According to the BBC, England is sending 1/4 of their military force to the Gulf. Many of these “Desert Rat” troops will be stationed in Kuwait. The British puppets echo Bush when they say on one hand, that “war is not inevitable,” while sending more and more troops to the region every day. Is Donald Rumsfeld (pictured: Bush’s Bulldawg) really the man you want deciding whether or not we go to war?

I honestly don’t know what the British are getting out of this. I can’t see how helping us storm the shores of Iraq…wait a minute. Doesn’t Britain supply a great deal of oil to the US from its North Sea drilling? And if the price of Middle Eastern oil skyrockets, won’t the gas-guzzling soccer moms of the US demand that America turn to Britain to bolster the rapidly draining oil stockpile? It seems cynical but world politics and the oil market weren’t built on glad-handing and open, honest relationships. Britain has everything to gain and very little to lose. If they join us in a war there, and the war turns for the worse and ends up like Vietnam, few will remember that the British were in it up to their necks. All that history will tell is how MadDog Rumsfeld and Baby Bush conspired to finish what Daddy Bush started.

Even if that scenario plays out, Britain wins out. The oil prices go up. More oil gets bought through the North Sea brokers and only some lives of British people are lost. There in it for the big picture, the long-term survival. Bush can barely see beyond the tip of his nose and the British are thinking decades out. It’s frightening how infantile and small-minded President Bush is.

I would love to get my hands on the lobbying checkbooks of some of these Defense contractors. Of course, Bush is in bed with the oil men, but he seems to be buddy-buddy with the missile and aircraft makers, too. Certainly, they are putting a bug in his ear about going to war. What sells more airplanes? Training crashes now and again or droves of F-16’s shot out of the sky with US-made Stinger missiles?

I know that it’s cynical, but it’s business. You can’t sell the newest, greatest people killer until some of the older stuff you built gets blown up. It’s the law of supply and demand.

And in this case, the economics are all backwards because the leadership of this country is supplying us with a war that none of us are demanding.

In response to a nice article advocating a computer worker’s union over at Corporate Mofo, I wrote the following missive. YES! YES!

I have been advocating an Internet Worker’s Union for years now.
Imagine the cohesiveness and speed with which this union, with its
permanently connected members, could acheive the desired results.

The key here is that the union must work for the good of the worker.
It needs to work to secure benefits like health insurance and
retirement plans for computer workers. What it doesn’t need to do is
to advocate for mandatory UT2003 time and silly shit like allowing
Nerf guns in the office.

At some point, even the educated will realize the power in unionizing.
The problem as I see it is that as educated people, most of us see the
ruin that unions have caused in the American manufacturing complex.
All the workers complain about jobs going overseas while out of the
other side of their mouths, they insist on their 15-minute smoke break
every hour.

As much as I think this union is a good idea, I wonder if it won’t
just push more offshore development into the marketplace. With the
code slums of India and Siberia bursting with intelligent, calm, and
underempowered quality workers, what does an American code monkey do?

(Here my original email to the editors stopped, but I add these few tidbits for your interest.)

The key to making the technology worker’s life better is to make the workers realize that they are professionals. They need to act a certain way to get respect. Some sysadmin can’t gain respect by sitting in a dark corner wiping Lunchable crumbs off his shirt while snickering about how he is keylogging his boss’ machine. He needs to shower, get a normal shirt (throw away the Evercon ‘97 rag), and learn to speak and write with effectiveness.

The reason so many of these computer workers get run over is that they let themselves be run over. They let people classifu them as the expendable, faceless, void of personality person that they project to all “outsiders.” So, then the problem might stem from less of an economic base as it does from a social norms and standards point of view.