In which the money changers start wondering if the Pope is really taking this representative of Christ thing too far…

Okay, I really like this guy.

Francis, at the start of a day-long trip to the Sardinian capital, Cagliari, put aside his prepared text at a meeting with unemployed workers, including miners in hard hats who told him of their situation, and improvised for nearly 20 minutes.

“I find suffering here … It weakens you and robs you of hope,” he said. “Excuse me if I use strong words, but where there is no work there is no dignity.”

He discarded his prepared speech after listening to Francesco Mattana, a 45-year-old married father of three who lost his job with an alternative energy company four years ago.

Mattana, his voice trembling, told the pope that unemployment “oppresses you and wears you out to the depths of your soul”…

“We don’t want this globalised economic system which does us so much harm. Men and women have to be at the centre (of an economic system) as God wants, not money.”

“The world has become an idolator of this god called money,” he said.

“It is not a problem of Italy and Europe … It is the consequence of a world choice, of an economic system that brings about this tragedy, an economic system that has at its centre an idol which is called money,” he said to the cheers of the crowd.

Francis said globalization had brought with it a culture where the weakest in society suffered the most and often, those on the fringes “fall away”, including the elderly, who he said were victims of a “hidden euthanasia” caused by neglect of those no longer considered productive.

“To defend this economic culture, a throwaway culture has been installed. We throw away grandparents, and we throw away young people. We have to say no to his throwaway culture. We want a just system that helps everyone,” he said.

Capitalism as it stands today causes human misery. It exploits workers. It dehumanizes people and treats them as cogs in a machine, and then it condemns them by telling them they deserve to be cast aside, defrauded and exploited. It despoils the environment for the sake of making just a little bit more money that quarter.

In short, it causes human misery for the sake of greed.

Which isn’t to say it’s not an efficient economic system, just an uncaring one.  In a just and sane world, we would have strong checks on the ability of companies to cause human misery, we would punish the ones that do because it is the right thing to do, we would push for greater unionization of workers, and we would have strong safety net programs to help the neediest get back on their feet and back to a fulfilling work.

Instead, we live in a world where half of the legislature just decided to pass out hundreds of billions of dollars to large farming corporations and cut billions of dollars to hungry families still suffering in the midst of a Recession caused by unmitigated, unregulated, and irresponsible greed in which the vast majority of those who caused it not only did not face jail time, but have since prospered even more while the wreckage in human lives that they caused lingers on.

Because 4DS Would Involve Time Travel

Nintendo has just announced the pending release of the Nintendo 2DS. April Fools Day came and went, this is real, and It makes my Nintendo Fanboy Heart sad. Not because I don’t think it is a good idea. Honestly, I never use the 3D feature, it gives me a headache and it only works when I’m looking directly at the screen. This makes me sad because Nintendo has dropped the ball in properly supporting the Wii U, and this announcement proves that they’ve been distracted. They should keep the main thing the main thing. However, with Nintendo, the main thing has become the DS platform.

Sigh…

I guess I’m in the market for a used 360.

Your depressing article of the day

I’m… I’m just going to start raising my own food now…

If you happen to vacation in Florida

Enjoy the cold, flu, and/or norovirus that the low wage service employees who don’t have sick leave will be bringing to their jobs handling your food, cleaning your hotel rooms, or stocking those souveniers you plan on handling and buying.

Yum.

All courtesy of your state government, which apparently would rather see workers spread disease than allow local governments to mandate that companies doing business in their locales should give these people paid sick time so they can stay home and not infect their co-workers or their customers.

If George Bush turned me from a libertarian into a liberal, I swear the current crop is starting to turn me into a socialist.

The high cost of low prices

Remember those articles I’ve linked to in the past detailing how quite a few people currently receiving welfare and government assistance were working poor?

Here’s another data point:

Walmart’s wages and benefits are so low that many of its employees are forced to turn to the government for aid, costing taxpayers between $900,000 and $1.75 million per store, according to a report released last week by congressional Democrats.

Walmart’s history of suppressing local wages and busting fledgling union efforts is common knowledge. But the Democrats’ new report used data from Wisconsin’s Medicaid program to quantify Walmart’s cost to taxpayers. The report cites a confluence of trends that have forced more workers to rely on safety-net programs: the depressed bargaining power of labor in a still struggling economy; a 97 year low in union enrollment; and the fact that the middle-wage jobs lost during the recession have been replaced by low-wage jobs. The problem of minimum-wage work isn’t confined to Walmart. But as the country’s largest low-wage employer, with about 1.4 million employees in the US—roughly 10 percent of the American retail workforce—Walmart’s policies are a driving force in keeping wages low. The company also happens to elegantly epitomize the divide between the top and bottom in America: the collective wealth of the six Waltons equals the combined wealth of 48.8 million families on the other end of the economic spectrum. The average Walmart worker making $8.81 per hour would have to work for 7 million years to acquire the Walton family’s current wealth.

We are effectively subsidizing a business model that is making 6 people very rich at our expense and at the expense of their employees.

But let’s not suggest taxing those 6 individuals a lot more to cover that cost, because then they might stop creating new jobs which will cost us more to subsidize.

There is a class warfare going on, and you and I have lost.

Then aspire to be the best thief you can be…

Just so we’re clear, the advice you young people should take is that if you’re poor now and you feel a bit criminally inclined, you should go to business school, get a degree, work your way up to a chief position within a major corporation, and then rob people of everything they’ve got and then some.

It’s a longer path, but far more lucrative and you’ll get a lot less jail time than if you give into your impulses right now and go jack some a convenience store.

Jeffrey Skilling, the convicted former Enron Corp. chief executive officer, may get out of prison in as little as four years if a judge approves a deal with prosecutors over objections by victims of one of the biggest corporate frauds in U.S. history.

In exchange for getting as many as 10 years cut from his 24-year sentence, Skilling will drop his bid for a new trial and end litigation over his conviction. A jury found he spearheaded a fraud of as much as $40 billion that destroyed the world’s largest energy trader in 2001.

Low Prices can still cost people a lot…

While digging through the rubble of a collapsed garment factory in Bangladesh, one that workers had previously tried to refuse to go into because of large cracks in the walls, recovery personnel came across this couple.

Graphic photo follows beneath the fold:

Keystone XL

It’s always worth noting that most of the things that come out of the mouths of energy executives and their bought and paid for congressional representatives are lies.

Whether the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would boost American energy independence is a key part of the debate over the pipeline, the biggest environmental battle in recent history. Keystone promoters say the $7 billion project is vital for the nation – but there are signs much of the oil coming through it would be exported.

The United States increasingly exports refined petroleum products such as diesel, heating fuel and gasoline from the same Gulf Coast refineries where Keystone oil would be headed.

There is no reason oil from Keystone would be treated differently, according to energy analysts.

Disputes rage over how much is currently exported. A recent State Department analysis of Keystone says less than half of the Gulf Coast’s refined products go into the U.S. market.

There is nothing that will prevent this oil from being exported. Nothing at all. Save the good word of an industry spokesman, and I hope we all know what that’s worth.

Also, producing the oil will probably cause Canada to miss their Kyoto agreement limits, as well as cutting down a large swath of forests that are currently the only large scale way of sucking up even a small portion of the CO2 we’re currently spewing into the atmosphere.

The Canadian government insists that it has found ways to reduce those emissions. But a new report from Canada’s environmental ministry shows how great the impact of the tar sands will be in the coming years, even with cleaner production methods.

It projects that Canada will double its current tar sands production over the next decade to more than 1.8 million barrels a day. That rate will mean cutting down some 740,000 acres of boreal forest — a natural carbon reservoir. Extracting oil from tar sands is also much more complicated than pumping conventional crude oil out of the ground. It requires steam-heating the sands to produce a petroleum slurry, then further dilution.

One result of this process, the ministry says, is that greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector as a whole will rise by nearly one-third from 2005 to 2020 — even as other sectors are reducing emissions. Canada still hopes to meet the overall target it agreed to at Copenhagen in 2009 — a 17 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2020. If it falls short, as seems likely, tar sands extraction will bear much of the blame.

Look, when it all goes to hell, and we’re riding around the deserts of Kansas searching for food, booze, and gas, can we all agree now that any energy industry executives we find get tossed into Thunderdome?

Also, seriously, Canada, you used to be cool. You gave us hockey, gravy fries, Shatner AND Trebek. Now you’re asking us to funnel acidic, toxic sludge across important aquifiers.

What happened to you, man?

My rant for today…

I really do appreciate you telling me that an update is available. Seriously, I do. It’s good information to have and good habit to make sure your software is up to date.

However, unless you are an antivirus software company, I do not appreciate the following:

1. Reminding me of your update every time I boot the computer
2. Reminding me of your update every day and popping up a window in the middle of my work to do so, throwing me off and forcing me to choke down the rage bile in my throat and click the No button to get rid of it.
3. Offering other downloads of software I do not have installed in your update window. I’m sure you’re super special toolbar for IE is awesome and poops rainbows across my desktop, but I’m not interested. If I were interested, I would have downloaded it already.

Did I leave anything out?

This is not hard.

Either:

• Auto-update the software silently, preferably when I’m not using the computer and definitely when I’m not watching a movie or playing a game, or…
• Pop the notice up once, and if I dismiss it, pop it up again after 3-5 days also preferably when it looks like I”m not using the computer so you’re not interrupting me and when I get back to my computer, I can see the notice, think, “Oh gee, I haven’t done that yet. I should do that now before I start working.” and click OK.

Compare and contrast

In case you were wondering how the banking sector was doing these days after destroying the world’s economy, making life sufficiently miserable for millions, and absconding with an as yet unknown amount of taxpayer subsidies to keep them afloat, followed by a concerted effort by Republicans and Democrats to protect the whole shebang from anything resembling a criminal investigation and lengthy jail sentences. Turns out, having friends in Washington when you’re con job explodes in your face can be very profitable.

The six biggest U.S. banks are projected to post a 35 percent increase in first-quarter profit. That may fail to prolong an 18-month rally in their shares as the firms struggle to boost revenue.

The banks are set to report $19.9 billion in combined net income.

Elsewhere…

The statistics are staggering. According to the Census Bureau, the nation’s poverty rate is at its highest level in decades. More than 46 million people — one in seven Americans — are living below the poverty line, 16.4 million of them children. Another 30 million Americans are just a lost job or serious illness away from joining them. And in the last six years alone, more than 20 million people have joined the ranks of those relying on food stamps to get by.

But I’m sure if we only cut Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare spending and gave JP Morgan another tax break, that those 46 million folks would be right as rain.