July 31st, 2006
Today is Day 20 of the “Crisis in the Middle East”.
Do you know how many days it’s been since the U.S. invaded Iraq?
According to Frank Rich in yesterday’s New York Times, yesterday was Day 1,229, making today a nice even 1,230.
According to CNN, “there have been 2,802 coalition deaths, 2,576 Americans, two Australians, 114 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, three Danes, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Fijian, one Hungarian, 31 Italians, one Kazakh, one Latvian, 17 Poles, two Romanians, two Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians in the war in Iraq as of July 31, 2006.” 1,000 plus Iraqis per month have lost their lives in Baghdad alone the last few months.
However, according to Frank Rich:
On the Big Three networks’ evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor, the Tyndall Report. On Thursday, Brian Williams of NBC read aloud a “shame on you” e-mail complaint from the parents of two military sons anguished that his broadcast had so little news about the war.
This is happening even as the casualties in Iraq, averaging more than 100 a day, easily surpass those in Israel and Lebanon combined. When Nouri al-Maliki, the latest Iraqi prime minister, visited Washington last week to address Congress, he too got short TV shrift — a mere five sentences about the speech on ABC’s “World News.” The networks know a rerun when they see it. Only 22 months earlier, one of Mr. Maliki’s short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi, had come to town during the 2004 campaign to give a similarly empty Congressional address laced with White House-scripted talking points about the war’s progress. Propaganda stunts, unlike “Law & Order” episodes, don’t hold up on a second viewing.
The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn’t happenstance. It’s a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever. The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. “It is depressing to pay attention to this war on terror,” said Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly on July 18. “I mean, it’s summertime.” Americans don’t like to lose, whatever the season. They know defeat when they see it, no matter how many new plans for victory are trotted out to obscure that reality.
So much for supporting our troops, eh? What happened to reporting all of that good news that was supposed to be happening in Iraq?
I’m upset about Israel and Lebanon too. Heck, I’m outraged; however, remember, Iraq and Afghanistan are our wars and our messes and our soldiers are dying over there. Shame on our media for a lack of patriotic priority.
Hat tip AmericaBlog.
Tags: Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Baghdad, American soldiers, New York Times, ABC, Fox News, NBC, Nouri al-Maliki, Frank Rich
April 11th, 2006
What would you say if I told you that the next time you pull up to a McDonalds or a Hardee’s drivethru to place your order, the person on the other end of that speaker could be 12 feet away or 150 miles away or a continent away?
Would you believe me?
I mean, surely computer companies aren’t the only ones who can utilize the anti-American dream of outsourcing; the promise of lower pay in sweatshop-like conditions can be the hope of any industry if well-thought out.
And fast food has found a way to join in the fun.
A call center in Santa Maria, CA, pays around 35 employees minimum wage to take orders for about 40 McDonalds as far away as Honolulu, Gulf Port, and Gillette, Wyo. This arrangement saves a few seconds per order.
Jon Anton, a founder of Bronco, says that the goal is “saving seconds to make millions,” because more efficient service can lead to more sales and lower labor costs. With a wireless system in a Home Depot, for example, a call-center operator might tell a customer, “You’re at Aisle D6. Let me walk you over to where you can find the 16-penny nails,” Mr. Anton said.
Efficiency is certainly the mantra at the Bronco call center, which has grown from 15 workers six months ago to 125 today. Its workers are experts in the McDonald’s menu; they are trained to be polite, to urge customers to add items to their order and, above all, to be fast. Each worker takes up to 95 orders an hour during peak times.
Customers pulling up to the drive-through menu are connected to the computer of a call-center employee using Internet calling technology. The first thing the McDonald’s customer hears is a prerecorded greeting in the voice of the employee. The order-takers’ screens include the menu and an indication of the whether it is time for breakfast or lunch at the local restaurant. A “notes” section shows if that restaurant has called in to say that it is out of a particular item.
When the customer pulls away from the menu to pay for the food and pick it up, it takes around 10 seconds for another car to pull forward. During that time, Mr. King said, his order-takers can be answering a call from a different McDonald’s where someone has already pulled up.
The remote order-takers at Bronco earn the minimum wage ($6.75 an hour in California), do not get health benefits and do not wear uniforms. Ms. Vargas, who recently finished high school, wore jeans and a baggy white sweatshirt as she took orders last week.
The call-center system allows employees to be monitored and tracked much more closely than would be possible if they were in restaurants. Mr. King’s computer screen gives him constant updates as to which workers are not meeting standards. “You’ve got to measure everything,” he said. “When fractions of seconds count, the environment needs to be controlled.” [“The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast Food Order” (The New York Times)]
Employees are subjected to constant electronic scrutiny with software tracking her productivity, speed and awareness. A computer in the breakroom keeps employees alert as to just how many minutes they have been away from their desks.
And the order-taking is not always seamless. Often customers’ voices are faint, forcing the workers to ask for things to be repeated. During recent rainstorms in Hawaii, it was particularly hard to hear orders from there over the din.[“The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast Food Order” (The New York Times)]
Like I said above and as Jill @ Brilliant at Breakfast points out, they’re testing this outsourcing here in the States, but what’s to stop them from following the way of IT off to another country where they pay practically nothing, leaving Americans unemployed?
And you can’t tell them to get an education because those jobs are being outsourced over there too.
Tags: outsourcing, McDonalds, New York Times
March 28th, 2006
Yesterday, lots of leftist blogs were talking about The New York Times reporting on the “latest” memo revealing President Bush and Tony Blair’s nefairious plans to go to war in Iraq no matter what, even if it meant *gasp* tricking the world somehow.
Stamped “extremely sensitive,” the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair’s most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book “Lawless World,” which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the memo.
Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president’s sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.
The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was “unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.” Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.
The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.
[…]
Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month, neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them.
“The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours,” the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.”
It also described the president as saying, “The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam’s W.M.D,” referring to weapons of mass destruction.
A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea. [”Bush Was Set on Path to War, British Memo Says” (The New York Times)]
The information about the Downing Street Memos has been out for almost a year, but only now that George W. Bush’s approval ratings are in the toilet does the New York Times see fit to cover them.
[…]
In February 2002, a half-million people marched in New York City because we knew that this president was going to take us into a war based on lies. The denizens of Left Blogistan knew that this president was going to take us into a war based on lies. When the Downing Street memo first came out, the British, and anyone who bothers to read anything other than the New York Post and the New York Sun and watch anything other than Fox News, knew for certain the kind of chicanery in which Bush and Blair engaged in order to get us into this war.
And now the rest of the country should know. The question is whether they will still choose not to know, because to know is to be obligated to get involved with the political processes necessary to do something about it.[“Late isn’t always better than never” (Brilliant at Breakfast)]
So the New York Times is running a big story headlined Bush Was Set on Path to War, Memo by British Adviser Says, as if it’s news. The only real news here is that they’re treating it like it’s news. As it happens, The Guardian covered the story in February, as did a whole lot of bloggers, many of whom had been covering a little thing known as The Downing Street Memos for, ahem, quite some time. Suffice it to say, the reaction to the Times‘ piece is a bit, uh, jaded in some quarters. [“Is It Really “News” If It’s Not New?” (Shakespeare’s Sister)]
O.K. So, I kind of feel the whole thing is a non-event. Really, look around. It’s the next day and no one is really talking about it. It’s kind of yesterday’s non-news already.
Do I think it’s real? Yes.
However, I think that no one’s listening — particularly to The New York Times. The right wing won’t put any credit into anything The New York Times publishes that doesn’t feed their agenda because they insist it’s a liberal-biased rag despite the fact that Judy Miller apparently was being hand fed stories for years by the White House. The left doesn’t trust the Times because of the whole Judy Miller thing. Really, the Times has lost quite a bit of credibility on both sides.
Ayway, Shakespeare’s Sister is right, this isn’t news. It’s preaching to a tired, frustrated choir. The people who need to hear it aren’t listening and don’t want to know. They can’t know because they can’t be wrong. There can’t be any truth in what those memos say, not a shred, because then they wouldn’t be able to be so self-righteous.
Tags: Iraq, Downing Street Memo, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, New York Times, Judy Miller, politics, WMD, Saddam Hussein, Conspiracy Theories
