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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Are Millennials the Most Ageist Generation Ever?

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Ted Rall

Ever notice how those who complain about being victims are themselves at least as likely to be perpetrators of the same offense? Examples that come to mind for me include the United States and Israel, two countries that portray themselves as targets of terrorism while carrying out wars of aggression whose death tolls far exceed their own losses. You’ll no doubt think of your own examples.

We’re seeing this projection at work with Millennial ageism. The Millennial generation is the most ageist in memory, yet the online media outlets they dominate discuss a problem that, if it really exists, pales in comparison: ageism against Millennials. But, like American presidents’ assertions that the United States has to protect itself against the world when, if anything, it’s really the world that needs to protect itself against the United States, it’s a joke.

Millennials’ status as members of the biggest generation in history – numbering more than 83 million, they have officially beaten the Baby Boomers – ensures that they will have a lot of power over American politics and the workplace, especially as they get older.

Which, if current experience serves to predict the future, they will abuse.

As I have written, ageism – the old-fashioned kind, by the young against the old – is endemic to Silicon Valley, the highest profile business sector controlled by people in their 20s and low 30s. Moreover, it’s normative: everyone thinks it’s OK. So OK do they think it is that national business magazines even publish articles saying it’s “smart” not to hire older Americans because they’re “dumber.”

I call it the old-fashioned kind of ageism because young-picking-on-old discrimination hasn’t been a thing since the “youth culture” of the 1960s and 1970s. Back in their hippie days, Baby Boomers in their 20s were so mean to their elders that they even made a movie whose plot involved putting people over 30 into concentration camps. As they got older, Baby Boomers flipped the switch, deploying their power as employers to discriminate against Generation Xers. Now that the Boomers are finally fading into the demographic mists, their Millennial children are beginning to repeat that half-century-old pattern, marginalizing and refusing to hire Gen Xers.

Ah, the great psycho of life.

While thinking about and researching this essay, I turned my critical eye to myself and my Gen X contemporaries. When we were in our 20s, didn’t we look down on older people? When we got a chance to hire and fire, didn’t we discriminate against those we viewed as boring and out of touch?

Not really.

Sure, we had more in common with members of our own age cohort than those older than us. But we didn’t look down on older folks…though many of them made fun of us (if they noticed us at all) and would rather let a job go unfilled than hire us.

I remember, for example, working as a staff writer for P.O.V. magazine. Almost all of us were in our 20s and 30s — not because management rejected older writers, but because older writers already had jobs elsewhere. But when editor Randall Lane brought on legendary sportwriter-barfly Bert Sugar as a columnist, not only did no one hold his age against him – he was pushing 60 and looked closer to 80 – everyone thought it was cool to add him to the team. Not just because he was “old school,” which we all admired, or despite his age, but because we appreciated the value that comes with experience. He had stuff to teach us; we wanted to learn, and hoped that some of that glory might rub off on us.

Compare that to the unceremonious departure of Mark “Copyranter” Duffy, 53, from BuzzFeed. Dude was the smartest man in the office; they fired him for being old.

I’ve never been into her music, but the cruel reception of Millennial-dominated media outlets to Madonna’s insistence on continuing to use sex to market herself at age 56 has me admiring her spunk (and, actually, finding her physically hotter than she was back in the 1980s). Also, I have to contrast the viciousness to the way that we Gen Xers treated older pop and musical figures at the same age.

As a record reviewer in my late 20s and early 30s, I can’t recall a single instance of an older rock or pop musician or group being dissed simply because he or she was old. If you sucked, you sucked. If you were good, you were good. If anything, our default mode was to tend to respect anyone who had stuck around for a while. We didn’t exactly respect our elders — as Gen Xers, we didn’t respect anyone, not even ourselves – but we didn’t disrespect them either. For us, it made perfect sense that punk rockers like The Clash admired old glam guys like Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople.

That “rather die before I get old” crap was from the 1960s, not us.

The tendency of Millennials to denigrate their Gen X and Boomer elders is probably hardwired into the demographic reality of belonging to a big, dominant generation. One of the ways you feel good about yourselves is by picking on smaller, weaker groups. No matter what I or anyone else writes, even if every Millennial in the world reads it, there’s virtually no chance it will reduce their ageist tendencies.

Still, it’s sad. I think about my former literary agent and friend Toni Mendez, who died 12 years ago —at work — at the age of 95. She was more vibrant and interesting and outrageous and intelligent than a thousand typical 25-year-olds combined, and I still miss her terribly. Those 30-year-old gatekeepers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere who think that everyone over 35 has nothing to contribute are screwing themselves too, and leaving money on the table.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the upcoming book “Snowden,” the first biography of NSA whistleblower Edward J. Snowden. It is in graphic novel form. You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

SYNDICATED COLUMN: If Rachel Dolezal is a Liar, What is Barack Obama?

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Ted Rall

Rachel Dolezal, the former Spokane leader of the NAACP who was born white but pretends to be (or “identifies as”) black, is widely assumed to be a lying con artist, suffering from psychological problems, or both. Many Americans, especially blacks who suffer at the hands of systemic racial discrimination, were furious at what they saw as Dolezal’s lack of — forgive me — skin in the game.

Unlike dark-skinned African-Americans pulled over by racist policemen for a broken taillight, she could opt out any time. Indeed, she did exactly that when she sued her alma mater, the historically black Howard University, for race discrimination — because she was white.

Dolezel has stepped down from her unpaid post where, by all accounts, she did a magnificent job. But what about another case of racial slumming that is not dissimilar from Dolezal’s, but far more prominent?

I speak here ­— though few others dare — of President Obama.

Obama, as everyone knows, had a black Kenyan father and a white American mother. Growing up in Hawaii, where so many people have multiple racial identities that they call themselves “chop suey” or “poi dog,” meaning “mixed” or “mutt,” Obama chose to sublimate his white ancestry and identify as fully black because he didn’t want to be, as friends remember, a “tragic mulatto” who had to suck up to whites.

Choosing which half of your family you prefer to identify with isn’t unusual. My mother is French and my father is American of German ancestry. I feel very French — I speak and read the language, listen to French music, follow French news, have dual French-American citizenship. I always assumed that was because my father wasn’t around while I was growing up, so he lost his chance to influence me. (But I’ve never denied his paternity, or the parts of my personality I believe came from him.)

Anyway, Obama’s situation was the reverse of mine. Like me, he was raised by his mom. The time he spent with his father could be measured in hours. If he’d followed the path of least resistance in terms of cultural influence, he would have identified as white. Instead, he took on the race of the father who left him.

Granted: race is a largely a cultural and political construction. Still, within the racial construct in which Obama and I (we’re almost the same age, and went to Columbia at the same time) grew up, he was and is biracial.

            Why’d he ditch the biracial moniker?

The Census Bureau began identifying multiracial Americans in 2000. (You check off two or more boxes for race, as applicable.) In 2000, 6.8 million Americans declared themselves as having mixed-race ancestry. Not Obama — in 2010, as President, he declared himself solely African-American.

Sorry, mom.

How is this different than Rachel Dolezal? Both of them identify themselves as blacker than they are genetically: Dolezel 100% more, Obama, 50% more. Why is Dolezal, an obscure woman who worked hard to fight for blacks, catching more shit than Obama, arguably the world’s most powerful man, who has been roundly criticized for sitting on his hands when black Americans come under attack, as they did in a Charleston church this week?

If Dolezeal is “transracial,” as she told an interview, so is Obama.

“I think his choice [to declare himself African-American and not biracial] will have political, social and cultural ramifications,” Michele Hughes, president of the Chicago Biracial Families Network, said after stories about Obama’s census declaration appeared. Certainly, it sent a message to biracial children: the president of the United States is ashamed of his biracial heritage, and maybe you should be too.

“Aren’t people supposed to fill out their census forms accurately? Why else are we doing it? If everyone put down on the form how they “identified,” I don’t know what kind of count we’d wind up with, but clearly it would not reflect the racial makeup of the United States. As many have argued, race is an almost useless construct, so that might not matter, except in one very important area: If every biracial person chose one race, as Obama did, or as people had to do before the forms were changed in 2000, the census would portray a society more divided than it actually is,” Elizabeth Chang, who identifies as biracial (and actually is biracial) wrote in The Washington Post in 2010. “If the most powerful person in this country says that because society thinks he looks black, he is black, it sends a message that biracial children have to identify with the side they most resemble.”

It also endorses the hoary “single drop of blood” rule, which dates to slavery and dictates that if you’re 0.1% black, the law, and American culture, considers you 100% black.

As I said, I’m not personally vested in this discussion. But I dislike hypocrisy, particularly in the context of media pile-ons against average citizens while objectively much bigger targets stand around watching, untouched by the flinging mud. If Dolezal is scum for lying about her race, so is Obama.

Half-scum, anyway.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the upcoming book “Snowden,” the first biography of NSA whistleblower Edward J. Snowden. It is in graphic novel form. You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

 

Beau Biden and David Goldberg Are Dead, But…Who?

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Even if you’re a news junkie, you probably never heard of Dave Goldberg or Beau Biden before they died. Yet both are at the center of a national mournathon.

Goldberg’s and Biden’s deaths marks the further advancement of celebritization. Millions of Americans care about people after they die – people whose existence they were completely unaware of prior to their demise – simply because they are related to someone famous.

Goldberg, 47, was the husband of Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, most known for her book “Lean In,” which advises women to be more assertive in the workplace. Just over a month ago, he fell off a treadmill at a hotel in Mexico, probably after a heart attack, and struck his head. (I write “probably” because there were a ridiculous number of conflicting reports about the cause of death.) Goldberg had been the CEO of SurveyMonkey, a relatively obscure Silicon Valley startup.

Beau Biden

Beau Biden was the son of Vice President Joe Biden. He was unknown outside Delaware, where he was a former state attorney general. He died of brain cancer at age 46.

Both deaths were sad. It is usually unfortunate when people leave us, especially at a young age. (Not as much when they’re, say, war criminals.) In Biden’s case, it is impossible not to feel for the vice president, who apart from the fact that he works side-by-side with President Barack Obama seems to be a decent man, and in any case has suffered more tragedy than most by losing his wife and his young daughter in a car accident in 1972.

But let’s face it: 2.4 million Americans die every year. They leave behind spouses and parents and children and friends and colleagues who miss them and will never recover from their loss. Some of them die in terrible, tragic ways: hit by reckless drivers, murdered, killed in industrial accidents.

But 99.9999 percent of them never get national attention. If the widow of one of them posts something about their dead husband to Facebook, as Sheryl Sandberg did, it does not get coverage on CNN and MSNBC and Fox News, NPR and the New York Times and the Washington Post, as Sandberg’s clunky, poorly written and really not worth reading, essay did.

david goldberg beau biden“A heartbreakingly beautiful and incredibly open tribute to her late husband, the Facebook chief operating officer is sharing what she’s learned about grief,” gushed the Post. Not since Judith Miller have I distrusted a newspaper this much.

When there is a funeral for one of the 99.9999 percent, the President of the United States does not attend, or deliver a eulogy (“his voice thick with emotion,” the Times said), and the event does not receive live national media attention, as Biden’s did.

Which is perfectly fine. Most people don’t make such a huge impression on a national scale that their death deserves to be marked by so much pomp and circumstance.

What’s weird – and make no mistake, it really is strange – is to see the deaths of unknown people elevated to national events simply due to their relationship with the rich and famous. If Biden died, I’d expect a state funeral. Sandberg merits an eighth of a page obit. Biden’s son and Sandberg’s husband? Not so much.

Until 2014, high profile deaths followed high-profile lives. Now, you don’t have to accomplish anything, at least anything that makes a public impact, to be grieved by the public.

If this goes on, it won’t just be those who are close to the rich and famous who get posthumously recognized, but those who know those who are close to the rich and famous. On and on it’ll go, until six degrees are achieved and we are all, fulfilling Andy Warhol’s prophecy, famous for 15 minutes.

But only after we die.

If you want to be sad about someone you never knew about, much less knew, that’s your business. But I’ve got a question for you: when the celebrities go on and on and on about how fabulous the dead man or woman in question was, how on earth do you know if any of it is true?

Texting And Driving: What to Do If You Get Pulled Over

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

If you’re a motorist, odds are that you regularly drive through a municipality that is one of the many currently engaged in a strict crackdown on “distracted driving”: using a mobile device to text, or talk on the phone without using a hands-free device.

A distracted driving ticket sucks. Fines are high, usually hundreds of dollars. Tickets add a lot of points to your record. (In New York, which suspends your driving privileges at 12 points, distracted driving costs you 5.) Your insurance rate, of course, may go up. And unlike other moving offenses, judges are refusing to vacate tickets for these offenses, even if you have a clean record and a good traffic lawyer. Nabbed recently for using the speakerphone to talk because my headphones were busted — yes, that’s against the law — my kickass lawyer was lucky to get it knocked down from 5 to 2 points, for turning without proper signaling.

driving and texting advice driving while textingOh, and if you get two of these suckers in 18 months, say goodbye to your license for at least a year.

I’ll spare you the lecture about the perils of distracted driving. You’ve seen other drivers do it, oblivious and therefore a danger to themselves and others. If you’re honest with yourself, you know your driving goes to pot when you do it.

I’m here to clear up some confusion about distracted driving laws, and what to do if a cop pulls you over.

Let’s Clear Up A Few  Things

One thing a policeman told me, and I bet you didn’t know this, is that in many states you’re not allowed to block both ears while driving. So if you’re like me, and you use white iPhone earbuds, you can only use one if you live in New York. Leave the other dangling. In Pennsylvania, go ahead, use both. If you’re not sure about your state, go with one — it’s safer anyway.

There is a common misconception that it is legal to, say, fire off a text message while sitting at a red light. As long as the engine is running, you’re vulnerable to a distracted driving ticket. Cops actually lurk at busy intersections because it’s easier to catch you there!

“Distracted driving” isn’t just about phones. Anything that takes away your attention from the road — applying makeup, reaching around for something, petting your dog, anything — subjects you to one of these tickets.

Here’s How They Caught You

Cops complain that this law is hard to enforce. How are they supposed to know what you’re up to inside your little metal and glass box, flying down the highway at 55 mph? But they’re trying.

Many police departments have purchased undercover, unmarked trucks that allow them to look down, where you’re looking down, at your lap. (Never mind that the cops are distracted themselves!) If you notice a “friendly” trucker matching your pace, look out.

Unmarked cop cars are key to enforcing this law. In Massachusetts, for example, three out of four infractions were issued this way.

Cops look to see if you have both hands on the wheel. It’s not a foolproof system, as the California man who baited his local enforcement by driving around with one phoneless hand on his face can attest (his ruse worked). I myself got pulled over by a very confused cop for talking on my phone — though I didn’t have one with me at the time. I was talking to my passenger, old school. He let me go.

What To Say If You Get Pulled Over

It’s not illegal to lie to traffic cops, so you don’t have much to lose by telling a fib. Bear in mind, however, that if you challenge a texting- or talking-while-driving ticket, the police can subpoena your phone records before your court date, which will reveal what you were up to at the time of the stop.

Still, given the fact that judges are going to hit you hard no matter what, you don’t have much to lose by claiming that you were doing something totally legal on your handheld device.

That’s right: legal. In some states, including California, there are clear exceptions to the distracted driving law. Courts have ruled that you may use your cellphone’s GPS in these states. So, when you get pulled over, before you grab your license and registration, fire up the GPS and have that running before the officer approaches. When you open the window, and he mentions your phone, say you were using your GPS. I’d do this even in a state like New York, which does not have this exception, because courts haven’t settled the issue yet — and it might convince the judge to reduce or throw out the ticket if you go to court (which you always should).

What To Do If You Get a Moving Violation

Call. A. Lawyer. It’s usually cheaper to pay a lawyer than to pay all the fines.

Flibanserin: Female Love Drug Leaves A Lot to Be Desired

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

The FDA is about to approve Flibanserin, which is being marketed as the “Viagra for women” who want to increase their libidos. Yet the effects are reportedly small, just 0.3 on a scale from 1.2 to 6.0. (Who comes up with these scales?)

And users report some rather significant side effects …

Filbanserin

Mike Huckabee Gets Schooled about Trans People

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

2016 Republican presidential candidate and former FoxNews personality Mike Huckabee is getting slammed for comments denigrating trans people by implying that their sexuality and gender identity is a matter of fickle personal choice rather than psychologically inherent.

Mike Huckabee

FIFA, We Hardly Knew Ye

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Sepp Blatter resigns! Who? A corruption scandal surrounding FIFA, the governing body of professional international soccer, would devastate our view of sports were the United States the least concerned about soccer.

A corruption scandal surrounding FIFA, the governing body of professional international soccer, would devastate our view of sports were the United States the least concerned about soccer.

Cover Girl Caitlyn Jenner: And The Media Smiles — Condescendingly

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

In one of the worst kept secrets since NSA spying on Americans, Caitlyn Jenner, the trans woman known until now as Bruce Jenner, who became famous as a record-setting decathlon champion during the 1976 Olympics, now debuts her new identity in a cover story in Vanity Fair magazine.

“A photograph of Ms. Jenner, shot by Annie Leibovitz, accompanied an article on her transition to a woman after long identifying as a man named Bruce … became a sensation on social media when the magazine posted the article online,” reported The New York Times. See the magazine’s YouTube excerpt of the interview below the fold.

This is a big story because Bruce Jenner was a man who, after gender reassignment surgery, is now a woman.

Caitlyn Jenner’s first tweet under her new name — “I’m so happy after such a long struggle to be living my true self. Welcome to the world Caitlyn. Can’t wait for you to get to know her/me” — garnered more than 150,000 followers within minutes.

Public interest has been raised by Jenner’s years as a reality TV star as well as the fact that while he was once a macho athlete whose image embodied the Wheaties cereal box, he is now not a male, but a female.

The New York Post led its coverage of Jenner’s upcoming feature story: “Meet ‘Her.’”

The quotes are because, whereas she was once a he, she is not a “real” she, in the minds of the editors of the Post, because she was born a man.

Much media reaction reflected the Johnny-come-lately status of trans people in the iconography of identity politics.

While gays and, to a lesser extent, lesbians have been considered acceptable among polite company in large coastal cities among educated elites for the better part of a decade or longer, transgenderism still makes liberals uncomfortable enough that it’s okay for them to vaguely allude to their lingering bigotry even while assuming the standard welcoming “hey, that’s great” posture.

The gossip site TMZ reported, for example, that Caitlyn Jenner “did not spell her first name with a ‘K’ because she wants a clean break from the Kardashian moniker.”

Of course, Kaitlyn is no more of a standard spelling than Caitlyn.

“Sources closely associated with Bruce tell us Caitlyn wants to make it clear to her family and the world … she is her own person. That sounds obvious, but we’re told it was an extremely meaningful choice for her … she has never been her own person before, and becoming part of the Kardashian brood would undermine her goal.”

Yes. It does sound obvious. An obvious attempt to reinforce the status of trans people as firmly entrenched, for now, as The Other.

Obama: America Will Be Attacked by Terrorists If One Useless Law Lapses

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

The United States homeland will almost certainly be attacked by terrorists if an anti-terrorist law that has never thwarted terrorists a single time in over a decade is allowed to lapse, President Obama is warning.

“But this shouldn’t and can’t be about politics. This is a matter of national security,” the president said. He appeared to be serious.

Unless the U.S. Senate can reach a compromise over this weekend, a section of the USA Patriot Act used by the Obama Administration to validate the NSA’s mass interception, collection and storage of every American’s “telephony metadata” — details about their phone calls — will expire. (The only court to have considered the NSA program, called “Stellar Wind” and part of the Edward Snowden leaks, ruled that it is illegal because, in fact, the Patriot Act does not authorize it.)

After “Stellar Wind” came to light, top American officials including the president repeatedly said that it had thwarted at least 50 terrorist plots, including 13 in the United States. “But there’s no evidence that the oft-cited figure is accurate,” the respected journalistic watchdog ProPublica concluded.

The White House has been stalwart in its belief that NSA spying on the telephony metadata of ordinary Americans is absolutely essential to prevent foreign terrorists living overseas from attacking the United States. Just because it has never worked a single time over the last ten years in doing anything useful at all — except providing much-needed American jobs during a time of high unemployment — doesn’t mean that terrorists wouldn’t take advantage of its absence were it to go away tomorrow night, as it will if senators like Kentucky’s Rand Paul get their way.

“If some Senate Republicans believe, as the president does, that we must be vigilant in the face of terrorist threats, it would be irresponsible to let these authorities lapse, even for a few days,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday.

“If I lose these tools, it’s a huge, huge problem,” said mathematically challenged FBI director James Comey. “We use it fewer than 200 times per year, but when we use it, it matters tremendously .”

Stringing together words into sentences, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also warned of grave peril unless Congress renews Section 215. “We need to recognize that terrorist tactics and the nature of the threat have changed,” McConnell said Friday. “At a moment of elevated threat, it would be a mistake to take from our intelligence community any — any — of the valuable tools needed to build a complete picture of terrorist networks and their plans, such as the bulk data collection program.”

Be afraid. For some reason.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Digging Your Own Grave: Evil Employers Can Lay You Off, But You Don’t Have To Go Quietly

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Ted Rall

You’ve seen it in movies: gangsters are going to kill a guy. But before they do, they force him to dig his own grave. Who would go along with that? What are these doomed souls thinking? Why, during their final moments alive, doesn’t the victim avail himself of the chance to die defiantly, with dignity, going to his death with the small pleasure of knowing that his assassin will at least be inconvenienced by the disposal of his body?

That was the question running through my head as I read a story that made my blood boil: Disney World in Orlando, Florida recently laid off 250 tech workers and had an Indian outsourcing company supply their lower salary replacements with foreign recipients of H-1B visas. This disgusting practice, which is becoming increasingly common and is the subject of a congressional investigation and at least one lawsuit, is illegal. H-1B visas are only supposed to go to highly educated foreign workers brought to the U.S. to work for employers who can’t find American citizens to do the job — but with 3 out of 4 American techies un- or underemployed, that’s never the case.

Disney, which had a profit of $7.5 billion last year, could easily have afforded to obey federal immigration law.

If found guilty of visa fraud, Disney should be treated the same way that individual criminals get slammed by “three strikes” laws: 250 felony counts? This rogue company is too big not to be failed. It should be nationalized and its executives sent to prison for life.

The part that really got my goat was that Disney pressured its laid-off workers, many of whom had received such glowing performance evaluations that they thought they were being promoted when they were called in to meet with their bosses, to train their replacements. “I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,” one of the H-1B outsourcing victims, an American in his 40s who has been unemployed since his last day at Disney on Jan. 30 told The New York Times. “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”

It is astonishing how few workplace shootings there are.

Why didn’t the 250 fired workers tell Disney to go to hell, and refuse to train their replacements?

Why did they dig their own graves?

The answer is, they got paid. But not much.

Disney “offered a ‘stay bonus’ of 10% of severance pay if they remained for 90 days. But the bonus was contingent on ‘the continued satisfactory performance of your job duties.’ For many, that involved training a replacement. Young immigrants from India took the seats at their computer stations,” reported the Times.

How much cash are we talking about?

Obviously, there’s the 90 days of pay. Nonmanagerial workers laid off by Disney receive one week of pay for every full year of service. So if you worked 10 years, you’d get 10 weeks severance, plus one additional week – 10% – for the so-called “stay bonus,” for a total of 11 weeks. But to assess the net benefit, you subtract the $275 a week in unemployment benefits most workers receive in the state of Florida, as well as the 10 weeks severance the laid-off employees would have received even if they’d refused to train their replacements.

According to the corporate salary site glassdoor.com, Disney tech jobs at Orlando start at about $61,000 a year. So let’s assume that the average salary of the poor suckers pushed out the door in favor of the new guys from India was $80,000.

Disney paid the laid-off Americans $20,000 – minus income taxes, so more like $15,000 – to dig their own graves.

Look, I get it. Most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That $15,000 looks like it’s going to matter a lot when you’re about to lose your job, especially when you are an older worker in technology, a field where age discrimination isn’t merely tolerated, but gleefully celebrated.

At the same time, how much is your dignity worth? That’s the big picture.

Victims of oppression have a responsibility not only to themselves, but to those who are suffering at the same hands, and to the next generation of victims, to resist and throw their bodies on the gears of bloodthirsty corporate capitalism. What if every worker refused, as a matter of course, to train their replacements? The resulting disruption would create a cost for the company.

What if the standard response of a laid-off employee in the United States was not to leave quietly, but to sabotage computers with viruses, trash their office, break as much equipment as possible, and go out kicking and screaming? What if every employer who tried to replace their American workers with outsourced foreigners on fraudulent H-1B visas could count on a big fat class-action lawsuit? Resistance might make some employers think twice before behaving with such disgusting impunity.

Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi wrote that the Nazis’ great triumph in their oversight of death camps was to reduce their Jewish inmates to animals, so that they would turn against one another in their desperate struggle to subsist. Levi was haunted by the horror of what he witnessed, and how easy it was to decivilize human beings. On the opposite side of the spectrum, we celebrate the heroes of the uprisings in the Warsaw ghetto and at Sobibór death camp because, though they knew they were going to die no matter what, they fought to the end.

Comrades! Don’t dig your own graves.

Not for $15,000.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the upcoming book “Snowden,” the first biography of NSA whistleblower Edward J. Snowden. It is in graphic novel form. You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

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