Rose Cantine » Current events

Carol Bartz and the absence of dignity in public life

esme — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 18:05:47 +0000

Don’t you expect better from people who are over the age of 18 and happen to be heads of publicly traded companies? Don’t you expect some measure of dignity and restraint? I do.

So when I see a public figure like Carol Bartz, who was fired by Yahoo the other day, whining all over the press like a 3-year old, I shake my head. She told Fortune: “These people fucked me over.”

She claims she told the Yahoo chairman of the board, who had telephoned her to tell her that she did not have a job any longer, “Why don’t you have the balls to tell me yourself?… I thought you were classier.”

Classier in the eyes of Carol Bartz is something other people owe her, not something she owes to herself and to the world.

By bitching and moaning in public, Carol is just as unclassy as the person who fired her. And what is it about these CEOs who feel that they are owed a huge favour, a red carpet way of being fired, complete with champagne and orchestral music?

You know how CEOs fire employees in the US? Mere employees (aka wage slaves) get a few minutes to clear out their desks while being watched by security. They are not allowed to say goodbye to colleagues, and they are escorted out the door by security, as if they were criminals.

This is what boards of directors need to do to CEOs and other executives in companies: treat them exactly the way they treat their employees.

Are you liberal, conservative, or libertarian? Take the quiz

esme — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 02:27:22 +0000

Take the world’s smallest political quiz and find out where you fall on the political spectrum. The quiz says I am Liberal (which in Europe actually means “economic conservative”).

Talented people leaving the US

esme — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:37:41 +0000

Reverse brain drain: “More skilled immigrants are giving up their American dreams to pursue careers back home, raising concerns that the U.S. may lose its competitive edge in science, technology and other fields. ”What was a trickle has become a flood,” says Duke University’s Vivek Wadhwa, who studies reverse immigration. Wadhwa projects that in the next five years, 100,000 immigrants will go back to India and 100,000 to China, countries that have had rapid economic growth. ”For the first time in American history, we are experiencing the brain drain that other countries experienced,” he says.”

I read somewhere else that for the first time, the percentage of Chinese students studying outside China went to countries other than the US. In the past, the US got most of the students. I wonder if this trend can be found with students from other countries.

Anna Wintour on David Letterman's show

esme — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:30:46 +0000

* * * * *

The documentary “September Issue” about Anna Wintour and Vogue Magazine is coming out at the end of this month. I can’t wait to see it.

One American's experience of the British NHS

esme — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 15:58:07 +0000

It’s funny how American conservatives get all it all wrong about the British NHS or any other country’s “socialized” medicine. They’ve been calling it a disaster but it works quite well, as Stephen Amidon, an American writer living in Britain, recently wrote in Salon:

“This, I learned, is what the NHS is about — common decency. It is about the shared belief that all the people who live in the United Kingdom constitute a society, and a decent society provides certain necessities for its members. Freedom from hunger is one. Police protection is another. Free healthcare from the cradle to the grave is simply one more item on this list.”

I’ve lived in the Netherlands for over a decade, My health insurance is fairly inexpensive and I have no complaints. The Netherlands does not have a “public” option; all health insurance is carried out by private insurers, but they are subject to very strict rules. They can’t just throw you out, they have to insure people with pre-existing conditions, and they compete with one another. It’s a single payer system.

I recently moved to San Francisco temporarily for business and my monthly health insurance premium here is three times what it was in the Netherlands, the care is no better, the copayments are outrageous, the prescription drugs much more expensive. That means ordinary people are getting ripped off big time and the US government is supporting the rip-off. That people have to go bankrupt because they can’t pay for healthcare is nothing short of barbaric.

Unfortunately the same rip-off artists lobby our federal and state legislators to pass laws that keep this unjust system in place. And ordinary people just let this happen because they’ve got their own nice little healthcare package and they don’t care what happens to others. Until of course, they get laid off. Suddenly the world does not seem so sunny anymore.

I don’t think much will change in the US until the mentality changes from “I’ve got mine, screw you” (which has been the dominant ethos for decades in this country) to “We need to make sure we take care of each other.”

NYC mayor uses tax money to build stadium for richest sports team

esme — Sat, 23 May 2009 05:48:36 +0000

It’s funny how things work in the US. They don’t want to spend public funds for health care, fiber-based high-speed broadband networks, repairing crumbling bridges, parks, schools and other important matters that serve the general public. But, when it comes to helping wealthy corporate sponsors and their investors suck money from the public, US politicians are heading the charge. This article in Salon by David Sirota says it all: The House That Taxpayers Built about NYC spending public funds to build a stadium for the richest sports team, the Yankees, thanks to the city’s mayor (excerpt):

“Nothing better captures the moment’s destructive greed than a billionaire politician using the municipal office he bought to defend charging $2,500 a ticket to a new Yankee Stadium he forced the public to finance. If there is a single act showing how kleptocracy and let-them-eat-cake-ism are systemic and local rather than momentary and exclusively federal, Bloomberg turning the House that Ruth Built into the House That Taxpayers Built is it. Foreign oligarchs use guns to confiscate citizens’ wages. American oligarchs rely on government to give theft the aura of legitimacy, and Manhattan’s richest man is no exception. As an investigation by Democratic Assemblyman Richard Brodsky documents, Bloomberg used various public agencies to extract between $1 billion and $4 billion from taxpayers and then spent the cash on a new stadium for the Yankees, the wealthiest corporation in sports.”

I run Muniwireless.com, a site about citywide wireless broadband projects and WiMAX, and for years, many people screamed, “oh don’t use public funds to build broadband networks!” Or “it’s a waste of public money to build fiber-based broadband that all ISPs can use as backhaul.” A waste? Building high-speed networks that benefit businesses and residents and are open to service providers?

Yet, when it comes to wasting money on a sports stadium, suddenly, the public purse is open and ready to be picked. The reason: politicians get lots of money for their campaigns from corporations and rich people, so they do what they are told by their benefactors. Corrupt is the only word for this.

Video: Gore Vidal on the media

esme — Mon, 18 May 2009 18:13:22 +0000

Why Congress is so corrupt and why we need campaign reform

esme — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:07:34 +0000

Join Change-Congress.org now.

Fake Tim Geithner on Saturday Night Live

esme — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 01:20:35 +0000

Americans' obsession with soft toilet paper is bad for the environment

esme — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:58:22 +0000

From the Guardian: “The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country’s love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public’s insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom. “This is a product that we use for less than three seconds and the ecological consequences of manufacturing it from trees is enormous,” said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council.”