Here's One Critic De Blasio Should Appreciate Having

They say you can know the mark of a man by the enemies he has - here's one enemy that Mayor de Blasio should be happy to have:

It’s a tale of the 1% city for Bernie Madoff.

The convicted swindler, cooling his heels in a North Carolina federal prison camp, is no fan of the progressive financial policies and vision touted by Mayor de Blasio.

“I’m not a great fan of redistribution of wealth,” the 75-year-old Wall Street villain said during a long, ranging interview with Politico.

...

The former Democrat, who now identifies as an independent, says he voted for President Obama in 2008, but would not have in 2012 because the president policies have become “too socialist.”

Dunno what Madoff is talking about - banksters are doing as well or better under the "Socialist" Obama as they did under Bush the Capitalist.

As for Madoff not being a fan of redistribution, that's not true.

He surely liked to redistribute other people's money to himself through fraud and criminal activity.

In that way, I suspect he isn't all that different from many of the "capitalists" on Wall Street these days.

Pope Francis

I am told by my Catholic relatives that this pontiff is not liked very much by some of the more "conservative" members of the church.

If Pope Francis keeps writing the kinds of things he's been writing about the global financial system and capitalism, keeps calling the fat cat RC bishops/cardinals out for spending millions of euros on their palaces, I wonder how long it will be until he comes down with some mysterious ailment that ends his papacy a la John Paul I or just has some kind of accident in that Ford Focus he drives around in.

This was a pretty strong critique he launched at the markets and the free marketeers.

The cynic in me says that sort of thing will not be allowed to stand for long - they'll either convince him to moderate his tone or we'll be looking for white smoke in the sky again real soon.

Bloomberg Says Billionaires Are A "Godsend"

That is actually the word he used:

So what if there’s an income gap? Mayor Bloomberg says the glaring disparity between the city’s rich and poor only exists because of the city is lucky enough to attract the world’s super-wealthy.

“You picture this income inequality measure, but if we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend,” he said in his weekly radio show Friday morning.

Bloomberg, whose $31 billion net worth last year put him 10th on Forbes Magazine’s annual list of wealthiest Americans, said billionaires keep the city running.

“They are the ones that pay a lot of the taxes,” he said.

“They are the ones that spend a lot of money in the stores and restaurants and create a big chunk of our economy. And we take the tax revenues from those people to help people throughout the entire rest of the spectrum.”

New York has the largest income inequality gap of any city in the country, according to a census report this week. But Bloomberg says that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“While there are still people at the bottom struggling,” he said, “we’ve made a lot of progress, the problem in the income gap is not at that end. The reason it’s so big is at that higher end we’ve been able to do something that none of these other cities can do. And that is attract a lot of the very wealthy from around the country and around the world.”

Oftentimes those same billionaires Bloomberg is aggrandizing own big chunks of corporations that pay no taxes, receive tax breaks from the city for 20, 30 or even 40 years, and enjoy all kinds of corporate welfare benefits that helps put those billions in those billionaires' accounts.

Sometimes those billionaires or multi-millionaires own companies that pay slave wages to their employees, forcing those employees to seek help from the government (i.e., food stamps) in order to feed their families.

Think Ken Langone, who owns Home Depot, or the Walton Family, which owns Walmart, or the Koch Brothers, who own all sorts of industries and companies that hire exploitable labor.

These same billionaires often use tax shelters to make sure they don't have to pay their fair share of taxes.

Take Mike Bloomberg, for example, who uses the Cayman Islands as a tax shelter for Bloomberg Philanthropy.

So Mayor Bloomberg can talk his Ayn Rand fantasy about how the billionaire "movers" and "creators" are letting the riff raff live off them all he wants.

The truth is, nobody makes a billionaire dollars honestly.

Nobody.

Not Ken Langone, not the Waltons, not the Koch Brothers, not anyone in the financial world and certainly not Mike Bloomberg.

Mario Puzo opens up The Godafather with a quote from Balzac:

"Behind every great fortune is a crime."

These billionaires Bloomberg is sanctifying with his religious gloss today are no better than organized crime kingpins Puzo writes about in his novel who make their wealth living off the blood of others.

In fact, they're all part of the same crew of capitalist vultures - gangsters and bankers, industrialists and billionaire mayors of NYC.

The only difference is, Puzo gave his criminals more charm.

Walcott Undercuts His Own Message

Nothing symbolizes how sick and tired people are of the Bloomberg education reform battles better than Chancellor Dennis Walcott receiving a muted response from what was supposed to be a friendly audience of 1,100 school administrators at Brooklyn Tech while he gave a speech defending the Bloomberg education legacy.

The Bloomberg administration went out of its way to sell this speech before it happened by having Walcott call up the NY Times and tell them about it on Friday.

This was supposed to be a strong defense of the Bloomberg/Klein/Walcott education reform legacy before an adoring crowd.

Instead Walcott got laughed at when he said he wasn't a political guy, then mostly got silence and cricket sounds for the rest of the speech.

Nothing undercuts a message like overselling a speech that is supposed to be a rousing defense of your policy before an adoring crowd and then getting mostly silence and cricket sounds.

Heckuva job, Dennis.

Thanks for crystallizing in one neat afternoon block just how people are ready to move on from the Bloomberg Era and get on with the business of educating children rather than using the school system as political weapon to promote free market ideology.

Companies That Value Workers

The Atlantic has an interesting piece about how Trader Joe's, Costco's and Quiktrip pay their employees well enough to actually, you know, live:

The average American cashier makes $20,230 a year, a salary that in a single-earner household would leave a family of four living under the poverty line. But if he works the cash registers at QuikTrip, it's an entirely different story. The convenience-store and gas-station chain offers entry-level employees an annual salary of around $40,000, plus benefits. Those high wages didn't stop QuikTrip from prospering in a hostile economic climate. While other low-cost retailers spent the recession laying off staff and shuttering stores, QuikTrip expanded to its current 645 locations across 11 states.

Many employers believe that one of the best ways to raise their profit margin is to cut labor costs. But companies like QuikTrip, the grocery-store chain Trader Joe's, and Costco Wholesale are proving that the decision to offer low wages is a choice, not an economic necessity. All three are low-cost retailers, a sector that is traditionally known for relying on part-time, low-paid employees. Yet these companies have all found that the act of valuing workers can pay off in the form of increased sales and productivity.

"Retailers start with this philosophy of seeing employees as a cost to be minimized," says Zeynep Ton of MIT's Sloan School of Management. That can lead businesses into a vicious cycle. Underinvestment in workers can result in operational problems in stores, which decrease sales. And low sales often lead companies to slash labor costs even further. Middle-income jobs have declined recently as a share of total employment, as many employers have turned full-time jobs into part-time positions with no benefits and unpredictable schedules.

QuikTrip, Trader Joe's, and Costco operate on a different model, Ton says. "They start with the mentality of seeing employees as assets to be maximized," she says. As a result, their stores boast better operational efficiency and customer service, and those result in better sales. QuikTrip sales per labor hour are two-thirds higher than the average convenience-store chain, Ton found, and sales per square foot are over 50 percent higher.

Here is an MIT study comparing Whole Foods to Trader Joe's - the "Staffing" section gives you some good information about how Trader Joe's treats its employees.

We can have an economy in which companies value workers and treat them accordingly and STILL have those companies prosper.

Amazon Uses Neo-Nazis To Keep Immigrant Labor Under Control

This rivals Apple's use of slave labor in China to make iPads:

Amazon is at the centre of a deepening scandal in Germany as the online shopping giant faced claims that it employed security guards with neo-Nazi connections to intimidate its foreign workers.

Germany’s ARD television channel made the allegations in a documentary about Amazon’s treatment of more than 5,000 temporary staff from across Europe to work at its German packing and distribution centres.

The film showed omnipresent guards from a company named HESS Security wearing black uniforms, boots and with military haircuts. They were employed to keep order at hostels and budget hotels where foreign workers stayed. “Many of the workers are afraid,” the programme-makers said.

The documentary provided photographic evidence showing that guards regularly searched the bedrooms and kitchens of foreign staff. “They tell us they are the police here,” a Spanish woman complained. Workers were  allegedly frisked to check they had not walked away with breakfast rolls.

Another worker called Maria said she was thrown out of the cramped chalet she shared with five others  because she had dried her wet clothes on a wall heater. She said she was confronted by a muscular, tattooed security man and told to leave. The guards then shone car headlights at her in her chalet while she packed in an apparent attempt to intimidate her.

Several guards were shown wearing Thor Steinar clothing – a Berlin-based designer brand synonymous with the far-right in Germany. The Bundesliga football association and the federal parliament have both banned the label because of its neo-Nazi associations. Ironically, Amazon stopped selling the clothing for the same reasons in 2009.

ARD suggested that the name “HESS Security” was an allusion to Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. It alleged that its director was a man, named only as Uwe L, who associated with football hooligans and convicted neo-Nazis who were known to police. The programme-makers, who booked in at one of the budget hotels where Amazon staff were housed, said they were arrested by HESS Security guards after being caught using cameras. They were ordered to hand over their film and, when they refused, were held for nearly an hour before police arrived and freed them. The film showed HESS guards scuffling with the camera crew and trying to cover their lenses.

ARD said Amazon’s temporary staff worked eight-hour shifts packing goods at the company’s logistics centres in Bad Hersfeld, Konstanz and Augsburg. Many walked up to 17 kilometres per shift and all those taken on could be fired at will. On arrival in Germany, most were told their pay had been cut to below the rate promised when they applied for jobs at Amazon.  “They don’t see any way of complaining,” said Heiner Reimann, a spokesman for the United Services Union (Ver.di). “They are all too frightened of being sent home without a job.”

Heil capitalism.

Capitalist Patriarchy In Action

A dentist in Iowa fired his dental assistant of 10 years for being too "irresistible."

This dentist began to sexually harass the assistant a year and a half before he fired her, began to send her sexually explicit text messages six months before the firing, asked her inappropriate questions like how often she experienced orgasms and just generally behaved in a creepy and predatory way.

So long as the dentist's wife was unaware of the harassment, the dentist seemed to have no problem with his behavior or the target of his harassment.

But then, the dentist's wife found a text message:

James Knight, the boss in question, is a dentist based in Fort Hood, Iowa. The employee, Melissa Nelson, is a dental assistant. She is married with one child, and is agreed by all parties to have been an exemplary employee. Indeed, she seems to have tolerated more for the sake of her job than most people have to.

What Nelson is alleged to have done to deserve the sack is to constitute a threat to Knight's marriage. The problems began in the year and a half before the sacking. On several occasions, Knight complained that her clothing was "too tight" and revealing. About six months before the sacking, the texting began. While Nelson was willing to engage in text exchanges, she reproved him when he told her off for wearing a shirt that was too tight, and refused to respond when he asked her how frequently she experienced orgasm.

Some time before the sacking, Knight's wife, who also worked at the dental surgery, discovered one of the text exchanges on his phone. Rather than demanding that he change his behaviour, she insisted that he fire his employee. The couple consulted their pastor, and the pastor agreed: the woman had to go, for the sake of his marriage.

All of this may seem ridiculous. Indeed, it seemed sufficiently ridiculous for Nelson to take her former boss to court with the intention of suing him for sex discrimination. But the all-male panel of seven judges in the Iowa district court, which threw the case out on 21 December, saw nothing amiss. As far as Judge Mansfield was concerned, to allow a case for sex discrimination in this instance would stretch the definition of discrimination.

The judges' rationale was that the employer was motivated by emotions, above all by his commitment to his marriage, and not by gender prejudice. "Ms Nelson was fired not because of her gender but because she was a threat to the marriage of Dr Knight," the judgment says – thus identifying the blameless employee as the problem, rather than the wayward behaviour of Dr Knight.

Okay, this thing is screwed up in so many ways.

First, Dr. Knight is a hypocrite extraordinaire, having harassed the assistant for a year and a half before he discovered the object of his harassment was "endangering his marriage" - and he only discovered that because his wife caught him harassing the assistant, Melissa Nelson.

Second, the wife decides to back up the husband and blame the victim of the harassment instead of the perpetrator of the harassment.

Third, the court backs up the rationale of Dr. Knight and his wife when the assistant decides to sue him.

Yes, it's true that Nelson could have quit the job and it's also true that she engaged in text exchanges with Knight.

Nonetheless, the rationale for the firing and the court's backing of the Knights over Nelson is rather telling of our American value system.

Richard Seymour of The Guardian puts it all in perspective for us:

The assumptions and the nature of the inferences made in the court's judgment all reinforce patriarchy in its dominant "family values" register. It consistently identifies the victim as the problem. It alludes to allegations by Knight's wife that Nelson flirted with her boss. Yet all the specific evidence it describes shows that Nelson put up with, rather than instigated or encouraged, flirting. The judgment notes that Nelson did not tell her boss that she was offended by his texts and that their texting was mutually consensual. Rather than considering the power relationships condensed in such exchanges, the court tacitly identifies the woman as the temptress.

Yet the court's behaviour was not some wild aberration. The legal justification for the decision may be intensely ideological, but so is all legal reasoning. The judges were able to cite ample precedent for their decision. "Several cases," they noted, " … have found that an employer does not engage in unlawful gender discrimination by discharging a female employee who is involved in a consensual relationship that has triggered personal jealousy. This is true even though the relationship and the resulting jealousy presumably would not have existed if the employee had been male."

Despite acknowledging that the situation as such can occur only in a relationship between male employers and female employees, that gender does indeed occupy the key determining place, the court refused to "stretch the definition of discrimination" that far. Essentially, even if an employee is at no fault, as long as she is female this is just one of the burdens she has to bear. The responsibility is on her, not her male employer, to safeguard against eroticism – on pain of being fired.

At each step, Knight, his pastor and, to an extent, his wife – and certainly the Iowa district court – fell back on and fortified a particular knot or intersection of power (business, family and church). This knot might be called capitalist patriarchy. And its full arsenal – political, moral, legal, cultural – has just been placed behind sexist employers.

You have to love a system that blames the victim for the crime

And as usual, it's always the woman's fault.

Her shirt is too tight.

She's too "irresistible."

She didn't tell her boss to stop in strident enough terms.

She didn't quit.

She didn't say no.

She didn't scream "Help!" loud enough.

What a fucked up society we live in.

Patriarchy, capitalism, religion, nationalism - all mechanisms of control used to empower rich white men and oppress everybody else.