Work Music.

Thinking of a way to celebrate the mediocre passage of our half-assed health care bill, one of the things I've decided on is listening to the 2008 Election day live set that Killdozer did on WFMU. And thanks to the internet, you can too. Home grown left-wing radicalism and proto-grunge to express our collectively ambivalent feelings.

ACORN Videomaker James O'Keefe's Funder: Facebook Investor Peter Thiel

I'm really glad this aspect of the story is out now.

Leftovers from the reported volume of money "Paypal don" Peter Thiel gave O'Keefe for his previous stunt in February could have easily been used to fund the ACORN videos filmed this summer.

There's just no way that the February "Taxpayers Clearing House" thing cost $30,000. [via The Village Voice; another fun story about Thiel's politics here at Valleywag]

Great Moments In Manufactured Youth Culture

Also: I strongly consider looking at my friend's piece on the last Polaroid film in existence being sold at Urban Outfitters.

Pollution In My Neighborhood Explained By WNYC

The Irony Of This "McCafe" Hulu Ad Is Sad

What is Adbusters Magazine going to do now that companies are "sponsoring" ad-free (virtual) environments?

On The Boston Globe's Big Picture Blog

[Via the Awl]

Each year, the New York Times presents in-house awards, called the Punch Awards, to recognize great contributions from the staff. This year they quite rightly recognize the inventor of The Big Picture, the genius Boston Globe-hosted photography weblog. Unfortunately, the owners of the Times are forced to note that staffer Alan Taylor (a software engineer) “developed and promoted the blog largely on his own time.” Perhaps in the future the newspaper company will encourage the development of their most successful products on, say, staff time.

“A world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.”

Stanley Fish, whose new book Save the World On Your Own Time is meant as a salvo against political activism in academia, took to the New York Times recently to better define his stance in lieu of accusatory contrasts to the typical neoliberal agenda for college institutions.

He didn't mean to, but his cursory definition reinvigorated my disdain for neoliberalism and left me interested in what the hell he thinks universities are for:

The objection (which I am reporting, not making) is that in the passage from a state in which actions are guided by an overarching notion of the public good to a state in which individual entrepreneurs “freely” pursue their private goods, values like morality, justice, fairness, empathy, nobility and love are either abandoned or redefined in market terms.

Short-term transactions-for-profit replace long-term planning designed to produce a more just and equitable society. Everyone is always running around doing and acquiring things, but the things done and acquired provide only momentary and empty pleasures (shopping, trophy houses, designer clothing and jewelry), which in the end amount to nothing. Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains, delivers a “world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.” (”A Brief History of Neoliberalism.”)

Harvey and the other critics of neoliberalism explain that once neoliberal goals and priorities become embedded in a culture’s way of thinking, institutions that don’t regard themselves as neoliberal will nevertheless engage in practices that mime and extend neoliberal principles — privatization, untrammeled competition, the retreat from social engineering, the proliferation of markets.

Not interested enough to read his book though.

The Roger Rabbit Of Super Bowl Commercials

A popular story behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit says that it would have been impossible to get characters like Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse onscreen together were it not for the insistence and industry weight of Steven Spielberg.

Part of me wonders if the same was true of this Super Bowl Commercial for MasterCard. (The rest of me thinks these companies were actually grateful.)

Cash4Gold Attempts to Clean Its Search Results Of Criticism

No Superbowl ad can hide the fact that Cash4Gold pays you a 3rd of your gold's value and is trying to hide that fact by bribing journalists who write about it. [via bEEPbOOP]

No to "Yes Pecan" Ice Cream?

This reminds me of an Onion headline I pitched earlier this month (that didn't make it past the Monday 700), "Obama's Economic Recovery Plan To Emphasize Campaign Mug, Tote Sectors."

Dude's image is like a recovery plan unto itself; and this fact seems to be developing into a serious "brand equity" issue for the administration:

White House lawyers are examining ways to control the use of the president’s image, while recognizing the worldwide fascination about Obama’s election, First Amendment free-speech rights and easy access to videos and photos on the Web.

“Our lawyers are working on developing a policy that will protect the presidential image while being careful not to squelch the overwhelming enthusiasm that the public has for the president,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

Obama’s calls for change and his “Yes We Can” campaign mantra are being evoked to sell assembly-required furniture in Ikea’s “Embrace Change” marketing campaign, bargain airfares during Southwest Airlines Inc.’s “Yes You Can” sale and “Yes Pecan” ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc. shops.

[via Bloomberg]

"I work to support my wife's Christian Louboutin addiction."

Best Abramoff Crony Quote Ever!

Off

Paul Krugman, The New Yorks Times' counter ballast to their infuriatingly smug free-market ideologue David Brooks, had a very astute (at least, to me) editorial in the Christmas issue followed by the unintentional punchline: David Brooks is off today.

I really want "David Brooks is off today" to pretty much follow every political statement I like.

Making The Snoopy Merchandising Model Work For Cat Owners

Slate's 2004 defense of Jim Davis's soulless merchandising empire (Basically, "He never wanted it to be art and achieved what he was going for.") highlights everything I hate about both Slate and Garfield:

Davis's genius is that he's created the most widely syndicated comic strip in history—with the attendant profusion of plush toys, T-shirts, and themed Caribbean cruises—and yet, through careful brand management, he's largely managed to deflate the naturally occurring cultural counterattack.

[...]

Davis makes no attempt to conceal the crass commercial motivations behind his creation of Garfield. Davis has the soul of an adman—his first job after dropping out of Ball State, where he majored in business and art, was in advertising—and he carefully studied the marketplace when developing Garfield. The genesis of the strip was "a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character," Davis told Walter Shapiro in a 1982 interview in the Washington Post. "And primarily an animal. … Snoopy is very popular in licensing. Charlie Brown is not." So, Davis looked around and noticed that dogs were popular in the funny papers, but there wasn't a strip for the nation's 15 million cat owners. Then, he consciously developed a stable of recurring, repetitive jokes for the cat. He hates Mondays. He loves lasagna. He sure is fat.

Please remember that Slate is a publication that loves capitalism so much they (incorrectly) believed In Trade betting would be an accurate predictor of the presidential primaries (an event that provided a few excuses, but little soul searching).

Blergh.

Jerk Behavior, Explosion-Related, Oil Companies

With the past few years of record profits, you'd expect oil firms to be able to responsibly deal with massive explosions that ruin people's homes. The fact that your instincts are so totally, flagrantly wrong is why no one pays you the big bucks:

[Via Josh Spear. Found on BeepBoop.] Nearly three years ago, Ian Silverstein, one of my dear friends and guest contributors to this site was simply minding his own business, asleep, when his home and everything in it was destroyed by Britain’s largest peacetime explosion.

His life would never be the same.

It’s now known as the Buncefield Depot explosion, and little has been done to remedy the situation for the people affected by this massive incident. Ian lost everything, his beautiful home, all of his belongings, and years later he suffers from symptoms caused by the blast. Frankly, he’s lucky to be alive– and he knows it, but deserves closure and help from the companies that caused it.

Literally, nothing has been done to help him with his situation — or anybody for that matter. The local authorities have failed him, the governments have failed him, insurance has failed him, and the companies that operated the facilities — Total and Chevron — have ducked blame entirely. The massive companies made more than £18 billion in cash last year, but can’t help a few people out when a leak in their tanks caused massive and catastrophic damage to dozens of people’s lives.

Chanel Guitar Bag

I am often appalled and delighted by deftly executed opulence: for instance this (very cool-looking) Chanel guitar bag wherein form follows function only to pants function and run off laughing, "All art is quite useless!"

Image: Matteo Volta for Style.com

I Won't Buy This Vodka, But I Love Its Pitch

Dan Aykroyd intentionally conveying total bullshit with (false) conviction is always hilarious.


[Uh, maybe he does believe what he's talking about.]

Silver Jews' David Berman Writes To The NYT's [Actual Hot Air]

I haven't been able to find out if this letter in today's New York Times Sunday Magazine is the David Berman, but it's fun to pretend:

David Frum’s political view of inequality (Sept. 7) reads like an internal memo from the court of Louis XVI — equality is not a value to be pursued for its own sake but a concession that might have to be endured to avoid imminent revolution.

Equality is the value with which the framers began our founding document and what the progress of civilization has been primarily about. In fact, the redistribution of wealth — a conservative’s most feared and hated thing — is most of what governments do. Reasonable people can disagree about precisely how much wealth should be redistributed and where, but to say that “equality in itself never can be or should be a conservative goal” is tantamount to rejecting the last couple centuries of progress.

David Berman

Berman's comparison is particularly interesting as former presidential speech writer David Frum hails from the court of George Bush II. He's widely known to have written the "Axis of Evil" speech—though, his draft read "Axis of Hatred," which was changed, presumably, to avoid alienating the GOP's pro-hate wing. [via NYT, orbviorsly]

Saucy Youth Remains Defiant [PG-13 Edition]

I have very little idea who took this picture, though the subject and style is very derivative of Terry Richardson, if he isn't the culprit.

You can buy (a whiter and less interesting) version of the shirt here.

What Do U.S. Prisoners Make For Below Minimum Wage?

Guess What? It's hard to decriminalize drug possession and our country's scandalously high incarceration rate when it's supplying a cheap labor force for corporations operating in the U.S. — especially when those corporations fund lobbyists, think tanks and university grants. What ever happened to those Halcyon days when all prisoners had to make were shivs and Pruno, clocks out of popsicle sticks and spit-Papier-mâché chessboards?

Forget about illegal immigrations, blue-collar America. This is where you( and you)r jobs are going:

Tens of thousands of US inmates are paid from pennies to minimum wage—minus fines and victim compensation—for everything from grunt work to firefighting to specialized labor. Here's a sampling of what they make, and for whom.

Eating in: Each month, California inmates process more than 680,000 pounds of beef, 400,000 pounds of chicken products, 450,000 gallons of milk, 280,000 loaves of bread, and 2.9 million eggs (from 160,000 inmate-raised hens). Starbucks subcontractor Signature Packaging Solutions has hired Washington prisoners to package holiday coffees (as well as Nintendo Game Boys). Confronted by a reporter in 2001, a Starbucks rep called the setup "entirely consistent with our mission statement."

Around the Big House: Texas inmates produce brooms and brushes, bedding and mattresses, toilets, sinks, showers, and bullwhips. Bullwhips?

Windows dressing: In the mid-1990s, Washington prisoners shrink-wrapped software and up to 20,000 Microsoft mouses for subcontractor Exmark (other reported clients: Costco and JanSport). "We don't see this as a negative," a Microsoft spokesman said at the time. Dell used federal prisoners for PC recycling in 2003, but stopped after a watchdog group warned that it might expose inmates to toxins.

[via Mother Jones]

UN Diplomats Using Immunity Status For Human Trafficking, Cooking, Cleaning and the Dishes

Meet Lauro Baja: a former UN Ambassador with a smile like some Filipino Rupert Murdoch. Baja's a defendant (along with his wife Norma, their adult daughter and the family-owned Labaire Travel Agency) in 15 civil charges including trafficking, forced labor and racketeering. After filing a motion motion to dismiss all 15 civil charges last July, Baja is now invoking the Vienna Convention and is seeking the shelter of diplomatic immunity.

While most of these specific charges stem from the Baja's escaped housekeeper, Marichu Baoanan, the practice seems to be scandalously widespread with upwards of 42 separate allegations noted by the Government Accounting Office. Worse still, the U.S. State Department keeps no record of abuse allegations accusing foreign diplomats—probably for the same reason that the Department of the Interior is toking up, snorting blow and having sex with oil industry reps. But let's take these scandals one at a time:

Baoanan, 39, a nurse, came to New York from Manila to the United States to earn money for her family. According to a federal lawsuit filed in June, she paid $5,000 to Baja and a travel agency run by Baja's wife for a promised nursing job.

But she ended up working full-time as the Baja's personal maid and was paid only $100 for three months of work, including cooking, doing laundry and cleaning the four-level ambassador's residence in Manhattan, she said.

[...] besides long hours with low pay, Baoanan was forced to sleep in the basement with only a sheet, her employers refused to buy proper shoes and clothes, and she was called "stupid" and "slow."

During one incident, she said the former ambassador "just stared" and did nothing as Facundo's 5-year-old son hit her with a broom, spat and kicked her in the face.

"My eyes became blurry ... from crying every night," she said, breaking down. "They did not treat me like a person."

After three months, she eventually escaped with the help of a fellow Filipina, lawyers for Baoanan said.

In the Bajas' defense, they do throw a nice cotillion:


[Via The Phillipine Reporter, The Epoch Times and the activist blog, End Trafficking]