U.S. or imagines that this could be done without catastrophic consequences…Instead [e]nforcement is a means for managing the flow of migrants, and making their labor available to employers at a price they want to pay. (4)

Bacon touches upon a point that is often misunderstood by both the Right and the Left. The government does not want to stop the flow of undocumented immigrants into the U.S., rather it wants to manage it. This is because the exploitation of undocumented workers is an essential element of how the U.S. economy works. Undocumented workers can be paid lower wages and forced to work longer hours than other workers, and forced to work in dangerous conditions, and they don’t have recourse to any labor laws in the U.S. What’s more, it’s difficult for undocumented workers to form unions, because organizers can be easily targeted and fired by companies. Let me use the case of Overhill Farms as an example. Overhill makes processed foods that are served on airlines and in other places. The workers at Overhill are unionized. Overhill has used the firing of workers as a way to weaken the union. Last year, the company fired 254 unionized workers, claiming there were discrepancies in the Social Security numbers. They then replaced the workers with “part-time” workers who receive no benefits, even though they sometimes work up to thirteen hours a day.(5)

Currently the Democrats in Congress are considering legislation that would create a guest worker program here in the U.S. This is not a solution to the immigration problem. Such a program would merely allow employers to do legally what they have so far been doing illegally, that is, exploiting immigrant workers. Workers who complain or try to organize can be fired, and they would have to leave the country under the terms of the guest worker program. The real purpose of this legislation is to provide U.S. companies with cheap labor. It has nothing to do with helping immigrant or native-born workers. The best way to protect the rights of both of these groups is give legal status to undocumented workers. According to Phil Gasper:

    A UCLA study conducted a few years ago concluded that if undocumented workers were given legal status, wages for all workers would immediately increase by approximately 5 percent in agriculture, 2.75 percent in services, and 2.5 percent in manufacturing.(6)

The legislation being considered by the Democrats would also call for stricter law enforcement along the border including the erecting of a fence. This would merely make things more dangerous for immigrants, forcing them to cross in more isolated areas in the desert and mountains, resulting in more deaths and suffering. The only real solution to the immigration problem is an open border policy that would allow the free flow of people across borders. The outrageous anti-immigrant bill passed in Arizona has provoked an angry backlash among Latinos and other groups. In the days following the bill’s passage, thousands marched through the streets of the state capitol angrily calling for repeal of this bill. Some protestors plastered swastikas made of refried beans on the windows of the state capitol building. Since the politicians are intent on only serving the interests of the capitalist class, only a movement of the people can bring any real change. Last month, 200,000 people marched through the streets of Washington, D.C. to demand an end to raids and deportations and a better immigration system. This Saturday, May Day, people will be marching in Portland and in Salem. We should stand with those people.

1. Orlando Sepulveda, “Is the Gutierrez Bill Good for Immigrants?” Socialist Worker, http://socialistworker.org/2010/01/21/gutierrez-bill-and- immigrants, p. 3.
2. Ibid.
3. Quoted by Brian Tierney, “Standing Up to Immgration Police”, Socialist Worker, September 20, 2009, Issue 706.
4. David Bacon, “The Brutal Dark Side of Obama’s “Softer” Immigration Enforcement”, Znet, http://www.zcommunications.org/the-brutal-dark-side-of-obamas-softer-immigrationenforcement- by-david-bacon.
5. “Standing Up to Overhill Farms”, Socialist Worker, http://socialistworker.org/2009/07/27/standing-up-to-overhill.
6. Phil Gasper, “Scapegoating immigrants”, International Socialist Review, Issue 50, November– December 2006, http://www.isreview.org/issues/50/gasper2.shtml.

Posted in Capitalism, Immigration | 5 Comments »

The Real Poor

April 22, 2010

The other night when I was leaving a grocery store, I was approached by a woman and a man. The woman told me that they had missed their bus, and the next one wouldn’t come for the next two hours. She said they needed to pick up their daughter. She asked me if I could give them a ride. I was reluctant to say yes, because the place they wanted to go to was on the other side of town. (I’ve also had a couple of bad experiences giving rides to strangers.) I told them that I didn’t have much room in my pick-up truck. They said they didn’t mind. With that, I gave in. Their names were Madge and Eddie. (This is really a guess. I have a terrible memory for names.) Eddie squeezed himself into the dummy seat in the back of the cab, with the spare tire between his legs, and immediately fell asleep. Madge sat next to me. She told me that they lived in a van. The fan belt was broken. They had replaced it once before, but it had broken again, and they didn’t have the money to get another one. She said someone had told her that she could make a fan belt out of nylon stockings, but she was skeptical about this. I told her that this didn’t sound like a good idea to me. She told me that she and Eddie supported themselves by doing odd jobs, mostly yard work. They were both exhausted after a long day. She told me she had to get up early the next morning, because she had to be at a free medical clinic at 5 A.M. in order to have her teeth fixed. The clinic only takes a certain number of patients each day, so she had to be there early to make sure she got a spot. I dropped them off in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen. They never asked me for any money.

These are the real poor here in the U.S. Not the tea baggers who paid $349 a head to hear Sarah Palin spout gibberish at the Tea Party convention. These are people whose voices are never heard, whose very existence is rarely ever acknowledged by the media.

Posted in Capitalism | Leave a Comment »

Credit Unions

March 12, 2010

I keep my money in a credit union. CU’s are supposed to be better than banks, though I have found that this is not necessarily the case. Last week, I made a purchase using my ATM card, unaware that I didn’t have enough money in my account to cover the purchase. Instead of declining my card, which is what banks used to do in the old days, the CU covered the purchase and charged me $25. This happened three more times before I caught on to what they were doing. By then they had charged me $100. I went to the bank to see if I could get the charges reversed. The woman I talked to said she would refund me $25 as a “courtesy”, which still leaves me out $75. What burns me up is this woman actually expected me to be grateful for this.

She told me it was my fault that I got hit with these fees. Well, yes and no. Yes, I should have kept better track of my account. However, if they had declined my card, I would have used my credit card instead and everything would be fine. (And isn’t this type of situation what a credit card is supposed to be used for?) Instead I’m out $75 because of their “courtesy”.

Credit unions are supposedly non-profit, but one thing I’ve learned in life is that some things that are “non-profit” actually aren’t. If these people aren’t making a profit, then why do they need to hit people with $25 fees? I smell a rat here.

Posted in Capitalism | Leave a Comment »

Non-Controversy of the Month

February 6, 2010

In a society in which we are discouraged from discussing the truly outrageous things that are going on in the world, it’s perhaps inevitable that people would contrive to be offended by trivialities.

I found this on the Internet the other day.

According to the article, NBC has issued an apology (to whom?) because, during Black History Month, their cafeteria served a meal that consisted of fried chicken, collared greens with smoked turkey, white rice, black-eyed peas and jalapeno cornbread. (Sounds like damn good eating to me.) The article doesn’t make clear who was supposedly offended by this. It is common in our society to associate certain foods with certain ethnic groups, and no one is bothered by this. Italian-Americans don’t get offended when a movie shows Italians eating pasta. I am of German descent, yet if the UO dorm cafeterias were to celebrate Oktoberfest by serving bratwurst and sauerkraut, I would not find this offensive.

The article quotes the chef, Leslie Calhoun, who is Black, as saying:

    I don’t understand at all. It’s not trying to offend anybody and it’s not trying to suggest that that’s all that African-Americans eat. It’s just a good meal. I thought it would go over well.

I would have thought so, too.

I spent nearly ten years of my life in the awful city of Los Angeles. Yet I will always fondly remember the soul food restaurants that I went to there. There is this place in Hollywood that I would go to called Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. (What two things could possibly go together better than chicken and waffles?) They have this dish called Stymie’s Choice. It consists of a heaping pile of fried chicken gizzards and grits, covered with gravy. Damn, it’s good.

There’s one soul food restaurant here in Eugene. It’s called Papa’s Soul Food Kitchen. (I recommend the gumbo.) It was, until his recent death, owned by a guy who called himself “Papa Soul”. He was a fixture in the local music scene. He would play the washboard with local bands. Lately, the place has started having live blues shows.

So, I don’t feel much sympathy with people who take offense at finding fried chicken and collared greens in the NBC cafeteria. All I can say to them is: “Get a life”.

Posted in Capitalism, Eugene, Los Angeles | 3 Comments »

Wrapping Up the Naughts

December 30, 2009

Well, not only have we come to the end of the year, but we have also come to the end of the decade. All the reviews of the 2000’s that I’ve read have been pretty much the same. There seems to be universal agreement that this decade sucked big time. W.H. Auden once called the 1930’s a “low, dishonest decade.” The 2000’s certainly had more than their share of dishonesty. Just think of the mind-numbing barrage of lies during the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

This is all the more dismaying considering that the decade started out promisingly. The Anti-WTO demonstration in Seattle in November 1999 had reinvigorated the left. People wanted to do things, to get out in the streets and make a statement. During the Democratic National Convention in 2000, 40,000 people marched through the streets of Los Angeles, in the face of intimidation by the police. When George W. Bush stole the 2000 election, that didn’t put any damper on things. To many people, it just confirmed their suspicion that the system is totally corrupt. The police repression at the Genoa demonstration in the summer of 2001 did disturb some people, but still they felt that they could accomplish something.

I remember that summer I was living in Los Angeles, and I was involved in a solidarity campaign with the Immokalee farm workers. They had called for a boycott of Taco Bell, to get them to pressure the growers into raising their wages. Once a week we would have a demonstration in front of a Taco Bell in East Los Angeles. Each week the protest got bigger and louder. People from the neighborhood would join in, as well as students from nearby East Los Angeles College. They wanted to make a difference in the world. Teenagers would go up to cars in the drive-thru and explain to people why they shouldn’t buy from Taco Bell.

Then September 11th happened.

Suddenly people were all driving around with American flags on their cars and bumper stickers saying, “United We Stand.” This was an understandable visceral response to the attacks, but I could see that it would only lead to trouble. The media suddenly stopped treating Bush as a joke and began touting him as a national hero (even though he hid out at two air force bases during the day of the attacks.) In the economic slump that followed the attacks, Bush urged people to go out and shop. The media treated this as serious advice.

The left never really recovered from what happened. I think it fair to say that most of the people who marched through the streets of Seattle probably voted for John Kerry in the 2004 election. This is really sad, especially when you consider that Kerry is an enthusiastic supporter of everything those people were protesting against. (And Kerry was promising to send 40,000 more troops to Iraq.) “Anybody but Bush” became the mantra. Anyone who questioned this immediately found himself a pariah, if not threatened with physical violence. Kerry’s campaign slogan was “Help is on the way.” I guess people didn’t think they needed help, since Kerry lost the election.

Four years later, we had Obama promising us “hope”, which sounded a little catchier. Then there was the financial meltdown, and Obama became a shoo-in. The irony here was that Obama is a firm supporter of the economic policies that led to the meltdown. Sometimes hope is just that.

The year started off with Israel’s savage attack on Gaza. Not a murmur of criticism from Obama or any of the other Democrats. Once in office he impressed everyone with his ability to form complete sentences, such a refreshing change from his predecessor. He put forward an economic stimulus plan (mostly tax cuts) that was too timid to have much effect. The Republicans immediately started screaming “socialism”, and they’ve been like a stuck record ever since. In October it was announced that, for no clear reason, Obama was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. (It seems that the prize was actually for not being George W. Bush. The legacy of W.’s presidency is that the bar has been lowered on just about everything.) Shortly afterward, Obama announced he was going to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

Now, the Democrats in Congress are on the verge of passing a Health Care “Reform” bill that has nothing progressive about it and is in some ways actually reactionary. One hopes that the way this bill made its way through the Senate will make people question the way our government is set up. The Senate (originally modeled after the British House of Lords) is an inherently undemocratic institution. Every state gets two senators, regardless of its size. Thus, California, which has a population of 36 million, has the same number of senators as Wyoming, which has 544,270 people. (More people live in the city of San Francisco than in the whole state of Wyoming.) This problem is compounded by the filibuster rule. It takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. (The idea here seems to be that having a simple majority just isn’t good enough.) So, we had the disgusting spectacle of Senate Democrats groveling at the feet of Joe Lieberman of Connecticut (pop. 3 million) and Ben Nelson of Nebraska (pop. 2 million). The most hilarious moment of the year came when Lieberman announced that he had suddenly changed his mind about the Medicare buy-in (which he had supported for years). He was now opposed to it, just because he had heard a liberal congressman say that he liked the idea. (This is the conservative mentality in its purest form: if the liberals are for it, I’m agin’ it!) So the Medicare buy-in was immediately jettisoned, without a murmur of protest. As for the cynical promises that were made to Nelson to get his one lousy vote, you can expect the Republicans to be making hay out of them in next year’s congressional elections.

Everything is not bleak, however. There have been a few glimmerings of a fightback, such as this summer’s G20 protests and the demonstrations at the Copenhagen climate conference. And there were the Viva Palestina convoys to Gaza. Interestingly, there has been an upsurge in struggle in Iran. It seems I was right in guessing that last summer’s demonstrations were about more that just a stolen election. So, I guess Obama wasn’t completely wrong about there being “hope”. It’s all a matter of what one does with it.

(By the way, the Immokalee workers eventually won concessions from Taco Bell. This was one of the few labor victories of this miserable decade.)

Posted in Anti-Capitalism, Capitalism, Democrats, Imperialism, Iran, Obama, Parliamentary cretinism, Republicans | Leave a Comment »

Oral Roberts (1918-2009)

December 16, 2009

Oral Roberts has died. He was a famous television evangelist and the founder of Oral Roberts University. He was an advocate of “prosperity theology”, which claims that if you’re faithful, God will reward you with material wealth. Roberts also claimed to be able to heal people through prayer. Strange to say, none of the obituaries that I’ve read mention what, to me, is the most interesting thing about him: he saw a 900-foot tall Jesus (or at least that’s what he said.) And he saw Him more than once. The second time, Roberts was having trouble raising money for a medical center he wanted to build. (If he could cure people by praying, what did he need a medical center for?) According to the Tulsa World, when Roberts talked about his problems, the 900-foot Jesus said, “I told you that I would speak to your partners and, through them, I would build it!” (The wording here suggests to me that Jesus felt that Oral was starting to nag him.) I don’t know about you, but if a 900-foot tall Jesus showed up at my door and told me to give money to Oral Roberts, I don’t think I would be in a position to say “No”.

To me, there is something quintessentially American about all this. I doubt that it ever occurred to Bernadette Soubirous that her accounts of meeting Mary would have sounded more impressive if she said that the Holy Virgin was 900 feet tall. A predilection for gigantism seems characteristic of Roberts. In the 1980’s he built the City of Faith Medical Center, which included a 60-story building, in Tulsa, Oklahoma; even though the local medical community said it wasn’t needed. It went out of business in 1989. (When he was raising funds for the place in 1987, Roberts told people God would kill him if he didn’t raise the necessary money. It seems that God doesn’t mess around.)

Out of curiosity, I went to the website of Oral Roberts University. What do they teach at a Pentecostal Christian university? I found that they have colleges of Art and Cultural Studies, Business, Nursing, and Theology. I’m pleased to find that they also have a college of Science, though it is unclear whether they teach evolution – or geology, for that matter. Discussing the accomplishments of the school’s graduates, the website notes: “One of our recent French language students was hired by the CIA.” That’s not something I would brag about.

In 2007, ORU was the scene of a scandal involving Roberts’s son, Richard Roberts, who was then president of the university, as well as Richard’s wife, Lindsay. According to the Associated Press:

    Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors’ expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter’s senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay.

    Lindsay Roberts is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as “underage males.”

Maybe they thought that God was rewarding them for being faithful. Just a suggestion.

Posted in Capitalism, Popular Culture, Religion, Republicans | Leave a Comment »

Pavlov’s Dogs

October 29, 2009

The ISO held a meeting the other day at the University of Oregon campus entitled “Socialism: What It Is and Why We Need It”. About a half-hour into the meeting, a group of campus Republicans showed up, one of whom was carrying a US flag. During the discussion, someone made the point that the working class was created when peasants in Europe were driven off their land at the end of the Middle Ages. One of the Republicans said, “No one’s being driven off their land now.” A woman then pointed out that 600 farmers are driven off their land every day.

“That’s because they’re lazy,” said the guy with the flag.

Some people have it easy in life. They can sleep soundly at night, knowing that all the world’s problems are because people are “lazy”. If farmers are forced off their land, it’s because they’re “lazy”. If people can’t afford health insurance, it’s because they’re “lazy”. If people are homeless, it’s because they’re “lazy”. If a levee breaks and people’s homes are destroyed, it’s because they are “lazy”. The world is falling to pieces, but they can rest assured that it’s just a matter of people being “lazy”.

It was actually a good thing that Republicans showed up at this meeting. People got a chance to hear just how vacuous are the arguments that are made in defense of capitalism.

Posted in Capitalism, Republicans | 2 Comments »

When Moore is Less

September 28, 2009

Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story has just been released. The comments I’ve heard about it have been mostly good. (You can find Louis Proyect’s review here.) I will no doubt go to see it. I must, however, admit to having some feelings of trepidation. Every Michael Moore film, no matter how good, has at least one awful moment in it.

Sicko is a great film. One has to admire the courage that Moore showed in taking on the insurance industry. Yet there’s that horrible moment when Moore starts gushing over Hillary Clinton, as if he has a school boy crush on her. (For all I know, he does.) What makes this insulting is that Clinton helped to kill the single payer movement in the 1990’s.

I know I’m not the only lefty who cringed when Moore started berating Charlton Heston (who was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease) in Bowling for Columbine. Heston was a crank, but he was a relatively harmless one in the larger scheme of things. I remember that when this film first came out, I heard an interview with Moore on the KPFK radio station in Los Angeles. The interviewer started things off by asking him to explain what the movie was about. Moore responded with a quote from D. H. Lawrence. I can’t remember the exact words, but it was something to the effect that “every American is essentially a killer.” The only conclusion I could draw from this was that Moore was saying that violence is ingrained in US culture. Interestingly, this was the argument that Heston tried to make in the film, but Moore kept interrupting him.

By the way, does anyone actually know what the main argument of Bowling for Columbine is?

On the thread following Proyect’s review, Renegagde Eye reports: “I saw a screening of this film, with MM in person there. He was asked about a labor party, why he doesn’t split with Dems. He replied he was too old to start a new party. He recommended taking the Dems over.” Moore might as well have argued that we should take over the Roman Catholic Church. In both cases, we have an entrenched institution with a great deal of money and vested interests behind it. The very idea that leftists (even ones who wear baseball caps) can take it over is moonshine. It would actually be easier to start a new party.

Moore is a talented and important filmmaker, but when it comes to trying to find some way for us to move forward, he is clueless.

Update: I went to see Capitalism: A Love Story and I must say that I liked it a lot. I think it is the best of the Moore films that I’ve seen. There wasn’t anything like the horrible moments that I talked about. True, the movie was soft on Obama, and there was a teary-eyed tribute to Franklin Roosevelt that I could have done without. However, the film was powerful because it showed concrete examples of the suffering that capitalism causes, and it also showed examples of people fighting back (though I would have liked to have seen more of the latter.) At the screening that I went to, people applauded at some moments. I strongly urge everyone to see this important film.

Posted in Capitalism, Cinema, Michael Moore, Parliamentary cretinism | Leave a Comment »

Some More Thoughts on Barnes & Noble

August 21, 2009

Since my last post, I have been thinking some more about my experiences at B&N. One thing that I didn’t talk about was the fact that I had to sell Barnes & Noble “Member” cards. (These were sometimes referred to as “customer advantage” cards, or, more accurately, as discount cards.) The deal was this: the customer would pay $25 for the card (which had to be renewed annually). In return, he or she would get 10% off most items (including cds, dvds, and cafe purchases), 20% off adult hardcovers, and 40% off hardcover bestsellers. So, a person would have to spend as much as $250 in a single year before he or she would begin to come out ahead. Now, there are many people who do spend more than $250 a year on books. However, there are many more people who don’t spend that much (or anywhere near it).

Whenever I was working at the cash register, I was obligated to try to sell, or at the very least mention, the card to every single customer. I felt a bit conflicted about this, since I knew it wasn’t a good deal for most people. Usually I would only do a hard sell if a person was buying a lot of books, or if the person asked about the card. However, management always seemed to be fretting that we weren’t doing enough to sell the cards. We were always having meetings, in which they would discuss the importance of selling the “memberships”. They would outline various strategies for getting customers to buy them. It all got to be a bit wearisome after a while.

The explanation they gave for the card is that it promotes “customer loyalty.” That’s putting it politely. I gradually realized that the card actually entails a subtle psychological persuasion. If somebody forks out $25 for a card, he or she will then feel obligated to spend enough money in order for the real savings to kick in. Otherwise, the person will feel like a chump. P.T. Barnum would have been proud of this.

The psychological persuasion cuts two ways. Every worker wants to believe that he or she is doing a good job, regardless of how that person feels about the nature of his or her work. I really did feel compelled to show management that I could sell the card. I felt proud that I always managed to sell more cards than were required by the company’s mandated quota. I even felt envious of the employees who sold more cards than I did. I know I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. There was a woman I worked with who would get visibly upset if she failed to sell any cards during a shift.

Another thing that bothered me: the cafe workers are paid the same wage as the booksellers, even though their work is more demanding. They aren’t even allowed to have tip jars. (The cafe workers at Borders are allowed to have tip jars.)

Full-time workers get health insurance only after they have worked a certain number of hours. This one woman I worked with injured her leg a few weeks before she would qualify for health insurance. (She had been working there for quite a while.) I remember her limping around the store in obvious physical pain.

Posted in Capitalism | 1 Comment »

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