As the Waxman hearings began today, I expect the situation will eventually force Major League Baseball to make changes that appear to look rigorous but will continue a culture of cheating and enabling.

Short of revoking threatening to revoke baseball's dubious anti-trust exemption, Congress can do little more than grandstand and point fingers at players, owners, and the union.

I was a bit disappointed to go in search of the Labor/Class Tuesday diary and find an open thread instead.  So a day late, heres my two cents worth:

Food for thought from my local paper:

A New Standard
With sale of Windsor manufacturer to employees, company joins trend popular with both owners, workers
By STEVE HART
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Windsor's Standard Structures Inc. has been in business for 60 years, riding the boom and bust of the North Coast's wood products industry.

The family business survived by developing a unique line of products -- laminated wood beams, trusses and joists used for heavy construction.

After six decades, the founding Caletti family has decided to sell. But the $60 million enterprise won't be gobbled up by a big corporation or investment group.

Instead, Standard Structures is being sold to its own workers through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP.

http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/...

Pelosi wrong on War

Six months ago I penned a diary that asserted what to many here was simply un-thinkable, namely that if they didn't take certain steps, The Democrats will Own this War.

Many disagreed:

Bush and Cheney started the war (7+ / 0-)

The GOP in the Senate blocked ...even a debate on the merits of the troop surge/escalation.  ALL of the Democrats in the Senate voted to proceed with a debate on the anti-escalation resolution.

The Democratic Congress may not be as aggressive as we might like...but any notion that the Iraq war is anything but a GOP war is totally ridiculous.

But many agreed it was possible. This person really surprised me:

If they don't put an end to it...they will own it (6+ / 0-)

...

They need to do what they promised they would when they ran in 2006...and they need to pull our troops out by the end of the year. Sure, it's March...I don't believe they "own" it yet...but they WILL if they don't get their acts together.

So where are we now that it's September?

"How to love people who have no use?"  I wrote this at Seeing the Forest in 2003:

Who Is Our Economy For, Anyway?

Robert Reich, writing about the loss of manufacturing jobs:

   "America has been losing manufacturing jobs to China, Latin America and the rest of the developing world. Right? Well, not quite. It turns out that manufacturing jobs have been disappearing all over the world. Economists at Alliance Capital Management in New York took a close look at employment trends in 20 large economies recently, and found that since 1995 more than 22 million factory jobs have disappeared.

I use to believe that old mantra 'This is the people's house..'
Before Bush it looked like this:

Now it looks like this:

I'm frankly mystified in how one can believe that we as posters -- even those of us who paid for lifetime subscriptions -- to this site have any degree of ownership interest in it.  If you are saying that we have an obligation to be responsible enough so as to not cause this site to be thought of as little more than some online playground for the liberally bent, I suppose I could agree with you to that extent.  But I don't believe that is what you are saying.

One thing is clear, and should be held above all else, and that is that this site is owned lock, stock and barrel by Markos Moulitas, and no matter how long any of us have posted here, or how often, or how many others our pearls of wisdom have attracted or kept posting, this is his site, and we continue to post here at his suffrage.  

Is is my failure to grasp reality, or is there a problem leaving pro-Democratic responses under Repug. video adds.  I tried, several times, to leave an anti Bob Corker comment under a video add of his denouncing Harold Ford J.r. as growing up in D.C. while Corker grew up in Tenn., and insinuates that Ford is disengenuous (imagine the nerve of Corker's porkers).  Follow me down, please.

I'll just use my diary tonight to highlight the Media Ownership Hearings that have just begun.

The concentration of media ownership by a few large corporations came under attack Tuesday as the
Federal Communications Commission opened a series of hearings on the issue.

"Without diversity in ownership and participation, our democracy is in danger," Rep. Maxine Waters said at the initial hearing held at the University of Southern California. - ap

We recently heard about a FCC report that was leaked to Sen. Barbara Boxer's office. Senator Boxer released the information at the confirmation hearing of new FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. It looked into the idea of media conglomerates and their affects. The study found that when media consolidations starts -- i.e. putting newspapers, television stations, and radio stations under the same umbrella -- that local news suffer, often times being replaced with more info-tainment, rather than substantive information the average American can use. The AP reported that when senior managers at the FCC saw the results, they ordered the report destroyed -- not a good sign for the pro-consolidation camp.

Now there's second report. More over the flip....

Irony has been so abused, misused, and overused by so many of slight talent and suspect intents, that the rapier bequeathed to posterity by men and women of great wit has been pounded by the popular posterior into a timeshare of ubiquitous of infra-insincerity. Modern irony has become a kind of language infarction, a dead zone where advertising ghouls dig for their gold and faux-rimbauds go to sell their souls.

"Reality" has suffered the same degradation and decay as "Irony." "Reality" now exists only as fodder for the cameras of the Industrial Delusional Complex; dead soldier, starving brown baby, or spoiled celebrity, all feed the lazy eyes on the sofas of the world and support the feudal pyschopathy of the Owners of the "Ownership society."

We all understand that our Media today is not "free".

If you wish to see this premise in action - VIEW THIS ON-LINE VIDEO - You can either:

1)Google two words:"SNL mediaopoly" or;

2)Watch here:http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/....

This short video was showed ONE TIME (SNL around 1998) - then pulled from all re-runs of the same episode and NEVER run again on TV.

Once you see the video, you will understand "why".
 

Here we have a familiar tale set elsewhere in the growing global economic desert...

German Town Wants Factory Back
Herzberg, with 28% joblessness, illustrates some hardships faced by the formerly communist east since reunification with the capitalist west. By Jeffrey Fleishman, Times Staff Writer, April 30, 2006

HERZBERG, Germany -- In the late afternoon, after the shops have closed and the egrets have returned to their nest in the old smokestack, the streets are quiet except for the rattle of gray-haired women balancing groceries on handlebars and pedaling bicycles along the Black Elster River.

Yesterday, at the "banner bridge" overpass on I-5 near Dupont, activists rallied in support of imprisoned soldier, Kevin Benderman who, according to
The Olympian:

... was deployed to Iraq from March to September 2003. He filed for conscientious objector status in late 2004; his application was denied.

Conscientious objectors are morally opposed to war.

Benderman was to leave for Iraq again in January 2005, but he refused. He was charged with desertion and intentionally missing movement for not boarding the plane for Iraq when his unit left. He was found guilty of the second, lesser charge and sentenced last summer to 15 months in prison. He is serving that sentence at Fort Lewis.

The activists did not have banner bridge to themselves. Apparently there are others who believe that since they have utilized the overpass with frequency they own that particular overpass and it should not be "desecrated".

In George Bush's America, we are all supposed to be owners of our fates.  We are to own our retirement accounts, act like the people running corporations and make our money grow.  We are all supposed to be in control of our own destiny.  Sadly, life often intrudes on well laid plans.  Around Thanksgiving I put up a diary that was part scream for help, part frustration, part knowing when the impossible had met the difficult and impossible had won.  The wonderful people here at the Daily Kos responded.  And I am grateful.   A little update is in order, where if the gratitude is not evident, then shame on me. From the suggestions received, I got a long list of things to do, and a lot to be thankful about.  And the saga of disability goes on.  Your thoughts made me think and better times are going to be ahead.  Or else.

As it often happens, two great pieces competed for my attention.

(`great' and `pieces' are links to separate articles)

The first deals with self-importance and the `disconnect' it produces between perceived and actual performance...just because you think you're wonderful doesn't make it true.

There's more here than meets the eye in this NY Times Op/Ed piece:

A Convenient Amnesia About Slavery
By BRENT STAPLES
Americans typically grow up believing that slavery was confined to the cotton fields of the South and that the North was always made up of free states. The fact that slavery was practiced all over the early United States often comes as a shock to people in places like New York, where the myth of the free North has been surprisingly durable. The truth is that New York was at one time a center of the slave trade, with more black people enslaved than any other city in the country, with the possible exception of Charleston, S.C.

The New-York Historical Society in Manhattan has set out to make all this clear in its pathbreaking "Slavery in New York," which ends in March. It is being described as the first exhibition by a major museum that focuses on the long-neglected issue of slavery in the North.