2010 Plans for mysoapboxrant !

2010 Plans for mysoapboxrant !

It is going to be a year full of information, ways to take action and stories shared by people just like you!

If have have been following our BLOG or just found us – please share your stories/experiences with us!

This BLOG has always been about using your voice! So come out in 2010 and make a difference.

If you wish to become an ongoing contributor, please contact us.

Happy ( BETTER ) New Year for 2010 !

YouTube Channel

I just started working on my YouTube Channel.

http://www.youtube.com/user/mysoapboxrant

More to follow soon…..

Artwork by MAGMO The Destroyer

Posted on my blog you will see some amazing artwork by MAGMO The Destroyer.

Visit http://www.magmothedestroyer.org/ for more from this incredible artist.

What ebaY doesn’t want sellers to know about scam buyers Part 1

Story by: Ming The Merciless – a featured blogger on sites like www.auctionbytes.com and our newest contributor to www.mysoapboxrant.wordpress.com

What ebaY doesn’t want sellers to know about scam buyers

Part 1

Many ebay sellers have already learned the hard way just what a buyer cesspool ebay has become. Aided by ebaY’s ongoing roll out of one set of anti seller policies after another, buyers can easily file false claims against a seller that can result in either the seller losing both the payment and the merchandise or the seller having to accept a return of item that wasn’t the item purchased or shipped. Contrary to what ebaY and PayPal want sellers to believe, sellers do have recourse.

When ebay sellers evaluate any ebaY policy, it’s crucial to keep uppermost in mind that ebaY policies are designed to protect ebaY’s best interests and profitability — not the best interests or profitability of its customers, the sellers. Once that is understood, then why ebaY behaves in the ways that it does becomes crystal clear.

When a seller is defrauded, ebaY and PayPal normally refuse to admit that the buyer has committed the crime of fraud and, in some cases, more than one unless the media becomes involved. The reason is that in most disputed cases the seller cannot recover the original payment reversal or the final value fees so ebaY and PayPal have no vested monetary or ethical interest or incentive whatsoever (1) to proactively protect sellers before the fraud occurs, (2) to have in place an unweighted dispute resolution process that’s equitable to both parties after a dispute has been filed, and (3) to admit buyer fraud when it occurs and return confiscated funds to sellers.

In fact, ebaY benefits monetarily (this is what ebay calls “monetizing” the site) by creating a dispute process whose default position favors the buyer therefore encouraging buyers to file complaints. PayPal profits by collecting interest whenever they remove and hold a seller’s funds while the dispute is open. When a buyer initiates a legitimate or fraudulent chargeback, PayPal benefits because they remove and hold a seller’s money until they’re compelled to reimburse the credit card company or return the money to the seller’s account. They refuse to reimburse the seller for lost interest and instead keep the interest money to enhance their revenues.

EbaY’s and PayPal’s goal is to transfer as much of the liability and expense as possible for any transaction to the seller from beginning to end while maximizing their earnings for the transaction from start to finish including the dispute process. The quaint concept of business ethics has little or no relevance to ebaY’s e-commerce model.

What can seller do when a buyer files a bogus not received or snad complaint and the seller has complied with all ebaY/PayPal requirements and still lose a dispute?

What can a seller do when the buyer returns a rock instead of the $3,000 laptop the seller shipped?

What can a seller do if ebaY and whoever they choose as a consultant determine that a legitimate branded product that the seller obtained legally is a knockoff, allows the buyer to keep the item or instructs them to send it someplace for “destruction,” and removes the entire amount including shipping from the seller’s account?

Read the answers in my next blog comments here. Believe me, sellers can fight back and be very “noisy” doing it.

On Tap Wednesday: eBay Town Hall, Q3 Results and Analyst Call

On Tap Wednesday: eBay Town Hall, Q3 Results and Analyst Call

Originally posted on:
By: Ina Steiner
Tue Oct 20 2009 15:01:29
http://www.auctionbytes.com

It’s a big day for eBay tomorrow, with the release of third-quarter earnings, a conference call with analysts, and a Town Hall meeting with users.

eBay is scheduled to release earnings on October 21, 2009, which it generally does after market close (4 pm Eastern), and its Q3 2009 earnings call with analysts is scheduled for 5 pm Eastern (link). Note that Amazon.com’s call with analysts is scheduled for October 22, 2009 at 5 pm Eastern (link), and Overstock.com has not yet announced when it will release third-quarter earnings.

According to the eBay Town Hall page on WSradio, which broadcasts the audio stream of the events, the next live town hall is scheduled for October 21 from 6:30 to 8:00 pm Eastern.

eBay takes call in questions during the event, or you can email your questions to townhall@ebay.com.

Analysts will likely want to know more about Skype’s sale and legal battles, PayPal and Bill Me Later, and of course what kinds of results eBay is seeing on the marketplace after recently rolling out changes to the PowerSeller program and to search. Seller questions will likely focus on the recent changes as well, including the Top Rated Seller program, traffic to the site, and lots more! Got questions? Post them below.

UPDATE 10/21/09: Here’s the announcement from eBay about today’s Town Hall Meeting posted today at 12:30 pm Eastern. (Not a lot of notice!)

Call 1-888-327-0061 and ask your question on the air or email your question or comment to townhall@ebay.com. eBay will be taking questions on all topics related to the Fall 2009 Seller Release.

Todays’ thoughts….

Arrogance and Ignorance have no place in society.

Arrogance:
Pronunciation: \ˈer-ə-gən(t)s, ˈa-rə-\
Function: noun
Date: 14th century

: an attitude of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or in presumptuous claims or assumptions

Ignorance:
Pronunciation: \ˈig-n(ə-)rən(t)s\
Function: noun
Date: 13th century

: the state or fact of being ignorant : lack of knowledge, education, or awareness

Glenn Beck Slams Obama Encouraging Volunteerism: “Almost Like We’re Living In Mao’s China”

Glenn Beck Slams Obama Encouraging Volunteerism: “Almost Like We’re Living In Mao’s China”

Huffington Post | Nicholas Graham
First Posted: 10-19-09 08:46 PM | Updated: 10-20-09 02:02 PM

The Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF), a Hollywood charitable organization, has helped to organize a push in the television industry to encourage volunteerism among the citizenry. The support for volunteerism will be spread across 60 shows, and in some cases woven into the plot lines.

Enter Glenn Beck, who reads in this yet another conspiracy theory that President Obama is using Hollywood in an attempt to turn American in a communist nation: “Well, this is fantastic. It’s almost like we’re living in Mao’s China right now.”

Beck seems worried that by encouraging more volunteerism we’re creating a problem, or a crisis, that will be exploited later, but it is difficult to follow the logic. Basically, Beck’s main point is that President Obama and Hollywood and the media are colluding to control your lives by promoting more community service and civic participation:

Celebrities are coming together to make it cool to volunteer. Disney gives you a free day at the park. This is all fine, but doesn’t it seem a little bit convenient that all of this comes out now at the same time the Obama administration is calling for it? Obama controls the message through the media he holds in his pocket. Or in his little hand. And soon if you disobey, he’ll just go [Beck slaps his hand]. Now the message will be embedded in television shows. Isn’t this great? Aren’t you proud of what we’re doing? Oh, this certainly is change.

‘The Cove:’ Japan Has a Dark Secret It Hopes the World Will Never See

‘The Cove:’ Japan Has a Dark Secret It Hopes the World Will Never See By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. Posted August 6, 2009.

Suspenseful and shocking film exposes the slaughter of tens of thousands of dolphins and the billion-dollar industry that profits from selling them.

Ric O’Barry almost looks crazy. He is driving a car, with a mask over his mouth, crouching low in his seat, hoping not to be recognized.

If the authorities catch him, there’s no telling what will happen to him. He’s cruising through the misty streets of Taiji, Japan, a small town with a really big secret, he says. And it’s a secret that the town’s fishermen want to hide from the rest of the world at all costs.

This is how the documentary, The Cove, opens. And it turns out O’Barry is not crazy, he’s on a mission — probably one of the most important in the history of conservation. And it’s personal.

He used to be a world-famous dolphin trainer. He captured and trained the five dolphins who played Flipper in the hit TV show of the same name. The show’s popularity sparked a dolphin craze that has continued since the 1960s and has grown into $2 billion industry in the U.S. alone.

But while places like Sea World might be raking in the cash, O’Barry has spend the last 35 years trying to end dolphin captivity — having had a change of heart after the tragic suicide of one of the main dolphins in Flipper. (If you want to know how a dolphin can commit suicide, you’ll have to see The Cove.)

It turns out these intelligent and charismatic creatures don’t do well in captivity — half of all captive dolphins die within two years. They’re used to swimming 40 miles a day, diving hundreds of feet deep and hanging out with their close-knit pod. Apparently jumping through hoops and swimming with tourists in a pool just isn’t an adequate substitute.

But that hasn’t stopped the plethora of marine theme parks and the horrific industry that has grown to support it. It has, however, inspired O’Barry to expose some of the worst of it, which is why he’s hiding out in Taiji.

In this quaint fishing village, each fall, tens of thousands of migrating dolphins are captured, some of which are sold into captivity (for up to $150,000 a piece), and the rest are taken to a secret cove and slaughtered (to be sold for their meat — sometimes falsely described as whale meat).

O’Barry wants the world to see what’s happening in Taiji, and that means staying out of reach of the authorities and the local fishermen, who would very much like him arrested, deported, or worse. It also means trying to get into the secret cove with a camera.

The film kicks off with O’Barry joining forces with filmmaker Louis Psihoyos and the Ocean Preservation Society to put together a dream team of sorts that will get them into the cove and capture the horror on film.

It’s reminiscent of Oceans 11 to be sure — there are underwater sound and camera experts, special-effects artists to hide microphones in fake rocks, marine explorers and world-reknown free divers who help get the gear into place, and unmanned drones.

There are secret night-time missions, viewed on film with military-grade thermal cameras, where the crew is constantly dodging either the police, the Japanese mafia or irate fishermen.

It’s a thriller. You’re perched on the edge of your seat wondering if they’ll get the footage they need or if they’ll get nabbed. Sometimes it’s so engaging, you forget to wonder if you actually want to see what they’re trying to tape. And that’s the film’s greatest accomplishment.

Mixed in to the night-vision goggles and camouflage narrative are the images and interviews that make you realize why these people are risking their lives to make a movie: to save some dolphins.

These creatures are incredible. And the filmmaking is incredibly beautiful — like Winged Migration with cetaceans. If they get the footage, you’re going to want to see it, you’re going to have to, because of the injustice of it.

There’s also another layer of complexity to the film. There’s the political stuff. Commercial whaling was outlawed in 1986, but dolphins — members of the same family — aren’t protected.

The International Whaling Commission deems them “small cetaceans” and, apparently, therefore worthy of slaughter. Japan, which has tripled its dolphin killing since the ban, kills 23,000 dolphins each year, and thousands more are sold into captivity.

The country is also trying to overturn the whaling ban, and as the film shows, it is offering financial support to small, bankrupt nations to get folks on their side.

And there’s also some serious health issues. Dolphins, sadly, are toxic-waste dumps these days. Their meat has been shown to have up to 1,000 times the allowable level of mercury. Eating their meat could be hazardous to a person’s health, but often consumers may not know they’re eating it.

The Cove shows that dolphin meat is sometimes passed off as whale meat — and was even being served in school lunches in Taiji.

All this might seem a little depressing. And in some ways, it is. But you won’t notice until after the film, because you’ll be so blown away by what’s on screen. It will captivate you, it will break your heart, and hopefully, it will make you jump out of your seat and help.

And if so, here’s what you can do:

* Learn more about dolphins in captivity.
* Choose the safest fish to eat.
* Help those on the front line by visiting Save Japan’s Dolphins.
* Support the Ocean Preservation Society with your donation.

But for starters, gather up your own pod and go see the film.

Bonus Bandits: Why Are Bank Execs Making a Killing in the Midst of Catastrophe?

Bonus Bandits: Why Are Bank Execs Making a Killing in the Midst of Catastrophe?

By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality. Posted October 20, 2009.

Welcome to post-meltdown America. One year and counting after last fall’s high-finance collapse, average Americans are reeling and Wall Street is rejoicing.

America’s biggest banks, amid the shakiest economic times since the 1930s, last week announced record profits — and deposited record billions into bonus pools for their top executives and traders. How did U.S. lawmakers and officialdom respond?

In Congress, a pivotal House committee gave the green light to a Wall Street regulatory reform bill that “does not do enough,” disappointed consumer advocates quickly charged, “to protect taxpayers and our economy.”

The nation’s top executive pay regulator did some disappointing, too. “Pay czar” Ken Feinberg, the White House pick to oversee pay at the nation’s biggest bailed-outs, last week convinced soon-to-retire Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis to give up his $1.5 million 2009 salary. Why did Lewis agree? He gets to walk away, at year end, with a retirement package worth $69.3 million.

Welcome to post-meltdown America. One year and counting after last fall’s high-finance collapse, average Americans are reeling and Wall Street is rejoicing. The boom’s back!

In fact, for Wall Street’s premiere financial giant, business is booming better than ever. Goldman Sachs last week announced $3.19 billion in third-quarter earnings, about quadruple the firm’s quarterly profit a year ago. Goldman now has $16.7 billion sitting in its bonus pool.

That pool, by the end of December, will likely top off close to $23 billion, enough to pay each and every Goldman Sachs employee over $700,000 if the bonus dollars were divided equally.

The bonus dollars, past practice makes clear, won’t be equally divided. In 2007, Wall Street’s previous record year, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein took home $68 million. In 2008, 212 Goldman Sachs power suits stuffed their pockets with over $3 million each.

This year figures to be even more lucrative. Goldman, as one financial analyst points out, has so far in 2009 “earned three times as much as it did in all of 2008.”

That’s not, to be sure, all good news for Goldman. In a record recession, record earnings create a bit of a public relations problem. To forestall any serious political blowback, Goldman’s movers and shakers have opened a “charm offensive.” Message: We feel your pain. Reality: Goldman feels no pain — and doesn’t intend to start any time soon.

The $200 million Goldman is now donating to charity, as the first thrust in its charm offensive, equals a mighty 6 percent of the firm’s third-quarter profit.

No other U.S. financial firm is matching Goldman’s stunning success. But you won’t find other firms complaining. One new survey, released last week, estimates that 23 top U.S. banks and hedge funds will shell out $140 billion in 2009 compensation, $23 billion more than their previous all-time record high set in 2007.

“We can’t go back,” a resolute White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told the nation earlier this year, “to the type of pay structure that incentivized wild speculation, like we had before this economic collapse.”

We now have gone back. But could the situation have turned out any differently? Could U.S. officials be doing more, given the complexities of our globalized economy, to prevent a return to standard executive pay operating procedure? They surely could.

At a minimum, U.S. authorities could be insisting, as British officials did last Wednesday, that every big bank in the nation either agree to the modest executive pay reforms that surfaced at last month’s global economic summit in Pittsburgh or lose the right to do business with the government.

The reforms the UK is imposing will keep bankers from immediately collecting all the bonus dollars they “earn” this year. They’ll have to wait several years, a delay intended to prevent bankers and traders from cashing in on risky short-term deals that later go sour.

But these UK reforms don’t speak at all to the overall size of the rewards that can go to the world’s banking and corporate elite. They should. Governments, as Institute for Policy Studies analyst Sarah Anderson noted last week on the PBS News Hour, should be leveraging “the power of the public purse to encourage more rational pay practices throughout the economy.”

Congress and the White House could do that, Anderson explained, by “limiting how much companies can deduct from their taxes” for executive pay and “using procurement policies to give preferences to companies that have more reasonable gaps between what their executives and their workers are making.”

One day after Anderson’s comments, progressive lawmakers took a daring move in just the direction she was suggesting. Progressive lawmakers in France, that is. The legislators brought before the French National Assembly the world’s boldest executive pay reform package yet.

The new French legislation, if enacted, would cap executive pay, in companies subsidized by tax dollars, at 25 times the pay of a company’s lowest-paid worker.

In all other companies, boards of directors would set the executive-worker multiple that determines the executive pay ceiling, after a process that includes worker input. Shareholders would have the final say on what that multiple would be.

Support in France for an outright income cap — a “maximum wage” — has been building since last spring when the popular French weekly, Marianne, launched a petition campaign for a “salaire maximum.” How far politically can this campaign now go?

One appraisal came last week from Jean-Philippe Huelin, the editor of the French maximum wage campaign’s online presence.

“With a little perseverance — and luck,” says Huelin, the French maximum wage drive just might become a “flagship” issue in the next French presidential election.

Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh Are Crazy — Yet Corporate Media Legitimize Them

Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh Are Crazy — Yet Corporate Media Legitimize Them

When Limbaugh, Beck and Fox news are treated like legitimate players, it causes the rest of the media to run to the right.

By Jamison Foser, Media Matters for America. Posted October 19, 2009.

It’s no coincidence that when members of the media talk about the media these days, they tend to talk about two things: the supposed importance of right-wing media like Fox News, and claims that the rest of the media lean to the left. The two concepts are fundamentally intertwined and mutually reinforcing — and deeply flawed.

It may seem odd that much of the news media would simultaneously pronounce itself guilty of liberal bias and spend the year after a presidential election won convincingly by the more progressive candidate talking about the importance and influence of a conservative cable channel whose viewership consists of about 1 percent of the nation. But both of those somewhat inconsistent media memes can be explained by journalists’ frequent inability to see where the center of the country really is. That inability makes journalists think they are further left of center than they actually are (even assuming they are at all to the left of center). And it makes them inflate the importance of right-wing operatives masquerading as media figures — people who would have far less influence if actual reporters stopped buying their nonsense.

Their hateful views and adversarial relationship with the truth place the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the far-right fringe of a party and movement that have lost the popular vote in four of the past five presidential elections and that holds only 40 percent of the seats in Congress. They are on the far-right edge of a party that is far to the right of the rest of the country.

And, it must be said, they do not tell the truth. They lie about things large and small. They lie to smear their adversaries, and they lie for no real reason at all. Their lies should disqualify them from ever being taken seriously. But instead, the media have decided that if anything they say turns out to contain a sliver of truth, everything they say must be paid immediate attention.

That’s what happened when, after years of making absurd claims about ACORN — remember the lie that ACORN was going to get billions of stimulus dollars? — some conservative activists induced a statistically insignificant number of the organization’s low-level employees to behave badly. The rest of the media rushed to cover the “scandal” — and to beat themselves up for not having taken their cues from Beck & Co. sooner. The ombudsmen for the The Washington Post and The New York Times, for example, scolded their papers for being too slow to report on Beck-generated controversies and gave credence to conservative claims that the delay was the result of liberal bias.

What few journalists seem to understand is that once you accept someone like Glenn Beck as a legitimate media figure, it skews your view of the rest of the media. This is not a new phenomenon — not by any means. More than two years ago, I argued that once you accept Ann Coulter, who calls John Edwards a “faggot,” as a legitimate guest on shows like NBC’s Today, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd — who merely calls Edwards a “girl” — seems positively reasonable. Thus the entire media discourse is shoved in the direction of its least legitimate participants.

That’s how reporters — and not just those on Rupert Murdoch’s payroll — come to see the non-Beck, non-Hannity “reporters” at Fox News as fair and balanced. The “news” division at Fox spreads falsehoods and right-wing nonsense round the clock, but many journalists have bought into the idea that while Fox’s “opinion” hosts may be conservatives, the rest of the channel plays it down the middle. After all, compared to a crazy liar like Glenn Beck, Fox’s “news” programs seem perfectly legitimate and impartial. But judged by any reasonable standard, they are nothing of the kind.

And, of course, if you believe that the rest of Fox News is, as Washington Post reporter Ed O’Keefe put it this week, “straight news shows,” that affects how you view other news organizations. Just as America’s Newsroom on Fox appears to play things down the middle in comparison to a dishonest demagogue like Glenn Beck, other news organizations appear liberal in comparison with America’s Newsroom.

And that’s how MSNBC — which gives three hours of airtime each day to conservative former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough and another hour to Clinton-hating, liberal-bashing misogynist Chris Matthews, employs Pat Buchanan, whose very name has been synonymous with bigotry for decades, and regularly traffics in conservative misinformation and right-wing framing — comes to be described as “liberal”: simply because it also employs the only overtly left-of-center hosts in all of television news.

And that’s how you end up with the perverse situation in which newspapers like The Washington Post are described by reporters at the Post and elsewhere as “liberal” despite hounding the Clintons for years over a phony real estate “scandal,” harassing Al Gore for lies he didn’t tell, handing the 2000 election to George W. Bush on a platter, and trading in their press passes for pom-poms during Bush’s march to war with a nation that didn’t attack us.

And so we have a poisonous media environment in which the “conservative media” consist of lying conspiracy theorists who are out to destroy President Obama and any other liberal they come across, and the “mainstream press” is considered “liberal” even as it “leans over so far backward to avoid the charge of left bias that it ends up either neutered or leaning to the right.”

That’s some range, isn’t it? From right-wing liars who purposefully traffic in conservative misinformation all the way across the spectrum to frightened liberals who accidentally traffic in conservative misinformation.

That’s the real problem with Glenn Beck and Fox News. It isn’t that they misinform the 1 percent of Americans who watch their nonsense (the vast majority of whom already agree with them). It’s that the rest of the media run to the right in response to Fox — even while becoming more and more convinced that they are guilty of liberal bias.