It was a couple of months ago that I started tracking the progress of the Plastiki project. It’s got a great story: A catamaran made out of recycled plastic bottles will sail across the Pacific Ocean, going through the great plastic gyre, where a giant island of plastic and other garbage floats. Led by Adventure Ecologist David De Rothschild, the journey will bring awareness to the problem of the garbage floating in the ocean…

…although there’s already plenty of awareness of that problem, isn’t there? It’s at this part of the story that the Plastiki voyage starts to fall apart for me.

People have been aware of the problems of excessive garbage, especially large amounts of plastic that never degrades, for as long as I can remember. Most people have been aware of the Pacific Ocean gyre for years. So, what do we need a Plastiki voyage to raise awareness for?

The only thing that the Plastiki voyage seems to raise new awareness for is the “career” of its leader, David de Rothschild, the Adventure Ecologist. What is an Adventure Ecologist? You probably haven’t ever met one before. There likely isn’t a neighborhood Adventure Ecologist working just down the block from you.

There’s a good reason for that. Being an Adventure Ecologist takes a lot of money. David de Rothschild seems to be the first and only Adventure Ecologist there has ever been.

An Adventure Ecologist is a person of leisure who has fun on a lot of adventures, using a lot of energy and resources in the process, but does so in the name of educating everyone else in the world about the importance of being ecologically sensitive.

David de Rothschild, you see, is an heir of the Rothschild family, perhaps the most wealthy and influential banking family in the world. The Rothschild family has funded the development of the industrial economy that has led to us having huge amounts of garbage littering the land and floating about in the ocean. The Rothschild family uses huge amounts of energy and natural resources just to satisfy its whimsies.

So, naturally, through his Adventure Ecology vacations, David de Rothschild seeks to educate us, the little people of the world who weren’t born into rich and powerful families, about what we have to do to make things better. David de Rothschild isn’t seeking to increase awareness within the Rothschild family empire about what the Rothschilds need to do to solve the world’s ecological problems. No, instead, he’s seeking to reform the rabble.

The more I look at the Plastiki project, the more it takes on the appearance of recycled Rothschild snobbery.

I’m not denying that the ordinary folks of the world have a lot of responsibility for the global ecological crisis we’re in today. I just don’t think it’s appropriate for a man who was born into extreme luxury, who has always been able to consume whatever he wants whenever he wants, to lecture the rest of us about how we need to live more simply, and change our lifestyles.

Have fun on your little corporate-sponsored South Pacific vacation, Mr. Rothschild, but please don’t expect me to give you applause as you board your yacht.

In March of 2008, Adam Davidson of NPR revealed the massive increase in “Suspicious Activity Reports” to monitor the purchasing and financial transactions of you and prominent “politically exposed persons,” without a warrant, to uncover evidence of precrime. Here’s Davidson’s description of how Suspicious Activity Reports work in the age of Homeland Security:

Banks monitor every transaction. Every one, no matter how small…. “Your transaction is being transferred to the bank and it will be loaded into our transaction monitoring system and we will actually add this transaction together with several other types of transaction that you’ve done recently.” The software is checking to see if maybe that $4 is part of a pattern…. The report goes to a bank’s compliance officer, listing all recent suspicious transactions. Every transaction is given a numerical score…. The computer makes the score based on who is making the transaction, where does he come from, who is he associated with, what else is he up to. Every bank customer has, somewhere, in some computer database, a risk assessment score…. It also checks a bunch of lists. Are you on a terror watch list? A list of criminals?… A PEP — banks really do use that term — is anybody with political power. That means a Nigerian General, a U.S. Senator, or say the Governor of New York. And any PEP — any Politically Exposed Person — is monitored more carefully…. The Patriot Act forced banks to more closely monitor suspicious activity.

Remember Eliot Spitzer, Governor of New York? He was brought down politically after — without any evidence, without a warrant — his extramural, extramarital activity was brought to light through government collection and analysis of, yes, Suspicious Activity Reports.

Since then, I’ve been tracking the Department of Treasury’s twice-annual reports of these Suspicious Activity Reports (also known as SARs). The SAR Activity Review By The Numbers report has been issued twice a year — once in the fall and once in May or June — since 2003, with trend information extending back to 1996. Here’s a representation of the available data as of the release of the last By The Numbers report in November 2008 during the waning days of the Bush administration:

You can see why the trends are important to follow; since the passage of the Patriot Act the volume of Suspicious Activity Reports filed with the government has ballooned. Notice the asterisk for 2008 — the November 2008 report, of course, could not include all data for 2008, but only data on reports up through June 2008. The figure for 2008 was a preliminary extrapolation. To get full data on the volume of SARs for 2008, we’d have to wait for the regular By The Numbers report, scheduled to be released in May or June of 2009.

May and June of 2009 have passed, and as you can see here (as of today, July 2) there is no new report available.

Candidate Barack Obama ran for president on the pledge that his administration would champion transparency in government. When federal snooping on the financial activity of everyday Joes and “Politically Exposed Persons” goes undisclosed, that does not strike me as “transparent.”

Did I mention that at the end of this year, a number of provisions of the Patriot Act will expire unless they are renewed by Congress? Continued public disclosure of Suspicious Activity Report trends would complicate this renewal. When information about Patriot Act surveillance is swept quietly under the carpet, renewal of the Patriot Act’s provisions is made that much simpler.

If you garden, you’ve been there: delighted at the success of your zucchini patch, you enjoy a zucchini salad, a nice loaf of zucchini bread, another loaf of zucchini bread, a pot of zucchini-cheese soup…. It’s after the second pot of zucchini soup that you might throw in the towel, but that doesn’t mean your squash have to rot on the vine. Find a local Plant a Row for the Hungry participant and arrange to donate your produce to a nearby food pantry. The Plant a Row effort, maintained for years by the Garden Writers’ Assocation, works best locally to provide poor families with the sort of fresh fruits and vegetables that are so valuable nutritionally yet so difficult to stock in food pantries otherwise. Bully for them.

Barack Obama loves giving lofty speeches about the need to confront the crisis of global climate change and pollution of the environment. On March 19 this year, Obama laid down the line on what must be done: “We can let climate change continue to go unchecked, or we can help stop it. We can let the jobs of tomorrow be created abroad, or we can create those jobs right here in America and lay the foundation for lasting prosperity.”

This weekend, Obama moved that line, and twisted into a kind of squiggly shape with a lot of loopholes in it. Obama declared that he opposes efforts to hold foreign countries accountable when they refuse to comply with limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Obama used the term “protectionist” to refer to elements of the American Clean Energy and Security Act that establish tariffs against nations that continue refuse to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Well, yeah, I guess measures like this are protectionist. They protect everybody from pollution, and from climate change. They protect American workers from foreign governments that try to use dirty, dangerous old energy technologies to create an unfair trade advantage. What does Obama have against protecting us from these sorts of things?

President Obama is the one who set an absolutist, dichotomous standard for climate action. He ought to be judged by that standard. If, as Obama says, “We can let climate change continue to go unchecked, or we can help stop it,” then Obama chose to side for this weekend with the forces that want to let climate change go unchecked. If, as Obama says, “We can let the jobs of tomorrow be created abroad, or we can create those jobs right here in America,” then Obama chose this this weekend to let the jobs of tomorrow be created abroad.

By Obama’s own measure, he’s not taking the action on climate change or labor that America needs from its President.

It’s been a year of a heck of a lot of broken promises for Barack Obama, and over the weekend a new one has come along. You remember that Obama and the Democrats criticized McCain health care proposals that would have taxed health benefits. They said it was wrong to tax health benefits at a time when people are struggling to pay premiums.

Health care benefits are, however, a significant form of income in the US. So, taxing these benefits could go a long way toward putting the government’s budget back in order, and could help pay for health care reform policies to provide health insurance to people who currently don’t have any at all.

The Obama Administration let journalists know this weekend that it would consider taxing health benefits - but only the benefits of Americans who make more than $250,000 per year.

Is it a good idea? Is this broken Obama promise acceptable, given that Obama is targeting wealthy Americans?

One of the most consistent points of resistance to efforts to bring America’s polluting contributions to climate change under control has been the claim that if we take any serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it will end up costing individual Americans a lot of money. Now, that claim has been formally debunked.

The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan office, was asked by Republican U.S. Representative David Camp to conduct an analysis of “the potential effects on households of the cap-and-trade program that would be implemented pursuant to H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009″. Representative Camp was probably betting that the analysis would show an extraordinary cost. Camp lost his bet.

What the CBO analysis actually shows is that, on average, Americans will only have a tiny increase in their household expenses if the bill is passed: 175 dollars every year. Furthermore, most of that cost will be borne by people who have lots of money, because they’re the ones who use the most energy. Low income Americans would actually see a decrease in their household expenses because of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.

The report doesn’t even take into account savings that will take place due to avoided expenses related to accelerated global climate change. Read it for yourself.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a great fan of this legislation. That’s for opposite reasons than the insubstantial whines of the Republicans. This bill gives huge amounts of money to dirty old fossil fuel companies. It’s not the clean, green energy bill we were promised last year. That’s what makes the Republican whining so ridiculous. The bill gives the Republican old energy crowd so much of what they want, they should be celebrating, rather than complaining.

Daniel Dunkle of the Camden Herald Gazette makes a point about the importance of libraries in troubled economic times:

As the recession continues, local public libraries are seeing an increased need for their services. In some cases residents are coming in to polish up their resumes and use library computers to search for jobs. Others are using the library as a place to spend some time out of the house now that they are out of work.

“As the economy worsens, library usage tends to go up,” said Molly Larson, who serves as both president of the Maine Library Association and director of the Rockport Public Library. Larson said some residents are using libraries to learn computer skills that will allow them to get a job. Rockland Public Library Director Amy Levine said the library provided a display of books and resources for job seekers that was very popular.

That’s a news story from Maine; the story is the same in West Virginia:

Basically, the library has been a source of assistance in helping displaced workers assemble a résumé and land fresh employment, West Virginia Library Commission Director J.D. Waggoner told lawmakers Monday….

Waggoner told a joint meeting of the Standing Committees on Government Operations and Government Organization that jobless residents are getting help in finding work through the libraries.

One man dropped his children off at school every week and then checked into his local library to go online and look for work. Within two weeks, the man found employment, Waggoner said. “That story is repeating itself over and over again across the state,” he said.

Move further west to the state of Ohio and you’ll find that libraries here are also providing needed services to people who are out of work. At my local Northside branch of the Columbus Public Library, there are dedicated sessions held twice a week for job seekers; librarians not only provide computer resources necessary for Ohioans out of work to write up a resume, but also provide guidance on resume strategy and education on the use of job banks databases. Other regular events in libraries across the city of Columbus — like GED classes and technology workshops — are aimed to help build citizens’ human capital so they can do more and earn more with their time. These services help Ohio pull its way out of its current deep recession.

As I pointed out last week, libraries provide essential social infrastructure to the young as well. At this time of year, summer reading clubs are in full swing, encouraging the latest generation to tap into the enjoyment of learning. In poor areas, libraries are distribution points for food to hungry kids who would have poorer educational outcomes (translation for WSJ readers: lower productivity) were it not for this supplemental nutrition.

Finally, as disposable income declines, libraries across the nation are experiencing large surges in book circulation; people are rediscovering the frugality of literacy at a starkly reduced price. I describe the economic good sense of libraries as a “starkly reduced price,” not free, because someone has to pay for the buildings, the electricity, the staff and, oh yes, the books. Our nation’s public libraries provide reading, educational, food for poor kids and job training more cheaply than if we each did all that work ourselves, and those services continue to redound positively, but it costs some money to keep them going.

Here in Ohio, public libraries have already taken cuts to their funding in stride. State funding for public libraries in Ohio is allotted as a proportion of tax revenues, so that as tax revenues have declined the funding for libraries has declined, too. In 2008, when the economy here was bad but not so bad as it is now, libraries across the state were allotted $458 million. This year, with tax revenues tanking, libraries in Ohio have already taken a $98 million cut, down to $360 million. Keep that in mind — this year, Ohio public libraries have already suffered a 21.4% cut in state funding without a complaint.

But last Friday (the day for news releases they don’t want you to hear), Governor Ted Strickland proposed cutting the state budget for public libraries by another $100 million. Strickland’s proposal would cut the libraries’ budgets disproportionately, singling them out for extra resource cuts beyond their share.

If this were an entertainment venue like a golf course or another new arena for a pampered professional team, I’d understand making another slash to the budget there. But these are libraries we’re talking about; they’re a vital piece of our social and economic infrastructure, providing services that help us get out of our slump. Ted Strickland proposing cuts to libraries as jobs leave Ohio is like the captain of a ship noticing the rudder’s broken and yelling for his first mate to cut some wood out of the hull to build a new one.

The window for comments to Governor Ted Strickland (call 614-466-3555) or to your legislator (find your member by zip code here) closes quickly — the public has less than a week left! As of July 1, 2009 the process, along with the fiscal year, will have already moved on. If you are an individual living in Ohio and you support your library, make yourself heard.

Fortunately, it’s not just an individual effort here. As George W. Bush learned during his presidency, you really don’t want to piss off the librarians. Across the state, advocates for libraries are passing out leaflets to patrons as they enter and leave their local branches. The brand spankin’ new activist website Save Ohio Libraries website indicates that pro-library rallies are happening tomorrow, Wednesday June 24 2009, at these sites:

Centerville: Centerville Public Library at 4:00 pm
Cleveland: Cleveland Public Library Main Branch at 10:30 am
Cincinnati: Loveland Branch Library at 11:00 am
London: London Public Library at 6:30 pm
Portsmouth: Portsmouth Public Library 1:00 pm

Those are just the Wednesday rallies. On Thursday, June 25 at 11:30 am, there will be a statewide Save Our Libraries rally at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. The Statehouse stands on the corner of Broad and High Streets downtown. Gather at the McKinley Statue (near High Street), and wear a red t-shirt if you have one. Bring a sign, but don’t attach any sticks — the police will confiscate these as a security threat. Stick up a flyer if you have the time.

See the Ohio Library Council for continuing information about this fight for Ohio libraries’ future.

I love the tinkering spirit of the internet. Dissatisfied with gaps in software capabilities, or dismayed by the extravagant costs of corporate software, self-regulating groups write and improve their own programs and make them available to the world for free, for the joy of it. Open source programmers are anti-authoritarian populists of our age, demolishing significant cost barriers to creative expression. If you can afford a computer (and really now, they cost far less than a television set these days), you can accomplish just about anything using free software; the only limitation is your mind.

I have two quick recommendations for you today: to extract zip, rar and other compressed files (or to zip them back up again), try Quick Zip. While WinZip has established dominance in compression and extraction due to its heavy advertising, it’ll run you $30. Quick Zip manages to accomplish the same tasks with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface, at no cost. Quick Zip, although not strictly open source, is free.

We all have used “unzip” programs; graphics programs may be a bit more unfamiliar to you. Raster graphics programs like PaintShopPro and Photoshop and Windows Paint work by putting together individual pixels to create what can be very pretty pictures. Unfortunately, if you try to enlarge them you’ll get a blocky looking, jagged mess as those individual pixels just get bigger. Vector graphics programs create pictures as mathematical expressions of lines, curves, color gradients and so on, mathematical expressions that are independent of scale. With a vector graphics program you can create a two-inch image, enlarge it, and stick it on a sixty-foot-wide billboard without any loss of quality. Another advantage: because every element of a vector image is a mathematical expression, every element can be transformed with precision.

If you want to go with the leading corporate vector graphics software, Adobe Illustrator, get ready to shell out as much as $300. Yowch! Try Inkscape instead: it’s an open source vector graphics program with most of the features of Illustrator and none of the price. While it’s powerful, the vector graphics approach isn’t quite as intuitive as using a paintbrush in Photoshop, so if you want to give it a try be sure to supplement your experimentation with the also-free manual and spiffy video tutorials by heathenx.

By the way, as with all programs downloaded off the internet, you’ve got to be sure that these are legit programs, not containing any spyware. You could just take my word for it, but fortunately you can do better: trust CNET, which links to software downloads only after they first verify that the software is spyware-free. Download through links you find at CNET and you’ll be all right. Free downloads of both Quick Zip and Inkscape area available there.

Lately, there’s a lot of attention being given to bailouts for banks and rescue for big corporate automakers, but there’s a more enduring sort of stimulus package that has my enduring respect. Each summer my neighborhood library, the Northside Library here in Columbus, launches a joint summer reading club and free lunch program for kids up to age 17. Monday through Saturday, the library is open all day, featuring presentations, arts projects, animals, magic shows, crossword creation groups, drum circles, writers’ workshops and more, more, more.

The goal is to get kids coming into the library during the summer, and from what I can see that goal is met: every time I pop in, there are kids all over the place, not only during the programs but at other times too, doing what kids do in libraries, which is to read. When school’s out for summer, kids who don’t read fall behind kids who do, exacerbating social inequalities and frustrating educational efforts. Reading clubs like these effectively promote gains in literacy for kids from low-income families where reading at home tends not to occur.

Because our neighborhood has a high concentration of kids from poor families, the library also offers free lunches to the kids who come in to the library each day. This effort, funded in part by in the long-standing Summer Food Service Program of the USDA, has been an annual effort for about forty years now, acting to fill in the nutritional gap of children who, now that school’s out, don’t have the nutritional supplement provided by school lunch. This year especially, there are a lot of parents out there who have trouble feeding their kids on their own, and the Summer Food Service Program fills that gap. I anticipate some negative reaction by people who ask why they should have to spend money to feed other people’s kids. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but it’s an observable fact that these supplemental food programs for kids lead to better educational outcomes, and better educational outcomes are associated with lower crime rates, better employment histories and higher productivity. Even if you don’t particularly care about being nice to children, these are considerable social benefits that result from a relatively low amount of social expenditure.

It’s the combination of the summer reading club and the lunch program that really impresses me. Kids come in for lunch and get exposed to reading, or kids come in to the library for the reading club and learn about the free lunch option. Together, these efforts promote children’s physical and intellectual health while integrating them in the neighborhood community.

Similar programs combining literacy and nutrition can be found across the country. The librarians and other people who work to make these programs possible have my admiration and respect.

If you want to understand how military spy satellites could possibly be deployed to conduct surveillance on the American people, in violation of Posse Comitatus prohibitions of military deployment in the United States, without the judicial warrants guaranteed by the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, ask yourself: who made it possible?

The path to military satellite reconnaissance of the American people was laid down by a “Blue Ribbon Study” commissioned by the Bush administration, whose inter-agency Civil Applications Committee (CAC) created an “Independent Study Group” to write its report. This report, issued in September 2005, made the following conclusions:

Intelligence Capabilities (as used in this report) includes: national satellite sensors; technical collection capabilities (archival, current & future) of the DoD; airborne sensors; NSA worldwide assets; military and other MASINT sensors; and sophisticated exploitation/analytic capabilities….

During the course of the study, no one said that they were failing at their mission due to the lack of access to IC capabilities. There was no “Burning Bridge” identified by the participating agencies and stakeholders. However, there were many areas where the process was shown to be broken and where efficiencies in the process can be realized to greatly increase the timeliness and relevance of the information provided. The current system operates in a risk-averse vice risk-management environment where protection of sources and methods and individual civil liberties, while important concerns to be carefully considered and taken into account, are the predominant concerns unreasonably operating to limit appropriate support to the defense of the homeland.

What was the makeup of this “Independent Study Group” concluding that civil liberties are unreasonably predominant in limiting the use of satellites to spy on the American people? Consult the report, page 2, to find the following names and affiliations:

Mr. Keith Hall: Chairman and Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton

Edward G. Anderson: Principal, Booz Allen Hamilton

Jeff Baxter: Independent Consultant

Thomas W. Conroy: Vice President, National Security Programs, Northrop Grumman/TASC

Dr. Paul Gilman: Director, Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies

Patrick M. Hughes: L-3 Communications

Kemp Lear: Associate, Booz Allen Hamilton

Kevin O’Connell: Director, Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis

Joseph D. Whitley: Alston & Bird, LLP

Greg Jay: Booz Allen Hamilton

Keith Elliot: USGS

Bob Evans: Booz Allen Hamilton

Marty Eckes: USGS

Chuck Symes: Booz Allen Hamilton

Randy Soderholm: ODNI

Ed Obloy: Booz Allen Hamilton

Robin Saenz: Booz Allen Hamilton

While Jeff Baxter is listed as an “independent consultant,” at the time of the report’s publication he was under the employ of military contractor Northrup Grumman when not participating in his other career as (I am not kidding) a guitarist for the likes of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers.

That makes two “Independent Study Group” participants out of 17 affiliated with Northrup Grumman, a contractor that builds military surveillance satellites on the federal government’s dime.

Another participant in the “Independent Study Group” worked for L-3 Communications, which has more federal contracts for military satellite systems.

An additional 8 out of the 17 “Independent Study Group” participants were in the employ of Booz Allen Hamilton, another contractor for the Total Information Awareness data-mining effort of the Bush years, along with NSA warrantless wiretapping programs.

When 11 out of 17 members of an “Independent Study Group” are military contractors getting money from federal government coffers to develop surveillance systems — heck, when nearly half of the members come from just one corporation — should we wonder that the “Independent Study Group” concludes that the Constitution is an unreasonably predominant concern blocking the domestic deployment of military surveillance?

The Congressional Research Service has issued a follow-up report that documents the historical link between the findings of this “Independent Study Group” and the creation of the domestic-spying National Applications Office. The planning for the NAO occurred during the Bush administration, with implementation being carried out thanks to the efforts of the Obama administration. The NAO has been set up to take this military satellite imagery and farm it out to law enforcement officials at the federal, state and local level. As House Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie Thompson notes, in this process there was:

no briefing, no hearing, no phone calls from anyone on [the DHS] staff to inform any member of this committee of why, how or when satellite imagery would be shared with police and sheriff’s offices nationwide.

I am looking forward to the next speech by Dick Cheney or Barack Obama, explaining again why citizens must cultivate a greater trust in their government.

I’m one of those people who don’t subscribe to cable television. I can’t afford it lately, and even if I could afford the expense I wouldn’t take it on. I’m impatient at cable television when I’ve encountered it: there’s so much noise, and so little content of interest, to me at least. To compensate for low volumes of information, for-profit documentary channels stretch their delivery beyond my capacity for patience.

I have enjoyed PBS, though. My kids get a cackle from Word Girl, NOVA programs can be really informative, Frontline gets me upset and more than occasionally delivers new reporting, and my daughter picks up phonics from Between the Lions. Or picked up, rather. Past tense. As of today, there’s no analog signal for PBS TV in my home. And no matter how I fiddle with the positioning of my antenna, there’s no digital signal for PBS either.

I live right smack dab in the inner city of Columbus, Ohio, the 15th most populous city in the nation (right below San Francisco), so this is not a problem of rural living. It’s not that I’ve hooked up my digital converter equipment incorrectly; I get clear digital reception of NBC (boring), CBS (boringer) and FOX (ack). When I tried to get digital PBS reception last year and failed, visitors reassured me that when the analog signal was cut, digital broadcasting power would be boosted. No dice. What’s happened is the disappearance of good PBS television from central Columbus. This “improvement” isn’t an improvement at all from where I’m planted; a public good is gone. What makes this an advance? My government tells me:

An important benefit of the switch to all-digital broadcasting is that it will free up parts of the valuable broadcast spectrum… some of the spectrum will be auctioned to companies that will be able to provide consumers with more advanced wireless services (such as wireless broadband).

Now I get it. It’s an “improvement” for the telecoms. Forward!

On June 2, 2009, we at Irregular Times withdrew from one of the two ways of selling shirts, bumper stickers and buttons at the online merchandiser CafePress. On June 1, CafePress started charging customers more and (paying its graphic designers less) when purchases were made via their search engine they call the “Marketplace.” We didn’t like those changes, so instead of just whining about it, we withdrew our participation in the CafePress Marketplace. For eight days, we have only been selling our liberal gear through our individual shop, where we’ve set our prices lower and made a bit more ourselves in commission to boot.

I’m telling you this because our withdrawal from the Marketplace system has exposed, and allowed us to document, a significant error in the CafePress Sales Reports. CafePress is erroneously marking sales made through shops as “Marketplace” sales. These errors result in reduced payments to graphic designers and increased profits to CafePress itself. If you earn your living by making sales through CafePress, I urge you in the strongest terms to track the paths of your sales, document any errors you find, and share your documentation with CafePress and the public.

My documentation follows below.

At 8:30 AM yesterday (June 9, 2009), I noticed the following sale reported in the CafePress Sales Report for Irregular Times:

I’ve deleted customers’ names for the sake of their privacy, and I’ve highlighted the order in question. Otherwise, this and subsequent screen captures are unaltered.

This is an order for an item placed on the CafePress shop “irregulargoods“… item number 160745631, a bumper sticker. The bumper sticker looks like this:

There are a few things wrong with this order. First, the reported sale price for the bumper sticker is $7.00, a high price that we have never posted for CafePress and that CafePress itself does not even charge on its Marketplace (CafePress’ own pre-set charge is $5.00). Second, the reported source for the sale is the CafePress Marketplace.

You can document for yourself that this bumper sticker is not available on the CafePress Marketplace. The way to see all the items from a particular shop that are up on the marketplace is to follow the form:

http://shop.cafepress.com/i_love_shirts

Where “i_love_shirts” is the name of a CafePress shop. Go ahead, try cutting and pasting that sample URL in and you’ll see what I mean. Then change “i_love_shirts” to “irregulargoods,” the name of our Irregular Times CafePress shop. When you put

http://shop.cafepress.com/irregulargoods

into your browser’s address box, you’ll see this:

Go ahead and use the CafePress search box you see in the upper left-hand corner of the image above. As you’ll see, this bumper sticker from Irregular Goods isn’t available on the marketplace (you’ll find others, from other shopkeepers, using the same quote, but not this one).

Bottom line: this bumper sticker is not available on the CafePress Marketplace. The entire shop “irregulargoods” is off the Marketplace. And yet this sale is being shown, at an incorrect price, as a Marketplace sale.

At 9:05 AM, I called the CafePress service line (1-877-809-1659) to report this error. The customer service representative on the other end of the line replied to agree that the shop “irregulargoods” had been taken off the Marketplace. When I asked how this could possibly have happened, the customer service representative replied: “Oh, well someone could have bought something before your change last week and then it could have stayed in their cart for a while, and then they could have finished the sale today.” This seemed pretty far-fetched to me, so I asked for CafePress to check back on the history of that particular sale and see if that was what happened, or if there had been a mistake in the CafePress Sales Report. The customer service representative for CafePress agreed this would be done, and told me I would receive a response by phone or e-mail later that day.

I actually didn’t receive any contact from CafePress during the day, and when I logged back into CafePress.com yesterday evening to check my account, I noticed the following additional sales report:

Again, I’ve covered up the names of the people ordering for their privacy’s sake. This time, someone ordered item 223982475, an “Earth for Obama bumper sticker,” from the shop “irregulargoods.” And again, it showed up as a Marketplace order, when this is not possible. You can find this bumper sticker for sale off the Marketplace, in our non-Marketplace shop. But as I’ve stated before, we opted “irregulargoods” out of the Marketplace system on June 2, eight days ago. I immediately made a Google search for “Earth for Obama bumper sticker,” and I did find this result leading to the CafePress Marketplace:

As you can see from the URL, the link refers to the same product number: 223982475. But upon clicking that link (a link that’s there because Google hasn’t reindexed all of cafepress.com yet), I obtained the following 404 web page from CafePress:

There you have it: the item is verified off the Marketplace — as it was taken off the Marketplace on June 2 — and yet we here we have the CafePress Sales Report indicating a “Marketplace” sale. As with the Ben Franklin bumper sticker, a search of the CafePress Marketplace through the search box can find no trace of this bumper sticker being offered.

Why am I obsessing over this? “Marketplace” sales, I should remind you, cost the customer more while earning CafePress more profit and the graphic designer less pay. When the “Earth for Obama” bumper sticker was sold as a “Marketplace” sale, according to this Sales Report, we at Irregular Times pocketed $0.50, CafePress pocketed $4.50, and the customer shelled out $5.00. If the “Earth for Obama” bumper sticker was credited as sold via our Shop, we at Irregular Times would pocket $1.16, CafePress would pocket $3.49, and the customer would have to shell out $4.65.

Now, I’m not too proud to admit I’m strapped for cash in these difficult economic times. Still, the difference for one bumper sticker sale — 35 cents more in cost to the customer, 66 cents less paid out to me and $1.51 more in profit for CafePress — hardly seems scandalous. This sort of money won’t keep gramma’s home from being foreclosed. But that’s one sale. CafePress doesn’t make just one sale every day, and I’m not the only shopkeeper out there. If there are ten thousand of these mistakes made every day, that makes CafePress an extra $15,100, it keeps an extra $6,600 out of the pockets of graphic designers, and it results in overcharges of $3,500 to customers. That would be the daily tally. If these errors persisted over a 30-day month, that would make CafePress an extra $453,000, it would keep an extra $198,000 out of the pockets of graphic designers, and it would result in overcharges of $105,000 to customers. That’s not chump change.

I must stress that those latter figures are hypothetical; the only numbers I know for sure are the numbers I’ve shown you for our particular shop. But for some time now there have been complaints without documentation that sales have been improperly marked as Marketplace sales when they actually occurred through shops. I’m being obsessive in order to thoroughly document that a problem people have been describing for many months is actually present. I think I’ve established that this is the case.

At 7:30 pm yesterday evening, I called the CafePress service line. I noted the new problem, and over the phone I described the same level of documentation to them that I’ve shown graphically to you. I was put on long hold. When the service representative returned to the phone after conferring with others, I was given a wholly new different account for the discrepancy. Basically, CafePress admitted they have errors in their Sales Reports. The following are quotes I wrote down as the service representative said them to me last night:

“We have an issue with some of the sales being marked as Marketplace sales when they were really shop sales…. It’s going to go back to the beginning of June.”

“We’re really sorry about all of the problems.”

“Give us about 24-48 hours to fix it.”

Status: As of this moment, 30 hours after I first reported the errors, the CafePress Sales Report errors on my account have not been rectified. I’ll write an update if and when the errors have been rectified, or 18 hours from now, whichever comes first.

If you are a CafePress customer, and you made an order through a shop that ended up giving you a final, higher cost than what you were first shown, gather documentation for this change, call the CafePress service line (1-877-809-1659) to report the issue, and also share your experience publicly here.

If you are a CafePress shopkeeper, and you see an order on your Sales Report that appears as a “Marketplace” sale but you know is actually a shop sale, gather documentation for this error, call the CafePress service line (1-877-809-1659) to report the issue, and yes, share your experience — with documentation — here.

Let us not speak of motivations or purposes, since those are unobserved and it is difficult to establish malicious intent where none may exist. Let’s instead focus on documented behavior, on what has demonstrably occurred. Please restrict your comments to the domain of that which you can show to be true.

A business like CafePress runs on trust between customers, designers and the corporation itself. That trust was strained when CafePress changed the terms of its relationship to its own benefit and to the detriment of customers and designers. That trust is broken when CafePress fails — again to its own benefit and to the detriment of customers and designers — to accurately report the nature and terms of sales. If that trust is to be restored, an accurate accounting of just what is going on behind the curtain at CafePress is essential. Please help me to obtain that accurate account.

Yesterday, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing about the ways in which the impact of the ecological crisis in the world’s oceans are affecting the U.S. economy.

From Deerin Babb-Brott, Assistant Secretary of Oceans and Coastal Zone Management of the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

“While tide, current, and wave resources represent potential as renewable energy sources, wind energy in the Northeast is the resource with the greatest promise on the basis of currently available technology. Here, offshore wind is superior to remote onshore wind in terms of resource size, distribution, capacity factor, reliability, minimization of environmental impact, and proximity to population centers. It is a potentially inexhaustible resource that, in many cases, is available in close proximity to regions with the highest electricity demand, minimizing the need for costly new transmission lines.

Concurrent with these new demands comes an increasing awareness of the tremendous importance of maintaining a healthy and resilient marine ecosystem to both support the uses and services that society values and benefits from and also to support its resilience to the increasing threats of global climate change. Time is long overdue to be more active stewards of these public resources and to take a more pro-active stance in planning for marine ecosystem protection and the responsible and sustainable uses that stem from it.”

From Judith T. Kildow of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute:

“The ocean economy?a smaller economy than the coastal economy?in 2004 generated $138 billion, approximately 1.2% of the US GDP, and provided 2.3 million jobs. This is equivalent in size to the U.S. insurance industry by employment and the motor vehicle parts industry by GDP.

I would like to make two points here that I think important: First, the coastal and ocean economies will power the nation’s economic recovery. Second, the deleterious effects of climate change will adversely affect the continuing growth of
these important economies unless we taken action to curb greenhouse gasses soon.”

From Alexandra Cousteau of Blue Legacy International:

“The decline of the oceans due to pollution, overfishing, and climate change is now increasingly being felt in the quality of life of people on land. This was never more apparent to me than during our Expedition last month to Louisiana. Louisiana’s wetlands are twice the size of the Everglades National Park, funnel more oil into the US than the Alaskan Pipeline, sustain one of the nation’s largest fisheries, and provide vital hurricane protection for New Orleans. And they are disappearing under the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of 33 football fields a day.”

SmartAssProducts writes an online article “Boycott the CafePress Marketplace”:

CafePress recently instituted a change in their pricing policy, and as a result its shopkeepers–the people who do all the work as far as coming up with designs, putting the designs on products, etc.–are going broke….

This is an unconscionable act on the part of CafePress and they should truly be ashamed of themselves. They’re screwing the very people who made CafePress the success that it is today.

Please boycott the CafePress marketplace.

A search for SmartAssProducts on the CafePress marketplace today shows “244 Smartassproducts designs available on 1,650 products.” And yep, I checked: they’re the same designs SmartAssProducts advertises on its smartassproducts.com websiite.

The imperative “Boycott the CafePress Marketplace” is missing the implied “You” which does not include the writer’s “Me.”

By the way, we at Irregular Times have withdrawn from the CafePress Marketplace, not just because the Marketplace is bad for graphic designers but also because it’s bad for customers. We encourage you to do the same. “You” means designers, too.