Ring ringgggg!

Good morning, Evergreen Dental. How may I help you?

Me: Hi – say I got a letter from you last November offering to clean my teeth and give me a full set of xrays for $149. Is that offer still good?

Evergreen: Yes it, is. Would you like to make an appointment?

Me: Yes, I would.

Evergreen: Great. We need for you to set aside a couple of hours for this. Would you like morning or afternoon?

Me: Why so long?

Evergreen: Well, the first hour is to go over our services with you, tell you what everything we can do to improve your appearance.

[How do they know about my appearance? Am I on Skype? Creepy!]

Me: Oh – I don’t want all of that. I just want my teeth cleaned.

Evergreen: Well, we really need for you to spend that time with us. You might even get to meet one of our dentists.

Me: Oooh! [Schwing!]Really, I just want my teeth cleaned.

Evergreen: I’m going to transfer you over to our scheduler.

Scheduler: May I help you?

Me: Yeah – I have a letter here offering to clean my teeth for $149.00.

Scheduler: Did you receive a letter from us in the mail? Are you new to the area?

Me: Yes – we just moved here.

Scheduler: We need to spend some time with you on the first appointment, and show you all of the things we can do to help improve your appearance. Are you willing to spend a couple of hours?

Me: Look – I don’t want to pick out curtains with you. I just want my teeth cleaned.

Scheduler: [getting testy, she is.] We’re not picking out curtains! Have you had a bitewing xray recently?

Me: Yeah – that was a few years ago. I just need the regular set.

Scheduler: Let’s see now … OK. The appointment with a bitewing xray starts at $271.

Me: Yeah, well, I have a letter here from you that says you’ll do a cleaning and xray for $149.

Silence ….

Click.

CNN”s Parker-Spitzer last night had interesting coverage of the protests in Madison, Wisconsin. Elliot Spitzer was absent, and in his stead was CNN’s Ali Velshi.

Fourteen Wisconsin Democrats have fled the state rather than face certain passage of of a Republican bill that strips benefits and collective bargain rights from state public employee unions. Their absence means no quorum, and no vote. Velshi was visibly upset about this, and confronted John Nichols, a journalist from the Capital Times, a Madison newspaper. He said that the voters had spoken last year, that there were no surprises going on, and that it was time for the Senators to come back and face the music.

Nichols said not so fast … he had followed then gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker, and nary once during the campaign did he even hint that he had such plans for public employees. The whole thing is a surprise, introduced in a bill last Friday with passage demanded yesterday. Democrats had asked for a slow-down, if only to have some debate on the issue, and Republicans said no – up or down vote only. Now!

Wisconsin is not facing a budget crisis, which makes all of this even more interesting. They are running short about $150 million, all produced by bills passed by the legislature this year to give tax breaks to businesses and wealthy people. It’s almost as if they are following the Bushies’s game plan, which is to create massive deficits through tax breaks and military spending, and then demand a crackdown on social programs to make up for the resulting deficits. It is all Kabuki theater right now in DC, but this also appears to be Obama’s game.

Anyway, I am proud of the Wisconsin Democrats, as they are playing dirty. They are Democrats, of course, and as I’ve often noted, being a Democrat is much like sitting in the center of a bowl of Jello. Will they fold? Most likely. They are, after all, Democrats.

But their gesture also exposes the lie of the Democrats in DC, 2006-2010, that they could not get anything done due to mean old Republicans. They always had plenty of available weapons, among them the ability to play dirty. They chose not to fight hard. This is because, in my view, the leaders of the Democratic party are complicit with Republican ideals. Up at the top, it’s really only one party.

Governor Scott Thompson of Wisconsin has set off huge demonstrations and blowback with his state budget cutbacks. There are throngs of state workers who object to his cuts in benefits, his anti-unionism, and especially his threat to call out the National Guard to disperse the crowd.

In Colorado, Governor John Hickenlooper has proposed similar cuts, but there’s not outrage, no demonstrations, nothing.

Both Thompson and Hickenlooper are radical right wingers who are afraid to challenge wealth, hold unions and workers in contempt, and are smitten by the anti-gubbmint neurosis so effectively marketed from 1980 forward.

Why is it that one encounters such resistance, the other not? Could it be that Thompson is a Republican, and Hickenlooper a Democrat?

Could it be that Democrats, as usual, are asleep at the wheel when a guy with a “D” after his name holds office?

Of course. Democrats are, after all, the problem.
____________________
PS: Years ago, not too long after Bush took office, Karl Rove talked about building a “permanent Republican majority.” I scoffed a little bit, knowing Republican’s proclivity to self-destruct. Little did I understand back then that the road to that permanent majority was going to be through the Democratic Party. It’s easy to see looking backwards, however. Merely change the “R” to a “D”, put them in office, and they do your work for you while the base sleeps.

Project Censored’s top censored story of 2009 was the death toll in Iraq, said to be close to 1.2 million dead in the wake of the 2003 invasion. It was a poll done by Opinion Research Business, a British polling group whose results are generally thought to be reliable when they do not contradict official truth. The true number of dead in Iraq will never be known, just as we now only speculate about the casualties of the Vietnam War. It’s considered bad taste – we do not investigate our own crimes. Only those of others.

I’ve been round and round with that at a number of sites over the years, and am familiar with the mindset/reaction that follows. The only research-based studies put forward are by groups like Lancet and ORB, and there are no counter-studies. Instead, there is hostile denial, and accusations that I wear a shiny hat. So all of the research is on one side, and only denial on the other. It is a classic emperor’s new clothes environment.

I’ve long accepted that the death toll is much, much higher than anyone acknowledges. (And note the ease with which hand-over-heart patriots accept lower tolls like only 65,000 or 100,000 – as if that was acceptable!).

But the mechanics are troubling – American bombs are not nearly as accurate as the Pentagon says, and targeting is not only at “combatants,” as in counterinsurgency, the domestic population is the enemy. So death from the sky accounts for quite a bit of carnage. But even Lancet said that such deaths were a minority of the casualties.

Others merely presume to know that crazy Iraqis are killing each other (we are neither crazy nor killers, you see), but Lancet attributed 56% of the casualties to American violence. How is it happening?

[ORB] points out that the logic to this carnage lies in a statistic released by the US military and reported by the Brookings Institute: for the first four years of the occupation the American military sent over 1,000 patrols each day into hostile neighborhoods, looking to capture or kill “insurgents” and “terrorists.” (Since February 2007, the number has increased to nearly 5,000 patrols a day, if we include the Iraqi troops participating in the American surge.) Each patrol invades an average of thirty Iraqi homes a day, with the mission to interrogate, arrest, or kill suspects. In this context, any fighting age man is not just a suspect, but a potentially lethal adversary. Our soldiers are told not to take any chances.

According to US military statistics, again reported by the Brookings Institute, these patrols currently result in just under 3,000 firefights every month, or just under an average of one hundred per day (not counting the additional twenty-five or so involving our Iraqi allies). Thousands of patrols result in thousands of innocent Iraqi deaths and unconscionably brutal detentions.

The house-to-house aspect of the war is hardly mentioned here in the land of the free, but My Lai-style face-to-face killing is the essence of counterinsurgency. Rebels have to be rooted out of their communities, exposed, imprisoned and made examples, tortured and killed. It is a truly remarkable feat of propaganda that we know so little of the violence that we have inflicted on that country. From 1991 forward, from the initial bombing and destruction of civilian infrastructure to the sanctions and bombings of the 1990s’ to the 2003 invasion, the toll is staggering. Iraq ranks somewhere between Rwanda and Pol Pot in casualties, and who knows – we may top old Pol before we are done. The country is not yet pacified.

And then there is the exodus:

Iraqis’ attempts to escape the violence have resulted in a refugee crisis of mammoth proportion. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration, in 2007 almost 5 million Iraqis had been displaced by violence in their country, the vast majority of which had fled since 2003. Over 2.4 million vacated their homes for safer areas within Iraq, up to 1.5 million were living in Syria, and over 1 million refugees were inhabiting Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and Gulf States. Iraq’s refugees, increasing by an average of almost 100,000 every month, have no legal work options in most host states and provinces and are increasingly desperate.

Yet more Iraqis continue to flee their homes than the numbers returning, despite official claims to the contrary. Thousands fleeing say security is as bad as ever, and that to return would be to accept death. Most of those who return are subsequently displaced again.

The underlying tragedy is that those who flee are those who can afford to flee. Iraq’s educated classes are leaving, the professionals, the doctors, civil engineers and other professionals who had turned Iraq into a burgeoning and wealthy country by 1989. If the object of the U.S. attack, 1990 forward, was to return the country to the stone age, then indeed George W. Bush was right: Mission Accomplished.

My apologies to Black Flag and Max, but that was just not what I wanted this blog to be. They each have a unique perspective, and each should have his own blog where I can come harass them.

To my other reader, comments are free and open again.

Note to reader: This is kind of long. You might want to just skip it and get on with your day.

“Marketing” is lying writ large. Everything around us is a lie in some form. Nothing is ever really on sale, prices are never really reduced, no matter the amount of advertising used to entice us into buying a product. Ultimately, we are ruled by “word barf” documents that we don’t understand when we buy something. There is no negotiating anywhere – if you want a product you sign their contract.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of this idiocy is the contract we are forced to sign merely to use a motel’s Internet service, or worse yet, Apple’s ITunes agreement, over fifty pages long and frequently updated. We are asked if we have read it and agree to it – of course we don’t read it. The exchange is not worth the effort – a very large amount of time expended for a very small service? They know this. Get real.

(Reminds me – we were in Alaska last summer, and were going to fly a puddle jumper across a bay to see some bears. Before embarking, however, we were told to read and sign a waiver – so I actually read it. It said that if anything happened, even if it was due to the pilot’s negligence, they were not liable. Of course, saying that doesn’t mean anything, as they cannot waive their own liability for negligence. Nonetheless, while the guy was not looking, I drew a line through that clause, and initialed it. Then, before we got on the plane, I called my daughter and told her that if anything happened, that I had altered the waiver.)

We’ve been doing some major purchases now and then for our new home. No matter where we go, merchandise is always on sale!!! We looked at couches and recliners at American Furniture Warehouse last November. They were on sale! We picked out some we like, and my wife suggested that we should go ahead and commit to buy, as the sale would end soon. I suggested that there would be another sale after the current one, and sure enough, the fall clearance was followed by inventory reduction by some other nonsense. Now it’s February, so somehow Abe Lincoln and George Washington are going to inspire them to offer yet another sale!!!

In the meantime, the price of the furniture never changed. Their only object is to give us a reason to buy now instead of later. It’s called “the close” – sales people can push and push and push, but the art of selling is to get us to make that decision to jump. To help us along, they put that feeling in our guts that we might miss out on a deal. It is the universal bait. It’s never true. Nothing is ever on sale. It is always a lie.

I needed a windshield replaced up in Bozeman. One company offered a big magnetic ad on the cover of the phone book that offered $100 off, and another was in the Yellow Pages just offering windshields. I priced them both, and it turned out that the $100 coupon actually meant spending more for a windshield! Get outta here!!!

Some companies are better, some worse. Wal-Mart consistently offers lower prices, but they underpay their help and are a net drain on the communities they “serve.” COSTCO, I am told, pays their help well and offers worthy benefits for working there, and this is reflected in their prices – COSTCO is not a net price savings. But all told, in the bigger picture, it’s a better deal than Wal-Mart, but who among us thinks big picture when shopping?

Some are pushy and annoying – Best Buy is higher in price than anyone around, as we learned – a TV that was $560 at Wal-Mart was $900 at Best Buy, “marked down from $1,300,” and “on sale!” Walking in the door at Best Buy we were immediately accosted by sales staff, wanting to “help” us. We repeatedly turned them down. As we later learned, Best Buy’s business model is one-on-one high pressure sales – that’s how they get away with ridiculous prices. Most people act on impulse and don’t shop around, and Best Buy knows this and so is committed to doing everything they can to pressure us into buying before shopping.

But suppose that you do buy an overpriced item at Best Buy and learn that you paid way too much. You can just return it. Right? Wrong. Best Buy charges a 10% “restocking” fee, which is nothing more than a way to keep their “gotcha!” cemented in place. That’s their true business model – the restocking fee. It’s in the word barf contract, but few people know about it.

There are not a lot of options out there, as the small mom-and-poppers have been driven out of the market place. In their place we have large corporations and business models built on “hooks” that are really nothing more than “scams.” We shopped around for everything we bought, did our research, and found that there is really little choice in our monopoly economy. There’s only a few outlets and they have absorbed so much of the market that the unspoken “covenant not to compete” is firmly in place. Instead we get a host of nonsense offers, traps for lazy shoppers, word barf contracts, disinterested (probably underpaid and demoralized) sales staff, and service calls to foreign lands. Underneath it all, at the upper levels of these few corporations, are people who are scheming, scamming, laying awake nights dreaming of new ways to fulfill their ultimate objective: To get as much from us as they can, giving back as little in return as they can, and hoping to smooth it all over with advertising. In the professional con game, the “mark” does not know he has been scammed. And truth is that at the very top, the people who run these companies hold us in contempt. Try to fight them on anything, you will quickly learn that lesson.

The best deal going on right now is called “Craigslist.” We needed a good snow plow to live up here on a mountain. I shopped around, learned about them, found out that there are really only two on the market, one sold by Lowe’s, one by Home Depot, that they are remarkably similar, and oddly enough, remarkably similar in price! I decided on the model we needed, and got on Craiglist, and found one that was one year old and used only to plow a cement driveway. We negotiated – that is, he asked a certain price, I countered with another, and we settled in the middle. We both walked away happy.

If it turned out that I bought a defective product, I have no recourse, but oddly, I’ve learned a great deal about the plow, and now know how to disassemble its parts and put it back together to keep it working. It is, after all, in my own best interest, as with Craiglist I know the seller doesn’t give a shit after he gets my money. Merchants only pretend to care.

Craiglist is polluted, of course, by regular merchants masquerading as real people. Even there you have to watch yourself. One product that we have looked and looked for is a home sound system with with a Blue Ray player that will operate on the wireless system. Information is hard to come by and confusing, and there are quite a few products out there that seem to offer something, but don’t. I went to Craigslist, but it’s not the kind of product that turns up there often. (EBay seems almost entirely merchant-driven now.) But I did find one offered, still in the box, and had some emails back and forth with the “owner.” We were almost ready to bite, and so did the one thing that we are not allowed to do with a merchant – offer less than the ask. He wanted $500 – I offered $400. “He” quickly wrote back and said “sorry – we just sold our last two.”

Two? He didn’t say he had two! He sounded like some guy who was getting rid of something he couldn’t use. Turns out he was a merchant, and this was his business model – to pretend to be a regular person. The system he wanted to sell, which “sells for $799 in stores”, actually sells for $500 in stores. No matter the store, it’s $500. $799 is the “manufacturer’s suggested retail price”, which, like Diogenes’ honest man, is something that does not exist here on terra firma.

Buyer beware, everywhere. Craiglist is our best bet these days, and you must understand that regular merchants are offended by it. Investors have tried to buy it, and are infiltrating it. But for now, prior to it being pirated by Best Buy and the others, it is the best place to go for the exchange of goods and services.

One final note – the “rebate.” The concept came into being in the 1970’s, I think. The idea was that manufacturers wanted to unload merchandise, but did not want to undermine their price structure. So they did two transactions – one, to take your money, the other, to give it back. It worked, in no small part due to the fact that people were buying on credit before credit got so easy, so that the rebate was really a loan at a better rate than credit cards offered.

Now, rebates are everywhere. I bought some antifreeze last week, and the shelf-offer was “buy one get one free”, or what I like to think of as “half price”, meaning that the shelf price is twice what it would sell for if there was really any competition around. But what the hell – it doesn’t hurt to have an extra gallon on hand, so I grabbed two and checked out and the price was $21, and I said “wait – it is buyonegetonefree, and the guy said – oh – that’s a rebate offer. I said “My kid will graduate from high school before I see that rebate,” and gave one back. I paid $11 for a $5 product. But it’s really the only choice out there, you know. There’s no antifreeze on Craiglist.

I had an eye exam, and it took a while to find the right set of contact lenses, and during the exam and trial process the eye doctor put in contacts and took them out and threw them away, and I asked if those things don’t cost a bit of money to toss away like that. He kind of shrugged, as if the lenses were free. We did find the right combination, and I bought a bunch of Coopervision contacts for $160, way too much, but it’s a trip into Littleton for a different deal. And, there was a $40 rebate!

Crap, $40 – why not, so I jumped through the hoops, cut the ends off the little boxes, copied the sales slips, filled out the forms and sent it in. I got an email saying they had received the forms. That was last November. I sort of forgot about it, but then checked back a few days ago in my email, and there was a rebate number to check, and so I went to the web site and plugged in the number, and it said that my rebate had been denied. They said I had not presented them with the date of purchase of the lenses or the date of the eye exam.

That’s bullshit, of course. I gave them both. I kept all my paperwork, as I’m not very trusting. Everything was there, every hoop jumped through. Here’s the business model: Coopervision offers eye doctors a way to generate more business. By offering a rebate, the doctor has room to jack up his price. So ultimately, he is partially the beneficiary of the $40. On their end, Coopervision doesn’t want to mess with fulfillment, and so turns it over to a third party. They don’t actually pay $40 for $40 – it’s something less because Coopervision knows that not everyone who is eligible for a rebate will actually apply for one. And the clearing house knows that if they take a long time to fulfill, that most people will forget. So I would bet that Coopervision is actually paying $10-$20 for each supposed $40 rebate. And this creates an incentive for the fulfillment house to do everything they can to avoid paying the rebate.

So oddly, when I was denied the rebate, they didn’t actually tell me it had been denied, though that would have been extremely easy to do, them having my email address and all. Instead, they put a note on the file, and waited for me to remember that there was some rebate last year, and to check back. It expires here in a week or so, so they are almost home free.

I called the doctor’s office, and told them that there wasn’t any fulfillment going on with the rebate arrangement, and was told that yeah, they get that complaint quite a bit, and tough luck. So next time I go to Littleton, and I hope someday that Eye Consultants of Colorado understand the nature of the annuity – that each customer represents a series of payments over years, and that blowing one customer off is to end that series of payments. A mere $40 claim can cost hundreds of dollars in present value of future cash flows.

Anyway, it was cage rattling time, as I will get my fricking rebate. Here’s the exchange that has ensued:

Me: My rebate (439508933) was rejected even though I carefully jumped through every hoop, so I called my practitioner, and they said many of their customers have this problem, and tough luck. So I told them that they should pay me the $40, and they should deal with you, and that if you make a practice of not honoring rebates, that they should stop dealing with you. I also told them that if they don’t reimburse me the $40, that I am done dealing with them too. See what problems you create? You make people unhappy, and it just spreads around.

Coopervision: Dear Mark Tokarski: Tracking number: 439508933

Mr. Tokarski, we apologize for any bad experience you have with this rebate process. It is not our intension [sic] to make people unhappy. The reason why we have not been able to process your rebate is because our system shows that we did not receive the receipt showing the purchase location, purchase date, eye exam purchase date, and the product(s) purchased.

We are willing to honor your rebate if you could send us a copy of what we are missing. The receipt, along with your name, your complete mailing address, and the Tracking number at the top of this email, may be mailed to:

Rebate Special Services
P.O. Box 540156
El Paso, TX 88554-0156

We appreciate your participation in this promotion. If there is anything else we can do to assist you, please contact us at rebates@parago.com. We are always happy to help.

You can also track the status of your rebate, using the Tracking number above, at http://www.coopervisionrebates.com.

Enmanuel
Promotions Customer Service

Me: I have already jumped through your hoops. I was very careful, copied everything. I know how you operate. Your business model is built on the assumption that people forget. That’s why it takes you months to honor a claim. When someone rattles your cage, you pay. You operate right above the legal line. It’s all highly unethical, but of course legal. Outfits like yours are all over behind the scenes running these little scams. It’s so seedy!

Now pay me the damned rebate and stop prattling about how honorable you are. You’re exposed. Honor the deal and I’ll shut up.

Enmanuel actually read my message, as he used the expression “make people unhappy,” which were my words. But he is just some guy, probably in Mumbai, who is doing his job. The notion that I did not provide them with the information required is what they say to everyone.

It’s only $40, and if I make them mad enough, they might just not pay to be pissy. Because you’ve got to understand that while all of this marketing is going on where we are constantly trying to screw one another, it is very important to be polite.

There will be regime change in Egypt, but democratic rule is not on the table. If I may be so bold, a short primer is in order.

First, the US does not “care” about the well being of people in other countries. That idea is almost anthropomorphic in substance – there is no “feeling” in the mechanization of power. It’s a large group of people who have control over wealth and military hardware, and enjoy a mostly unspoken consensus on how the US should project its power around the world. It’s often referred to as “the game.” People in the game don’t talk about the game, kind of like Fight Club.

The government is only part of this consensus, and the most difficult to manage due to the ability of ordinary people to occasionally affect government policy. But the ability to tax the American public to build the military hardware used to project power is extremely important, so control of government is an important part of what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial” complex. So it naturally follows that when there are large concentrations of private wealth, that wealth naturally tries to take control of government. It’s an ongoing battle, and since 1980, private concentrated power has largely prevailed – we have to go back to the 1890’s to find more corruption than we have right now in all branches of government, including our Citizens United Supreme Court.

Presidents come and go, and that office has power. But the quality of presidents varies wildly, with strong and visionary men (we may not always like the vision) like Nixon and Johnson (both forced out of office), clowns who don’t even know they are being manipulated (Reagan and Bush II), and men of limited vision who are smart enough not to cross real power, like Clinton and Obama. Foreign policy does not originate in government. They merely carry it out.

The American media is largely owned by the same complex that owns the banks and weapons manufacturers, the same corporations that want access to resources across the globe and within this country. They don’t report news so much as control our focus. We think about the things they want us to think about.

Consequently, we here in the land of the free are all aware of what a horrible!!! threat Iran poses, how Hugo Chavez is a “dictator,” how awful Milošević was, what a tyrant Saddam Hussein was (post 1990, not before), etc. But there was no awareness of another thug named Mubarak, who has been running a totalitarian terror/torture state called Egypt for the last thirty years.

Events are random and unpredictable, but perceptions are manageable. Things got out of hand in Egypt, and now the sentient portion of the American public knows how unhappy the Egyptian people are under Mubarak. This leads to a predictable shuffling of chairs. Mubarak, now stigmatized, is no longer useful. Egypt is too important to be allowed to go its own way, and democratic rule is out of the question. What to do?

A new thug is in order. His name is Omar Suleiman. He’s a terrorist of sorts, as he is considered a “CIA point man” and he cooperated with the US in its torture/rendition program.

There will be hell to pay for writing the four words that follow, but hell, why not:

Thus endeth the lesson.

_______________
This is worth a reading, if you have an hour or so.

No kidding – this is a screen grab. Apparently Iraq has trans-morphed – either that, or the Pentagon wants to invade Egypt now, but can’t afford to move all their hardware.

Dear Mark,

I’m Preston Elliott, and I’ve just signed on as Jon’s campaign manager. I would tell you a little more about myself, but this just hit my inbox:

Denny Rehberg to Announce Senate Bid Saturday – Roll Call, 1.31.11

Our race is now officially underway — please consider a secure online donation to show our new opponent that we’re ready for a tough campaign!

Oh, I know, progressives are trembling in their boots, and soon they’ll be saying “Yeah, Jon Tester ain’t so hot, but he’s better than Denny!!!

And here is where that logic goes haywire, and it’s just one example: The Forest Jobs and Recreation Act. Had Dennis Rehberg come forth with that legislation, progressives and Democrats would have rightly condemned it as a massive sellout to industry in the name of jobs that will never be. Because it is being put forward by Jon Tester, it has a chance, as Democrats are snoozing and progressives are confused.

Bad legislation has a chance of passage because it is carried by a Democrat, and not in spite of Democrats. Triangulation is worse than having Republicans in office. Republicans create their own opposition. Triangulators deliberately undermine their own base.

Go Denny! Montana Democrats need a long cold shower.