The Daily Parker

Not that anyone who reads a newspaper will be surprised, but Abramoff didn't give money to Democrats, only Republicans:

A new and extensive analysis of campaign donations from all of Jack Abramoff’s tribal clients, done by a nonpartisan research firm, shows that a great majority of contributions made by those clients went to Republicans. The analysis undercuts the claim that Abramoff directed sums to Democrats at anywhere near the same rate.

It's the corruption, stupid.

For the record: The existence, or quantity, of any photos of the President shaking Jack Abramoff's hand, is totally irrelevant.

As Josh Marshall points out, Abramoff was the #1 most-connected guy in Republican fundraising during Bush's first term. So it's unlikely that Bush didn't know him, regardless of what either says on the subject.

Haven't we had enough of this already? One president lies about extra-marital sex, the other about helping his friends steal billions and kill thousands. One gets impeached, the other re-elected.

It's sad, really.

First, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has a great column today (sub.req.):

[The President's] breathtaking arrogance is exceeded only by his incompetence. And that's the real problem. That's where you'll find the mind-boggling destructiveness of this regime, in its incompetence. ... [T]he plain truth is that he is the worst president in memory, and one of the worst of all time.

Second, I've been ambivalent about the Times charging $49.95 per year to read most of its content, but I think more and more that it's fair. I don't know, though. I pay it, because I read Krugman and Dowd every week, and I like occasionally reading the Magazine. What are other people's thoughts on this?

A man enters a bar and orders a drink. The bar has a robot bartender. The robot serves him a perfectly prepared cocktail, and then asks him, "What's your IQ?" The man replies "150" and the robot proceeds to make conversation about quantum physics, string theory, atomic chemistry, etc. he customer is very impressed and thinks, "This is really cool."

He decides to test the robot. He walks out of the bar, turns around, and comes back in for another drink. Again, the robot serves him the drink and asks him, "What's your IQ?" The man responds, "100." Immediately the robot starts talking, but this time, about football, NASCAR, baseball, supermodels, etc.

Really impressed, the man leaves the bar and decides to give the robot one more test. He goes back in, the robot serves him and asks, "What's your IQ?" The man replies, "70." And the robot says, "So, you gonna vote for Bush again?"

First, Palestine's Fatah government has resigned after Hamas has apparently won yesterday's ellection, following several years Fatah of inaction and corruption. I suppose that means we can look forward to several years of Hamas inaction and corruption, with an occasional terrorist bombing thrown in every now and then. Hamas, you may remember, is dedicated to the annihilation of Israel.

Reactions from Israel were restrained, for now:

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert scheduled talks with senior officials later in the day. Olmert said Wednesday, before Hamas claimed victory, that Israel cannot trust a Palestinian leadership in which the Islamic group has a role.

"Israel can’t accept a situation in which Hamas, in its present form as a terror group calling for the destruction of Israel, will be part of the Palestinian Authority without disarming," Olmert said in a statement issued by his office.

Note to the new Palestinian Authority government: You'll accomplish more for your people if you stop blaming others for all your problems. But I suppose you know that already, don't you?

Next, it was 65 years ago today that the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz. All together now: "Never again."

Finally, a not-entirely-unrelated fact, exactly ten years later, on 26th January 1955, the Constitution of India took effect, solidifying it as the world's most populous democracy.

Anne and I were discussing this morning how January is our least-favorite month. Apparently Cardiff University, Wales, professor Cliff Arnall agrees:

Arnall found that, while days technically get longer after Dec. 21, cyclonic weather systems take hold in January, bringing low, dark clouds to Britain. Meanwhile, the majority of people break their healthy resolutions six to seven days into the new year, and even the hangers-on have fallen off the wagon, torn off the nicotine patches and eaten the fridge empty by the third week. Any residual dregs of holiday cheer and family fun have kicked the bucket by Jan. 24.

Some good news. First, sunsets are 35 minutes later than they were a month ago (in Chicago, anyway; in Cardiff, Wales, they're fully 44 minutes later).

Second, if January 24th is the worst day of the year, then today is not the worst day. Unless, of course, you're one of the 80,000 people who dies today. More likely, you're one of the 6.2 billion people who won't die today, so things are looking up!

And Chicago today is sunny, bright, and above freezing, which is wonderful for this time of year.

Still, we're looking forward to May.

The BBC reported last week on a new workplace rule at a firm in Germany.

The firm, which until recently had a staff of 16, forbade complaining or whinging in the workplace, on pain of immediate firing:

[E]mployees have a clause in their contracts which states: "moaning and whinging at Nutzwerk is forbidden... except when accompanied with a constructive suggestion as to how to improve the situation."

Ramona Wonneberger, chief executive of Nutzwerk, came up with the idea. She claims that "negative energy" puts a dampener not just on workers' moods, but also on productivity.

The story raises several questions. First, these are Germans, right? I've met plenty of Germans and I think only we Chicagoans outdo them in the quantity or quality of our complaints. Second, how bad was the problem that Wonneberger felt she needed to do something about it? Finally, how does one determine whether a comment constitutes a complaint, or is merely the predicate for a "constructive suggestion?"

Deutschland Über Beschwerdeführen, I guess.

I've asked Yak, one of the friends I mentioned Sunday, to give us his two cents. He gave us a couple of bucks and said "keep the change." And just before posting this, CBS and Time Warner announced a merger. Interesting, no?

I think the first idea I need to reinforce is that I am not a Democrat and do not embrace the hope that if Democrats can "take back" the federal government, this should in turn "take back" America. I do not believe there is a fundamental difference between Republican and Democrat in this country, though at the local and perhaps at the state levels this may not be as true. Perhaps this is the opposite of what conventional poli-sci takes as truth. One of the reasons I don't see a substantive difference is that both sides are predominantly older, rich, white male lawyers. When so many members of Congress have such common backgrounds, I don't think we can expect much real difference among them. With a deeply entrenched bureaucracy handling the day-to-day operations of the federal government—see James Q. Wilson's "Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It" for the most objective and generally lucid explanation I've seen about this—our policy makers argue about semantics, posturing for sound bites and empty rhetoric. I know this is generalization, but I just don't see enough of a difference between Dem/Rep to view either as "the problem." To me, they both are.

Let me also add that I do not believe a Republican conspiracy is driving the problems I've asked about (rhetorically, or at least Socratically). If Dem basically equals Rep in my opinion, then neither is intrinsically less desirable as a political representative, and neither is conspiring against anyone. You're right, most of our crises can be attributed to human vices or apathy. Put someone in power and he (yes, he, still vastly more likely than "she") will likely bend his power to serve his personal needs. The Greeks understood this. But then, they had a democracy; we live in a republic, and most Americans don't seem to understand (or, you're right) care about the difference.

Let me throw a Supreme Court case at you: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 11 US 394 (1886). This is the decision that is widely identified as the case that gave corporations the same protections under the 14th Amendment as individuals. With this precedent, the courts were quick to extend this interpretation to giving corporations the same legal rights and protections as individuals. When that happened, I think, the American political landscape changed forever. Now a legal amalgamation of assets and financial resources far dwarfing almost any individual could operate in ways that served its best interests even when those interests ran contrary to individual citizens—or when those interests were predicated on the illusion of what Marjorie Kelly calls "shareholder primacy." Over time the corporation rose in power and influence, and nobody could stop it. It is virtually impossible to fight a corporation - and where one falls, several more rise from its legal corpse. Re-read Heinlein's Friday starting on page 120 (of the edition I borrowed):

Any territorial state is a sitting duck. But fighting a multinational is like trying to slice a fog. Where's your target? You want to fight IBM? Where is IBM? Its registered home office is a P.O. box number in Delaware. That's no target. IBM's offices and people and plants are scattered. you can't hit any part of IBM without hurting somebody else as much or more But can IBM defeat, say, Russia? It would just depend on whether or not IBM could see a profit in it. So far as I know, IBM doesn't own any guerrillas. [You can] take [your] own sweet time getting set because Russia isn't going anywhere. It will still be there, a big fat target, a week from now or a year.

Heinlein's commentary, a mere aside buried in the fast-paced plot, makes a point that many people tend to forget: A company like IBM doesn't have borders, it isn't tied to a piece of geography. The corporation may have started in the United States but that doesn't mean the IBM Corporation is bound to US ideology or politics unless its own organizational mission benefits from that association. Thus, it becomes difficult to regulate; legislation for such a company must go beyond the US borders to truly affect the corporation. And with the rise of private security companies, Heinlein's work becomes even more eerily prescient.

My perspective on the American condition can be laid out like this:

A very small percentage of Americans control a very large percentage of the assets, wealth, and resources in this country. Through their investment managers (who in turn are grotesquely overcompensated) they shape the direction of capitalism, which is carried out by corporations with the purpose of maximizing the bottom line. If something doesn't increase profits, there's no reason to try it - which is why so many corporations aren't more socially or environmentally responsible - if the potential fines and PR spinning are less costly than fixing the problem in the first place, then it's business as usual, full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes. Consider General Electric, which pays hundreds of millions of dollars in fines every year. What do they call this? The cost of doing business—and they budget for it! Anyway, corporations are largely owned by private investors or investment plans, whose participation are largely dominated by other corporations and investment plans. At the end, who benefits the most? A very small number of private investors - the richest people in America. If this appears circular, good, it is. The introduction of new money in the 80s and 90s with financial machinations and the tech bubble shifted some of the money to new investors, but when the markets "corrected" a few years ago, what a surprise, the same faces show up that have been there all along. Read Kevin Phillips' "Weath and Democracy" for more stats. It's not that the rich control America actively, it's that the consequences are inevitable and too big for any of us to stop or even slow down. We aren't even a mosquito biting in a tender spot; we don't matter because we can't stop the corporations that control the media, the majority of access to our political reps, the culture in which we're all so immersed, even the education we've received and the information we can access to continue learning.

I don't know who's ultimately in charge if Dem=Rep and the top rich have the most access to power via their disproportionate resources. It analyzes like a plutocracy but the rich don't seem to pull the strings actively. I've heard the word "meritocracy" thrown around but that's not accurate, either. "Aristocracy" and "oligarchy"? I dunno. It just seems we live in a nation that isn't what it claims to be and has elements of structures we're taught don't exist here. And for most of us, every day goes along without any clear sign that things are different than we were taught and believe. Why question the American Dream when most of us have food, shelter, and some of the considerations that allow us to move a little farther up Mazlow's Hierarchy of Needs? Just don't get me researching Bohemian Grove again - that stuff really rattles my sociopolitical-economic cage...

It's really hard to get anything concrete on these ideas. It's taken me several years to piece some of this together; such a vast societal inertia is really hard to push against. I'm still not done tying threads together, which is why I can't give you a nice neat executive summary of my theory with E.B. White-sized bullet points. And I'm not convinced I'm right, either. I feel as though I'm onto something Big and Paradigm-Rattling, but the closer I get to illumination the more I wonder "why bother?" I can't change anything, I don't really want to try, I just want to live on my country property and make a good life for us without more challenges than life will throw at us regardless of any non-conformist ideas we may have. Fortunately, I have a great deal of work ahead of me this spring, so there won't be much consideration for these ideas until the summer. For anyone who wants to get a better foundation to understand my perspective, here are some suggestions:

Bakan, Joel. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. New York: Free Press, 2004.

De Graaf, John, et.al. Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic . San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2001.

Hartmann, Thom. Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft. New York: Rodale Books, 2002.

Hawken, Paul. Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999.

Hooks, Bell. Where We Stand: Class Matters. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Kelly, Marjorie. The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2003.

Miller, Ron. What Are Schools For: Holistic Education in American Culture. Brandon, Vt.: Holistic Education Press, 1990.

—Guest blogger Yak

Canada yesterday elected a minority Conservative government, sending Liberals home after 12 years in power.

The Conservative leader, now Prime Minister-elect, Stephen Harper, has no plans to privatize the Canadian health system, nor to open up the country to a flood of immigrants from the south. But he is closer to the U.S. than outgoing Liberal PM Paul Martin was, a fact which crippled Harper's last run in 2004.

Also at issue were some of the same social questions we're fighting over down here:

Martin warned that Harper would try to reverse last year's vote legalizing same-sex marriage, would seek to erode abortion rights and would pack the judiciary with conservative judges.

Harper stayed above the fray, insisting that those social issues were not on his agenda. Instead, he promised to slightly reduce the national sales tax, replace a sputtering national day-care program with direct payments to parents and increase penalties for gun-related crimes.

Yes, the Conservative wants to toughen gun laws. But let's wait and see about those social issues. I expect the next couple of years will see some fireworks in Parliament.

The biggest difference between the Canadian Conservatives and our Republicans is that the Tories really are free of significant corruption. In fact, the Liberals lost in part because of a campaign finance scandal, in which Federal money was used to fund pro-Federal advertisements in Quebec. This caused an outrage in Canada similar to the outrage felt over the U.S. funding scandal when...um...let me think about this...

Also of note, since Harper doesn't have a clear majority of Parliament, he has to work with the opposition. It's quite an interesting concept: the two biggest parties, duking it out on the floor, coming up with policies they both can live with for a while.

Oh Canada.

Another thing government does better than business: make businesses play nicely with each other.

Cable companies and telephone companies are fed up with the free Internet because they have to carry it on their backbones for free. So they're looking for ways to charge for use, including creating premium access for a fee.

One of the easily foreseen ways this "premium access" could manifest, as the Washington Post reports, looks like this:

[Y]ou may one day discover that Yahoo suddenly responds much faster to your inquiries, overriding your affinity for Google. Or that Amazon's Web site seems sluggish compared with eBay's.

...For the first time, the companies that own the equipment that delivers the Internet to your office, cubicle, den and dorm room could, for a price, give one company priority on their networks over another.

Perhaps it's time to re-regulate telecommunications? Or maybe I'm wrong, and we should de-regulate further. How about letting the Post Office charge more to deliver mail from certain buildings? Or how about letting electric utilities charge differential rates by political affiliation?