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

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

The Case for Intelligent Design: Hairs on Top of Your Feet

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

“Intelligent design” is the belief that the universe is perfectly ordered, logical and optimized, thus God exists. “The Case for Intelligent Design” explores aspects of biological design that support this thesis. This week: We look at hairs on the top of your feet.

What with the part of the earth where I live moving into more-direct alignment with the sun, it’s getting warmer. This prompts me to skip normal shoes in favor of sandals when I’m running out the door in the morning.

The first or second time I wore sandals this year, I noticed an oddly painful tug on the top of my feet. With every step I took, my sandals tugged on the hairs on the top of my feet.

This was the first time, 51 years in, that I had noticed the hairs on my feet. I knew they were there. But I never paid them any mind. I let them be, and until a few weeks ago, they did me the same favor.

Anyway, this prompts the question: What is the purpose of hairs on the top of your feet?

I called my friend the evolutionary biologist, who refused to be named for this article. “Hairs on the top of your feet,” he replied after recovering from his initial surprise at my query, “protect your bare feet from sunburn when walking in the desert. Androgenic hairs, we call them in the trade.”

“Wouldn’t it have been better for God, who does everything just so, to have given us sandals if we were meant to wander the desert?”

“He gave us big brains that allowed us to design sandals.”

“Which pull on the foot hairs that we no longer need, and instead cause us pain.”

“Got me there,” he said, excusing himself in order to pursue his biological imperative to spread his seed with a 61-year-old colleague whose husband is away this week on a book tour.

Work ‘Til You Drop

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

A frightening survey of Americans by the Federal Reserve finds desperate poverty among a high percentage of ordinary citizens. Among the highlights: 31% of pre-retirement Americans have zero retirement savings or pensions and are planning to work until they die.

A frightening survey of Americans by the Federal Reserve finds desperate poverty among a high percentage of ordinary citizens. Among the highlights: 31% of pre-retirement Americans have zero retirement savings or pensions, and are planning to work until they die.

Look At Their Evil Propaganda, Not Our Identical Evil Propaganda

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

America, they tell us, is exceptional.

Exceptionally wrong about how exceptional it is.

Here comes today’s New York Times to re-re-re-reconfirm that with an Opinion piece headlined “The New Dictators Rule by Velvet Fist.”

“In recent decades, a new brand of authoritarian government has evolved that is better adapted to an era of global media, economic interdependence and information technology. The ‘soft’ dictators concentrate power, stifling opposition and eliminating checks and balances, while using hardly any violence,” write Professors Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treismanmay. “These illiberal leaders — Alberto K. Fujimori of Peru, Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela — threaten to reshape the world order in their image, replacing principles of freedom and law — albeit imperfectly upheld by Western powers — with cynicism and corruption.”

“Imperfectly upheld,” indeed.

They Depose Democratically Elected Presidents, Don’t They?

Like, for example, how the democratically elected president of Venezuela – the above-mentioned Hugo Chávez was overthrown by a corporate junta backed by the CIA and the Bush administration, as well as the slobbering editorial page and front page of — ahem — the New York Times.

Or how the democratically elected president of Honduras was overthrown by military coup backed by the CIA and the Obama administration, and, oh yeah, the New York Times.

Or how Judith Miller used the Times to convince the American people who Saddam had WMDs, used to justify the disastrous Iraq War.

“The West needs to understand how these regimes work and how to confront them.”

We Do the Same Exact Stuff

Read on, and it doesn’t take long to see that the West, and in particular the United States, well understand how these regimes work – because the US deploys many of the same strategies and tactics to quash opposition.

“The new autocrats often get to power through reasonably fair elections. Mr. Chávez, for instance, won in 1998 in what international observers called one of the most transparent votes in Venezuela’s history,” Guriev and Treismanmay admit. This, I suppose I should concede, is different from the American model, which included two consecutive presidential elections widely viewed as having been stolen: the 2000 judicial coup d’état precipitated by the Florida recount, and the stealing of the pivotal state of Ohio in 2004 via poll manipulation, both to the benefit of George W. Bush.

“The new autocrats use propaganda, censorship and other information-based tricks to inflate their ratings and to convince citizens of their superiority over available alternatives,” say Guriev and Treismanmay.

Here, in the meat of the matter, it is difficult to see any difference between the United States and these so-called “soft dictatorships.” No American newspaper, for example, employs a socialist opinion columnist, much less a communist one – even though these leftist ideologies are very popular among American citizens. Instead, in the United States, the only acceptable “mainstream” ideological discourse takes place on what is, by global standards, the far right: militantly procapitalist, contemptuous of such liberal ideals as leniency in sentencing, opposition to the death penalty, anti-militarism, and basic social safety net policies, like paid parental leave.

“They dominate the Internet by blocking access to independent websites, hiring ‘trolls’ to flood comments pages with pro-regime spam, and paying hackers to vandalize opposition online media sites,” Guriev and Treismanmay point out. How awful! But the same thing happens here, as numerous reports of trolls hired by the Bush and now the Obama administrations attest.

A “Pocket of Democratic Opposition”…to Hillary

“The new dictatorships preserve a pocket of democratic opposition to simulate competition.”

Um…Bernie Sanders, anyone?

“The new autocrats are not squeamish — they can viciously repress separatists or club unarmed protesters. But violence reveals the regime’s true nature and turns supporters into opponent.”

See, for example, the Obama Administration-coordinated police crackdown on the nonviolent Occupy Wall Street movement.

“And violence is not just costly — it’s unnecessary. Instead, the new authoritarians immobilize political rivals with endless court proceedings, interrogations and other legal formalities.”

Yup. The US does that too. The IRS conducts audits of political rivals. They harass them at TSA checkpoints at the airport, and when they cross US borders. They even force them into exile.

My favorite part comes at the end: “Western democracies should provide objective native-language news broadcasts to counter the propaganda and censorship.”

Can we start with the US? That would be…exceptional.

Happy Memorial Day 2015

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

There’s always plenty of cash for the Pentagon to spend on wars of choice, such as America’s military campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. But there’s nothing to get the nearly 50,000 homeless veterans from previous wars off the streets and into decent housing. It’s all about priorities and, despite what we say this Memorial Day and every other Memorial Day, taking care of the veterans who succumb to PTSD and poverty is not a priority for the military.

There's always plenty of cash for the Pentagon to spend on wars of choice, such as America's military campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. But there's nothing to get the nearly 50,000 homeless veterans from previous wars off the streets and into decent housing. It's all about priorities and, despite what we say this Memorial Day and every other Memorial Day, taking care of the veterans who succumb to PTSD and poverty is not a priority for the military.

 

On The Perils of Being No. 2 at ISIS

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Used to be “Al Qaeda’s number two” man was constantly getting killed, or reportedly getting killed, by the United States. Now the same pattern is repeating itself, but with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the crosshairs. How will this affect the internal office politics of ISIS?

Trt83ISISNumber2

“Snowden” by Ted Rall: Coming Soon!

IMG_1393-1I have in my hot little hands a copy of the galleys (publishers proofs) for my graphic novel biography, “Snowden”! The book comes out August 18th.

If you’re a book critic or you’d like to sponsor me coming to talk in your town, hit the Contact tab and send me your address so I can mail you a galley as a review copy.

You can pre-order the book via Amazon here.

Or you can pre-order a PERSONALLY SIGNED copy from me directly here:


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In Fond Remembrance of ‘Mad Men,’ Which I Never Watched

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Earlier this week, approximately (I don’t know which night of the week it aired, or on what channel, or whether it was an hour or a half-hour show), the influential “Mad Men” finally closed the door on the saga of Don Draper. Draper was the cynical, funny and deeply flawed antihero of the series, set in the fast-moving fashion-conscious Manhattan of the 1960s.

In the finale, we see (from what I hear) the hard-drinking, womanizing Draper — who had crashed and burned, and left Madison Avenue, in the vernacular of the era, to “find himself.” Instead of finding himself he found inspiration for his biggest hit ever, Coke’s legendary “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” spot. Which, actually, a real person wrote. And he was nothing like the character of Don Draper wrote.

John Hamm Mad Men Don Draper Ted Rall anewdomain What will fans of “Mad Men” do now that all those memorable characters are gone once and for all?

Don’t ask me. I’ve never watched the show.

I wouldn’t be able to recognize Don Draper in a crowd, or the actor who played him, whoever he is. I wouldn’t recognize him even if I woke up with him sitting on my face. But that doesn’t mean that I’m unaffected by the devastating wrap-up of the “Mad Men” saga.

I plan to periodically check Netflix to see when they post the entire run so I can binge-watch the whole series at once.

That is to say I just might “Mad Men” if and when I ever happen to feel like it. That might be never. It might be so soon. I have no idea. But it is nice to know the option is there, just in case I’m ever on house arrest or in a prison with exceptionally generous television streaming or something. It’s an option I have that I probably won’t ever use, that’s all. It’s an option. Like voting.

Though I’ve never seen or heard the soundtrack of “Mad Men,” I can’t tell you how much it has influenced me.

According to articles I’ve read, the return of thin lapels and skinny ties, a look I’ve always approved of for men and adhered throughout the 1980s and 1990s even when other guys looked upon me with contempt, was in part due to the popularity of “Mad Men.” . 

Also, I’ve heard there is 1960s music in the show. Sounds cool. Of course, I don’t know which 1960s music we’re talking about. Girl groups, like The Ronettes and The Crystals? Pop, like the Beatles? Simon and Garfunkel? I bet it wasn’t anything like the Stooges or the Seeds or the Standells or the Mysterians, because if it were anything like that Nuggets stuff my friend Cole the film critic would have insisted that I watch. And then I would have. But he didn’t. 

Another way the show impacted me was when friends asked me if I watched it, and I said no, they either changed the topic or moved off in search of someone else they had more in common with. 

Like “The Wire,” “Girls” and until recently “Game of Thrones,” the last of which I later caught up upon on HBO Go but still happen to be like seven episodes behind — will I go back? who knows? — “Mad Men” was one of those shows I rarely failed to read about in TV recap stories because it sure sounded like a program I’d enjoy were I to give it a chance.

So I may be the biggest “Mad Men” fan of all, right?

Anyone can be into a show they’ve seen.

But takes real commitment to dedicate yourself to one you may never — indeed, probably never will — watch. Long live “Mad Men!”

Ted Rall on Wall Street Corruption: Slackers!

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

One third of the highest paid Wall Street professionals earning more than $500,000 a year say that they “have witnessed or have firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace.” What are the other two-thirds up to? What slackers.

wall street slackers wall street corruption

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