Yeah, there might be a billion things going up 1.5%, but too bad rent, utilities, gas, tuition, and the other stuff Tristean actually buys isn't one of them.
VENEZUELA REVEALS 'SOCIALIST BARBIE' JUST IN TIME FOR THE HOLIDAYS by FRANCES MARTEL 14 Nov 2014 83POST A COMMENT Just as he did last year, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is starting off the holiday season early to distract from the massive failures of his socialist regime. This time, Maduro is kicking off the holiday season with a "socialist Barbie," which is the same Barbie all children know and love, reduced to a tenth of retail value. According to Spanish newspaper ABC, Maduro is using the government's hand to force toy vendors to sell Barbies—the Mattel brand doll, not off-brand imitations—at a tenth of their retail price, in order to entice Venezuelans to invest in the OPEC nation's fledgling market. The price reduction, which allows mothers to buy one doll for the equivalent of $2.50, has left stores depleted of their Barbie supply in "minutes." The initiative is part of something Maduro calls "Happy Christmas." The "integral plan" was launched in October and will include, according to the President, "national security, culture, and music." Maduro has added in announcing the Happy Christmas Plan that reducing the prices of the doll is an attempt to prevent "speculators" from "ruining the holiday." Mexican publication El Financiero notes that Barbie is just the latest product to fall under strict price regulation from the government. Eggs, milk, flour, and other essentials have long been under strict price controls that have significantly damaged the Venezuelan economy, so much so that, earlier this year, Maduro imposed rations on the products preventing individuals from buying more than their allotted supply. Necessarily, goods have become so scarce in this socialist economy that President Maduro has had to resort to rationing even water. Many have noted that using the Barbie doll to launch this initiative appears a strange move for the socialist President. Barbie has been for decades one of the most identifiable icons of American industry-- the "Empire" that Maduro claims to so loathe. Hugo Chávez himself was often critical of the doll, as have been many leftist "feminists" for claiming that the doll imposes unreasonable beauty standards on small children. The move also appears to be doing little to curry favor among Venezuela's poor. Andrea Alberto, a woman interviewed by the Mexican Editorial Organization, said of Maduro as she bought a doll: "he is the reason we are in this mess to begin with, but I guess I have to admit I am benefitting from Chavism at the moment," with a shrug. Last year, Maduro celebrated the holiday season by releasing a "socialist" Christmas carol in which he and a chorus literally sung his own praises.
I think it isn't a bad thing to have prices fall sometimes if wages are going to remain stagnant for a long period of time. Specifically targeting 1-2% inflation is stupid.
Disagree. Rather than piss-and-moan, "it's not fair.. the boss makes 100X what I make" Well, he's the BOSS. One could become "A" boss if not "THE" boss if one did something other than sit on one's butt and complain about the success of others. (While I personally doubt the value of most CEOs vs. their pay... that's a different discussion.)
(While I personally doubt the value of most CEOs vs. their pay... that's a different discussion.) But that's the whole problem. Their pay is not remotely related to their value. It rings a little hollow to say some slob working the floor is only worth $7.50 an hour when you are making tens of millions for keeping a seat warm. I despise socialists, but I also despise these corporate hogs who make their arguments look reasonable.
A single mom in Pennsylvania may skip her family’s Thanksgiving dinner so she can start her holiday shopping early. A newly divorced dad plans on getting out at 6 a.m. on turkey day to buy gifts for his kids. A Best Buy worker in Iowa knows for sure that he’ll be missing his family’s celebration: He has to work. Welcome to Thanksgiving in 2014, a day that many lower- and middle-income Americans will spend either at work or out bargain hunting. Nearly 20 percent of people in households making $40,000 a year or less said someone in their family will be working on Thanksgiving, according to a HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted in November. That’s compared to just 11 percent of households earning $80,000 or more. Even if they could use the extra money -- retailers are typically paying time-and-a-half -- many say they’d rather have the holiday off. Employees at multiple retailers have written to The Huffington Post via email, Twitter and Facebook complaining about having to work on Thanksgiving. Shoppers looking for deals on the holiday also divide along income lines. Nearly 20 percent of people in households making less than $80,000 said they plan to shop at some point on Thanksgiving, according to the HuffPost/YouGov poll. That’s compared to just 10 percent of households earning $80,000 or more. While some stores like Walmart and Kmart have opened on Thanksgiving for years, recently more and more retailers have joined in. That means more low-wage workers are staffing stores and more stores are advertising “can’t miss” bargains. Increasingly, Thanksgiving is a holiday that only some can afford to celebrate. more . . .
Killer cops, drone wars and the crisis of democracy Americans have surrendered democracy and enslaved ourselves to illegitimate power. The consequences are murder ANDREW O'HEHIR This will long be remembered as the week when another grand jury declined to prosecute another white police officer in the death of another unarmed African-American man, this time in the nation’s largest and most diverse city, a supposed bastion of liberalism. For many black people, and indeed for many people of all races, this seemed like a disturbing lesson on race and state power in America. For all the apparent progress we have made, and all the enormous social change of the last half-century, it seems evident that those who wield state power on the most direct and intimate level – the police – still have the right to exercise lethal violence against ordinary citizens with impunity. At any rate, they have that right when it comes to some citizens. It was also a week when another news nugget flashed by in my Twitter feed, noticed by hardly anyone and unlikely to be much remembered. But there were disturbing lessons to be found there also. A British legal nonprofit called Reprieve reported this week that, on average, every United States drone strike in the Middle East kills 28 unidentified people for every intended target. In America’s fruitless quest to kill al-Qaida head Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Reprieve report alleges, your tax dollars and mine have paid for the deaths of 105 individuals, 76 of them children. In its attempts to kill 41 specific people deemed “high-value targets” in the war on terror, the U.S. has apparently killed more than 1,000 people as unintended collateral damage. Incidentally, al-Zawahiri and at least five other of those celebrity villains remain alive. No one has taken to the streets to mourn those deaths and cry out for justice, largely because they took place far away in a murky war we are told nothing about. (Finding any media coverage of the Reprieve report proved to be a challenge.) As the daughter of Eric Garner, the man choked to death by cops on Staten Island, said on Friday, this is a moment of national crisis, and one that is long overdue. But the true crisis is not limited to the relationship between African-Americans and the police, as urgent as that issue appears at the moment. Indeed, that is only one aspect of the crisis, which is not something that can be fixed with cop-cams or by sending a few rogue officers to prison. On a larger scale, the crisis is about the corruption and perversion of democracy, and in many cases the willing surrender of democracy by those who live in fear of terrorists from distant lands and criminals from the inner city. To borrow an explosive concept from Nietzsche and turn it to new purposes, it’s about the “slave morality” that characterizes so much of American life, meaning the desire to be dominated and ruled, to give up control over one’s own life and allow others to make the decisions. Since the word “slave” carries special meaning in American history, let me be clear that I’m not talking here about the legacy of 19th-century human slavery (although that too is still a factor in our national life). I’m talking about the plurality or majority of contemporary Americans who have enslaved themselves – in moral and psychological terms — to the rule of a tiny economic oligarchy, and to a state that serves its interests, in exchange for the promise of order, safety and comfort. That order, safety and comfort then become the absolute values, the only values; they become coterminous with “freedom,” which must be defended by the most exaggerated means. If the leaders hint that those values are under attack from sinister forces, or might someday be, the timorous, self-enslaved majority consents to whatever is said to be necessary, whether that means NSA data sweeps, indefinite detention camps, mass murder by remote control or yet another ground war in the Middle East. Compared to all that, letting a few killer cops go free is small potatoes. more . . .
Jedediah Purdy The Media's Pro-Torture Cheerleaders The American people didn’t demand that we torture detainees and embark on permanent war after 9/11. Our politicians and pundits did. “The American people were demanding that the government do anything necessary to keep the country safe.” That has become a talking point exonerating American torture after 9/11, which a Congressional investigation has recently recently detailed. It is a convenient story: the government was faithfully obeying the people, and the people were shocked by events, freshly aware that the world is a dangerous place. Understandably, mistakes were made. This story is almost criminally wrong. The 9/11 attacks were shocking and frightening, of course. They did just what terrorism aims to do: shattered the unthinking, complacent security of a peaceful country, and revealed the fragility of things. It was also a hugely open, uncertain moment. People were scared but, just as much, confused. We had no mental category for such an attack. I vividly recall, that day and the weeks afterward, people groping for a decent way forward. Should we cancel gatherings, reunions, excursions, or throw ourselves into them with even more gratitude for one another? Should we stay away from cities or flood into them? Nothing was obvious. Most of all, it was not obvious that the government would soon throw itself into kinds of violence and surveillance that had been almost unimaginable during my post-Vietnam lifetime. There was no spontaneous call for torture—nor, for that matter, for war in two countries, only one of them even arguably connected with the attacks. The policies that followed were not serving democratic demands. Instead, politicians and pundits rushed to tell the public what the events meant. George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” and “war on terror” militarized national consciousness and drove political language far from pragmatism and nuance toward black-and-white absolutes. Centrist pundits like Thomas Friedman said war was justified to show American resolve and set Arab countries back on their heels—telling them to “suck on this,” as Friedman put it. Fear and belligerence ran together. A certain kind of intellectual loves to show that he (usually he) is no pussy, that he can stand up with the toughest tough guys – usually by sending the actual tough guys, soldiers and CIA operatives, on life-threatening and destructive missions. At the same time, pundits began normalizing talk of torture, which for decades had been beyond the pale. Alan Dershowitz wrote in 2001 that torture should simply require a warrant. This was ostensibly to extend the rule of law by guaranteeing due process, but the real effect was to corrupt law and morality by bending them to make torture seem normal and lawful. Five years later, after the first revelations of “black sites” and “extreme rendition,” Charles Krauthammer was still arguing that “It would be a gross dereliction of duty for any government not to keep Khalid Sheikh Mohammed isolated, disoriented, alone, despairing, cold and sleepless, in some godforsaken hidden location.” He did not mention rectal feeding, but perhaps he was not fully briefed. more . . .
I think the public was largely ok with doing anything necessary with these terrorists. They observed no rules of civilized warfare and thus forfeited their rights to claim protection under them. The problem with torture, etc is that eventually governments engaging in it begin to expand it from actual terrorists to suspects then to people who seem threatening then to people who maybe annoyed it. Since it is largely secret, the public has no way of knowing whom is being tortured, until one night the gestapo kick in your door.