Friday, December 20, 2013

Charles Pierce Poses Old Timey Questions About Civil Rights



Today's questions:
Does your job own your civil liberties when you're off the clock? Does it own your thoughts, expressed freely, when you're home? Are we saying that the government can't abridge your constitutional rights, but that The Brand can?
And the answer is, of course, that the question is moot:



In the world of associate managers, smart phones, a never-ending avalanche of last-minute boss-has-gotta-have-this projects, +7% unemployment, three applicants for every job and "other duties as assigned", you're never off the clock. You thoughts expressed freely on the internet or in range of a smart phone camera while you happen to be sitting at home, or in a cab, or at a party are part of your public profile that every hiring manager and HR gatekeeper will be gleaning for the rest of your life to find reasons fire you, or not to hire you in the first place.

So unless you're rich, well-connected or have one of the 17 jobs remaining in America with a strong labor union at your back, congratulations, you are now a proud resident of Rand Paul's vision of utopia: a never-ending, no-rules cage match where mobs of desperate individuals are pitted against machines and monied, corporate interests and unregulated capitalism decides the winner.

Yowza!

Yowza!

Yowza!

2 comments:

D. said...

Gee, shouldn't we all be off committing suicide right about now?

(Compress people long enough and you get Robespierre. Robespierre was shall we say rather wholesale. The oligarchs might want to think about that a bit.)

Monster from the Id said...

D, the Mr. Potter Elite think their shiny new surveillance tech will enable them to detect and neutralize (in one way or another) all potential Robespierres before they can flower.

The ones who do think about it at all, that is. Many of them aren't nearly as smart as Potter, being more like the Pythons' Upper Class Twits (the former Chimperor comes to mind).