Unions love New York's new Mayor Bill de Blasio. But can he deliver?
When Bill de Blasio won the New York City mayor’s race in a historic landslide Tuesday, most of the city’s 152 municipal unions felt a wave a relief – if not outright joy.;
Opinion
Google and Facebook may be our best defenders against Big Brother
The big online companies are calling for urgent reforms to protect us from having data intercepted
Over a few weeks' worth of bedtimes in the summer of 1984, my dad read me Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Though the dystopian context would have been lost on nine-year old me, the pervasive malevolence and the futility of the struggle was not.
References to Orwell are never far off today, whether to Big Brother and the surveillance society, or doublethink and Room 101. The Orwellian dystopia is so familiar now to us – and so astonishingly real – that we might need a new cultural reference, a new literary vision to warn of what lies ahead.
It's the relentless creep of progress and development that inevitably makes our worst nightmares and most brilliant visions a reality. Fifty years ago, security expert Eugene Kaspersky told a conference last week, the public would have been protesting on the streets at the idea that cameras would be surveilling every public placeacross the country, all day, every day. Today, we just accept it.
At the same conference, Dublin's Web Summit, the vast audience in the hangar-sized hall was asked how many had abandoned consumer web companies in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations. Three people put up their hands – and this among well-informed, technologically confident people.
The gap between the shock of these revelations and the call to action is perverse. The story is huge, multifaceted and complex, which excludes all but the most committed. For others, the truth about services on which they are utterly dependent – we are all utterly dependent – is too inconvenient to want to act; far easier to declare, "I'm not doing anything wrong," and, "I don't care if I'm being watched."
In truth, the call to action is not that we consumers abandon our online lives and seek out anonymity tools such as Tor, or start encrypting all our email using PGP. It's no bad thing that more sophisticated security techniques are seeping into the mainstream consciousness; gleeful pub conversations about our how mobile phones double as microphones and how even the subtle differences in the sound of typewriter keys can be decoded. Kaspersky has his own currency of expertise to maintain, and he too recounts how he won't store any compromising data on a computer at all.
This is borne out by the testimony of the tech investors at Web Summit too. "We're just not looking for privacy-aware services," said Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures. "There are so many compelling examples of value being created by sharing data, from traffic jams to healthcare. The problem isn't privacy but trust. We can't retreat into the dark ages." That means spending time influencing policy, he concluded. Entrepreneurs were falling over themselves to testify to their fierce protection of customer data; taxi-app Hailo is building up records of payment details combined with location data for account holders, while Evernote records increasingly extensive personal notes covering everything from bank statements to work meetings. Both say they have not handed over customer data outside of specific warrants but as we now know, the NSA doesn't need permission – it will help itself. What are you sharing online?
The crisis is in public trust of both our governments – who, when it suits them, will seize the opportunity to criticise oppressive regimes who restrict free speech — and corporations whose reputation depends on credibility and trust. European nations have generally set up rigorous laws to protect their citizens from business, while its governments rely on the trust and goodwill of the public. In the US that situation is reversed, with citizens protected from government through the constitution, and business commercially dependent on trust, among other things. The lack of oversight and accountability has meant the security services never had to draw the line about what is acceptable, necessary, moral and legal.
This dynamic of corporate autonomy may end up creating the strongest fightback against the over-reaching security services, with Google and Yahoo's fury at the intercepts of their data networks and heavy lobbying in Washington. "We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fibre networks," said Google's chief legal officer David Drummond. "It underscores the need for urgent reform."
Surveillance is the undercurrent in every tech conversation now, a lens for understanding our vulnerability and exposure to every part of the online world. This is not a choice between catching terrorists and what David Cameron astonishingly described as some "la-di-da, airy fairy" views on free speech and the right to privacy. If we are happy to accept that our online lives are best represented by Google, Skype, Yahoo, Facebook and all the rest, despite the compromises we make on those commercial platforms, then we have to hope they have the best chance of clawing back our right to free expression and privacy, our right to relate the world around us without being watched.
Returning to Orwell, what will the state of our surveillance nation be in 2031? The worst that can happen is that the whole lot comes true.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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Dear Richard Dawkins: Stop with the tweeting already. We atheists need you more than ever now
Atheism has plenty of adherents, but few internationally respected people we're happy to have speak for all. It's high time Richard Dawkins stepped back up to the plate
'Bin Laden has won, in airports of the world every day. I had a little jar of honey, now thrown away by rule-bound dundridges. STUPID waste," was the heartfelt message posted this week on Twitter by Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, author, emeritus professor of New College, Oxford, and world-famous proselytiser for atheism.
It's a good thing that, in addition to the chance to fire off any first, furious half-thoughts that cross our minds, Twitter has given us the expression *headdesk*. Even the most rigid secularist can find a crumb of comfort in that karmic rebalancing.
To channel Twitter's love of brevity for a moment, Dawkins is doing my nut in. The tweets are bad enough; everything about this one, in fact (not just a jar of honey, the world's most inoffensive foodstuff, but a little jar, up against the world's mightiest hate figure), contriving to stuff more bathos into 140 characters than most novelists manage in a lifetime, then adding a dash of arrogance by thinking this an ideal time to try to make his new coinage for modern jobsworths take flight. (Pardon the pun! LOLZ!) And it comes after a flurry of (primarily Islamosceptical) others that, as a Dawkins devotee ever since I read The Selfish Gene, leaves me deploying another few Twitterisms. Namely, WTF? WTFF? FFS.
Atheism has plenty of adherents, but few internationally respected people we're happy to have speak for all. Douglas Adams and Christopher Hitchens are lost to us for ever (unless, y'know, we're wrong about a couple of key issues). Stephen Fry's still around, but too busy. And my personal choice, Stephen Colbert, insists on remaining Catholic. We can't afford to lose the most cogent and indefatigable of them all.
Religion (or non-religion) needs marketing, like everything else. Atheism has been coasting for a while, as that dismal bus ad ("There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life") proved, managing to be both pusillanimous and patronising in an even shorter space than the average tweet. But after all, potential converts to Islam were presumably deterred by the prospect of being rotated by various parts of the media (even before Dawkins lent a hand) through a variety of roles from terrorist to benefit scrounger. And Catholicism was bringing itself down with one vile child abuse scandal after another, and further alienating followers and potential followers with its disapproval of gay marriage and acceptance of women in the church. Life was sweet.
But now Catholics have got a new, improved pope, keen to emphasise the centrality of love and charity to faith, instead of policing private sexual matters while offering lifetimes of succour to the worst of sinners. The Anglicans have performed the ecclesiastical equivalent of a Tesco price match and produced an archbishop who condemns corporate greed, is pro-marriage in all its forms, and generally seems to chime with the public mood better than anyone had dreamed.
Secularists must start fighting harder for market share, especially now that Dawkins is shrinking it with every tweet. At the risk of playing Sinead O'Connor to his Miley Cyrus: professor, please stop. Otherwise, it's all, well, *headdesk*
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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Hillary Clinton is the most formidable presidential frontrunner in modern era
All the variables that predict primary winners from polling to endorsements are working more in her favor than in 2008
Hillary Clinton remains the most formidable presidential nomination frontrunner for a non-incumbent in the modern era. As I wrote about last year, Clinton's combination of a number of factors made her strength pretty much unprecedented. Clinton has, if anything, become stronger over the last 12 months.
Clinton's polling among Democrats is still incredible. The latest Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey has her at 67% of the vote among Democrats nationally. That compares to 61% in December 2012. The fact that her numbers have if anything gone up is a very good sign for her. It shows that her numbers weren't merely inflated because she held the non-partisan secretary of state position, as they were for general election electorate.
Some might want to dismiss the predictiveness of early polling. Some may want to point to Clinton or Rudy Giuliani in 2008. The problem with that point of view in my opinion is that most early front-runners didn't put up anywhere near the same numbers Clinton is doing for 2016. Clinton was about 30pt lower in 2008 than she is now. Giuliani was about 35pt lower than Clinton now.
Other candidates too were simply not close. George W Bush was stuck in the mid 20s for the 2000 Republican nomination. His father was in the low 40s for 1988. Colin Powell was in the mid 20s and mid 30s for his 1996 and 2000 no-goes respectively. Bob Dole was in the high 30s for 1996.
The only candidate anywhere close to Clinton was Al Gore for 2000. Gore had long been in the upper 40s to mid 50s. Gore went on to waltz to the nomination in the single strongest non-incumbent performance in the modern era. He won every single primary and took 76% of the primary vote.
Clinton's numbers look a lot more like an incumbent. Bush was in the low 70s for 1992. Clinton was in the low 60s to low 70s for 1996. Obama mostly was in the low to mid 60s for 2012, even when matched up against Hillary Clinton.
Moreover, Clinton's edge extends to the early caucus and primary states. You national numbers can be amazing, but if you don't win either Iowa or New Hampshire, you're likely not going anywhere. Clinton is in the mid 60s in New Hampshire and the low 70s in Iowa.
A peak under the hood should give Clinton more confidence. Her favorable rating among Democrats nationally per Quinnipiac is 90% compared to just 4% who viewed her unfavorably. That suggests that it isn't just name recognition that is catapulting Clinton at this time.
Almost all other factors that made Clinton strong when I wrote my last article remain the same. She's got the organization in place in the early states thanks to her 2008 run, while pretty much any other candidate would need to start fresh. Clinton remains incredibly well polished in public speaking, as she was in 2008. I mean she says pretty much nothing to possibly get in trouble.
Importantly, there is no sign of anyone like Barack Obama contemplating a run. Clinton's coalition of women, non-college educated whites, and Latinos was just beat out by Obama's of African-Americans, college-eduated whites, and young voters. All Clinton needs to do is take a little bit of Obama's 2008 base to ensure his nomination.
The only candidate in my mind who could catch fire, Massachusetts' Senator Liz Warren, has already declared her support for Clinton. In fact, every single female Democratic senator is behind Clinton. What a difference that is from 2008.
Much of the establishment was actually encouraging Obama to run in 2008. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid weren't backing Clinton. Claire McCaskill's endorsement of Obama in 2008 was particularly memorable. All three of them are now openly pleading for and endorsing Clinton for 2016.
That's big news because a candidate who clearly wins the "invisible primary" usually takes the nomination. Primary voters can get confused between candidates whose ideology is very similar, so they look to the party elders. It's how Mitt Romney was able to take down Newt Gingrich in 2012. Clinton will have invisible primary advantage, which she didn't have in 2008.
Overall, there are many reasons to think Hillary Clinton will win the 2016 nomination, if she were to run. There are not many reasons to think she's going to repeat her 2008 performance. Every factor that forecasts nomination winners points more strongly in her direction than it did eight years ago. Now none of this means Clinton will take the general election, though you have to get there first to have a shot.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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Looks like Sen. Lindsey Graham's office is going to need a new voicemail message
When we learned that CBS had adios'd its "account of Morgan Jones [AKA Dylan Davies] on Benghazi" from its website because they've received new information that "undercuts" said account, we thought we'd check-in with the biggest Benghazi-humper of them all -- Senator Lindsey Graham.
Earlier this evening, The Raw Story tried to contact Graham's office for comment to include in our story. No one answered. But we did hear this:
If the 60 Minutes report is debunked, never fear as Graham could always revert to some of his other old Sunday morning standbys ...like the "actually existing apocalypse" and invading Iran. #thanksObama
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A growing coalition of progressives tries to expand social security instead of cutting it
In our nation’s capitol, calls for cutting Social Security benefits and shifting the ever-rising costs of health care from Medicare onto the backs of American seniors are ubiquitous. But context matters, and these ideas are nothing short of perverse…
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The false outrage over Obama's 'healthcare lie' is absurd
There's something verging on unseemly in the glee so many journalists have taken in the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act and in the incontrovertible fact that the Obama administration knowingly misled the American people about "keeping your plan". Magazine covers! Feuds! Late night comedians! Pursed-lipped statements of disappointment! The "breakdown" of the ACA has made analysts bold: "The Collapse of the Obama Presidency","Why Obama's 'iPod Presidency' Was Doomed", "the entire presidency is riding" on the exchanges, the promise that "you can keep your plan" is (quoting Rush Limbaugh here) "the biggest lie ever told by a siting president." Most people do not understand the ins and outs of the ACA. Most journalists don't understand it, either – and the clearest proof of that is that Obama shouldn't have been able to get away with the blanket language that he did. He was called on it, by Politifact, Factcheck.org and ABC in particular. Instructively, the fact-checking organizations found that the statement was at least "half true", and ABC allowed that the line "isn't literally true" and that Obama acknowledged in a press conference that it would be impossible for the government to entirely prevent changes to everyone's plan. It has never been a secret that there would be Americans whose coverage would change under the ACA, that some would face higher prices or, as they correctly surmise, "better" coverage is in the lead of the Washington Post story about the bill's passage.
All those accusations about how "Obama knew there would be cancellations and still lied about it"? Yes, the administration knew. But so did any reporter that read the press releases put out be the Department of Health and Human Services. To be sure, that language favored the interpretation the administration still prefers: that policy holders would have to "transition" to "ACA-compliant" plans. But there was no subterfuge about the fact of change.
Most Americans, I'm sure, still feel they were lied to. Obama's deception will cost him and the Democratic party goodwill moving forward, and in the short term, he will face even more resistance in moving along any substantial policies. (One can reasonably ask if that's enough of a price, given that it's no different than the situation he was facing before.) But the American people have been lied to before. A lot. This is not a trait they associate with Democrats or Republicans. It is one they associate with politicians. This experience will sour them on Obama, but they were already pretty sour on the system. That said, there is little evidence that people's feelings about politicians sour them on their legislative legacies, if those policies are working. Plenty of Tea Party voters are happy with the interstate highway system. President Nixon gave us Title IX educational benefits. And, more to the point given its problems in implementation, Medicare Part D came from President Bush II. And unlike a lot of legislation, especially legislation designed to address social ills, there is a definite metric, or just a few of them, that will tell us if the ACA has done the job it was intended to do: whether more Americans will have health insurance after its full implementation than those who did in 2009. I already know the answer to this question, and so does everyone covering the story: more Americans already have health insurance today, because of the expansions to government programs that were a part of the ACA's initial phase: about 2m more people, to be exact. The highest estimate for those who will receive cancellation notices I've seen is 16m (which is probably too high). Before the ACA, there were 50m Americans without any form of insurance. That 16m estimate will include people who get better, cheaper plans. It will include people who get more expensive, better plans. It will also include people who decide to pay the fine. But if the majority of them wind up with healthcare coverage, it will still be a preferable result to the state of the system prior to ACA. Most people who don't have health insurance want it – only 1.5% of the uninsured say they don't have it because they "don't need" it. Even the "young invincibles" you hear so much about want insurance, 80% of them. The GOP will have to run a lot of "don't enroll in Obamacare!" ads to keep pace. The sob-stories flogged by conservative and non-partisan outlets alike have already proven, when investigated, to be more complicated than "Obamacare took away my healthcare" headlines would have you believe. (See , here, and here, to start.) Any story on health insurance under ACA is going to be complicated, that's one of the law's many flaws: there's a lot of moving parts to keep track of. That jerry-rigged system of subsidies, exchanges, expanded programs and penalties is one of the reasons the website crashed. Plenty of carpers bemoaned the government not bringing in better programmers and designers to work on HealthCare.gov, but the truth is that the best information architects would have seen the potential problems and could have offered an elegant solution: a government program for all that would eliminate the need for any website at all. There's been much ink and venom spilt on the irony of our "tech president" presiding over a logistical and logical failure, but I sympathize with Obama. I think he did see all these problems coming. He's a smart guy. The biggest big lie he's told about Obamacare is that he actually believes it's a better idea than single-payer.
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Once again, the RIAA shows how easy it is to infringe on copyrights
One of the regular claims from the major labels and their representative groups, like the RIAA and BPI, is that copyright infringement is serious business, and everyone "knows" when copyright is being infringed. They always seem to brush off any claims…
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Food stamp cuts are ideological, not fiscal: Republicans make the poor pay to balance the budget
During a discussion at the University of Michigan in 2010, the billionaire vice-chairman of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway firm, Charles Munger, was asked whether the government should have bailed out homeowners rather than banks. "You've got it exactly wrong," he said. "There's danger in just shovelling out money to people who say, 'My life is a little harder than it used to be.' At a certain place you've got to say to the people, 'Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.'"
But banks, he insisted, need our help. It turns out that moral hazard – the notion that those who know the costs of their failure will be borne by others will become increasingly reckless – only really applies to the working poor.
"You should thank God" for bank bailouts, Munger told his audience. "Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else, there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies."
In the five years since the financial crisis took hold, people have been sucking it in by the lungful and discovering how pitiful a coping strategy that is. In Michigan, the state where Munger spoke, black male life expectancy is lower than male life expectancy in Uzbekistan; in Detroit, the closest big city, black infant mortality is on a par with Syria (before the war).
As such, the crisis accelerated an already heinous trend of growing inequalities. Over a period of 18 years, America's white working class – particularly women – have started dying younger. "Absent a war, genocide, pandemic, or massive governmental collapse, drops in life expectancy are rare," wrote Monica Potts in the American Prospect last month. But this was a war on the poor. "Lack of access to education, medical care, good wages and healthy food isn't just leaving the worst-off Americans behind. It's killing them."
This particular crisis, however, has also accentuated the contradictions between the claims long made for neoliberalism and the system's ability to deliver on them. The "culture" of capitalism, to which Munger referred, did not die but thrived precisely because it was not forced to adapt, while working people – who kept it afloat through their taxes and now through cuts in public spending – struggle to survive. Given the broad framing of economic struggles in the west exacerbated by the crisis, this reality is neither new nor specific to the US. "Over the past 30 years the workers' take from the pie has shrunk across the globe," explains an editorial in the latest Economist. "The scale and breadth of this squeeze are striking … When growth is sluggish … workers are getting a smaller morsel of a smaller slice of a slow-growing pie."
A few days before the bailout was passed, I quoted Lenin in these pages. He once argued: "The capitalists can always buy themselves out of any crises, as long as they make the workers pay." What has been striking, particularly recently, has been the brazen and callous nature in which these payments have been extorted.
Last Friday, 47 million Americans had their food stamp benefits cut. These provide assistance to those who lack sufficient money to feed themselves and their families. Individuals lose $11 (£7) a month while a family of four will lose $36. That will save the public purse precious little – bombing Syria would have been far more costly – but will mean a great deal to those affected. "Before the cut, it was kind of an assumption you were going to the food bank anyway," Lance Worth, of Washington state, told the Bellingham Herald. "I guess I'm just going to go $20 hungrier – aren't I?"
The cut marks the lapse in stimulus package ushered in four years ago. But while the recession is officially over, the poverty it engendered remains. Government figures show one in seven Americans is food insecure. According to Gallup, in August, one in five said they have, at times during the last year, lacked money to buy food that they or their families needed. Both figures are roughly the same as when Obama was elected. This negligence will now be compounded by mendacity. Republicans propose further swingeing cuts to the food-stamp programme; Democrats suggest smaller cuts. The question is not whether the vulnerable will be hammered, but by how much.
The impetus behind these cuts are not fiscal but ideological. Republicans, in particular, claim the poor have it too easy. "We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency," claimed former Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan. "That drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives."
The notion that food "drains the will" while hunger motivates the ambitious would have more currency – not much, but more – if the right wasn't simultaneously doing its utmost to drive down wages to a level where work provides no guarantee against hunger. In last week's paper for the Economic Policy Institute, Gordon Lafer, an associate professor at the University of Oregon, revealed the degree to which conservatives have been driving down wages, benefits and protections at a local level after their victory at the 2010 midterms.
He writes: "Four states passed laws restricting the minimum wage, four lifted restrictions on child labour, and 16 imposed new limits on benefits for the unemployed. With the support of the corporate lobbies, states also passed laws stripping workers of overtime rights, repealing or restricting rights to sick leave, and making it harder to sue one's employer for race or sex discrimination."
That's why 40% of households on food stamps have at least one person working. And the states most aggressive in pursuing these policies, Lafer points out, had some of the smallest budget deficits in the country.
Immediately after Obama's election in 2008, his chief of staff to be, Rahm Emmanuel, said: "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." The crisis didn't go to waste. But it is the right that has seized the opportunity. Not content with balancing the budget on the bellies of the hungry, it is also fattening the coffers of the wealthy on the backs of the poor.
Twitter: @garyyounge
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
[A child goes hungry. Photo: Shutterstock.com, all rights reserved.]
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Rip-Off: How private-sector health costs are killing the 'American dream'
Part one of this series, “The High Cost of Low Taxes,” noted that while Americans enjoy a tax burden lower than that of other wealthy countries, we also pay four times as much as they do, on average, for out-of-pocket “social costs” in the private…
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A man's perspective on why engagement rings are a joke
A diamond is forever' is genius marketing with no basis in relationship reality. My love isn't proportional to a ring size
Most of us are adult enough to know magic doesn't exist. And yet we're the same species that thinks fat rings are fairy-tale items which somehow "secure" another person's love, one step away from a "happily ever after".
They're expensive, useless and, worse, are insulting to notions of actual love. As anyone who's been in a serious long-term relationship knows, you don't need geology to proclaim (let alone justify) said love.
Before you take me for a cheapskate who just doesn't want to spend the money on a ring, let me explain a bit more. Many of us, especially men, have strapped our feet to the commercialised notions of what constitutes relationships. We've turned into zombies, hungry for all things red and supposedly lovey dovey. We buy into the baffling displays of romance like the nauseating crimson heart-shaped horror show we call Valentine's Day. Or the flowers and boxed chocolates we're supposed to deliver on anniversaries to celebrate monogamous tolerance and the disbelief you haven't murdered each other.
We speed through our finances and morals, enjoying the exhilaration of fitting in to societal expectation, as opposed to reflecting on whether our actions are warranted or justified. And our partners seem all too ready to go along with it.
Engagement rings – specifically expensive diamond ones – are often prime examples of this unthinking mindset. The problem isn't the rings themselves, but the justifications – or the lack of justifications – behind their acquisition.
We mustn't confuse engagement rings – given, usually to a woman, when a proposal is accepted – and wedding rings – given on wedding day. (Already, we should recognise how strange it is to need two different kinds of rings.)
Whatever the long history of engagement items – I've heard claims of it dating from ancient Egypt or Rome, for example – the focus on engagement rings should really start with De Beers, in the 20th century.
After large diamond mines were discovered here in South Africa around 1870, the mines' major investors amalgamated their interests to form De Beers Consolidates Mines. They recognised that due to diamonds having little intrinsic value, they would need to create demand via (the illusion of) scarcity and pretend worth. So began one of the most successful marketing and public manipulation campaigns of the 20th century, originating from four words: "A diamond is forever".
By convincing men their love for their future wife is directly proportional to the expense of the diamond ring, and convincing women to expect love in the form of shiny stone, De Beers and their marketers, NW Ayer, began a tradition so embedded we forget it's a marketing ploy. Genius marketing, to be sure, but marketing nonetheless.
And guess what? The prices keep going up, as if we are really loving more and deeper these days. According to the XO Group Inc 2011 Engagement Engagement & Jewelry survey, the average engagement ring cost $5,200. If you think that's bad, consider that nearly 12% of US couples spend more than $8,000 for an engagement ring. Of course, we should take such stats with some measure of scepticism, as Will Oremus highlights. Nonetheless, these are the prices at a time when the average American family earns less than it did in 1989.
The American bias of these stats shouldn't negate the overall point: diamonds – and therefore diamond rings – are expensive and the demand was created artificially for an item that's only property here is shininess (it decreases in value as soon as you walk out the store).
Any remotely logical person can see that spending several thousand on actually important items for a new couple like a place to live or putting money in an investment account will serve them far better in the future (and likely help with romantic and/or wedded bliss).
That engagement ring purchases tend to be for women – not by women – is also insulting to the cause of not viewing women as objects to be acquired. Consider that this is worthy of a headline in a respected US magazine at the beginning of this month: "Women Now Paying for Their Own Engagement Rings".
Many people will say that engagement rings are symbolic of love and devotion. Ignoring that this idea is itself manufactured by the profiting businesses, it also gives an arbitrary definition of "symbol": why can't a beautiful home be a symbol? Why can't long-term investments be a symbol? Indeed, would it not be more impressive to show off a house than a finger rock?
Tradition is another assertion when discussing almost anything to do with monogamy and marriage. But, like nature, tradition is a description not moral justification. Just because we've always done a particular action, doesn't mean it's always (or ever was) justified. Pointing to tradition means pointing to the mistreatment of different races and sexes, human sacrifices, and so on. Longevity, too, doesn't give moral immunity, or automatic goodness, to anything.
Engagement rings aren't even used to show one is married: they're used before the wedding even occurs. Indeed, even helping avoid awkward social encounters isn't aided, since there are other (and cheaper) ways of showing you're "in a relatinship" (not to mention just telling people trying to hit on you).
If you need a ring to prove your love, it's not your lack of a ring that's the problem.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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Want to end corporate welfare for McDonald's? Raise the minimum wage
You've got to feel for McDonald's. Every time the misunderstood corporation tries to offer its' low-wage employees a hand, it backfires. First the fast food giant was ridiculed this past summer for dispensing helpful budgetary advice to its struggling workers (in a nutshell: get another job). Now the company is in hot water again after a recorded call to its' McResource helpline, in which an employee who reported not being able to make ends meet was advised to sign up for food stamps and other government assistance programs, went viral online. Strangely though, the very people who ought to be most upset about this state of affairs – small government loving republicans who don't want anyone relying on federal assistance for anything – have raised little or no objection.
When Nancy Salgado, the employee at the center of this latest storm, called the McResource line to tell them she was having to ration food and couldn't take her kids to the doctor, the helpful employee on the other end of the line didn't offer to raise her wages or sign her up for health benefits, but advised her instead about the various federal government programs she could avail of. While it's not news that hugely profitable corporations like McDonald's are only too happy to rely on the American taxpayer to subsidize the non-living wages they pay their workers, (Salgado earns $8.25 an hour) the blasé nature of the phone call still sparked considerable outrage, but not from budget conscious Republicans.
Perhaps I'm being unreasonable, but it seems to me that when Republicans are so vocal about how much they hate government programs like SNAP benefits (aka food stamps) and Medicaid and indeed anything that makes life a little more feasible for low-income or no-income Americans, they should surely be able to work up a small sweat at such a blatant example of the system being gamed. Just last month congressional Republicans voted unanimously to cut $39bn from the food stamp program, and I surely don't have to waste words here outlining their opposition to any form of government subsidized healthcare. Why then, when they have made their objection to welfare programs abundantly clear are they seemingly okay with hugely profitable corporations exploiting these programs while they underpay their workers?
McDonald's have tried to do damage control on the phone call, claiming that the recording was "not an accurate portrayal of the resource line" because it was "very obviously" edited. The full 14-minute version of the call was provided to numerous medial outlets, however, and the facts remain unchanged: Salgado was told to seek out government assistance instead of being given a raise.
It doesn't help McDonald's case either that just a week or so before the phone call, the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the University of Illinois released a joint study on the public cost of low-wage fast food jobs. They found that 52% of the families of front line fast food workers are enrolled in one or more public assistance program compared to 25% of the workforce as a whole. Overall, subsidizing the wages and benefits of employees of highly profitable fast food chains costs the American taxpayer nearly $7bn per year.
The seeming indifference to this giant corporate welfare program that low wage employers like McDonald's and most of its' competitors in the fast food world are happy to avail of might be easier to understand if the companies were struggling but the opposite is true. McDonald's 2012 annual report(pdf) was a glowing affair – in which the company enthusiastically announced a 3.1% growth in global sales, a 5% earnings per share growth, worldwide expansion plans and billions in profit. Does a company this healthy (I use the term lightly) really need federally funded public assistance programs to stay in business? Hardly, but that doesn't seem to bother the very people who generally loathe any kind of handout.
If congressional Republicans are serious about their claim that cutting government spending is their highest priority, why are they so indifferent to this flagrant abuse of federally funded benefits? The reason can only be that if they were to raise serious objections to what is effectively a corporate welfare program for the fast food industry, they might be forced to do something that would be an even bigger violation of conservative principles – raise the minimum wage.
Since 2009, the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for non exempt employees, a figure so low that it doesn't qualify as a living wage in any state. Even Republicans acknowledge that it's simply impossible to cover basic living costs with wages this low, yet they voted unanimously earlier this year against a modest increase to $9 an hour. It seems that conservatives would rather demonize low-wage workers and find ways to blame them for their poverty instead of facing up to the fact that the only way to not be poor is to be paid more.
So for now we are stuck with a situation where one set of American workers has to subsidize the wages and benefits of another set of workers just so that certain corporations can keep their low end labor costs down and their profits way up. Fast food workers have actually come up with the most feasible way out of this unsustainable situation. They are asking their employers to raise their wages to $15 an hour, up from the average of $8 an hour. Needless to say McDonald's and their fast food counterparts will happily stick to the cozy arrangement they have going as long as their enablers in congress allow them to. They may soon find, however, that the American taxpayer is not quite so easily played.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
[Image via Tomasz Bidermann / Shutterstock.com]
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