First, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy as directed by the director of the original Swedish vampire film that made me think vampires could be interesting again, Let the Right One In. A truly inspired bit of daring movie-making, that one. With TTSS, he brought along his truly wonderful talent at evoking atmosphere and style, but I was rather underwhelmed by the film as a whole. There’s really nothing I can pinpoint as any one particularly weak point (except maybe the somewhat impenetrable script — but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If everything else is good, and I get a sense that the plot is making sense, I can let a dense script I’m not immediately grokking wash over me knowing I can watch it again some other time for the details). But even the script isn’t a failure by any means; the dialog was well-written with the tension-filled spareness of a Pinter play.

The acting was also quite good all-round — but I wasn’t blown away. Which is my failing. For months, I’d been so worked up about this film, about Gary Oldman, that I expected a tour de force performance. What I got was skillful subtlety, and natural and believable underplayed drama. Well, except for John Hurt, but then, his angry forcefulness was exactly what was needed and entirely appropriate for character and tone.

This asplosion not in any film reviewed here. Or, anywhere.

Did I not like it as much as I was hoping because, what, I was expecting a Bourne movie? Bond? Mission Impossible? No. I’m familiar with the book (though I haven’t read it) and the original production, so I knew it was going to be a realistic, non-explody, spy film. I loved The American, for example, even though — no, because – it was stark and understated and atmospheric and tension-building and virtually no actiony-action. (I’m actually the only person I know who liked The American.) But then, I really didn’t know what to expect with The American except that it’d been described as a European-like film — which is a plus in my book! I simply, for some unknown reason, went into TTSS with high expectations — and they were ironically fulfilled in that it’s an excellent film, but not what I expected.

Then there’s J. Edgar. I pretty much got exactly what I expected with that film, and that may be one of the reasons for its surprisingly low RottenTomatoes score (although Ebert, who I almost always agree with, gave it a high 3.5 arbitrary stars). It was a rough, uneven, hit-and-miss film with much unfulfilled potential. Part of the problem is Leonardo DiCaprio. I can’t buy him. I recognize he’s a good actor who takes on challenging roles, but he’s . . . so . . . it’s the very weird dissonance he creates in my mind where I can’t decide if he did well or not, like one of those “magic eye” pictures where if you work at it, the 3D image will pop out at you — but usually, it’s just lingering on the edge of being and you know you can bring it into focus if you try. . . . Anyway, that’s DiCaprio for me in any adult role he’s in. He was great in Gilbert Grape, perfect in Titanic, quite wonderful in Gangs of New York. But I could just barely accept him in Shutter Island (good film!), though, I’ll admit, I accepted him in Inception. But as J. Edgar Hoover, I just can’t quite bring my opinion of his performance in focus, but I’m pretty sure I see the outline of an opinion that he was out of his depth and gave a pretty 1.75-note performance. His squint gave the other .25.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the makeup! OK, DiCaprio’s was passable, but what the heck was the Play-Dough and stipple monstrosity that was “Clyde Tolson”? It looked like Odo came back from Deep Space 9 with chicken pox and a bee sting allergy. Also, the film skipped around in time indiscernibly. It wouldn’t have been a problem if it had been two or three very different time-lines that went along at their own, but chronically forward, line — but there were points in which it skipped around in time just enough where you couldn’t quite tell by any visual cue if it went forward 1 year or 15 before skipping back 30.

Those flaws aside, the story surrounding Hoover and his longtime companion and possible lover, Clyde Tolson, was nearly perfect in its level of intimacy, its tone, and its anxiety. They played it quite well. Although, unfortunately, there’s one scene in which they have a fight resulting from Hoover’s repressed fear and Tolson’s sense of betrayal, in which they’re rolling around on each other and despite the sincere drama of the moment, I couldn’t help but hear Mark Russell in my head singing, “Sexual, subli-MA-tionnn . . . sexual SUB-li-ma-tion. . . .” It was just too contrived and blatant. But, as a whole, as I said, it was well-done and dramatic as I couldn’t help but cry a little at the end in Hoover’s bedroom.

But, being the Marxist that I am, I couldn’t help but see the movie from another perspective. Most of Hoover’s career was, as was depicted in the film, an obsession with a war against terror, I mean, against the Commie Menace. Now, I know Clint Eastwood, socially and politically, is a complex guy who has a foot in both the liberal progressive and the conservative camps, so I’m not terribly certain whether he wants us to cheer for Hoover and his elimination of communism in America (after all, the only depiction we get of the people Hoover fought were legitimately dangerous and violent anarchists — which, by the way, is a different ideology from communism), and no glimpse of American socialism of the 1910s through 30s that wasn’t through Hoover’s eyes, or whether he wants us to realize Hoover’s view is a skewed and ideological one. Is Eastwood taking it for granted that the audience knows who Emma Goldman was and what the Chicago union strikes were all about? Or does he side with Hoover’s ideals, but just not as neurotic about it as Hoover was?

In any case, I booed (mentally) with the 1919 anarchist bombings, sure; but, when Emma Goldman, the mother of American anarcho-socialism, appeared (and with such an eerie likeness that I questioned the accuracy of Maureen Stapleton’s portrayal of her in Warren Beatty’s epic film, Reds), I cheered! She’s a hero in my book, and a movie very desperately needs to be made about her. (Probable sociopath Ayn Rand got a sympatheric TV movie made about her, but Emma just gets cameos.) But as I was saying, in this time of the 2nd great-ish depression, thinking about the fascist iron fist that was brought to bear down on the nascent socialist movement in America during the 1st Great Depression, makes me frustrated and angry. People today have no clue that, especially before WWI but continuing into the Depression, the socialist party was a viable and legitimate party in America with supporters from all walks of life (except the wealthy capitalists, the politicians they bought, and the police they used to protect them), from Woody Guthrie to John Steinbeck to Albert Einstein.

If the development of modern capitalism had been mitigated and wasn’t allowed to take complete dominance in America in the early 20th century, I’m just guessing here of course, but I seriously doubt we’d have the boom-bust collapse of the economy across the predominately postmodern capitalist world we have now. (But then, to be fair, capitalism was needed then in order to get us to a state where it can destroy itself by making capital wealth ownership by the few, unnecessary. Which is the state we’re now in, with capitalism self-destructing.) But, if socialism had been allowed to remain side-by-side with capitalism — even if in a lesser role — and share the “base,” then when capitalism collapsed as a viable socio-economic model, viable and evolved socialist models for the 21st century could’ve been ready to take over. Yet, thanks to the war-on-pinkos waged by the likes of Hoover (and McCarthy, whom, according to this film, Hoover disliked greatly), all reasonable ideas of socialism were lumped in with the violent anarchists and eradicated as one boogey-scapegoat. And, while Hoover’s pet project and legacy, the FBI, became enviable in the realm of criminal investigation, I’m less than pleased about how corrupt, like most of government, it has become. (Although, really, with all the bugging and wiretapping the FBI was doing in the film, often for Hoover’s own secret personal files, I guess they really haven’t changed all that much!)

So, what was Eastwood’s point? Does he share his contemporary, Beatty’s, leftist sensibilities and made Hoover into a murkily depicted ideologue who changed history on his own terms? Or as a flawed hero who but for being sadly repressed (I know, fortunately, Eastwood’s liberal progressive opinions on homosexuality) and conflicted, did the right thing, badly? I can’t tell. And I don’t think that ambiguity, useful in arthouse films, is a good thing in this very Hollywood biopic.

Christian local businessman pops over to the annual free “Skepticon” conference to see what’s going on. Thinking, understandably so, that it might be all about skepticism on UFOs and ghosts and whatnot (which it somewhat is), he’s treated to a few minutes of Sam Singleton’s parody act of a holy-roller revivalist sermon, not promoting gettin’ saved, but parodying religion and promoting skeptical atheism — and the crowd participating in the parody by, not yelling “amen!,” but rather “goddam!”

So, said Christian businessman runs over to his neighboring gelato and smoothie business and posts a sign reading:

“Skepticon is not welcomed to my Christian business,”

where it remains for anywhere between 10 minutes (he says) and two hours (others say), possibly violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The near immediate result? Atheists with access to the Intertubes (purt near ev’rybody), went apoplectic and completely decimated his online rankings on such social media services as Urbanspoon, Yelp, and Google reviews. I mean, decimated. (Although, will taking a store’s ranking down to 1 star, or 5%, or whatever on one of these, really harm a business? Especially in a town that’s not very social media savvy? Meh, doubt it. But it’s still something that would make a struggling businessperson’s stomach turn to water.)

So, he posted an notpology on his Web page: a very thinly veiled ”please lay off, m’kay?!” apology. After that made the rounds of critical mockery, he posted an extensive and reasonably sincere-sounding apology over on Reddit, where his infamy across the world was begat. Some atheism/skepticism bigwigs and muckymucks accepted the apology. Others did not. Boy-howdy, did they not. And this is where my opinions on the matter begin….

As this drama played out, plot twist by plot twist, my own views changed somewhat with each new development.

• Posted the sign: I freaked-the-flip out.
• I learned he posted it after watching some undeniably inflammatory and reverse-offensive Sam Singleton: I nodded my head sagely and with tee-pee’ed fingers murmuring, “Indeed. Quite understandable, wot!”
• The notpology: “OMG hes such a lyingjerk!!1!”
• The full apology: “Ah, good show, old bean!”
• JT Eberhard’s non-acceptance: “Yeah! Totally! We ride!… whoa… wait a second… Really?”

See, JT Eberhard’s a quickly-growing muckymuck of atheism in his own right. He’s the driving force for the first three years of Skepticon and is a very vocal opponent, and mockerizer, of religion. And nearly all the time I agree with nearly everything he posts (although, I find his frequent use of profanity completely unnecessary and juvanile… but whatchya gonna do). Yet, I’ve decided that in this late stage of this already getting old issue, his approach (the first “non-acceptance” post linked above, and his ironically-titled follow-up: “We Have No Choice But To Invade Gelato Mio” is wrong and likely do to far more harm than good. (But FSM help the person who tries to suggest JT might be wrong about something, unless you already happen to be in his inner-circle of friends. You take your metaphorical life in your hands. But, here goes….)

There is a time and a place and a need for bulldog firebrands. And, in JT’s day job, I rather think his style of take-no-prisoners scorched-earth approach is necessary! As he’s “a campus organizer and high school specialist with the Secular Student Alliance,” I believe he has to work on a daily basis dealing with some absolutely terrible bigotry from people in positions of unquestioned authority toward kids who have little to no defense against the religious intolerance they face. He has to defend students’ rights, legal and ethical, to express their beliefs and even form legally-allowed student clubs and associations which are constantly under attack from school administrators. Atheist students, especially those still in the closet and in much need of vocal and voracious support, need people like JT and his “give no quarter” single-mindedness. And I celebrate him for it!

But, there’s also a need, and a time and a place, for choosing one’s battles, deciding when discretion is the better part of valor, and allowing the “enemy” to slink away with a noggin-bump, instead of nuking them from orbit and then salting the earth for good measure. Yes yes, I know, JT’s actual demands are:

“Tell me bigotry is unacceptable.  Tell me offense is not the same as breathing life into prejudice.  Tell me that punishing somebody for disagreeing with you or thinking your beliefs are silly is immoral.  And tell me you will make a donation that will actually help make the world a better place rather than inviting us to patronize your business for an insignificant discount.”

…and they’re not unreasonable demands, really. (Well, there’s valid debate over whether demanding a struggling small business owner [who is likely in great debt and probably not even paying himself a wage -- if the average situation of small business owners is applicable in this guy's case] make a large personal donation is unreasonable or not. Although, I can see how that 10% discount the guy’s offering might be seen as patronizing and a cynical ploy to simply help his business.)

But it’s not just the demands themselves as much as it’s the inflammatory approach and words JT uses. The demeanor, the tone, the insults, the mockery he uses, feels to me less like a noble battle, and more like curb-stomping the local bully after getting a lucky break and jumping him when his back was turned. And while in the battlefield of protecting students from bigoted school boards and principals and teachers, for the sake of establishing proper laws and rules and making sure they’re enforced, one does not concede the battle until the other side gives unconditional surrender. But in the battlefield of public opinion, media, the general public, that approach does the atheist “movement” far more harm than any possible good.

In the minds of the general public, they see a situation where a local businessman does something, and are shown by the outraged minority that the something was discriminatory and bigoted, we now have the upper hand. We now are seen by many people as having rights and that there is discrimination that goes on, and the general public (including liberal Christians), now have the seed planted in their head that discrimination’s not cool and we’ll call them on it. They themselves may not disagree with the bigotry, but at least they may be thinking about the repercussions of it and may even be questioning the bigotry itself as something they never really thought about before. It’s not a big win, but it’s progress.

Then, the guy apologizes, and the atheist community at-large generally, and publicly, accepts it. What happens? The general public and the liberal Christians have their preconceptions of the angry, religion-hating atheist challenged! We’re shown as reasonable, ethical, diplomatic, and perhaps even calmer and more sane than your average holier-than-thou religious leader and spokesperson who appears on FOX News. Now they’re more willing to listen to what we have to say, to consider our positions, to truly rethink their bigotry and not just the outward acts of discrimination. Now they’re willing to concede issues and work with us in other issues.

But then, what happens when prominent atheist spokespersons demand heads on spikes? (Metaphorically.) The walls redouble in size, the shields go to maximum, and the us-versus-them mentality is reinforced. The general public and the liberal Christian (which, really, by and large, are greatly overlapping Venn Diagram circles), believe their preconceptions are well-founded and continue to ignore our valid complaints and criticisms.

If we let this one bigoted business owner go, probably not having had a real change of heart but just a show of one, what do we really lose? If we accept his sincere-sounding apology and let him off with tail tucked between his legs and a stern “Okay, off with you — but we’ll be watching,” is that really so terrible if it means we gain great PR and the willing and open ear of millions of other people? So he’s not beaten into submission — but will anything we do really, possibly, change his “heart”? Do we seriously think that we can possibly convince this guy he was truly wrong by continuing to berate and insult and bash him and demand things of him? Will that make him, and many like him, watching this, see the light? Have a true conversion?

No, it will not. No amount of continued battle against him will truly change him or others, and will only harden them all to us. But diplomacy, some forgiveness, leniency, will not only be more productive to our cause in the long run and on a wider scale, but may actually do more good in setting this guy on a path to the real and sincere atonement that is currently being demanded at the point of a verbal spear.

*blog post image taken from this lifehacker post: “Venting Frustration Will Only Make Your Anger Worse.”

Had an interesting day last week with a significantly important coincidence:

So we spent two hours at work last Wednesday doing our annual insurance benefits review. For two hours, with our insurance broker and our Aflac rep, we discussed how much our insurance costs. How many thousands our deductible is. What’s in-network and what’s out. Whether ER visit costs get rolled into the hospital stay coverage or not. What conditions allow for supplemental insurance payouts and whether it follows you and your job. Tips and hints on how to try to get the insurance company to authorize and pay out for treatments. Etc. etc.

(Interesting note provided by the Aflac rep: 70% of bankruptcy cases in America are due to medical costs. And 50% of those — the bankrupt had medical insurance.)

So, two hours of numbers and facts and complex conditions surrounding how your life can be slowly destroyed by medical bills instead of quickly destroyed. Now for the comedic coinkydink:

That very morning, on the way to work, I was listening to a recent “Sword and Laser” scifi/fantasy book club podcast with a conversation with multi-bestselling and award winning author Robert J. Sawyer. And when asked how old he was when he was able to start writing full-time, he said he was writing full-time in his early twenties. Why? Because he’s Canadian. He expressed that, like him, a lot of Canadian writers and other artists are able to even have careers as artists, are able to work on their art from an early age and get good, developing their skill and talent early, allowing them to have decades of quality output far in excess of American writers and artists for primarily one main reason: socialized healthcare. As a young man, Sawyer never had to worry about giving up his talent and dream in order to find and work at a job doing not at all what he wanted to do in order to have healthcare. Sure, there were times he had to eat pretty skimpily, but that’s doable. Paying thousands of dollars for an illness or accident isn’t.

Award-winning Canadian author (among other things) Cory Doctorow once expressed similar arguments on an episode of American Freethought. He said now that he had a family, he’d never live in the U.S. again, never not live in Canada or the U.K., so that his daughter would never be without healthcare. He told a story of how when traveling across England, his daughter started developing a bad fever. They stopped in a town and saw a doctor who examined her, wrote a script, they picked it up, and were able to continue on, and they never had to fill out papers and only had to pay a couple of dollars (equivalent) for the medication. He and his wife get to thrive in their dream jobs because aren’t forced to work for healthcare.

I can’t say who because I didn’t ask permission to say, but I know someone in Canada who had a car accident not long ago. They were taken to the ER by ambulance, were examined, treated, and released with great care. They were provided with a new shirt because theirs had to be cut off, and, reimbursed for the cut shirt. All they had to do was show their Canadian citizen health I.D., and they got all this treatment without paying a dime or filling out paperwork.

Oh, of course, taxes pay for this care. But I once compared how much taxes I pay (sales, income, property) with a relative who lives in Canada (higher sales but no income (or property — one of the two, I forget)), and at the bottom line is we pay about the same in taxes.

…except they don’t have to pay what I do in health insurance premiums and deductibles and medical co-pays and out of pocket bills…. So, who wins here?

In every modern country in the world: the citizens do. In the U.S., and only the U.S., health insurers do. And the so-called healthcare “reform” that was recently passed? That “Obamacare” (which can be called “Newtcare” since it’s the same reform proposed by the House Republicans in the 90s), it actually put insurers in better position to make more money while hurting small businesses and much of the people. But, small wonder considering how many millions of dollars politicians, from both parties, get from insurance industry lobby.

Do I hear someone yell, “If you love Canada so much, why don’t you move there!“? Oh, I swear I wish I could, I really very much wish I could. But it costs to move and I’m too far in debt with student loans.

Oh, did I mention that, like most of Europe, most of higher education in Canada is also as free as their healthcare? They have this crazy idea that a healthy and educated citizenry is somehow good for the country on the whole. I know, crazy, huh?

Update: Well this is funny!
Note the date of today’s post — September 2011. Well, after posting this post, my blog automatically created a set of “related posts” links (see below). And lookee what’s likely still the first suggested link.

It’s a post I did in April 2009 about the same author(s) talking on different podcasts about the same thing. I’d totally forgotten! Wow, so much has changed in the last 2 to 3 years, huh? Oh I’m laughing til I cry.

It started with something a friend of mine said recently. A group of us were ragging on corporations, and someone commented about something vile a corporation recently did, and the friend quipped, “It’s almost like corporations were made up of people.” The subtext to his sarcasm was to imply that it’s silly to discuss corporations as if they’re some separate entity from humanity because, after all, corporations are made up of people and, evidently, will only do the same good and ill that humans do.

Unfortunately, despite what the conservative-leaning Supreme Court thinks (vis-à-vis “Citizens United v FEC”), corporations aren’t people. They are a collection of people, that, like any collection of people, make a gestalt that is very different than the sum of its parts. To claim to not be able to analyze and critique (and judge ethically) corporations as a separate thing because they’re made of people, is utterly meaningless. By that rationale, nothing could be said about anything within the realm of human culture and creation because, after all, it’s all made by, or made up of, people. Like all forms of human culture and its production, corporations can — and should — be analyzed and critiqued as a concept that acts separate and apart from humanity in general. Why?

Think of it this way: Would you walk into a library and find a literary book club in progress and expect it to behave and have the save motives and agenda as, say, the group of Ultimate Wrestling fans that show up regularly at the local sports bar? Or how about the local Baptist Bible study group versus the local Society for Creative Anachronism group? They’re all made of people, yes? But any group of people with a shared goal, or interest, is going to A. be very similar to other groups that have the same goals and interests; and B. be very different from groups with different goals and interests. Similar groups will be similar enough that you can usually talk about that kind of group using generalities, and different groups can be different enough to be able to critique them as altogether different entities. This sounds silly and obvious when stated like that, but it’s the ridiculously obvious reason corporations lend themselves to separate and justified deconstruction and critique apart from the motivations and behaviors of people in general.

One of the reasons should be obvious: self-selection. Particular type of people with particular types of demeanors, attitudes, outlooks, ideologies, will choose to associate themselves with others of similar types, under the banner of a shared goal or interest. You will find particular types of people at a book club and different particular types at the sports bar. Oh, sure, there will be cross-over. The occasional mixed-martial-art fan may also be a Jane Eyre fan, and the occasional Nicholas Sparks fan will be seen at the sports bar. But the exceptions point up the rule.

And so too with corporations. Particular types of people seek and earn MBAs and become stock traders and managers and accountants and whatnot who gravitate toward the corporate culture. And the larger, the more multi-national the corporation, the more the individual dissolves and melds into the background of the homogeneous culture of the corporation. Those who don’t fit in or are different than the corporate culture demands, either self-select to leave the culture, or get pushed out for not fitting in — not being a “team player.” And so the corporate culture self-reinforces and insulates itself even more in order to achieve its goals and realize its agenda.

And what is the corporation’s goals and agenda? All groups, organizations, have goals and agendas. The book club, the Bible study, the sports cub, the football team, the knitting circle, the SCA group, the anti-vaccination group, the local skeptics’ club, the Young Democrats, the Future Business Leaders of America… all groups that have come together for a shared interest have an overarching goal. And what is the corporation’s? Profit, pure and simple. Profit by means of selling a product or service to as close to 100% of the market share as possible, and by any means it can get away with. In fact, legally, a corporation can’t make operating decisions that would knowingly deprive the shareholders from making money. As observed by Robert Hinkley in “Redesigning Corporate Law,”

“Distilled to its essence, [the law] says that the people who run corporations have a legal duty to shareholders, and that duty is to make money. Failing this duty can leave directors and officers open to being sued by shareholders. This explains why corporations find social issues such as humanrights irrelevant – because they fall outside the corporation’s legal mandate. Secondly, these provisions explain why executives behave differently than they might as individual citizens, because the law says their only obligation in business is to make money.“

Well, you can’t make it more plain than that. Corporations exist to make money; and civil liberties, human rights, decency, laws, are all obstacles that must be worked around and, wherever possible, ignored and broken, in order to reach its goal.

A corporation, because of its self-selection and its over-aching goal that all members of the corporation buy into, makes the corporation act as something individualized and apart from humanity. In a way, a corporation is like a person — a sociopath. An amoral being without empathy or remorse, single-minded and manipulative, and dangerous. Capable and willing to do any harm necessary if it means getting what it wants.

In society, when an individual sociopathic human does harm, we punish them. We take them out of society. When a corporation does harm, what happens? The corporation may get fined, it may get sued. But as the link above explains, that’s just a cost of doing business. The corporation will likely continue on without a hitch, especially if it’s a multi-national where its finances are in the Cayman Islands, its management is in Dubai, and its production is in China. Some CEO or manager may become the face of “the problem,” get slapped on the wrist, leave the company — but the company persists as juggernaut. (And the CEO likely will be just fine as well, don’t you worry. Most corporate CEOs and managers sit on the board of directors of other corporations in an incestual game of musical chairs. Boards that hire on a new CEO from another corporation who leads the company for a while, makes several million, gets a few million more as a severance package even if he does a poor job, where he’ll move on to oversee the hiring of a CEO in another company he helps run.)

Oh, and by the way, most of the people on top, the CEOs and managers and directors of the board, aren’t generally people who started out at a community college and worked full time and took classes until they Made It. No, that group at the top, who shuffle around the companies and hand each other favors, are the type of people satirized in this “Note of Appreciation from the Rich.” So when the top of the corporate structure is led by these hereditary, dynastic, feudal lords, and the bottom 95% is constructed of those who strive to be like those at the top — you get a very particular type of culture.

Corporations are, in general, evil in the same way a psychopath is evil. (In fact, it’s estimated that an inordinate amount of corporate leaders are, in fact, sociopaths and psychopaths. Why? Again: self-selected culture.) So, like all and any construct of human creation, the corporation is something that has its own agenda, goals, motivations, effects, and sub-culture, which is perfectly open to deconstruction and ethical judgement.

For more, excellent analysis of why we should analyze and deconstruct any element of human culture, see Roland Barthes Mythologies. It’s actually very short, and a fascinating read.

With the coming of this completely arbitrarily demarcated new year and new decade (contrary to popular opinion, decades begin on “1″ years, e.g.: 2011, not “0,” e.g.: 2010), I need to make some serious changes; I need to refocus, re-prioritize, and start anew. As someone I don’t recall said, “If you want things to be different, you must do something different.”

Part of my problem is frakkin’ Facebook. It’s an evil, evil bane on productivity and a facilitator of my getting distracted and bent-out-of-shape about subjects that, while are important, serves only to make me upset and completely unproductive in regards to what’s even more important in my life: my nascent, budding writing career that I hope to make into a viable “second job,” with aspirations of it being my main job within a couple/few years.

In addition to the craptacular events that have sideswiped me and/or made me utter a general “WTF, world? W. T. F.?!” every other week, it seems, I recently read a blog post by writer/director Kevin Smith: “SMonologue #2.” The first half he discusses “Clerks 3″ and the cost/process of investing in a movie idea and making it happen. But the important bit is the last half, in which he writes:

Don’t pursue a role, LIVE that role. Like my sister told me, back when I confessed I wanted to be a filmmaker…

“Then BE a filmmaker,” she said.

“That’s what I’m saying: I wanna be.”

And that’s when she gave me the million dollar advice…

“No - BE a filmmaker. You say you wanna be; just BE a filmmaker. Think every thought AS a filmmaker. Don’t pine for it or pursue it; BE it. You ARE a filmmaker; you just haven’t made a film yet.”

And it sounded artsy-fartsy as fuck, but it was CRAZY useful advice. A slacker hit the sheets that night, but the CLERKS-guy got out of bed the following morning.

The old writer’s adage goes: “A writer writes.” It means a writer doesn’t pine to write, a writer doesn’t think about writing and wishing, a writer does it. Good, bad, lots, little, it doesn’t matter.

It reminded me of a blog post from popular and well-awarded SF author, John Scalzi (whose books I love and is only 2 years older than me), I read some months ago, and then came across again recently: Writing: Find the Time or Don’t. And while he’s not normally this in-your-face, this is obviously a subject, the kvetching about finding time to write, that gets his goat — so he writes:

This is why at this point in time I have really very little patience for people who say they want to write but then come up with all sorts of excuses as to why they don’t have the time. You know what, today is the day my friend Jay Lake goes into surgery to remove a huge chunk of his liver. After which he goes into chemo. For the third time in two years. Between chemo and everything else, he still does work for his day job. And when I last saw him, he was telling me about the novel he was just finishing up. Let me repeat that for you: Jay Lake has been fighting cancer and has had poison running through his system for two years, still does work for his day job and has written novels. So will you please just shut the fuck up about how hard it is for you to find the time and inspiration to write, and just do it or not.

Kind of puts things into perspective, don’-it? Regardless of what goals you want to pursue. For me, writing has been what I’ve wanted to do since I read my first Ray Bradbury story around 4th grade. Solidified when I started writing narratives of my D&D game exploits around 6th grade. And what have I got to show for 30 years of wanting to be a writer? Three finished short stories and a novel that’s still shambling toward an ever-ungraspable ending. Bupkis! Why? Oh, because I have work, and family, and school, and yadda yadda yadda. It’s really all because I’m easily distracted. The Internet has helped give me adult ADD. My falling ass-backwards into a computer career didn’t help, as it forced me to multi-task. Oh, and good news, studies on multi-tasking has been shown to make you suck at everything you’re trying to do at the same time. Oh, and your general reasoning ability as well.

This excuse, that excuse…. Scalzi asks:

So: Do you want to write or don’t you? If your answer is “yes, but,” then here’s a small editing tip: what you’re doing is using six letters and two words to say “no.” And that’s fine. Just don’t kid yourself as to what “yes, but” means.

I’m sick of saying, “Yes, but…”. The answer is “yes, dammit!” Every year I age I’m closer to death. Closer to dementia. Closer to debilitating car accidents. Alzheimer’s. Embolisms and aneurysms. Things that will take away my ability to write without giving me any choice in the matter. Not to mention the fact that after 30, the adult brain begins to plasticize and harden neuropathways making it more and more difficult to learn new things, think in new ways, consider alternatives to assumed ways of thinking and knowledge — basically, makes you less of a nimble and adaptable person with a dynamic voice and ability to explore various and risky or challenging writing styles and subjects. Every year that passes is my life becoming less and less what I want it to be, with wasted opportunity and missed chances.

Find the time or make the time. Sit down, shut up and put your words together. Work at it and keep working at it. And if you need inspiration, think of yourself on your deathbed saying “well, at least I watched a lot of TV.” If saying such a thing as your life ebbs away fills you with existential horror, well, then. I think you know what to do. (Scalzi)

I am filled with that horror!

I can’t quit my insurance-providing day job, and of course I can’t give up my family. But I can squeeze those writing moments, those 250+ words a day, from the spaces where reading about how politicians are ruining our democracy, how the TSA are the new Brown Shirts, how religion does this or that, etc., currently saps my time and attention. The podcast “Writing Excuses,” episode: “5.8: The Excuses You’re Out Of” has three successful writers talking about all the “yes, buts,” and they reiterate what I encounter time and time again from writers (and other creators of art and scholarship) — they gave up TV in order to do what they wanted to do. Not necessarily all TV as at least one of them uses some shows as inspiration (more on some vs. all in a moment), but certainly the turning it on just to see what’s on habit — but the bottom line is you make the time to do what you want, and you make it a priority over the other things that you complain are sapping your time.

The idea of giving up wading through daily doses of political, anarchism, religious, social-critique articles and blogs and news and essays, cold turkey, is very daunting. Intimidating. Being a well-informed advocate of educating one’s self about the forces out there in socio-political economics and culture, is something I’ve become, is a central part of who I am. Ever since the late 90s, when I knew something was wrong with society and politics and middle-class life, but couldn’t put my finger on it. I kept hearing from both political sides what problems were and who was to blame, but it all seemed superficial and scapegoating for the real problems. Then a few years ago, I was introduced to a method of thought, an ideology (yes, “ideology,” no bones about it) that serves as a tool for examining culture and politics and economics and religion — everything, and everything made sense! I could begin, just, to see the roots of the problems and not just the symptoms.

One can’t unsee, unexperience, what one has seen and experienced. I can’t become that quality I loathe in most people in America who limit their entire social awareness and political activisim to spending 5 minutes every four (at best two) years in a voting booth, putting checks next to people who have been selected for them as their representitives, who don’t actually represent them at all! And then coast through life with smug arrogance that they’ve performed their civic duty and are engaged citizens of democracy — when all they’ve done is choose a lesser evil fed to them, maintaining the status quo, and aren’t any more engaged or civic than the person who stayed home during that one day in 1460 days (or 740). I can’t be that person. Granted, I use a lot of “yes, but”s when it comes to actually doing things like protesting or marching or letter-writing campaigns, and the like — but I see my endless shouting into the storm as a form of engagement with the cultural forces that affect my life without my consent. It’s a form of doing something that’s better than just passively watching FOX News or MSNBC and going “tsk tsk tsk” at the symptoms of cultural rot and manipulation. I don’t know if I can be passive and uninformed any more.

Part of my mind keeps trying to reassure me, no no no, of course not! Go ahead and be engaged in deep socio-politics and religion critique and the like, little bits. It’ll be OK. And I realize that voice sounds a lot like what I figure the mental voice of an addict tells him that it’s OK to still hang out with his druggie friends, or go places where people will be using. It’ll be OK. But I know hanging around Facebook with all the news feeds and interest groups that feed my “bad”-news-junkie addiction, will just suck me back into time-wasting distraction from what I truly want my goal in life to be right now. So, I have to ask myself, can I do it for one year? Can I block, set to ignore, defriend, unsubscribe from all the people and groups that send me socio-economic-political-religious news and info, and be a disattached and disengaged sleepwalker?

Unfortunately, not entirely, I can’t. Because that ideology I’ve embraced which makes sense of the world to me, is the same one I use to critique popular culture, literature, and the other subjects of my scholarly writing — the second aspect of my writing life I need to make active and viable. That aspect that I just spent years and racked up debt getting my Masters Degree in. I need to continue to nurture and engage the scholarship that will allow me to write interesting and applicable journal articles, and hopefully books. And no scholarship can be done absent of some model, some theory — some totalizing ideology. And, even if I were to limit my scholarship purely to the study of certain literature, I can’t avoid some engagement in contemporary socio-politics. More so since my general area of scholarship is in posthuman postmodernism. (Well, unless I wanted to approach it purely from a “liberal humanist” perspective and claim the text/film contains everything necessary within it already to expose the inherent “good, truth, and beauty of art,” with no need to contextualize it within its culture of its creation. Pah! Gag.)

So, I can’t cold turkey, but I can’t fall prey to rationalizations and distractions any longer. At least not for one whole year. I have this arbitrary new year to get rid of bad habits, make some new, and get significantly closer to the person I want to be, accomplishing the things I need to accomplish. I need to prune and lop off parts of the enabling where I can, and limit exposure to distraction everywhere else. To that end, my resolutions:

• Identify the Facebook friends and groups that are more than 33% about politics, socio-economics,religion, etc., and block/ignore/defriend them.
• Identify the RSS feeds that are the same, and delete them from my feeder/reader.
• Identify the podcasts that are the same, and delete them from my iTunes updater.
• Write at least 250 words a day, every day, of fiction or scholarly work — not blogging or journaling!*
• Read at least one short story or chapter of fiction a day, every day.

*250 words is basically only one page of text (without dialog), and isn’t much at all. I’ve written 15-page school papers in a day. But it’s Cory Doctorow’s minimum, and it’s a good low bar that should be do-able and won’t lead to ultimate failure. (Cory is a prolific author and social-political activist who straddles both roles and does it well! But then, I’m pretty sure he’s not human, either.)

Well, that’s my resolution for 2011. Hopefully by this time next year I can look back and proudly state that I see in me what I want to be, and there’s no turning back.

So, am I going to vote next week? Actually, yes. But, with caveats, and I’m more than happy to explain why.

First, a little parable:

Three wolves and six goats are discussing what to have for dinner. One courageous goat makes an impassioned case: “We should put it to a vote!” The other goats fear for his life, but surprisingly, the wolves acquiesce.

But when everyone is preparing to vote, the wolves take three of the goats aside. “Vote with us to make the other three goats dinner,” they threaten. “Otherwise, vote or no vote, we’ll eat you.”

The other three goats are shocked by the outcome of the election: a majority, including their comrades, has voted for them to be killed and eaten. They protest in outrage and terror, but the goat who first suggested the vote rebukes them: “Be thankful you live in a democracy! At least we got to have a say in this!”

Voting is a right. People fought and some literally died for he right to be able to vote in fair elections for such things as fair taxes, appropriate laws that are meant to help society function, and people who would represent them in a government by, of, and for the people.

But on most scales, that’s not what we have. We have a government where the higher up you go, the less you, as a person, are being represented so much as being governed in the interests of corporations. The congresspeople, the president, the massive support system that runs the federal government, are paid for by corporate profit — sanctified by the recent Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend as much money as they wish to make sure the politicians vote in their interests. In fact, the only politicians at all that get to that high of a level, that get their name on the ballot, are politicians that, regardless of the R or the D next to their name, will support corporate interests over those of the people.

These people do not represent me. I don’t not wish to associate a vote, by right and purchased by many people braver than I who gave their lives to give me the privilege and not the obligation to do so, to any of these people. A vote for a less vile, less corporate-owned, less dishonest, politician is not an exercise in freedom and liberty and civic duty — it is an insult and a mockery of freedom and liberty.

My right to vote quite certainly includes my right to choose to not vote, if that represents my opinion that the people who are my forced choices do not represent me. If I despise both options I have to vote for, I will complain about either one of them regardless of whichever one wins, and I should not have to be compelled to associate myself with either repugnancey in order to be granted the boon of being able to complain about them.

Especially when what I complain about is not just the puppets that I’m forced to choose between, but the entire corrupted and perverted system that puts only bought-and-paid-for corporate tools as my choices for representation.

Indeed, there are people who don’t vote, not because they are exercising their right not to, but because they’re too uninformed, detached, and unconcerned about the process, the system, civil rights and duties. You know what? They too have a right to complain! All people have an inalienable right to speak their mind (granted, so long as it does not directly incite harm to others), regardless of whether they participate in the farce.

I may pity and scowl at them in my own elitist, condescending way for not being involved and interested and engaged in the process, the events, the system that essentially controls their lives. But they still have a right to complain.

The parable above is often used to illustrate what’s called the tyranny of democracy. The idea that the minority must concede to will of the majority for no better reason than because they’re the majority. We all know this is on many levels wrong and unethical. It was seen during segregation, where the racist views of the majority violated the rights of a minority. We can see it today in such things as California’s Prop 8 in which the rights of a minority were eliminated by a majority vote.

If you ever found yourself in a vastly outnumbered minority, and the majority voted that you had to give up something as necessary to your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it, does anyone really believe it makes sense to accept the authority of a group simply on the grounds that they outnumber everyone else? We accept majority rule because we do not believe it will threaten us – and those it does threaten are already silenced before anyone can hear their misgivings.

–From THE PARTY’S OVER: BEYOND POLITICS, BEYOND DEMOCRACY
http://thecloud.crimethinc.com/pdfs/democracy_reading.pdf

I agree with the position. Majority rule; minority suffers. That’s all well and good so long as you’re part of the majority. But everyone belongs in someone else’s minority group. What happens when the majority on a given position, or condition, votes to remove a right of yours? How fair is democracy to you then?

As an anarchist, I believe ultimately in the removal of all coerced obeisance to the will of another group, whether that group has the force of greater numbers, or a monopoly on violence (the state). But, like Marx who understood that capitalism was a necessary step on the road to socialism, then communism, I understand we’re likely not going to have mass anarchism (nor communism) within my lifetime. The state is here, and it’s not going anywhere, any time soon. And the structure of representative government, as corrupt and flawed and manipulated as it is, should at least somewhat be made to work for the people and not for corporations, whenever possible….

So, I’m going to vote next Tuesday, despite the fact it will be a violation of my integrity. (I don’t believe in the very system itself, I shouldn’t support it with my participation.) But, living completely on the grid, within the culture, subject to the will of the hegemonic cultural logic, and millions of other people have no choice — so I’ll go ahead and cast votes where, and only where, I have a choice in which I think one option is ethically acceptable, and not because it’s the alternative to a worse option. If neither option represents my beliefs, it’s not getting my approval simply because of some non-existent obligation to have to choose one.

What gets my goat, is how so many of the people who wallow in self-righteousness and decree that you’re unAmerican and not worthy of the right to free speech if you don’t vote, are people whose entire civic consciousness, entire political activity, entire involvement in the world around them, begin and end with that 30 minute exercise once every couple of years — maybe only every four years. And of course, that just the way those in power like it. Convince people that they’re actually capable of changing things, get rid of bad and install good, improve the system, by making them think that all they need to do is vote for person A or nearly identical person B, whose differences are those that make people bicker while ignoring the fact the rot goes down to the roots. Make people think that voting equals change, and just shuffle the same agents of corruption and dominance through the offices while the very system itself that underlies the main problems gets blissfully ignored.

So, if you’re one of those who sticks your nose into the air with superiority because you go out of your way to vote for a new boss, same as the old boss, save your breath on me. I’m going to participate in the farce. But you better anticipate some write-in names on my part.

As I write this, the last of the Chilean miners, trapped underground for more than two months, has been rescued successfully! I can’t even imagine the trials they must have faced, and the joy and relief felt by their family and friends must be overwhelming.

It’s a wonderful, amazing accomplishment of human determination, courage, and ingenuity. What it isn’t, is it isn’t “a miracle” as many are professing.

I understand that many say things like “it’s a miracle!” figuratively, and don’t actually mean a deity has altered the laws of reality to willfully change events in the world in ways that can’t be explained in any naturalistic manner — which is what a miracle is. Some people throw the term around when they really mean to say something is wonderful and amazing (as this story is), without thinking about the physics-altering nature inherent in “miracle.” I and other non-believers have been known to exclaim a “thank God!” now and then, but we shouldn’t be accused of being closet believers.

But there are many who do refer to the Hand of God when they say this rescue is a miracle, and I find that horrifically insulting, belittling, and dismissive of the enormous work, toil, cost, tenacity, and bravery of those who did all the work and shouldered the cost of the rescue.

What kept the miners alive was that there were caches of food and supplies placed throughout the cave because hey, mining is dangerous and collapses happen. Humans thought to do that.

Some of the men were well-experienced professionals who had the skills and abilities to keep them organized and calm and able to ration and stay positive.

Human skill and industry drilled the air and supply holes down to them. And enormous human skill and labor went into drilling and constructing a rescue tube and cage that worked flawlessly.

Human compassion and ability kept those men alive and saved them. Human skill and ingenuity has continued to battle nature and make a dangerous industry somewhat less so, not divine intervention: how far mine safety has come. (Ironic article source.)

If the mine had collapsed and an unknown person appeared among them from nowhere, staying with them and helping them through the 69 days, only to disappear before the rescue tube was finished, that’d be miraculous. If their store of food literally never depleted, that be a miracle. If the ground had shook and a perfectly straight tube opened up from the surface to the miners on its own: miracle. If the 33 miners had suddenly been poofed to the surface, instantaneously, definite miracle. But instead, every component of what saved them was purely natural, explainable, human. Wonderful and amazing! But human nonetheless.

And to give credit to an unseen force that has no marks of having done anything, is to crap all over the very human bravery and fortitude, intelligence and experience, strength and will everyone involved added to the rescue. We should rightfully be celebrating life saved, as well as human qualities that help us, more often than people realize, rise to the occasion!

Same with when someone says, “God/Jesus/angels/happy-thoughts fixed my organ/cured my cancer/brought me back to life.” No, ungrateful: a staff of humans who spent years and ridiculous money in medical school and nursing school, and years in residencies and practice, who read journals and attend conferences to learn latest techniques and treatments, and who spent significant time and energy and effort on you and your condition, fixed/cured/saved your whatever.

If a deity is to be thanked for being responsible for the rescue, it should also get the blame for the collapse:

(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.)

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.

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.)

And again, I give Schiff a hand for observing:

“If all of this seems absurd, that’s because it is. War is a great way to destroy things, but it’s a terrible way to grow an economy.

What is often overlooked is that war creates hardship, and not just for those who endure the violence. Yes, US production increased during the Second World War, but very little of that was of use to anyone but soldiers. Consumers can’t use a bomber to take a family vacation.”

It amuses me when libertarians like Schiff and Marxists share the same opinion. The base of our modern capitalist economy has been the military industrial complex. Nearly half our taxes go to the Pentagon to help create metric craptonnes of ammunition and rockets and equipment that gets spent out in some foreign land, and in support of politics which makes sure we continue to have a reason to spend massive amount of natural resources and labor in sending stuff overseas to help kill people and get left there.

OK, so, war is bad. Got it. We’re on the same page. But what suggestion does Schiff have to revitalize the economy? Well, after spending paragraphs outlining a doomed-from-the-start Global Liquid-ular War, and then more to explain how we can’t afford it, his plan is explained in his final paragraph:

“What we need is more savings, more free enterprise, more production, and a return of American competitiveness in the global economy. Yes, we need Rosie the Riveter – but this time she has to work in the private sector making things that don’t explode. To do this, we need less government spending, not more.”

Why, of course! Let’s just do that! Here we go– oh, wait… How? See, I left my magic wand at the dry cleaners, and my Genie isn’t returning my calls.

Look, first of all, you, Schiff, already agreed that it was government spending that pulled us out of the Depression, so already we can establish that theoretically, yes, government spending can be an answer. What it gets spent on is important, and it’s better that it gets spent on infrastructure, for example, and not eternal war. But where is this magic savings, production, and private sector making-of-things going to come from? If it were as simple as saying, “Hey, let’s do that now,” it’d be done. But the problem of why Schiff’s hand-waving solution can’t work is the very reason we’re stuck in this economic melt-down in the first place:

High unemployment means less people with jobs to have money to spend on consumer goods, and lowering wages means less money for people to spend on consumer goods. The excuse of “We’re overtaxed!” is utter nonsense and here’s why:

U.S. citizens are already one of the lowest tax payers in the developed world.

(http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/numbers/international.cfm)

And yet, some of the most taxed countries have higher rates of general “happiness,” and higher standards of living on many criteria. Based on other examples around the world, there’s no reason why we in the U.S. couldn’t pay a little more in taxes. Most modern nations do pay more and are getting their money’s worth.

In fact, the current average tax rate for the average middle-income wage-earner is between 25% and 28%. During World War II, the lowest tax rate for anyone was 39% with middle-income tax rate in the 50% region. So where Schiff gets this idea that our current tax burden is already greater than it was for WWII and we couldn’t stand any more, I have no idea. Convenient since he provides no numbers or sources and just seems to pull “facts” out of his… hat.

But you know what, it’s not even necessary to raise taxes on the middle-class. There’s another group is not only not at any kind of breaking-point, but is so far away from the tax rate they were paying in the 40s and 50s that they can’t even see it from where they are: The top 1 to 5% of the wealthiest in the country. Back during WWII, the 5% of the nation who owned 80 to 90% of the nation’s wealth, were paying 80, 90, even 95% in taxes! Can you imagine? Now, guess what they’re paying today? 60%? 50%? Try around 35%. Mr. Schiff claims we’re already taxed to death, beyond WWII levels, and yet the people who own nearly all of the nation’s wealth are paying a third in taxes from what they were paying during WWII and throughout even the 50s!

Now, one might protest the idea of taxing the rich more. I mean, why should they have to pay more taxes? Just because they have more? Well, actually, yes. It’s as simple as that.

Take yourself, your family, everyone you know. It’s a safe bet that you and everyone you know earns less than $1 million a year or so, yes? If you’re earning a middle-class income of $50,000 a year, and 25% is going toward taxes, that’s $12,500. What if that increased by 10%? You’d be paying another $5,000 a year. In your budget, what would that mean? That’s your car payment, or mortgage payment. That’s eating out money for a year. Maybe have to take a part-time job. You would be immediately impacted.

If the top 1% wealthiest had to pay a measly 10% more on their $750,000 income, their 10% would be more than your entire annual income. Honestly, do you think a person making half, a quarter, a million dollars a year has to stick to a grocery budget really close? Has to consider whether they can afford daycare or not? Has to decide whether they can afford to go to Applebee’s this Friday? Yeah, the rich have more they can afford to lose, it is right that they should have a higher burden supporting the social services and infrastructure and military apparatus that they take advantage of to maintain and increase their wealth. As I already pointed out recently, the wealthy already aren’t even paying a fair share of burden off their wealth, much less are they burdened by taxes.

And let’s not forget, this is all assuming they’re paying the percent for their bracket — which they’re not! The wealthiest have tax loopholes, breaks, shelters, and strategies available to them to pay even less-to-no taxes than you or I have available to us. When we have to pay our 25 percent, we’re actually paying our 25%. When the wealthy are told to pay their 35% (remember, as opposed to the 91% they used to pay), their accountants and lawyers are getting them out of paying even that. (Tax law that, by the way, often get voted in by the poor and middle class who will never ever come close to being in the top even 20%, because the conservative mindset is deluded into thinking they will one day earn a quarter of a million a year, if they just work hard enough! So they vote against their own interests.)

There’s that other pesky problem to Schiff’s magic buy-stuff-so-stuff-can-be-made solution: unemployment and lowering wages. Despite what Republicans are spouting, that the unemployed are lazy and not looking for work (yeah, that $250 a week unemployment check is a king’s ransom!), there are more people looking for work than there are jobs. Do the math. But the more significant problem with the economy is even deeper and more entrenched. Labor wages are at best holding steady over the last 30 years while cost of living, cost of education, cost of debt, continues to increase. The value of the dollar for the average household is actually less every decade since the mid-60s (coincidently, the same period in which tax on the wealthy dropped precipitously and GOP-led deregulations and New Deal dismantling began. Odd timing, that.) Meanwhile, capital gains have increased, corporate profits increase, CEO compensations increase… In case you’re just now joining us, what’s going on here the last few decades, and fast and heavy since Reagan, is a destruction of the middle class and elevation of the rich back into a new Gilded Age.

“One of the major trends in income inequality that began in the 1980s was dramatic increases in executive compensation. From the 1980s on, compensation for the average American worker has barely kept pace with inflation, yet compensation for executives running the same companies at which worker’s pay has barely kept pace with inflation have seen their compensation levels increase by orders of magnitude.”
~ R.G. Price; source coming up…

(notice that Schiff wants more productivity, yet, GDP and other indicators of productivity in the U.S. show a constant increase already. Hmm, maybe something to do with labor getting less and less of the pie they are baking, maybe?)

Ever wonder why it was that after WWII, during the 50s, into the mid-60s, the average middle class family had only one working adult and still bought a car and a house and went of yearly vacations, sent their kids off to college, and did so without significant debt? What really has happened since then?

R.G. Price has an extensive, extensive, article explaining the beginning of the end of the middle class in the 60s, and the hammer-fisted pillaging of the middle class and Jaws of Life widening of the class divisions Reagan facilitated, in “How Reagan Sowed the Seeds of America’s Demise“. And his arguments are held together by copious (but easy to understand) charts and graphs and numbers and actual data, as opposed to the fantasy-land wishes of Invisible Market Hand libertarians like Schiff.

“In the 1980s Reagan talked about restoring America, yet his policies were designed to do the exact opposite economically, they were designed to undo the America that middle-class Americans had come to think of as the “good ole days” to which America would be restored. The America of the 1940s and 50s was an America of a strong central government, with a highly regulated economy, built through the extensive use of federal programs and massive federal subsidization of the white middle-class. And that is what it was really all about. “Restoring America” always meant “restoring white dominance”, yet it could never really be admitted that the white dominance of the 1940s-1960s was itself a product of government programs.”
~ Price

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:

Karl Marx’s greatest work is not a revolutionary propaganda, it’s an political/economics theory book. There’s a reason why it’s called Capital and not Socialism or Communism. It’s a very, very detailed examination of capitalism as a basis of socio-economy. I can be tough to get through but it’s the best examination of capitalism there has been. Because it was written during early capitalism and Marx and Engles couldn’t have predicted global market capitalism, they did get some things wrong — but the basic explanation is sound as much today as it was 150 years ago.

To help the average person understand the tome, SF author Steven Brust has followed up his fascinating blog series on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (arguably the father of capitalist economics) with a series presenting and discussing Capital. In his latest posting, he highlights a passage in which Marx quotes Benjamin Franklin!

“…It is the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities that alone brings into relief the specific character of value-creating labour, and that it does by actually reducing the different varieties of labour embodied in the different kinds of commodities to their common quality of human labour in the abstract.”

Here we have a footnote, in which Marx cites Ben Franklin, quoting him as saying, “Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labour for labour, the value of all things is…most justly measured by labour.” The point, here, is that, just as we are able to reduce the linen and the coat to values because they embody human in labor, so, too, the labor of producing them is, economically, reduced to abstract human labor.

(Emphasis mine.) I was quite intrigued by this inclusion, and I can’t help wondering what the American founding fathers might have thought about modern capitalism and Karl Marx’s assessment of it. I do know Thomas Paine would be turning in his grave if he knew what Glenn Beck and the Tea Party were doing with him. Check out some of these Paine quotes:

“Pay as a remission of taxes to every poor family, out of the surplus taxes, and in room of poor-rates, four pounds a year for every child under fourteen years of age.” Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

.

“It is painful to see old age working itself to death, in what are called civilised countries, for daily bread… pay to every such person of the age of fifty years … the sum of six pounds per annum out of the surplus taxes, and ten pounds per annum during life after the age of sixty… This support, as already remarked, is not of the nature of a charity but of a right.” Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

.

“Create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property.” Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice.

Yeesh! Sounds like a socialist, don’t he.

Speaking of Glenn Beck, back to Ben Franklin, in that same paragraph in that same essay Franklin wrote that Marx quotes from, Franklin wrote, “Now Silver and Gold being of no permanent Value….” That must be very awkward for Beck and his “BUY GOLD NOW before the inevitable  mass economic collapse occurs!” advertisers.

Anyway, with the intent of blogging a comment on just this Franklin quote used by Marx, I started searching for an image of Marx and Franklin together with absolutely no anticipation of actually finding something I didn’t have to Photoshop together. But then I found one: a still from a short video advertising Glenn Beck’s How to Argue With an Idiot. (Ugh! I feel dirty linking to that. But don’t let is be said I’m not fair in providing info.) It’s a short that is essentially a blatant ad hominem attack in which animated Marx and Franklin provide no info specific to the real people and serve only as mouthpieces in an extremely juvenile screed.

So this video makes Marx sound like an idiot in suggesting a progressive tax (which I’m not even sure Marx ever advocated) and then Beck-Ben “counters” not-Marx’s progressive tax by illustrating that the current tax situation is unfair. So…what’s Beck’s stance? Is the progressive tax Marx-level stupid? If so, why point out we don’t have a progressive tax situation? And why present the current unfair tax situation as if promoting a progressive tax as a solution while mocking it? It makes no sense. (Not surprising from the guy who professes churches who advocate Christianity, er, social justice I mean, are preaching Naziism and Communism; and warns that government “czars” is the Obama’s way to endorse socialism. 1. Nixon started the whole czar thing and Reagan made it famous with his “Drug Czar,” and 2. the Russian czar was the king that the communists rebelled against and expelled. Idiot.)

That aside, Beck-Ben presents the evil unfair tax numbers:

The top 1% are responsible for 40% of income tax,
the top 10% are responsible for 71% of income tax, and
the top 50% are responsible for 97% of the income tax.

OMG! Doesn’t that look evilly unfair!? You know what? Le’s just assume these numbers are correct. I’ll give him that. But any fact can look however you want it to look with divorced from any context. Of course, that’s what Beck’s best at: taking spurious and unconnected information and making false conclusions. Let’s add some more facts.

In 2007:

The top 1% owned 43% of the nation’s financial wealth,
the next 19% owned 50% of the nation’s financial wealth.
(The bottom 80% of the population owned 7% of the nation’s wealth.)
(source)

So, according to Beck, the top 50% paid 97% of the income tax; yet, the top 20% owned  93% of the wealth. Catch that? Even though half the nation paid 97% of the tax, only 1/5th owned 93% of the wealth.

Yeah, those tax numbers are unfair…in the direction opposite what Beck suggests!

Finally, Beck reveals the sociopathic outlook of the conservative when his pseudo-Franklin dumps on the poor for having the audacity of getting a tax refund. Oh no! The people in our society that struggle to even afford food and shelter aren’t having to pay income tax, when those who have problems deciding between the 3rd multi-million-dollar house or the 2nd private jet have to pay less than their fair share based on the grotesque percentage of wealth they own?

Why, that’s eeeviiil! Those slackers who work two jobs just to make ends meet and are still below the poverty line, need to belly up and give up their daycare money so that the 1% who own nearly half the nation’s wealth can feel better about using lawyers and accountants to take advantage of tax shelters and loopholes that no one in the lower 80% of the population have available to them.

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.”

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 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.

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, I’m not one to believe the whole “humans rule the earth by divine providence” or we’re masters of the animal kingdom or any of that hogwash. But let’s be honest: we humans, like it or not, regardless of any imbued esoteric meaning, are kind of in a position of power on this planet. We have species-wide sovereignty, agency, sentience, and capability. When you think about it, shouldn’t we be living under a socio-economic system where we’re in actual control? Where humans have a privileged place in our own societies to determine our own value and not be considered both an expendable commodity and a liability by the socio-economic base?! I mean, shouldn’t that simply be obvious?

In this world of commerce where labor (i.e.: most everyone) is an annoying liability to management and owners and shareholders–business as normal, in general–unions try to fight for the basic right of people to have an exchange value for their labor closer to the output value their labor produces.

Ah! says the average American. Labor unions?! They’re as bad as soviet commies. Well, here’s where things get fun….

Let’s grant for a moment that when you start scouring the land far and wide for unions, there are some that are as corrupt as the corporations they are fighting for workers’ rights against. (Co-opting and assimilation of labor-friendly things is a tool of capitalism to undermine its effort, but that’ll be addressed later.) But let’s talk generalities and averages here. What is the goal of the union?

To bilk workers of union dues, Joe American says.

No no no, that’s one of those rare instances. Back to general intent here. Unions fight to increase worker wages, benefits, leave time, insurance, etc. Now, fellow worker of the world, how in the world is that a bad thing?

Because they’re greedy and they ask for too much pay!

Uh huh. And what exactly is too much pay? Is it compared to what you make? Is it sour grapes and jealousy? Is it that you think the average steel worker, mine worker, nurse, actor, teacher, auto assembler, any of the millions of jobs served by unions, are buying multiple houses and several cars and taking trips at a whim’s notice to Europe on their ill-gotten union negotiated wages? Oh, no, sorry–I got workers confused with the owners of capital.

If things worked the way they should, the 80%+ of the world’s population who labor and toil and work for a living should not have to negotiate for an extra $5 and hour against the 1 to 5% of the population who own literally 90% of the world’s wealth.

This is an important point worth repeating: The super-majority of workers in the world, including you and everyone you likely know, should not have to also toil and fight to extract a few bucks more pay out of the 5% who own 90% of the world’s wealth.

Ah, says Joe, but when the union (or even non-union workers) fight for higher wages (which are always lower than the value of what their labor produces, by the way), that means products and services have to cost the consumer more! Unions and even wages themselves harm society!

Really? Here’s the really crazy thing about capitalism: When labor costs are forced to increase (e.g.: wage increases), the very same companies who raises the prices of their products and services tend to pay their CEOs and presidents and owners multi-million dollar compensation packages. Labor fights tooth-and-nail for more porridge, the consumer is forced to pay more for consumption, but the wealth that flows up the pyramid stays untouched and protected, allowing the rich to get richer.

And, here’s the joke of it all: We, the massive majority who are the labor class, are convinced to protect that flow of wealth up the pyramid, that it’s the right and natural way of things. We’re convinced to hate unions, to see other laborers as greedy, and put the capitalists on pedestals like royalty–behavior that harms ourselves and benefits those with the power and wealth! The labor class produces the goods, provides the services, has the expertise and skills, and the overwhelming numbers; the top 1 to 5% only have the wealth. But they control the masses and convince them, us, to work and vote and live against our own best interests in order to protect theirs.

Think about this: You’re in a room of a hundred people. You want to rule and control the other other 99. Do you do it by force? Yeah, see how far that gets ya. Or do you get the other 99 to do what you want by convincing them that what you want is the natural, proper way of things–even if it’s against their own interests? That’s what the capitalists have done with our entire cultural logic: convinced us greed is good, consumption is good, buy more stuff; that unions are greedy (uh oh! another contradiction!) and people should be thankful for the few bucks an hour their labor gets them and that to demand more compensation for their life-absorbing labor only harms everyone; and to ignore the fact that the only people who aren’t harmed by any of this are those to who all profits flow upward toward; and to accept as the natural and proper Way of Things that a tiny few (who are good at trading companies among each other), continue to get obscenely wealthy off the struggling labor of the masses who fight to keep their own wages and benefits as low as possible to make more profit for others.

Once more for effect: and to accept as the natural and proper Way of Things that a tiny few (who are good at trading companies among each other), continue to get obscenely wealthy off the struggling labor of the masses who fight to keep their own wages and benefits as low as possible to make more profit for others.

It’s an entirely upside down world we’re living in. When and how will it change?

(Facebook? Essay originally published: http://www.celticbear.com/weblog/2010/02/17/laboring-upside-down)

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.

Well, sadly, I no longer have the joy of saying that with a hint of hyperbole. With the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, wherein the majority judges eliminated regulations that have been put in place preventing corporations (and unions, sure) from buying off elections, we now truly have a corporatocracy. From this moment on, multinational corporations which may have their money in the Camen Islands or Dubai, and major labor forces in China and Mexico, can spend as much money as they want to support the legislators they want and the laws they want.

Supporters of this move say it’s a free speech issue (which, after all, that’s how SCOTUS couched it). So, what this means then, is that money, wealth, now equals free speech. So, let me ask you now that wealth is the same as free speech: do you feel that your amount of speech (real or potential) is as free and equal as that of Haliburton’s? Or KBR’s? Or Phizer?

The best way to put the implications of all this is to let Keith Olbermann spell it out. And don’t worry, this isn’t just a bleeding-heart liberal warning, he points out exactly how this cuts the throats of conservatives and right-wingers alike:

(If you can’t see the embedded video, go here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/34985508#34985508 )

This truly is the beginning of the nightmare scifi scenarios of corporate-owned-reality of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. There’s a reason Thomas Jefferson said the following:

“I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

He saw even then that the interests of the nascent capitalist, for-profit corporation, lay not in democracy and liberty, but in market dominance and crushing the interests of free markets and free speech and individual choice. Corporations don’t want competition and free markets, they want the advantage against anyone and anything that will stop their drive for profit.

Sure, some corporations are non-profits, or little guys, or special interest groups. But let me ask you this as well: do you think any non-profit or special interest or local home-grown corp will have a sliver’s of a chance buying laws and legislators against multinational, billions of dollars a year in profit, mega corps? Our government in just a few election cycles, will effectively be run by the richest, dynastic multinational corporations which will seek to destroy anything resembling dissent.

After all, they’re already trying tooth and nail to control government in their favor–think now that they can bring the full power of capital gains to bear they’ll stop? Take for example AT&T’s democracy-riddled and free market tactics (sarcasm) of buying charities to support elimination of ‘net neutrality, and a glance at this list of legal cases the Electronic Frontier Foundation is involved in shows a long list of corporations fighting not for truth, justice, and the American way, but to crush competition, stifle free speech of we the people, and twist government regulations to serve their private interests.

This new development simply paves the way for them to just buy all the legislators they want.

Larry Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, has this brief message regarding the implications of this court decision and what can, maybe, be done to fight it:

Lessig on Citizens United: Sign Up to Learn More

Another site attempting to fix this very broken situation, is:

Move to Amend: A Project of the Campaign to Legalize Democracy

We think it can’t end, this great American experiment. I’m sure that’s what the citizens of all the great, fallen empires have thought. We, you and I, have grown up in this “land of the free and home of the brave,” and we can’t possibly imagine it coming to an end. But it can. One day, most certainly, it will. What we’re witnessing this last week is possibly the beginning of the end: the end of (pseudo) democracy and the rise of corporate ownership of life.

When you think about it, it’s been heading that way since J. P. Morgan first bought legislation to favor the United States Steel Corporation. Corporations have been controlling which presidents get to the primaries and the debates. They’ve been buying legislators with lobbying money (a fraction of the money they can now spend on campaigns). Really, when you get right to it, being a true corporatocracy overtly and in the open is really a more honest, forthright way of being what we already are at the very base. All we need now is a new branding to Corporate States of America and a new, fresh logo!

Addendum: A BoingBoing commenter has a great reply to people who still hold that this decision is somehow a win for free speech:

Shareholders are the owners of corporations, and shareholders each have a single vote as citizens (those that are citizens.)

The sum representation of a corporation in America is equal to the portion of its capital that is owned by americans. That is honestly a very fair system already.

What corporations wanted in this ruling is not fair representation, but rather an advantage, which is what businesses crave. Advantage over competition.

In this case, the competition is popular opinion. Corporations want to compete against governance in a 1-person, 1-vote system and are essentially attempting to make their shareholders have more clout than people who do not hold shares.

To not recognize that this philosophy is at odds with egalitarian democracy is a serious crime against your own best interests. You may attempt to see how you yourself could benefit from this if you are a businessperson, but remember that there will always be another, larger company who does not have your best interests in mind and who will gain even more from this than you do. They will not take mercy upon you the way a functional democratic government can be made to.