"When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." Twain / "I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of these contradictions out for myself." Montaigne / "I write because I have found no other means of getting rid of my thoughts." Nietzsche / "Writing is an integral part of the process of understanding." Arendt / "Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." Asimov.
This post from the U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth is just distracting fluff, but it's such a curious collection that I want to give it a second look (video of him here).
If we take "BIBLICAL" to mean "in the Bible," and "Bible" to mean specifically the Old and New Testaments, then those first three claims are accurate in that they appear in the Bible, but there's still some wiggle room around what they mean AND whether or not they're moral or reasonable. There are many, many passages of the Bible we ignore for better or worse. More on that later. And, of course, anything in the Bible is almost necessarily political. It's chock full of rules and laws that people had to follow or face the consequences, not unlike our current legislation. It's part of a long line of versions of legislation from the Code of Hammurabi to all those American Amendments. But let's look at these claims one at a time:
This is a great video of some excellent speakers to listen to while you make dinner or, maybe, do your taxes. In a nutshell, governments need to stop taking out social programs since they cost so little of the GDP anyway, and they need to make sure the wealthy pay their taxes in full or maybe even raise their taxes, and we all need to get everyone involved to create a more loving and just world.
Rutger Bregman references William James's essay, "The Moral Equivalence of War" in a slightly different context from James in that Bregman thinks we need a war, for our survival, against climate change.
James establishes that wars continue as a necessary means to bring forth valour. But, he clarified, "War is not the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy." He proposes that the youth of the day (back in 1906) be trained to be strong and vital by being sent, not to wars, but to build infrastructure and factories, to fight a war against Nature itself. His essay doesn't hold up today in the specific way he hopes to establish peace worldwide, but the idea behind it is still viable. One flaw, even at the time, is that if we train the youth in compulsory hard work, they're missing the potential benefit war brings to a few of the youth: coming back home a hero.
So, instead of proposing a war against Nature, I propose something along the lines of what Bregman is getting at, but a little more concrete: a war against tragedies. Train them in the work of enriching lives and saving people from disease and suffering by clearing areas destroyed by hurricanes and floods, by rebuilding homes and schools in safer areas complete with solar panels and rain collection systems, and by helping people transport their lives as necessary. Instead of a war against nature, it can be a war against soil erosion, deforestation, and plastic bits everywhere. Now we need to fight in defense of nature.
I went to the CCAC yesterday after my surgery on Tuesday - the Community Care Access Centre - an agency I only heard about when they had a local whistleblowing scandal a couple years ago questioning the decision to reduce case managers instead of front line therapists, and then more recently, when they spent money to send employees to a conference, which turned out to be largely funded by donors. It's a very necessary agency that cares for people after surgery among many other things, and it's a concern if funding is mismanaged.
It's also a concern if funding is reduced.
It's a complicated system to an outsider. After my surgery, I felt fine and declined homecare, but changed my mind once the drugs wore off, and it took many phone calls to relay that decision because homecare is under a different umbrella than the regular CCAC on-site work staff. This article says the system in Ontario is, "plagued by inconsistent standards of care, byzantine processes and a troubling lack of transparency for both patients and family caregivers." And apparently they're all going to be shut down soon anyway to be replaced by LHINs: Local Health Integration Networks.
Whatever they're called or do, I haven't really followed it all, but they are ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.
Or something is necessary. I don't really care how they operate so long as they exist - so long as something's in place when you leave the hospital. It would be kinda nice if it was your own surgeon who could answer questions, but their costs are too high and their time too valuable. Or something like that.
I got my drainage tubes out this morning. When we got there, the cab driver questioned my intentions: "Carpenters?! Is this a union office? Are you part of a union??" No, silly, Care Partners. Well, yes, actually, but that's a longer story, and what's it to you, bub!?
Anyway.
The CCAC nurse warned me that I might faint because the drain was "right up in there." I didn't, but it was significantly worse than with my mastectomy. The armpit has a bevy of nerve endings. My surgeon was right: boobs are just blobs of fat - easy peasy. Lymph nodes are much more integrated and involved in things. The nurse had concerns. I was reporting more pain that I should have at this stage, but maybe I'm just sensitive. But the blood in the drain was more thick and dark than is typical, so she expected a clot, but couldn't find one, and I had way too much bruising way too far from the site, and it shouldn't be swollen right down to my wrist! She removed the tube anyway (thank God), but told me to see my doctor immediately.
Before I left, I asked her about aftercare. Shouldn't I be doing exercises of some sort? I had a booklet to take home after my mastectomy. She thought the surgeon should have given me something, but the day surgery staff was pretty sure CCAC should have something for me. There are too many cooks stirring this soup!! Thank god for Google (and here too). We're on our own, here, kids.
I called my surgeon, but he, as with most of the doctors I try to see, lives behind a protective wall of receptionists or assistants or a "care team" of some sort. They told me I don't see him for that kind of thing, and that I couldn't see him anyway because he's not in on Fridays. It's my family doctor from here on in. So I called her, but she also doesn't see patients on Fridays. Okey dokey. I know her well enough to know that she wouldn't know what to do with my engorged black and blue arm anyway. So, her receptionist suggested emerg was my best option. Middle of the afternoon, how bad could it be, right??
I went to work in the afternoon because I'm out of fully paid sick days from my surgery in the fall - yes, I've got a strong union, but the public perception of being allowed to carry over sick days was deadly to that clause of our contract. God forbid we piss off the public. That fear also ensures every PD day is spent in useless meetings rather than being allowed time to prep classes and mark work in a timely fashion. That part of our job is to be done on weekends and evenings. But I digress.
Okay, one more thing. When I had surgery last semester, I went part time for a week. I had all my classes in the morning and my prep in the afternoon. So I taught A, B, C, 3/3 of my courses, then went home to fall into a mild coma. That counted as half time because I was only in the building for half the day. This time, new semester, I have two classes in the morning, and one in the afternoon. I decided I'd come for the afternoons and teach that one class and stay for my prep. But that doesn't count as a half day. This time it counts as 1/3 day because I'm only teaching one out of three classes. Hmmm. Doesn't that seem a little fishy to count by day portion or number of class, whichever is less? . . . Whatevs.
So I went to the hospital right after my class instead of staying for my prep period, because I'm going to do all my marking at home anyway. I half expect to be docked 1/6th pay for publicly acknowledging leaving early - that's fair, teach one of three classes for 1/6 of your pay. And I'll be spending my weekend prepping for the supply teacher and marking even though I'm on sick leave because supply teachers aren't mandated to mark or prep anything. IF I PUNCHED A CLOCK.... Blarg!!
So I got to the hospital at 1:40. It was packed. I finally met with the triage nurse at 3:00. He said I should be seen within an hour because the section I needed to go to was moving pretty quickly. I asked about my meds, which I was scheduled to take at 3:30. A different nurse insisted that the hospital needed to dispense all that rather than my kids coming to deliver them. After an hour of figuring that out, and being given only an Advil because they can't actually dispense Tylenol 3s or any of the other nerve repair drugs and aromatase inhibitors I'm on despite insisting they must be the only dispensing physicians while I'm in their care, I called my daughter to bring me my plethora of pills.
At 6:00, I won the lottery and got called on to move TO A BED, which was very exciting. I thought it meant I'd be seeing a doctor!! But hold yer horses. All in good time. I hadn't had anything to eat or drink since 11 in the morning - I was terrified to leave the waiting room in case I missed my turn, and the water from the sinks in the hospital tasted horrible. I work right next door and drink the tap water there all the time. I'm not sure what makes the difference, but I tried to force down a few sips out of the tap while I waited. At 7:30 the doctor came to check me out. He said I have a hematoma, blood collecting under the skin, which was causing the extra special pain this time round. This called for an ultrasound to check for clots in the veins which could cause all sorts of problems. His turn was over for now, and he left.
At 8:40, I saw the ultrasound technician in a dark and creepy part of the hospital. We were the only ones there. After tracing all my veins with her gooey magic wand, she told me someone would come to take me back up, and I was left all alone in a hospital gown, open at the back, and my jeans. A thin coating of goo remained down my left side despite attempts at cleaning it all off. It's tenacious stuff. While I waited, I tried to wipe a bit more with a kleenex, and it was quickly saturated with thick, dark red globs. The sticky dampness I felt was pretty much all blood. My escort arrived and told me a nurse would redress that wound. Back in my curtained room, I scrubbed the blood from my jeans with the paper towel eroding as I rubbed, leaving traces behind in a bigger mess.
A nurse came and cleaned me up. She tried valiantly to find a pamphlet of exercises for me, but had no luck. The day surgery staff was long gone. She told me to call my surgeon on Monday, even though that first week after surgery is most important for aftercare, and I already know the surgeon doesn't take my calls. But don't worry - Google's got my back.
While I waited for the results of the ultrasound, I read every word of every poster in the room. One in particular warned people that they might get a call asking them about their experiences. They want to know what would make the emerge experience better. I'll tell you. It's one thing. There is one answer to that question: We need more doctors and nurses available. Just MORE. That's it. It's not complicated and doesn't require a survey. We need more money to pay for more staff so we have shorter wait times. No matter how it's organized and where little bits of money are misspent or where there's an overlap of services or cracks between them, those are all important issues and all, but nothing will get better until we have more staff to be able to take on more patients. But not just in emerge. We need more staff everywhere. It took me months to get in to each surgeon to find out I should have had surgery months ago. Take money from education if you need to. Cut my salary in half if that's the only place we can find a buck. I mean God forbid we raise the marginal tax rate or anything. I don't even care right now. I just want the Ontario health care system to be swimming in cash, at least enough for some quality water fountains so we're not so monopolized by Timmys to quench our thirst. This level of care is ridiculous. I feel like I live in the states!
Anyway, at 9:50, the doctor came back with the results. No clots in the veins! Hurray! I just have that hematoma that needs regular surveillance. Come back if it doubles in size or the swelling gets significantly worse (what does significantly look like??), or if it gets hot or I get a fever. All that jazz.
My incredible, beautiful, precious children had dinner ready for me when I walked in the door, eleven hours after leaving for a half day at work - ahem, a one third day at work. It's questionable for me to be back at work at all. I was advised to take two weeks off; I should be spending my days resting. I decided I could manage one class that's presenting seminars to me. But I should have been resting those other nine hours today instead of sitting upright in a hard chair lacking arm supports, in a crowded, noisy room full of contagious germs, with no access to food or water or necessary meds, and no accurate timeline of events - not even a reasonable guess - on offer.
My kids took pics of the hematoma so we could document any changes. You don't want to see that. [ETA - it's here, for the morbidly curious.]
Okay, it's amazing that I had access to an ultrasound tech immediately (relatively immediately). And of course there were a few patients screaming and growling in the triage area and an old guy too drunk to understand why his police escort wouldn't let him have a cigarette. We need more money in mental health services and addiction treatment. Absolutely. And whenever I felt impatient, I watched the number of people there with little ones. Sitting for hours in pain is nothing compared to sitting for hours with a child in pain. They should always get bumped to to the front of the line.
No. Scratch that. There shouldn't BE a flippin' line!
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead (maybe)
Here's a little video by comedian Sarah Silverman that suggests you can do your part to oppose Trump's gains in the DAPL mess by, in part, switching to a credit union.
But I was more fascinated by the arguments going on in the comment section that's verging on 2,000 comments. Here's a tiny random collection:
"Everything around her has to do with oil...what a hypocrite. When she lives off the grid completely and has sourced her own food, clothes, shelter, etc from nature..then she can talk. Silverman Newsflash: "People are trying to make money"..omg I had no clue, those monsters! Guess she gives all her away?"
This is a claim made against Suzuki and many other environmentalists who continue to live like the rest of us while they try to make some changes in the world. Political activists have to be perfect in deed and attitude before they should expect anyone to listen to them. This is unlikely to happen; therefore, we never have to change our own behaviour.
"I'm sick of FAKE NEWS, this pipeline shit isn't not a big deal at all and yet they have to make it look like one just to get people angry for something that isn't true at all....white people pretty much invented or mastered everything."
Lots of people have radically different ideas about the pipeline, and about the history of Indigenous relations with the earliest settlers, and about history in general. It's a struggle for people to identify what real news actually is. People are skeptical of all news outlets and textbooks to the point that I predict rampant ignorance to come. How do we begin to teach anything to anyone anymore?
"We don't need oil? You're to dumb to even understand how dumb you truly are!...It doesn't matter how you power your car. Unless you plan to do away with all hoses, wires, plastic, cushioning, oh and tires...you still need petroleum-based products to make cars."
A friend pointed me towards this podcast in which Tim Ferriss interviews Mr. Money Moustache (MMM), a man who retired from work in his 30s to live on the interest from his investments and then got a significant following as a blogger.
The podcast describes the kind of life I've tried to live (except for that early retirement bit), and MMM talks about ideas I've been writing about for ages. I'm successful in actually following some parts of this lifestyle and horribly disappointing in others. Like me, he loves to build things, and I'm going to have his explanation for why he doesn't love travelling at the ready next time I'm asked why I don't travel: he gets his joy from creating, which isn't travel-friendly. Absolutely!
He hates cars as much as I do, and cautions, "You should never get a job that requires you to drive to it." Once I started a permanent job, I moved closer to it to cut my daily travel time down to a ten minute walk. People don't do things like that anymore. He thinks walking is the best medicine in the world. Tim adds, "We've evolved to be able to walk very long distances. Humans are better humans, less neurotic, when they walk a lot."
In the U.S., about 70% believe climate change is real, 35% believe it's caused by humans, and 16% are worried about it. The 30-minute film, "The Doubt Machine: Inside the Koch Brothers' War on Climate Science" explains how you've been tricked into false belief. It features Michael Mann, who was also in recent films makes by Josh Fox and Leo DiCaprio. What makes him so important? He published the "hockey stick graph" in 1999, which shows how industrialization connects directly to the increase in global temperature, and he was summarily attacked for it.
Later used in Gore's Inconvenient Truth.
It was a matter of shooting the messenger. There were death threats made to him and his family, and money was offered to his colleagues to discredit him. He was eventually cleared of all wrong-doings. The smear campaign was funded by Charles and David Koch.
The Koch Brothers own a $100 billion oil, chemicals, and minerals empire. They control 1-2 million acres of the Tar Sands in our fair nation. And you thought this was just an American problem! Their number one goal is to stop any climate action. They do this by controlling Congress and the Senate by paying off politicians directly. The 52% of Senators and 39% of member of Congress that are in their pocket have pledged to stop any policy that will impede their business ventures. Because the US is so influential, this is the single biggest obstacle to climate change action.
The film doesn't say this, but if it weren't for the "intent to destroy" line in the definition, what the Koch brothers are doing is genocidal in nature: deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of a group in whole or in part. Okay, it's not a deliberate intent to destroy life; it's just an unfortunate side effect of their business model that will take down 100s of millions of lives. That's all.
Climate change is all real. The worst predictions keep coming true, and it's going to get so much worse really soon. We stand to pass 2° threshold by 2050. How much money does it take for politicians to allow policies to continue that will destroy the world for your children? About a million dollars on average.
The API - American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying arm of the oil industry, uses the same methods as the tobacco industry to provoke doubt. Remember this?
Charles and David's dad, Fred Koch, was a chemical engineer from Texas who couldn't get an in to promote his tactics in the U.S., so went abroad and set up refineries for Stalin and Hitler. Really. He trained his sons in neo-liberal, small government philosophies. In the 1990s, the Koch family needed clout in Washington to stop regulations that would impact their profits, so they got involved in bribinglobbying politicians for their support. Now their reach is unprecedented in its complexity. Any politician that runs counter to their policies is hung to dry, like republican Bob Inglis.
They have the cash to bombard the public with whatever message they need them to hear. And they have rounded up scientist-types who are making a fortune denying climate change. One of the most famous is Willie Soon, an aerospace engineer who carefully allows people to believe he's a climate scientist, even though the difference is huge. There were some climate scientists who were skeptical, but not now. There is too much evidence matching GHGs to climate change that it's clearly not just a matter of solar variability. No scientist educated in climate studies is currently denying that this is a human effect that requires human action to slow it down.
In other news, no pain pills today! I'm that much closer to being able to have a beer! And I need it after all this. I mean climate change, of course. Recovery from surgery is relatively easy all things considered. Recovery from climate change will be a bugger! We need the Koch Brothers unceremoniously lopped off from any connection with politics, so we can finally start to heal.
From Woodward and Bernstein to Edward Snowden, breaking stories from the 5th Estate are always exciting. This one is the biggest story yet to blow open millions of files linking dirty money to high-powered officials.
After a leak of over 11 million documents compiled from the 1970s to today, and offered up to the Munich paper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 350 journalists have taken about a year to read, assemble, research, and connect data through one corporation: Mossack Fonseca, a Panama law firm that's helped elite clients to launder money, evade taxes, dodge sanctions.... It's been guarding the data of the word's most powerful people including 240,000 companies, sports organizations, and political leaders.
The first journalists got the ICIJ, Guardian, BBC, and Le Monde involved. They all met in Washington to figure out how to file through all the information and turn it into well researched, verifiable, and readable stories about undisclosed financial transactions, weapons, drugs and pedophilia rings, and offshore tax havens linked to war crimes and other illegal activity around the world.
But the video below gets at the heart of why the story is so important:
Take a look at "who did what and how"at the official Panama Papers website. Prepare to lose a few days reading through it all. It's the kind of thing you always suspected, but now there's proof of all the connections.
It's a line from the excellent film The Big Short, which is brought to us by Adam McKay, the director known for goofball comedies like Anchorman and Step-Brothers. But it's nothing like that. At all.
It's listed on IMDB as "Biography, Drama," but it has its funny moments. It's really a rare form of docudrama. It could be used for a flipped class in economics. Star-studded, the actors break the fourth wall from time to time to explain what really happened. And, even better, to help us grasp the essentials of complex subjects like derivative trading and synthetic funds, they use celebrities to act out analogies in mini-seminars throughout the story.
You can get essentially the same story from Inside Job, but nobody wants to see a bunch of talking heads explaining how the market collapsed. Instead of watching real people talk about real events that they experienced first hand, we want to see actors bring some colour and staging to it all. Curious, but there it is. And it really works! People will see this and understand. Well... they'll understand more than they did two hours earlier.
It's similar to what happened with Trumbo, a 2007 documentary, and Trumbo, a 2015 drama. People will watch the latter because of the stars in it. Except the former documentary is significantly better entertainment.
Ryan Gosling as Jared Vennett (Greg Lippmann)
Steve Carell as Mark Baum (Steve Eisman)
Christian Bale as Michael Burry
In The Big Short, the actors are perfectly cast, but what's particularly impressive is that they carried out the mission to create an engrossing vehicle for a very upsetting message that so many knew about and chose to ignore or actively bury with pleas like: "Could you please stop being such a buzzkill, dude?"
Now if McKay could do it again for climate change.
ETA this link "debunking" the film (h/t Larry). The article clears up some aspects of the film, but I put debunking in quotes because the article takes the film to task for making these men out to be heroes saving the day. I didn't think they were portrayed that way at all. I thought it was pretty clear they were also con men taking advantage of, what they hoped was, the stupidity of certain players in the system. At one point, Vennett clarifies that he's no hero. And although Baum waited to trade his shorts until the very end, and even though he seemed to feel badly about it, he still did it knowing, very clearly at this point, that he was also part of the problem. They were heroes the way Newman and Redford were heroes in The Sting. They were conning the cons, but they were still clearly immoral themselves. It's just fun to watch them in action.
ETA another criticism. I'd say the errors listed in this one are errors of omission rather than inaccuracies. When I saw it, I noticed they don't get into the shift in governmental policies starting in the early 70s. It might be too much to ask in a film that passes the 2 hour mark, but it would have been amazing from a teaching p.o.v.
There are dueling petitions out to continue and to stop statues of all 22 prime ministers being planted on the grounds of Wilfrid Laurier University, my old school that I loved all to bits. I wrote about this statue project on its inception two years ago. The statues were originally to be set up at Victoria Park, but a survey of our citizens showed 79% rejected the idea. This debate has made news at The Star, The National Post, and The Globe and Mail, where one professor noted,
"Parliament wants to encourage the participation of diverse groups for the 150th celebrations. No one here was asked what they wanted,” said Nelson Joannette, a history professor at the university. . . . "Imagine any other marginalized group walking around campus and seeing those 22 monuments celebrating great white leaders. What kind of message does that communicate? It flies in the face of what contemporary universities are about."
I talked to my grade 10 students about this issue. They were in full support of the project, but their arguments are telling. They more vocal respondents fell along two lines:
1. "If it's free, then it's good. If someone wants to give you something for free, you'd be crazy not to take it."
The fact that it's privately funded takes away some of the concern of taxpayers, but it raises a different issue. Should wealthy benefactors be allowed to dictate the art that permanently represents our city? As Joannette suggests, if we want to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Canada, our voices should all be heard with respect to what type of display is warranted. Our voices were heard once in this city, and now the majority that protested the statues is being ignored.
2. "I don't see a problem with the First Nation issue. It was so long ago, who really cares about that anymore?"
Yikes! And, exactly. People don't get the connections and the long strings of history that sit behind the current occupation of land, and they don't understand problems with some of the policies of the past that have left a lasting negative impact on our nation. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and the disproportional number of Indigenous people in jails are just skimming the surface of the number of problems created by colonization.
I recognize that we have to understand people's lives within a historical context, much as I praise some of Plato's work even though he was cool with slavery. We can't attack their entire body of work because of one piece. But some PMs don't have much of a piece to praise, certainly not compared to other Canadians focused more on social reform than personal status.
Some American cities have been takingdownconfederatememorials. It's curious we'd want to put up something that could be seen as glorifying a dark history, just as our neighbours are becoming more enlightened.
And our own Luisa D'Amato tried to explain the problems with the opposition to the statue project:
It will be one of the ways that visitors, students and employees get information, both critical and supportive, about the behaviour and legacy of that prime minister. Perhaps a conversation or two will happen. "We're not trying so much to celebrate as we've tried to document," said one of the proponents of this privately funded project, Jim Rodger.
They want to display the PMs with warts and all to elicit further discussion about our history. The problem with Rodger's argument is that he wants to change the meaning of erecting a statue, but we can't arbitrarily change the symbolic vernacular of a culture. We don't look at statues and think, "This group of people obviously wanted to discuss this person further." Culturally, we understand statues to be a commemoration. We can't just change that definition as it suits us.
We should celebrate people who have sacrificed and fought in order to help our nation flourish. Terry Fox, the Famous Five, and Shannen Koostachin are good examples. Being a politician that gets to the top through trickery, dumb luck, or honourable means shouldn't be enough to warrant a bronze legacy. Some politicians fight for the top position for power and prestige, not necessarily to make Canada a better nation. Title alone doesn't make one laudable.
If the statues are about learning about history, then a smaller version of the statues could sit in a display travelling through museums and galleries across Canada. As a temporary display, people will come to see the statues when they're near where they can remark on the trajectory through one PM to another and look for the hidden iconography of the pieces. Maybe they can end up housed in the foyer of Kitchener's The Museum. In a museum, they are clearly an educational tool. As public art, they are celebrations of former Canadians. There's no getting around that.
D'Amato closes with these words: "When people at a university start instantly dismissing something because it makes them uncomfortable, that makes me uncomfortable."
Professors openly discussing and debating an issue in the news is not the same as "instantly dismissing" them. They're presenting their views for larger consideration, and the debate will continue.
But what's really interesting to me about this issue, is how passionately I feel about it. Beyond all the rational discourse, it should be noted that I am shaking with rage at the very idea that a statue commemorating Stephen Harper could go up in MY city. After all he has done to destroy what made Canada great, if he is to be celebrated here, then I WILL MOVE!
I went to see Chris Hedges speak last night. His words brought forth a mix of devastation and elation, with some in the congregation compelled to applaud after every few sentences. He's a brilliant storyteller, and I could have listened to him all night. It went far too quickly.
I had a chance to speak with him in the time it took him to sign my well-annotated copy of Empire of Illusion and my brand spankin' Wages of Rebellion, and I regret not buying all of his offering in order to extend our conversation. My voice actually shook a little when I started talking, and I talk to people for a living!
I told him of the impact Sam Harris has had on my students who now say openly bigoted things in class, and he gave me some words of encouragement and signed my book "keep resisting." Well, he signed everyone's book like that, but still. I felt sincerely encouraged, and he looked me right in the eye when he spoke to me.
He was being interviewed by Susan G. Cole, whose books I gobbled up twenty years ago. I actually called her up once and asked her if she'd present to my students at a conference I organized in the mid-90s, and she agreed but for a handsome fee. Unfortunately I didn't have the wherewithal to ask the school board for money, and I was a dirt poor mom of two babies - all I really had were the balls big enough to call her up - so I had to decline her acceptance. But she was a great moderator.
Here are the bits that stayed with me after he finished. These are his words, only somewhat paraphrased and out of order (I'm a fan, not a journalist), but they lack the stories that give them colour, so you still have to buy the book!
On Intellectual and Emotional Knowledge and the Necessity of Faith
When confronting climate change, we know intellectually that change is necessary. But the emotional knowledge of our fragility is hard to acquire. The existential issue of our time is how to digest issues intellectually and emotionally in order to rise up and resist. Rebellion is an act of faith. It's what we become, not what we achieve. The religious (not necessary a belief in a god, but those with belief in our inevitable historical progress) are less susceptible to emotional highs and lows.
We need to fight fascists, not to win, but because they're fascists. And we need to believe in the good in order to want to take action. Most people don't want to change anything because their religion is a belief in the system (e.g. they believe we have a free press). It keeps people doing nothing. The American religion glorifies the hyper-masculine, patriotism, strength, and the right to use violence to impose virtues on the rest of the world. It's a sacralization of empire.
Faith isn't irrational, but non-rational. It can't be empirically measured much like beauty, truth, justice. Wisdom involves enveloping the non-rational forces into our life - what artists do. The utilitarian tech culture severs us from these forces: arts, education, journalism - anything that has the power to transform. But we can only achieve wisdom with the capacity to be in touch with the non-rational.
The christian right are heretics. Jesus was not about making money. Like Popper said (p 543), in the name of tolerance, we've accepted intolerance. The christian right has infused the state with religion. They've misused the gospel to sacralize elements of the state.
On Prisons: "The only act left is civil disobedience."
People are convicted before trial. They stack charges, then plea bargain away most so they never go to trial. It's criminalized poverty. They prey on the poor knowing they have no resources. They prey on families who are fleeced for hundred of dollars for phone calls. Due to austerity measures, in cities like Baltimore and Ferguson, 30-40% of city funds are raised by fining residence for things like not mowing their lawn. There's a 64% recidivism rate. Dostoevsky [possibly*] said we understand civilization by looking at the prisons. To corporations, these are the ideal workers. They live there; they're never late, and they cost little.
Inmates know the horrible things that can happen to them if they step out of line. They're a deeply religious community because they have so little else to hold on to. Like in Gaza - the only thing to give structure or normalcy to their days is the call to prayer. And, with respect to Charlie Hebdo, I'm angry at the idea that it's amusing to make fun of religion.
The privatization of the prison system means each prisoner makes the prison some money. Prisoners are charged for everything: they have to buy their own shoes, blankets, phone calls.... There are fees charged to send money home to your family. An emergency visit to a relative's deathbed will cost you $900.
Corporations write the legislation. Slavery is integral to the U.S. economy. We're seeing sweatshops being recruited by prisons. They can pay 22 cents/hour here instead of in some factory in Bangladesh. It's neo-slavery. The 13th Amendment allows us to use it as a form of punishment, and it's used by Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Starbucks, Victoria Secrets....
Appealing to the systems that are profiting off the exploitation of prisoners is useless. The only act left is civil disobedience inside and outside the prisons. Prisoners had a demonstration knowing the consequences they would face.
This nascent moment in the US is about organizing prison labour to get minimum wage. It would collapse the system built on neo-slavery. This is a perfect example of how we have to organize in that manner.
ETA - John Oliver on the inequity of bail:
On the Right and Left
Nader was destroyed by the Democrats when he ran as an independent. They were frightened by him. Sanders won't run as an independent because he doesn't want to be hit like Nader was. It would mean not being at the debates and not having enough money.
The Liberals are more dangerous than the right. Under Clinton and Obama, there were more executions and we filled more prisons. Clinton brought in the 1993 Omnibus crime bill and drug laws, which are key to understanding the rise of the surveillance state. This is "omnipotent policing" as Arendt calls it in Imperialism. These are mechanisms that prey on the undocumented and the poor.
[In an different interview, he clarified that Sanders made a mistake not running as an independent. The democrats are saturated with corporate money so they're under the control of corporate power. Obama proved that in an 8-year assault on civil liberties worse than under Bush. It's the role for the 3rd party candidate with the understanding that we have to recognize that the goal is to build movements; that you may run a candidate not to win, which is almost impossible, but to further empower the movement. Sanders is giving legitimacy to the Democratic Party. The democrats aren't reformable. We must be able to agitate on the outside.]
On Activists: "People are complex. There's no perfect hero."
These people are messianic. The rose up against corporations. They have the DNA of constant rebellion. No uprising is possible without them. They feel passion for social change. Community is key; we can't effectively resist without it, so we need to create acts of solidarity.
On Canada: "There are signs of life here, but you're not going in the right direction."
There's no hope in the U.S. We're finished. It's remarkable how often the U.S. blunders, and then Canada replicates it. But Canada's not nearly as far gone. The U.S. is very violent, founded on genocide and slavery, with corporate-owned politics. Canada doesn't have nearly the same level of violence, and its political system isn't completely closed.
To stop Harper, read Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies. The question is NOT about how to get good people to rule. The question is how to make the power elite frightened of you. Power is always the problem. We need movements to keep power in check. Elections are fine, but the last liberal president was Nixon because he was the last one still frightened of movements.
In Canada you have Idle No More and the Quebec student protests, which are great. You have to begin movements that might have a political wing, but every action must be about nourishing the movement.
On Rebellion and Madness: "A protest of one is still a protest."
Nothing gets done if we're enraged or overwhelmed. We need to embrace sublime madness to make real change. There's nothing rational about rebellion. When rebellion starts, people are not striving towards a vision, but driven by it.
Movements are monitored and infiltrated. There is a psychological warfare waged against you. We can't compete on the state's level of violence or security. What we do have is transparency and non-violence. If we try to play their game (snitches...), we'll eat ourselves alive. We can create tiny committees to mess with the heads of state. Consider: What can we do as an act of resistance that they won't expect? It says to the state, 'You don't know everything.'
The most powerful weapon we have is speaking truth about discrediting the system of power that many can hear. I talk to people about the difference between police in blue shirts and the white shirted assholes. The blue shirts have to listen to the white shirts all day. But there are always people even at that level that can hear you.
We're standing up as forces of life. Saving the ecosystem so the future can have life is as stark a battle as you can get. Our capacity to speak truth is relentless, and non-violent, and there's a real possibility of bringing foot soldiers to our side. Once we do that, then the state has no security.
I sued Obama over section 1021 of the National Defence Authorization Act which allowed military to take over in cases of domestic law. We won federally, but Obama appealed and won. The law was enacted because the state doesn't trust the police not to defect.
The state is corrupt and decadent. In marches we find hope, light, creativity. We are blessed by new generations of rebels.
* Sources suggest it's in The House of the Dead, but I couldn't find it, and I wonder if this is similar to the situation with Voltaire's quotation on free speech that he never said.
I watched Robert Reich's film last summer on a camping trip. I woke up in the middle of a pitch-dark night and couldn't fall back asleep. I tried a movie on my phone to lull me into a coma, but this was the wrong one to choose.
Reich's film clearly explains how we've gotten into this economic pickle, and he offers solutions to get ourselves out. Here's a synopsis the 90 minute film. It's about the U.S., but much of it applies to Canada as well, so I use "we" throughout.
The (corporate controlled) media has created the illusion that the U.S. is poor, and we don't have any taxes to pay for anything, but that's a myth. The U.S. is very wealthy, richer than it's ever been, but it's just no longer sharing the wealth in a way that can support itself.
The media also contributes to the problem by spinning any attempt to discuss income inequality into a conversation about class warfare - which, apparently, is a topic to avoid. Jon Oliver gets at this issue very well and in only 14 minutes (with jokes!):
We have the same disparity now as we did in the 1920s - just before the great depression. Policies that benefit a few at the expense of the many, according to Oliver, get passed because we've been brainwashed to believe erroneously that we, too, will end up in the upper echelons with the very wealthy:
"60% believe our system unfairly favours the wealthy, but, and here's the key, 60% also believe that those who work hard enough can make it. Or, in other words, 'I can clearly see this game is rigged, which is what's going to make it so sweet when I win this thing!'"
Or, as Steinbeck said,
Federal estate tax is created to tax anything over 5 million, and is on the verve of being abolished because people think it might apply to them one day. The problem with inheritance is it keeps the wealth circulating in few hands, and the poor have less chance of every getting out of poverty. Marx was on the problems of inheritance, but from the other end. He warned about the error of dismantling inheritance first while leaving the economic system intact:
"The disappearance of the right of inheritance will be the natural results of a social change superseding private property in the means of production; but the abolition of the right of inheritance can never be the starting point of such a social transformation."
And we're back to Reich.
The Class Struggle
Reich and Oliver agree that, like cinnamon, a little inequality is a good thing, but too much is dangerous. Reich uses a graph that looks like a suspension bridge, with the peaks - the danger points - in the 1920s and now. In 1928 as in 2007, the top 1% took home more than 23% of all income, and the middle class stagnated. That's what too much inequality looks like.
The middle class is imperative to a healthy economy. The rich buy very little proportionate to their numbers ("a person making a thousand times as much money, doesn't buy a thousand times as much stuff"), so we count on the masses to keep shopping. A good economy will support the middle class and the poor who will create jobs by spending money. But they are struggling too much to survive for them to shop any day except, of course, Black Friday.
Policy Changes in the Late 1970s and Early 1980s
There's no such thing as a truly free market. There are always governmental rules necessary to run things. The real question is who do the rules benefit and who do they hurt. Middle class wages rose from the late 40s until the late 70s, and then flattened out.
The best book to understand this period of history, for my money, is The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein outlines in detail exactly how the US, UK, and Canada (under Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney) changed the economic system with worldwide repercussions. From the film: The tax rate on top earners dropped from 70% to 28% under Reagan. In the late 50s it peaked at 91% under Eisenhower for top earners, which was set at incomes over $400,000 (about $3.5 million in today's money). That was dismantled in the name of equality: Why should some people be taxed higher than others. But that confuses equality and equity.
The financial markets were granted more power as governments moved to deregulate the market, so they engaged in more excessive behaviour. Labour unions declined (often by force) which mirrored a decline in the middle class share of income. And globalization and technology added to the destruction of the middle class.
Where a company's headquartered means less and less. We can outsource jobs which undercuts wages of workers in the US. And automation has reduced the need for as many employees.
On the positive side, we have more cool stuff that's cheaper, and CEOs and financiers are much richer. But CEOs raised their own salaries as they fired workers. When companies depend on shareholders, there's a growing pressure to increase profits, which plays out by pushing down wages and benefits to the bare minimum. But then they have fewer consumers available to buy their products, so they have to widen their market worldwide, make products that self-destruct, and encourage people to buy crap they really don't need.
What Worked in the Past
Policies that were around from 1947-77 (Keynes' economics) worked for the general prosperity of all.
Higher education was a priority, and universities expanded.
Labour unions were strong, and more than a third belonged to a union.
The middle class bought more, so companies could hire more, providing a stronger tax base for governments to invest more in people.
Today tuition is rising as the government is taking money out of education. Infrastructure is crumbling and becoming dangerous. There isn't a tax base to use to fix the problems because we've lowered taxes on the very wealthy, shipped jobs overseas, and flattened middle class wages so they no longer keep up with inflation. If the wealthy don't pay their fair share, and the middle class doesn't have enough to pay tax on, then there's less revenue for social services like public education and health care. Then tuitions go up, and the population becomes less educated, and, globally, less competitive. In the 1960s, tuition at Berkeley was free. In the 1970s, it was $700 in today's dollars. Now it's $15,000/year.
In the 1980s, we coped with declining incomes for a time by introducing double wage families with more women in the workforce. Families worked longer hours, taking on second and third jobs. And we borrowed money with fewer restrictions on loans - that, to some, seemed like a good idea at the time, but later blew up. Now the coping mechanisms the middle class used are exhausted.
The Effect on Democracy
Inequality is a problem for democracy too. When so many resources accumulate at the top, there comes the capacity to control politics through wealthy lobby groups who give the maximum amount allowed to election campaigns. All politics have shifted to the right, so that Reich maintained the same views, but shifted from a Republican to a Democrat over a few decades. (And some of us NDP supporters are left without a truly leftist party to back.) High inequality brings with it a high degree of political polarization with politicians disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing instead of working together for the good of the country (like Howarth rejecting a very left-leaning budget). For $300 million, you can buy a president. We can't have government on an auction block.
There's a polarization of citizens too. Losers of a rigged game can get very angry. These trends of society pulling apart are very dangerous. Reich sees fights on the Berkeley campus.
Solutions
The economy does better when everyone does better, and history is on the side of positive social change. There's no "single magic bullet," be we need to mobilize, organize, and energize other people, from what I gleaned from the film, to...
shop locally - avoid automated check-out line, on-line shopping, or anything that reduces jobs
decrease technological use in manufacturing to increase jobs for the working class at home which will increase wages, increase shopping, and increase our tax base
put tax money into infrastructure to decrease risk of collapse and create jobs
support union creation and maintenance
convince the government to invest in education, skills, and infrastructure
regulate corporations to prevent companies from being allowed to deduct executive pay
raise the tax rate for the very wealthy to increase the tax base which will allow for more money in education and health care
But the question, as always, is... how do we get from here to there? I can do the shop locally thing, and support unions, but everything else seems horrifically out of reach.
I feel like I don't have to read this one with all the press it's getting. Maybe next summer. This is the gist I've gotten so far:
Michael Rozworski wrote a piece about it recently. In brief: the basic thesis of the book is that capitalism has a tendency towards the concentration of wealth in few hands. And there's a discrimination inherent in the system that ensures whites are better able to make it at least into the middle.
In Canada right now, our distribution looks like this:
* the top 10% owns 58.2% of the wealth, up from 51.7% in 1984, and it's largely in businesses and enterprises
* the middle 40% owns 38.6%, down from 43% in 1984, and it's mainly in their own homes
* the bottom 50% owns 3.2% of the wealth, down from 5.3% in 1984
Since the bottom third owns nothing, the continuation of this concentration will come at the expense of the middle class. If it's the case that capitalism demands concentration, then some of the middle class will move into the top bracket, but, because most middle class get there through good wages, rather than through investments in land or stocks, most of them are in danger of slipping in with the bottom bunch if anything threatens those wages. We're doing better than the U.S. in part because of our socialist leanings. And the middle class can be saved with a tax agenda that takes from the rich and gives to the poor.
Rozworski calls for "seeing the middle class as a sputtering anomaly," and "toning down the dream of individualize patrimony, while reigniting a vision of a common wealth and a democratic franchise over it." I'd vote for that, but I have no idea how we get there from here.
But then I came across an older discussion of the book by Paul Krugman (from last April). I've read a few of his articles about the book, but this 26 minute interview - What the 1% Don't Want You to Know - flushes it out more fully:
We tend to think of the 1% as largely self-made millionaires, but more and more they are, or are becoming, wealthy from inherited wealth: an oligarchy, patrimonial capitalism, dynasties. Krugman says he hadn't noticed it before, but I'm pretty sure Chomsky's spoken about all of this.
If a family has a fortune, they can live well and still put money into investments that will grow faster than the economy. It's no longer the case - or will soon no longer be the case - that the wealthy are getting rich from high incomes and bonuses - it's just their money making money, not them. When returns on capital are higher than economic growth, as they are now, they can pass on an even higher share to their children, until a tiny fraction of the population dominates.
Usury used to be a bad word.
And like they said in Ethos, when you have a few people so wealthy that they can buy the system, the system will serve their interests.
Piketty: "Wealth is co concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence." Krugman points out that, "You'll never meet these people - most people have no idea how far the commanding heights are from you and me."
The U.S. is more unequal than other countries. The average American makes more than the average person in France and has a higher disposable income because of higher wages, but to be in the bottom fifth in France is a far better place than to be in the bottom fifth in America because of the governmental programs. The U.S. gets away with the inequity with mass media that "hammer against any suggestion of redistribution."
Piketty suggests a global tax on wealth, which, Krugman adds, would be feasible if the U.S. supported it which is actually possible. PIketty thinks we only escaped from the oligarchy briefly due to wars and depressions that disrupted the system, but Krugman points out that the U.S. invented serious progressive taxation. If we look at the history of the new deal, there was a progressive movement building for some time, and a readiness to take on inequities long before FDR was elected.
I want to look at a few things Russell Brand has to say - in print and on video (quotations below are from both). As Elizabeth Renzetti said in yesterday's Globe & Mail, he's resonating with people. But, as she also suggests, he's not going far enough clearly enough for others to follow. It reminds me of the Canadian film The Trotsky in which a young rebel tries to encourage a student protest. (*spoiler alert*) In the end, they all decide that he hasn't really thought it through all the way, but who cares? It's clear we so desperately need a revolution. We might not know exactly how our world should look, but we know it's not like this.
Renzetti refers to Brand's rant as a generational conflict, but she seems to forget that Brand is almost 40, and he's lived a long life. Sure Paxman is older, but many people implicit in the system Brand condemns are not. He's not a rebellious youth; Brand is practically middle aged! And it's dangerous to frame the argument as about age because that alienates the older supporters and dismisses some important ideas as part and parcel of a childish naivete spewed by the adolescents of the day.
Brand's not a rebel without a cause. He is saying something important, more than just a stance on voting, and people are starting to listen:
"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." - James Baldwin
Thus begins Chris Hedges' Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle(2009), a collection of five independent parts that lead to the same place. We're in denial - thick and deadly. It's similar to Jane Jacobs' Dark Age Ahead, but I can't, for the life of me, find my heavily annotated copy of the book. So I'll skip the comparison except to say they both suggest we're in a similar cultural place that many empires were just before collapsing. What Jared Diamond did with environmental degredation's effect on the fall of empires, Hedges does for cultural illusions. The problem with this fall is that it will be global. There will be no area of the world that can rise up afterwards. There will be no area of the world.
Here are some of the main points in brief. It's a quick read though, so go buy it!
So, the argument goes something like this: If you raise minimum wage, corporations will pay for that cost by raising prices, thereby increasing inflation, and we'll all be poorer for it as everything gets more expensive. The problem isn't wages, but inflation. Therefore, we should not increase minimum wage.
It follows, that it's necessary that some people work full time yet live well below the poverty line because otherwise, if we raise their wages, they'll end up even poorer because everything will costs so much more - right? So, we're actually helping people by maintaining a lower wage for them and letting them choose between heat or food. We're awesome!
By request - how well does using solar panels work?
Well, it's hard to say.
I covered my roof with panels under the Ontario MicroFIT (Feed-in Tariff) program that ends next year. So far I think it's only in Ontario, but some other provinces are thinking about it. The power I generate from the panels goes directly back to the grid, and I'm paid about 55 cents a kWh and will continue to be for the duration of my 20 year contract. So far this summer, even with all the rain, it translates to about $300-400/month. So the cost of the panels is paid for in about 6-8 years. After that, the money I make in the following 12 years is mine to keep!
I'm trying to get solar panels on my house under the MicroFIT program. It's been a process so fraught with frustration, I'm thinking of forgetting the whole thing. A colleague told me, "This could only happen to you," which offered a strange sort of comfort. At least it acknowledges that it's a crappy situation, full of incompetent people, and that this sort of thing comes my way ALL THE FREAKING TIME! Well, too much of the time anyway.
First, I did my research very carefully and, after scrutinizing three companies, I chose one that seemed to have the best reputation from satisfied customers, offered the best explanations for how it all worked, always e-mailed me back immediately to answer any further questions, and was in the mid-range for prices. Then, the weirdest part, one of the sales people from a company I DIDN'T choose started phoning and e-mailing me several times a day, fanatically begging to be chosen and questioning, almost in tears, why I didn't go with his company. I had to threaten to call the cops if he didn't stop harassing me.
This is when my colleague first suggested, with a pitying head-shake, "Only to you, Snyder."
Over the break, I got a Kindle app for my Macbook (free!) when I realized I could wait for morning to go to Wordsworth to get one of Paul Krugman's books, or get it right that second and start reading. Immediate rewards are very motivating.
The book outlines the diminishing overlap between Democrats and Republicans and the increasing rich/poor gap, and explains how the government could actively change this current scenario. It's not impossible at all to manipulate things to stop the debt crisis and eradicate the kind of poverty the states is seeing in its "1st world" citizens. The problem as I see it is that the people in power are in the 1%, and they'd have to actively destroy their own means to wealth in the process. What could possibly make them want to do that to themselves? What could make people work collectively at the expense of the gains they've made individually? A common enemy. Kennedy said that long ago, and now we've got a few.
Okay, maybe "moron" is a little harsh. I just finished a painful conversation with a banker. We argued for over an hour before he asked a superior and conceded that I actually know what I'm talking about. Here's the deal...
ETA (Jan 10) - Okay, wait! The following shouldn't have happened at all according to Rob Carrick AND according to the Canada Revenue Agency. I'm still waiting for National Bank Securities to explain themselves - or for the agent I spoke to to apologize for an error that maybe had nothing to do with company policy. And I could be out $5,000. I'll keep you posted. Anyway...
ETA MORE (Jan 13) - The following shouldn't have happened but for a different reason. I got an e-mail from National Bank Securities, and they showed me the complicated formula and insist it's government imposed. SO why doesn't the Canada Revenue Agency know about that?? BUT we're NOT back to (as I'll get to later): if you withdraw the EAP portion in a family plan, you have to ask for a little bit at a time in hopes you don't go over, BECAUSE the last person I spoke to at NBS completely understood what I was on about, and said she solves this problem by making a note to tell the "formula people" when someone's close to the maximum grant, and they make sure it's the full amount. Rob Carrick wasn't precisely right when he told me I could "specify the breakdown of the money", but what you CAN do, is specify the amount of grant you want, and they can figure out the formula from that figure instead of the total figure then give you the total amount later. Too bad that first guy just didn't get it. The problem isn't the formula, it's that some agents at NBS don't understand how to use the formula to help the customer. Anyway... back to the beginning...
I'm at the wondrous point of withdrawing RESP contributions. It's a tricky, tricky thing to do. It shouldn't be, but it is. I'm going to explain it all right here for anyone googling for advice. First of all, if you've got a kid under 18, get an RESP - you can backpay for a few previous years if you've missed out on this windfall. It's well worth the automatic 20% gain. But there's a lot of information out there that explains it all from that end. Here's what's harder to find - the withdrawing bit:
