digamma.net - notes

Back in 2002, the Democrats wanted to repeal portions of Bush’s future tax cuts. Republicans insisted on framing that as a tax increase, while Democrats insisted it was no such thing.

This week, Bush announced a plan to slow or halt the increase of Social Security benefits for middle- and upper-class people. Democrats, as far as I can understand, are saying these are cuts because the benefits would be lower than the current promised level of benefits.

So if today the law says my marginal income tax rate in five years is going to be X, and you want to change it to X + 5, are you raising my taxes? And if today the law says my social security benefits when I retire will be Y, and you want to change it to Y - 5, are you cutting my benefits? And does ANYONE have a consistent position on this type of math?

It’s time for another episode of 24 AMIGO - America’s Most Incompetent Government Organization.

• I’ve been rewatching Season Two this weekend, and it’s amazing how different their attitudes were. When Bob and Reza are being interrogated at CTU AMIGO, Tony asks George, “How hard can I push them?” George answers, “Pretty hard.” But no needles are involved. In Season Four (the current one), those guys would have been electrocuted in 15 minutes.

  If you watch the deleted scenes, there’s an atrocious one where Kate is begging Syed Ali’s henchman not to torture her, and she talks about how she lived in Saudi Arabia and knows that Islam is a peaceful religion and then proves it by, I am not making this up, listing the five pillars. That’s the kind of left-wing tripe that Little Green Footballs is always mocking. Glancing at TVTome’s AMIGO Episode Guide, that was mostly written by the same people writing the current season. And that makes me wonder if they don’t have some left-wing card up their sleeve whereby everyone at AMIGO, a la the Seinfeld finale, gets their comeuppance for violating the Constitution.

• Jack’s reintroduction to Mike Fake Dick Cheney was disappointing. These guys are enemies. It should have gone something like this.

  FDC: Hello, Jack.
  JB: Hello, Fake Dick Cheney. Started any wars lately?
  FDC: Jerk.
  JB: Hey, whatever happened to that speechwriter you threw down a flight of steps? Shouldn’t you have gone to jail for that?
  FDC: She was paralyzed and couldn’t accuse me. Now can we PLEASE get to work?
  JB: You know, Sherry was a traitorous lunatic too, but at least Palmer got to hit that.
  FDC: Shut up.
  JB: I know I woulda hit that.
  FDC: Jack, look. We have disagreed in the past, but in this debate, we are on the same side - the side of government run completely amok. Can we work together just this once?
  JB: Rub the phone over your scalp. I want to hear what that sounds like.

• When that lawyer showed up (see, now AMIGO is offensive to Muslims AND Jews) with the US Marshal, I don’t know why Jack didn’t just torture all three of them. He’s above the law.
• And what an ending. Jack resigns to go do something outside of the law. What a sacrifice! He’s only ever done it 39 times before, and served a total of 0 days in jail for it.

Last weekend, we felt the threat of terrorism was high, so when the mail came, we called in our bomb-sniffing cat.

11′09′’01 - September 11 bills itself as various cultures’ responses to the 9/11 tragedy, but it works better if you stop trying to compare everyone’s view on the attacks and just enjoy it as a collection of foreign short films.

Highlights of the collection include a Chilean man’s open letter to the United States drawing the parallel between September 11th 2001 and the CIA-backed coup against Salvador Allende on September 11th 1973, also a Tuesday. Unlike others who have made this connection, most notably Noam Chomsky, segment director Ken Loach makes no attempt to sneer at the 2001 attacks as deserved comeuppance, but rather portrays the two incidents as genuine tragedies worthy of grief. (Many critics have been less sympathetic than I to Loach on this point.)

Mira Nair’s segment on Pakistani immigrants in New York City whose son disappears after 9/11 has drawn less critical discussion, probably because it’s far less “arty” than the rest of the series, but its story and cast make it totally worthwhile. Sean Penn’s contribution makes less sense than it probably should, but is carried by Ernest Borgnine’s unflinching portrayal of a grieving widower. Claude Lelouch’s piece on a deaf woman planning to leave her boyfriend who works as a tour guide in the World Trade Center makes no large point, but succeeds in its emotion - likewise Idrissa Ouedraogo’s on boys in Burkina Faso who scheme to claim the bounty on Osama bin Laden’s head.

Roger Ebert called Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s segment the best, and in fact Inarritu’s name was the reason I rented the DVD, but I thought it was annoyingly padded to fill the required 11 minutes, 9 seconds, and 1 frame - maybe three minutes of it were necessary.

Technical quibbles: the DVD is full-screen, but makes no attempt at pan-and-scan - if something important is happening on the right side of the screen, you don’t see it, and these omissions include the name and home country of every segment’s director. The segments are effectively titled with the country they supposedly represent, but I would argue that Loach’s segment is more about Chile than the UK, Nair’s is more about Pakistan or the US than India, and Lelouch’s is more about the US than France.

Those complaints aside, I recommend the collection, which certainly need not be watched all at once, and I look forward to a proper DVD release.

Daniel at Crooked Timber responds to an overexcited piece by John Tierney on online betting markets and the papal election by using some alleged opportunities for arbitrage to show that said markets are irrational. Having dabbled a bit in Tradesports myself and never found any such opportunities, I was surprised at this, and investigated.

I realized pretty quickly that Daniel had overlooked the 4-cent fee imposed by both Intrade and Tradesports on each transaction. As I lay out in comment 11 on the Crooked Timber thread, once you figure in those fees, most of those arbitrage opportunities disappear, and the prices look a lot more rational.

I just sent in my check to Uncle Sam. On the line where you mark the purpose of the check, I wrote “Abu Ghraib prison.”

I am totally getting audited.

Growing up in Philadelphia, I used to watch all kinds of left-wing tripe on DUTV. Even when I was much more sympathetic to their ideology than I am now, I was still put off by the close-mindedness and self-congratulation of everyone speaking, and scared by the expression on their faces that said not only did it not matter how many eggs needed to be broken to make their omelet, but the fascist eggs have it coming to them.

I had high hopes that The Corporation would go beyond the Free Speech TV paradigm, either through humor, production values, or a genuinely new way of approaching certain issues. For the first half, my hopes came true despite a litany of objections I’ll get to in a moment. In the second half, the directors seemed to run out of material, and turned the film into the usual litany of horrible things corporations have done and how you – YOU! – have the power to stop them, if only you get into cool fights with cops wearing riot gear during trade summits, or something.

So here are all my quibbles with The Corporation:

• They love to tell you the cost of the labor that went into an article of clothing and compare that to its retail price. It seems to me that when you make something abroad and sell it in the U.S., your costs consist of a lot more than foreign labor. Transporting anything across large bodies of water is difficult, and presumably all retail workers in the U.S. are making at least the U.S. minimum wage (if they weren’t, I’m sure this film would have told me thirty times.) It’s possible that after all those costs, the company is still making a filthy amount of money, but why not tell us how much money that actually is instead of trying to compare apples to oranges?
• There’s a whole set of behaviors the film attributes to corporations with the intent of showing that they can technically be considered psychopathic. True, perhaps, but there is not one of those symptoms that does not appear tenfold in governments. “Ah,” say the democratic socialists, “But governments are accountable.” Well, then how the hell do they get away with all the horrible things they get away with, many of which go far beyond the wildest dreams of your favorite evil CEO.
• Jeremy Rifkin asks, “As the consumer, why should I take any risk?” Mr. Rifkin presumably recorded his interview inside a germ-proof fallout shelter, to avoid taking any risk.
• Commodities trader Carlton Brown says, “Our information that we receive does not include anything about the environmental conditions because until the environmental conditions become commodities themselves or are being traded, then obviously we will not have anything to do with that.” Well, Brown just (accidentally, of course) stated how free-marketeers want environmental policy to work. They want there to be a cost to polluting that can be fairly weighed against other costs. Later in the film, Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute tries to explain this concept, and the filmmakers are stunned.
• There’s one moment where it lists corporations and tells you what each one “was guilty of.” It seems to me that the standard way to express that in American writing is “was found guilty of", but I guess corporations are so evil that declaring them guilty has no margin for error.
• I laughed out loud at Marc Barry, the “corporate spy.” I expect to see guys like this in bars casually boasting to girls, “Yeah, I’ve probably worked for about 25% of the Fortune 500.” I don’t expect to see them in serious documentary films.
• Jeremy Rifkin romanticizes the “collectively-lived life” in England before the 14th century, in which land was “administered by the Church and then the aristocracy.” I’m not making this up. Tell me again why these people get to use the word “liberal"?
• If Elaine Bernard were a right-wing ideologue, she’d be referenced on Saturday Night Live every week for characteristics I would never write about. TBogg probably has pages of material on her ready to go just in case she pulls a Horowitz.
• Noam Chomsky says that privatization means “you take a public institution and give it to an unaccountable tyranny.” You know what I hate about not living in Pennsylvania anymore? The unaccountable tyranny that lets me buy wine or beer anywhere I want. I wish the unaccountable tyranny that sold me my computer could be more like the public institution that got me my car registration. If only DVD rentals were controlled by a public institution instead of an unaccountable tyranny, I might not have been spared from watching this crap.
• More Chomsky: “If a public steel industry runs at a loss, it’s providing cheap steel to other industries. Maybe that’s a good thing.” Well, maybe it is. But last I checked, the free market’s been trying to provide cheap foreign steel to other industries, and government’s involvement in the steel industry has been to prevent that.
• I agree that it’s troubling that the filmmakers can’t use the song Happy Birthday to You because some corporation owns it. The excesses of intellectual property law are an important issue that should be discussed. It’s too bad this film wasn’t smart enough to take that subject any further.

There you go everyone. I’ve watched The Corporation so you don’t have to.

He loved it when we called him Il Papa
Throw your hands in the air
And join me in a prayer