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Stealing fromA mashup of Sadly, No! and Slashdot…

A few months ago, I was sup­posed to get some help on my job. Specifically, some­one to work on the .NET side of things, which would free me up to do the job I was actu­ally hired to do: PHP devel­op­ment. He wasn’t my first choice, but he was sec­ond, in large part because of his mas­ters degree and (minor) expe­ri­ence with .NET. In real­ity, though, find­ing some­one to do .NET CF devel­op­ment is a total pain, let alone on a startup company’s budget.

On his first day, he never arrived. I called and called, and three days later he informed me that he was in India on an emer­gency, and had asked a friend of his to return my calls if/when I called him. His “friend” never did, so it fell through. About a month after that, the first-choice can­di­date called me up out of the blue and asked if we were still look­ing for developers.

I said sure, and he came onboard for the same salary as choice #2 (the main stick­ing point for him the first time around). He was sup­posed to start on or about the first of November, though the owner and him had those con­ver­sa­tions and it was never quite clear what exactly was said as far as a def­i­nite start date (if any­thing was). So last Monday, I called him up, and he was in Austin. We worked out that he would start yes­ter­day at 8am.

He too, never showed up.

Five more mes­sages and 30 hours have passed since he was sup­posed to start work­ing here. Reading Glen Greenwald today, I come across this lit­tle tid­bit, which he quoted from an Associated Press story from Monday (empha­sis is Greenwald’s):

In court doc­u­ments filed with the 4^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., the Justice Department said a new anti-terrorism law being used to hold detainees in Guantanamo Bay also applies to for­eign­ers cap­tured and held in the United States.

Immigrants arrested in the United States may be held indef­i­nitely on sus­pi­cion of ter­ror­ism and may not chal­lenge their impris­on­ment in civil­ian courts, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion said Monday, open­ing a new legal front in the fight over the rights of detainees.

The story also goes on to note that the “test case” of this is a Quatari pro­gram­mer liv­ing in Peoria, IL (yes, that Peoria) — about an hour and a half south of my house. Nice that some geek is now sim­ply a test-case of Presidential TortureAlternative Interrogation Procedures, not a human being with a wife and four kids. If I were an immi­grant, I’d get the fuck out of the coun­try and not look back as well.

Of course, it’s also pos­si­ble that dude is just an ass­hole, and the whole “we can dis­ap­pear you” thing is just a coin­ci­dence. Not that it really makes the “we can dis­ap­pear you” thing much bet­ter, sim­ply less immediate.

BTW, where are the Democrats on this? Or was the plan to just get elected and let Bush’s phony “bipar­ti­san­ship” non­sense pre­vent them from actu­ally doing any­thing lest the media paint them as “Terra-loving San-Franciscamites”?

[Kinda sorry some­thing this snarky is the first post to PGO in months, but this par­tic­u­lar paranoia-kicker is a lit­tle close.]

Update: Turns out dude had a “per­sonal life cri­sis” that meant he had to stay in Austin, and would’ve called except for his dead cell­phone bat­tery. I guess Texas is worse than I sus­pected, since they appar­ently don’t have pay-phones or e-mail there either… *fume*

via Rad Geek:

or: Good times, good times (more on the photo later).

Yesterday, I read Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse. On the one hand, it’s nice to know that I intu­itively under­stood the neo-conservative inva­sion plan and rea­son — the so-called “Plan B” — well enough to describe it as “glob­al­iza­tion by force” in a paper I wrote for a Political Economy course. It’s also nice to know the vaunted-but-ignored State Department plan was, essen­tially, the oil indus­try plan, and not all that much less fan­ci­ful (an “inva­sion dis­guised as a coup that would be over in three days” — sure).

The cli­mate chaos unleashed by find­ing large new reserves would make the mere col­lapse of indus­trial civ­i­liza­tion look like a sideshow bagatelle¹

On the other hand, it’s some­what dis­ap­point­ing to have my belief in Peak Oil skew­ered so expertly. The issue is not so much that I believed in it, but rather that there is so much petro­leum in the world as to make both extreme cli­mate change and fur­ther impov­er­ish­ment of the U.S. poor and mid­dle classes essen­tially inevitable.

I don’t, how­ever, sub­scribe to his hand-waving dis­missal of the petrodol­lar the­o­ries for the inva­sion of Iraq, if for no other rea­son than he does the stan­dard “only on the Internet” shuck-n-jive in lieu of any actual counter argu­ment. Yes, Bush wants to devalue the dol­lar against the Euro. That does not include throw­ing the global econ­omy into chaos by let­ting over three bil­lion dol­lars sit idle each day — or worse, come back to the Federal Reserve as coun­tries dropped their dol­lar cur­rency reserves, no longer requir­ing them to trade oil? Because that is what a switch from the dol­lar to the Euro would entail.

Americans really don’t care about free­dom; they don’t really care about lib­erty; they don’t care about any of that.²

After that, the book reaches into the var­i­ous vot­ing scams which allowed Bush to steal the office, again. It cov­ers quite a bit of infor­ma­tion, from Ohio to New Mexico, from the more mun­danely racist lists of vot­ers to chal­lenge to the more “sexy, Hollywoodish” (the book’s term) machine hack­ing. On page 243, I read the fol­low­ing, from an African American who was ille­gally denied the right to vote in 2000 in Tampa, and would have been again in 2004 had Palast’s film­ing crew not shown up to do a story on him:

I went into the place to vote and I was with my son and there were about 40 to 50 other peo­ple around and I got up there to vote and they told me I was a con­victed felon. I told the young lady that I had never been arrested. I’ve never been arrested in my life. I I was in the mil­i­tary for four years and have been in the med­ical field ever since. You can’t even work for a hos­pi­tal being a con­victed felon… I was in the Persian Gulf War in ’91. It’s pretty screwed up how they did me, but what can I say?

I was upset, I was ashamed — with 40 peo­ple around — it made me feel real bad. And I’m just hop­ing I get a let­ter stat­ing, hey, you can vote again, Willie.

I really feel it was bad for African-Americans — but hey, what can we do some­times? What can we do?

At which point I col­lapsed out of my chair with a colos­sal fuck­ing headache behind my left eye­ball. After lying down for a few min­utes to get my bear­ings back (an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence in itself, BTW), I con­tin­ued read­ing, even­tu­ally com­ing across another cou­ple gems from New Mexico: Governor Bill Richardson (the only Latino gov­er­nor in the U.S.) is the son of a Citibank exec­u­tive and a woman who hails from Mexico City, and the only greater pre­dic­tor of how worth­less your vote is than race is income.

The resis­tance is just wait­ing to be orga­nized³

When this is all finally sorted out, the mid­dle class in gen­eral, and white peo­ple in par­tic­u­lar will have a lot to answer for. It may be us, the younger-types in the work­force today ask­ing for the account­ing. It may be our kids. People will turn back to the last few gen­er­a­tions and ask them: why did you let them get away with all this? Why did you keep your head down, try­ing to not fight them.

We’re all so busy scrap­ing, just try­ing to hang onto our own toys, that they can get away with these kind of colos­sal crimes they’ve been get­ting away with. And while you’re busy try­ing not to get fired, they lynch the black guy next door. And that’s just the progressives/liberals/left.

The self-described “con­ser­v­a­tives” will have more. One thing I don’t want to see, after the fight has been won, is some kind of phony “heal­ing process” where all the bosses get to pre­tend they had noth­ing to do with it — to pre­tend they weren’t right there at the table, waited on by starv­ing peo­ple. Where none of the police can quite remem­ber who was in the K-9 units, and none of the mil­i­tary men can recall who was killing fam­i­lies and rap­ing women in some desert hut, 12,000 miles away.

Ever notice how they never can find the racist cops in those civil rights doc­u­men­taries — the cop who was sic­c­ing the dog on the kid, or the fire­man man­ning the fire hose? That’s what I mean.

1. Robert Newman’s A History of Oil
2. Aaron McGruder, on C-SPAN
3. Ani DiFranco, Millennium Theater

I started writ­ing this post to point out that the coör­di­nated demands by vir­tu­ally every major nut­case over the New York Times’ reveal­ing the data-mining of bank­ing records via SWIFT—the calls for exe­cu­tion, harass­ment, lynch­ing, etc. — was a clear indi­ca­tion that Karl Rove is no longer a tar­get of Fitzgerald’s inves­ti­ga­tion. The much-vaunted “Fitzmas” is over, and you got a sweater. Huzzah. But then I real­ized that was silly, it sounds like it was cribbed from a uni-dimensional, dystopian sci-fi novel, which really sucks since it’s not fiction.

…sounds like it was cribbed from a uni-dimensional, dystopian sci-fi novel, which really sucks since it’s not fiction…

At any rate, it’s actu­ally kind of humor­ous to watch to Democrats floun­der and the Republicans go insane over the issue. Essentially, the Administration is tread­ing extremely close to fuck­ing with the money with their transaction-tracking pro­gram. I mean, how many rich peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions have their fin­gers in pies they would be embar­rassed to have them in? Monthly dues to the Arse-tickler’s, Faggot Fan Club?¹ A copy of the receipt in the hands of the U.S. Treasury Dept. Wire-transfers to drug-running para­mil­i­taries who are later impli­cated in a string of dead com­mu­nity and union activists? A copy of the receipt in the hands of the U.S. Treasury Dept. You get the picture.

Determining how that makes any sense is a task left to the reader…

So the Republicans have opened the door to allow the Democrats a chance to suck Capital’s dick, because Capital is now aware that the Republicans are wear­ing braces. Therefore, the goal of the smear cam­paign is to state, quite bluntly, that only a trea­so­nous, objec­tively pro-terror com­mu­nist would note the Republicans are wear­ing braces. Determining how that makes any sense is a task left to the reader.

Historically, how­ever, the chances that any of this infor­ma­tion will ever send some­one wealthy, pow­er­ful, and white to pound-me-in-the-ass prison is nil, regard­less of who is in charge. Clinton may have pun­ished the tobacco indus­try for killing his uni­ver­sal health care plan over the cig­a­rette tax hikes (which we got any­ways) with the 90s law­suits, but that’s a far cry from jail time. It appears the Democrats are either unable or unwill­ing to exploit this fis­sure pub­licly, they could have been caught off-guard by the venom directed at the Times, or they could be exploit­ing it pri­vately. I think the party is refus­ing to dis­close it’s motives pub­licly, because the DLC ulti­mately believes it can get it’s col­lege tuition paid for if it does it pri­vately. As the eco­nomic for­tunes of the U.S. decline (as they must in a free-trade envi­ron­ment), the only recourse the state will have against the pissed-off newly-poor are repres­sion and nation­al­ism, so I think the Democrats are wor­ried about giv­ing up this power now, since they’ll likely need it back in a decade or so.

I fully expect the Democrats will half-ass it on the abuse-of-power scan­dals, and will prob­a­bly end up doing what they say they want to do, if allowed: expand­ing the FISA Court again, to allow for “mass-target” war­rants. If so, I’d expect them to pitch it as a “nec­es­sary log­i­cal exten­sion of rov­ing wire­taps,” even though the abil­ity of the FISA court to issue non-FI-related war­rants in the first place is already a pretty broad exten­sion under the PATRIOT Act. Essentially, I think they’ll take another large step towards a com­pletely secret Star Chamber, and call it a check against the Monarchy.