Tag Archives: Home Depot

Facebook advertisers can repost “likes” in your name so you don’t have to

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Users of Facebook are accustomed to seeing friends listed in right-column ads, mentioned liking such-and-such a brand, or two or three. It’s understood that those friends at some point visited the brand’s page and clicked “like”, permitting that company, Amazon for example, to pay Facebook to advertise the “like” as frequently as it wishes. It’s also understood that when one “likes” a page, a post is simultaneously shared to herald the act and appears on the user’s wall unless that feature is turned off. What you may not know is that your initial timeline post can be reposted, in the center-thread, at the advertiser’s whim, perhaps limited to when you’re online, perhaps triggered when you log on, but not logged on your wall and thus unseen by you. Does it also boost the number of people pretended to be “talking about” that brand? Are 372,523 talking about Starbucks? That could include “you”, repeating yourself ad-maybe-nauseum.

Or maybe, for a premium, your original “like” is not shared simultaneously, but doled out as each of your friends comes online to guarantee one hundred percent reach. Who knows. As personalized as we know the ads can be, no doubt the algorithm is not calculated for clarity.

Do you remember which pages you’ve liked or not? Perhaps you clicked like to be able to comment on the page, or to monitor a monopolistic miscreant, or perhaps it was before Wells Fargo, Bank of America, or British Petroleum became persons and not-so-grata. Maybe now you’d rather not be said to like Chevron, Monsanto, or killer Coke. You can review your “likes” under INFO, then INTERESTS. Or you can check the list below. On each page, see if beside the LIKE button, you have the option to unlike, for example, Facebook.

Here’s a quick list of corporate brands which have fallen from fashion among those with fashion sense. You can click on each to check whether you are counted among their unpaid repeated endorsers.

Nike
Gap
Fox News
CNN
AT&T
Caterpillar
Disney
Walmart
Target
K-mart
Toys-r-us
Lowes
Ikea
Home Depot

And the fat merchants:
McDonalds
Burger King
Hardees
Carl’s Jr
Wendy’s
Taco Bell
KFC
Pizza Hut
Sonic
Chick-fil-A
Jimmy Johns
Subway
Outback
Dairy Queen
Dunkin Donuts
Krispy Kreme

Ikea factory workers organized by IAM, who will unionize the retail employees?

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Ikea factory workers in Danville, Virginia, voted to unionize. Did they do it alone? No, they joined the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (Upside for Ikea, its customers can pretend their prefab furniture is tooled by rocket scientists). If Ikea retail employees follow suit, maybe there’s hope for organizing the poverty-wage employees of America’s largest private retailers: Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, so what current retail unions are recruiting their membership to flier offending locations, circulate among the workers and initiate organizing campaigns?

Composer Jason Robert Brown wants to protect his unintellectual rights

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As a musician and fan of stage musicals, I must proffer this disclaimer about American theater composer Jason Robert Brown: he’s terrible. Brown is a poster child for the music industry’s common mediocrity, of commerce’s habitual triumph over art. Now Brown has appointed himself defender of intellectual property rights, holding that teens should not use the internet to pirate his sheet music. Of course, I can only wish him foolproof success.

American musical theater saw a golden age in the 1940s, with notable glimmers of resurgence since then, in ever infrequent cycles. I don’t think anyone would argue that in-between was constant dreck –to which “show tunes” owe their stigma. Defenders of Andrew Lloyd Webber will find themselves similarly unrestrained enthusiasts for popular music, popular fiction and television. To each his own slop.

I have particular antipathy for contemporary composers of awfulness because they drive the inartistic music publishing industry where it does irreparable harm. School bands and theater departments are influenced to pay royalties for the performance pieces whose rights are most profitably leveraged, at the expense of older works of renown. Instead of seeding young repertoires with melodies and lyrics to enrich their memories, teachers pollute their students with forgettable claptrap, courtesy of bards like Brown.

I have the same prejudice with regard to literature. Why aren’t today’s students reading Stevenson or Poe instead of Blume or Rowling? Of course, composer JR Brown is more on par with author RL Stine, he’s that horrible. But don’t take my word for it, have a listen.

That said, here’s Jason Robert Brown championing not just the exclusive right to sell online what his publishers hawk through their network of scholastic pushers, but he wants the same markup. If ever a commodity could change hands for its true worth, Brown’s entire catalog should be ventilated for free through file sharing. Instead he’s personally joining various trading websites and then emailing each and every member who appears to be trading in his goods.

To paraphrase: Hello, I’m Jason Robert Brown, yes, The Jason Robert Brown, and I’d appreciate it if you stopped illegally sharing my music, since it deprives me of my rightful royalties.

Brown has posted some of the ensuing email exchanges on his blog, without any mention of offering remuneration for their contributions. Most laughable, but consistent with the weakness of his music work, Brown has engaged chiefly teens in his discussion of intellectual rights. He lists one discussion in which he compares his stolen sheet music to a loaned screwdriver, a Xerox’d book, and a copied CD.

Mr. Brown, might I direct you to the innumerable organizations which argue that intellectual property rights are not inalienable. They are restraints to trade, impediments to idea sharing, and diametric to elevating community wealth.

You have every right to contrive a product and sell it by whatever connivance, but your monopoly ends there. Whoever were your customers should have the right to do with their purchases what they will. What right have you to tax the use of your thought fart as it passes from ear to ear? Home Depot can’t charge multiple times for a screwdriver it’s already sold; to use your example.

Consider also that your melody was plucked from the ether of shared cultural experience. Should a rights police attach royalty liens on every whiff of inspiration you borrowed? Better to admit we are all channels of a community expression.

Mr. Brown, please be satisfied to exploit the business advantages you’ve built. Your Tony Award is indication enough of that accomplishment. Insisting that you deserve more only invites scrutiny of your ouevre. Your arguments may find refuge with fans of the “Twilight” caliber, but I am not about to underestimate the sophistication of your own musical taste. If you love Broadway, you know the incredible deficiency of the songs you are peddling. Describing your “music sensibility [which] fuses pop-rock stylings with theatrical lyrics” is faint self-praise enough.

Young stage enthusiasts. To you, JRB may appear a “genius” but what else would we expect of a generation raised on High School Musical. For superior fare, check out the pre maudlin days of Broadway, the shows which see regular revivals. If you want something further afield, look to lesser known works by those same composers. Even their obscure productions eclipse the best efforts of hacks today. Much of this material is freely available, but you’ll find that real showstoppers will have you showing no reluctance to part with your lunch money.

Jason Robert Brown, please stop your indecorous whine about the new leak in your traditional income monopoly. Leave your fans to trade them for their real worth.

Boycott Israel Apartheid this Christmas

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Boycott Divestment and Sanctions of Israel to end Palestinian OccupationIn solidarity with the ONE MILE MARCH to free Gaza, on the one year anniversary of Israel’s genocidal incursion into Gaza, let’s kick start a Colorado Springs effort to support the Global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement against Israel, to end apartheid and free Palestine. There are many US/Israeli companies who promote or profit from the illegal occupation of Palestine. On December 28, let’s target those in the Chapel Hills Mall!
L’Oreal, Revlon, Estee Lauder, Ahava, Hanes, Timberland, Teva, Victoria’s Secret, and Bath & Body Works.

American citizens can feel a vague sense of disconnectedness with respect to US business ties with Israel, or we can trace the responsibility for the injustices suffered in Palestine directly to retailers in our neighborhoods. Let’s let these local outlets know we will not tolerate their companies’ agenda in Palestine.

These are just among the consumer products and retailers which actively support Israel’s illegal actions in Palestine. Others you can boycott in town include Home Depot, Starbucks, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Sara Lee, Danon, Nestle, Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly Clarke, AOL Time Warner, [Fox] News Corp, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Motorola and Caterpillar.

The BDS movement against Israel is attempting to recreate the same pressures which ultimately brought down apartheid in South Africa. Academic, cultural and business boycotts are targeted against US and Israeli companies which participate in the settlement industry, the economic exploitation of Palestine and Palestinians, and control of the population.

The Path to 9 11

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In defense of ABC’s docudrama The Path to 9/11. Near the beginning, when the terrorists were taking responsibility for the 1993 WTC bombing, “Ramzi Youssef – Palestinian Terrorist” explained why they had done it: because of America’s military and economic support of Israel.

The subject of Israel and Palestine never came up again, and never came up at all on Ted Koppel’s counter-ABC-straw-man The Price of Security.

We’ve got our boot on Palestine’s windpipe, they’re flailing their arms hoping to dislodge us, and we declare a war on arm flailing. Our media runs through what options America has to be safe from arm-flailing without looking at our boots to let American citizens consider how we might tread the earth with more humanity.

The US and Israel, it’s hard to say who is the master of whom, are actively killing Palestinians in a genocidal program every bit as calculated as the Holocaust or the extermination of the Native Americans. The US supported the recent slaughter of Lebanese peoples, also considered by the international community as genocide.

The US accuses Syria or Iran of backing Hizb’Allah. Those links are sketchy compared to our sending weapons and aid to Israel and other false authorities in the Middle East. When Israel was stepping up its bombing Lebanon in advance of the nearing ceasefire, we had to speed our resupply of Cluster Bombs lest Israel run out of time to use them. The US arms and defends the self-proclaimed kings and sultans who amass great wealth from the sale of their countries’ oil while at the same time subjecting their peoples to abject poverty. Bin Laden opposed our propping up of the Saudis. Youssef decried our support of Israel in Palestine. Arabs have cause to reject US strong arm policies in Egypt, Qatar, Kuwait, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and of course Iraq. Muslims have very good reasons to reject US policy in Afghanistan, Indoneasia and the Philippines.

The least ABC could do in its mockudrama was to set the scene with the Muslim extremists’ motives, and that was it. Even though the rest of the program was re-edited because of the criticism, there followed closely law enforcement characters endlessly lamenting they needed authority for warrantless searches, domestic eavesdropping and inter-departmental information sharing. Filipino police were depicted heroically for not waiting for warrants, female border agents were lauded for using their intuitive -read racial- profiling, suggestions were made of an FBI coverup, even that Clinton’s people were helping Osama.

The irrationality-mongering was so egregious it would take forever to enumerate. The good news is that the Stephen Bochco style shaky camera, the endlessly tight closeups, the jump cuts unto incongruous details lacking context, and the frenetic action going every direction, serve really like an alarm bell going off next to your ear. It’s not conducive to critical thinking, but it’s also painfully and obviously contrived.

I draw one fundamental conclusion. The 9/11 truth seekers have been right all along. We must diffuse the 9/11 lie because the establishment yahoos, both Republican and Democrats, plan to ride this vile deception as long as they can.

By comparison, Ted Koppel’s sombre contemplative piece was full of verbal obfuscation. Koppel began his report with “by now every adult in America knows what happened on 9/11.” What an innocuous way to brush aside the fact that what happened is known, yes, and disputed! His language got no clearer as the program progressed. Lots of “clearly” this, when of course it very clearly could be unclear.

Koppel asked critical questions of such criminals as the author of the latest definition of torture and the commander of Gitmo who declined to admit that detainees had ever been tortured, but Koppel let Bush cabinet officials off with softballs and setups. Koppel let Tom Ridge appear thoughtful as to hold a mirror to himself asking what America is about, he let effete Senator Hays tell everyone that nuclear bombs can be made from items purchased at Home Depot, and Koppel let an NSA software developer appear pro-civil liberties by rejecting racial-profiling. His solution? Eavesdrop on everybody.

By assuming the role of white knight, Ted Koppel is really an effective mouthpiece for the Time-Warner machine, a major player in upholding corporate dominance. What do you think of his “point well taken” technique? As if his smilingly elusive subjects have just trumped him with something other than a quacking canard!

The good news about Koppel on Discovery is that we got a close look at the Bush operatives. They are in charge, yes, and they benefit from being presented by a charming, deep voiced newsman, but didn’t you recognize Larry, Moe and Curly right down to the haircuts? These guys are dopes! In morals, self-reflection and speech. It makes me giddy to contemplate because it’s not going to take much thinking power to take them down. Call me gullible, call me idealistic. It’ll take effort, determination and sacrifice, but it won’t take nucular-chemical-rocket science.