This is a must-see video where Lawrence Lessig gets to the heart of the problem with our current government and what must be done to return or republic to something resembling a truly representational democracy (whether that’s a good or bad thing is a different topic).

(It starts looking like a video all about youth obesity, but keep watching — that’s just setup for the real discussion. He also spends a minute perpetuating the myth that high fructose corn syrup is somehow magically worse than sugar despite their being nutritionally and chemically the same and broken down and used by the body in the same way, but that’s also not the focus of this video.)

(Update: Quick addendum. I previously mentioned that high fructose corn syrup was chemically identical and metabolized identically to sugar. I was wrong. They are indeed different.
However, as this recent science blog points out in its refutation of the highly biased, inappropriate, and premature suggestion made in a study regarding HFCSs and possible pancreatic cancer connection, the end result between HFCS and table sugar is negligible at best.
Also, this science blog also points out the chemical and metabolic differences between HFCS and refined sugar, but likewise establishes that HFCS is not a significant factor (no more than table sugar) in obesity. It’s an easy to blame scapegoat that distracts from the fact that obesity and diabetes come from too many calories and too little exercise. Period.)

Roger Ebert once again reminds us he’s a journalist who happens to excel at reviewing movies. He wrote a recent article,”BP’s tree fell on my lawn,” in which he details exactly all the ways in which BP was negligent and irresponsible. But perhaps even worse, how they gamed the system to look victimized. How they got members of Congress to apologize to them. How they’re using police to hide the damage they’ve caused us. How much power and control they have over the situation to obfuscate and avoid responsibility.

Ebert makes the analogy:

“A big tree blew over over on our property. That was an act of God. Parts of it landed on my neighbor’s property. Another act of God. It was my responsibility to pay for its removal. If I’m going to go around growing trees, I have to pay if they get blown over. You can be sure my neighbor will pay if one of his trees blows this way. And if my neighbor could prove that I was trying to cut the tree down (for fuel, let’s say) and it fell the wrong way, he’d have grounds for a lawsuit. Especially if it fell on his house and he could no longer live there.
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BP had a very big tree that blew down in the Gulf. It was not looking after it properly. It ignored or evaded safety regulations. It possibly bore criminal responsibility. The tree fell on my property. BP should have to pay to remove that tree, right? What if it enlisted cops to prevent me from even walking over and taking photos of what they were doing on my property? What if they issued statements saying it wasn’t such a large tree, and my property would soon recover? What if it landed on my house, and BP said it wasn’t much of a house in the first place?”

If BP were a neighbor, their expectation to pay for damages would be obvious. Their avoiding responsibility would be criminal. But in the corporatocracy we have now, we have lawmakers apologizing to BP and equating the demand for damage-repair funds from them as a “shakedown,” and those with a veneer of ethics making some grumblings about responsibility but doing nothing to hold BP accountable in any real sense.

Ebert remarks:

“What I don’t understand is how corporations were granted their immunity. How it is axiomatically understood that their interests come before those of people or even their governments? Why must they be defended against reform?”

Isn’t that the kicker? Somehow, as modern capitalism in the U.S. grew as the robber-barons began buying laws and politicians in the late 1800s, the culture was crafted for us in a way that made us forgive corporations of their crimes, their sociopathology, their activities that would put individuals found guilty of equivalent behavior behind bars for life. Corporations have become the heart and soul of America, the beacons of freedom and democracy, sacrosanct symbols of good ol’ God-fearin’ American capitalism. We have come to value the idea of the corporation as more valuable than the ideas of civic duty and responsibility, of civic service, of representative government and the ideas of democracy that used to stand for being American.

Ebert observes:

“Corporations know no patriotism. They are multi-national. They deal with all markets. It is hard to say just where a big corporation is actually centered. They may have a corporate edifice, but it can be anywhere. Halliburton is in Houston, in theory, but it opened an major office in Dubai, and that is where its chairman, president and CEO lives and works. BP, the fourth largest company in the world, is in London and Houston. Enron seemed to be in Houston, but it turned out not to be a company at all. The largest company in the world is Wal-Mart, which has had great success in China, where its profits will eventually outstrip those in the U.S. It effectively decides the minimum wage in the United States.”

There was a time, during early modern capitalism, when corporate identity and nationalism were interchangeable. When company names like US Steel and American Oil Company weren’t ironic. But the entire point of the corporation, the entire purpose of capitalism, is greatest profit at the lowest cost. So the second national boundaries became elastic enough for countries to locate factories in other countries, place tax shelters in others, relocate service elsewhere, the nationalism of corporate identity evaporated faster than wages and benefits as corporations fell over themselves to become multi-nationals.

And now the Supreme Court has decreed that corporations are people, and may spend as much as they want to influence elections. Glenn Smith in that linked article said:

“Ask yourself this question. If you had to persuade your community about political opinion X, but corporations opposed your view, would you stand a chance knowing that their “political speech” was worth much more than your political speech? The answer is obvious. Mere people have been thrown on the scrap heap. The U.S. Supreme Court is lifting corporations to the top of the evolutionary ladder.
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Teabaggers, do you get it now? You are outraged by your powerlessness. Can you now see the real source of that powerlessness? It is not government. Government has been turned into the handmaiden of the corporate oligarchs.
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I’m compelled to repeat something else: I’m a fan of entrepreneurship and responsible capitalism. But it’s not the so-called heavy hand of government that is the enemy. It’s the corporate monopolists.”

Blanket hating of government is ridiculous. A government can take any of many, many forms. And the U.S. is designed, originally, to be of, by, and for the people. That means that in essence, hating the government is hating the people — hating yourself and your fellow citizens.

Of course, that would have made more sense before modern capitalism. Over the last 100 years or so, there’s been a massive shift going on under our very noses. The government is not the problem, not if it were of, by, and for the people. If that were the case, it wouldn’t matter how big or powerful it is, it’d still be in service and beholden to us. But that’s not who the government represents or serves anymore. It is now the legislative and enforcement arm of multi-national corporations. Like BP. Politicians are so bought and paid for by corporations that they should be wearing NASCAR race outfits.

And this foundational shift in our government coincides with a cultural shift that serves to protect the corporation no less. We the people have been trained over a few generations to give corporations a pass. Value their interests over our own.

Unions? Why, their goal of aiding and protecting the worker is evil because it harms the poor maligned CEO and shareholders and we don’t want that because one day we’ll no longer be a worker and we’ll be CEOs!

Regulations? Why, trying to protect the consumer from fraud and exploitation and safety hazards is evil interference in the Holy Free Market which harms the CEO and the shareholders, and we don’t want that because one day we’ll no longer be consumers, we’ll be CEOs!

The economy collapses and the middle-class crumbles and corporations get giant bail-outs with our money. But that’s not the corporations’ fault, that’s the fault of the government — government is inherently evil. This is a no-lose position for the corporatocracy: so long as government has power, buy it so that it serves the corporate interest and not the peoples’. And if the people wise up, make government the enemy. If government loses power and becomes ineffectual, “small enough to drown in a bathtub,” who’s there to fill the power vacuum? The monopolies and the megacorps and transnationals — and the oligarchy that owns them, that have held the real power in this country for the last 40 years.

What’s the solution? That’s the question that’s always on my mind, nearly constantly for the last 5 years or so, since I really started paying attention to where we are and especially how we got here. Pfft, don’t ask me; I’m just an armchair amateur cultural critic wannabe. The fantasy solution is for the workers to rise up, revolt against the 5% who own 90% of the wealth, the corporate owners and the CEOs, abolish private ownership of large corporations, redistribute that inherited and stolen wealth back to we the 95% it was stolen from, and return the government to the people and not corporate-owned career politicians. But to be honest? I think we’re on a one-way track of corporate despotism, two-class society (the working poverty and the rich), and nothing can be done except feel at home in our chains.

I imagine that may be how the French peasant class felt by the 1780s. Before the utterly unthinkable happened and they rose up and changed the entire course of history, in a blink of an eye, and abolished royalty, wrested power from the wealthy elite and put it back into the hands of the masses.

Imagine! Before the French Revolution, royalty was a divine right, God-given and decreed! To contemplate revolting against royalty was blasphemy. Was for most people not even comprehensible. People can change the foundations of everything most take for granted as immutable, permanent, always-has-been-and-always-will-be. But we know from history that every great advancement in society has come from the abused class revolting against the abusers.

Government isn’t our enemy. It’s a tool that serves whoever controls it. Right now, the oligarchy controls it to serve them. And they’re laughing themselves into pants-wetting as we fight amongst ourselves over race and immigration and religion and the distractions of Republicrat and Demopublican differences, completely oblivious to the real problems. We’re fighting over the positioning of deck chairs on the Titanic.

(yeah, I’ve never claimed to be a blog title expert.)

Peter Schiff wrote an article titled, “Why Not Another World War.” It’s actually an interesting article in which he explains how we all agree that World War II ended The Great Depression and sparked the greatest American economic trend, so why not have another? This Gulf War is too small to do the same thing again. Except, war sucks and has this annoying tendency to be deadly and break things — so let’s make it a great World Water Balloon War!

Go ahead and read the article; it’s short and entertaining. But, then at the end of it he takes a sharp turn into La-La Land.

After laying a good case for describing the World War as the biggest socialized employment program, evah, (major props to Schiff on this — most right-leaners usually berate the New Deal as being evil socialism and shout that it was the war that saved the country… and then conveniently ignore the fact that how the war saved the country was by creating government jobs for millions and spending truckloads of taxes on government programs known as weapons manufacturing), he explains how his proposed Fun War of the same scope of government spending wouldn’t work because the government couldn’t afford such a project like it did 70 years ago: We’re already too taxed and there’s no savings.

“Current tax burdens are now much higher than they were before the War, so raising taxes today would be much more difficult.”

(Keep that in mind for a moment.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Coming up in this post: Glenn Beck and his perversion of history, logic, and data. Stay tuned.

There’s a hilarious video I can no longer find of a British comedy show sketch. Four stereotypical young anarchists come into a messy flat, and one of them passes out copies of Marx and Engles’ Capital. He says something like “OK, if we’re going to proper revolutionaries, we need to actually read this book, yeah?” “Yeah!” And with great, revolutionary gusto, they all open their copies and the leader starts reading: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity….” As he reads he starts getting more despondent and the others start looking distracted. After a few weighty sentences, he finally slams the book and says, “Ah bugger this. Let’s go kill someone!” “Yeah!” And off they go.

The sketch pointed out what most people, especially people who live in the U.S., have no clue about:

Read the rest of this entry »

Hawaii’s Republican Governor Linda Lingle is a giant [insert pejorative of choice here]. She recently vetoed a state bill that would grant equal rights to gays via civil unions, that straights get to enjoy through marriage.

Note that this bill was passed in both the state’s House and Senate when she says:

“It would be a mistake to allow a decision of this magnitude be made by one individual or a small group of elected officials.”

This person obviously has now idea how a representative government works. The entire role of the legislature is to represent the people.

Although, her hypocrisy isn’t surprising, as a Republican: they’re more than happy to use the power of government when it serves their desires, then turn around and pose as populists and claim government is evil when it’s tasked to actually serve the people and protect liberty and civil rights.

I wonder how much of a populist she would be about putting decisions of such magnitude as war and war funding to a popular vote. Think she’d whistle the same tune?

It’s one thing to put issues of taxes and such to popular vote, but you do not have a popular vote in regards to civil rights and liberties! It’s the role of government, the single governors and the small groups of elected officials, to protect the rights of the minority against the tyranny of the majority!

Again, not surprising. She stated herself that she always has and always will fight against gay marriage. She, like most ideologues, can’t see the irony that her very act of intentionally vetoing the bill that the congress passed is itself putting a single person in charge of making a monumental decision that affects many.

Greta Christina has a fascinating article over on AlterNet:
“Why Being Liberal Really Is Better Than Being Conservative
(Liberals and conservatives don’t just disagree about specific issues — we disagree about core ethical values. Can a case be made that liberal values really are better?)”

“When asked a series of questions about different ethical situations, self-described liberals strongly tend to prioritize fairness and harm as the most important of these core values — while self-described conservatives are more likely to prioritize authority, loyalty and purity.”…

In the past (mostly on Facebook) I’ve proclaimed that the conservative value-system is inherently a selfish, xenophobic, authoritarian one that has tried to stop all historic efforts to better humanity with social justice and equality. Greta is a lot nicer than I am and makes a case for the necessity for standard conservative values.

However, I think her arguments that liberal (I prefer “progressive”) values (that’s values, not people) are inherently better to be the best argument I’ve heard made.

Oh my! It’s hard to argue with that cartoon! Look how evil and scary unions are.
Are you an American who believes unions are organized extortion, protecting the lazy and demanding luxuries like Bon-Bons for workers?
Please take 30 minutes of your day to listen to the 1st half of this Small World podcast for the interview with Cory Doctorow. They mainly discuss his new YA novel, but they also talk about unions and workers organizing. I think it’s well worth the listen!

Then, after you listen, give this and this a read for some of the evils of organized labor.

If there’s anything Enron, the West Virginia mine tragedies, AIG and Goldman Sachs have taught us is that corporations care about safety, employees, doing the right thing, because capitalism and the mystical magical “invisible hand of the market” encourages corps and their owners to not put profit above all else!

Oh, wait….

http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2010/05/smoking-gun-bps-deep-horizon-mess
“Seems that a crew from Schlumberger, on contract to BP, hightailed it off the platform at their own expense 6 hours before the blowout becuase BP refused their recommendation to shut down the well.”

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/costly_time-consuming_test_of.html

And the well-written and summary of the foundational causes of corporate disasters (whether it’s natural disaster or economic disaster)

http://www.socialistwebzine.org/2010/05/bp-oil-spill-crime-not-disaster.html

“BP has fought the federal government on safety procedures that might have minimized the impact of the most recent spill for more than a decade. CEOs do not get bonuses based upon ensuring future generation’s access to resources, clean air, or a hospitable climate. The purpose of corporations is not to oversee the welfare of the people of the world, but to make money. Environmental damage is not factored into the corporate calculations of costs and profits. Instead, environmental damage is viewed as the collateral damage of the free market in operation.”

It’s Everybody Draw Muhammad Day today! Because depicting Muhammad is severe enough of a crime to fundamentalist Muslims that people who have done so have been attacked, beaten, even received death threats.
PZ Myers at Pharyngula posted “Violence is not free speech”, decrying the asinine violence and includes a video of a Danish cartoonist being attacked (he’s not harmed) at a university while giving a talk, appropriately enough, on free speech.
Hemant over at Friendly Atheist explains the reasons why we should all draw Muhammad quite well — I won’t belabor the point (any more). He also includes a compilation of Muhammad drawings; I like the recursive blasphemy of Muhammad drawing himself, and the three identical stick figure one.
Well, here’s my Muhammad doodle:

No, he’s not flying. It’s just him hanging out, chillin’.
That’s enough to be blasphemous, which is patently ridiculous, I don’t feel it’s necessary to, say, have him be smitted by the Flying Spaghetti Monster or doing something gross. The point is to point out the absurdity of being labeled heretic, apostate, evil, insulting, blasphemous, for doing nothing more than innocently drawing a religious figure. Going out of my way to depict the figure as a dog, or a rapist, or particularly ugly or cruel looking, might be free speech which is also perfectly defensible, but I think detracts from the more reasonable message that religion is not universally sacrosanct and people who do not believe should not be victimized by whatever ancient and barbarous rules the believers follow.
It’s enough for me to say, “I don’t believe in Yahweh,” I don’t need to go out of my way be rudely insulting about it.

I’m going to keep this short, because I want to mainly present this potentially interesting documentary in the works: “Skipping Sunday School“:

I’m amused and annoyed by the old and ridiculous canard of Pascal’s Wager used at the end of the clip. Spoken by the guy who throughly didn’t believe that a person could be good without the indoctrination of religion. The truth is, there are countless people throughout the world who are perfectly ethical and moral people without having been indoctrinated into religion. If, without religion people would go wild and be amoral, northern Europe should have self-destructed by now! The Scandinavian are majority atheist/agnostic, and yet they have far lower crime rates and a far better social structure than certainly the U.S.

I used to think myself that, even as an atheist, a religious upbringing was still important for the learning of social rules and guidance. I am now horrified I once thought that. Terribly embarrassed. The morality that religion instill is not a thoughtful, empathic, selfless morality. The basis of religious morality is carrot-and-stick: Do what God (who is so hidden as to be indistinguishable from invisible, so you need this book to know what God wants) and you’ll get rewarded. Don’t do what he wants, and you get eternal torment. What kind of basis for ethics is that?!

No, the ethical guidelines and morality a secular humanist upbringing can provide is, in my opinion, a “truer,” more sincere and responsible ethics.

Marxist criticism of the capitalist system says that it’s rife with contradictions. I want to spend a few minutes discussing what I see is one of the biggest, overarching contradictions at the very foundations of capitalism. In short: capitalism has forced us to live in a world in which humans, (who presumedly control society, economy, and business), are expendable chattel.

See, here’s the situation: Under capitalism you are an owner of capital (the richest 1 to 5% of the population), you are a laborer, or you are unemployed. Now, most people in the world are part of the labor class. (This includes those who own their own businesses. Unless you actually own production factories, airlines, a media conglomerate, a bank, you are not a capitalist. You are a laborer.) But here’s the switcheroony: labor costs is the most despised, inconvenient, troublesome cost to those who own and run businesses. All this piles of money handed out to the necessary evil of workers. Business owners (including the bourgeoisie who own small businesses), work and work (ironically) to minimize labor costs–cut benefits, lower pay, decrease the number of employees costing the company money.

Seeing the problem here? The grand majority of human beings in the world are the enemy of business (so long as they’re labor and not consumers). Business grudgingly pays labor, as little as it can get away with, in order to give the masses the means to buy the commodities and services capitalism produces at obscene rates and worthlessness. The majority of the world’s population is the enemy of the very socio-economic base that they live under and serve.

Now, Read the rest of this entry »

First, a little story:

I’ve been a huge fan of SF author Steven Brust since circa 1988 when Taltos came out. (I didn’t know at the time that was not the first in the “Vlad Taltos” series, but it worked out OK.) After becoming a fan, I discovered Brust was a self-described Trotskyist. Being in my teens, early to mid-20s, I really didn’t have any idea what that was but I knew it was somehow connected to GASP! evil Communism! One part of my brain processed this information something like, “Huh, his writing is kick-ass, he seems really cool…perhaps whatever Trotskyism is it’s either a) inconsequential to who he is, or b) it’s not some all-encompassing evilness as my culture leads me to believe.” The other half of my mind processed more like, “LA LA LA LA I’M NOT LISTENING! I SEE NOTHINK! I HEAR NOTHINK! MOVE ALONG, CITIZEN!”

So the cognitive dissonance was dealt with by ardently ignoring it.

Until around 2007 when I started grad school and my first instructor was Dr. William Burling: the most influential professor, and one of the most influential persons, I’d ever met. I had the privilege of being a student of his for three (almost four) fantastic classes. What his greatest influence on me was to introduce me to the idea of questioning culture, society, government, art, everything. Everything is, to a greater or lesser degree, either a product of or a reflector of the socio-economic base of a culture and nearly everything in the culture is in service to those who control the wealth in society. In short, Dr. Burling was a Marxist, and by the fortune of serendipity, happened to come into my life just as I was questioning political structures.

At that time I was moving from Democrat to vague libertarian. It took nearly a year of questioning and study and investigation and debate, but eventually I too became a self-described Marxist. Although I’ve barely scratched the surface still of Marxist theory.

So, at one point as Dr. Burling and I were discussing Marxist theory and SF and fantasy literature, I realized something from the long forgotten recesses of my mind… (See, I kinda stopped reading Mr. Brust’s books by this point–not because I stopped liking them, but I’d pretty much stopped reading for pleasure altogether! I am glad to say I’ve since picked pleasure reading back up and have caught back up with all of Mr. Brust’s “Taltos” books at least.) I recalled that tidbit of info about my favorite fantasy author being a Trotskyist. I asked Dr. Burling, who had introduced me to Stanley Kim Robinson, and China Miéville, and Philip K. Dick, and a Marxist outlook of William Gibson (who, now, I have no idea how you couldn’t read Gibson with a Marxist outlook! My god, the man is postmodern materialist cultural criticism up and down!) if he had read any Steven Brust. He replied, somewhat dismissively that he didn’t have time for any pleasure reading. Then I mentioned Mr. Brust was a Trotskyist and, if I recalled, wrote in a couple of his novels about a peasant uprising in his fantasy world.

Dr. Burling grabbed a pen and asked me what that name was again.

Sadly, Dr. Burling passed away a couple of years later. I never did find out if he started looking into Brust’s writing. Probably not; he was pretty busy, in addition to teaching, editing a book of essays on Kim Stanley Robinson and working with  Miéville on a book of criticism about Marxist SF. *sigh* I still feel acute sense of honor of having been able to know the man and learn from him. He changed my entire way of looking at life and I could have missed it if I’d been a couple of years too late.

Anyway, so now that I’m deep in trying to learn and understand Marxist theory, both as it applies to literature and culture, guess what my favorite Trotskyist fantasy author has started doing? He’s reading and commenting on Karl Marx’s seminal work on socio-economics, Das Kapital.* (Volume 1, I believe, which is the one Marx had worked mostly on before he died, while Engels wrote the other volumes.)

What’s really cool is that just before this he had read through and commented on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (arguably the father of and the manual of modern capitalism). This kicked-ass because not only did I learn something from it (unfortunately I came in rather late), it just goes to show that Brust is interested in exploring all the angles of modern socio-economics and doesn’t just surround himself with material that fits his perceptions or ideologies. That’s certainly a quality to admire and emulate.

I’m looking forward to reading what he has to say about the tome. And I’m very glad that one side of my brain stopped being a pest and started paying attention. Marxism is not evil, Trotskyism is not evil, communism is not evil. These are just ideas, concepts, ways of investigating and ideas are never evil. They may not be good or practical ideas, but one should never dismiss a way of thinking, a way of investigating, because authority has proclaimed it verboten, taboo, out of bounds. Question everything, especially authority. There’s a reason why they are in power, and a means by which they stay in power.

* I think he’s moving his blog over to a new location. I’ll try to update this link if I can when it happens.