The Blog

The mission was “accomplished” four years ago.

Since then several hundred thousand people have died in Iraq, our military has been stretched to the breaking point, a half-trillion dollars has been wasted, worldwide terrorist incidents have more than doubled and the American voters have sent a clear message to this president that they want out, NOW.

Yet the President continues to insist that we stay there, even escalate our presence there, despite all the evidence that the fun is over, and we have lost all our marbles.

Bush could have signed the current funding bill. Politically, it would have made a lot of sense. He could have acted as if he hated the idea of surrender, but the Democrats were forcing it on him, and if he wanted the money to keep our troops safe and well-equipped he had no choice but to sign the odious funding bill with the timetable for getting out. Then when it actually came time to get out, it would be right before the next election and he could claim credit for ending the war. Nixon called it “peace with honor,” but I’m sure the current crop of Orwellian spin doctors would have come up with a better slogan. There’s no way the Republicans will win the White House in 2008, but this strategy would have cut their loses in the Congressional elections, and Bush would come out of it looking like a statesman. Completely aside from the rightness or wrongness of it from a moral standpoint (like, what does he care about that?), it would allow him to write a fitting end to the fairy tale of his life that he’s been spinning for the past six years.

So why didn’t he do it?

Is it because the war is an excellent diversion from what the neocons are really up to? Is it because they’d rather have us all angry and frustrated and incredulous and demonstrating against the war, when what’s really going on is something else altogether, something more important to them than human life and the honor and reputation of their country?

Is it because they don’t want us to notice that they are looting the United States Treasury, destroying labor and the middle class, redistributing all the money into their own pockets? Are they using this insane war to distract us from the sight of their curly little tales wiggling and the sound of their rapacious snorting as they belly up to the public trough and take their fill of your tax dollars? Are they hoping the war will keep us from noticing that we are being turned into worker drones, working more and more hours for less and less real compensation, and always with the threat that our jobs could be done for even less by someone overseas if we don’t like it?

Heck, I don’t know, Maybe they’ve got an even stinkier plan. I’m just wondering.

I was not aware that Vice President Cheney has recently been slandering former Senator George McGovern,

…but today in the Los Angeles Times I saw a rebuttal of sorts from McGovern. Actually, it’s more like an ass-kicking, something that I think the old Senator might still be capable of in person if Cheney ever dares show his face when George is around.

I’m not going to analyze the story. You can read it here, and you’d better hop to it before it disappears behind the news-for-money firewall at The Times.

But for younger readers. let me just say that George McGovern was the Democratic presidential candidate who lost the 1972 election in a landslide to the corrupt, unbalanced Republican incumbent Richard Nixon. It was an era of civil unrest, anger and alienation. Then as now, our government was involved in a war overseas with a small sovereign nation (Vietnam) which had not threatened the U.S. Like our current Iraq adventure, we were there on false pretenses fabricated by powerful corporate interests who are always the ones to profit from the slaughter. It seemed that the war would never end, and anyone who said it should was labeled a traitor or a defeatist. Sound familiar?

McGovern was not the first national figure to speak out against the war, but he was the one who mounted a real challenge to the snake-pit in the Pentagon and the White House, and he captured the imagination and the loyalty of a generation of disaffected youth, not to mention all the leftover pacifists from the fifties and the sixties.

Of course he had to be crushed, and the Nixon stink machine raised dirty campaigning to a new and slimy art form. McGovern’s defeat that year was a heartbreak that I still haven’t gotten over, and to think that the certifiably evil Dick Cheney (I certify it myself!) has now reached back into history to vilify this honorable man…

just

makes

me

SPIT!!

Go read the article. If you’re already in the choir, you’ll enjoy singing along. If you’re not, how do you sleep?

Somebody poke a hole in this.

It’s my new* theory about how businesses should pay workers. I just thought of it in the shower this morning, so it’s probably a little flaky.

First, we stipulate that the best way to hire workers is that you find the smartest, most competent and trustworthy candidates. All other things being equal, this should give you an edge against your competition in the marketplace. (If you happen also to have a great idea, or the best technology, or a huge head start, all the better.)

Once you’ve got your smart, competent staff that you trust, how do you determine salary structure? I suggest that you pay your people the most you can afford. You should run the numbers, find out what your revenue is and what part of that is profit, and allocate as much as possible of it to your labor force. The process should be as transparent as possible, so that the workers can be assured that they are, indeed, participating to the fullest extent in the wealth that they are, after all, helping to create.

As the owner, you should resist the temptation to pay yourself or your executives a hugely disproportionate piece of the available cash. You deserve something extra for taking a chance with your money, and the managers do, too, responsible as they are for making groups work together efficiently. But you must not go overboard, or you’ll lose the trust and respect of your employees. (For example, I would have to work almost 200 years with no vacations in order to make what the CEO of “my” company made last year. And I wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire, much less contribute more than the bare minimum of my abilities to his bottom line You see how that works?)

In this way, you’ll find yourself with a happy, highly motivated staff who will do their best to make things better at your company. And qualified candidates from around the country will flock to your recruiting office to join your organization. Because let’s face it, when it comes to work, we’re in it for the money.

Supply-siders and free marketeers and “invisible handers” will argue that No, you should cut costs as much as possible to maximize profit, and you should try to “win” in your negotiations with labor by getting them to settle for less than they’re worth. Salaries are costs, after all, and should be pushed as low as possible. This is the perennial mistake that Capital makes. In fact, it seems to me that survival in the marketplace is much more likely when you’ve got the best people on your team. The focus should be not on reducing compensation, but on paying well and getting the most for your money: The most talent, the most loyalty, the most productivity and stability.

But then I’m working class, so I’m probably wrong.

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* I confess I have not read the classic works of communism and socialism, but I’m guessing this is more or less what they say. If you’re a baby boomer, as I am, think about it: The most horrible monster in the universe, the thing to be feared, fought and avoided at all costs throughout most of your lives, was communism, a way for people to get what they deserve in exchange for honest work. To save ourselves from this scourge, we have built 10,000 hydrogen bombs and lived in fear and isolation for generations.