Transit Strike and Syriana Spoiler/Review

This post originally appeared on the now defunct blog, Team Sakib.

Saw Syriana recently. Great movie. Will review it below (more a polemical rant than a review). Also, quick take on the transit strike.

As for the transit strike, it was curiously worthless for the union, for the Transit Authority, and for the city. Really, the only person who benefited was Michael Bloomberg. He got the requisite political capital that comes from leading a people through some minimal hardship. The union struck for a retirement age of 55, not the proposed 62, with 100% for all new employees, and a approximately 6% raise in salary per year, instead of the proposed 3% raise. I'm a fan of collective bargaining, and generally screwing the man over, but for a group making an average salary of 50k per year with no requirement of higher education and a full pension, the transit workers sure raised a lot of hell. Well, to be fair, the transit workers had very little to do with it. Roger Trussant, the head of the local NYC Transit Workers Union, is probably to blame for the whole deal. In an effort to further his own political career (inside organized labor), Rog pulled classically unimaginative and out of touch tactics to create a cause of grievance where none existed. The strike hurt the labor movement, it hurt his career and it hurt the city. The city was hit by days of lost work, hours of gridlock, $$ not spend on shopping, and time spent driving instead of taking public transport. His career is dead; he led his union into a no-win strike, ruled illegal by the courts, ruled inappropriate by the international labor movement, and declared selfish by the new New York media (Post/Daily News/Fox). Lastly, this move is another in a long line of dumbass moves by organized labor that show absolutely no creativity or vision. At this point, the labor movement is simply another coopted tool of Corrupt Corporate America (the 'CCA'- more on them later). Get some frickin' brains and get yourselves to China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Malaysia, Eastern Europe, Pakistan. Fighting NAFTA was stupid. If business can go multinational, shouldnt collective bargaining diversify as well? WTF is an "American job" anyways? Last I checked, the trade stiching soccer balls had no nationality. Niether does putting a rivet into a car or making tiny electronics or making Banana Republic pants. Imagine if the AFL-CIO represented workers in Mexico, Malaysia, and Michigan. What kind of contracts would Nike sign then? Wouldn't that help level the labor playing field across borders? No trade union will ever even dare to think along these lines. Its a shame. A DAMN SHAME.

switching gears to Syriana...

The hardest part of formulating a strategic response to the threat is defining Islam as a political and military enemy. Once that psychological barrier has been crossed, defense sources tell me, the development of countermeasures -- such as educating the public about the militant nature of Islam and exploiting "critical vulnerabilities" or rifts within the Muslim faith and community -- can begin.
~Fighting words from the Pentagon and David Horowitz.

Syriana is a movie about the other country that resides in these 50 states, Corrupt Corporate America, or the CCA. I distinguish the CCA because it is NOT the United States of America, the country of which I proudly call myself a citizen. The USA is the Bill of Rights, baseball, apple pie, etc. CCA is Enron, Rockerfeller, Iran-Contra, Halliburton, the Iraq War, the Vietnam War, Watergate, foreign aid to third world dictators, death squads in Nicaragua, the assassinations of Mossadegh, Malcolm X, JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., crack in the 1980s, rigging of the 2000 election, detention, disappearance and torture of thousands of innocent A-rabs and Pakistanis without charge, shadow deaths in unknown wars in Africa, billions of dollars of bloody diamonds sitting in DeBeir's warehouses in Canada, and perpetuated war in the Middle East to keep oil just inaccessible enough to keep prices high and production just below demand.

MOVIE SPOILER BELOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In Syriana, an oil-rich Persian gulf state, the US has backed the ruling monarchy for at least a generation. The ruling family has become fat and somewhat distracted by its high-tech gadgets, Mercedes Benzes and $50,000 per night hotels. The aging king is somewhat old and dying, so the succession struggle between the elder son and the second born son is somewhat on. Both sons are western educated and have enjoyed the fruits of being rich beyond belief. The older son seems more ambitious than the younger and has ideas of reforming his nations economy, implementing parliamentary democracy, bringing an energy exchange to the Middle East and diversifying investment to allow Chinese contracts for oil distribution. All of this is disconcerting for recently merged Connex-Kileen, a massive Texas oil conglomerate. Connex-Kileen dispatches its Chief Corporate Counsel lawyer to talk to the second born prince. Meanwhile, the CIA puts a hit out on the first born prince, formulating a flimsy cover that he's some sort of terrorist supporter. A little wine and a little bravado is all it takes for the second born prince to hop on board and with a quick meeting with some more Connex-Kileen lawyers, the king is ready to work the first born son out of the equation and declare the second one the successor.

Meanwhile, Matt Damon becomes the first born son's economic adviser. He says that the kingdom is "squandering the greatest natural resource known to man" and that the nation's "number two export is second hand goods, and number three is dates, which lose $5 per pound". Damon says the business community's perception of the kingdom is that "you lived in tents and cut each others heads off 100 years ago, and that's where you'll be again in another 100" and that the monarchy would be better served investing in "infrastructure instead of overpriced airplanes" and luxury cars and what not. The first born retorts that every so often the government receives "a call from the American President, saying that he has unemployment in Texas or Arizona or Washington state" and that the monarchy must by some airplanes or televisions or American cars. He also points out that all it took was one contract with China and he was immediately both a God-less communist and an anti-business, Islamic fanatic.

The key to Syriana is that no elected official was ever really shown and no real government figure was ever involved in the decision making process. The CIA's involvement was mostly as an uniformed executive wing of the oil companies. The minute the Connex-Kileen lawyer secured the second born son as an ally, the CIA immediately had a hit out on the first born prince, and a director level one at that. The oil companies formed the Committee for the Liberation of Iran as a group to create chaos in Iran to block the construction of a Chinese pipeline through the country. As soon as that Committee started meeting, Hezbollah was already contacted about potential Irani targets to take out in Lebanon.

5:51 AM- Falling asleep
will finsih this post later...