Submitted By: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
When I awoke a short time ago my mind was in its usual morning fog that slowly dissipates as I go through my wake-up routine which includes laying out the 35 or so pills that I take to stay alive. That fog mentally is usually a jumble of wide ranging short thoughts that are later forgotten as the fog lifts after my first coffee. On the way to the bathroom for my morning ablutions I found myself thinking about the biggest news all week which had been the shutdown of the government and the crisis that ensued. Suddenly, as an idea arose that woke me from the fog. Political Theater, it is all political theater. The threatened shutdown by the Republican Congressman, led by John Boehner et. al. was merely a show whose purpose was to destroy the publicity that would have surrounded the inception of enrollment in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) dubbed by the conservative PR geniuses “Obamacare”. How obvious this was took my breath away and also gave me some chagrin that it took me so long to see this con job in the making, while I mulled over the ramifications of a government shutdown. As the President has said and as some Republican have opined the GOP’s great fear regarding “Obamacare” is that it will succeed. Since enrollment was scheduled to begin on October 1st, without the shutdown speculation dominating the news cycle there would have been much publicity on the beginning of people enrolling in the plan. There would have been actual discussion of the plan and not just the cacophony of misinformation deftly spread by well placed conservative rumor mongers, broadcast blaringly on FOX News and flacked by the innumerable leaders of the “Tea Party”. Our mainstream media would play their continuing game of false equivalence by blithely accepting all information as being equal and not bothering to supply context when lies are told in the service “informing” the public.
Instead we have a manufactured crisis that sends the ACA to the back pages of virtual news media and we have faux layoffs and service loss endlessly debated. Now in truth this thought make me even a little sad for those “Tea Party” congresspeople that haven’t been let in on the nature of the game, nor their role as pawns in the manipulations of some the wealthy elite in this country. As I explained awhile ago in these guest blogs: http://jonathanturley.org/2011/08/02/tea-party-and-the-myth-of-a-grassroots-movement/#more-38049 and http://jonathanturley.org/2013/02/16/tea-party-a-phony-movement-mantled-as-legitimate/ the so-called “Tea Party” is not a grassroots movement, but the creation of the Koch, via an organization known as “Freedomworks” which they fund. On the Bill Maher show last Friday night one of his panel guests was the President and CEO of “Freedomworks” Matt Kibbe. From my perspective he was debunked by the panel, particularly Congressman Alan Cranston. What caught my attention though, was that Kibbe was at one point railing about how big government was run by insider lobbyists. None on the panel, or Maher, were perceptive enough to call him out on this since he is the quintessential lobbyist for the Koch Brothers. To my mind there is nothing to see here folks, move along and allow yourselves to be distracted by yet another manufactured crisis, designed to prevent you from actually evaluating the health care plan that is now available to you without adequate health care, or who are paying far too much for what should be a basic right of citizenship, health care. The Affordable Care Act is not my ideal of what American health insurance should be about because I believe in the “single payer” system used in most civilized nations. However, it is far better than what we already have and because of that should be fairly evaluated by the public. Perhaps though that fair evaluation will never get a chance since there are those who consciously work to distract us through propaganda, mythology and political theater into supporting what is in our own worst interests.
After I had written and posted this to my surprise I discovered this article in The New York Times. “A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/us/a-federal-budget-crisis-months-in-the-planning.html?hp&_r=0 . A short excerpt:
“WASHINGTON — Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.
Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.
It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off financing for the entire federal government.”
Perhaps my subconscious was channelling, but it seems that my idea through the morning fog has some weight to it.
Submitted By: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
Nick,
I’m not sure in what way Steve Jobs supported education reform. I know that Gates is monetarily supporting Khan Academy, which I like because it is grass-roots and the individual can control their own learning. My kids have used that site and enjoy it. I am not too sure about Common Core.
Did Jobs and Gates support vouchers? If they supported NCLB that would really irritate me.
Prairie Rose,
When I wrote my comment to davidm (see below), I was attempting to make the comparison between someone who may have gotten rich from writing a book and the folks who are ultra wealthy. They are not the same. A professional who earns $200,000, $300,000, $500,000 a year may be considered rich. He/she would not be considered to be among the ranks of the folks that I listed in my comment to davidm.
*****
Elaine M. 1, October 11, 2013 at 9:40 am
davidm,
You’ve missed the point–being rich is not the same as being uber wealthy. Amanda Hocking may have made money. You can’t compare her to people like the Koch brothers…Bill Gates…Warren Buffett…the Waltons…Michael Bloomberg.
Nick,
It seems Jobs and Gates have been indicted (not sure why Jobs has been maligned, other than I heard he was difficult to work for), but do the following people merit approbation?
John Mackey (Whole Foods CEO–I have no idea whether you’d consider him wealthy or just rich)
Bernie Marcus (co-founder and former CEO of Home Depot)
Joy Covey (co-founder of Amazon)
Could these three people be held up as models for how the 1% should behave? That is, if they fit the definition of what it means to be part of the 1%. Do they?
No atonement, he wears the Scarlet Letter ‘R’ forever.
Otteray Scribe,
Just thought of a distinction that might need to be made for the sake of clarity.
Does ‘stepping on people’ amount to exploitation?
I guess I associate stepping on people with arrogance, rudeness, and ruthlessness that amounts to burning bridges, damaging relationships in the pursuit of power and glory, or maybe even monopolistic business practices that interfere with a fair and open marketplace. Despicable, yes, but exploitation as it is understood in the vernacular?
Exploitation seems to me to involve using people as though they were commodities, without regard for their equal standing under the law or plain, ole human decency.
Prairie Rose,
That had occurred to me when I was composing my reply to you. Obviously, we have no way of knowing for sure, but it is an interesting theory.
Thank you, OS, for the details on his business practices. I wonder if he is trying to atone for his past actions by being so involved in philanthropy now.
OS,
In all fairness, some companies like Dell are now starting to offer machines with some form of Linux pre-installed, but they are not easy to find and I’ve never seen a Linux box in a retail store. But it has taken 25 years of MS anti-competitive practices and crap software to finally make people sick enough of DOS/Windows bloatware to generate that demand.
Not only does MS use anti-competitive measures in software, but now they are using leverage against hardware manufacturers at the firmware level. Recently, all the motherboard manufacturers capitulated to MS demands to switch from BIOS chipsets to UEFI chipsets – which oddly enough make it really difficult to install anything next to Windows and only provide a minimal improvement in hardware security.
Also take into account that DOS was bought from Tim Paterson for a pittance, that it took until Windows Vista before Windows was actually a GUI-based operating system instead of just a bunch of crap bolted on top of DOS, and that many of their most successful products – like Excel and Visio – were not MS innovations, but products they bought from someone else.
I won’t even mention the horror that is Xbox One and LIVE.
Microsoft sucks, both in their products and as a corporation.
There isn’t enough largess to remove the stain on Bill Gates. He wealthy, but he’s not a creator. He’s an exploiter. People like to deify him because he’s made a lot of money. As a person? I wouldn’t trust him to watch my cats while I was on vacation.
So, If Juliet wrote a book and became wealthy she would automatically be evil, or OK? These rules keep changing? It’s not situational ethics is it??? “Can’t tell the players w/o a program.”
As OS says, Gates did exploit people and engage in highly unethical and monopolistic practices to stay on top; I do not use a Windows system and know very little about them.
That said, Gates certainly could have become wealthy without exploiting people. Starting out, nobody had to have MSDOS or the first versions of Windows, they were luxuries. And sweat-shop labor to create his software was not really a viable option; in fact he was the actual programmer of a fair part of it. Early Microsoft employees ended up multi-millionaires, including his secretary. By all accounts I have read, some of them from actual employees and direct reports to Gates, the early Microsoft was (like the early Walmart) reasonably straight and honorable.
In business, I have put (with partners) over a dozen competitors out of business but never by any unethical means, only by straight up competition: I am smarter than they were, I was more creative than they were, I understood the market better than they did, I sold better than they did, and I always paid my taxes without quibble or loophole and obeyed all business law with American workers on American soil. I do not regard fairly winning a business competition as unethical or exploitation. At the start, that is all Microsoft was doing; Bill Gates made his fortune by seeing what IBM did not see, and now looks obvious in retrospect but was not obvious then: the revolutionary potential of microcomputers.
Prairie Rose, You must have been out of the loop when the memo was passed. Jobs and Gates support[ed] education reform, making them evil incarnate. Here’s the basic formula: Rich = Evil, unless anointed by a panel of experts. Jobs and Gates were never even granted a hearing, their support of education reform makes them evil.
But I am a dago, therefore having complete immunity under our PC culture rule book. So, you are free to stereotype women, Christian Dems, etc. But, you are not allowed to stereotype rich. Oh…wait a minute, I forget rich, along w/ poor white folk and fat people have no protective status. Never mind. I forgot the PC loopholes.
Prairie Rose,
Gates stepped on a lot of people on his way up the ladder. His business model can best be compared to a great white shark. He worked a deal to require all non-Apple computers sold to have his DOS software installed, whether you wanted it or not. That added something like a hundred dollars to the cost of every non-Apple computer sold. Go to any computer seller now and try to buy a computer (other than an Apple product) that has an operating system other than DOS and Windows. Not going to happen.
David,
You miss the point. One thing I NEVER do is use somebody’s name on a blog or other online posting without permission. I don’t read minds, so have no idea whether it would be OK or not–that’s why the ethical thing to do is ask first. As for this little exchange, it is not worth the bother to send her an email and not worth her time to bother with a reply.
Elaine,
Maybe I missed or have forgotten news stories on Bill Gates. Would you consider him to have exploited him to become wealthy? I know of his philanthropy in Africa and work with Salman Khan on Khan Academy, but I may be overlooking documented problems with his company exploiting people.
davidm,
You’ve missed the point–being rich is not the same as being uber wealthy. Amanda Hocking may have made money. You can’t compare her to people like the Koch brothers…Bill Gates…Warren Buffett…the Waltons…Michael Bloomberg.
I agree that the answer of Abraham and Job is not helpful, even a rather silly (sorry David, referencing the Bible in an economic discussion just doesn’t make sense). Even if they were real, they are not contemporary whatsoever. People who have lived within the last 250 years at most, or say since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, should be held up as examples.
Do these (non-entertainment industry) folks fit the bill of wealthy without having exploited people?
Steve Jobs
Bill Gates
John Mackey (Whole Foods CEO–I have no idea whether you’d consider him wealthy or just rich)
Bernie Marcus (co-founder and former CEO of Home Depot)
Joy Covey (co-founder of Amazon)
Also, for clarity, what is being considered as having ‘exploited’ people? Sweat shops? Yes. Unsafe working conditions? Yes. Getting bailouts from congress? What else counts?
Many in the 1%, by lobbying Congress, have been able to tilt capitalism in their favor. It is not an even playing field anymore; we have corporatism as far as I can see. I’m hoping those few names I found indicates that there are at least a few decent wealthy people.
David, my friend has been on the NYT list numerous times, but I am not going to name names. That is very presumptuous on your part.
BTW, I notice your recent posts have taken a rather angry and confrontational tone. Interesting.
OS wrote: “David, my friend has been on the NYT list numerous times, but I am not going to name names. That is very presumptuous on your part.”
Presumptuous? A best selling author who wants to remain anonymous? Really? Using anonymous people as evidence for your point is what I call presumptuous.
My comments have been terse, but not angry. Sorry for that. I have been spending too much time here.
And what about Amanda Hocking, earning millions through self publishing Kindle books in her spare time while working another job. That doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Is she exploitive?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Hocking
And what about J.K. Rowling? Is she exploitive? She lived in poverty until her Harry Potter books grabbed everyone’s attention. Within five years, she went from being on welfare to being a multi-millionaire.