The Unconomy

Cap in Hand, part 1: Green Realism

noreply@blogger.com (Charles R Schultz) — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 19:52:00 +0000

The Refuge for Realists

Cap and Trade or Dividend is an old idea, an old Republican policy, and I am told an updated version of this Trojan horse, presented as a great gift by Peter Barnes, is creaking on its wheels as it rolls into West Marin from the darkest corners of 20th century economic philosophy for us townsfolk to gawk at. Cap and Trade solves thorny problems for the timorous thinker. First, you don’t have to blame corporations. It isn’t their essential activity that is destructive to nature, and must be stopped. It is that markets have not been created to account for their behavior and “price-in” their destructiveness. Once they pay the right price for the smoke they produce, or at least the carbon in the smoke, they will correct their behavior.

And who is going to enforce this new market? Well, the same politicians who are presently beholden to the corporations who pollute. Cap and Trade asks the corporations and the government to go into a room together and solve the problem by creating a new market to fix the old market. Of course, because the intellectuals refuse to take a stand directly against the corporations themselves, attempting only to modify corporate behavior over time, the politicians don’t even have a basis from which to resist them. As Paul Fenn put it, “It is like putting the tobacco companies in charge of the strategy to stop people from smoking.”

Where these Cap and Trade schemes have been tried various tricks are used, often built into the markets themselves, to allow polluters to evade the cap – to not reduce carbon emissions. These markets have failed repeatedly in practice. But how is it supposed to work in theory? Well polluting corporations, like power plant owners, have the amount that they pollute grandfathered into the scheme. Then starting from year one the cap gets lower, polluters must emit less carbon, until say 2050 when carbon emissions will be at a level that, based on the enormity of the problem, they need to be today. It is a proposal on a timeline so long that only people who believe in cryogenics won't find themselves utterly dismayed.

That last bit, sadly, isn’t entirely a joke. Hedge fund founder and Googleian Ray Kurzweil eats 150 pills a day in a bid to live until technology will make him immortal. The grand old man of the convenient fantasy California-style Stewart Brand has his own “Long Now” foundation which asks us to look forward to the year 10,000 and start planning on that basis. No wonder he is so untroubled by the half-life of nuclear waste. Not to be outdone, Peter Schwartz, business partner of Brand, both longtime consultants to Shell Oil amongst others, once told an audience in San Francisco that he wasn’t concerned about climate change because through the advances of bio-technology his son would live forever, giving him ample time to deal with the problem. Does it bother anybody that our intellectuals sound like a group thirteen year-old boys in a treehouse trying to write a Star Trek script?

Cap and Trade does not even rise to the level of tragedy because either foolishly or shamelessly it serves the powerful interests that are destroying the world. It is no compensation to be paid $5,000 a year by polluters in exchange for the loss of our future as a species. For even with this addendum of a dividend scheme, where will this money be spent in the climate change conditions that Cap and Trade cannot halt?

Ideas like Cap and Trade flow from people like Friedrich von Hayek and Ronald Coase (who ultimately disavowed it) through Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, though the locals who tout them seem not to know it. They are predicated on a worldview that believes there is no such thing as a society, that only when we make a market out of the whole earth, including the air we breathe, can our problems be solved. In an effort to be “realistic”, Barnes and the serious men have become, perhaps unwittingly, dominated by the ascendant ideology of our time: Neo-liberalism. Though they probably think they are just helping the Democratic Party – supposedly a force for good – the Party leadership beginning with Bill Clinton has moved in earnest to adopt the economic policies of the right as well. I am reminded of the line from a terrible early 80s fantasy film, “It used to be just another snake cult, but now, it’s everywhere!”

Remember that these local thinkers talk to some extent about the forces that govern our world, but not about the structures that holds all of these interests in place. Those underlying structures they think of as a natural and immutable ecology of power in which we need to find the right balance between participants – a balance, for instance, between the interests of the coal industry and the people whose water and air are poisoned. That is right, this line of thought says that companies mining coal are a part of nature as well, and any solution will have to balance their need to survive with ours. This false ecological view of the world causes blind spots in their vision, narrowed further by the fears they confuse for wisdom. Many of them, of course, are simultaneously rich, distracted and unevenly educated, and the combination of these cardinal West Marin qualities often compels these men and women to speak, with great confidence, opinions that are useless, trivial or demented (sadly for those dependent upon their patronage, the service population in its various forms are often compelled to listen to them).

What are these fears that pervert the minds of our intellectuals? The first and most obvious is the fear of the empire itself. Take our institutions of higher learning: although universities usually allow each department a token radical, they too are increasingly entranced by “free market” ideas and are endlessly constructing new buildings that require wealthy, often corporate, donors and federal funding. To jeopardize either patron would be fatal to the growing university bubble, and their chancellors dare not alienate them. Energy corporations, like BP and PG&E, are notorious (or should be) for constraining the debate on politics and policy within universities in favor of technological research – which when it comes close to showing promise – is often defunded. With John Yu whose odious mind produced the Bush administration’s rationale for torture as a tenured professor of law and former head of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano now the Chancellor, you can’t slide a postcard between the most malevolent interests of empire and the University of California.

Older fears possess our thinkers when writing about changing the world for the better, based in memories of the political upheavals of the 1930s. Remember FDR was a compromise; he was going to protect businessmen from those they more deeply feared like Huey Long. But the ultimate and to some inevitable danger of political unrest is represented by figures like Stalin and Hitler who remain bidden or unbidden in our political memory. If, like those two, a leader says he has the formula for a new and better society, to achieve our dreams of freedom and prosperity, what then will he do to those who oppose it, or whom the leader has designated as the enemies of the dream?

The consequence of these persistent half-remembered memories is an unwillingness to speak out in opposition to either corporations or the government. These are the “realists”, and their sober and stable managerial approach to crisis explains the poverty of the solutions they present to climate change or the “Great Recession.” Writers like Peter Barnes refuse to directly confront the sources of climate change or declining living standards in America for fear, I believe, of arousing political ideas.

Today, there are ideas that say you can change the world by disallowing through law the abuse of the planet or its people, ideas that simultaneously allow our local governments to provide investment in infrastructure to replace the burning of fuel. Such direct actions are considered, “unserious” or “unrealistic”, because if we identify corporations as the culprits of global and domestic decline, the realists fear we will march toward Communism. If we identify the government as the cause of failure, we will unwittingly bring to power fascists and a greater tyranny. And let’s pull away the curtain for a moment, lurking in the shadows is perhaps the true fear of the portfolio men and women: the capricious Index, like the Dow Jones Industrial Average, to whom they must make endless sacrifices in an effort raise share prices ever higher, because without those particular dividend payments, survival in West Marin is truly unimaginable.

West Marin is nestled in the center of American empire, not at some rural margin. That is why what we think, and still more to know who we truly are, is very important. Some of us believe we are really out in the country and receive the terrible events on TV or the internet as fragments from a distant world. Our lives feel stagnant as climate change, war, government spying and declining prosperity demand serious collective answers to the question of how we and our children will survive. Unfortunately for us, our local intellectuals are proposing answers to the big crises of our time which in their pursuit of the “real” are ironically more utopian than any Bolshevik dream. The realist says, “Ask the polluters not to pollute, ask them instead to pay the poor.”

Cap in Hand, part 2: Peter Barnes doesn't know it, but he is doing it

noreply@blogger.com (Charles R Schultz) — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 19:39:00 +0000

Peter Barnes wrote last week in a letter to the Citizen that, whatever the validity of my other observations, he is not a neoliberal or a Thatcherite…

Tony Benn records in his diary in 1999 the introduction of a bill in parliament by Tony Blair’s government to privatize the British postal system. Benn writes that the Conservative Party opposite the supposedly left of center Labour Party were beside themselves, roaring in wave after wave of laughter as the bill was being read out. The Conservatives couldn’t believe that the privatization of this valued and formerly inviolable public service, the destruction of a public institution that they had failed to achieve in 10 years in power under Margaret Thatcher, was going to be accomplished by their opponents. The Labour Party? Thatcherite? Neoliberal?

In their long exodus from power, the Labour Party adopted the economic policies of the right, neoliberal economic policies. Peter Mandelson, Blair’s Karl Rove if you like, even declared after a “weekend-long policy brainstorming session” with Blair and Bill Clinton that “we’re all Thatcherites now.”

The man whose work is the basis of Cap and Trade was called Ronald Coase. In 1990, the year before he received the Nobel Prize in economics for the very theory we are discussing, Coase told the man who was to become the leading exponent of the localist opposition to empire and climate change, Paul Fenn, that Milton Friedman had hijacked his idea, that Cap and Trade couldn’t work because the contracts would be unenforceable – polluters would find ways to cheat. Whatever their disagreements, Coase and Friedman are considered two of the thought leaders of neoliberalism and Thatcherism.

That bit about unenforceability is important. Neoliberals have an answer to Coase’s opinion that Cap and Trade would just be a realm for gaming – fraud – by polluters. They call for a strong government, and say so, to extend markets across the world and enforce the rules of these markets. Neoliberals are not for weaker government – that is just propaganda for the Bakersfield chapter of the Tea Party.

Cap and Trade was a Republican policy, but in the logic of “triangulation”, the hallmark of Bill Clinton’s “political genius”, some Democrats decided to make it their policy. Then the Republicans dropped it and moved further toward the right. And the Democrats treat their opponent’s idea as progressive.

If you are proposing the privatization of the atmosphere, to create a new market to fix the old market and call for a strong national government to enforce this new economy, what school of thought (tracking back to which politician) do you belong to?

One definition or aspect of ideology – the limits of the thinkable – runs, “They don’t know it, but they are doing it.”

So much of the poverty of our discourse is the assumption that the field of action for these issues is the national or international, that local democracy must be set aside or is irrelevant. But my message here is that there are no imperial solutions to the problems of empire. Even if the federal government did pursue the reregulation of industry, carbon taxes, or cap and dividend, and the largess of these policies do trickle down to the masses as intended, they will cause new terrifying problems.

How will we organize opposition to new crises, or our current wars, if we are all on the federal government’s payroll? The founders of this project, the Enlightenment, believed you could not both have an empire and a democracy. Jefferson said that independence from the government was a necessary condition for a citizen, as opposed to a subject. What will happen, indeed what has happened, to the idea of a citizen, when the empire has the masses on financial life support?

Cap in Hand?

These mass movements are as bankrupt as the ideas they beg the powerful to implement. They say 400,000 marched in New York. In 1995, 870,000 gathered in Washington for the Million Man March – the lives of the overwhelming majority of African Americans have been in continued steady decline since in spite of it. Marching will not melt the hearts of CEOs or Presidents. Remember all of the idea men and activists that went to DC in ‘08 – and had their meetings with senators and the President’s men – believing that they could get Obama’s ear and convince him to address this or that crisis? And they tell us we should now have a new movement, to influence a new President or even the leaders of other countries. Do they really expect a better outcome from Hillary Clinton, supposing it isn’t Jeb Bush?

Anyone who believes the federal government will hear their prayers, over the inducements of industry and the white noise of imperial power will again be predictably disappointed. Go to the level of politics where citizens still have the ability to impose their will: the municipality is the sleeping giant of American democracy and the best hope for action on the climate and economy.

I invite Mr. Barnes to publicly discuss our differing positions and how to take action on these crises.

The Reich Stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Charles R Schultz) — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 19:18:00 +0000

I taught at a high school in Maryland for a year after college and during that time the school invited Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s secretary, to speak to my American Government class, an event notable for two reasons. One was her telling the story of Dick Morris being caught “with those ladies of the night!” This was exactly the flavor of American Government that a room full of sixteen year olds was dying for, and with no training as a teacher myself, there was no hope of holding back the deluge of giggles. The other thing that I remember was that she thought Robert Reich was a very nice man.

Those two men, Reich and Morris, feature in a brilliant documentary, Adam Curtis’s “The Century of the Self”. Reich’s description of the adaptations the ever adaptable Bill Clinton, under the influence of Dick Morris, toward focus group or marketing based politics is well told and insightful. Reich was so clear about the confluence of politics and marketing. I encourage you to watch it. But, when you get one thing right, people pay attention; and it makes it even more important that you get other things right, because now you have the power to lead. In spite of his niceness, I think Reich is wrong. And really, when I hear someone described as nice, I hear Zero Mostel in The Front when his character says “It’s nice when nice happens to someone nice” just before throwing himself out a window.

So recently I watched Inverness home owner Robert Reich in his own documentary called “Inequality for All” that was made in the style of Errol Morris’s brilliant “Fog of War”. With its parade of black and white photographs of Reich with Bill Clinton and archival clips of his press conferences, married to a minimalist musical score, the quotations were eerily direct from Morris’s movie about the tortured conscience of Robert McNamara. Indeed, it amuses me to think of Reich shouting at the editor, “More! Make me more like McNamara!” More likely, we can put this down as a visual storytelling shorthand that because of the success of the “Fog of War” has become very common. While no historian would compare Reich and McNamara, there are actual similarities between the two former members of Presidential cabinet. It is in the way that we talk about our problems and how to solve them.

Our war on the Vietnamese is a monstrous crime that haunts us till this day. McNamara himself put the number of Vietnamese that Americans killed at 3,800,000. Less than a year ago a veteran of that war, after forty years of nightmares like so many others, hanged himself in Tomales. But it isn’t war crimes that Reich shares with McNamara, it is that McNamara more than anyone else represented the idea that a modern and sophisticated government would rely on the compilation and computation of statistics and “systems analysis” to describe and solve the problems of our world. As Secretary of Defense, he redefined the idea of the “serious” or “realistic” way to talk issues: it isn’t about history or patriotism, realms of emotion and subjectivity, it is about the numbers.

In his writing, Reich often tilts against concentrations of wealth, but then, when he reaches the precipice of insight, in fear of what lies beyond perhaps or in fear of not being thought “serious”, he withdraws. And he begins to speak like McNamara, a technocrat, declaiming statistics as though they had any power still to persuade. It is his desire to be seen a serious thinker, to avoid platitudes, that we enter into this contemporary numerology – so many per cent of this means so much increase in that.

How is he wrong? History, the story of what happened and why. Robert Reich asks us to look back to the first decades after the Second World War, to discover solutions to our present problems. He says, to improve the world, we need to reduce income inequality – such a modest phrase, such an obvious good. The problem is that it doesn't suggest what we ought to produce through our labor or who should own it. It just says: we need to pay people more, so that they can consume more, and then the economy will take off. Setting aside how wildly irresponsible it is to suggest that increasing "growth" and consumption will solve the problems of a society poisoning itself to death – via consumerism – let's look at one of his proposals specifically: we need stronger unions, then we will all have the disposable income, therefore more equality, that we need. He is asking us to be realistic. Don’t ask for the system to change, change the balance within the system.

The union movement, thanks to "realists" like Samuel Gompers and the Federal Government's violent suppression of labor activists during various "Red Scares", moved away from worker control of production and social transformation, toward a sole focus on collective bargaining to increase the compensation of workers for their labor. This led to unions in the post-war era, Reich’s golden age to which we should return, whose members attuned themselves to a barren intellectual and spiritual landscape. Unions stood for nothing except what a Teamster once told was the attitude of "Pay me. Don't delay me."

For a while it looked like unions had made a good deal with corporations. Based on this blinkered history, he is not the only "realist" today speak of the amount of disposable income an individual has, or relative income inequality, as the statistic to focus on. So couldn't we just go back to the 1950s?

The condition that created the industrial boom of those years was the devastation caused by most destructive war in human history, World War II, always treated as some disembodied event and brushed over. In the aftermath, the unions made their peace with corporations and the government. What they lost when they largely abandoned anarchist, communist or socialist politics was the question of whether laborers would be involved in the question of what they would build and to what purpose. And while workers did enjoy short term prosperity after the war, because they forgot or never were taught the historical and philosophical foundation that unions were built upon during the early 20th century, when the boom time ended they didn't get the either good monetary compensation and had no idea how to construct an alternative to American empire and globalized trade.

Still, talking about strengthening unions is considered modest, “realistic.” I maintain it is outlandish as a response to the decline of our society. Let’s unionize workers at Walmart or McDonald's, so that they can increase their pay, but isn’t Walmart itself problem? This melanoma that blotches the map of America; this swollen lymph node that indicates underneath a cancer of globalized trade that undermines local producers and laborers and ensnares the world in making garbage food and goods for slave wages then shipping them, at massive carbon expense, to keep on life support the impoverished and demoralized citizens of the new third-world country we have built within the borders of the United States. That global trade policy (a parade of abbreviations in addition to NAFTA: WTO, GATT, and now TPP, etc.) and its effects on workers, health, climate and civilization generally goes uncommented upon is astonishing.

The Black Death’s impact was so profound that chroniclers of the 14^th century, who recounted all the wars in detail, give it often only one short mention. Indeed, it is said that a society’s greatest madness is called “normal” and not seen at all. And while these policies were so easily, if ruthlessly, implemented, realists like Reich tell us, if only through his refusal to comment upon them, these treaties cannot now be undone. Just as McNamara refuses to offer his opinion on his responsibility for the Vietnam War (“I’d rather be damned if I don’t.”), Reich, Secretary of Labor at the time of its passage into law, cannot utter five little letters, NAFTA. They do not appear in his version of “Fog.”

The union revivalists at least approach the level of tragedy because they come from a tradition of the weak standing together to make demands of the powerful. But what is the demand? Just that the corporations just give a little of profits of global collapse back to us! And then, when the minimum wage is $15, magic!

Americans are in a trap. First we gave up our ideas of transforming society, then we lost the money that we thought we were receiving as compensation for our obedience to power during the Cold War. As the money now slips away, what the "realists" won't tell you, because they have synchronized their minds with the interests of the powerful and the techniques of the technocrats, is we can as communities, through existing laws and technologies, take control of the resources we need to live and thrive in locally. As for the realists, whose dark cynicism constantly undermines us and casts in shade the local in favor of their fantastic visions about benevolent governments in distant capitals, of corporate tigers who can change stripes on a path of redemption, or the impossibility of challenging our laws of trade, always "The 'real' is the enemy of the possible."

"If someone tells you this is difficult, it is class propaganda by the enemy!"

noreply@blogger.com (Charles R Schultz) — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 20:19:00 +0000

We are obsessed by being entertained. If media can hold your attention, if they can entertain, then you can be sold products through advertising. If you like playing games on the internet, you can be sold services, too, or "apps." Entertainment, neither in form or content, transgresses our expectations. If it is shocking, it is only by intensifying our expectation: sport becomes more violent, boxing gives way to cage fighting.

We might expect this of sport and soap operas, but we all know that it is serious topics that perform as entertainment, too. The television news is like this: explosions, shootings -- all a drama. I remember my uncle telling me as a child about the coverage of the 1st Iraq war, "We all watched those planes dropping bombs onto buildings, and I thought, 'those are apartment buildings, people live there.'" All of this in support of toothpaste commercials and that new Fiat (there's a dealership in Berkeley now).

These are the types of media I grew up with, which exist as pure enjoyment, that are unchallenging, whose truths are all self-contained, a fantasy world you enter into, that do not tell you anything about yourself that you do not already know. And more, we select media because we know that it will not challenge us.

This what Roland Barthes called "readerly" texts, ones that confirm our prejudices and embody our desires. But he described a second category, the "writerly" text, one that can be transgressive and truly shocking, that can attack our beliefs and make us uncomfortable, that can rend the fabric of our settled and self-satisfied perceptions of reality and through this opening allow us to attain new truths and understanding. This is the ultimate goal of great art, but we don't like it, because it interrupts our gluttonous self-amusement.

Well educated people are subtly aware of this, and it causes them to be ashamed of themselves and their indolent minds and lack of moral courage.

So we have invented new forms of entertainment that will deal with this dilemma, this crisis of conscience caused by these forms with their appearance of "writerly" content. One example is the provocations of contemporary art: sharks in embalming fluid, the photographs of Robert Maplethorpe, etc. The late Robert Hughes called these, "...not a critique of decadence, they are merely decadent."

And this takes another subtler form, to another medium, radio, and for that we must come to NPR. The hosts on public radio not only play to their audiences desire to be merely entertained, they are in essence the internal voice of the passive listener. Slavoj Zizek says that canned laughter in television does not tell you when to laugh, it laughs for you. In this way reports about Iraq give way naturally to discussions of the complications of providing your dog or cat with health insurance, or an elk in Yosemite that has its own blog. Indeed Terri Gross listens for you, and asks inane questions on your behalf. To some aging protest singer she will yawn, "I mean, um, for you, was that time, like a good thing or a bad thing?"

These serious entertainments, form subverting content, function to suppress discourse in our society. The excuse is, of course, that real discourse is too difficult. And so I will end where I began:

"If someone tells you this is difficult, it is class propaganda by the enemy!"

A Plague of Sorrow and Grief

noreply@blogger.com (Charles R Schultz) — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 02:55:00 +0000

"It occurred only in the summer months. As with dancing mania, people would suddenly begin to dance, sometimes affected by a perceived bite or sting and were joined by others, who believed the venom from their own old bites was reactivated by the heat or the music."

Yesterday, Bradley Manning was convicted of Espionage because he reported to the world that our military and our politicians were engaging in crimes against humanity. As political refugee Alexander Solzhenitsyn told Americans of Stalin's vast network of prison camps, Edward Snowdon revealed that the American Government is spying on our calls and emails. Ed Snowdon today sits in a Moscow airport seeking refuge from political persecution: in Russia.

But the nation is fixated upon other issues. Why?

In 1518 a "dancing mania" broke out in Strasbourg. A woman named Frau Troffea was struck first, dancing uncontrollably in the street, and soon the mania spread with hundreds of the residents of the town joining in. Observers of those held in this trance were even attacked if they didn't join in, while many participants, exhausted, panicked and tired, danced till they died. The church, the city government and the medical profession did not know how to respond, but the record survives of their concern and confusion. Then, in the hilarious logic of the medical profession of medieval Europe, a cure was found: If music was played to accompany the dancers, they'll dance their way out of it! The City Council accepted this therapy and so cleared two guildhalls and a grain market, even setting up a stage and paying musicians to play for the entranced. The solution to mass hysteria was to encourage it.

The cause of this mania, it has been suggested, was an atmosphere of danger and fear present in the city because of poverty, failed harvests: what we call today, economic insecurity. In times of extreme stress and crisis, when the causes of our pain and anxiety seem to be outside of human control, there is a sublimation of dread and panic onto the body, and the mind -- the performance of a ritual, no matter how improbable its efficacy, becomes a command that all must obey...

...even if it makes everything worse.

And here we have to go back in time, to the frustration of democracy and the rise of business and empire in the 1960s. Fifty years ago many Baby Boomers set out to take control of the government itself and make it equitable and just. And the Government fought back. After the civil rights victories of the middle 60s, the idea that activist politics would transform government in America and take control of its institutions was abandoned in the wake of COINTELPRO and other government attacks upon those activists. President Nixon set in motion the globalization and financializaiton of the economy and a consequent decline in the welfare of the majority of Americans for the last forty years. The void of lost prosperity was filled, by subsequent Presidents and their marketing campaigns, with the endless waving of little American flags and an increasing fixation by Americans on sports -- leaving middle America in 2013 a gibbering unemployed fool in a football jersey cursing Arabs, buying Cheetos, and ammunition at Walmart.

A Plague of Sorrow and Grief:

Those still interested in politics since the 1970s. accepting as they did that the government and society couldn't be changed for the better, thought perhaps that the new role of government could be to spread the existing benefits enjoyed by the white middle class to minorities. And thus began the descent into the mad dancing world of identity politics.

Remember: the from the mid-70s globalized trade and production caused America to de-industrialize. Production and jobs were transferred and lost abroad. Always among the first to lose their jobs in an economic downturn were African Americans; without meaningful work, black life in America was "recriminalized", the new Jim Crow. In the 80s Americas prison system expanded dramatically to house a larger and larger population of the unemployed. All indicators of prosperity were dismissed in favor of a mania for indices like the Dow Jones Industrial Average... ...Today the stock market is at an all time high, while unemployment is endemic, and 1 and 6 Americans are feeding themselves with food stamps, and 4 of 5 live in poverty during their lifetimes.

They play that Tarantella...

Undaunted by the real: on the parade of policy trinkets, among them Affirmative Action. Instead of Civil Rights for African Americans, we have a policy that says: if you survive eighteen years of degrading poverty and crime in America's collapsing cities, then we'll let a tiny percentage of you into the universities. Championed by university professors who wish away the first two brutal decades of life and meet those famished in body and mind with a performance of postmodern concern and a featherweight aria of enlightenment. "Come dance with me."

Here in the midst of these crises. the law is bent to token inclusions: like gay marriage, marriage itself the extension of a Medieval privilege, and our listeners can look forward to something called "Trayvon's Law" a bill that will not address unemployment, destruction of the natural environment, rotten schools, and government corruption and government criminality, but will outlaw some set of accidents, circumstances of a celebrated an instance of crime.

Now every major newspaper and website is running dozens of articles on racism and gay rights and the dance is on. The causes of globalization and global warming are not to be considered, only the symptoms of our hysterical anxiety are to be treated. And if you question this dance, the trance of Americans suspended and whirling in terror and hallucinatory elation, if you don't join in, you may yourself be attacked.

Presently in the United States, there is a fear and dread in all of us. In history, this anxiety is usually the private reservation of the poor, but because of global warming, a globalized economy, a wrecked environment and our vanishing civil liberties, this dread can no longer be escaped by the rich and middle classes, those people formerly invincible in their ignorance of the problems of the world.

Like the Dancing Plague of Strasbourg, in their moment of confrontation with the what they believe to be the inescapable decline of our World, strange distractions and manias have captured the imagination of Americans. Our ever-dancing issues, gay marriage, abortion and the pageant of mourning over the death of a teenager, who died not of race, but of social and economic collapse, these eclipse reality: and the prescription of our medieval doctors? The journalists and intellectuals in America say today, "Dance yourself to Death."

The Executioner's Thong

noreply@blogger.com (Charles R Schultz) — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 05:44:00 +0000

We live in an increasingly absurd and corrupt world in which the simulation of violence in movies is perfected, convincing us that we are indeed watching real explosions and tortures, while in the wake of the bombing at the Boston Marathon one paper, The New York Daily News, photo-shopped carnage, rent limbs, out of images of the explosions' aftermath to make them less horrific: the simulated is real, and the real must be faked. We are surrounded by a ferocious whirlwind, an opaque cloud, churning performance and verity, beyond which, unseen, mythical, lies history.

This condition terrifies us, and our reaction is acquiescence to empire, war and the mad shattering of civil liberties. If there is a reason to admire bad history, "ecstatic truth", and those stories sometimes called conspiracy theories, it is that at least with half-baked history there is a narrative that one can engage -- allowing us to talk about history -- because what we have more commonly is no history. And with no history everything is predestined, wealth, intelligence, cancer, poverty, sexuality, all conditions of existence only sourceless phenomena in a lonely chaotic landscape -- no source and no subject.

This is the way we feel. It reminds me of my hometown; those people who got tattoos to commemorate the deaths of friends and family -- the guys with the Chinese symbols on their shoulders that just as surely read "Panda Express" as "Brothers Forever" -- these men and women feel so lightly present in the world that they try to inscribe on their skin some memory as though any thought not literally present upon their bodies would be sucked into this gyre of unmeaning. In the West the tattoo was once a mark of sub-human status, sailors in their unfixed world, legionaries, soldiers and gladiators marked for and making death, and criminals, outlaws, prostitutes inviting hire. These ink runes told of their wrecked state; specifically threatening, they read "I have less to lose than you". Some women tattoo their lower back -- a desperate indelible lingerie framed by a gesture of underwear, not an open erotic invitation, but the cattle brand of surrender to humiliation and contempt -- commonly called a "tramp stamp".

In the solitary free-fall of American unknowing, men and women hope to preempt what they believe to be their necessary or inevitable degradation by tattooing themselves, the foreword of a violent and hopeless life. These feelings often exist unconsciously within the tattooed. Once the mark of the proletarian, this retreat of expression onto the body has become popular with the middle class in America who previously branded themselves through material possessions -- their combination, once the Apple logo on the back of the VW, now a scarf, a garlic peeler, a designer baby-carrier and bicycle rack upon their Leaf. They too now, in the loss of their future, in the absence of history, are exploring the proletarian arts of the condemned. These are the Faux-letarians and their affect of danger, these account managers in leather and IT girls at the gun range, abrade their bodies in an act of mourning, to manifest the shards of this broken vessel Enlightenment through which their future has fled.

All this buttoning and unbuttoning: fun against fun

noreply@blogger.com (Charles R Schultz) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 22:29:00 +0000

In the old order of the 1950s we were all repressed and that was good; it meant society would be stable. People couldn't enjoy the physical experience of life, sex, and pleasure because we had been trained to repress our desires and not to express them. This goes back to Freud. He believed that inside of man were powerful unconscious, violent and sexual urges that if we didn't control, we would tear each other to pieces, but not before raping each other. Then Wilhelm Reich came along and said the opposite; he thought, if we don't express our primal sexual urges, then they will drive us crazy and then we will all tear each other to pieces, but not before raping each other. This latter idea, Reich's idea of the libidinal ego, forms the foundation of the 1960s counter-culture, particularly in California; essentially that unconscious desires must find expression, and that our bodies, and one's individual experience, one's pleasure, might provide solutions that old politics were not producing, the revolution people wanted. Herbert Marcuse at UC San Diego said if enough people pursued non-traditional relationships, homosexuality, whatever, just not the mom-dad-kids patriarchy, it might cause a social transformation. In a similar vein, Norman O. Brown at UC Santa Cruz championed the idea of the "polymorphous perversity", sources of sexual pleasure not directly related to sex organs, or at least to the biological sexual function of our species. Politics was refocused upon our bodies. We would be find pleasure in the weird, and it would change the world.

Fast forward 40 years, and this is our ideology, and in places like West Marin, our religion. We are all focused on our emotional lives, the struggle to be our "authentic selves", self-expression, and our sex lives -- a trance of pseudo-Buddhist detachment from reality and spiritualized hedonism. And it is a terrible trap. For a few reasons -- one, it doesn't know what to do with concentrations of power, like the corporations which control the economy; as other authors on Local.org point out: our belief in our individuality and separation from the whole, and its deliberate indifference to concentrated power, is the "scafolding that supports Empire" itself. Two, it disregards politics, the weak uniting to negotiate with the powerful, because the process of organizing politically means the individual is no longer the center. And alone in nature, we all think about the terrible things going on in the world, but don't think we can do anything about them. Finally, it is a totally regulated and conformist ideology, in which pleasure becomes an order, i.e. "you must enjoy." The liberty of experience, of sexual experience for instance, with liberty its essential quality, is forfeited -- people regulate and obsess over all aspects of sex; in relationships, people act as though they were each other's sex therapists trying to do the right thing for each other's sexual health and satisfaction; sex becomes a grim sacrifice, similar to the sex of the 1950s that we rebelled against. And more, people do outdoorsy adventuring because they feel they need to do it. We get anxious if we can't conform to "the dude let's go rock climbing" command we all apparently have to obey now. We shameless suit our aging bodies in Lycra outfits, patronize coffee shops, and discuss our stamina. More importantly, to not be focused on pleasure, our ecstatic aerobic selves, would be a betrayal of one's being; it would be dehumanizing.

And this is why we are so maniacal and unhappy. Our "I wanna have fun!" answer to everything treats other people as instruments of our own pleasure and emotional fulfillment. The humans that our eye pans across exist to play a role, two dimensional place-holders for humans, and if the 2D people come off the page, when they leave our script for them, we are forced, sadly, to replace them with new actors. Worst of all, this new ethos described, makes me sound like the Pope, an instrument of social control. We are confronting, ascendant, invincible banality. But if you say today that we have inverted and created a more extreme form of the social control of the 1950s, you are considered to be the enemy of freedom.

Groovies in motion and at rest

noreply@blogger.com (Charles R Schultz) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 23:38:00 +0000

These two posts were originally read on Local.org Radio Blog on KWMR (http://kwmr.org/show/281) and are reflections upon the American Groovy, a privately educated Imperial Idiot coming in many varieties. The most refined and exalted of those is, no doubt, the Bay Area Groovy. I note in passing that a rare subspecies, the West Marin Groovy, is unsurpassed in pure copper-bottomed groovitude.

Groovies in motion...

For those wealthy Americans with an empathetic concern for Africa – usually highly romantic in their conception of history and purpose – there is charity adventure travel: Stanford grads spending two weeks at a time studying the Meerkats of Africa or setting up solar panels in Kenyan villages before returning home to post photos documenting their exotic humanity sans frontières to the websites containing their internet identities, their post-ideological public selves. Aside from the natural wincing their 'Orientalism with a human face' causes me, what is wrong with African charity? So what, one solar panel more is a worthy thing (and even I admit that Meerkats are cute).

Take these two statistics: the West gives 50-80 billion dollars in charitable aid to Africa every year, and in the opposite direction 500-800 billion dollars of African wealth is transferred by African businesses and government officials to off-shore Western banks, every year. Essentially, for every one dollar we give in charity, the West takes ten. And that process of capital being dislocated and then reconcentrated in the West is just part of the massive transfer of wealth from Africa that is constantly occurring.

I met a professor who raises money for libraries in villages in sub-Saharan Africa. He told me that it was wrong to discourage or defame charitable giving, that what it helped regardless of the larger context of globalization. This is the essence of the post-ideological, post-historical mindset – he is saying that we can operate independent of reality, because reality is beyond our control. Regardless of the hypocrisy of American's offering advice on primary education, I think he was wrong to exclude the context – along the lines of Oscar Wilde's criticism of charity:

...it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they [the givers of charity] very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right.

... and at rest

I am conflicted over the present obsession with the sensual enjoyment of food. I do prefer good food, the quality of flavor and production (organic, non-GMO, etc.), but those who focus upon the consumption of this food – whose price is indicative not only of the cost of production, but the market it serves as well – indulge in this sensual experience because they are simultaneously wealthy and convinced that they have no power to change the world. They seek pleasure out of unconscious despair. They are perfectly adjusted to the deep cynicism of our age. In this, the lovers of great and expensive cheese are deeply contemptible and to be treated as fools, the traditionalists of no tradition.

The industrial world has existed barely 150 years. The dislocation of the population from farm to city undermined the mores and traditions of these new industrial men and women. The dynamics of community, family, love, politics and labor were in a state of radical flux. It gave rise to many of the political ideals we still hold. But because of the attendant uncertainty of this new city life, the figure of the liar and dissembler found a boundless new stage on which to perform, while the standards for the criticism of their arts disappeared. A butcher sells rotten meat; the old enforcer, the collective judgment of the village – voodoo death to the transgressor – is gone; in its place the police, the anonymous men from another neighborhood, are open to bribery. And this new level of cynicism and mistrust in the society gave rise to a reaction – political movements who sought to use government to reestablish village law.

But the problem of centralization gave the world an irresistible indifference to justice, and as the peasants and laborers attempted to reassert the law, the Second World War began. In the wake of this catastrophe, touching nationalism, fascism and communism – all political ideals, all conceptions of justice, were lost to cynicism, sometimes called realism; while born of centralization and industrial empire, it embedded itself squarely in the mind of the individual. Cynicism is the parasite that came to control its host – Western man.

Our terror at the consequences of political ideas was institutionalized; it is built into the dominant post-war economic philosophies – man as a lone selfish actor strategizing against all other men for survival. This, bolstered by the pop gene theory of later day social Darwinians, is the present consensus view of man. For my generation, say everyone from 20-40 years old, this has been wholly internalized, the history lost. So we now take for granted that politics are irrelevant and the economy is unchangeable. If we are rich, we focus on what we are unconsciously certain is the last meaningful realm of human activity, pleasure. Pass the cheese.

But does fossil fuel know it's the problem?

noreply@blogger.com (Charles R Schultz) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 01:27:00 +0000

We know that fossil fuels are poisonous, that they cause myriad social and environmental crises. Why then are we unable to stop using them? Our inability to deal with the problem of fuel invites a perverse question: does fossil fuel know that we don’t need it? This is a version of a joke told by Slavoj Zizek (regarding belief and commodity fetishism): briefly, a man believes that he is a piece of grain; he goes to a psychologist and he is cured of this delusion. Time passes, and he returns to the analyst and tells him, “There is a chicken outside of my house; I am afraid he will eat me.” The analyst says, “But you are cured of your delusion; you know that you are a man, not a piece of grain.” The man replies, “Yes, I know. But does the chicken know?” This joke helps us to understand how we could know that fuel is causing catastrophe, but because our survival is wholly dependent upon fuel, we could contain the contradiction; we could hold the two separate. This was the way in which Zizek hopes to explain our relationship to money and commodities, and the same insight, that in spite of our ability to describe the commodity and its effect upon our lives, our enacted belief is in those commodities and relationships – our paradoxical affirmation of what we claim to deny – can help us understand what fossil fuels mean.

The control of heat is a much more primal force than money (though for our empire they have become inseparable – what would happen if global oil transactions ceased to be conducted using US dollars?) Heat is necessary in an absolute sense, and with the advent of modern fuel based technology, our relationship of dependency has become one of total humiliation. This is a deep human humiliation under the strain of which we have uncoupled cause and effect, history and politics. What is the power of a man and his thoughts in comparison to an airplane, or more to the point, what is the meaning of a “community” which is entirely dependent upon imported sources of fuel for all of its survival needs (for food, transportation, heat, etc.)? We have internalized this craven dependency; it operates unconsciously even for those people who are consciously aware of climate change for instance, or the fact that their commute is ruining their marriage, etc. In this reduction of ourselves, what remains held in common are sentimental images of human interaction, and similarly man in this humiliated state, with labor, now wholly machine and fuel, just the idyll of labor, is left only with romantic and sentimental relationships with other individuals. This is the world of your town Christmas party and the play-date trips with your wife.

Commonly our relationship to fossil fuels is called an addiction. When we observe a drug addict or drunk doing the same thing to themselves that we all do with fuel, we alternate between hatred and pity of their apparent madness – ultimately their desire through addiction to transcend unto death. Unlike fuel which is unconsciously accepted as beyond our control, the traditional addict abandons what control we are assumed to have; the addict intrudes upon our sentimental selves – our last pathetic gesture toward virtue. Their rejection of control is our proof of their madness. But as we have walled off the reality of our dependency on fossil fuels from our sentimentality, that which remains of our idea of humanity, we cannot recognize or even describe our true belief in fuel’s transcendent power.

We have to replace combustion of fossil fuels for the generation of heat and power in almost every role in which they currently function. Through politics and the reinvention of our infrastructure, we can resolve the joke – we can let the chicken know that we are men not kernels of grain. The very act of this replacement of fuels is the process by which we will mature beyond pale sentimentality toward actual virtue and community.

I'll be coming for you...

noreply@blogger.com (Charles R Schultz) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 06:14:00 +0000

Contained within the architecture of modern transportation networks are the plans of mass dislocation. So while the driver, or commercial air passenger, feel they are given freedom, they are actually accepting the ease and facility of their dislocation. Their mobility robs them of a fixed position, a locality. As the global economy, a grandiose fantasy, collapsed, there was a spirit, promoted by business media, that we should or would have "six jobs in our lifetime." When the crash happened perversely hopeful NPR radio essays told us of "permanent 'temps' who travel the nation" -- temporary job to temporary job. A punishment from antiquity: for those men who wished of traveling freely over the face of the earth, to know the world, they have traded the ability to know their home.

If Friedrich Kittler is correct, and Marshall McLuhan's idea of media as extension of self is a dangerously unexamined question (i.e. what is self?), that technology in fact imprints "self" (down to the very use of the word "imprint" as this word is not written but burnt onto silicon), that we are not in control as we imagine, that the technology defines us, then we can have our sanity, but we live in a terrifying world filled with endless vectors, real and not yet identified threats. If McLuhan's argument is correct, then we are all insane, but the illusions and spectacles that are generated by our society can relieve us, however temporarily, of fear. Said another way, technology is not a tool we pick up and use at our will, a separate entity that we take up and put down, but the lens through which we perceive what is real. The pair of glasses is not just an object, it is your vision.

There is a false dilemma as well between a humanist, "we tell the machines what to do" and a supposedly anti-humanist view "the machines tell us what to do." The truth is that we tell the machines what to tell us to do. What if we change our infrastructure to limit the dislocation of population? And what of globalization and its parallel fuel transportation system? Put not in a reactive, but a radical way, if we build infrastructure and machines that by its nature, imparted by humans, privilege the local, what of that?

In a sense, the 20th century was about connecting the whole globe, and this great technological feat permeated the entire culture of the west. The New Age mantra, "We're all connected, man..." was really hippies connecting with the spirit of President Eisenhower and the interstate highway system. And while it is true that we are all connected, the appropriate response, to transportation infrastructure and cloying hippie bullshit, is "Oh no! We're all connected!"

Obsolescence and Freedom

noreply@blogger.com (Charles R Schultz) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 20:47:00 +0000

General Motors came upon an idea, planned obsolescence, the origin of which I do not know. GM chairman Alfred P. Sloan championed the notion of building marvelously powerful but intentionally deficient machines: that they would be essential, transformative in their power, yet fail--and have to be immediately replaced (his contemporary's creation Screwtape may have indicated his method). They would transform reality. The act of operating them would be efficacious but not clearly understood or acknowledged (academics would study the suburbs), but above all, the articulated emotion, the articulate unmeaning of the technology, the intoxicating simulation of liberty would be treated as the rational purpose of the technology. How can you sell an object over and over again? How can you sell a person a solution that never quite meets the question it proposes loudly to answer? How can we monetize the damnation of Tantalus and Sisyphus? Could their fate become an lifestyle that we accept and inhabit?

My neighbor grew up on a ranch on which there are tools that provide utility many generations after their manufacture and purchase. This, like their land now valued beyond the means of all but the extremely rich to buy, is accumulation of generations. It is the essence of civilization--that which is saved, that which increases through saving, selection, that which is admired for its ability to sustain. Those things that sustain us, civilization--the accumulation of utility--are through planned obsolescence systematically destroyed in order to supply them again. It is pernicious--it acts upon the psyche; it appeals to Christian and more general religious ideas of renewal--with man's capability of forgiveness, to live again, his bond with every man who shares the experience of life, replaced by a ritual of buying new clothing from JC Penny every Easter. Ultimately the beautiful proposition of the author of the religious text is entirely forgotten and we simply buy new clothes to feel the sensation of power. The desire to be responsible is subverted to deliberate and incontinent disregard for the use of resources; the hatred of future generations. I have been bred, ironically, to despise breeding, specifically the idea of being a biological fact. Houellebecq: Children are existence's cruelest trick--you support them all your life, then they out live you.

This is my rehash of the ideas of writers like Karl Marx and his descendants like Herbert Marcuse repeated through an education heavily influenced by Christian apologists. The primary idea and apprehension is not religious doctrine: it is that uselessness, trivial desire, effrontery and boredom are the motivation or emotional quality of this forty year moment of our motionless ecstasy in anti-civilization. It is the same apprehension the neo-conservatives; the fear that struck them, the terror they projected upon the terrorist. Their failure is their false or perhaps deliberately fraudulent attribution of responsibility for this destructive learned boredom on "liberal society" which they say must become wanton from freedom and seek to destroy the foundation that allowed or "afforded" them their contempt for the past. How much more likely is this assessment than powerful industries obsessed with the potential crisis of "over supply" of goods, developing and articulating in a deliberate campaign within our culture of insatiable desire fed by planned obsolescence? Is it true that what one necessarily does with freedom is destroy everything in reach? The man unbound from cultural chains immediately bashes his wife's head in for not making him coffee? It is an absurd question to ask--can I be free of culture? Can I lick my own tongue? It is a false question. It assumes, in a negative form, the failure of the neo-cons rejected mentor, Marx--that one could become conscious--rather than what I believe, which is that ideology is consciousness, and that our consciousness is an expression of ideology, that parsing ideologies is essential, not obsessing over their potential escape. The reality is that we are bound by culture, but that we have a real if limited agency to change it. The perverse determinism of the "neo-con's" is the real irrationality. Their necessary unraveling of society with too many freedoms, is flip side lie of Nike shoes, that if you possess this object you will master your enemies. Like planned obsolescence and the idea of marketing and public relations--it is the transference to an object a power or quality that it does not possess. Liberty is not causing the collapse of our society, concentrations of power are playing games with the perceptions of reality available to an atomized society, atoms that will never be molecules, auto-organizing atoms, molecule without combination, without attraction, molecule in one atom ("socialism in one person"), the auto-eros of homunculii like Bill Kristol and Daniel Pipes. They are themselves the disgrace of liberty as power gestures to these new non-men to participate in the manufacture of reality. To lie to automata. The determinism of geneticists progressed on the same lines--"this has to be"; your biology is your enemy; you hate you. To point out that the Greeks had contributed much to the discussion of the fate of those who defy fate is lost perhaps. In all of this, the beauty and awe of human investigation of our perceptions is lost.