Nepal-- An Unhappy Model For The Republican Party? Or China?

Last month I was in Nepal and writing about how deplorable their system of aviation is... as well as their environmental controls and food safety regulatory systems. Their capital, according to the UN, is now the most polluted city on earth; it was practically pristine the first time I visited. And it is so dangerous to fly on their airlines or land at their airports that you have to take those considerations into your plans. Recently the national carrier sacrificed two goats on the tarmac in the hopes it would help get a malfunctioning plane to take off. If the Republicans keep up their Terrible-Twos kind of behavior, this country will grow more and more backward and "catch up" with Nepal... maybe soon. In fact, yesterday we hear that their latest fit goes beyond taking the debt ceiling (and economy) hostage to their petulant and unpopular demands to gut Social Security and Medicare and into the realm of air safety. Now they're threatening to defund the Federal Aviation Administration if they don't get their way on their latest attack on unions. And it could shut down... tomorrow! Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says the government will lose about $200 million a week in airline ticket taxes and that $2.5 billion in airport construction projects will come to a halt if Republican anarchists force the Federal Aviation Administration to shut down.

The Federal Aviation Administration could shut down on Friday because House Republicans are tying its funding to an anti-democratic (note the small "d") provision to hinder union organizing. The anti-union provision is not included in the Senate bill, and President Obama has said he might veto it. If they don't reach an agreement, the FAA's operating authority expires on Friday and it shuts down.

This is the right-wing's idea of governance-- destroy everything if you can't get your way. They're a scourge on humanity and they're always on the wrong side of history.

Only tangentially related-- after all, China is right over the Himalayas from Nepal now that they've absorbed Tibet-- I can't help bringing up China as an economic model for America, as has been publicly suggested by two of the most extreme Republican reactionaries in the Senate, Pat Toomey (PA) and Ron Johnson (WI), each of whom benefited from illegal campaign contributions from China that were funneled through the Chamber of Commerce last year. Yesterday Bird Abroad suggested that we might as well forget about counterfeit handbags from China because now there's a whole counterfeit Apple store there. I wonder if Ron Johnson is an investor in what he insists proudly is the remarkable and rapid change in the world’s fastest growing economy.

[W]hen we strolled down a street a few blocks from our house a couple weeks ago, I was only sort of surprised to see this new place, one that any American of my generation can probably recognize instantaneously:

It's an Apple Store!

Or is it?

RP and I went inside and poked around. They looked like Apple products. It looked like an Apple store. It had the classic Apple store winding staircase and weird upstairs sitting area. The employees were even wearing those blue t-shirts with the chunky Apple name tags around their necks... [T]his was a total Apple store ripoff. A beautiful ripoff-- a brilliant one-- the best ripoff store we had ever seen (and we see them every day). But some things were just not right: the stairs were poorly made. The walls hadn’t been painted properly.

Apple never writes “Apple Store” on it’s signs-- it just puts up the glowing, iconic fruit.

The name tags around the necks of the friendly salespeople didn’t actually have names on them-- just an Apple logo and the anonymous designation "Staff." And of course, Apple’s own website will tell you that they only have a few stores in Beijing and Shanghai, opened only recently; Apple famously opens new stores painstakingly, presumably to assure impeccable standards and lots of customer demand.

Is this store a copy of one of those in Beijing? A copy of a copy in another Chinese city? A copy of a copy of a copy?! While you’re pondering that, bear in mind: this is a near-perfect ripoff of a store selling products that were almost unknown when we first came to China. My white MacBook was likely to draw only blank stares or furrowed brows as I sat gnashing my teeth trying in vain to get a piece of Chinese software to run on it.

Being the curious types that we are, we struck up some conversation with these salespeople who, hand to God, all genuinely think they work for Apple. I tried to imagine the training that they went to when they were hired, in which they were pitched some big speech about how they were working for this innovative, global company-- when really they’re just filling the pockets of some shyster living in a prefab mansion outside the city by standing around a fake store disinterestedly selling what may or may not be actual Apple products that fell off the back of a truck somewhere.


And the best part? A ten minute walk around the corner revealed not one, but TWO more rip-off Apple stores.

In Kunming!

And the White House responded to the Republican tactics on closing down the FAA:

The Administration strongly supports passage of a clean extension of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) programs, as the Congress has done 20 times without controversy, in order to allow bipartisan, bicameral negotiations to continue on a full reauthorization.

H.R. 2553 includes controversial provisions that, because they have not been negotiated, needlessly threaten critical FAA programs and jeopardize thousands of public and private sector jobs. Without timely passage of a clean extension, all of FAA’s capital accounts (Grants-in-Aid for Airports, Facilities and Equipment, and Research, Engineering, and Development) would be shut down, and approximately 4,000 employees would be furloughed. FAA’s ability to award new grants, including for infrastructure upgrades at airports across the country, as well as to move forward with vital testing and implementation of the Next Generation air traffic control system, would come to a stop.

After the debate yesterday, the Democrats offered an alternative measure that "prohibits air carriers from charging a fee for four or fewer items of baggage checked by a member of the Armed Forces who is traveling in scheduled air transportation on official military duty." This is a real problem, as we saw last month when Delta was caught ripping off active duty servicemembers again. Although every Democrat voted for it, so few Republicans crossed the aisle-- just 3-- that it was defeated 187-233. The Republicans then went on to ram through their crazy turn-America-into-a-third-world-hellhole bill. It passed 243-177, only 6 Republicans with the guys to oppose Boehner and Cantor. Thirteen of the worst Democrats let their freak flags fly and voted with the GOP, reactionary a-holes like John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA), Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK), Joe Donnelly (Blue Dog-IN), and Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC).