Thursday, September 20, 2007
Friday, September 14, 2007
The Bicycle Thief
From Salon:
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Sep. 14, 2007 Imagine you're the federal official in the Bush administration charged with overseeing the nation's transportation infrastructure. A major bridge collapses on an interstate highway during rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring an additional 100. Whom to blame? How about the nation's bicyclists and pedestrians!
The Minneapolis bridge collapse on Aug. 1 led Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters to publicly reflect on federal transportation spending priorities and conclude that those greedy bicyclists and pedestrians, not to mention museumgoers and historic preservationists, hog too much of the billions of federal dollars raised by the gas tax, money that should go to pave highways and bridges. Better still, Peters, a 2006 Bush appointee, apparently doesn't see biking and walking paths as part of transportation infrastructure at all.
In an Aug. 15 appearance on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," Peters spoke against a proposal to raise gas taxes to shore up the nation's aging infrastructure. The real problem, the secretary argued, is that only 60 percent of the current money raised by gas taxes goes to highways and bridges. She conveniently neglected to mention that about 30 percent of the money goes to public transit. She then went on to blast congressional earmarks, which dedicate 10 percent of the gas tax to some 6,000 other projects around the country. "There are museums that are being built with that money, bike paths, trails, repairing lighthouses. Those are some of the kind of things that that money is being spent on, as opposed to our infrastructure," she said. The secretary added that projects like bike paths and trails "are really not transportation."
Peters' comments set off an eruption of blogging, e-mailing and letter-writing among bike riders and activists, incensed that no matter how many times they burn calories instead of fossil fuels with the words "One Less Car" or "We're Not Holding Up the Traffic, We Are the Traffic" plastered on their helmets, their pedal pushing is not taken seriously as a form of transportation by the honchos in Washington, D.C.
Bike paths are not infrastructure? "There are hundreds of thousands of people who ride to work, and millions who walk to work every day, and the idea [that] that isn't transportation is ludicrous," says Andy Clarke, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists, who has biked to work for almost 20 years on a path paid for with federal dollars. Clarke fired off an angry letter to Peters, and invited the 25,000 members of his organization around the country to do the same. "The guy in his Humvee taking his videos back to the video store isn't any more legitimate a trip than the guy on the Raleigh taking his videos back," says Andy Thornley, program director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.
In fact, only about 1.5 percent of federal transportation dollars go to fund bike paths and walking trails. In the meantime, 10 percent of all U.S. trips to work, school and the store occur on bike or foot, and bicyclists and pedestrians account for about 12 percent of annual traffic fatalities, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "We represent a disproportionate share of the injuries, and we get a minuscule share of the funds," says Robert Raburn, executive director of the East Bay Bike Coalition in the San Francisco Bay Area, who calls the Peters' comments "outrageous." Plus, he notes, with problems like global warming, the obesity epidemic and energy independence, shouldn't the U.S. secretary of transportation be praising biking, not complaining about it?
What really drives cyclists around the bend is that while they're doing their part to burn less fossil fuel -- cue slogan: "No Iraqis Died to Fuel This Bike" -- they're getting grief for being expensive from a profligate administration. "War spending, tax cuts for the rich, and gas taxes are all big sources of funding. Bike spending is not," fumes Michael Bluejay, an Austin, Texas, bike activist, in an e-mail. "The few pennies we toss toward bike projects is not enough to fix our nation's bridges, not by a freaking long shot."
One of the many communities that benefit from federal dollars for bicyclists and pedestrians is the very one where the bridge collapsed. For the St. Paul, Minn., program Bike/Walk Twin Cities, administered by Transit for Livable Communities, $21.5 million of federal dough is being spent to create bike lanes, connect existing walking and biking trails with one another, and install signage to alert drivers of the presence of bicyclists and walkers. Despite the cold winters, Minneapolis is something of a biking Mecca, with 2.4 percent of all trips to work made by bike, significantly higher than the national average of 0.4 percent, according to Joan Pasiuk, program director of Bike/Walk Twin Cities.
It's hard to argue that walking paths and bike trails are robbing federal coffers when states can't even spend all the federal money they've received to repair bridges in the first place. In 2006, state departments of transportation sent back $1 billion in unspent bridge funds to the federal government, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "The fact that there is a billion dollars of bridge repair money sloshing around in the system not being spent suggests that it's not the fault of bike trails," says Clarke.
Congressional Democrats agree. "It's a red herring to point to bike paths and even imply that if we didn't build another bike path we'd have all the money we need to fix our highways and bridges," says Jim Berard, communications director for the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. "You can't build very many bridges with the amount of money that you would save if you didn't build any bike paths."
So why is Peters suddenly taking on bikes and pedestrians? Her comments are especially odd since she sang the praises of bikes as transportation in a speech at the National Bike Summit in Washington, in March 2002. Has she simply forgotten the glory of two wheels? One theory: Peters is on a campaign to quash the idea of raising the gas tax, as she editorialized recently in the Washington Post. A key proponent of raising the gas tax to fund bridge restorations in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge collapse is Democratic Rep. Jim Oberstar of Minnesota, who has advocated for bike and pedestrian paths in his district. By putting a culture-war spin on the bridge collapse, Peters is hoping to run his gas tax proposal off the road.
Does Peters herself buy this theory? Does she really think that bike paths do not qualify as transportation infrastructure? Why does she say that things like bike paths steal money from bridge repairs when states have more than enough money to fix bridges? The secretary would not respond, but Jennifer Hing, a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation's Office of Public Affairs in the Office of the Secretary, would. She answered all the specific questions with one resoundingly uninformative e-mail: "The federal government should set high standards for and invest in the ongoing safety, reliability and interconnection of the nation's transportation network. State and local communities should have the flexibility to then set local transportation priorities."
For their part, cyclists have been weaving through political land mines for decades. In the perennial struggle to gain public support for bike paths, they remain philosophical. Says Thornley of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition: "Before there were automobiles, and after there will be automobiles, there will be bicycles moving people around for transportation."
Bike activists face an uphill climb against Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who claims bike paths are not transportation and are stealing tax money from bridges and roads.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Sep. 14, 2007 Imagine you're the federal official in the Bush administration charged with overseeing the nation's transportation infrastructure. A major bridge collapses on an interstate highway during rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring an additional 100. Whom to blame? How about the nation's bicyclists and pedestrians!
The Minneapolis bridge collapse on Aug. 1 led Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters to publicly reflect on federal transportation spending priorities and conclude that those greedy bicyclists and pedestrians, not to mention museumgoers and historic preservationists, hog too much of the billions of federal dollars raised by the gas tax, money that should go to pave highways and bridges. Better still, Peters, a 2006 Bush appointee, apparently doesn't see biking and walking paths as part of transportation infrastructure at all.
In an Aug. 15 appearance on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," Peters spoke against a proposal to raise gas taxes to shore up the nation's aging infrastructure. The real problem, the secretary argued, is that only 60 percent of the current money raised by gas taxes goes to highways and bridges. She conveniently neglected to mention that about 30 percent of the money goes to public transit. She then went on to blast congressional earmarks, which dedicate 10 percent of the gas tax to some 6,000 other projects around the country. "There are museums that are being built with that money, bike paths, trails, repairing lighthouses. Those are some of the kind of things that that money is being spent on, as opposed to our infrastructure," she said. The secretary added that projects like bike paths and trails "are really not transportation."
Peters' comments set off an eruption of blogging, e-mailing and letter-writing among bike riders and activists, incensed that no matter how many times they burn calories instead of fossil fuels with the words "One Less Car" or "We're Not Holding Up the Traffic, We Are the Traffic" plastered on their helmets, their pedal pushing is not taken seriously as a form of transportation by the honchos in Washington, D.C.
Bike paths are not infrastructure? "There are hundreds of thousands of people who ride to work, and millions who walk to work every day, and the idea [that] that isn't transportation is ludicrous," says Andy Clarke, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists, who has biked to work for almost 20 years on a path paid for with federal dollars. Clarke fired off an angry letter to Peters, and invited the 25,000 members of his organization around the country to do the same. "The guy in his Humvee taking his videos back to the video store isn't any more legitimate a trip than the guy on the Raleigh taking his videos back," says Andy Thornley, program director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.
In fact, only about 1.5 percent of federal transportation dollars go to fund bike paths and walking trails. In the meantime, 10 percent of all U.S. trips to work, school and the store occur on bike or foot, and bicyclists and pedestrians account for about 12 percent of annual traffic fatalities, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "We represent a disproportionate share of the injuries, and we get a minuscule share of the funds," says Robert Raburn, executive director of the East Bay Bike Coalition in the San Francisco Bay Area, who calls the Peters' comments "outrageous." Plus, he notes, with problems like global warming, the obesity epidemic and energy independence, shouldn't the U.S. secretary of transportation be praising biking, not complaining about it?
What really drives cyclists around the bend is that while they're doing their part to burn less fossil fuel -- cue slogan: "No Iraqis Died to Fuel This Bike" -- they're getting grief for being expensive from a profligate administration. "War spending, tax cuts for the rich, and gas taxes are all big sources of funding. Bike spending is not," fumes Michael Bluejay, an Austin, Texas, bike activist, in an e-mail. "The few pennies we toss toward bike projects is not enough to fix our nation's bridges, not by a freaking long shot."
One of the many communities that benefit from federal dollars for bicyclists and pedestrians is the very one where the bridge collapsed. For the St. Paul, Minn., program Bike/Walk Twin Cities, administered by Transit for Livable Communities, $21.5 million of federal dough is being spent to create bike lanes, connect existing walking and biking trails with one another, and install signage to alert drivers of the presence of bicyclists and walkers. Despite the cold winters, Minneapolis is something of a biking Mecca, with 2.4 percent of all trips to work made by bike, significantly higher than the national average of 0.4 percent, according to Joan Pasiuk, program director of Bike/Walk Twin Cities.
It's hard to argue that walking paths and bike trails are robbing federal coffers when states can't even spend all the federal money they've received to repair bridges in the first place. In 2006, state departments of transportation sent back $1 billion in unspent bridge funds to the federal government, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "The fact that there is a billion dollars of bridge repair money sloshing around in the system not being spent suggests that it's not the fault of bike trails," says Clarke.
Congressional Democrats agree. "It's a red herring to point to bike paths and even imply that if we didn't build another bike path we'd have all the money we need to fix our highways and bridges," says Jim Berard, communications director for the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. "You can't build very many bridges with the amount of money that you would save if you didn't build any bike paths."
So why is Peters suddenly taking on bikes and pedestrians? Her comments are especially odd since she sang the praises of bikes as transportation in a speech at the National Bike Summit in Washington, in March 2002. Has she simply forgotten the glory of two wheels? One theory: Peters is on a campaign to quash the idea of raising the gas tax, as she editorialized recently in the Washington Post. A key proponent of raising the gas tax to fund bridge restorations in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge collapse is Democratic Rep. Jim Oberstar of Minnesota, who has advocated for bike and pedestrian paths in his district. By putting a culture-war spin on the bridge collapse, Peters is hoping to run his gas tax proposal off the road.
Does Peters herself buy this theory? Does she really think that bike paths do not qualify as transportation infrastructure? Why does she say that things like bike paths steal money from bridge repairs when states have more than enough money to fix bridges? The secretary would not respond, but Jennifer Hing, a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation's Office of Public Affairs in the Office of the Secretary, would. She answered all the specific questions with one resoundingly uninformative e-mail: "The federal government should set high standards for and invest in the ongoing safety, reliability and interconnection of the nation's transportation network. State and local communities should have the flexibility to then set local transportation priorities."
For their part, cyclists have been weaving through political land mines for decades. In the perennial struggle to gain public support for bike paths, they remain philosophical. Says Thornley of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition: "Before there were automobiles, and after there will be automobiles, there will be bicycles moving people around for transportation."
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Well, Duh
Study finds conservatives, led by George Will, dominate editorial pages
Associated Press
NEW YORK — George Will's column runs in more newspapers than any writer in the nation, according to a new study by a liberal media watchdog group that concludes conservative voices such as his dominate editorial pages.
Will's syndicated column runs at least once a month in 368 newspapers with more than 26 million in total circulation, said the Media Matters for America. The organization surveyed 96 percent of the nation's 1,430 English-language daily newspapers.
"He reaches half of the newspaper readers in America," said Paul Waldman, the study's author. "He has a huge megaphone, probably bigger than anybody else in America."
His group found that 60 percent of the daily newspapers print more conservative syndicated columnists each week than liberals. Twenty percent of the papers are dominated by liberals and 20 percent are balanced. Media Matters had no information on local columnists.
It's similar to how conservative talk radio voices dominate, although to a much more limited extent.
Waldman called it "one more nail in the coffin of the myth of liberal media bias." Better balance should be the goal, he said.
Will, 66, distributes two columns each week to newspapers through the Washington Post Writers Group and writes every other week for Newsweek. He's been a columnist since 1974, when newspapers began searching for conservative voices after the Nixon administration complained about a liberal bias.
"It's pleasing news, because one never knows," Will told The Associated Press. "You send these things out and you can't possibly keep track of how the newspapers are using them."
Alan Shearer, editorial director and general manager of the group that syndicates Will, said he thinks the column is popular because it contains original reporting and is not just opinion. Will can also be unpredictable, and predictability is the death of columnists, he said.
Some well-known TV personalities can't approach Will for reach in their written work. Bill O'Reilly, for example, reaches 4 million readers and Ann Coulter 1.1 million, the survey said.
The five most popular columnists include another conservative, Kathleen Parker, and two liberals, Ellen Goodman and Leonard Pitts Jr. David Broder of the Washington Post, who is third, isn't assigned an ideology by Media Matters.
The top 10 is rounded out by Cal Thomas, Charles Krauthammer and three from The New York Times: Thomas L. Friedman, Maureen Dowd and David Brooks.
Both Will and Shearer said they believe that Media Matters is right, that conservative columnists have a wider reach than liberals. It may partly be because publishers lean conservative, and editorial page editors often report to them, Shearer said.
Will said he hoped to write "'til I drop," pointing to his 50th anniversary as a columnist as a goal. That's in 2024.
"I love to write," he said. "I think that's unusual among journalists. A lot of journalists like the reporting and hanging around the journalistic subculture and seeing their names in the paper, it's the middle part they don't like. I like the middle part."
Associated Press
NEW YORK — George Will's column runs in more newspapers than any writer in the nation, according to a new study by a liberal media watchdog group that concludes conservative voices such as his dominate editorial pages.
Will's syndicated column runs at least once a month in 368 newspapers with more than 26 million in total circulation, said the Media Matters for America. The organization surveyed 96 percent of the nation's 1,430 English-language daily newspapers.
"He reaches half of the newspaper readers in America," said Paul Waldman, the study's author. "He has a huge megaphone, probably bigger than anybody else in America."
His group found that 60 percent of the daily newspapers print more conservative syndicated columnists each week than liberals. Twenty percent of the papers are dominated by liberals and 20 percent are balanced. Media Matters had no information on local columnists.
It's similar to how conservative talk radio voices dominate, although to a much more limited extent.
Waldman called it "one more nail in the coffin of the myth of liberal media bias." Better balance should be the goal, he said.
Will, 66, distributes two columns each week to newspapers through the Washington Post Writers Group and writes every other week for Newsweek. He's been a columnist since 1974, when newspapers began searching for conservative voices after the Nixon administration complained about a liberal bias.
"It's pleasing news, because one never knows," Will told The Associated Press. "You send these things out and you can't possibly keep track of how the newspapers are using them."
Alan Shearer, editorial director and general manager of the group that syndicates Will, said he thinks the column is popular because it contains original reporting and is not just opinion. Will can also be unpredictable, and predictability is the death of columnists, he said.
Some well-known TV personalities can't approach Will for reach in their written work. Bill O'Reilly, for example, reaches 4 million readers and Ann Coulter 1.1 million, the survey said.
The five most popular columnists include another conservative, Kathleen Parker, and two liberals, Ellen Goodman and Leonard Pitts Jr. David Broder of the Washington Post, who is third, isn't assigned an ideology by Media Matters.
The top 10 is rounded out by Cal Thomas, Charles Krauthammer and three from The New York Times: Thomas L. Friedman, Maureen Dowd and David Brooks.
Both Will and Shearer said they believe that Media Matters is right, that conservative columnists have a wider reach than liberals. It may partly be because publishers lean conservative, and editorial page editors often report to them, Shearer said.
Will said he hoped to write "'til I drop," pointing to his 50th anniversary as a columnist as a goal. That's in 2024.
"I love to write," he said. "I think that's unusual among journalists. A lot of journalists like the reporting and hanging around the journalistic subculture and seeing their names in the paper, it's the middle part they don't like. I like the middle part."
War With Iran?
War with Iran? We—meaning Anglo-American financial interests—have been at war with Iran for nigh on two hundred years.
The conflict began in 1856, when British forces attacked Persia to force them out of portions of Afghanistan. Constant skirmishes with Russia and its Mid-East neighbors had eroded Persia’s sphere of influence more or less to present day Iran, and the newly throned Qajar Dynasty was intent on re-establishing lost territory, but those intentions went unmet as Tehran fell prey to foreign influence, first from Russia and later from England.
In 1888, the Ottoman Empire inked a deal with Germany to build the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway; the discovery of oil a few years later turned England against the scheme. England had developed an oil monopoly in Iraq, and by 1901, they had a similar arrangement in Iran. A German railway into the region would weaken England’s hold on the world’s newest strategic resource: oil. Some historians cite this as the main impetus behind World War I.
The Oil Concession of 1901 spelled the beginning of decades of British tyranny in Iran, as the Anglo Persian Oil Company (later, the Anglo Iranian Oil Company) bought politicians, bullied legitimate opposition and foisted laws upon the people. By 1951, the people had had enough. They toppled the Shah and elected a semi-socialist prime minister named Mohammed Mossadegh, who quickly nationalized Iran’s oil production. The AIOC was reduced to simply one of several competing entities allowed to bid on Iran’s oil fields.
The following year, British intelligence operatives drew up plans for a joint Anglo-American plot to overthrow Mossadegh and install a new puppet regime. President Truman killed the idea, however, and it was shelved until Eisenhower became president in 1953. By then, it had become a CIA operation codenamed TP-AJAX. Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., Teddy’s grandson, led the scheme. In 1954, AIOC reinvented itself as British Petroleum, regaining a 40 percent share of Iran’s oil production, and positioning itself as the preeminent oil producer in the region.
History repeated itself, as it so often does, in 1979, when the Shah was again overthrown. This time, however, instead of a Socialist, Iranians elected a Muslim extremist, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, who framed his takeover in religious destiny terms. The current Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, though not a religious figure, has maintained Khomeini’s hardline stance towards the West. And recent British and American actions suggest our leadership is repeating itself too.
The conflict began in 1856, when British forces attacked Persia to force them out of portions of Afghanistan. Constant skirmishes with Russia and its Mid-East neighbors had eroded Persia’s sphere of influence more or less to present day Iran, and the newly throned Qajar Dynasty was intent on re-establishing lost territory, but those intentions went unmet as Tehran fell prey to foreign influence, first from Russia and later from England.
In 1888, the Ottoman Empire inked a deal with Germany to build the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway; the discovery of oil a few years later turned England against the scheme. England had developed an oil monopoly in Iraq, and by 1901, they had a similar arrangement in Iran. A German railway into the region would weaken England’s hold on the world’s newest strategic resource: oil. Some historians cite this as the main impetus behind World War I.
The Oil Concession of 1901 spelled the beginning of decades of British tyranny in Iran, as the Anglo Persian Oil Company (later, the Anglo Iranian Oil Company) bought politicians, bullied legitimate opposition and foisted laws upon the people. By 1951, the people had had enough. They toppled the Shah and elected a semi-socialist prime minister named Mohammed Mossadegh, who quickly nationalized Iran’s oil production. The AIOC was reduced to simply one of several competing entities allowed to bid on Iran’s oil fields.
The following year, British intelligence operatives drew up plans for a joint Anglo-American plot to overthrow Mossadegh and install a new puppet regime. President Truman killed the idea, however, and it was shelved until Eisenhower became president in 1953. By then, it had become a CIA operation codenamed TP-AJAX. Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., Teddy’s grandson, led the scheme. In 1954, AIOC reinvented itself as British Petroleum, regaining a 40 percent share of Iran’s oil production, and positioning itself as the preeminent oil producer in the region.
History repeated itself, as it so often does, in 1979, when the Shah was again overthrown. This time, however, instead of a Socialist, Iranians elected a Muslim extremist, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, who framed his takeover in religious destiny terms. The current Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, though not a religious figure, has maintained Khomeini’s hardline stance towards the West. And recent British and American actions suggest our leadership is repeating itself too.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
93% Ain't Bad, Is It? Well, Is It?
| You Are 93% Feminist |
 You are a total feminist. This doesn't mean you're a man hater (in fact, you may be a man). You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It's a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action. |
Monday, September 03, 2007
The American Dream is a Lie
The American Dream is a cruel hoax perpetrated by Wall Street on a mostly unsuspecting populace addled by years of TeeVee and disinformation. This Labor Day post comes directly from the front line trenches where average Americans chase their own tails for fun and profit.
In 1998, I had a temp job at a local Ameriquest Mortgage affiliate. The assignment lasted from right before Thanksgiving to right before Christmas.
God, that job sucked.
Mainly, my job was to enter mortgage information into a database, but they would occasionally ask me to perform other tasks, such as driving to the Government Center to hunt down information on recently filed foreclosure notices. That was the modus operandi at this office – locate desperate families who were about to lose their homes and offer them a refinancing deal. It didn’t hurt that it was Christmastime.
In 1998, I had a temp job at a local Ameriquest Mortgage affiliate. The assignment lasted from right before Thanksgiving to right before Christmas.
God, that job sucked.
Mainly, my job was to enter mortgage information into a database, but they would occasionally ask me to perform other tasks, such as driving to the Government Center to hunt down information on recently filed foreclosure notices. That was the modus operandi at this office – locate desperate families who were about to lose their homes and offer them a refinancing deal. It didn’t hurt that it was Christmastime.
In the sales office, there was a huge zip code map with pushpins identifying the poorest neighborhoods. The sales staff would pore over the white pages looking for addresses in the shitty zip codes and then cold call the hapless suckers and offer them refinancing deals. Evidently, business was booming, because the “loan officers” all wore expensive suits and drove new cars. A couple of the guys, however, had forgotten to include shoes in their new ensembles. Nothing says redneck nouveau riche more than white Nike high-tops with a suit.
When I asked my supervisor, a wiry bleach blond mother of three from a far away suburb, why the database included race information, she said it was just a legal technicality. “Don’t worry,” she reassured me, “there’s no racism anymore.” After that, I started marking every entry as “Caucasian, non-Hispanic.” I don’t know if that helped or hurt, but I had to do something subversive. In the anteroom where the coffeemaker and fax machine were, the walls were decorated with news clippings. Every one of them was about ACORN, the non-profit group that helps working class families buy homes. Names of ACORN representatives were highlighted in yellow with nasty remarks written in the margins.
Since it was autumn, hunting and football were the main topics of conversation. And of course children. “Blah blah blah hunting,” they would say. And “blah blah blah football.” And of course, “blah blah blah family.” Since I didn’t hunt, watch football or have children, I was like half a fag in their eyes. Politics were carefully avoided, probably on orders from the Main Office or something, but it didn’t take a rocket surgeon to figger out who these dolts voted for in the last election. (HINT: Bob Dole)
Anyway, flash forward nine years. Now I’m working for the second largest settlement administrator in the country (yes, I’m temping again) handling the class action settlement against – you guessed it – Ameriquest. According to the badly spelled script we are supposed to be reading to the class members, all 50 states except Virginia (supposedly because Ameriquest never did business in Virginia) have found Ameriquest guilty of violating just about every law governing home loans. They provided deceptive information on interest rates and discount points, convinced homeowners to refinance when doing so provided no benefit to the borrower, and they falsified borrowers’ financial information in order to maximize the loan amounts.
Here’s how a class action settlement works, for those of you who, like me, were never very clear on the concept: What happens is, somebody sues someone. Then another person sues that same entity for more or less the same reasons. Then another person does it. Then another. After awhile, it becomes apparent that the entity being sued perpetrated the alleged crime on numerous individuals. Said individuals are then identified as a ‘class.’ Efforts are made to locate all of the class members – in this case, anyone who had a loan with Ameriquest between 1999 and 2005. (I’m not sure how those dates were arrived at, since the bad behavior extends beyond them.) If the defendant is found guilty (or about to be found guilty), they offer a settlement to be divided among the class members. If the majority of the class members accepts the settlement, then the whole thing is settled. If the majority of the class members fails to accept the settlement, then it’s back to the drawing board. In the case of Ameriquest, the average settlement amount is around $600. Naturally, Ameriquest wants everyone to accept the settlement, since it means the company will pay out a mere fraction of what they stole. Class members are faced with the choice of accepting the settlement and at least getting something, or refusing the settlement, hiring an attorney and going it alone in the hopes of getting the tens of thousands they are really owed. Since most of the class members were poor to begin with, or at least not rich, this latter option is usually beyond their reach, unless they know a lawyer willing to help them out pro bono. One fly in Ameriquest’s ointment is the fact that many of the class members have lost their homes and are now unreachable using the information in Ameriquest’s databases. If less than a certain percentage of the class members accept the settlement, either intentionally or because they couldn’t be reached in time, then new settlement arrangements must be arrived at.
When I asked my supervisor, a wiry bleach blond mother of three from a far away suburb, why the database included race information, she said it was just a legal technicality. “Don’t worry,” she reassured me, “there’s no racism anymore.” After that, I started marking every entry as “Caucasian, non-Hispanic.” I don’t know if that helped or hurt, but I had to do something subversive. In the anteroom where the coffeemaker and fax machine were, the walls were decorated with news clippings. Every one of them was about ACORN, the non-profit group that helps working class families buy homes. Names of ACORN representatives were highlighted in yellow with nasty remarks written in the margins.
Since it was autumn, hunting and football were the main topics of conversation. And of course children. “Blah blah blah hunting,” they would say. And “blah blah blah football.” And of course, “blah blah blah family.” Since I didn’t hunt, watch football or have children, I was like half a fag in their eyes. Politics were carefully avoided, probably on orders from the Main Office or something, but it didn’t take a rocket surgeon to figger out who these dolts voted for in the last election. (HINT: Bob Dole)
Anyway, flash forward nine years. Now I’m working for the second largest settlement administrator in the country (yes, I’m temping again) handling the class action settlement against – you guessed it – Ameriquest. According to the badly spelled script we are supposed to be reading to the class members, all 50 states except Virginia (supposedly because Ameriquest never did business in Virginia) have found Ameriquest guilty of violating just about every law governing home loans. They provided deceptive information on interest rates and discount points, convinced homeowners to refinance when doing so provided no benefit to the borrower, and they falsified borrowers’ financial information in order to maximize the loan amounts.
Here’s how a class action settlement works, for those of you who, like me, were never very clear on the concept: What happens is, somebody sues someone. Then another person sues that same entity for more or less the same reasons. Then another person does it. Then another. After awhile, it becomes apparent that the entity being sued perpetrated the alleged crime on numerous individuals. Said individuals are then identified as a ‘class.’ Efforts are made to locate all of the class members – in this case, anyone who had a loan with Ameriquest between 1999 and 2005. (I’m not sure how those dates were arrived at, since the bad behavior extends beyond them.) If the defendant is found guilty (or about to be found guilty), they offer a settlement to be divided among the class members. If the majority of the class members accepts the settlement, then the whole thing is settled. If the majority of the class members fails to accept the settlement, then it’s back to the drawing board. In the case of Ameriquest, the average settlement amount is around $600. Naturally, Ameriquest wants everyone to accept the settlement, since it means the company will pay out a mere fraction of what they stole. Class members are faced with the choice of accepting the settlement and at least getting something, or refusing the settlement, hiring an attorney and going it alone in the hopes of getting the tens of thousands they are really owed. Since most of the class members were poor to begin with, or at least not rich, this latter option is usually beyond their reach, unless they know a lawyer willing to help them out pro bono. One fly in Ameriquest’s ointment is the fact that many of the class members have lost their homes and are now unreachable using the information in Ameriquest’s databases. If less than a certain percentage of the class members accept the settlement, either intentionally or because they couldn’t be reached in time, then new settlement arrangements must be arrived at.
For some strange reason, there is very little mention of the class action lawsuit against Ameriquest in the supposedly liberal media.
As I mentioned above, Rust Consulting is the second largest settlement administrator in the country, a fact they are eager to repeat at every opportunity. I probably shouldn’t be linking to them, since they are kinky for confidentiality and this will probably come back to haunt me somehow. One observation I have made on this assignment, or I should say, one suspicion I have long had which has been emphatically confirmed on this assignment, is that the American educational system is woefully inadequate. Both my fellow temps, and the class members I am calling at a rate of 30 per hour, display a shocking incapacity for basic communication and reasoning skills. For example, whatever happened to the tradition of keeping a pen and paper near the telephone in case you need to write something down? Time and again, I am forced to wait while someone laboriously searches for a pen, and even then I must spell nearly every word of the two-sentence message while they scratch it out Ali G style. “…Set-tle-ment,” I repeat patiently. “S-E-T-T-L-E-M-E-N-T. Ad-min-ist-rat-or. A-D-M-I…” I hang up knowing that not one word of the message will reach its intended recipient in any meaningful form.
I can tell by the uneasy expressions I receive from my supervisors whenever we talk that I am an anomaly among the temp crowd in that I catch on quickly and use relatively good grammar in my daily speech. There must be something wrong with me, they suspect, since I am not borderline retarded. What I mean is, there must be something wrong with me that isn’t readily apparent; there is something wrong with nearly all of my coworkers, but you can tell what it is at first glance. With me, the problem is lurking below the surface somewhere, and that fills my supervisors with unease. I think some of them suspect me as some sort of corporate spy – perhaps from Ameriquest or one of the law firms – sent here to make sure they are handling things professionally. But maybe I’m just being paranoid. In any case, they are right that something is lurking beneath the surface; it’s an irrepressible urge to speak truth to power, which is precisely why I keep landing in these crappy temp jobs in the first place. The American workplace, from the White House on down, craves obedience. Independent thinking, even if it is used to accomplish the tasks at hand, is a Major Threat that needs to be extinguished quickly before it spreads. Likes golf? Check. NASCAR? Check. Hooters? Check. Sinclair Lewis? WARNING WARNING WARNING…
On Friday, August 17th, 40 or 50 of us temps crowded into a hotel conference room to receive our “orientation,” which consisted mainly of reiterating Rust Consulting’s extremely high level of ethics, and repeating the importance of being at our workstations on time each morning and after every break. And speaking of breaks, these are rigidly enforced. Unfortunately, the process for punching in and out for breaks consumes nearly a third of the break time.
On Monday, August 20th, we arrived for our first shift. We were forced to wait in the lobby for nearly 40 minutes before we were allowed through the front doors. The delay was never explained. We didn’t get to punch in until after 9 am, over an hour after our agreed upon start time. What I deduce from this, naturally, is that our time is worthless to Rust Consulting, but that Rust’s time must be regarded as precious to the temps. Bryan, one of my many supervisors, spent most of the morning filling out MAF forms for each of us to sign. MAF stands for Manual Adjustment Form, and one must be filled out anytime there is an error in the electronic timekeeping system; for example, if you forget to punch out for break, you need to fill out a MAF, and it needs to be signed by you, your supervisor and the HR director.
The scripts we were expected to read to the class members over the telephone went through many rewrites, exacerbating the already awkward task of calling strangers and reading to them. We were instructed to read the scripts “conversationally,” which is impossible since they are laden with legalese. Well, not legalese so much as excruciating ass-covering detail. For instance, you can’t say “the tenth,” or “Monday the tenth;” you have to say, "Monday, September 10th, 2007." Every. Fucking. Time. How do you do that “conversationally?” Not even Spock speaks that formally. There is always somebody listening to your phone calls, and from time to time one of the many supervisors appears with a checklist that you must sign grading your performance. The most common criticism is that you didn’t adhere to the script. The script is so poorly written though, that you cannot adhere to it without splitting infinitives and dangling participles.
The class members we are calling – that is, the ones who haven’t yet lost their homes – already stinging from the flogging they have received at the hands of Ameriquest, become belligerent the moment the word “Ameriquest” is uttered. That’s the only word from the whole script that they seem to hear. If they don’t just hang up, which is understandably common, they blurt out some variation of “the check’s in the mail.” About half the time, it takes a solid 30 seconds of arguing just to get them to understand that they are eligible to receive money this time, and of course you can’t do so at all without deviating from the script. We are expected to make a minimum of 25 calls per hour. Since either Ameriquest or Rust has screwed the pooch on this deal, we are having a hard time reaching all 200,000 or so of the class members before the September 5th deadline. As a result, overtime is available for the temps who aren’t ready to pull their hair out at the end of their regular shift. But in order to be considered for overtime, you must make at least 30 calls per hour. As a result, most of my coworkers read the script in an unintelligible monotone that results inevitably in even more hang-ups. Hang-ups are good, since they only take a few seconds. I suspect that the whole thing is designed to minimize the possibility of actually making contact with all the class members. But maybe that’s just me being paranoid again.
I wish I could've been there at the Ameriquest branch when the chickens started coming home to roost and people were getting laid off and the phones weren't ringing except when the lawyers called and it became painfully obvious that, yes, you self-absorbed suburban white trash twat, racism is still alive and well in the Land of the Free. It's about the only time I've wished to be at a temp job.
As is so often the case, corporate America has pitted two groups of poor people against one another in their interminable effort to evade justice. One group, so desperate for meaningful employment that they will immerse themselves in an absurd tragicomedy just to make ends meet, is forced to attempt contact with the other group of poor people who foolishly believed in something that vanished around 1950, if it ever even existed at all – the American Dream.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Joybubbles RIP
From the Memphis Flyer
Joybubbles, RIP
As reported by Douglas Martin in The New York Times on August 20th, Josef Carl Engressia Jr., aka Joybubbles, made a name for himself in the 1960s when he discovered that he could make free phone calls anywhere in the world by simply whistling the proper sounds into what was then a tone-based national phone system. He and others -- including Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak -- turned that talent into a game. They became "phone phreaks," precursors of what we know today as computer hackers.
As reported by Douglas Martin in The New York Times on August 20th, Josef Carl Engressia Jr., aka Joybubbles, made a name for himself in the 1960s when he discovered that he could make free phone calls anywhere in the world by simply whistling the proper sounds into what was then a tone-based national phone system. He and others -- including Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak -- turned that talent into a game. They became "phone phreaks," precursors of what we know today as computer hackers.
But in the '70s, Engressia got caught. He had moved to Memphis in 1971, where he was eventually convicted of phone fraud. From Memphis, he moved to Denver and then to Minneapolis, where he built a network of fellow phone enthusiasts. He survived on Social Security disability, but he did take part-time jobs. Engressia's superb sense of smell, for example, led agricultural researchers to use him in their efforts to control the odor of hog excrement.
Throughout his life, Engressia clung to childhood. As Martin reports in the Times, he made himself minister in what Engressia called the Church of Eternal Childhood. He owned tapes of every episode of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, He collected teddy bears. His I.Q. was 172. The cause of his death remains unknown.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Saturday, August 18, 2007
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