Month: March 2008

The Dirty Little Secret of Globalization

Trish

On the campaign trail Hillary Clinton tries to distance herself from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) worked out by her husband’s administration more than a decade ago. But you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, and the Sierra Club’s executive director, Carl Pope, sums up where globalization has brought us.

When corporate America tied its future to globalism, it made a deal with the devil. The record profits reaped by outsourcing U.S. manufacturing abroad came at a high price: the risk to the good names of the country’s biggest companies.

“Globalism has turned brand-name manufacturing into a fraud. Many knockoff handbags and other luxury goods are made in the same factories as the real thing. We’re not paying for quality goods anymore — we’re paying for high-priced marketing and design combined with low-wage, exploited workers.”

…In today’s globalized economy, top companies have lost control of the quality of the goods that display their logos. They are powerless to prevent a recurrence of the toxic-toy tragedy–and they are terrified that their brands could be dragged through the mud when the next epidemic of dangerous products strikes.

…The problem is a business model in which companies outsource manufacturing under short-term, low-cost contracts to the firm that will follow their design standards most cheaply. All that is really Fisher-Price about Dora the Explorer is the design–the product itself is made in a factory over which the company has almost no control. It doesn’t manage the working conditions, environmental standards, or safety practices. As a result, it no longer controls the product itself.

…Fisher-Price didn’t want lead used in its products. But it did want to drive the best bargain it could with toy manufacturers in China and to be able to shift to new suppliers if it found a lower price. Faced with this pressure and already located in the cheapest labor market in the world, subcontracting manufacturers realized the only way to cut costs was to cut corners, and lead is a cost-effective corner to cut.

The joke is on the companies who exploit cheap foreign labor. It’s also on those of us who are willing to shell out big bucks for new items with the right labels.

So brands no longer mean what they used to: Globalism has turned brand-name manufacturing into a fraud. Many of the knockoff handbags and other luxury goods you can buy on the street in Shanghai–or even New York City–are actually made in the same factories as the real thing. We’re not really paying for quality goods anymore–we’re paying for high-priced marketing and design combined with low-wage, exploited workers producing inferior products using shoddy safety and environmental standards.

Eliot Spitzer Kept His Black Socks On During The Act

Trish

O.K., I have to admit I really don’t get strippers and prostitutes and lap dances and all that stuff, but I’m female so there you go. I mean, how do you pay for it and keep up the illusion in your mind that there’s anything but contemptuous nose-holding disdain going on in the mind of the payee? You know that this woman would not look at you twice if you weren’t giving her cash, so how much fun is that?

That said, wouldn’t you expect that if you were in fact paying thousands and thousands of dollars to someone to have sex with you that you would at least be able to take off all your clothes — socks included? Not if you’re Eliot Spitzer.

Almost four months before New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in a sex scandal, a lawyer for Republican political operative Roger Stone sent a letter to the FBI alleging that Spitzer “used the services of high-priced call girls” while in Florida.

The letter, dated Nov. 19, said Miami Beach resident Stone learned the information from “a social contact in an adult-themed club.” It offered one potentially identifying detail: The man in question hadn’t taken off his calf-length black socks “during the sex act.”

“…The governor has paid literally tens of thousands of dollars for these services. It is Mr. Stone’s understanding that the governor paid not with credit cards or cash but through some pre-arranged transfer,” the letter said.

“It is also my client’s understanding from the same source that Gov. Spitzer did not remove his mid-calf length black socks during the sex act. Perhaps you can use this detail to corroborate Mr. Stone’s information,” the letter said.

The entire Spitzer scandal is one big exercise in demoralization, but this is just sad. Roger Stone, legendary Republican consultant best known for the Willie Horton ad that helped put Bush I in the White House by its appeals to fear and racism, not to mention staging fake protests of the 2000 recount, was most recently behind a smarmy 527 out to smear Hillary Clinton. He’s also had a long-time feud with the Spitzer family. For him to be the one to expose Eliot Spitzer’s embarrassing sex life has to hurt.

Fox News Anchor Lectures Fox News Morning Bubbleheads for Trashing Obama’s ‘Typical White Person’ Remark

Jon Ponder

Via Pam Spaulding at Pandagon, the first video below offers a snippet from “Fox and Friends,” which is hands-down the worst morning show this side of home shopping, as the airheads natter on about Obama’s comment that his grandmother was a “typical white person” because she said she felt trepidation when she encountered a black man in public.

The second video picks up the broadcast a few minutes later when Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who, unlike the morning show bimbos, had a career as a legit news reader before debasing himself at Fox News, comes on and lectures the rightwing fluffers about their incessant trashing of Obama.

The question, of course, is whether Wallace’s criticism was legit or just a pathetic attempt to bring back Fox News’ now-banished tagline: “Fair and Balanced.”

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

— Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16th President of the United States

First the State Department, Now the IRS is Harassing Obama

Trish

Don’t you hate it when someone you don’t like does something you’re forced to applaud? Let’s hear it for Sen. Joe Lieberman. The one-time Democrat who lost his way after he and Al Gore were robbed of the White House in 2000 finally showed up. He’s asking the Internal Revenue Service very good questions about why they are singling out Barack Obama.

Lieberman complained that the agency’s guidance “implies that an individual who is a well-known candidate can become a ‘non-candidate’ for the purpose of a church appearance”

…the agency had advised the United Church of Christ last month of its “reasonable belief” the church violated a ban on partisan electioneering when Obama appeared at its 50th General Synod in Hartford last June.

But Lieberman contends there are no published guidelines on how churches remain tax-exempt while addressing issues of the day. The IRS’s “we know it when we see it so just take our word for it” policy makes compliance challenging.

Lieberman wrote that he was concerned about that inquiry and asked the IRS to explain “the specific process by which it establishes the statutorily required ‘reasonable belief’ of improper activity.”

…Lieberman complained that the agency’s guidance “implies that an individual who is a well-known candidate can become a ‘non-candidate’ for the purpose of a church appearance,” but that it doesn’t explain “how such a candidate can be transformed into a non-candidate for the purposes of the appearance.”

Meanwhile, the State Department announced it’s firing employees who passed their spare time browsing through Obama’s passport files. The agency is careful to identify the offenders as “contract workers,” reminding us all what life was like before we agreed to “run government like a business” and hand over the most sensitive tasks to whoever shows up at the day labor office.

[Officials] said that the three employees had access to the passport database for their jobs and had inappropriately accessed Obama’s information out of nothing more than “inappropriate curiosity.”

But they admitted that assessment was based on nothing more than the reassurances of the employees’ supervisors at the two outside companies. The officials said they don’t know the political affiliations of the individuals.

“No, no, these folks weren’t up to anything. Why Annie Rove and Bobby McCain and Wanda Clinton are just random employees with inquiring minds.”

Update: It looks like there could be a Clinton connection for real. Daily Kos:

This is what Hillary Clinton campagin said in a memo they released on March 12:

“As voters evaluate you as a potential Commander-in-Chief, do you think it’s legitimate for people to be concerned that you have traveled to only one NATO country, on a brief stopover trip in 2005, and have never traveled to Latin America?”

Now the question is, how did Hillary Clinton campaign know about the countries that Obama visited?

In the aftermath of the Obama passport breach something stinks in the Clinton camp.

Updated update! It just gets better! Now Secretary of State Condo Rice is saying someone took a look-see at Clinton’s files sometime in 2007.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday told Sen. Hillary Clinton that the security of her passport file were breached in 2007, according to Clinton’s Senate official…

The State Department will brief Clinton’s staff this afternoon, a statement from her Senate office said.

Updated updated update!! Now it’s McCain! Hilarity ensues!

An embarrassed State Department admitted today that the passport files of all three presidential candidates — Sens. John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — have been breached by its employees…

State Department Secretary called Obama to apologize. She then had to call Clinton to apologize as well. And by noon, the department held a news conference to concede that McCain’s personal file had also been improperly accessed.

Poll: Clinton Retains Over Half of African-American Support

Jon Ponder

The report from the daily Presidential Tracking Poll from Rasmussen Reports describes Hillary Clinton’s support among African-Americans as a glass that is half-empty:
The Democrats are too busy attacking each other to do what needs to be done — connecting McCain to George W. Bush, morning, noon and night.

African-American support for Clinton has collapsed, falling to 55 percent in the general election match-up. [Barack] Obama, on the other hand, earns solid support from African-American voters but attracts only 36 percent of white voters in a match-up with McCain.

Considering the charges that the Clinton campaign has used racial issues to marginalize Obama, it is noteworthy that Hillary Clinton has held onto the support of a majority of black voters. It’s hard to parse what this says about the attitude in the community toward Obama, but may simply mean that 55 percent of African Americans believe Clinton stands a better chance of beating McCain than does Obama.

If the Obama campaign fails to recover from the controversy over the racial comments of Rev. Jeremiah Wright (or if other scandals come to light before the summer) and Clinton becomes the nominee, African-American Obama supporters — like the hordes of newly minted liberal Clinton-haters — will have to decide between their antipathy for Hillary and the vital interests of the country, which might not survive four more years of Republican control of the Executive Branch and the Judiciary.

Underscoring this, the Rasmussen report also shows that John McCain’s advantage in the general election is widening. McCain leads Barack Obama 49 percent to 42 percent and Hillary Clinton 51 percent to 41 percent margin.

The reason for this is simple: The Democrats are too busy attacking each other to do what needs to be done — connecting McCain to George W. Bush, morning, noon and night.

H/t: Trish

McCain Camp Pulls Another ‘We Didn’t Mean to Send That’

Buck Banks

approved.jpgAn aide to Sen. John McCain’s campaign was suspended and supposedly reprimanded for distributing a video clip that questioned Barack Obama’s patriotism. Politico has the story:

Soren Dayton, who works in McCain’s political department, sent out the YouTube link of “Is Obama Wright?” on twitter at 12:31 today with the tag, “Good video on Obama and Wright.” It has since been taken down.

Twitter is an online device that allows users to send out short messages and links en masse through computers or PDAs.

McCain and his campaign have repeatedly said that they would stay away from personal attacks on Obama, but the temptation has increased as Wright’s words have dominated the race in recent days.

Last week, they included an op-ed that hammered Wright and Obama in their morning clip package emailed to reporters. The same day, a campaign aide they regretted doing so.

It’s an all-too-familiar pattern in this election — some “overzealous” staffer sends out a damaging byte of information and the campaign then says it’s sorry it didn’t mean to and that’s not the kind of campaign I am, honest.

It’s a convenient shield, this anthropomorphic campaign thingy. The campaign says things, does things, strives to behave in a civil manner, but always seems to backslide, for which it also is always ready to apologize and express remorse.

Meanwhile, the other guy’s campaign gets to act all hurt and self-righteous, while the girl’s campaign just sits back watching smugly as the boy campaigns tease each other.

Sounds kind of childish for a process of picking the most powerful leader in the world …