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Zebra 3 Report by Joe Anybody
Monday, 7 December 2009
The Factory
Mood:
 not sure
Now Playing: LED's & USB's help create pollution, and capitalisms poverty
Topic: TECHNOLOGY
The Factory . By John Biggs on December 7, 2009 
The driver pulled up to a small office complex in the heart of the city and beckoned us into the back of his scuffed white van. The surface of the vehicle was caked in dust and the seats, clad in new blue velvet, were sized for someone much smaller. I curled up in the back and we were off into the city, cars coming at all sides and bikes darting out in front of the unflappable driver, his smile never wavering as we drove. 
I was on my way to a factory outside of Shenzhen, a city of 14 million people mostly dedicated to the manufacture of the things we buy. If it beeps, makes phone calls, or increasingly, if you can wear it, it’s probably come from out here. We roll through the city to the outskirts and then onto a wide five-lane highway that rolls up through the smog, past rocks and hills that look like a stage set for a Kung Fu fable. This is modern China, a place of conflicting images and a world of untrammeled growth.
The factories are about forty minutes outside of town in a special economic area dedicated to commerce. Sadly, the smoke from the endless stream of cars and trucks heading back and forth from the manufacturing center along with whatever is coming out of the factories themselves casts a pall on the landscape; little can be done about that right now, though. Motorcycles are outlawed here for safety and environmental reasons, and if this van is indicative of the current state of repair of many work vehicles, it’s going to take a long time to scrub this city’s skies clean again. Most of this most recent smog comes thanks to this chilly November. People outside of town – and in – are burning wood. It won’t get clear again until the Spring and then the Summer will bring idling cars, their air conditioners cranked up in the heat. We trundle along into the economic zone, down long roads lined with people returning from work. We narrowly miss a man on a bike and we pass electric cycles carrying huge, heavy loads of plastic and other scrap. This zone is where the factory workers live and raise families. There are no street lights and I see children meeting their parents after work, silhouetted by the lights of a stream of cars. We pull into a guarded complex of smaller factories. The man I’m here to see runs a company that makes USB keys. I probably have twenty of his products, all of them given to me by PR people, in a jar at home and don’t even know it. He has clients all over the world and most don’t even know they’re doing business with him. A chain of distributors come to him to make the finished product. When people say “OEM,” this is who they’re talking about. I climb up the dark stairway into a wood-paneled office area where sales and marketing people sit. I sit down with the president who offers me a water and a cigarette. He shows me his new selection of LED lights: he’s coming in on the ground floor with these just as compact fluorescents are leaving the realm of the profitable and moving into the commodity. He’s betting on these new lights to take him through the next decade. He’s been doing this for about seven years. He used to work in integrated circuits but he bought a few used Japanese PCB manufacturing machines and started making devices for clients. He stuck with USB keys because it’s a steady market and he lives comfortably. We walk into the factory. This is no “Intel Inside” clean room. A dozen long benches run through the room. There are ten old Dells with CRT monitors for quality control and a line of soldering irons at the ready. It’s late – about 6pm – so everyone is home. During the day the factory is full of people. All of them are making USB keys and the company can punch out about 30,000 a day, a minuscule number compared to the capacity of the behemoths down the road. The keys start out as circuit boards. There are about five keys per board and they come already milled to specifications. One employee lays down a layer of solder and puts the board through to the SMT machine. SMT stands for surface mount technology; it’s a way to tell a robot how and where to place resistors, transistors, and capacitors on a board. The machines here are old. They still use 3.5″ floppies to program them and they’re all in Japanese. They cost about $100,000 each, now, used. The better ones can hit the $1 million mark. The first SMT machine grabs tiny components from a long reel of electronic parts. It’s a mad dance. The hand – a box with pistons, really – picks the part and then places it. Pick, place, pick, place. It takes about a minute to do a set of five. Another employee checks the work and then it moves on. There’s plenty of room of error here simply because this is a commodity. The machine breaks down, it places transistors a bit skew. It doesn’t matter. In the end it’s going to hold whatever data you put on it, at least for a while. The dead devices go back into the recycling bin. The second SMT places the IC chips, the controllers and the memory. A final employee spot checks the board and sends it out to the soldering line. There they solder on each USB port by hand. The PCB itself costs maybe 50 cents to manufacture – that’s only parts – but the IC and the memory add about three dollars more. In the end, you’re looking at about $5 in costs, including labor. The final step is the application, by hand, of the silk screen, embossing, or laser etching. Each piece. By hand. The margin is slim at best, especially considering distributors sell these things to customers for about $7. So is this a place of horror? No. This is where men and women are given a wage and living quarters to make USB keys. There are few amenities here, no child care, no donuts at lunch. The toilets are squat toilets; the sinks are overflowing into the bathroom. The lockers are six inches by six inches. Enough for shoes, maybe, and a jacket. But this is how this stuff is made. Bigger companies won’t touch these orders – a run of 1000 pieces to them isn’t even worth the energy it takes to start up the machines. This factory fills a hole in the market. The employer fills a hole in the employee’s life. The employee lives in a free house and comes to a steady job. It’s hard, to be sure, and it’s a mess — but it’s a living. We moved our manufacturing over here. That’s what happened. To say this is good or bad, positive or negative, is not my place. The employees here are content and the owner has a nice car and is planning a vacation to the US next year. On a micro scale, this is what countless small businesses have done all over the world for about two centuries. You fill a need. You fill an order. On the macro scale you can cry and moan about exploitation, pollution, and capitalism. Pittsburgh was probably once as dirty as Shenzhen is right now. Blue laws were put into place there early on to prevent desolate employees from drinking themselves into an oblivion. We changed, and China will change. My fear, however, is that we’ve become inured to the way things are made here. We love how our phones spring to life a touch of a button. We love how we can buy a terabyte of disk space for $100. We love how Moore’s law is always punching something new across the transom. But consumption clouds the true value of this stuff. We need to rethink what we buy and expect more from the companies that try to sell it to us. This is a mom and pop USB factory. Someone like Foxconn, manufacturers of the iPhone, are a different animal entirely. But both are part of the menagerie that is Chinese manufacturing. It’s globalized. It’s monstrous. It caused this smoke and this darkness and this mind-numbing work. Don’t be fooled by clean rooms and white walls you see on TV with magical robot arms carrying iPhones into the heavens. This is dirty work and it will get dirtier. This is an industrial process to fulfill our desire. Shenzhen, and this small factory on her outskirts, show us the price of that desire.
Next: Order Fulfillment
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21 Comments
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 12:01 AM PST
Updated: Tuesday, 8 December 2009 9:37 AM PST
Sunday, 6 December 2009
Climate Coverup ...or is it
Mood:
 loud
Now Playing: ClimateGate
Topic: ENVIRONMENTAL
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/11/climategate ClimateGate. As near as I can tell, ClimateGate is almost entirely a tempest in a teacup. Among the stash of emails recently hacked from computers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of  East Anglia, one mentioned a "trick" for producing a nice looking graph, but the word "trick" was plainly used in the sense of "technique," not chicanery. There's nothing questionable there. Another bunch of emails shows that when scientists are communicating privately they can be as catty and nasty as anyone else. It's good gossip fodder, but nothing more. Another set of emails deals with outraged reaction to a particular journal article, but this isn't news. It was an entirely public incident when it happened a few years ago, and half the board of the journal resigned in protest. The emailers were determined not to have shoddy science published in peer-reviewed journals, and there's nothing wrong with that. Then there are some emails about which research should and shouldn't be included in the next IPCC report, which, again, is entirely normal. Every scientist who worked on the IPCC report surely had opinions about which research was on point and which was shoddy. Finally, there's the revelation that CRU has destroyed some raw temperature data, but this happened back in the 1980s, before global warming was even on anyone's radar screen, and was obviously motivated by space considerations (they were paper records), not any kind of coverup. What's more, the raw data is still available from the original sources that provided it to CRU anyway. Unfortunately, there are also a couple of messages that suggest an effort to destroy emails that might have been subject to a Freedom of Information request. That's a genuine problem, though it's not clear to me just how big a problem it is. So on a substantive level, there's really very little to this. Certainly nothing that changes the actual science of climate change even a little. The earth is still warming and disaster is still highly likely if we sit around and do nothing. But George Monbiot thinks we lefties have our heads in the sand if we think that makes any difference: I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can't possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging. ....The crisis has been exacerbated by the university's handling of it, which has been a total trainwreck: a textbook example of how not to respond....When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU's opponents landed blow upon blow on it. When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped "no comment" and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean "guilty as charged". ....The handling of this crisis suggests that nothing has been learnt by climate scientists in this country from 20 years of assaults on their discipline. They appear to have no idea what they're up against or how to confront it. Their opponents might be scumbags, but their media strategy is exemplary.
It's hard to argue with this. Climate change skeptics have gotten fantastic mileage out of this affair, but that's only partly because technical explanations of facially damaging statements are never very convincing to the general public. An even bigger part of the problem is that a lot of the scientists involved haven't even been providing the technical explanations, leaving that up to others who are trying to get a handle on what's going on. From a PR standpoint, it's been a disaster so far. For years the CRU has resisted public release of its underlying datasets, partly for the understandable reason that they're tired of dealing with amateurs who comb though raw data looking for ways to pretend that warming isn't really happening, and partly because they don't have the authority to release it all. Still, science is all about transparency, and annoying or not, the data should be available. Now it probably will be, and under the worst possible circumstances. It's going to be rough sledding for the next couple of years against the fever swamp crowd, aided and abetted by the coal industry. Buckle up.
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 12:01 AM PST
Thursday, 3 December 2009
Ralph Nader and the W.H. Public Library announcement
Mood:
 amorous
Now Playing: Great News regarding my favorite "real politician"
Topic: NADER
Nader visits W.H. Public Library . By: Justin Kloczko 12/03/2009 _____________________________________________________
WEST HARTFORD - At approximately 4 p.m. on Black Friday, Ralph Nader, the 75-year-old consumer activist from Winsted, took his seat inside a room at the West Hartford Public Library and began scribbling his autograph on copies of his new book, "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" A line of about 50 people spilled out into the library's main room, eager to meet Nader, who gave a speech downstairs after the signing. Upon seeing Nader enter the room, a cluster of six reporters spiked to the front of the line and set their recorders down at his table, forming their own shield around him as fans approached one by one. Some local television news techies erected a wall of cameras directly in front of Nader's face as he tried to make small talk with fans. When the line ended, Nader stood up and acknowledged the press, who in unison zoned in for the close-up with their cameras, tape recorders and microphones in hand. "Big question is, Ralph, are you going to run for the US Senate?" blurts out a local TV reporter with the first question. The local media was not there to talk about Nader's new book. They wanted to get down to brass tax and see if the three-time presidential candidate would declare to them that he would challenge Chris Dodd for his Senate seat next year. "It's premature," said Nader, who acknowledged that there is growing resentment with the two senators who represent the state (Joe Lieberman being the other). People don't agree with how they "represent them on a number of issues, including their pensions, financial crimes and health care," he said Nader expressed concern with the Senate and the passing of legislature. "The crisis in the Senate is really the big issue. The Senate is the graveyard of the legislative hopes of the country," he said. Nader said his declaration to run isn't dependent on just him, but whether people from around the state are going to be willing to work and put together a grassroots campaign. He said it is hard for him at this point to truly gauge the political field for a run. He isn't sure if people want him to run just because they're upset with the two incumbent senators or whether there is an actual force out there that will work in 169 towns in Connecticut. The one force that could serve as his main vehicle to run a campaign is the Green Party. Two members of the Green Party showed up with signs urging Nader to run here at the library on Friday. Vic Lancia, a weathered former state worker out of the Department of Labor, walked up to greet the man he has admired since 1967. "I'm retired, Ralph. I've got good legs to go to work for you," said Lancia. "Give me something to do next year Ralph." Lancia attended to get Nader to start seriously thinking about a run for the Senate. Asked what difference Nader offers from someone like Dodd, he said Nader wouldn't be penetrated by lobbyist money. Lancia feels the current healthcare bill moving through the House and Senate will still leave millions of uninsured. He favors single-payer healthcare, a system that cuts down costs and extends universal coverage through a single government source, like Medicare. "The blogosphere is going crazy. This is the most important senate race in the country," said Tim McKee, a national committee person from the Green Party who held a sign saying "Run Ralph, Run." "He's definitely intriguing," said Danielle Barry of West Hartford, who waited in line at the library. Although the reporters were hoping to get Nader to admit a run for the Senate (Nader concluded the session with reporters by saying "Must be a slow news day"), the questions they were asking him seemed to suggest otherwise. "Do you really want to be a US Senator? You say the whole system is broken, so do you want to be a part of that?" asked an Associated Press reporter. Another reporter from Channel 8 asked "What would Ralph Nader lose by running for U.S. Senate?" Nader shrugged it off by simply saying "time." The conversation then focused on Dodd, the longest serving senator in Connecticut history. Nader says Dodd is very resilient despite facing challengers from his own party in 2010. "Chris Dodd is very personable and I wouldn't write him off," said Nader. "He has been very concessionary to the banks and relied heavily and successfully on Wall Street contributions." Nader said the real test for Dodd is seeing how far he'll push for real consumer organization in the Financial Consumer Regulatory bill. Nader proposed the creation of a Financial Consumer Association to Dodd as a non-profit for consumers, investors and savors of financial services to keep a check on banks. If it isn't done Wall Street will control the regulatory agency, he said. "The test for Sen. Dodd is, as chair of the Banking Committee, (to) sponsor this Financial Consumer Association which does not cost the tax payer anything," said Nader. Down a floor below, there are no reporters present as Nader talks to a packed room about his new book. He speaks about his crusades to perform real change in Washington by trying to route out corporate lobbyists who began their vice-like grip on both Democrats and Republicans in the 1970s. The Democrats, the party that had high hopes as being a real alternative to the Republicans, ended up being "depreciated" by lobbyist money as well, according to Nader. "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" is a fictional book using real characters. It talks about the wealthiest citizens in our country, like Warren Buffett, assembling a cast of 16 plutocrats who use their power to save America's troubles. To get to the heart of the story, Nader uses fiction to point out certain truths about our modern culture. "A society that has a lot of justice doesn't need charity," he said.
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 7:24 PM PST
Updated: Thursday, 3 December 2009 7:26 PM PST
CIA: Our Drones are Killing Terrorists. Promise.
Mood:
 chatty
Now Playing: Drones
Topic: WAR
CIA: Our Drones are Killing Terrorists. Promise.
Al Qaeda is so spooked by CIA drone attacks that Osama’s crew is staging spectacular bombings in Pakistan, in an attempt to get America to call off its unmanned attack fleet, former U.S. officials and counterterrror advisers say. And the CIA is apparently so spooked about the possibility of a withdrawal that they’re spilling details about their supposedly-secret drone strikes to the New York Times. On April 19th, agency sources tell the paper, a CIA drone hit a truck parked inside an al Qaeda compound in Pakistan’s tribal province of South Waziristan. Packed with “high explosives, apparently to be used as a bomb,” the truck “erupted in a fireball” when it was struck. “A second, empty truck destroyed in the same attack may also have been there to be outfitted with explosives,” intelligence officials say. “In another significant attack, on April 29, missiles fired from a C.I.A. Predator killed Abu Sulayman al-Jazairi, an Algerian Qaeda planner who American intelligence officials say they believe helped train operatives for attacks in Europe and the United States.” In other other words: Pay no attention to those reports of civilian casualties, like those reports of “25 bodies” in the latest unmanned attack. These drones are killing terrorists. The Times goes on to report that “in meetings this past week in Washington, American and Pakistani officials discussed the possibility of limited joint operations with American Predator and Reaper drones. Under one proposal, the United States would retain control over the firing of missiles, but it would share with the Pakistani security forces some sophisticated imagery and communications intercepts that could be relayed to Pakistani combat forces on the ground.” But according to Gen. David McKiernan, commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, the U.S. military already shares its drone footage with the Pakistanis. “We exchange frequencies, we exchange intelligence, we have a Predator feed going down to the one [Afghanistan/Pakistan] border coordination center at Torkham Gate that’s looked at by the Pak military,” he said in November. And according to the Wall Street Journal, the CIA is already sharing footage from its unmanned air force, too. On Jan. 22, Pakistani paramilitary forces arrested Zabu ul Taifi, a Saudi national and alleged al Qaeda operative… [He] was located at a safe house in the Khyber Agency… through a combination of human intelligence from Pakistani agents, informants on the ground and aerial surveillance by U.S. drones. Once authorities were confident Mr. Taifi was in the walled, mud compound, Pakistani paramilitary forces backed by helicopters grabbed him, the officer said. Throughout, Predator drones hovered overhead and would have attacked if Mr. Taifi or other suspects had tried to escape, the officer said. In all, Mr. Taifi and six other men — Afghans and Pakistanis — were nabbed in the raid.
That seems to be in direct contradiction to the Times report. Something’s not adding up here. Meanwhile, Pakistani president Asif Ali Zadari keeps saying that he wants killer drones of his own. On Meet the Press yesterday, Zadari was asked if he considered the “drones that fire missiles and target Taliban” to be effective. The Pakistani’s answer: “I would consider them to be very effective if they were part of my arsenal. I’ve been asking for them, but I haven’t got a positive answer as yet. But I’m not giving up.” Apparently not. According to Air Force Times, “Pakistan is working on its own Predator-like unmanned aerial vehicle,” or UAV. The country’s air force and government-owned defense conglomerate, the National Engineering and Scientific Commission, are flight-testing a new-design aircraft to be equipped with a… laser designator and laser-guided missiles. The Burraq UAV is named for a winged horse creature in Islamic tradition, similar to Pegasus. According to local news reports, Pakistan is focusing its unmanned aircraft efforts on upgrading various older UAVs with Chinese help. But the sources note that no domestically produced UAV is large enough to heft both a missile and a targeting system. The military’s most capable UAV is the air force’s Selex Galileo Falco, which can laser-designate targets for other platforms but cannot deliver munitions.
UPDATE: IF you’re new to the killer drone world, this 60 Minutes segment, which aired last night, is a good primer. [Photo: Noah Shachtman] ALSO:
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 4:11 PM PST
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
Homeland Security Incarcerating Refugees in USA
Mood:
 blue
Now Playing: Human Rights are in the USA made toilet
Topic: IMMIGRATION
Why Is the Department of Homeland Security Incarcerating Refugees Across the U.S.? http://tiny.cc/jfrdY *** By Emily Creighton, Immigration Impact. Posted December 1, 2009. Last month, President Obama authorized the admission of 80,000 refugees into the U.S. in fiscal year 2010, something every President has done annually since passage of the Refugee Act of 1980. The United States has long recognized the importance of providing a safe haven for refugees. Beginning with laws granting refugee status to displaced persons after World War II and culminating with the comprehensive Refugee Act of 1980, the U.S. has sought to safeguard those who are unwilling or unable to return to their homeland based on a "well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion."
Despite this commitment to helping refugees resettle in the U.S. permanently, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have adopted a policy of incarcerating refugees who have not adjusted to permanent resident status after one year of residency in the U.S. (“unadjusted refugees”). Often ICE comes in contact with unadjusted refugees who have had some contact with local law enforcement; however ICE also has detained refugees who have no criminal charges pending against them. In recent months, advocates have alerted DHS and ICE about such detained refugees in regions including Minneapolis, MN; Florence, AZ; Eloy, AZ; York, PA; Atlanta, GA; Los Angeles, CA. ICE defends this detention policy by citing section 209(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) which states that refugees who have not acquired permanent resident status after one year “shall return or be returned to the custody of the Department of Homeland Security for inspection and examination for admission.” ICE says “return to custody” means that refugees who have not applied for permanent resident status after one year may be detained and held while they complete their adjustment application and while ICE’s sister organization, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), adjudicates it. This interpretation is particularly unfair since the law prohibits refugees from applying for permanent residence until one year after they have been admitted to the U.S. as refugees. In essence, ICE detains refugees for not doing what the law bars them from doing. ICE’s interpretation of the law has particularly harsh consequences for refugees. First, the refugee is not in removal proceedings, so he or she cannot request bond before an Immigration Judge. Without an opportunity to be released, the refugee must complete the adjustment application process in detention -- for example, he or she must appear for the required USCIS interview and obtain vaccinations while detained. In some cases, the process can take over a year. Second, even if USCIS denies the refugee’s application for adjustment and he or she is placed in removal proceedings, ICE has charged the refugee as an "arriving alien." Under the relevant law, "arriving aliens" may not ask an Immigration Judge for a bond hearing and are entirely dependant on ICE -- the prosecutor in the case—for release from detention. The interpretation of refugees as “arriving aliens” is incorrect because refugees have already been admitted to the U.S. as a refugee. Despite this, when the agency charges them as "arriving aliens," refugees are unable to seek release from detention from a neutral decision-maker -- neither during the pendency of the adjustment application, nor during removal proceedings. In Arizona—where representatives of detained refugees recently filed a number of habeas lawsuits challenging the detention of unadjusted refugees—ICE stated that it will release unadjusted refugees or put them in removal proceedings within 48 hours. It also promised to stop charging refugees in removal proceedings as "arriving aliens," which therefore enables refugees to seek bond from a neutral immigration judge. Yet in light of these changes, advocates in Arizona report that unadjusted refugees continue to spend time in detention and cannot proceed with their immigration cases until DHS adjudicates their adjustment applications. In addition, DHS has not officially committed to these changes or to any widespread changes in policies related to detention of unadjusted refugees. DHS’ policy of detaining unadjusted refugees is extremely problematic -- it is not required by the language of the statute and is unsupported by the policies that drove lawmakers to pass laws protecting refugees. The word “custody” in the statute does not require ICE to take physical custody of unadjusted refugees, something ICE’s predecessor organization recognized. The former Immigration and Nationality Service reasoned that "custody" in INA § 209(a) could be satisfied by simply requiring refugees to apply for adjustment of status and compelling them to appear at the agency. Organizations that work with detained refugees continue to urge DHS to reconsider its policy of detaining unadjusted refugees and to this end, recently submitted a letter to DHS with policy suggestions. DHS acknowledged receipt of the letter. Hopefully, in any new policy, DHS will cease using "custody" in INA 209(a) as another means to detain refugees. This is not the purpose or intent of this statutory provision. Instead, the statute was designed to encourage refugees to apply for adjustment and to lawfully remain in the United States. Let’s hope the agency acts quickly to issue fair and humane new policy, so that future refugees will not have to suffer the unnecessary detention that current refugees face.
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 2:16 PM PST
Factors outside Obama's control to shape Afghanistan campaign
Mood:
 d'oh
Now Playing: More War is not Hope and Change
Topic: WAR
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 1:17 PM PST
Sunday, 29 November 2009
Friday, 27 November 2009
WalMart Bullshit
Mood:
 mischievious
Now Playing: Website full of information on Walmart
Topic: CORPORATE CRAP
http://www.greaterthings.com/News/Wal-Mart/index.html 
Summary Wal-Mart provides an up-front savings for shoppers, but the cost is carried by increasingly brutal labor conditions, especially in China, but also in the U.S. Because Wal-Mart is now the largest corporation in the world, its practice of disregarding human rights for the sake of a good sale on the other side of the world is setting an ominous trend in an industry that is now trying to keep up with Wal-Mart by wringing more labor for less and less compensation. Consider, also, that foreign cheap labor comes in part because of their socialist government that covers daily living expenses of the workers, so the true cost of labor is actually through subsidies by a Communist system. By supporting Wal-Mart, we endanger American Free Enterprise and prop up totalitarianism. Now Wal-Mart is leading the way in implementing RFID product tracking, leading the way to more of an Orwellian big brother world of tyranny here in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
This is creating a very serious breach of conscience for millions of otherwise upright Americans, who can sense that these low prices come at a price. It is time to stop patronizing increasingly slave-like labor conditions at home and abroad. Sterling D. Allan
April 30, 2002, with update Jan. 29, 2004
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 12:38 PM PST
Thursday, 26 November 2009
WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN
Mood:
 lyrical
Now Playing: its all in the song....
Topic: POLITICS
THE WHO WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals when they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgment of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song
I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the foe, that's all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they'd all flown in the last war
I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
No, no!
I'll move myself and my family aside
If we happen to be left half alive
I'll get all my papers and smile at the sky
For I know that the hypnotized never lie
Do ya?
Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
There's nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are out-phased, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now parting on the right
And their beards have all grown longer overnight
I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again
No, no!
Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 2:25 PM PST
AIG screws over small town by jacking up water bills
Mood:
loud
Now Playing: Profits over People - AIG greed ruins lives in Middlesboro and Clinton
Topic: CORPORATE CRAP
Bailed-Out AIG Forcing Poor to Choose Between Running Water and Food By Yasha Levine, AlterNet
Posted on November 26, 2009, What are we getting in return for the bailout? So far, predatory credit card rates, exorbitant bank fees and obscene Wall Street bonuses. But we're being robbed in other, sneakier ways, too. It seems that taxpayers in the poorest, most vulnerable parts of the county are getting plundered by the same institutions they bailed out. One example is AIG's underhanded fleecing of residents of rural Kentucky. Middlesboro and Clinton are two tiny, impoverished towns in southern Kentucky with a combined population of 12,000. In 2008, Middlesboro's per capita income was $13,189 a year, only a few hundred dollars more than the average worker earned in third-world Mexico. That is if they were lucky to even get a job. Real unemployment hovers somewhere around 30%, and the state is so broke that half the people eligible for unemployment benefits can't receive them. Life may be tough and most people live in poverty, but that doesn't mean they can't be made a little poorer. That's the lesson locals learned after bailed-out insurance villain AIG took over their water utility and instantly raised rates to squeeze an extra $1 million in profits out of its new customers, forcing some to consider choosing between running water and food. The towns are so rural, their residents have yet to be touched by the Internet revolution. Forget comment sections or forum threads. In Clinton, you have to track down actual hand-written notes that residents filed with city hall to read their complaints about the rate increase. Luckily, city officials were nice enough to scan some of them. Here's one, dated August 8, 2009: My husband and I are on a fixed income and with everything going up in price this would be very a very large burden on us as well as most of the citizens of Clinton. Our town is mostly of people like us and this would be such a hardship for us. A 50.8% raise is outrageous on anything. Please do not let this happen. It would mean the difference in bringing buying food and medicine or paying a high water bill to make someone else's life easier.
Here is how the AIG takeover went down: In 2005, flush with cash from its shady dealings in the mortgage derivatives market, AIG announced that it was in the process of acquiring Utilities Inc., a holding company that controlled scores of small water utilities across 17 different states. With just 300,000 customers, the company wasn't huge, but it boasted of being the largest privately held water utility in the country. "We have long considered water infrastructure as an attractive investment opportunity and an excellent complement to [our] existing energy infrastructure portfolio. Utilities Inc. is a leader in this industry and we are pleased that [we have] the opportunity to acquire this business,” AIG Chairman and CEO Win J. Neuger gloated in a press release. AIG had reason to be pleased with its purchase. Water utilities are one hell of a profitable business, with international corporations easily making a 20 to 30% profit margin, according to a 2007 report by Food and Water Watch. In the US, federal regulations limit profits to 10%, a pesky rule that companies easily subvert by shuffling their income around and “investing” it in side businesses. These kinds of returns would be the envy of the pharmaceutical and oil industries. How do water companies do it? According to Food and Water Watch, they charge 50% more for services than public utilities and pocket the difference, thereby unleashing the potential of the free market. People who have been ripped off by bailed-out banks' schemes to trick late fees out of their customers will recognize what Utilities Inc. did to the people of Middlesboro and Clinton. In the summer of 2008, as AIG was teetering and desperate for funds, it "upgraded" its billing system, and suddenly a slew of late fee charges hit the struggling locals. Residents had been getting their water bills like clockwork for as long as anyone could remember, but confusion and disorder set in as soon as Utilities rolled out its new and improved billing system. Monthly statements started coming late or didn't come in for months at a time. People were double-billed and double-penalized for bills that never arrived. One month, a bill would include sewer fees, the next month it wouldn't—and you'd be charged if didn't catch the omission. It's obvious the new invoice system was designed for pure harassment, creating chaos and reaping the rewards of the late fees it generated. Internally, Utilities referred to their revamp of the billing system as "Project Phoenix." It sounded eerily similar to the CIA's "Phoenix Program," which was designed to terrorize, kill and torture uppity Vietnamese villagers into submission during the Vietnam War. One month after Project Phoenix started wreaking havoc on locals, AIG collapsed and took the first of over $150 billion in taxpayer bailout funds. That meant Project Phoenix could still go on terrorizing locals—which it did. Here is how a local newspaper described the new billing program in Clinton in March, 2008: It wasn’t until the summer of 2008 that the new bills began to arrive and from Day One, they were messed up. Few customers here in Clinton [called] the water company because they got multiple bills. One business thought it got a break when its bill went down somewhat, only to discover that the bill hadn’t included sewer costs. This went on for several months. Finally, the [sewer bill] showed up – due in full – on one bill. Requests to spread out the payment fell on deaf ears. . . . Some of us were so confused by the bills, we paid them every time they came in. . . . Fears of bad credit reports and shut offs kept most customers paying whenever a bill arrived.
To make it harder for Clinton residents to file complaints, AIG closed the utility's local office as soon as it took over the company. Pleas made by phone were rejected. Local citizens are angry, upset and fearful. Many senior citizens on fixed incomes are already stretched past the breaking point. Others living below the poverty line without hope of getting a job are worried about how to pay another rising utility bill. Customers we’ve talked to “want to do something,” but say they cannot afford to file to intervene in the case. The trip to Frankfort is daunting and expensive. Some dare not leave the jobs or businesses they have for the time it would take to travel and attend a hearing in Frankfort. In November 2008, right as AIG was recieving the second installment of its bailout and the economy was in a free-fall, AIG's water utility notified Middlesbro and Clinton residents that it would be raising rates by 51%. It would mean more than $750,000 in additional revenue a year, just from 8,000 customers. The money wouldn't be used to fund infrastructure improvements—none had been made and none were planned. No, according to a company spokesman, the utility was trying to recoup money it had invested in its "improved" billing system, in effect forcing the victims of the billing system to pay for their own fleecing. It seems Utilities was quite honest about explaining that a good chunk of the $750,000 would be transferred straight into the pockets of its investors, according to the West Kentucky Journal of Politics and Issues. [Another] reason came from [the] company's financial expert, Pauline M. Ahern, who opined that a rate increase will allow [the utility] to “earn a range of common equity cost ratio of 11.60% to 12.10%.” In the present market, that is an attractive return on investment.
One million dollars may not seem like much these days, but it sure meant a lot to the poverty-stricken residents of Middlesbro and Clinton. There were quite a few bleak handwritten statements filed with Clinton's city hall during a public hearing on the water rates increase. It makes sense to quote them to get a feel for the level of despair that exists in rural communities like this all over the United States. Here's one from August 8, 2009: I get $675.00 a month, if they raise the water, or utilities, I can't pay them. I would have to go without water, etc. or gas. I'm disabled and I can't walk. Raising the utilities hurt a lot of people here in Clinton. Not just me but everyone. As it is I can't pay the water bills because its high. But I pay what I can.
And here is another from August 12, 2009: I feel that a rate increase of 50.8% will add a heavy burden on our small rural community. Our citizin [sic] that lives in our city are on Social Security, have full time jobs that pay barely minimum wage or are working as many as 3 part time jobs to make their monthly budget.
And another from May, 2009: “I always have a high bills [sic] to pay. I pay what I can. I am on disable. [sic] I try not to use too much water. But yet I have a high water bill. If the bill goes up, I will be lucky to pay them $10.00 instead of $80.00.
In the end, Kentucky's regulatory commission reduced the water rate increase from 50.1% to 30%. How long before they try raise the rate again? Or until the energy company decides to follow suit? It's hard to say. But one thing is for certain: AIG's takeover shows again that the American people were screwed by the bailed-out billionaires, who, instead of showing gratitude or willingness to reciprocate, have been preying upon the most vulnerable Americans like they are 15th century barons soaking the peasants. And as our cities and states start leasing out and selling public infrastructure to pay off their municipal debts, we can expect banks to gain more control of public wealth. Middlesbro and Clinton are a glimpse into the future of post-privatized America. |
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 2:07 PM PST
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crushed out