State of the United States (2011)

* 44 Million Americans on food stamps, including 1 out of 4 children

* # of low income jobs now = 41% of all jobs in U.S.

* 50 million people have no health insurance

* 5.5 million unemployed receive no unemployment

* The percentage of millionaires in Congress is 50x higher than the percentage of millionaires in the general population

* Student Loan Debt = $1 Trillion Dollars, having now surpassed U.S. credit card debt

* Cost of college education is now 900% more than it was in 1978

Thanks mom, and U.S. Business Insider.

Here's a nice piece from U.S. BI detailing real facts about our economic 'recovery'. Which concludes that... drum roll...  Picture from Wikipedia's page on Economic Inequality

Private-sector job growth under Barack Obama has been just as good if not better than it was under George Bush.

You do have to fuck people over to survive

Anarchists have a rallying cry: "You don't have to fuck people over in order to survive."

It's not clear that this statement is true. It's veracity, of course, depends on how one parses it. It could be equivalent to the statement, "Under conditions of capitalism, it is necessary for each person to fuck-over her fellows to survive; but another world is possible." Alternatively, one could take "You don't have to fuck people over to survive" to mean that "For all or at least most human individuals, in the present world, fucking people over is not the only viable strategy for survival." One suspects that the first interpretation of this slogan is closer to what its carriers mean: to say that another world is possible amounts to an indictment of capitalism; on the other hand, to say that fucking people over is not the only viable strategy for survival is not only an apology for capitalism, it's also manifestly false.

In the highest spirit of journalistic corroboration, your correspondent has therefore ventured into the world of markets and enterprise to investigate whether, in fact, behaving decently will allow you to fill your belly and pay the rent. Under present conditions (as opposed to, say, human society sixty thousand years ago), is it possible to economically survive-and-thrive while obeying basic moral norms?

The short answer: not so much. Anyone who actually participates in the economy--from the poorest busker to the richest businessman--knows that profit-generation boils down to successful manipulation of other people. Not treating them as free-and-rational ends-in-themselves; not doing unto them as you'd wish done unto you. No: the art of profit essentially involves treating other human beings as objects to be moved, whether they physically move (into the condos your company rents), economically move (capital into your company's stock), or are emotionally "moved" (by the breath-taking vision of the Better Tomorrow your company is striving toward, according to the PR materials an outside ad-agency created).

Everyone knows this. Only small children believe that the smile they receive from the Starbucks barista springs from real and un-coerced emotion. Only fools and Republicans believe that BP advertising which depicts clean gulf beaches represents the vision, rather than the poise, of that oil giant. The fact that businessmen struggle to manipulate the knowledge and emotions of everyone around them is obvious in the way that the sky is obvious: it's so in-front-of-you, it's hard to keep sight of.

Does this kind of manipulation amount to fucking people over? Yes. Not just in a high-fallutin' ethics kind of way, as when Kant implores us to treat one another as other-selves instead of humanoid tools. It concretely erodes the quality of human society; for example, by making trust a laughable exercise and acclimating everyone to cynical self-presentation as a norm. As the great Mr. Stewart said recently (on Paul Ryan's faked photo-op at a homeless shelter), "Even if you don't really give a shit about the homeless, at least give a shit about making us think that you give a shit. Don't phone in your cynicism." No one was surprised by the vice presidential candidate's cynicism; people were appalled only by the shoddiness of his effrontery.

Your correspondent's recent experience with lucrative manipulation took the form of pedicab-operation: I pedaled people around a six-block radius during large sport events. The transportation-utility of my work is practically nil: if you can walk, you can get to your destination almost as quickly as a pedicab. Rather, I sell the novelty of being tugged around on a couch hooked to a bicycle. I put on a performance of strenuous exertion and chat customers up in the most flattering way possible. In exchange, they pay me twice as much as I've made at other, more productive jobs (e.g. shellfish farming; caring for the disabled). We can skip past how 1) the fact that lots of people having enough disposable income to afford a pure-luxury service like pedicabbing, while 2) heroin addicts twitch in the gutter, is 3) an astounding example of economic disparity. I just want to point out that my line of work is pretty much useless to society overall; pedicabbing is only valuable within the context of a privileged elite. And--what's more pertinent to our discussion--I make my money mostly by manipulating people: not by getting them from Here to There, but rather by flattering them with chatter and impressing them with my physical exertion. I manipulate people to pay my rent.

So do you have to fuck people over to survive? In an economy where money (i.e. access to resources) is allocated according to a person's ability to manipulate others, then, yes, you do have to fuck people over to survive. Whether you're Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs (stealing your peers' ideas, using brand-identity to manipulate consumer choices, and outsourcing labor to the cheapest/most desperate workforce you can find) or a homeless guy on an off-ramp (with a "Two Kids! God Bless!" sign to pull heartstrings, or a "Why lie? I need beer money" sign to flaunt your 'honesty') or a member of the proletariat (a waiter, salesman, or middle-manager with a Welcoming Smile and all the charm you can muster), we all manipulate each other, because we're all at the mercy of scarcity. Decency (as opposed to the performance of decency) is a luxury good: suburban do-gooders volunteer in poor countries, then cover their Facebook with pics of their romantic piety. Decency is what you do when you're not working: ethics as a hobby, like birdwatching or stamp collecting. Manipulating people--fucking them over--is what you do to survive. What we all do to survive. And it's not at all clear that we can change this imperative, or how, or at what cost.

Bike Theft Economics

http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-stolen-bicycles

Interesting article on the economics of bicycle theft. A bit fluffy and insubstantial at parts, but worth reading.

Review: A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright

If, like yours truly, you are concerned by the continued geometric growth of the human population, dwindling renewable and non-renewable resources, toxic air, melting ice-caps, hemorrhaging biodiversity, and the like, then this book might be for you. If, like yours truly, you think that designing transportation infrastructure around automobiles is patent madness, or that over-farming plant crops in order to feed livestock in order to sell meat at addictively-low prices is asinine, or that finite resources preclude infinite economic growth, then this book might be for you. If you're a Republican, then this book is definitely for you, but you probably won't like it.

This is a book about the end of the world.

Ecologists, primitivists, and other Greens will already be familiar with Wright's central thesis (which is basically identical to that of Jared Diamond's less-accessible Collapse): that stupid or excessive use of resources leads to social collapse, what Wright calls a "progress trap." Different societies make different choices about how to use resources and relate to their environments, and these choices have consequences. Groups of humans become too good at something (farming, hunting, fighting, city-building) and ultimately gobble-up the ecostructure upon which their infrastructure is built. Like a virus killing off its host-population, or hunters extinguishing the population they hunt, human populations have been and still are apt to kill our respective golden-egg-laying geese.

Wright begins by explaining culture.

"I should make it clear that I'm defining 'civilization' and 'culture' in a technical, anthropological way. By culture I mean the whole of any society's knowledge, beliefs, and practices. Culture is everything: from veganism to cannibalism; Beethoven, Botticelli, and body piercing; what you do in the bedroom, the bathroom, and the church of your choice (if your culture allows a choice) and all of technology from the split stone to the split atom. Civilizations are a specific kind of culture: large, complex societies based on the domestication of plants, animals, and human beings."

He holds that our culture--the society that has grown from Christian, European roots to pretty much take over the world by the time of this writing--is caught in a particularly large and troublesome progress trap. That's partly due to the fact that globalization puts all of humanity's survival-eggs in one basket, and partly because our culture tells us not to bother with sustainability because, ostensibly, history is teleological: "...a short one-way trip from Creation to Judgment, from Adam to Doom." During the Enlightenment and especially the nineteenth century, this view of history shed God but retained its promise of salvation via technical and social progress toward earthly paradise.

Again, these aren't original ideas. Fans of Daniel Quinn's Ishmael books will recognize the critique of civilization as a method human society, and anyone who reads a newspaper will agree with Wright's observation that, sooner or later, we're headed for disaster.

What's really valuable about Short History is the way that Wright documents collapses that have already occurred. Reading him explain of the collapse of Rome, the Sumerian empire, Easter Island, and Classic Mayan society leaves little room for the skeptic's retreat. It's one thing to outline our society's tragic misuse of resources, as I bitterly did at the beginning of this review, and say, "Look, we can't live this way forever. We're headed off a cliff." But this argument leaves room for the hope that our society is special, that technology will somehow save us, that our resource-use will gradually curb and stabilize, that superficial fixes might allow civilization to continue indefinitely. Wright prevents a skeptic from taking these hopeful fantasies seriously by showing, again and again, how societies just like our own have catastrophically destroyed themselves through self-delusion and by refusing to live within their natural limitations. By backing the logical argument for imminent collapse with historical examples of how it has occurred before, Wright makes it difficult indeed to hope that, somehow, our contemporary method of life might be anything less than disastrous.

Short History is adapted from a series of public lectures Wright delivered, and this shows in the text's accessibility. At a tiny 131 pages, it's a pleasant and thoughtful prophecy of the doom of all human life. The only real drawback is how depressing the book is: like an oracle in Greek tragedy, Wright shows us how we will destroy ourselves; yet despite this knowledge, there doesn't seem to be much we can do about it.

Facebook: the new agora

Word has it that Facebook has about 900m active users at present; that is, 1 in 8 human beings. There are about as many people on FB today as there were on earth 200 years ago. Last year it generated $3.7b in revenue, and its stock is expected to be valued at a total of $87b or more when it goes public next month.

Most of this money, presumably, comes from ad revenue. I'm not an expert, but I understand that, in addition to a social networking tool (i.e. a big, interactive phonebook), FB is also a big cookie machine. (Cookies are programs which track your online movement, and then use that data to target the ads you see.) Punditocracy has gone so far as to suggest (on FB) that FB users are "the world's largest unpaid workforce." This is a weird and interesting idea--that consumers who produce advertising revenue by the way they consume are, thus, workers--which I'm too baffled by to get into here.

The website was founded less than a decade ago by a couple of Harvard undergrads. Check out a graph of its users and you'll see a geometric increase begin circa 2008. As portrayed in the biopic The Social Network, FB's meteoric rise in popularity relied on two strategies. First, it used a sophisticated approach to peer-to-peer connections. FB found ways to connect members to people they already knew or with whom they shared an important demographic. So, rather than having one big ocean of users, relationships were compartmentalized and prioritized. FB also took user-privacy seriously (obviously important). Second, FB thrived by becoming (and remaining)the medium for peer communication. When everyone in your school is on FB, there's enormous pressure to become a member. FB exploited this strategy by conquering one arena at a time: first Harvard, then nearby colleges, then regional colleges, then all colleges, then high schools, etc. Again, it used compartmentalization to succeed: I don't care if FB is popular in general, but I care very much if it's popular within my specific peer group.

So congratulations to Mark Zuckerberg and all those other hacker/entrepreneur wonks on their unprecedented success. Now, let's talk about democracy.

Democracy (from the Greek demokratia) requires public conversation. If citizens can't talk and argue and negotiate and forge cynical alliances and voting blocs, then democracy doesn't work. If the people (demos) can't coordinate among themselves, then they can't rule (kratia). In ancient Athens and in colonial America, the place for public conversation and debate was the public square (agora).

Then came the telegraph, and radio, and TV, and interwebz. 21st  century communication technology has led 21st century political communities to be defined less and less in terms of physical location (e.g. Olympia, WA) and more and more in terms of demographic (e.g. libertarians against Obama). As Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan argue, the medium through which we communicate exercises influence upon the content that we're able to talk about.

We XXI-centenarians speak and listen in the digital agora. We get our news, argue our debates, and build our political communities via mass communication. Physical location isn't irrelevant--I still live in Olympia, and I'm still affected by Olympia-specific issues like taxes and public transit policies--but even local issues get discussed online, e.g. local-specific websites. You cannot unplug without exiting politics, and thus becoming, in ancient Athenian terms, an idiot.

So:
1-Democracy functions in the agora.
2-Today, the agora is online.

And, 3-FB is one enormous part of the agora. Enormous, and sort of inescapable, because it's a closed system: either you're on FB, or you're not. Unlike email (where I can easily switch to an independent provider without losing access to my peers), FB as a mode of communication is monopolistic, a closed system. Either you're in, or you're out. The nature of closed-system social networks means that competition between providers isn't comparable to, say, competing newspapers or telegraph companies. I can read the Washington Post and write letters to the editor without excluding myself from the readership of the NY Times; I can call people who subscribe to AT&T from my Verizon phone. But I can't participate in Facebook without being a member; FB is a closed realm. As anyone familiar with the term "antitrust," the role of communications in politics, or the Fourth Estate knows, this compartmentalization of communication is really, really dangerous to democracy.

Enormous and monopolistic and privately owned. This is one of the weird things about FB that it seems vital for users to discuss but which users, perversely, remain silent about: how is it healthy for our democracy-enabling agora to be owned, tracked, sold, regulated, and (potentially or subtly) censored by private owners? (As Postman would point out, this is less Big Brother and more Brave New World--or better yet, Oryx and Crake; the iron heel of totalitarianism is not the only threat to democracy.)

I'm not writing this post to Zuckerberg or Congress. I'm writing it to FB users and to citizens. How can this possibly be okay, for our agora to be privately owned? How can this possibly be a good idea?

OWS is back, baby!

Reading up on some basic political philosophy has reminded me that the fundamental question of that discipline is, How should we choose to organize society? It's an obvious point, but easy to miss in the everyday specificity of political issues like Supreme Court rulings or party competition.

Which makes me think of the Occupy movement. This week the New York section of the movement returned to the streets: now they're literally on Wall Street. This is the first successful occupation from OWS since they were evicted from Zuccoti Park in November, following a three-month encampment.

Here's why the question of how to organize society makes me think of Occupy. Between September and November of last year, it seemed like everyone was criticizing the movement for lacking clear goals. Here's a particularly cantankerous bit of advice from someone's Dad:

I am unsympathetic. Blocking streets to prevent commuters from picking up their children and getting home to their families, shutting down banks so folks can't cash their paychecks and disabling ATM machines with super glue isn't sticking it to "the man." It simply does injury to the true 99 percent, the hardworking people trying to make a living, obeying the laws and paying taxes. 


While I still think it's just not true that the movement lacks goals--anti-plutocrat seems like a pretty specific agenda to me--there's an element of truth in these criticisms. OWS lacks conventional goals in the sense that it's about more than specific changes in policy. Simply, say, reversing the Citizen's United ruling, or prosecuting top players from the 2008 financial collapse, or even electing Ron Paul (or whoever) wouldn't fulfil Occupy's goals.

OWS is, even more than an expression of outrage at banksters and croney capitalism, an experiment in a different way of doing politics. A different way of being political. As Bernard Harcourt argues here, here, and here, stuff like consensus voting, call-and-repeat forums, and the absence of leaders are examples of how OWS functions according to a different format from conventional US politics. A different way of speaking and thinking about politics. A different (pardon the buzzword) discourse of how we can best organize our society. And it seems to me that this, this radical attempt to reinvent the way that we talk/think/do politics is more valuable than any conventional demand that the movement might make.

The upside of SCOTUS striking down Obamacare

On All Things Considered, Robert Siegel aptly considers what might happen if the Supreme Court strikes down the part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) which requires individuals to become insured or pay a penalty when it rules in June. Common consensus has it that the entire act stands or falls with this piece of legislation, because the act won't work if Congress can't compel pretty much everyone to get on-board. The relevant legal question boils down to whether it's appropriate for Congress to mandate individual health insurance. Opponents of the act say that it compels Americans to enter a market they might not otherwise participate in; supporters say that virtually everyone is already participating in the healthcare market (given that it's already law that ERs cannot turn away patients who lack insurance), so PPACA amounts to a regulation of already-existing economic activity, not a mandate unto participation.

Some speculations I've heard:

1. Hell Hath No Fury
Whichever way the court rules, the losers are going to rally. If the court upholds the act, then Republicans will make the case that beating Obama is the only way to rid the nation of the blight of socialistic Obamacare. If the court declares it unconstitutional, then Obama and the Dems can appeal to a popular uprising against judicial overreach by ideological justices, pointing to Bush vs. Gore, Citizen's United, and now PPAHA. In either case, one party is going to have a healthcare rallying-cry for the fall election.

2. The Empire Strikes Back
Striking down this market-based version of Obamacare could set the stage for the Dems to come back with real universal healthcare, where the federal government uses direct taxes to pay for direct services without any private-sector middleman. If exploitation by insurance companies is the engine for our country's bad, expensive healthcare, then replacing the market-model with a this could be a really, really good thing.

Two points made by justices during hearings this past week: First, Chief Justice Roberts questioned whether the penalty for not getting insurance (i.e. forfeiting your tax return) are strong enough to count as a mandate rather than a mere incentive. Punditocracy covers that here. Second, Justice Kagan points out the weirdness of the argument that States' treasuries will be depleted by delivering Medicaid to all the people who already qualify for it but don't take advantage of it:

…that does seem odd, to suggest that the State is being injured because people who could show up tomorrow with or without this law will -- will show up in greater numbers. I mean, presumably the State wants to cover people whom it has declared eligible for this benefit.


Odd is one word for it. Jonathan Cohn covers it here in the New Republic.

Gay Rights, AIDS, and Public Health

 If you're a queer man then you know that the rise of the AIDS epidemic was the moment when we galvanized. If the Stonewall riot of 1969 was our Pearl Harbor, then AIDS was our 9/11. Gay man after gay man died, suddenly but slowly enough to suffer, their bodies literally falling apart one process at a time. If you don't know this and you're a man and you have sex with men, then go here immediately.

And we—or rather, our predecessors—reacted. Groups like ACT-UP and Gay Men's Health Crisis took to the streets and phones to agitate. Recall that this was during Reagan's White House—years of “gay plague” passed before the president said the word “AIDS” in public. The bloc of queer activism which endures to this day—which we have to thank for the recent end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the imminence of national gay marriage—was born of the fact that gay men had a choice: fight, or die. Take your rights, or die. Become recognized, respected, political--or die. 

Not that 2012, three decades after the initiation of AIDS, has seen the erasure of homophobia. The HIV epidemic persists—indeed, it may be on the rise among young gay men because of the effects of new medications on risk-perceptions. Three decades of survivors are still with us, still surviving. Plenty of Americans give money to have us imprisoned or killed en masse,  or—perhaps worse—forced back into the closet. Queer kids still get bullied to death. Queer adults (some groups more than others) still get beaten and raped and killed for who they are or what they're perceived to be. Presidential candidates make opposing our very existence talking points during stump speeches.

BUT! But. But things are better, by any reasonable estimation. Marriage and the military are just two concrete examples of a broader progress we've made. Explicit homophobia is more or less rude in mainstream society, like farting or smoking. Our position as a threatened sub-group has improved tremendously during my lifetime.

What hasn't improved is: poverty. In fact, as the Occupy Wallstreet movement emphasizes, the gap between rich and poor has continued to expand in the past thirty years, following a trend which has held for twice a long. The gap between the medical care the two groups receive has stretched correspondingly: rich heiresses receive plastic surgery on their reality TV shows while ERs around the country function as de facto clinics to hoards of the tired and hungry, charging loan-shark rates for their services. If the position of queer men has improved, that's because we're moving up the ladder of inequality. The country hasn't improved, so much as it's improvedfor us.

What I want to highlight is how this issue of poor-healthcare intersects the issue of gay men's ascent from criminalization to contempt to grudging acceptance. This intersection occurs in two ways. First, there's the practical fact that in a country with fair healthcare, AIDS wouldn't have been nearly as devastating for gay men or anyone else. If our healthcare were modelled aroundreasonable-need and long-term public welfare,  instead of stop-gap emergency care and profit, we wouldn't have needed to wait for years—until a white, hemophiliac child named Ryan White died from AIDS after receiving an infected blood transfusion—for our government and our country to do something about the epidemic. And if we'd had fair healthcare, it's a good bet that HIV wouldn't have been as widespread. In short: if America had had fair healthcare for everyone, then homophobic apathy wouldn't have literally killed thousands of gay men throughout the 80s.

So it’s awesome that we galvanized into a national movement to demand fair treatment and equal rights, in the face of this horrific epidemic and sickening complacency. Awesome, but insufficient. Even though our position has improved, the medical system which casually allowed thousands (by now, millions) to die, the medical system which openly values lives according to dollars and social status, is still in place. Question: if next year some new plague swept through, say, migrant worker populations, or the homeless, or the incarcerated, does it seem plausible that the rest of us might just let them die, until our friends and neighbours began to get infected? Homophobia has decreased since 1981, but America’s willingness to let the poor die is as strong as ever.

This is the second intersection between poverty-healthcare and gay men as a political entity. When we appeal to straight America for fair treatment, our argument is based in a larger view of justice, equality, and human decency. We don’t want to be treated as gays; we want to be treated as human beings. There is, properly speaking, no such thing as gay rights. There are only human rights, and the groups to whom human rights are denied. As a consequence, our movement, our political bloc, can only demand equal protections and dignity for queer people when we demand them for all people. Our movement is only legitimate insofar as it advocates for all people’s dignity.

That is why it is simply not good enough for us to move up the ladder of inequality. We must be committed to equality in general, for all, queer and otherwise, and especially for the poor. And that means fair healthcare.

An Ode to the Movement: Jensen brings it back home

In stock at Last Word Books!

Review of Truths Among Us: Conversations on Building a New Culture, a collection of interviews by Derrick Jensen, PM Press, 2012

By Sasha

Derrick Jensen can be a very enigmatic author. At one point he is talking about preserving nature by destroying civilization, and then in a blink of an eye he is engaging you on the subject of violence against women or civil war in Guatemala. This is because, for Jensen, the datum of abuse is civilization. We will finally be able to heal from our trauma and abusive behavior when we dismantle the idea of civilization and live in peace with one another. In his books, Jensen is constantly referring to his friends—his socialist friend, his feminist friend, his indigenous activist friend—who are reminding him to remain humble and informing his thoughts all the time. But who are these friends, and how can we figure out where their independent thoughts intersect with Jensen’s?

That is where Truths Among Us comes into play. Interviewing a diverse array of activists, scientists, and theorists, Jensen strikes to what is personal in all of our experiences with abuse, and finds the healing kernel of love in an intimate relationship with one another, mediated by nature. Civilization, here, is the abusive intervention in natural relationships; it is—via capital, commercialism, colonialism, etc—what pits us against one another through shame, competition, or outright victimization.

In today’s heated terrain of ideological polarization and alienation, Truths Among Us comes as a breath of fresh air. What strikes the reader at first are the names on the front cover. Jensen interviews sociologist Stanley Aaronowitz, feminist Jane Caputi, activist Luis Rodriguez, and a careful selection of other important thinkers. Throughout the book, Jensen’s own voice is subsumed within a broader discourse about science, activism, biodiversity, and social issues. Aaronowitz’s marxian socialism illuminates a surprising link with Jensen’s autonomous, primitivist views on the basis of a critique of technological civilization and contemporary science. Here, the alienated stance of scientism is challenged by appealing to the traditions of the philosophy of science, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and a host of other thinkers whose thoughts have been sacrificed at the alter of “method”.

In place of science as it exists in today’s highly professionalized and corporatized world, Jensen seeks out Marc Ian Barasch, the former editor of The New Age Journal, for some actionable medical knowledge. Barasch pulls on ideas of the collective unconscious hashed out across the world, from Carl Jung to Hasidic tradition to Buddhism. Presenting an interesting case for curing cancer through a personal quest of self-healing, Barasch explains that by listening to his dreams and following his desires he was able to win his battle with the scourge of modern civilization.

Accompanying self-healing, Jensen makes special inquiries into bioremediation with renowned mycologist Paul Stamets. Through the activities of fungi and mycelial mats, ecosystems are able to regenerate to a mind boggling extent, Stamets declares. Pursuing this knowledge base might be the key to restoring devastated ecosystems and returning to wild nature. Another interview with activist John Keeble exposes that the connection between bioremediation of Super Fund sites and other biohazard locations might have a lot to do with a sociological turn away from white supremacy and corporate control. Corporations “rob the world of its subjectivity,” says Keeble, “They are culturally sanctified, supported, and protected in their role of turning the living—forests, oceans, mountains, rivers, human lives—into the dead: money” while hate groups “serve that same function of objectifying. Their entire self-definition is based on this objectification.”

To get a closer understanding of the problems of hate and objectification, Jensen turns to influential professor and critic of patriarchy, Jane Caputi. In this interview, Jensen’s personality shines through; he draws on his own experience and strikes to the core of our collective trauma as well as the need for recovery. What Caputi shows us is that oppression is afflicted within before it is afflicted without; in rape for instance, what the perpetrator is “afraid of—perhaps even more profoundly than getting a dose of their own violence—is the feminine within themselves, the chaos represented by the wilderness.” Hence, the connection between the assault against nature and the assault against particular groups grows more keen, and is elucidated further by Jensen’s discussion with Luis Rodriguez.

A best-selling author whose autobiographical work, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Life in L.A., describes life as a gang member in South Central LA. Rodriguez discusses the need for place amongst inner city youth whom economic structures have abandoned. “[Gangs] are products of the industrial age,” declares Rodriguez, who also touches on the subject of the collective unconscious. “[W]e all have an ancestral pool of knowledge and experience that we’ve somehow forgotten about… in their bones these kids are indigenous people.” Raised on a reservation in New Mexico and trained as a Tzutujil Mayan shaman in Guatemala, Martín Prechtel also provides Jensen with an important connection to the indigenous: “We are all still human beings. Some of us have buried our humanity deep inside, or medicated or anesthetized it, but every person alive today, tribal or modern, primal or domesticated, has a soul that is original, natural, and, about all, indigenous in one way or another.” In contrast to the notion of indigeneity, love, and appreciation, professor Richard Drinnon provides a sweeping analysis of the connections between modernity, industrialism, and racism, asking the question, “Where can an attempted dominion over nature and self lead but to the eradication of feelings in any kind of fully human way?” The answer comes through Jensen’s interview with trauma expert Judith Herman: “If you’re part of a predatory and militaristic culture, then to behave in a predatory and exploitative way is not deviant, per se.”

To fit this many observations in a single work while pulling so many voices into a bricolage of diverse and complimentary discourse is a momentous achievement by Jensen, and it is sorely needed today. Which brings me to the next interesting aspect of Truths Among Us: many of the interviews took place before 9/11 and the Green Scare, bringing together a number of voices in an interesting time capsule; a point when “the movement” had the ability to articulate particular demands with far more discursive freedom. One can see in the history of Jensen’s writings a complicated tension between the right-wing anarchist-primitivist tradition and left wing socialist thought. Jensen’s own writing, which culminated in the monumental, prophetic lamentations of, Endgame, has always played along a tight-wire of resistance, moving between prison advocacy to animal welfare sympathies to feminism and post-colonial theory, while maintaining what one might call an autonomous political position. While the anarchist right has chided him for endorsing a liberal mindset, much of the liberal left has disassociated itself from Jensen’s antipathy for reforms.

When Jensen released Deep Green Resistance with controversial anti-vegan primitivist Lierre Keith and anarchist Aric McBay, he was criticized heavily from the left, which blamed DGR for adding fuel to a cultish right-wing tendency within primitivism that has attacked at various times vegetarianism, antiracism, feminism, and queer activism. This “backlash” against the left, however, is far from Jensen’s line of thought. The release of these interviews dating back to the late nineties is a relief from the infighting and disruption that has plagued activists in recent years, and an invitation to escape the repressive dead ends of reactionary discourse.

The glance back at the wonderful things that activists have done and said in solidarity with a global movement against oppression and pathological abuse serves as an inspirational (if not nostalgic) reminder of the relationships of solidarity that Jensen has helped to protect over the past two decades, and a motivation to embrace different people, different ideas, and different walks of life. It is a rewarding book, well worth the read, and is, ironically, perhaps a better reference point for Jensen’s thought than any other of his works that I have read.

Five top hackers arrested... I wonder if this could have been a false flag all along or it's just a traitor...

I'm not sure what to believe now... Though I know our super secret government is quite good at what it does... You decide who to trust. And if there are any elite hackers reading this, thanks for the crucial, dangerous work you are doing in our global village.

It also means that the FBI allowed the recent wiki leaked Stratfor communiques... Now why would they do something like that? Makes me think a bit harder about this article from the Atlantic that Techonoccult turned me onto.

False Flag

Thanks to Citizens for Legitimate Government for the news snippets below.
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Five arrested in high-profile cyberattacks 06 Mar 2012 Top members of the computer hacker group "Anonymous" and its offshoots were arrested and charged Tuesday after a wide-ranging investigation used the help of a group leader who was working as a secret government informant. Five of the suspects, considered by investigators among the "most sophisticated hackers in the world," were arrested in the United States and Europe and charged in a Manhattan federal court over their alleged role in high-profile cyberattacks against government agencies and large companies, according to an indictment. A sixth man, Hector Xavier Monsegur, a notorious hacker known as "Sabu," pleaded guilty in August to computer hacking and other crimes.

LulzSec boss Hector Monsegur was working for us - FBI --Monsegur, aka Sabu, turned by FBI last June --'We're chopping off the head of LulzSec' 07 Mar 2012 Police on two continents swooped on top members of computer hacking group LulzSec early today, and acting largely on evidence gathered by the organisation's leader - who sources say has been secretly working for the government for months - arrested three and charged two more with conspiracy. Charges against four of the five were based on a conspiracy case filed in New York federal court. An indictment charging the suspects, who include two men from Great Britain, two from Ireland and an American from Chicago, is expected to be unsealed today in the Southern District of New York. "This is devastating to the organisation," an FBI official involved with the investigation said. "We're chopping off the head of LulzSec." [We'll see.]

International hacking group LulzSec brought down by own leader --'They caught him and he was secretly arrested and now works for the FBI.' 06 Mar 2012 Law enforcement agents on two continents swooped in on top members of the infamous computer hacking group LulzSec early this morning, and acting largely on evidence gathered by the organization's brazen leader -- who sources say has been secretly working for the government for months -- arrested three and charged two more with conspiracy. The offshoot of the loose network of hackers, Anonymous, believed to have caused billions of dollars in damage to governments, international banks and corporations, was allegedly led by a man FoxNews.com has identified as Hector Xavier Monsegur. After the FBI unmasked Monsegur [working under the Internet alias 'Sabu'] last June, he became a cooperating witness, sources toldFoxNews.com. "They caught him and he was secretly arrested and now works for the FBI," a source close to Sabu toldFoxNews.com. Monsegur pleaded guilty Aug. 15 to 12 hacking-related charges and information documenting his admissions was unsealed in Southern District Court on Tuesday.

Should the value of a local independent bookstore be measured in more than dollars and cents?

First aired on Q (30/1/12)

Is the neighbourhood bookstore a romantic notion of the past, or are bookstores still important and vibrant hubs of culture and community? Slate Magazine's Farhad Manjoo published a controversial essay in December about how independent bookstores are "inefficient and outdated," which was criticized by several writers, including Salon.com's Will Doig and novelist Salman Rushdie. Earlier this week on Q, Joanne Saul, who owns Toronto bookstore Type, took part in a debate with Manjoo about the value of the independent bookstore.

Manjoo argues that bricks and mortar bookstores are "cultish, mouldering institutions," and that online retail giant Amazon.com does more for literary culture. 

"My feeling is that I read more often now that I have an Amazon Kindle because I have instant access to books at a much larger selection, and because I can get a book basically any time I want," he said. "I think the most important factor in literary culture is people reading books and the most important force in recent times of people reading books has been Amazon's development of the e-reading platform, and everything else they do -- customer reviews, recommendations, all that stuff fosters more reading.... I think the idea that a bookstore is a local institution is a little misguided."

As the owner of a local bookstore, Saul naturally disagrees, and she expresses concern that Manjoo's contempt for bookstores stems from some unpleasant experience in one. 

"I don't think it's necessarily a case of either/or -- it can be a case of both/and. What I took issue with was the tone of [Farhad]'s argument -- it was so angry! Farhad sounded like he'd been really hard done by some independent bookstore in the past, and I'm sorry about that," said Saul. "I think that independent bookstores are trying very hard to survive and grow and thrive in an era that is very difficult. I was spurred on to open Type Books because I felt that there wasn't anything in my neighbourhood, in my community, a place where I wanted to shop, where I wanted to buy my books and to grow community." There are two different locations of Type, and each is a reflection of the neighbourhood it's in, says Saul. "When I go and buy books, I certainly have my neighbourhood in mind."

Manjoo called bookstores "user unfriendly" and "mistakenly mythologized," a claim that Saul finds baffling. "I think independent bookstores are extremely user-friendly," she said. "I have one of the most brilliant staffs around; my staff is full of people who write their own books - that's pretty local, we sell books that are actually written by authors who work at our stores.... These are smart people who understand what bookselling is. Bookselling is a craft."

Manjoo, meanwhile, takes issue with what he calls the "hectoring attitude of bookstore cultists." He thinks that, although all kinds of institutions are closing, people get more upset about bookstores closing than they do about other establishments. 

"Part of the argument is that [they think] something is going to happen to the culture...that people are going to read less and it's going to be very bad for literature," he said. "I think that some of the smarter bookstores will survive, but I'm mostly reacting to the idea that if bookstores die, literature dies, and I think that's obviously not true."

But Saul argues that stores like hers do foster a literary culture: "We do offer a gathering space, a place where there's human interaction, which I think is often a very good thing."

In the Wake of Protest: One Woman's Attempt to Unionize Amazon

Amid the Occupy demonstrations, a former anti-WTO activist recalls her efforts to organize workers at the online books giant.

Occupy demonstrators are shutting down ports along the West Coast today. For a movement that needs to show its strength and expand beyond city parks, it is a dramatic step that has many watching the news with bated breath. And yet, it has echoes in the past. In 1999, during the Seattle World Trade Organization protests, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union threatened to shut every port from Hawaii to Alaska if the city of Seattle didn't let the protesters they had arrested out of jail. It worked. And for people like me, unions suddenly became relevant.

I had been at the WTO protests. I had watched hundreds of UPS Teamsters wearing shirts that said "Kicking Ass for the Working Class" march into the pepper spray and concussion grenades. The people I knew seemed unable to organize in groups larger than twenty-five, so the organization union actions made an impression.

I don't know precisely what's going to come out of the Occupy protests of the last few months. But I know what I did after the "Battle for Seattle." I decided to get a job working in the Amazon warehouse solely for the purpose of unionizing it. No one asked me to do it. No one paid me. I took the task on out of a newfound zeal and a belief in what unionizing could do.

Up until then my ideas about unions were vague. I was pro-union in orientation, not experience. I had seen John Sayles' Matewan and knew that "Solidarity Forever" was a song, but that was about it. What ideas I did have were steeped in nostalgia and rooted in a desire for working class authenticity.  I found ethical simplicity of a world in which the boss is the guy in the office, and the worker is the guy in the coal pit very appealing, but it wasn't all that relevant.

But the Teamsters and the Longshore had something we didn't, the mystique of the blue-collar worker. Like most of my generation, I made my living in the service industry. We worked, sure, but we weren't 'workers.' Somehow, our shiny tech world was exempt from class struggle. Our economy depended on market speculation. It revolved around saleable ideas, stock options and vesting. People at Microsoft and Amazon were walking away with hundreds of thousands of dollars after two or three years. By fall of 1999, though, fewer and fewer people were getting lucky and jobs were growing scarce. If you wanted in to Microsoft, you had to spend years temping with rolling layoffs. And if you did get in, you better not complain. 'Be grateful you have a job' became the new mantra. Besides, your manager probably listens to Sonic Youth and won't care if your hair is green-isn't that enough? 

For some it wasn't. A nascent tech workers union called WashTech had sprung up and was trying to organize contract employees out at Microsoft. The campaign failed, but not before it sparked off a union drive within the customer service side of Amazon. Down in Oregon, the Powell's Books workers had just unionized and a whole crew of them up had come up for WTO. Discussion between unions and environmentalists, affinity groups and student anti-sweatshop organizers was heady, the kind of cross-pollinating going on now through the Occupy movement.

I remember a Powell's worker saying that Powell's supplied 40 percent of Amazon's used books. And the Teamsters said they loaded and shipped them.  And of course, the orders were processed by the very customer service center that was organizing with WashTech. Since Amazon's whole business model was built on speed, accuracy, and convenience, it was easy to see the potential for leverage. Because what I had seen at WTO was power. The Longshore workers and UPS had the power to shut something down. Amazon was a bookseller and the warehouse was where they kept the books. Moreover, I needed a job and was tired of waiting tables. I was also tired of the way we all lived, unsustainably and bridging the gap with credit cards. Here we were, a generation of workers fueling the largest expansion of business since the transcontinental railroad and we didn't have living wage jobs or benefits. The bigger these companies got, the more we were asked to give. The start-up model where everyone worked 72 hours a week and got paid nothing had become the new standard of productivity and wage rates.

Standing on an overpass on New Year's Eve 2000 I looked out over Seattle. Midnight hit and the only sign of Y2K was that the PEMCO bank clock started blinking the wrong time. The apocalypse and its convenient organizing strategy of dystopian collapse, apparently wasn't coming. So when the roar of WTO diminished, I got a job at the Amazon warehouse.

Right about the time Nike-town was being smashed to bits by anarchists , Time magazine named Jeff Bezos "Person of The Year." Yet Amazon had failed so far to show a profit and stockholder pressure was on. In January, five days before fourth-quarter earnings were to be published, Bezos laid off around 150 workers, nearly 2 percent of its workforce, and posted its first-ever gains.

I was hired the following week.

My first day at the warehouse, I was handed a green lanyard that said TEMP and led through a security checkpoint with about 30 other people where we showed our cards and underwent a simple bag search. It was just like an arena show. I didn't think much of it at the time, why they searched us on the way in, but it made sense later.

Once through security, the warehouse opened up into a brightly lit place with soaring ceilings from which motivational banners hung. These weren't the pictures of kittens clinging to tree limbs saying "Hang In There" in script. No, these were sweeping vistas, mountaintops, desert roads through Joshua Tree at sunrise.  I don't remember what any of them said exactly-something about growth and expanded horizons, maybe a little Sun Tzu-but the message of the images were clear: We were part of a new dawn...

READ MORE>>>

A Discussion on Occupy Wall Street with Amy Goodman and Chris Hedges

The Pentagon Is Offering Free Military Hardware To Every Police Department In The US !

Yup... saw that one coming too. Welcome to the machine. Let's arm the radical left and see what happens.

Happy Birthday to Left Bank Books!

1907 -- US: Pike Place Market dedicated in Seattle, Washington. Current home of Left Bank Books, a collectively owned & operated anarchist bookstore still going after 25 years. Next to the flower shop at the beginning of the market, you can just see the bookstore sign. Auntie Dave worked in this collective from 1978-1995, helping found their Books-to-Prisoners project, Left Bank Distribution & Publishing, & aka Used Books.

NYPD raid on Occupy's Zuccotti Park camp destroyed thousands of books Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/11/23/131224/nypd-raid-on-occupys-zuccotti.html#ixzz1erezR6K4

As if I didn't have enough to be pissed off about already...


By Gianna Palmer | McClatchy Newspapers

NEW YORK — What started in September as a few piles of books on a tarp in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, the de facto headquarters of the Occupy Wall Street movement, had grown into a full-fledged outdoor library with 5,000 volumes and an online catalogue by November.

On Wednesday, a group of library workers and supporters of The People's Library, as it's known among Occupy protesters, gathered in midtown Manhattan to discuss what had become of the library during the Nov. 15 eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park ordered by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The event was held around a conference table covered in library books from the park in varying states of damage — torn, wrinkled, coverless and even mangled. Among the books visible on the table were a leather-bound copy of the Bible, a collection of Chinese mythology and a volume of selected poems by Allen Ginsberg. The speakers present shared their collective disgust with the raid that had destroyed the donation-supported library in Zuccotti Park.

"Today we are here questioning the appropriateness and the legality of the confiscation of approximately 4,000 books," said former New York Civil Liberties Union director Norman Siegel, who hosted and moderated the event. Siegel said that 1,275 books of the 4,000 books seized had been recovered; of those, one-third were damaged to the point of being unusable. He estimated that 2,725 books had been destroyed.

The self-appointed Occupy librarians said that many of the books were not easily replaced, including signed copies, handmade publications and a special edition.

"Our nation's poet laureate, Philip Levine, came in the morning before the raid and donated and signed a copy of his book, 'What Work Is,'" said Stephen Boyer, 27, an Occupy librarian who had been living and working in the library until Nov. 15. Boyer held up the book, displaying its damage. "The NYPD and Bloomberg trashed it," he said.

Mayor Bloomberg's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Boyer said that he'd been at the library on Nov. 15 when the New York Police Department ordered occupiers out about 1 a.m. Besides his personal belongings and an armful of poetry anthologies, Boyer said he was unable to rescue much else from the library.

"I just got what I could in one load and that was all I could save," Boyer said, adding that once he had left, the police wouldn't let him back into the park to take more books.


In a photo posted to Twitter on Nov. 15, Mayor Bloomberg's office showed piles of books, neatly stacked on a table and arranged in plastic bins below. The accompanying message said that property from the park, including the Occupy Wall Street library, was being "safely stored" in a sanitation facility and would be available for pickup the next day.

When protesters went to retrieve the books from the sanitation facility the next day, they said that the only books they found in good condition were those shown in the Twitter photo. The other books retrieved from a back room by sanitation workers were in much worse shape, said Michele Hardesty, 33, one of the protesters who had gone to retrieve the books.

"It was clear from what we saw at sanitation that our books were treated like trash," Hardesty said.

Speakers at the event called on Bloomberg to acknowledge that a wrong had been committed and to guarantee that similar actions would never occur again.

They also asked that Bloomberg replace the books and provide a space for the People's Library to be recreated.

Mandy Henk, 32, a librarian at DePaul University, said she saw the library's destruction as an attempt to silence and destroy the Occupy movement.

"What kind of a people are we if we can't create a public space in which people can come and share books with each other? In which people can come and share ideas with each other?" she said. "Who are we as a country if we don't have room for that?"

(Palmer is a McClatchy special correspondent in New York.)

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/11/23/131224/nypd-raid-on-occupys-zuccotti.html#ixzz1erfJrylO