Month: September 2008

quote of the century

On the remark that “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”:

“Mrs. Palin needs to be reminded that Jesus Christ was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a governor.” [source]

Firedoglake » GOP Thinks Organizing In Your Community Is Worthless :

without community organizers like Martin Luther King, Jr., we’d all still be dealing with separate water fountains for coloreds and Jim Crow Laws. And I mean the old ones, not the new poll tax crap that Hans Von Spakovsky keeps trying to sneak in through the sewers.

Oh, and ladies? No community organizers means that your voice doesn’t count for shit. No vote for you!

Lost your job and you need a hand with the utility bills or some food from the local church pantry? Suck it up, America, because the folks who used to extend a hand to those in need don’t count in Republican land. That “do unto others” crap has to stop, and Jesus was clearly just a rabble-rousing, do-gooder. Loaves, fishes, feeding the multitudes? Hogwash.

Your neighborhood watch program, to help supplement the police force whose budget keeps getting cut under the Bush Administration? Well, you don’t deserve a safe neighborhood and your efforts are useless anyway.

Cleaning up a local riverbed or a walking trail with your kid’s scout troop? Republicans think you are a loser.

Working with a job training or literacy program to help folks move from welfare to work? Republicans think your efforts deserve ridicule. Promoting a spay and neuter program at your local animal shelter? Republicans are laughing at you. Volunteer at your church pantry to help the least of these? Republicans are mocking you.

money that’s not worth making

I found a gig on Craiglist for a “mystery shopper” assignment, one of those deals where you visit a local business, complete some transaction, and report on how it went. I wasn’t 100% convinced I was comfortable with it, but that soon changed once I got the store list: Wal★Mart and one of those check-cashing outfits.

Hmm, I won’t set foot in a Wal★Mart, and certainly not to act as a spy for their less than stellar employee policies. And those check cashing joints give me the creeps: they take advantage of people who can ill afford it, and I don’t want to be part of that.

It was never so clear what these companies — the mystery shopper outfits — are about: they enable absentee owners to keep an eye on things without having to actually be in the store. The whole customer experience is boiled down to some reports on how fast things move, how accurate, and in some cases how patient (one of the later assignments is to try to get the employee to lose their cool: how uncomfortable would that be?). Some holding company in a distant state or country is hiring these companies and making decisions based on those reports.

You would never see a locally-owned and operated business using these services, as the owners are there. You can assume that the money paid to an outside consultant is money that doesn’t go to training or raises or any incentives to make the experience better: it’s really about finding the lowest cost per transaction, with a certain standard of quality. One more dehumanizing aspect of capitalism, perhaps?

Not for me. I’d rather dig ditches.