Sorry

I'm sorry to have offended anyone regarding the recent post about Adriana Salem. My intention was only to show how despite tremendous disadvantages in her life, she chose to give back to her community by enlisting in the army. Had I believed that anyone actually read anything that I put up here, I would never have chosen to post such private information. I have removed the post, and again, I am sorry.

Employee Abuse at Motorola

I have worked for Motorola as a factory worker, through Manpower, and the abuses of employeed that I suffered and witnessed were numerous. As a policy, they treated their temporary employees with a criminal disregard for safety, and I am posting this in the hopes that the abuses that I and many like me have suffered will not be allowed to continue.

While on the factory floor, we were required to wear special straps on our shoes which discharged static buildup so that we did not damage the electrical components that we handled with electrostatic discharge. What they fail to inform their employees is that they have an official policy, which the low level management is eiter unaware of or chooses to ignore, that no employee is to work around powered equipment while wearing these shoe straps. This is because the shoe straps create a short circuit between your feet and the conductive floor, and make the severity of an electrical shock at least three time what it would be without the straps, and the difference could be life or death. Wearing the straps is equivalent to working around electrical equipment while standing barefoot in a puddle of water. There was not a day that went by, however, where I was not required to work around powered equipment. There were several days when I even was required to connect 100 amp power supplies to equipment while wearing the ground straps. To give the reader an idea as to the scale of these supplies, a typical electric chair generates 6-20 amps. None of the employees I worked with understood that the straps were dangerous. Most even thought that the straps actually protected them from being electrocuted. I brought this up numerous times with two supervisors at Motorola, and with Manpower. Each time, they told me they would look into it, and then of course they put me right back to work with the straps.

The majority of all workers at Motorola are temps, like I was. They are not actually temporary employees, many have actually been working in the Motorola factory for years, and even decades in a few cases. What makes them temps, or "contractors," to use Motospeak, is that they are not officially employed by Motorola, but rather by staffing agencies such as Manpower. They do this so that they do not have to give their employees health benefits or vacations. The prominence of "contractors" of course decreases the further you travel up the corporate chain, along with the frequency of abuse. I had several different "contractor" positions, both as a factory worker and as a filing clerk, and from my experience, virtually all of the factory workers and at least half of the clerical workers were "contractors." Each "contractor" was hired for a term of exactly three months, coincidentally the precise amount of time an employee at Manpower can work uninterrupted without being entitled to health benefits. Every three months, Motorola would close for a week for "inventory," at which time all of the workers contracts had expired. After that week, all of the employees' contracts would be renewed, and they would be back to work, and not entitled to benefits. I have asthma, so it is not only impossible for me to get private health insurance, but it is also dangerous for me to go without my prescription inhaler, which I was forced to do while working at Motorola.

There are also many other comparatively minor abuses. For example, I was told that I would be fired if I did not work seven days per week. I quit after I was threatened by a fellow employee. I of course told Manpower about this incident before I quit, and about the hostile work environment, and from then on, they just no longer had anyassignments for me.

The use of "contractors" has increased dramatically in recent years, despite job cuts in virtually all other industries. According to their website, Manpower currently employs 2.5 million workers. The staffing agencies claim to be creating jobs, but in reality, more and more full time employees are being replaced by permanent temps. I know that my experience was not an isolated incident.

Education vs. Manipulation

It seems that there may be a point in campaigning where parties and candidates must choose between educating the public about their position, i.e. information-based propaganda, and relying on pure emotion-based propaganda. The line is admitably blurred, and also very subjective, but I do feel that it exists. Perhaps the distinction comes when the goal is no longer to present information and allow the public to make up its mind, and instead tries to persuade the public into believing that there is only one possible choice, and that all other choices will lead, essentially, to certain damnation.

By the time that John Kerry was officially chosen as the Democratic party's presidential candidate, the left-wing propaganda machine (it does exist, despite what us liberals would like to believe) began to direct this emotion-based propaganda at anyone, from both ends of the political spectrum, if they did not support their candidate without question. Randi Rhodes on Air America radio, for example, was ruthless in her berating of Nader supporters, and even of Kerry supporters who were merely simpathetic to Nader supporters. It was not enough to allow individuals to make up their own minds, to her it became necessary to assure them of their imminent demise if they did not agree with her.

Conservative instances of manipulation are even more prevalent, and so due to their overwhelming abundance, I will not mention them here. For some examples, please refer to any of my previous blog entries.

Both strategies will be effective among certain groups of people, and completely innefective among other groups. It may seem intuitive that the education approach will be more successful with more educated individuals, however I do not believe this is necessarily true. Even the most educated can still be swayed by emotion-based propaganda, and even for those who will choose to further investigate a candidate's claims, this approach will have the added advantage of helping to create an initial bias in most individuals, aside from those who are automatically sceptical of all of the candidates claims.

It is far from a clear moral decision which approach is better. The emotion-based propaganda approach may have lately proven to be more effective, and so the essential question becomes: is it justifiable to use these manipulative techniques to accomplish your goals as a candidate? I am certain that just about every candidate is assured of their own moral superiority, so from a relativistic perspective, can it be considered wrong for a candidate to choose manipulation over education, as long as they have what they consider to be society's best wishes in mind?

The choice for liberals then becomes: is it justifiable to choose manipulation if the opposition is already using it, and it would be impossible to accomplish our goals without it. A good example would be the anti-war protests leading up to the invasion of Iraq. The participants always included both the rational, education-oriented individuals, and the irrational individuals who were there to draw attention to themselves by any means necessary, and often did not even fully understand what they were protesting against. The irrational ones were easy to spot. They were the ones, for example, getting arrested for closing down Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Many of them carry signs with vastly oversimplified, although memorable, sayings such as "No Blood for Oil," etc. When the protests recieve press coverage, the focus is naturally on these individuals because they are seen as more newsworthy and exciting. Aside from the massive demonstrations whose size alone is enough to attract attention, these irrational individuals may be necessary in order to attract any attention at all.

There is value in oversimplified, essentially propagandized, expressions of dissent, however, I believe there must be a balance. It may be permissible to oversimplify as long as the whole evidence is made so easily available that there can be no misrepresentation of the general movement as being uninformed or irrational.

Wonderful, Wonderful News

Maya Marcel-Keyes, the daughter of Alan Keyes, has come out as a lesbian. I recall a statement made by the anti-homosexual, radically conservative activist during his miserable failure of a campaign for senator in Illinois:

"I have said that if you are actively engaging in homosexual relations, those relations are about selfish hedonism," he said. "If my daughter were a lesbian, I'd look at her and say, `That is a relationship that is based on selfish hedonism.' I would also tell my daughter that it's a sin, and she needs to pray to the Lord God to help her to deal with that sin."

Here is a link to Maya's blog, provided by CBS. I suggest that all readers (all zero of you) send her nice messages. She did a wonderfully brave thing, and she should be recognized. According to CBS, her parents have kicked her out of the house and refused to pay for her college.

I should mention that my father voted for Alan Keyes for senator in Illinois last year. He is also a radically conservative christian, like Alan Keyes. He opposes gay marriage and abortion rights, like Keyes. My father also does not believe in Dinosaurs since the Bible does not mention anything about them, and he once told me that he believes that the Chinese, all 1.3 billion of them, have united in a vast conspiracy to undermine and eventually take over the United States.

John Negroponte

Here is an excellent summary of newly appointed counter-terrorism czar John Negroponte's role as one of the primary planners in the terrorist war in Nicaragua in the 1980's. His official position was as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, and he facilitated the use of Honduras as a staging area for the contras. Thanks to Dennis Ott on ZNet.

"Negroponte’s pretend job in Honduras was to implement the pretend U.S. policy of democracy promotion. (Sound familiar?) His real job was to prevent any meaningful democracy, and to ensure that key foreign-policy decisions were made not by the democratic façade — the irrelevant Honduran president and legislature — but by two hard-nosed, hard-line SOBs: Negroponte and the head of the armed forces, General Gustavo Alvarez."