Recently in other news, a woman in Fort Pierce, Florida called 911 because, God forbid, McDonald’s didn’t have any chicken nuggets. Thankfully the police showed up to give this madwoman an appropriate fine, and we all had a nice laugh.

But we all know the full story – the woman paid for one product, and was later informed that they had run out of that product, and instead of opening the cash register and giving her her money back, they offered her a hamburger and said she could take it or leave it. It demonstrates the power of the headline that this story, a clear situation in which a consumer was robbed during a purchase and didn’t know who to turn to for help, is now so widely seen as the story of a mad McNugget fiend who freaked out when she couldn’t get her fix.

So why was the AP headline “Florida woman calls 911 3 times over McNuggets” rather than “McDonald’s Steals from Customer”, or “Woman Calls 911 During Robbery in Progress, Cited for Misuse of 911 Service”? Apart from the institutionalization of wealth in the United States making McDonald’s automatically right and the irate customer automatically wrong, the crazy McNuggets woman angle is catchier. Just Google the story, and you’ll see the kinds of insults this woman has received for standing up for herself as best she could after being stolen from by a very wealthy corporation. And maybe 911 wasn’t the best option, but I think this woman knew that the minute she left the store, nobody would pay attention and McDonald’s would get away with it.

This immediately reminded me of the 2004 story of a man who was arrested, according to headlines, for refusing to leave a tip. If you remember, it was the case of a person who didn’t want to pay a gratuity fee, and it was all over the news during its 15 seconds of fame. It’s the same issue – to increase their ratings and come up with a buzzworthy story, they manipulate the storyline to make the story seem more interesting than it actually is. They simply interchanged the word “gratuity” with “tip”, although in the context of a “gratuity fee”, this is a bit of a stretch, to say the least. Although the courts did rule that in order to make it a legal requirement, the name had to be changed from “gratuity fee” to “service charge”, but the difference is semantic, and the bottom line is, if it’s listed on the menu, you have to pay it.

It may seem trivial with these small, “In Other News” type stories, as long as you’re not the one being made fun of on every newschannel for being a McNugget addict, but it makes you wonder about their journalistic integrity with more important issues. And the rampant uniformity of these stories may be a reflection of how eager news organizations are to just take the news as fed to them by government and special interest sources, or the AP and Reuters, rather than doing their own investigations and coming up with their own headlines.

By the way, I have my own “beef” with McDonald’s. After working for a short time at Burger King, where I was ordered to handle frozen and cooked meat, back and forth, without gloves or washing my hands, and reflecting on the idea that other forms of nourishment, often more sustainable, are available in modern civilization, it seemed to me that eating meat wasn’t justified and I became a vegetarian. That’s right, vegetarians can be fat too. McDonald’s had some trouble when they announced that their French fries were free of animal products, which turned out to be a lie, and when the truth was revealed it was an unpleasant revelation for vegetarians and Hindus who don’t eat cows as part of their religion.

I come from a town called Lawrence, Kansas, which is a little blue area in a consistently red state. There are more trees in this middle-sized town than in the rest of the state combined, and it would be a safe bet that there are more vegetarians as well. I knew someone in this town who worked at McDonald’s for years. He told me, on the condition of anonymity, that the owner of several different McDonald’s locations told him before this came out that the fries were not vegetarian, but it was imperative that he tell the clients, if they asked, that they were. The thing is that the fries being vegetarian was a major selling point for them, because imagine, if a group of friends is trying to decide on a restaurant, and one or two vegetarians in the group are holding a veto for any restaurant which doesn’t allow a vegetarian option, a lot of them would agree to McDonald’s because they could eat those hot, golden fries.

I’m proud to say, by the way, that I got this video up a couple of days ago, which means I beat out the networks; the story of the strong Republican opposition to the stimulus plan was all over CNN yesterday. Plus I totally caught Anderson Cooper in a really yellow move, before a commercial break the teaser was: What really caused the plane to crash in the Hudson River? A new report reveals blah blah blah… And after the commercial, the story is: Bird parts were found in the plane engines. OK, so what Really caused the plane crash was what we’ve been told all along? They’re using this thing to get people to sit through the commercial break now. It’s good news that everyone survived, but otherwise it’s not that interesting a news story. Can we move on to something else?

Being the minority party allows the Republicans to take on the facade of being against the direction in which things are currently moving in Washington, and have been since they were in the majority. The Democrats have gotten in trouble for being too bipartisan in the horrible legislation passed under the Bush administration, but the Republicans are successfully distancing themselves from bailout legislation today, even though their opposition is based on the failed concept of job creation through tax cuts and their attempts to break the United Auto Workers union.

When they are in the minority, both parties use their position, although they do use what little power they have to actually make legislative change, to attempt to define themselves. The Democrats try to define themselves as the party willing to compromise to get things accomplished, and the Republicans are taking on the stronger position of a real opposition, rather than cooperation, party. They’re shutting out the new administration’s legislation, and putting together the talking points to change public opinion. The Democrats don’t have the luxury of being able to really convince people that they were opposed to what the Republican majority was doing because they were voting Yea, and they have to depend on the talking points put forward by the progressives who would really rather be voting third party anyway.

The war of words is coming on strong. The media has already been using terms like “terrorists’ rights” to define Obama’s shutting down Guantanamo, and Dick Cheney has taken it a step further, claiming that Obama will give the terrorists the opportunity they need to attack us with nuclear weapons. He fails to point out that the terrorists have had U.S. soldiers conveniently shipped over to them in droves for the last five years in Iraq, so they’ve been able to kill Americans without having to falsify passports or pay for airline tickets. Now, the headlines are all saying “Maximum Wage” and then in little tiny letters (for corporations accepting bailout money). Obama set the limit at $100,000 above his own salary, when some of us would be willing to kill for $50,000 a year (or at least work for a corporation that systematically kills people). I think there’s nothing to complain about here, although it is legally questionable to impose these limits and even morally questionable to add these limits to the deal after giving away the bailouts.

The corporations receiving bailouts, however, are giving big bonuses for a reason. What bad performance? The corporations have an excuse to do all the downsizing they want with no nagging naysayers because “everyone has to tighten their belts”, and they’ve successfully convinced the government to give them billions of dollars in free money. That’s 100% profit. I’d say it’s time for big bonuses all around, and pop open that champagne. Even if a limit is imposed this year, these executives will be rewarded later for this performance unless some kind of permanent limit is placed. I’m not even in favor of putting a permanent limit to executive pay. Instead, we should be demanding that the corporations pay their workers a real living wage, regardless of where they outsource the work, and installing the kinds of good business practices and regulations our government has been working hard on phasing out over the years, and whatever they have left over after that, let them enjoy it as they please.

The executive branch gave the same requirements, but instead of being a prerequisite, it’s a vague requirement they have to meet by the end of March. They have to prove to the Obama administration that they have made the necessary changes to return in time to profitability, and if he uses George W. Bush’s criteria, the necessary changes are reducing union wages, benefits, and pensions to match the foreign automakers with U.S. factories. Barack Obama has left it unclear what he plans to do, stating that he agrees with and respects the president’s decision, but also saying that the brunt should not be exclusively on the workers.

What will happen now is unclear. Bush has made it clear that the requirement to retain government funds, and not face instant bankruptcy when it’s time to pay the piper, is to break the UAW, which has already agreed to ending the job bank program for laid-off workers, which will make all of the planned layoffs and plant closings a lot easier for the Big Three, but a lot tougher on a job-starved economy. Will Obama respect this criteria, when the time comes for him to act as judge over the fate of the auto industry?

Why did they even go to Congress in the first place, if the executive branch was capable of giving them the funding independently? When they’re doing something as politically risky as very publicly giving away billions of dollars to rich people, it’s always better to pass the buck. That’s not the only reason; they also want to make it as official as possible. There’s so much grey area in U.S. law that things can be “more” or “less” legal and official, and they wanted it to be first approved by Congress, then signed by the president.

An international example of the same trend would be the mobile retentions in Argentina. When big farming businesses organized a protest against the executive branch’s taxation of windfall profits on soy exportation after the price boom, President Christina Kirchner asked Congress to vote on the measure, where it was killed in the Senate by a tie vote decided by her own Vice President Julio Cobos.

The Republicans want to save the auto industry almost as much as the Democrats, although I’m not convinced of the actual danger, but while the Democrats are perfectly willing to give money to an industry which is continuing to refuse to develop the technology necessary to neutralize the effects of transportation on the environment, a major issue for their voters, the Republicans were not willing to give them money without killing the unions. Republicans don’t like unions, and not just because they give campaign donations to Democrats.

The concept of collective bargaining has been turned around. Now, rather than unions working in one industry or for a single employer organizing to bargain for a good wage, benefits, and income security in the form of layoff benefits, a single employer, an industry, or just the “market” of the largest international employers in general have the bargaining power. Unions use the number of workers and what they can produce, especially if they are skilled laborers, to bargain for a better deal, but big businesses have the same collective bargaining power, the jobs and the wages that affect large groups of people, but with the unity of a single entity or small group.

There are a lot of factors which reduce the bargaining power of unions, including globalization, a failure to protect the right to organize, such as in the case of Wal-Mart, where the employees must sign a contract saying they will not form or join unions, high unemployment leading to an abundance of desperate workers willing to accept low wages, a middle-aged middle class with the economic power to help their young adult children as they enter the job market for less than a living wage, and an active movement in the government to suppress unions and an effort in the public dialogue to make them look bad. They are being blamed for the automakers’ problems, despite the lack of innovation, the competition making more fuel-efficient vehicles, and the fact that their competitors without union workers are having trouble as well.

The move by Bush will at least serve to continue to defame unions, and will demoralize their cause or even possibly destroy one of the few remaining unions in the U.S. with any strength or bargaining power. If the union accepts the measures demanded by the Bush administration, it will have lost its entire purpose. What the Republicans have demanded is nothing less than starting over from zero for the union, taking away any pay and benefits they have earned beyond the market value, which may, in turn, decrease.

If the union doesn’t accept the terms of this agreement, the U.S. government has the option of demanding immediate payment of the bailout loans, thereby most likely instantly putting the companies in bankrupt, and when they are in bankrupt, they do not have to fulfill certain obligations to their workers or pensioners, or may close down completely and/or fire the entire union.

Chrysler and GM accepted the bailout funding because they think that, considering the fact that the government is willing to give them bailout funding now, they’re not going to destroy the businesses and their jobs later on to demand repayment. They believe that either the union will give in to the government’s demands, or a more union-friendly Obama administration will let the matter slide.

However, Obama has been reaching across the aisle so much, and the unions and/or the automakers may take so much negative press between now and the end of March, that he may be willing to deal the final blow against the automakers by demanding repayment of the loan, or will make it so clear that he intends to do so that the union gives in to these demands, rather than facing total destruction. Ford, who already provided the basis for their refusal by saying their liquidity crisis wasn’t immediate, denied the funding because there’s just too much uncertainty here. If the government was giving away free money, they wanted in, but with a little bit of risk and some demands, they’re no longer interested. After all, if the currently rather unpredictable political climate permits, they can always ask for money later, and possibly get it without any conditions.

The hammer is falling hardest here on the unions. Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli said that Chrysler is committed to meeting the Bush administration’s conditions by the end of March, so there will be a lot of pressure on them to convince their union workers to accept the deal or end up jobless (or just fire them).

Union members traditionally vote more toward the Democratic side, but will the Democrats stand up for them? Will the party which is known historically as the party of unions and the party of the workers go down in history as the party whose president, Barack Obama, betrayed one of the biggest and most powerful unions left and contribute to the ultimate demise of labor unions in America? There’s no way of knowing until the end of March; for now, nothing is certain.

At the same time, they’ve been trying to convince their shareholders that they will bounce back, with or without the federal bailout, and that they’re going to return to profitability and that they are a sound investment.

Note that GM CEO Rick Wagoner says he’s looking forward to reading all comments to this YouTube video. Comments, however, are disabled.

Ford CEO Alan Mulally said that Ford did not currently have a liquidity crisis, and that even without the bailout they will be able to survive the economic crisis and bounce back. So what are you doing in Washington? Why aren’t you working on your financial strategy? Why are you trying to get emergency federal funding designed for industries with liquidity issues when you don’t have an immediate liquidity problem? Why don’t you try to solve your own financial problems and come ask for bailouts only when it’s absolutely necessary?

These CEOs were in Washington because the handouts are happening now, and they don’t want to miss out on the action. There is no way to justify this behavior, and if your representative in Congress’s response was anything other than “get out of my office”, you should be sending them an angry letter and you should start organizing on a local level right now to replace them with a third party candidate in the next election.

It shouldn’t be that hard, nobody votes in midterms anyway.

When things started looking bad for the big three giveaway, and a few representatives in Congress showed the surprising insubordination of asking why they came in private jets, Mulally came up with the idea of accepting a $1 salary for a year of work. What was the point of this? Are we supposed to think you’re some kind of humble, hard-working man, so dedicated to your company that you’d make such a sacrifice as to work for $1 for one year? How stupid do you really think the American people are? I mean, I know we’ve made some bad decisions in the past and we have been rather complacent and perhaps even complicent at times as the corporations have taken over the government and begun to systematically dismantle any protection of workers’ rights, but this is one you’re not going to get away with. This is completely outrageous.

Mulally got an $18.5 million bonus when he became CEO of Ford in 2006, after streamlining Boeing employees into the unemployment lines. In 2007, he earned a $2 million salary and another $4 million in bonuses. This doesn’t even include stock options. I don’t know exactly what the $1 deal would have been, whether or not he would be receiving bonuses or additional stock, but the actual salary is the least of the money these CEOs are making. And if they do get the federal funding, as soon as that first year passes, there are going to be big, fat bonus checks with “thanks for getting those $25 billion of public money” written on them in invisible ink. And the stock market doesn’t like uncertainty, but it seems to love a publicity stunt. Ford stocks surged when he made the statement, and therefore, Mulally made money just by saying that he would work for $1.

This is an insult. It’s an insult to the intelligence of the American people. I don’t even have that much faith in the intelligence of the American people, as a whole, but this is just too much. It’s an insult to anyone who had to invest their savings or their parents’ money in their cost of living while working an unpaid internship getting coffee for the people with real jobs. It’s an insult to all of the people working in the automotive industry who know they won’t be seeing a raise anytime soon. It’s an insult to all of the foreign workers making parts for wages that don’t cover the cost of living. And it’s especially an insult to all of the people who are going to be laid off, and won’t even be earning that one dollar a year.

Taking a temporary pay cut when we all know you’ve got millions in the bank is not a show of solidarity. It’s an insult. If you really wanted to show your solidarity, to show your faith in the company, and to show that you really need these federal funds and are doing all you can to make it work, and if you’ve really got liquidity issues, why don’t you liquidate your own assets, lend the money to the company, and work for a year on the same wage as your janitor? Or is the lifestyle of a real working-class American not good enough for you?

Now the blame is being spread to the Auto Workers Union. Congress Republicans required a pay cut for union workers in order to vote for the bailout, furthering the idea that the best way to make a business viable and competetive is to pay the workers as little as possible, literally offering government funding in exchange for lowering wages. The UAW is refusing to cooperate, as they should, especially considering the fact that the Big Three aren’t even talking about going out of business without the handout, but they’re taking a lot of flak now in the public debate for refusing to cooperate.

It’s been a bad decade or two for unions, and for the working class in general all over the world. The new focus on staying competitive, trimming down workers’ wages and benefits in order to increase profits, has been both a cause and an effect of global outsourcing, and it’s one of the main reasons globalization is such a “bad thing”. Sectors in every nation all over the world are putting pressure on the local politicians to keep wages stagnant and cut benefits, spreading the word to all the big corporations always looking for cheaper labor while putting on their biggest, brightest “We’re Creating Jobs” smile.

Ford was a company founded on the idea that with the right kind of organization and innovation, the use of the assembly line, you could offer a product of consistent quality at a reasonable price. They knew that if you offer a quality product at a reasonable price, and pay your workers enough money to pay that price, then every worker will also be a customer. And they were a success.

Today, businesses grow, but they do so in a different way. The safest way, they’ve found, of increasing profits is not to invest in innovation or new technology, but to lobby for deregulation, close factories, outsource, break up or ban unions, and basically do everything they can to save money on things like environmental protection and workers’ wages and benefits.

Politicians have been doing their part. Making it easier for corporations to take away the right to organize, and bashing unions as being nothing better than secret Communist organizations and Mafia fronts has been common practice for decades. Ford has been accused of fingering union organizers in their factories in Argentina for the 1976-1983 military dictatorship organized by Henry Kissinger which systematically tortured and murdered leftists, and gave away their children to ranked military families.

This bailout thing is getting uglier and uglier. The bailing out of corporations was meant to prevent unemployment, supposedly, but layoffs are going forward as planned, and union-busting wage and benefit cuts are actually being named as a requirement to receive bailout funding, when not cutting wages or laying off workers should be the what the government demands in exchange for bailing out businesses.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Don’t think that just because the Republicans have suffered during this election that everything’s going to be better. One side wants to bail out every corporation who still has the strength to hold out their hand, while the other side wants to do the same, just as long as they break up their unions. We need to make our voices heard now more than ever and demand real change.

(This article also appears at www.operationitch.com, where I am writing as a contributing author.)

Really, the media isn’t doing its job. There’s a very, very important news story being completely ignored, right under our noses. As Election Day goes on, every news channel will be reporting all day long that there are extremely long lines for voting, and they will offer no other explanation than “turnout is high”. High voter turnout is a good thing, but it’s not the reason there are long lines. A high voter turnout was expected, and long lines are indicative of a voting system which is not prepared for any real participation in the democratic process. This is an extremely important issue which is getting absolutely no mainstream media coverage, and I imagine the handful of people around the nation who are really taking this issue seriously and working toward a solution must feel like they’re just banging their heads against a wall.

What’s causing the long wait times for voters? The prohibitive cost of voting machines.

Four long years ago, before I moved to a different country, learned another language, got married, and started working translating in the language I learned here, I was working at a small news production company, where my job was to process news being presented by the major networks, serious news, entertainment news, and news of the weird included, for a report compiled for major news outlets to have a written record of what’s out there, every day. I was a CSPAN junkie in my free time, and I would even keep tabs on Fox News (know your enemy, right?). During the 2004 election, the focus was on Ohio, and there was a news item that showed up at some point, very briefly, that stuck with me ever since. They were talking about the correlation between voting machine costs, poorer, urban, densely-populated areas, and long lines at the voting booth. They talked about it then, and they haven’t talked about it since, and finding information on it is extremely difficult.

Here’s the basic idea: Voting machines are extremely expensive. Whereas with paper ballots, each precinct buys only one scanning machine to count the ballots, when voting machines are required, multiple machines are required in order to accommodate voters. A simple voting booth is much cheaper than the voting machine, and with a limit to how much can be spent in each precinct, fewer people can vote at the same time with a voting machine setup than with paper ballots.

As I stated before, this is a tough issue for a blogger to get a handle on, because there aren’t many resources publicly available. A 2004 article at TomPaine.com states that the shortages of voting machines and long lines were more of a problem in inner city areas, and they don’t pinpoint a reason, but they question whether it’s a coincidence or a method of voter suppression in areas favorable to the Democratic Party.

I think they’ve effectively exploited a coincidence here. After the 2000 debacle, in which butterfly ballots were specifically designed to disenfranchise voters by creating a simple counterintuitive ballot design with an unerasable punch hole, the same party which stole the election was given the task of coming up with a better solution. In many precincts, and in some entire states, electronic voting machines, built by Republican campaign financer Diebold, now their division, Premier Election Solutions, became mandatory. Setting aside the valid accountability, partisanship, and transparency concerns, these machines are incredibly expensive. And the simple fact that they are incredibly expensive makes it harder to buy them in poorer precincts or to get enough of them to serve precincts with denser populations, such as in cities.

Saveourvotes.org tracks the effects of Maryland’s statewide mandatory voting machine systems. These machines are not just expensive for the state and local precincts (which share the cost) to purchase, they also require maintenance. According to Saveourvotes.org’s research, Maryland’s election system costs nearly 10 times what it used to since the voting machines became mandatory. They break down the numbers into per capita voting costs by county, and just roughly looking at the numbers (I’m not really a numbers guy) there seems to be a general tendency toward a bellcurve in per capita election spending along an axis from counties with lower populations to counties with higher populations. I imagine this is because in precincts with smaller amounts of people spread over a larger area, buying just a few voting machines to serve them raises the per capita cost because each machine is so expensive. Really, in these areas, voting machines are not a justified expense. (My wife also questions whether the little “I Voted” stickers are a justified expense.)

In more densely populated areas, however, there is also a higher per capita cost. And in densely populated, low-income, urban areas, the amount of money available per capita to pay for the election system is lower than in other areas. Remember, the state pays a portion, but the rest has to come from local funding.

Now, you would think that, considering the high cost of these machines and the profit they would make, Premier Election Solutions would be lobbying for more voting machines per capita in these densely populated areas, but maybe they’re afraid that if they actually put them there, someone would be elected who would put this electronic voting nonsense to a stop. There are people working toward organizing elections with a high turnout and the imperative to keep wait times low in mind, including backup paper ballots during peak hours, but their efforts are largely ignored.

Waiting in line for an election shouldn’t be that much of a problem, but despite legislation allowing employees to vote without consequence if they are late for work, in practice, these laws are not taken seriously. This is a problem which may have more of an effect on urban areas as well, and which certainly has more of an effect on working poor and working-class voters, rather than professional voters or business owners.

All you’re going to see in the mainstream media is the story that turnout is high, and they will say that whenever they show long lines, to make you think that the long lines are a result of the high turnout and nothing else. Don’t worry, they’ll imply, the election system is just fine. Well, it’s not. In fact, according to some estimates, it may have been possible for John Kerry to win the 2004 election if voters hadn’t given up on voting, be it for impatience or need, because of the 7-10-hour wait times in many precincts.

With all the voter intimidation tactics happening right now, along with the clear lack of any effort on the national level to deal with the problem of voting wait times and voting machine availability or any intention on the part of the national media to report on this problem, voting is an act of patient defiance. We should be proud of those who are enduring long lines to vote, but do not forget, the reason they are in those long lines is because the system is designed to keep them from voting.

Bring a book. I recommend Naom Chomsky.