Ford Motor Co. will offer its 75,000 hourly workers packages of incentives to leave the company, cut one-third of its white-collar jobs and sell or shut down its parts-making plants as part of a turnaround plan intended to slash annual operating costs by $5 billion.

That’s according to an article in this morning’s Washington Post. Later in the article, blame for Ford’s dire financial straits is laid at the doorstep of rising fuel prices:

Both Ford and GM, reeling from global competition and high gasoline prices, have initiated massive programs to slash costs. In recent years, the Detroit automakers relied heavily on pickup trucks and large sport-utility vehicles, but sales of those vehicles are down and profits have plunged. The companies have made deep cuts as they try to shrink their way back to profitability.

In other words, as a commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition put it (I’m paraphrasing here, as the transcript is not yet available online), “Ford got caught selling gas guzzlers during a time when gas prices went very high.”

I have to confess that I am somewhat baffled by the implication that Ford (and GM, which is already going through the same sort of problems) had no way of knowing that gas prices might be going up. Aside from pundits cloistered inside the walls of the American Enterprise Institute and the mentally insane (what’s the difference, realy), I am not aware of anyone who thinks that long-term, oil prices are going anywhere but up. Nonetheless, Ford found the short-term sugar-high of profits made from selling 6mpg Excursions and F-350′s irresistable.

At the same time, it is hard to argue that there has not been a clear demand among the car-buying public in the US for giant 4-wheel drive land-yachts, and I imagine that if Ford had not been busily churning them out, some other company would have stepped in to fill the gap.

It is unclear who is to blame in this situation—the companies that have spent the last 5 years cranking out huge SUVs and pick-ups, or the people that have lined up to buy them. As usual in cases such as this one, there seems to be plenty of blame to go around.  Unfortunately for a large chunk of Ford employees and the communities that will most assuredly be deeply affected by those employees’ impending joblessness, there seems to be little analysis in the press beyond the immediate situation.

After screwing around with WordPress in the background for a week or two, I have decided to  make the change on the front end.  Nucleus, the CMS that the site was previously running on was okay, but WordPress has a lot more cool features, and seems to be under more active development.

Also, I can now have the letters “html” in my post without generating MySQL errors.  w00t!

There is obviously still some work to do, though.  I can’t guarantee that there won’t be the occasional errors as I tinker around with stuff, so please bear with me.  Any comments or suggestions are, as always, welcome.

In the meantime, I will be trying to keep to my more or less normal posting schedule.

I got this album two weeks ago, but, for a number of reasons, had not had a chance to give it a real listen until this past weekend. Part of the problem was that I had heard a couple of preview tracks last month and was not that impressed.

It must have been sometime between hearing those initial tracks last month and listening to the full album that I stopped smoking crack. Having given it several spins in the last few days, I can safely say that A Matter of Life and Death is easily as good as 2000′s New World Order. A number of reviewers are saying it is Iron Maiden’s best album since Powerslave. While I am not sure I am quite ready to jump on board with that claim, they are not wildly off the mark.

If it’s not clear from Eddie sitting on a tank surrounded by skeleton soldiers on the cover, this album is about war. While the lyrics and plotlines will be somewhat familiar to anyone who has heard Iron Maiden songs inspired by mythology and literature, it is interesting to hear the band seemingly reflecting on the world around them. Where previously the band wrote about the devil, Edgar Allen Poe, and Daedelus, here they reflect on soldiers stuck in wars they didn’t start, the atom bomb, and wars fought over religion. Not exactly novel topics, to be sure, but they are well-served by Iron Maiden’s big sound and epic song structures.

This album is a long one, clocking in at around seventy minutes, and there are no obvious singles. As a whole, though, it flows together quite well—not a concept album in the traditional sense, but thematically consistent. Iron Maiden sounds damn good here, too. The band is tight, but the music has a loose, spontaneous feel to it. Bruce Dickinson is in fine form on all the tracks, cementing (if he hadn’t already) his place as one of the best metal singers in the business.

Long story short, A Matter of Life and Death is a great album.

Today is Primary Day in New York, so I’ll be heading over to the library town hall this evening after work to cast my vote.

New York has closed primaries, so being a registered Democrat, I can only vote in the Democratic races. I am dubious about the merits of such a system, but I have not thought the question completely through. On its face, the “spoiler” argument seems to have some merit. However, I have to wonder if the risk of spoiler votes wouldn’t be worth taking to eliminate the advantage closed primaries provide to incumbents.

Speaking of incumbents, the lastest polls show Hillary Clinton running at 85% in the Senate race, as compared to Democratic challenger Jonathan Tasini’s 9%. Clinton will clearly win the Democratic nomination, but Tasini’s positions on most issues are a lot closer to mine than Clinton’s are.

So what will happen? I’ll vote for Tasini in the primary, he’ll lose, and then, come November, I’ll end up voting for Clinton in the general election. Part of me wonders why not just vote for Clinton now?

In theory, voting for an alternative candidate in a party primary should not have the same “throw your vote away” qualities as, say, voting for a third-party candidate in a general election. While the primary is still a winner-take-all affair, there is at least the theoretical possiblity that even if the alternative candidate loses, her/his positions will influence the winner’s platform.

While I imagine it is fairly unlikely that the 18 people who actually vote for Tasini will motivate Clinton to suddenly reverse her positions in support of the war in Iraq, “defense” of marriage, etc., there is still enough of the idealist/contrarian in me to go vote for the other guy. Perhaps if primary turn-out wasn’t so dreadfully low, this sort of thing might make more of a difference.

After a number of years of hearing quotes and seeing bits and pieces, I finally watched Sydney Lumet’s Network in its entirety last night.

For the most part, I liked it.

On a film-making level, it makes for a nice break from the rapid-fire editing and constant soundtracks of contemporary movies to see a film from a time when characters could have long conversations, and there wasn’t a different song playing every two minutes. Nothing blew up, nobody ran anywhere, and no segment of this film inexplicably took place in a nightclub filled with flashing strobes and thumping dance music.

As for the story/message, it’s pretty clear that the people behind Network had a big beef with TV, and they definitely weren’t afraid to say it. Nearly every single minute of this movie is devoted to blistering critiques of television and its corporate sponsors. Honestly, while I was mostly impressed with the quality of the story/plot, there were occasions when I found myself thinking, “Okay, we get it—TV is bad. Enough already.”

Then I would remind myself that this film was made in 1976. While criticism of television as a medium wasn’t exactly a novelty, it certainly had not become as widespread as it is today. It is also important to note that the film’s critique is not the simple one that we might expect in a contemporary film, e.g., “Honest Reporter speaks truth to power and is put down by Evil Corporate Executives.” The protagonists here are, in many ways, just as screwed up and corrupted as the bad guys—Howard Beale is clearly insane and ends up serving as the mouthpiece of Ned Beatty’s corporate overlord, while Max Schumaker is a philanderer who seems more or less resigned to watching the world fall apart around him.

Meanwhile, the Ecumenical Liberation Front, the terrorist group that gets their own reality show is more interested in the terms of their contract than ideology, and the Angela Davis-inspired Communist leader that acts as their liason with the network quickly becomes obsessed with ratings. No one here is above the fray

Overall, considering its age, Network does an excellent job of illustrating the all-pervading influence of mass media. Yes, it’s a bit message-heavy at times, but looking around for any major studio effort in the last ten years that comes close to the the level of criticism that this film achieves, I have yet to come up with anything.

I swear to god, if I have to read one more damn lefty blog post complaining about ABC’s 9/11 docu-drama, I’m going to scream.

While I understand the desire to take the fight to the Republicans, the sheer volume of type spilled over this tempest in a teapot is mind-boggling. Nearly every single political site I frequent has been hyperventilating about the planned miniseries for going on a week now, and it’s getting ridiculous.

I fail to see how this whole affair is any different than all the right-wing blogs getting their panties in a twist over non-stories like the supposed doctoring of photographs by Reuters and possibly faked ambulance attacks in Lebanon.

Seriously, people—get a grip.

I’m just sayins’, all.

Following the last two days’ worth of news and commentary regarding the President’s announcement of his “new plan” to deal with detainees by bringing them to Guantanamo Bay and trying them before Congressionally-sanctioned military tribunals, I am left with a couple of impressions.

As usual, these impressions are not positive.

First, this so-called plan is nothing more than a cynical election-season political ploy. These “new” tribunals would be exactly the same as the old ones, except that they would now have Congress’s stamp of approval. As an added bonus, the sanctioning legislation would be back-dated to 9/11/01, thereby excusing any law-breaking that the administration might have engaged in between then and now.

While the proposed plan is no different than the old set-up, the White House has now upped the ante by throwing high-value detainees such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah into the mix. Presumably, the hope is that, faced with the decision of either acquiescing to the President’s plan or being accused of letting 9/11 perpretrators go free in an election year, Democrats will take the easy way out, ceding the national security argument to Republicans as they did in 2002 and 2004.

While this aspect of the President’s announcement is being played up as a big win by right-wing pundits and many journalists, it can be counted as such only by overlooking the rather embarassing fact that the administration has competely reversed course on its claims regarding these detainees. Up to this point, the President and his supporters have denied that the CIA was even running secrect prisons, and anyone suggesting as much has been accused of treason and conspiracy-mongering. Now, though, they’re more than happy to admit that these guys were being held in clandestine CIA facilities, which would seem to indicate that they’re feeling the risk of losing one or both houses of Congress this November is greater than that associated with torturing people in off-the-books prisons.

The other aspect of this whole story that has struck me is that throughout the reporting of the torture debate and the military tribunals question, most of the emphasis in the press has been on the fact that these policies could result in captured US military personnel being treated more poorly.

While that is clearly an issue, it seems that the greater risk is that stemming from the Bush administration’s tendency to play fast and loose with the definitions of “terrorist” and “detainee.” Six year later, the mainstream media still is not even asking what is to prevent these powers from being deployed against US citizens. The hesitance to ask such questions is understandable, as it amounts to a de facto admission that the President is not to be trusted when he tells us that we have nothing to worry about. However, I have to wonder how much longer this hesitance will continue, what it will take for reporters to start mentioning this issue.

I got into a discussion a few nights ago about art, specifically, art that is displayed in a museum and what impact its display has on its effectiveness as art.

While I am told that this sort of conversation is old news to anyone who has done time in art school, it is a topic that, while not completely novel to me, I have never explored in any depth before. Consequently, any art majors out there will have to indulge me for a few minutes.

This particular conversation came about as a result of the Artist’s Choice exhibit (“Herzog & de Meuron, Perception Restrained”) currently on display at the MoMA, wherein the two architects have attempted to bring various pieces from the museum’s collection together in a way that will surprise you. While their explanation of it is unsurprisingly pretentious, the idea is that the public is used to going to an art museum and looking at neatly organized and professionally explained paintings hung on neutral-colored walls. Here, the art is all jumbled together, viewable only behind chicken wire and through narrow slots in the walls, or playing on ceiling-mounted video screens that have to be looked at via small hand-held mirrors.

By imposing these contraints on museum-goers’ experience, Herzog and de Meuron hope to wake them up to the fact that seeing art is not something to be taken for granted. Talking about this exhibit, we got onto the topic of whether the stuff hanging on the walls of a museum can even really be considered “art,” or whether by being added to an officially sanctioned collection and made available for widespread consumption, it is stripped of its power and turned into a commodity.

The conversation meandered on from there and eventually turned to other topics, but what struck me afterward was how similar it was to a conversation I had had a few weeks ago about zoos. (more…)

I know I am not the first to say it, and I’m sure I won’t be the last, but watching the gears of the Bushpublican war-mongering machine churning away with the anti-Iran rhetoric, I have to wonder if there is even any point in opposing the run-up.

On the first day back from the end-of-summer political break, the White House is out of the gates with a brand-spanking new “strategy” document for winning the War on Terror^TM. I use quotes around the word “strategy” because the document contains about as much actual strategy as the average issue of TV Guide. Unsurprisingly, it is filled with empty rhetoric about spreading democracy and fighting Islamic totalitarianism, summed up in the brilliant sentence “Since the September 11 attacks, America is safer, but we are not yet safe.”

To no one’s surprise, the document makes nary a mention of Osama bin Laden, and discusses al Qaeda largely in the past tense. The focus is now on “state sponsors of terrorism,” namely, Iran and Syria.

On top of that, we now have the President giving one speech after another in which he makes broad statements about the evils of Iran, while his various proxies make all sorts of outlandish claims about the threat that country and its leadership pose to America, democracy, puppies, apple pie, and everything else good and true in the world.

This whole process appears to be playing out in the same manner as it did four years ago during the run-up to the war in Iraq. While that war is now going exactly as badly as its opponents predicted, it seems to have little bearing on current events surrounding the Iran question. The President, not exactly known for his love of nuance and intrigue, has clearly set his mind on beating up another country in order to whip up his war-mongering, knuckle-dragging base. Who exactly is going to oppose it this time around, and how will such opposition have any more influence than it did last time?

At this stage, I honestly do not see what is going to prevent another debacle on an order at least as ugly as the war in Iraq, if not worse.

Perhaps inspired by my recent revisitation of old favorite Front Line Assembly, I have been going through the collection to find albums that I listened to a lot in the past, but not so much anymore.

What I’m looking for here are the doughnut hole albums (or “lucky duckies,” as the Wall Street Journal editorial page might refer to them)—stuff that I didn’t stop listening to through any conscious decision, but which has simply slipped through the cracks as newer material has piled up.

Today’s entry is Is This It? by The Strokes.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I liked this album a lot when I first heard it. Due to the insane hype surrounding its release in 2001, it was considered fairly unhip in some circles to acknowledge that The Strokes were anything more than poseurs. However, these are the same circles that consider any band that someone else has even so much as heard of not worth listening too. As for the hype, it was largely attributable to the British music press, the same bunch that would have us believe that Oasis, rather than being a couple of drunk jerks making half-assed pop-rock, were actually the second coming of John and Paul.

Listening to Is This It? for the first time in at least three years, I was not disappointed. What I like about this album is that the songs, while well-constructed and well-produced, have an edge to them. Sure, everyone in the band might be a Manhattan prep school rich kid, but they still manage to pull off The Rock.

Sadly, The Strokes’ subsequent records do not hold up. Room On Fire and First Impressions of Earth are decent albums, but as with so many bands that have a great debut, they have a re-run quality about them. It’s a shame, but I have to wonder if the post-punk-influenced style that The Strokes embody really provides much room for growth.