The often daft Ron Paul -- he named his son Rand in honor of his hero Ayn Rand -- has proposed to sell the gold in Fort Knox, the value of which currently approaches $400 billion. He and loony libertarian groups like the Cato Institute, Jon Caldera's Independence Institute, and the Heritage Foundation have proposed to sell our national parks and every other thing of value that we own.
"Selling off the gold is just one level of crazy away from selling Mount Rushmore," one unnamed official told the Washington Post.
Paul has also proposed to convert our economy back into one which employs a gold standard. There is one really obvious problem with this proposal: how does a country have a gold standard after it sells its gold? Another problem is in the actual implementation: our gold is worth around $400 billion, yet we have in excess of $800 billion in dollar bills floating around the world, so is he also proposing a devaluation of the dollar by 50%?
Paul's latest hare-brained scheme is to verify that the gold in Fort Knox has not been stolen or sold. He has a neurotic fixation on the Federal Reserve, having proposed many times to eliminate it, and this is again manifested by his bizarre comment that the Federal Reserve of New York, possessing 5% of the U.S. gold reserves, can and does surreptitiously sell or exchange gold with other countries or parties unknown.
Next we can look forward to Paul proposing to sell Area 51, along with the aliens and alien spacecraft stored there.
* * * * *
Sony Ericsson is only one of many employers who have come out of the libertarian closet to declare their true feelings. It placed employment ads with the following text: "NO UNEMPLOYED CANDIDATES WILL BE CONSIDERED AT ALL."
Their reasoning is that everyone who has been laid-off and/or fired is a worthless deadbeat incapable of contributing to a grand institution like itself, with those people being fired because they deserved it.
Sony and other capitalist companies are clearly ignorant of corporate reality; it is quite common for management to have been the reason for the failure of a project and/or company.
I once worked for USWest, an RBOC later purchased by Qwest and recently by Century Link. Senior management decided one day that they needed to convert all of their billing and business systems from COBOL to a state-of-the-art language like C++. The old systems were put on life support with just a handful of people to support them. Some new employees were hired and ones from the legacy systems were interviewed to see if they could handle the new technology, with the ones deemed unworthy laid-off.
The new projects were created with great fanfare. These projects exhibited problems from the start because management did not understand the new technology; many of us suspected that they did not understand technology, period. Deadlines were missed, again and again.
Eventually the projects became such albatrosses that they were canceled, with many more employees being laid-off. Yet the people responsible -- management -- retained their jobs, even though they had been the ones to fail. At this time the company had legacy systems it could not longer support because it had eliminated many of those employees, yet it had no future vision of the replacements for those systems.
The final kicker was that nine senior USWest / Qwest executives, the most prominent being former-CEO Joseph Nacchio, were later charged with fraud and insider trading. Nacchio went to prison, joining WorldCom's Bernard Ebbers, Tyco International's Dennis Kozlowski and several top executives of Enron.
BNET's article, RIM is King Lear: Self-Blinded and Waiting for Death, echoed my experience. A Research in Motion employee with some insight wrote a long memo to a clueless management.
He wrote "Focus product design on customer requirements and needs, not strategic alignment, partner requests or even legal advice." This is the typical management style, or lack thereof, of people who cannot make-up their mind if they are to satisfy customers, stockholders, stock analysts, their drinking buddies, shysters, or their bosses. These people often speak in sports and/or frat-boy jargon: he dropped the ball, take the ball and run with it, etc. Here's a clue: who buys the products?
* * * * *
The king and queen of the Tea Party, Rand Paul and Michele Bachmann, want to return the country back to the 1800s when robber barons were free to treat workers as ersatz serfs. Bachmann is on record as wanting to eliminate the minimum wage to "virtually wipe out unemployment."
She's technically correct that eliminating the minimum wage would reduce unemployment, having the same effect as our allowing 12-20 million illegal immigrants into the country. She just wants to legalize the behavior of many wealthy people with respect to housekeepers, landscapers, and nannies, i.e. treat them like slaves.
Bachmann and other Republicans decry "big government" and its wasteful spending, yet she and her husband have accepted over a quarter of a million dollars in farm subsidies.
Bachmann may or not be familiar with one of the robber barons she so much admires, George Pullman, but she is clearly following in his footsteps.
Pullman created an empire with his railroad car company. He wanted to control every aspect of the lives of his employees, so he created a company town in the south side of Chicago. His employees were required to live in company apartments and buy from the company store. This arrangement was barely acceptable, but at least the employees survived. That is, until Pullman's business suffered a downturn. His solution was to reduce wages, but keep rents the same. The employees were squeezed between a rock and a hard place, with the Pullman Strike being the natural outcome.
Pullman's will required him to be buried in a lead-lined coffin under tons of concrete because he rightly feared that his corpse would be dug up and desecrated.
Rand Paul has declared that the Food and Drug Administration should be eliminated, along with many other government agencies. It is unclear whether he believes the libertarian claptrap that businesses can self-regulate or whether he just wants capitalists to have no limits, regardless of the consequences.
Thalidomide is a sedative commonly used in the 1950s, often for morning sickness. We discovered to our horror that when it was given to pregnant women, their children were born with horribly shortened limbs and/or extra appendages. Europe suffered many thousands of deformed children because of thalidomide, but the USA was largely spared. Doctor Frances Oldham Kelsey refused Food and Drug Administration approval for it, demanding that drugs be fully tested prior to approval. She is rightly considered one of the heroes of our country and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
Given that human nature has not changed since the 1950s, the Food and Drug Administration remains essential to protect us from dangerous medications.
* * * * *
My brother is a typical Tea Party member. During the last presidential campaign he excitedly told me of something Rush Limbaugh had said, that Michelle Obama had been caught on tape saying something nasty about "whitey."
Anyone who performed even a cursory amount of critical analysis on Limbaugh's statement would have realized that he was lying. If such a tape existed, it would have been worth many millions to the Republican Party. Airing such a tape would have destroyed the candidacy of Barack Obama. Yet it never appeared in the public arena.
And how could Limbaugh have known of such a tape? If he had only been told of it, then he was merely spreading a rumor. If he actually heard it, why did he not release it on his radio show? No Democrat would have allowed Limbaugh to hear such a tape and Republicans would have been okay with giving it to him, probably for a price.
The answer is clear: the tape never existed.
My brother avidly watches Fox News and swallows everything he hears. He buys many of the books written by Fox News personalities and even sends copies of many of them to our parents. Like the Pauls, he believes that business owners should pay no taxes.
Before 9/11, there was not a lot of love for New Yorkers outside the NYC metro area. In Colorado we had bumper stickers that read "If you love NY, take I-70 east"; the bumper sticker actually used a heart symbol, of course. 9/11 softened this attitude and brought us together as a country, until George W. Bush expropriated that empathy to invade Iraq. The ephemeral warm and fuzzy feeling for bankers and Wall Street workers has evaporated due to the obscene Wall Street bailouts and bonuses, but most people generally still feel compassion for the ordinary people of NYC; support for the NYFD goes without saying.
Immediately after 9/11, my brother commented that it "served those BLEEPers right" or something similar to that. He was referring to the people of NYC, not to the Muslims who drove the planes into the buildings and ground. We were shocked, but it accurately expressed the typical Tea Party view: screw everyone else, or as my fourth grade teacher often said regarding a selfish student, "Me, myself, and I."
"Selling off the gold is just one level of crazy away from selling Mount Rushmore," one unnamed official told the Washington Post.
Paul has also proposed to convert our economy back into one which employs a gold standard. There is one really obvious problem with this proposal: how does a country have a gold standard after it sells its gold? Another problem is in the actual implementation: our gold is worth around $400 billion, yet we have in excess of $800 billion in dollar bills floating around the world, so is he also proposing a devaluation of the dollar by 50%?
Paul's latest hare-brained scheme is to verify that the gold in Fort Knox has not been stolen or sold. He has a neurotic fixation on the Federal Reserve, having proposed many times to eliminate it, and this is again manifested by his bizarre comment that the Federal Reserve of New York, possessing 5% of the U.S. gold reserves, can and does surreptitiously sell or exchange gold with other countries or parties unknown.
Next we can look forward to Paul proposing to sell Area 51, along with the aliens and alien spacecraft stored there.
* * * * *
Sony Ericsson is only one of many employers who have come out of the libertarian closet to declare their true feelings. It placed employment ads with the following text: "NO UNEMPLOYED CANDIDATES WILL BE CONSIDERED AT ALL."
Their reasoning is that everyone who has been laid-off and/or fired is a worthless deadbeat incapable of contributing to a grand institution like itself, with those people being fired because they deserved it.
Sony and other capitalist companies are clearly ignorant of corporate reality; it is quite common for management to have been the reason for the failure of a project and/or company.
I once worked for USWest, an RBOC later purchased by Qwest and recently by Century Link. Senior management decided one day that they needed to convert all of their billing and business systems from COBOL to a state-of-the-art language like C++. The old systems were put on life support with just a handful of people to support them. Some new employees were hired and ones from the legacy systems were interviewed to see if they could handle the new technology, with the ones deemed unworthy laid-off.
The new projects were created with great fanfare. These projects exhibited problems from the start because management did not understand the new technology; many of us suspected that they did not understand technology, period. Deadlines were missed, again and again.
Eventually the projects became such albatrosses that they were canceled, with many more employees being laid-off. Yet the people responsible -- management -- retained their jobs, even though they had been the ones to fail. At this time the company had legacy systems it could not longer support because it had eliminated many of those employees, yet it had no future vision of the replacements for those systems.
The final kicker was that nine senior USWest / Qwest executives, the most prominent being former-CEO Joseph Nacchio, were later charged with fraud and insider trading. Nacchio went to prison, joining WorldCom's Bernard Ebbers, Tyco International's Dennis Kozlowski and several top executives of Enron.
BNET's article, RIM is King Lear: Self-Blinded and Waiting for Death, echoed my experience. A Research in Motion employee with some insight wrote a long memo to a clueless management.
He wrote "Focus product design on customer requirements and needs, not strategic alignment, partner requests or even legal advice." This is the typical management style, or lack thereof, of people who cannot make-up their mind if they are to satisfy customers, stockholders, stock analysts, their drinking buddies, shysters, or their bosses. These people often speak in sports and/or frat-boy jargon: he dropped the ball, take the ball and run with it, etc. Here's a clue: who buys the products?
* * * * *
The king and queen of the Tea Party, Rand Paul and Michele Bachmann, want to return the country back to the 1800s when robber barons were free to treat workers as ersatz serfs. Bachmann is on record as wanting to eliminate the minimum wage to "virtually wipe out unemployment."
She's technically correct that eliminating the minimum wage would reduce unemployment, having the same effect as our allowing 12-20 million illegal immigrants into the country. She just wants to legalize the behavior of many wealthy people with respect to housekeepers, landscapers, and nannies, i.e. treat them like slaves.
Bachmann and other Republicans decry "big government" and its wasteful spending, yet she and her husband have accepted over a quarter of a million dollars in farm subsidies.
Bachmann may or not be familiar with one of the robber barons she so much admires, George Pullman, but she is clearly following in his footsteps.
Pullman created an empire with his railroad car company. He wanted to control every aspect of the lives of his employees, so he created a company town in the south side of Chicago. His employees were required to live in company apartments and buy from the company store. This arrangement was barely acceptable, but at least the employees survived. That is, until Pullman's business suffered a downturn. His solution was to reduce wages, but keep rents the same. The employees were squeezed between a rock and a hard place, with the Pullman Strike being the natural outcome.
Pullman's will required him to be buried in a lead-lined coffin under tons of concrete because he rightly feared that his corpse would be dug up and desecrated.
Rand Paul has declared that the Food and Drug Administration should be eliminated, along with many other government agencies. It is unclear whether he believes the libertarian claptrap that businesses can self-regulate or whether he just wants capitalists to have no limits, regardless of the consequences.
Thalidomide is a sedative commonly used in the 1950s, often for morning sickness. We discovered to our horror that when it was given to pregnant women, their children were born with horribly shortened limbs and/or extra appendages. Europe suffered many thousands of deformed children because of thalidomide, but the USA was largely spared. Doctor Frances Oldham Kelsey refused Food and Drug Administration approval for it, demanding that drugs be fully tested prior to approval. She is rightly considered one of the heroes of our country and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
Given that human nature has not changed since the 1950s, the Food and Drug Administration remains essential to protect us from dangerous medications.
* * * * *
My brother is a typical Tea Party member. During the last presidential campaign he excitedly told me of something Rush Limbaugh had said, that Michelle Obama had been caught on tape saying something nasty about "whitey."
Anyone who performed even a cursory amount of critical analysis on Limbaugh's statement would have realized that he was lying. If such a tape existed, it would have been worth many millions to the Republican Party. Airing such a tape would have destroyed the candidacy of Barack Obama. Yet it never appeared in the public arena.
And how could Limbaugh have known of such a tape? If he had only been told of it, then he was merely spreading a rumor. If he actually heard it, why did he not release it on his radio show? No Democrat would have allowed Limbaugh to hear such a tape and Republicans would have been okay with giving it to him, probably for a price.
The answer is clear: the tape never existed.
My brother avidly watches Fox News and swallows everything he hears. He buys many of the books written by Fox News personalities and even sends copies of many of them to our parents. Like the Pauls, he believes that business owners should pay no taxes.
Before 9/11, there was not a lot of love for New Yorkers outside the NYC metro area. In Colorado we had bumper stickers that read "If you love NY, take I-70 east"; the bumper sticker actually used a heart symbol, of course. 9/11 softened this attitude and brought us together as a country, until George W. Bush expropriated that empathy to invade Iraq. The ephemeral warm and fuzzy feeling for bankers and Wall Street workers has evaporated due to the obscene Wall Street bailouts and bonuses, but most people generally still feel compassion for the ordinary people of NYC; support for the NYFD goes without saying.
Immediately after 9/11, my brother commented that it "served those BLEEPers right" or something similar to that. He was referring to the people of NYC, not to the Muslims who drove the planes into the buildings and ground. We were shocked, but it accurately expressed the typical Tea Party view: screw everyone else, or as my fourth grade teacher often said regarding a selfish student, "Me, myself, and I."
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