Oh! PBS goes down on the Koch brothers. Nasty!

From here:

A New York public television outlet, WNET, went to great lengths to placate conservative industrialist David Koch as PBS aired an Alex Gibney documentary on income inequality that focused on the conservative billionaire. The president of WNET called Koch and offered to let him film a roundtable discussion that would air after the documentary, among other conciliatory gestures. The controversy reportedly also prompted PBS to back off another Koch-focused documentary in the pipeline. All the placation didn’t work: Koch resigned from his position on WNET’s board and reportedly canceled a large donation.

Not surprising, but I wonder if the PBS president feels like he did his best to blow Moneybags Koch and it didn’t work.

Overall, a cheap and tawdry affair.

I can’t wait for the Koch brothers to die — the world will be a much better place when they do.

 

Bloomberg company policy easily explains stop and frisk policy of its founder

From here:

Many current and former Bloomberg employees say they have been told the company keeps a record of every action taken on a terminal, whether by staff or outside customers, in a practice known as keystroke logging. The data are closely held within the company but can be used for everything from assisting customers with their machines to investigating employees for violations of their confidentiality agreement.

I’m not sure if you could call this anything but social control.

The sad bit is that the 9/11 attacks and fearmongering has made this sort of social control acceptable with parts of our population asking for it!!

And has been repeatedly pointed out, the Bloomberg ‘thesis’ that stop and frisk makes New York City safer has not been confirmed by data.  It’s just the hot air from a short, controlling, municipal dictator.

 

 

All the big, powerful dudes cover for (and blow) each other

From here:

As JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s Jamie Dimon prepares for a vote tomorrow on whether he should keep his chairman and chief executive officer titles, he may take comfort knowing most of his biggest shareholders are led by men with the same dual role.

Let’s all be grown up and speak openly about the corruption of corporate America.

If I lost $6.5+ billion I would expect to be thrown out on my ass.  The idea that King Dimon, narcissist to end all narcissits, doesn’t just take his ass whoopin’ like a man and go get a job somewhere else is beyond me.

 

Collapsing factories keep workers on toes, increases productivity

From here:

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — The ceiling of a Cambodian factory that makes Asics sneakers collapsed on workers early Thursday, killing two people and injuring seven, in the latest accident spotlighting the often lethal safety conditions faced by those toiling in the global garment industry.

Folks don’t understand if the building is shaky the workers are working hard and quickly so when the factory does collapse they’re ready to bolt out.

It’s not a tragedy it’s a corporate strategy.

In this case, the sneaker company gave all the employees free sneakers, told them the building was shit and then let them work in there and sprint out when it finally started to collapse.

Our corporate kangaroo Supreme Court

From here:

In an unanimous ruling written by Justice Elena Kagan, the court ruled that the farmer, Vernon Bowman, had infringed on Monsanto’s patent for its GM soybeans when he bought some of those seeds from a local grain elevator and planted them for a second, late-season crop. Monsanto sued, arguing that Bowman had signed a contract when he initially bought the Roundup Ready soybeans in the spring, agreeing not to save any of the harvest for replanting. The seeds are genetically modified to be resistant to Roundup Ready weedkiller.

God bless this unanimous verdict!

I think it’s great one company wants to control all our seeds.  It keeps things more organized and it’s very profitable.

I get worried about nature’s ability to keep the seeds floating around and propagating themselves as they have for however many hundreds of millions of years they’ve been at it.

Sloppy ass, unprofitable nature, Monsanto is gonna take care of you.

 

This should drive the stock market through the roof!

From here:

…unemployment is nowhere close to getting back to normal. The current level of claims is typically associated with a level of unemployment about 4 million workers lower than it currently is, or an unemployment rate of about 5 percent, instead of 7.5 percent.

That suggests that employers aren’t firing people any more. But, they’re not hiring people, either, according to Tuesday’s JOLTS data.

“There are no positive trends here for the job picture,” independent economist Robert Brusca wrote in a note.

Shitty job prospects, lower wages, more human misery, corporate profits higher, go stock market!!!

War machine requires steady stream of enemies and cash

From here:

Excerpt 1:

“Abroad, new threats are rising, even as old threats become more menacing,” said Hewson, speaking at Lockheed’s annual Media Day event in Northern Virginia. “Iran, we know, edges closer to nuclear statehood, and North Korea has already achieved it. The list of threats goes on and on.”

Her not-so-subtle message: It’s a bad time to slash defense spending.

Excerpt 2:

Last year, (Former Lockheed Martin chairman — my add) Stevens described sequestration as a “blunt-force trauma” and suggested the cuts could force Lockheed to lay off 10,000 employees. So far, the company has let go about 50 employees as a result of the automatic cuts, which began taking effect on March 1, Hewson said on Tuesday.

 Lies too.  Don’t forget the lies.  You have to lie about the strength of our enemies so you can sell more weapons.  That happened all through the Cold War.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Al Qaeda was never more than 500 really pissed off dudes sprinkled across the globe.

But hey, we’ll never know, we’re just here to feed the war pigs.

Let’s not rush, that’s still 3% that don’t believe in global warming

From here:

A new study has just come out that looked at nearly 12,000 professional scientific journal papers about global warming, and found that—of the papers expressing a stance on global warming—97 percent endorse both the reality of global warming and the fact that humans are causing it.

I really think we should wait on that last 3%.

And we should definitely approve that dirty ass, shale pipeline Keystone XL.

That’s change I can believe in.

 

It takes a lot of energy and rest to be an evil, war criminal

From here:

Per Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office’s request, a special “rest chamber” was installed in the airplane which took the PM and his wife to Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in London.

According to the report, the chamber included a double-bed and was surrounded by four walls to give the couple absolute privacy.

Maybe they’re really loud when they get their freak on.  Lord knows, any woman that would venture near the private parts of that ill, misshapen bitch ass cretin has to be half deranged herself.

 

Cornel West’s hammer hits nail right on head

From here:

West cited the need for a “democratic counterweight” against what he described as three dominant tendencies on the globe: “financializing, privatizing and militarizing.” He warned that as long as we’re stuck with an “empty” and “shallow” public sphere that has been “colonized” by the “oligarchs at the top,” we’re most certainly headed towards fascism. West remarked that the assassination of citizens without due process and other recent trends paint a grim picture of the effectiveness of our institutions.

Empty and shallow?  He’s being kind.

It’s a fucking wasteland.  You can’t get a conversation going unless you’re a hooker or you have a big bag of dope.

Is there anybody out there?