LYT's Blog » Political

An Impersonation That Actually Gets Better, Instead of Worse

LYT — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 18:46:46 +0000

Obama’s first State of the Union address

LYT — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:08:26 +0000

First one I’ve ever heard that didn’t begin “The state of our union is strong!” Nice to have a president who will own up to error sometimes.

One Year Ago

LYT — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:30:33 +0000

Postal

LYT — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:59:12 +0000

In the ongoing debate about health care, right-wingers who don’t want the government involved consistently point to the post office as an example of how terribly the government runs things.

Now, I’m not gonna pretend that I like lining up with my package to France, the week before Christmas, when there are only two clerks on duty. Nobody does. But in general I’ve had an okay time with the post office. And it’s like night and day — or rather, like my socialized medicine surgery in Ireland versus my private appendectomy here — when compared with the Postal Service’s most prominent private competitor…UPS.

I live in an eight-unit apartment building that has no call-box, and a curiously useless doorbell stuck behind a metal door such that it cannot be accessed by anyone. When the delivery guy, public or private, comes by, I have to be able to hear the knock if I want to catch him. If it’s in the midst of a heatwave and my loud bedroom fan is on, this will not happen. Naturally, I get a lot of sticky notices pasted to my door, and this is going to become far more common as movie-awards season begins.

If I miss the mailman…I can walk a few blocks to my nearest post office. If it’s after 6pm that day, or any time thereafter, I wait in whatever line there is, turn in my card, show ID, and get the package.

If it’s UPS…well, today it was UPS. Let me tell you how that went.

I called UPS once I got the notice. UPS does not like you talk to either an actual human being or your local UPS office. You can fool them on the former by saying “customer service” into the phone, even though the robot voice doesn’t tell you that’s an option. Anyway, via the robot, I tell UPS to hold my package for pick-up, sort-of assuming that in a major city like this, they must have an office near me (I know FedEx does). The robot tells me I can expect a call back within an hour to confirm.

Over an hour later, nothing. called again. Said “customer service,” and I actually got a human. Hooray! But a human who was powerless to do anything for me except put in ANOTHER request for UPS to call me within the hour.

A little over an hour later, they did. I could pick up my package at their warehouse in downtown LA. But only between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m.

I set out around 8. And made the mistake of assuming that the directions on the UPS website were accurate and up to date. They’re not. There are medians that keep you from driving straight when you are — according to UPS — supposed to. After a couple miles in the wrong direction, I figured this out.

The UPS warehouse is a whole city block in the ass-end of downtown. And the customer service area feels a lot like a hospital waiting room. It’s dingy, and people look poor and unhappy.

You’d imagine that turning in your slip with its tracking number would be next. But no. They give you a yellow post-it and make you hand-write your name and address. Then they take it, and don’t necessarily help people in the order received.

Ten minutes after it looked like they were doing nothing, my name was called. I responded.

“We’re looking for the car,” the guy said. “We don’t know where he parked it.”

So they know what van my package is in. What they don’t know is where inside their block-sized building said van has been left. Shouldn’t there be some sort of system, ya think?

Twenty minutes later I had my package.

Now, under capitalism, the idea is that companies that don’t work well or deliver good service will not make money, and fail. Here’s the problem with that in UPS’ case: Big companies like to use UPS. It’s convenient for them. I don’t know the nuts and bolts of why, but it seems to be so. That it is not so convenient for us recipients matters not one whit, because we don’t spend near as much money on UPS services as corporate clients.

Is it maybe possible that the same is true when it comes to health services?

Post offices have their issues, at times. UPS, however, is an issue almost all the time.

Victory: government.

Like Mike

LYT — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:36:14 +0000

It occurred to me yesterday that Michael Moore movies actually have a lot in common with Tyler Perry movies. Both lure the viewer in with the expectation of some comedically righteous outbursts from a funny fat person, in order to ease you into a far more depressing story about suffering people, with the end goal being to convert you to the director’s philosophy — Christianity in Perry’s case, populist liberal activism in Moore’s.

So it probably comes as no surprise that, as predictably as Madea yelling, “I KNOW you did not just say that to me!”, CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY has the familiar greatest hits: Moore and camera crew trying to get into GM corporate headquarters and others, a routine by now so familiar that the security guards are all prepared for him, and he knows they know. There is the inevitable visit back to Flint, Michigan, where Moore and his dad look at the land where the GM factory once stood. And just as in ROGER & ME 20 years ago, Moore focuses on the way a bad economy leads to evictions and foreclosures. It isn’t until later in the film that he explains just why these people are being kicked out of their houses, by which point he has sufficiently undermined a skeptical viewer’s cynicism. In most cases, it seems that these people used their homes as equity, unaware of all the hidden fees involved in such loans. Granted, you could say it’s their responsibility to read up on that stuff first. But does the lending company have no responsibility whatsoever to ensure the buyer knows about the risks, or to not arbitrarily jack up the rates?

Moore sees such things as endemic to capitalism, and part of the case for eliminating it altogether. In some ways, this is his most bipartisan film yet — Bush Junior and Reagan take their lumps, but Democrat Chris Dodd probably gets it the worst for his hypocrisy in “regulating” companies that give him sweetheart deals. And lest we forget, the movie reminds us that the stimulus/bailout that has all the teabaggers mad at Obama was begun under Bush, though I note with some amusement that a new meme with righty bloggers who once supported W in lockstep is that he was never truly conservative and they actually didn’t agree with him much at all! Obama doesn’t get a ton of grief here, but seems to be mostly because the film had to end sometime.

But even if you are relatively alert to all things political, there is useful information here that you probably didn’t know, most notably the existence of “Dead Peasants” insurance policies — life insurance secretly taken out by big corporations on their more vulnerable employees in the hopes they will die and pay out big for the bosses. Wal-Mart can thus make hundreds of thousands off somebody’s death, and not have to pay the family one cent for the funeral (Wal-Mart recently gave up this practice, according to the end credits). These policies are perfectly legal, even though, unlike most insurance, they are given to people who have a vested interest in cashing in.

Trotting out various Catholic priests to say that capitalism is evil isn’t necessarily persuasive, but does make the case that Christianity isn’t all that compatible with mass profits; for cheap laughs, Moore redubs scenes from JESUS OF NAZARETH with right-wing talking points, a joke shamelessly cribbed from Al Franken’s book “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell them.”

A major goal seems to be to try to explain economic theory in terms that won’t bore people to death; to this end, Moore tries to get various bankers to explain, in simple English, what derivatives are, and none of them can. Now, could he have found someone who could? Perhaps. But even if these people are the only ones making a living from derivatives who cannot explain them, the point is still made.

There’s thankfully little obvious grandstanding — I happen to think the Cuba section of SICKO vastly undercut the seriousness of the valid points it was previously making. Of course patients will be treated well in Cuba while the cameras are rolling, and I’ll bet they’d have gotten great treatment in an American hospital as well if the same cameras were at hand. You can disagree with Moore and still find material in CAPITALISM that’s thought-provoking.

And the part where I can’t quite go is the step from “capitalism is an easily abused system” to “capitalism must be entirely abolished.” Moore’s proffered solution is democracy, but even if the workers own their own factory, they’re still going to want and need to make some sort of profit, no? Regardless, in a media world in which moderate Democrats like Al Franken are presented as fairness and balance to far-right whackjobs like Glenn Beck on the talk shows, it’s good to see an actual far-left — i.e. left of the Democratic party — voice get out there into mainstream discourse. Real balance isn’t Hannity and Colmes, it’s Hannity and Moore.

Agree or not — and in the interests of full disclosure, I’ll note that I agree more than I disagree — Moore’s voice broadens the debate in a vital way. And the long-lost archival footage of FDR that gives the movie its climactic punch indicates that we came oh so close to having all that stuff like health care that we still have to fight for today. Moore claims this may be his last documentary…if so, he’s going out on top.

Is it wrong to speak ill of the dead? (updated)

LYT — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 01:54:08 +0000

Really. Is it?

This has been swirling through my mind since the death of Ted Kennedy, one of the right-wing’s most hated Democrats. If you honestly hated the guy in life, should you be obliged to suspend that hate in death?

I don’t think anyone argued on the day of Saddam Hussein’s execution that we should say only nice things. Kennedy is not comparable as a person, but this is an extreme example.

On the other extreme end, I don’t think many people support the loathsome pastor Fred Phelps loudly protesting outside military funerals with signs calling the soldiers “Fags.”

Part of the issue with Ted Kennedy is that those who disliked him rarely seemed to make it a policy discussion. It was all about Chappaquiddick, the litmus test for any liberal who turns conservative (It was Michael Berube who coined the joke: ““Everything changed for me on September 11. I used to consider myself a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11, I’m outraged by Chappaquiddick.”). The thing is, many of them are outraged by something that happened (a) in 1969, before they were even born, and (b) to someone they probably would make fun of had she lived, for her appearance or being a slut or whatnot, as was done to Monica Lewinsky.

Driving into the water and causing a death by your own incompetence is an awful thing, and indefensible. But nobody I know of defines Laura Bush’s entire career that way, even though she too is responsible for a traffic death. Kennedy was tried and got off lightly. But it’s not like he wasn’t busted for it. The courts decided…and therefore what, we then write off forty subsequent years of legislating? If you have a problem with the courts, reform the courts. We don’t do double-jeopardy in this country.

Bit of a tangent there. I just tire of people pretending to be concerned about a dead girl who’s nothing more than a rallying symbol to them. She was, after all, a Democrat, and probably wouldn’t appreciate being used as such. Let me just say here and now that even if Joe Biden himself were to murder me, I would not want to be used in wingnut rallying cries, ever.

But no, the point is, do you keep silent when someone you dislike dies? I didn’t when Reagan died, or Jesse Helms. I think it’s best to avoid cheap shots as much as possible, but if you had substantive criticisms, don’t suddenly pretend you didn’t.

And if you’re going to make a show of class and say you disagreed with the guy, but will observe silence out of respect, it sort of undercuts the whole point if you’re back to talking about Chappaquiddick a day or two later.

ADDENDUM: A personal anecdote came to mind on this. Way back when I went to school in Ireland, at a place called The High School (really), there was a groundskeeper named Jim, a white-haired man whom I considered barely competent and not very nice. One day he died, and school was scheduled to let out early for his funeral that we were all to attend. I was adamant that I didn’t want to go because I didn’t like Jim. But then, in assembly, school headmaster Mr. Brook sternly noted that anyone who didn’t want to go to the funeral had to see him afterwards and explain why. Teachers there were an intimidating lot, and I was easily intimidated back then. So I caved. Didn’t stay after, just went to the funeral.

The priest who presided at the funeral made sure to thank “Mr. Brookling, president of the college.”

If you were Jim, do you think you’d have wanted me in that church on that day?