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“Commentary: Make wearing a flag pin the 28th Amendment”

from

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/19/roland.martin.05.19 :

“…..we need to lead a national movement to demand that Congress and the states make requiring officeholders to wear a flag lapel pin the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution…..”

–Roland S. Martin

Roland S. Martin is a nationally award-winning journalist and CNN contributor. Martin is studying to receive his master’s degree in Christian communications at Louisiana Baptist University.

================

Pleh! (”help” spelled backwards. Thank you, the pet!)

I’m still gonna vote for Ralph Nader, but I really like what Obama said about how it’s more important to protect the Constitusion than the flag:

http://obama.senate.gov/press/060627-obama_statement_29/

Democrats tend to get under my skin, but some Republicans more. I get the impression that many Republicans haven’t even read the Constitution.

Regardless, I really can’t vote for anyone in the upcoming election. As much as I WOULD love to see a woman or black president, Hilary and Obama would wreck this country with unchecked immigration and unchecked social services. But McCaine, as much as I like his fiscial policies, is anti-abortion and very pro-war in Iraq. And very conservative on morals issues.

Bleah!

Is there any way we can Barry Goldwater? I’d vote for that guy.

I kinda liked Ron Paul, and apparently he’s somehow still in the race.He’s very into SMALL government. But he’s also kind of a nut. Still, I may vote for him.

I decided to get creative. Check out the nifty 404 page I made today while the furnace cleaners were here.

Apparently it doesn’t work perfectly on all browsers. Click below to see what I’m seeing on my end:

Jesse Kidd liked the 22-year-old demo of me jammin’ with East Bay Ray from Dead Kennedys. It was recorded when Jesse was a baby before Jesse was born.

Jesse sat down in his room in Australia this week, added drums, and sent me the MP3. It’s cool. GRAB THE MP3 HERE.

My book $30 Film School was originally published by Muska & Lipman. Different pressings of it have also come out under the banner of Thomson Learning and Course Technology, all owned by the parent company, Thomson Learning. Thomson is a huge company and print a lot of the textbooks purchased by US schools. Thomson treated me OK and the book sold well, but in 2006, they were bought out by Cengage Learning, a UK company. Cengage is owned by multinational investment group, Apax.

The first printing of the second pressing of $30 Film School shipped without the DVD. I’m STILL fielding e-mails from irate buyers who write me about it. Those books are still in a warehouse somewhere and getting out to store shelves somehow, even though it came out two years ago and the books were supposed to be recalled and fixed, according to what I was told.

Cengage is recently getting even more sloppy with book production. A few months ago they asked me to do tech updates for third pressing of second edition of $30 Film School. I spent about 40 unpaid hours doing the updates, sent them in. When they sent me the third pressing of the second edition, they’d made none of my changes. This was, according them, a mistake on their part. (And they did send me the third pressing, you can tell the pressing by the last number on the descending numeric series on the the copyright page of any book.)

Worse than that, the book they sent was poorly bound and started falling apart after I’d read it for five minutes. And it was not a test copy. It was what they’d printed to ship.

I’ve talked to some people higher up the food chain than me in the publishing biz, and they say that these are not isolated problems, and that the new owners, Cengage, seem to care more about profits than making decent products.

MWD

I’ve been a Bank of America customer since 1993. I have three accounts with them, my personal account, joint account with my wife, and a corporate account for my business.

I recently tried to have one of the companies I do business with switch over from sending me checks to doing direct deposit. Should be simple enough. But being dyslexic, I accidentally switched two numbers in my account number on the form I faxed them. They wired my next payment, the princely sum of $86.90, into someone else’s account. This was due to my own error, and I told Bank of America this when I called them about it on April 4th.

BofA told me I had to have the company that sent the money revert the error. I called that company. They told me that BofA had to take care of it. I called BofA back. BofA said they could see my money on their screen in that other person’s account. I asked them to please move it into my account. They said they couldn’t, but that they would transfer it out of the person’s account and put a hold onto it until I filed a complaint, the complaint was reviewed, and then, if the bank decided in my favor, I would get the money back. I filed a complaint.

This turned into over a month of near-daily calls, waiting on hold, being transfered, being told something was put into my record of actions taken, finding out later that it had not been. I felt like I was getting the runaround.

Finally, I was told that I’d been talking to the wrong department, and was transfered over to the “W-Bar” department, who told me I should be talking to the “Electronic Claims Service department.” They told me that the money would be refunded to my account after I signed the affidavit they were mailing me. The affidavit never arrived. I called back, waited on hold more, and was finally told that they had denied my claim again, but never bothered to tell me.

All in all I spent probably 20 hours on the phone dealing with this tiny issue. This seems like a lot of work for a paltry sum of $86.90, and it probably is, but I feel that Bank of America has screwed me. They said they took the money out of that other account, they won’t give it back to me, so that means they are keeping it. On the schoolyard, that’s called stealing your lunch money. On the street, it’s a mugging. I’m not sure what it’s called in the corporate world, but I don’t like it.

This all makes me think about an internal Bank of America document I once saw. (I was a temp worker and signed no NDA, so I feel that I am free to mention this.) I was temping in San Francisco at Bank of America in 1998, right after Bank of America was bought out by NationsBank (the North Carolina firm you’ve never heard of that owns Bank of America). The document was a PowerPoint presentation for internal use. I was asked to format it, using text that already existed. The basic premise of the text, as far as I could tell, was this: “Poor customers cost Bank of America money, we don’t want them. But it’s illegal for us to refuse to service them. Let’s try to find ways to make their banking experience so unpleasant that they go elsewhere.” The document suggested leaving them on hold for an extra long time, nickel-and-dime them with charge after charge, and outright refusing to settle up with things upon initial filing of complaints. Make poor people stress over their little bit of money until they give up.

The office at BofA where I was doing this work was almost empty. Most lower-level and mid-level people had been laid off. The lady in charge of creating the PowerPoint presentation had a corner office and was the most nervous person I’ve ever worked for. She was so worried that she would be next under the corporate hatchet that she was literally screaming at me, and everyone else, for no reason. It was the only temp job I’ve ever had where I called my employment agency and asked to be removed from the job.

Nothing I’ve stated here is slander, because none of it is untrue. I am willing to sign an affidavit that all of it is true, including and especially the part about the internal Bank of America document enumerating ways to get rid of poor people as BofA clients.

– Michael W. Dean

p.s. Here’s a list of controversies about Bank of America, many of which seem to me like they’re a result of the types of policies outlined in the PowerPoint presentation I mentioned.

So, John Beers mailed me the master tapes (multitrack and mix-down) of the Baby Opaque stuff the other day. Was really neat…first, I don’ have anything from back then, except my body, mind and spirit, and stuff that people who had a more responsible 90s than me, like John have saved. Thanks John!

Second, I haven’t seen multi-track tape in over ten years. Wow. Blast from the past. I felt like an archaeologist excavating my past, and the past…the analogue past.

Third, John also included a cassette I’d lent him. He included a short note apologizing for taking so long to return it, but I want to thank him for taking so long, because I’m finally stable enough not to lose things like that. Thanks John!

The tape was two songs of me and East Bay Ray jamming, around the time Dead Kennedys were breaking up. They had a few gigs booked that they were playing (including a series of shows in Brazil, and they didn’t want to pass that up, because they’d never been there), but they were kaput. Ray was looking to start a new band, as he put it, “A pop band to get on MTV.” He answered my “bassist seeks band” flier and we played music around that time, twice (we later played once more, when he played on my solo record.)

First time was at my friend Beau’s house, where I was couch surfing. That jam included was this first song “I’m Not Restless” (>>GET MP3.) It’s a Baby Opaque song that Bomb later recorded also (the only song both bands did, though Baby Opaque did not record it). The song is good, but this recording isn’t that great…I taught it to him, we played it once, then recorded it and moved on to the next song. (If any drummers wanna play to it and send me the track, I’ll remix and add it on here.)
Since I also sang, and not just played bass, he also gave me a tape that day of a song he’d written and recorded in his home studio. He played guitar, bass and drum machine on it. He asked me to write lyrics and melody to it and come to his house in Oakland the following week, and we did. I recorded the song, which I called “Drivin’ Fast” (>>GET MP3). Ray told me I peed too much, he gave me a rough mix, and I left. He called me the next day and said he was going a “different direction”.

He finally assembled a band, and I went to see them at the Firehouse (a.k.a the 16th note) club on 16th street. He was great, the band was horrible. Skinny pouser female vocalist, like Pat Benatar but not as good, adequit but boring drummer, bass player and keyboard (!) player, and Ray. Ray was fucking great (I love his playing and loved his muted stage presence and his cool look…like Ric Ocasek crossed with Roy Orbison). But the band made me sad.

So….there you have it, the story and the songs. The songs are not me or Ray’s finest work, by FAR, but “Drivin’ Fast” does have it’s moments. And it’s about the world killing itself at an exponential future-shock rate, with traffic and dependence on oil as the metaphor….Something that seems very relavant to me now. It’s also about finding your way in life. Hearing it is sort of like getting a postcard as a middle-aged man from myself as a young man. Neat! Especially since I haven’t heard it in 20 years.

I love the last line “is life the classroom, the waiting room, or the party itself?”

MEW