A new year's clean slate and little happening forces the journalist to end up burrowing through piles of audits to find news. Here's my perennial beef about almost all of the investigating: it's all focused on penny-ante small-time pilfering by individuals, not the big money corporate ripoffs.
An appointee steers contracts to favored consulting firms? The fine tooth comb is used to qualify everything until the misdeed is found either negligible or not subject to proof.
But let someone, usually someone none too smart, chisel a dime here or there to feed his or her family and the Marines get called in. There was even a Republican president who lied and slandered and racially stereotyped people with a claim about an alleged "welfare queen" that turned out to be false.
We could give away public assistance to everyone who said they needed it (frankly, it's not much to begin with), without verifying their papers and we'd save tons on paperwork and bureaucracy, to which a substantial portion of the money goes.
All told the real and significant corruption is corporate, not individual.They get contracts for millions for services they perform poorly, at very low cost or not at all. In contrast, the average individual gets, at most, a below-poverty income. Time to refocus accountability on the private sector's use of the public dime.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Monday, January 03, 2011
Consumer Rights in a Corporate Internet
Now that the Internet is about to be swallowed up by governments and giant multinational corporations, let's assert some basic rights as consumers. After all, if it's just going to be a service we pay for, let's get our money's worth, at a minimum.
If the United States of MicroVeriGoo will be in charge, on our dime, let's demand:
If the United States of MicroVeriGoo will be in charge, on our dime, let's demand:
- no more tweeting and status-updating involving the trivia of everyday life (we don't care what you're cooking for dinner);
- no more endless comments by people who obviously have never read the words they're attempting to write (we do so need edyucashun);
- no more scams, by Nigerians or European software companies alike; and
- no more spam.
Saturday, January 01, 2011
2011: the year without heroes
Call me naïve, but for most of my life I have had heroes, seemingly immutable principles, beliefs and hopes and even faith. Each has peeled off me like the skins of an onion until coming to believe in nothing much, eschew hope, deem most principles self-serving and finding malleable clay at the feet of all my heroic statuary.
My first heroes were, of course, the simple projections of a child. John F. Kennedy, John XXIII. Later I reveled in the contemporary literary figures such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Heinrich Böll, Nikos Kazantzakis. As a journalist, my patron saints were H.L. Mencken and I.F. Stone and Seymour Hersch.
Indeed, the latter's Dark Side of Camelot, which I lacked the stomach to finish, slayed the moral standing of my beloved Bobbie Kennedy as surely a St. George skewered the dragon. Robert F. Kennedy remains at best an outstanding stylist, as evidenced in the exquisitely prose in Thirteen Days -- assuming it was not the work of a ghostwriter, as his golden speeches were.
There were many other admirable figures, Alexander Dubcek, Pierre Trudeau, Hannah Arendt, over the years but none set in bronze or stone as notably as the first ones. None all that larger in life than the professors or most brilliant fellow students or colleagues.
By the time Barack Obama came along in 2008, with oratory that exuded an inspiring whiff of Camelot, the hero was a relatively pedestrian figure, no longer riding a grand white horse. Obama promised -- he did promise, whatever the White House hacks now want to say -- to set in motion at last many of the much needed changes in our society and, indeed, the world.
To say he has disappointed is an understatement.
We are entering this year an age of mental midgets and grand demagogues and no religion, ideology, or idea has been left standing to hold up as a yardstick, a goal or an aspiration. 2011 is the year without heroes, without hope, the year of muddling through.
My first heroes were, of course, the simple projections of a child. John F. Kennedy, John XXIII. Later I reveled in the contemporary literary figures such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Heinrich Böll, Nikos Kazantzakis. As a journalist, my patron saints were H.L. Mencken and I.F. Stone and Seymour Hersch.
Indeed, the latter's Dark Side of Camelot, which I lacked the stomach to finish, slayed the moral standing of my beloved Bobbie Kennedy as surely a St. George skewered the dragon. Robert F. Kennedy remains at best an outstanding stylist, as evidenced in the exquisitely prose in Thirteen Days -- assuming it was not the work of a ghostwriter, as his golden speeches were.
There were many other admirable figures, Alexander Dubcek, Pierre Trudeau, Hannah Arendt, over the years but none set in bronze or stone as notably as the first ones. None all that larger in life than the professors or most brilliant fellow students or colleagues.
By the time Barack Obama came along in 2008, with oratory that exuded an inspiring whiff of Camelot, the hero was a relatively pedestrian figure, no longer riding a grand white horse. Obama promised -- he did promise, whatever the White House hacks now want to say -- to set in motion at last many of the much needed changes in our society and, indeed, the world.
To say he has disappointed is an understatement.
We are entering this year an age of mental midgets and grand demagogues and no religion, ideology, or idea has been left standing to hold up as a yardstick, a goal or an aspiration. 2011 is the year without heroes, without hope, the year of muddling through.
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