Breitbart died too old

Thank you Mark Ames:

For some reason, my fellow Americans are too squeamish, too hooked on false pieties, to openly, honestly gloat about Breitbart’s hilarious death-by-driveway, and stomp joyfully on that rat-fucker’s warm grave. Even the few edgy mavericks willing to admit they’re happy to see Breitbart dead, including my old partner Taibbi, for some reason ruin their gloats by interjecting paragraph after paragraph, tweet after tweet publicly justifying their death-gloat with “He would want it this way” or “He did the same thing”—um, who really gives a fuck about what Breitbart would want? He’s dead. His feelers aren’t hurt. He’s dead and done. And good riddance.

Here’s what I said elsewhere when the news came out yesterday:

I hate it when a douchenozzle like him dies, somebody who did his best to make the world a worse place, to make American politics even more soul destroying and nasty than they already were, a man who saw no bones in bearing false witness (Sherrod) or in helping to end a decades old organisation that was attempting to make life better for the poorest people in the US (Acorn) if that furthered his petty political goals or self promotion.

I hate it, because instead of pissing on his grave as all good and decent people should, the moral scolds will inevitably show up to tell you that you should speak nothing but good about the dead, that he had friends and family who are mourning for him too and you shouldn’t hurt their feelings.

As if it makes up for his actions in public that he had the bare human decency not to be too shitty in his personal life, as if he gave any of this consideration to others, as if you should be sheltered if you chose to be friends with such an asshole.

I’m glad he’s dead, just wish he had never been born, one of those people who left the world a worse place than they found it.

I want to live in her world

Because in NY state senator Suzi Oppenheimer’s world all the world’s worst problems must’ve been solved long ago if she can take time out of her busy schedule to tackle the threat of eating in the street:

You can hear an echo of Victorian finger-wagging nowadays from lawmakers who pit public eating against cleanliness, godliness and that elusive quality we refer to as being “civilized.” State Senator Suzi Oppenheimer, a Westchester Democrat who has signed on to Mr. Perkins’s bill, even went so far as to tell New Yorkers that we should eat “at tables or sitting down,” and that eating on the run “doesn’t add anything to our civilized society.”

Imagine that. No world wide depression, terrorist attacks or civil war in Syria, no health care problems or local concerns about rising criminality or high school dropout rates, just genteel concern for other people’s civility.

Land of the Free

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

On not voting for Obama in 2012

Chris Clarke talks about his reasons not to vote for Obama next year and in the process creates the best metaphor for US national politics I’ve yet seen:

There are differences between the two parties. Despite the usual straw man, no one — except college students new to leftism and maybe Alexander Cockburn — ever really says there’s no difference between the parties except as the most shortened of shorthand. In point of fact, there’s as much difference between the parties as there is between clockwise and counterclockwise on a ratchet wrench turning a bolt. Turning rightward tightens the bolt. But you don’t want to break the handle by pushing too hard, so you relax and turn the handle back to the left. The wrench loosens a bit, if ineffectually — the bolt doesn’t move, but the pressure eases up. And then comes the next push to the right, tightening the bolt still further. Each cycle has its new status quo, its period of tightening up and release, and the result in the end? The leftward relaxation has merely made the rightward clampdown possible.

Student labourers lured under false pretences? Just Hershey

So you’re a foreign student wanting to come to the United States through a summer visa programme, to both work and travel, get a bit of cultural exchange going? Sounds perfect doesn’t it, until you realise it means you spent your summer packing chocolates in boxes, for less money than it cost you to get there. Well, some of the students fooled this way aren’t taking it anymore:

PALMYRA, Pa. — Hundreds of foreign students, waving their fists and shouting defiantly in many languages, walked off their jobs on Wednesday at a plant here that packs Hershey’s chocolates, saying a summer program that was supposed to be a cultural exchange had instead turned them into underpaid labor.

The students, from countries including China, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine, came to the United States through a long-established State Department summer visa program that allows them to work for two months and then travel. They said they were expecting to practice their English, make some money and learn what life is like in the United States.

In a way, they did. About 400 foreign students were put to work lifting heavy boxes and packing Reese’s candies, Kit-Kats and Almond Joys on a fast-moving production line, many of them on a night shift. After paycheck deductions for fees associated with the program and for their rent, students said at a rally in front of the huge packing plant that many of them were not earning nearly enough to recover what they had spent in their home countries to obtain their visas.

[…]

Ms. Ozer and other students said they were paid $8.35 an hour. After fees are deducted from her paychecks as well as $400 a month for rent, she said, she often takes home less than $200 a week. “We are supposed to be here for cultural exchange and education, but we are just cheap laborers,” Ms. Ozer said.

Added exploitation bonus: the cheap labour Hershey (and I’m sure other companies too) get through this programme means they don’t need to hire expensive American workers whom you can’t nickel and dime with dodgy fees…

(Via Avedon.)