Gangsters and The State; The State as Gangsters: On the Semantics of "Gangster"

As we keep learning over and over, the NSA's spying into our every move has stopped zero terrorist attacks. So, this is not only a massive abuse of civil liberties and an absurdly gross violation of the 4th Amendment, it's very costly and so yet another welfare program for people already well-off.

It seems only natural to ask: is catching a terrorist really the main purpose behind the building of the total information awareness of the Panopticon? Because no War Criminals or Wall Street crooks have been prosecuted - almost everyone seems to be doing "better than ever" among those crowds - are they preparing for the inevitable uprising when the economy collapses again?

Is this all merely well-dressed gangsters from Ivy League schools seeing The People as a threat to their interests and taking precautions to smash any person(s) who deign to stop their gluttonous lust for cash and power? It's probably more complex than that, but I don't think I'm drilling in a dry hole here. There's just too much historical precedent.

Historical precedent for what? WTF is the OG on about now? Just this: most of the citizenry are garden-variety brainwashed to believe that "gangsters" are only Italian guys from New Jersey, or Mexican guys selling drugs and using machine guns, or some other Hollywood fantasy-image. I think it semantically fruitful to open up the definition of "gangster." Stick with me on this; it's brilliant. I may be paranoid, but I'm also a free-thinker.

UK Now
If gangsters can buy off juries, cops, lawyers, issue "get out of jail free" cards for a nominal fee, and infiltrate Scotland Yard, then who would be the gangsters and who would be the government? This is not an idle postulate, as Operation Tiberius, in effect since 2003, shows. UK gangsters even used a little-known but historically effective trick of infiltrating the Freemasons in order to aid in their corruption of cops. As William S. Burroughs might say were he alive to hear this: "It's the old game from here to eternity: it helps the pay The Boys off..."

Using a secret society in order to further the goals of your own secret society goes back at least to Adam Weishaupt's Bavarian Illuminati, which many Masons seem proud about after the fact. So far my research suggests Weishaupt's goals were what most of us would consider from the "Left;" the Propaganda Due (P2) secret society that corrupted the Italian justice system were right wing fascists who had infiltrated the Freemasons, starting (probably?) in the early 1970s.

Rather black (gangsters and thugs and criminals) and white (those sworn to uphold the law, truth, justice, and maybe even a modicum of fairness), the color I see when I look at various "justice" systems more often looks like this:

                                         Rather than "good guys" vs. "bad guys"?

No, but seriously: grok in its fullness the rot in the UK. I think this sort of thing is historically inevitable when the wealthiest 10% can buy the political system. And this is greatly aided by income inequality, perhaps the biggest social justice issue in the Northern Hemisphere since anthropogenic global warming, but this is mere opinion on my part.

US Allowing Sinaloan Drug Cartel to Flood US Cities With Drugs
In exchange for info on the members of other drug cartels, the DEA made deals with the members of the upper hierarchy of the notorious Sinaloan cartel, circa 2000-2012. It's estimated that 80% of the drugs - cocaine and heroin - entering the Chicago area were allowed under this deal.

A daily-repeated trope among right wingers in Unistat is that, since Chicago is Democratically-controlled and Obama came from there, (and other "reasons"), this explains all the corruption and murder in Chicago. It's a lot more complicated than that. (Of course it would be: the right wing's concocted stories seem increasingly designed to appeal to a 5th grade reading level.) This State-crime - the DEA agents are paid for with our tax money - is a FACT. Or to put it another way: children and other destitute people in Chicago and all over Unistat are murdered and terrorized by the decisions made about "information gathering" by members of the Unistat government, paid for by us. (See the gray area above.)

I have not seen this story covered in the mainstream corporate electronic news, but it may have been. And it should be covered and many members of the DEA and the Unistat government who sanctioned this should go to jail for a long time. But I've lived long enough to have grave doubts any white-collar of Unistat government-gangsters will do any jail time. Why? Because when I was twenty I read Alfred W. McCoy's The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. I saw what happened to Gary Webb. I had worked for the Christic Institute, which was smashed by the Bush41 Admin. I attended talks and read the book by Michael Levine, a former DEA agent who revealed how corrupt the whole international drug smuggling scene was. I knew enough about the CIA dealing with Lucky Luciano and heroin trafficking in the 1940s. I read Chomsky, Peter Dale Scott, and others...like Ryan Grim, in his book This Is Your Country On Drugs, see especially pp. 171-192 for stories on Unistat-State-gangsters aligned with the Mafia and other syndicates and drug smuggling. I could go on and on.

This is all out there, but you have to READ; this won't be covered by Eyewitless News. If it is covered - and every now and then it is, and well-done, too - it's talked about for two days and then disappears; no public discussion emerges. Because it's...taboo to think about the implications? Robert Anton Wilson thought so. See his essay, "The Godfather, Part IV," in The Gemstone File, ed. by Jim Keith, pp.133-143.

And therefore, there will be no justice, only smashed lives in a terminally criminal and evil and stupid "War On Certain People Who Use The Wrong Drugs."

This may seem a bit glib or histrionic to you. But think about the mothers whose children are now dead, shot in the streets of the south side of Chicago. And then realize that sworn officials of the government allowed the drugs that were being warred over to flood those Chicago streets. Picture a mother at a funeral, crying for her baby who never had a chance. Who are the "gangsters" here? It's not so black-and-white, is it?

       CIA aid for Thailand
   was channeled through a front established

by a CIA agent
             with underworld bank connections
    thus helping to open up the world

to a flood of heroin through Thailand
             while the mob in Manilla
     helped to Westernize the Philippines

by its control of gambling
             and later child prostitution
     carried on in the big hotels

Can we be surprised this happened
              when the mob was being protected
     both by Hoover in the FBI

and Angleton in the CIA
             who vetoed a Justice Department investigation
     and almost no one in the US seemed to care

at least in its universities
             When I wanted to pinpoint
    the center of the corruption

I did not point to the CIA
            who seemed to think they were doing their job
    or even the government

which has always been corrupt
             so much as to universities
    for having sanctioned this system

-from Peter Dale Scott, Minding The Darkness, pp.178-179, and he gives footnotes for all his sources and assertions in the margins. NB PDS has the harshest criticism for his own: the universities who "sanction" this gangsterism.

Legalized Gangsterism

According to Simon Johnson of MIT, the "Most Dangerous Man in America" right now is Jamie Dimon, the head of JP Morgan Chase. Dimon seems to have contempt for Congress, the laws, and anyone who will challenge him, anyone not as rich as himself, or anyone who would try to reign in his Too Big To Fail (TBTF) bank. Recall that We the People bailed him out.

                                   Jamie Dimon: "The Most Dangerous Man in America"

                                        

Here's an article that describes how angry Dimon was with Obama for leaving him out of the team that was supposed to re-write the rules for the way Wall St worked. It links to a better and longer piece on this guy, who now knows he's TBTF, and can do just about any evil he wants in the world, and he'll only be fined if caught. He doesn't really produce ANY WEALTH with his own hands; he merely gambles with other people's money and wins even if he loses. And he wants MORE. He's worth an estimated $400,000,000 and "earns" an annual salary of $27.5 million. He may wear a nice suit. He may have a Harvard MBA. He may belong to all the best private clubs and be asked to give his opinions on the stock market on CNBC or Faux News, but to me, he's a gangster. But I'm only entitled to my opinion.

JP Morgan-Chase/Jamie Dimon studies:
Too Big to Charge?
Despite Eight Ongoing Criminal/Civil Investigations, the Bank's a Law-Enforcement Partner With the NYPD
JP Morgan-Chase: "Incredibly Guilty"
Now We Know: JP Morgan-Chase Is More Criminal Than Enron
Matt Taibbi Explains JP Morgan-Chase's Crime Spree

Jamie Dimon's feelings are hurt: people don't appreciate him enough. I'm not making this up. Sociopath? I'll go: yes. Gangster? Oh hell yea. I know, I know: I have a very active imagination. What do I know? I'm just some dipshit blogger sitting in his living room, among his books, worrying about paying the utility bills. Dimon's rich! He must be a Good Guy! Did he actually use an automatic rifle to kill a bunch of people over money? No. Well there you go: he's cool.

And I could've picked 30 or 40 other white collar Business Criminals here; Dimon just seems stellar to me.

From a poem about the year 1934:

He was a hero in Oklahoma
helping the oppressed by
              stealing from the eye-rollers
                                 & now and then giving to the poor

He hated bankers
and finally he was killed by FBI agents on 10-22
                                               &
Woody Guthrie wrote a song about him
with those great lines: 
  
                                       Yes, as through this world I ramble,
                                            I see lots of funny men,
                                       Some will rob you with a 6-gun,
                                           and some will rob you with a fountain-pen.
                                       But as through your life you'll travel,
                                           wherever you may roam,
                                       You won't never see an outlaw drive
                                            a family from their home.
-from "Pretty Boy Floyd," by Ed Sanders, America: A History In Verse, Volume I, 1900-1939, p.323
["JP Morgan Chase Settles: Is $13B For Role in Mortgage Crisis Fair?"]

Note: Sanders regularly uses the term "eye-rollers" for the wealthy class, who, if you bring up anything like the ideas presented in this particular blog-spew, they merely roll their eyes, as if you're crazy.

This has been a ramble on the semantics of "gangster" and I hope at least one person found a modicum of edification. Thanks for reading!

Big Data and Two Proposals For How We Should Be Compensated For It

Both Jaron Lanier and Evgeny Morozov have looked at the asymmetries in Big Data, saw how We have given our data away for free to gazoollionaires, and Lanier and Morozov have done gedankenexperiments to see how the playing field may become slightly more leveled, regarding the case of The People v. Google, WalMart, Goldman Sachs, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, health insurance companies...the NSA.

I'll try to give a thumbnail, but some of you are ahead of me on this stuff, so feel free to chime in and correct my various egregious erroneous apprehensions. Even though you may be ahead of us here, can we agree this Big Data asymmetry qualifies as a Missing Public Discussion? On with it...

Morozov notes the winner-take-all aspects in Facebook and Google, et.al, having the biggest computers to harvest the most data about us. They've got megapetaflops of data stored on us. And they need more. We thought we were just having fun and playing and they were "giving" us search or social connectivity. We volunteered our user data, belatedly realized there were such things as "data trails" and gigantic computers somewhere with fancy algorithms attached to our name/number and what we do, what we like, who we know, where we live, how much money we have...and of course the NSA has the goods on the sort of porn-loving perverts we are. We only devoutly wished they wouldn't "go there," assuming like three year olds that if we wished they'd be decent they would be. Back to Bad Boy Evgeny.

The problem of Big Data asymmetry is a democracy problem, and passing privacy laws would be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Lusitania. We need a civic solution.

He says the metadata should be thought of as the "social graph" and it's ours. Mostly. Anyway: it's time someone "pay" for it; we should be getting something back for...ourselves. For Morozov, this isn't money for us. The social graph should be given free to any startup. Google and Facebook: how are you going to compete with them? Level the data playing field! As it is, the situation is not good for "free market" competition. To say the least. If there was more competition for Google and Facebook (et.al) it could lead to possibly a reacquisition of some privacy...and innovation among the data-gatherers.

How about government getting in on it? Nope: public money can't compete here; the behemoths are way ahead of all that. They're that Big. However, our personal information and our social connections (which we gave them, remember) are not only the public...mind? and much of the personal aspects of our selves, but we and our connections may outlast Facebook and Google and the other tentacles of the Behemoth. Historically, very very few corporations have lasted 100 years. (I smell that last part as a component of a Bad Argument, but let me sally forth anyway...)

Morozov proposes the social graph as a public institution, to be regulated, maybe by a civil agency or even the UN. This would open up competition: say you wanted to start something to compete with a Behemoth: the social graph is there, and you access it. Morozov seems correct: if we went back in time before these Behemoths got started, we'd look at the hardware and algorithms and not be all that impressed. They only got there earlier and nabbed our data quicker than everyone else, and "won."

As a new competitor, maybe you'd guarantee anonymity, so you would opt in. Or you could opt out. The regulatory body would control how social graph data was collected and accessed.

The NSA is mired in secrecy, with no congressional oversight, which seems like a clear violation of the 4th Amendment to many of us. And that's not to mention what they've been doing. Of course, NSA used Google's and Facebook's data on us. And Verizon's and AT&T's and holy muthafreakinshit what a mess this is for any semblance of privacy, Constitutional rights and protections, decency, democracy. You know: The little things.

NSA ain't goin' away, so let's take the NSA's data (they're being paid by us, our taxes!) and make some or a lot of it available for a more robust competition for social networking and search engines.

This is a basic sketch of Morozov's way of dealing with our current Worldwide Theatre of the Absurd and Big Data collection asymmetry. Personally, I think it's nuts. (He does call it a "modest proposal.") But, if implemented, can it make things worse? Or would it be more likely to make things better in some way? What am I missing here? One thing I like about his ideas here: he wants to fiercely politicize the public dialogue about privacy and data and democracy.

Lanier basically sees the mess we're in as a "collective action" problem: it can't be solved by individuals in a free market but only by a sort of paradigm-shift in the way We perceive the problem, and by an adjusted normative response.

Facebook employs less than 5000 people, but it's worth over $65 billion. The heirs of the WalMart fortune are worth, according to one data point I saw recently, $147 billion...and they're just Sam Walton's offspring.  How can a scenario like this be sustainable? It can't. (Lanier in his book Who Owns The Future? fascinated me in many ways, but one of them was his explanation of how WalMart "won": they basically did what Facebook and Google did, but earlier than them: massive data banks [what Lanier calls "Siren Servers" and they're the new "factories" for the Robber Barons of 2013] on consumers, buyers, distributors, every sort of technological minutiae imaginable, all to get a leg up on their competitors.)

The bigger the computer, the more likely you're gonna be the winner in a game that's basically winner-take-all. And what really makes you a winner? Data. Big Data. Gather the data, enter it. Pay hotshot computer people to write the algorithms. Pay others to keep the lights on and the data servers from overheating.

The Facebook game of "giving" consumers something they want then harvesting data about them? This will continue to spread throughout banking, health care, retailing: they'll give us good service at good prices...but soon most of us will be unemployed and at their mercy because The Behemoth is too good at doing what it does. Marc Andreeson wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal in 2011: "Why Software Is Eating The World." With the acceleration of computing power entire industries are replacing workers and distribution with a few dozen of the most talented programmers and a few dozen data servers.

Look at how Amazon ate up its competition. Look at how many people Kodak employed, with decent, middle-class-bolstering jobs. Then look at how many people work at Instagram (hint: the number is 13), which bought Kodak. How can anything like that be sustainable without some sort of "collective action" solution, as Jaron Lanier puts it?

Note: there are scads of smart free-market thinkers who think all of this is good. No collective action required. Andreeson is one of those guys. You probably know one yourself. Jaron Lanier is not one of them. He sees this as a disaster: you think the inequality between the 1% and the rest of us is bad now? He sees all this as making it much worse, and it's happening so fast we're stunned. I agree.

So what does Lanier propose? He's somewhat similar to Morozov in that he agrees the Behemoths have mostly gotten that way by collecting data about us. But his solution - and he's proposed variations on this scenario - is that we should be paid for our data, via micropayments. NSA and other governmental surveillance is out of control because there's no limit on the cost to them. If they had to pay you a tiny bit of something when they took a picture of you on some camera on some street corner and used facial recognition and stored that data...you should get some little bit back for that. It's your data. Whoever agreed to allow the government to be so intrusive in our lives? If they're going to do this sort of shit, they're going to have to pay. After all, We are the government, in a democracy....errr...right? In increasingly starry-eyed theory we're the government. We pay them out of our taxes to work for us. Imagine that.

And not only that: all the data about us that's being shuffled around and sold to other Behemoths and vendors: that represents us. If they're going to do business with our data, they're just gonna hafta pay. Literally. With "micropayments." Every bit of data about us can be tagged when it's used and we get a little bit back. If you write some article and all kinds of people link to it, tweet it, use it in some way (still not sure about the limits of this), you get something back. One of the godfathers of the Net, a fascinating genius named Ted Nelson, wanted HTML to always link back to the origins of some idea. It didn't go Ted's way, but Lanier - who knows and loves Nelson - says there might be a way to tag our data to ourselves so that if our face ends up in an ad on Facebook, we get paid. This would seem to entail a reworking of the architecture of the Net, so I don't know how workable the idea is. In theory I like it more than Morozov's idea...which is, I know, anathema to the Everything FREE! vision we all love(d) so much.

Some Sources Used
"Let's Make the NSA's Data Available For Public Use" by Evgeny Morozov
"The Real Privacy Problem" by Morozov
"Who Owns the Future?": Morozov reviews Lanier and thinks Lanier's ideas are lame. (Of course!)
"U MAD???: Evgeny Morozov, the Internet, and the Failure of Invective" by Maria Bustillos: a sort of smack upside the head for Evgeny; Bustillos rather likes Lanier. And Bustillos is one of our best interpreters of this whole scene, in my view; I love her.
video: "Jaron Lanier On Connected Media Universal Micropayments and Attribution": 2 minutes. I think Lanier had a dental problem here, which accounts for the lisp?
"In Venting, A Computer Visionary Educates," an article by John Markoff about Ted Nelson
- A bunch of other sources; presumably I'd have had to pay a little bit under the micropayment scheme, but then presumably I'd get something back from people reading this? However, when we look at it from Jaron Lanier's perspective, the Behemoths are gonna have be paying us far more than we're paying them?

Assault on Poverty: Universal Basic Income

Sometime in the next few months, the Swiss will vote on whether to give every citizen around $2800 a month, with no conditions attached. They have an initiative system where if you get 100,000 people to sign a petition, it must come up for a vote. The Swiss government is pissed because they have to deal with this; they think their welfare state is good enough. But enough Swiss citizens are alarmed at growing income inequality, an outdated welfare system and unemployment and underemployment and the specter of accelerating technological unemployment. As one of the main shakers behind this movement, Daniel Straub, said, "It is time to partly disconnect human labor and income.  We are living in a time where machines do a lot of the manual labor - that is great - we should be celebrating." And who was another one of the prime movers behind this in Switzerland? An artist named Enno Schmidt. Of all the artists I've known in Unistat - quite a lot - this seems like something so bountifully good they might start sorta thinking about believing in god maybe. (<-----That last sentence is as I have deliberated over; let's let it stand, if only for its ornate badness, hmmmkay?) I hope they get it done in Switzerland, and I hope we get something like it in Unistat. (If it passes, in heaven - or wherever he is - Orson Welles might add the UBI to the five hundred years of brotherly love and the cuckoo-clock, for there are already good reasons to suspect the UBI will add to artistic and inventive derring-do.)

Here's an interesting interview about UBI and Switzerland with John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The neoliberal austerity idea was and is a smashing failure in Europe, and that's a big reason why many groups are becoming interested in the UBI. Do we want Greece in our streets? I don't think so. As for Unistat, Schmitt points out that fascists (my word, not his) shut down the government because we were going to make sure every citizen had health coverage, while in Europe, far-right groups are extremely angry because austerity economics has cut into their health services, and so there's an immigrant backlash. I guess I'd trade Europe's fascists over ours, but now I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel, aren't I? Indeed, Schmitt talks about the history of "welfare" in Unistat and how much of it is coded racism, which I think is true, and I think this pending debate will be won or lost on the fields of metaphors...

                       If we got UBI in Unistat I'd spend a lot of time learning how to write!

Speaking of which: George Lakoff has long said that capturing the "freedom" metaphor is one of the major games in Unistat politics. And perhaps the major thinker in the world on UBI is Philippe Van Parijs, who started thinking about the idea in the 1980s in Belgium, when he witnessed high unemployment accompanied by fast productive growth in the economy. As a Green he began playing with the idea among other sociological colleagues, and after awhile they began to realize it wasn't such a crazy idea after all, and began systematic work on it. He's often asked in interviews about the reception of the idea: technical aspects, administrative topics, and how to fund the idea. But he answers that the main objection people have when they first hear about it are moral ones, and demand a good answer. And I find him seductive when he talks about the idea of freedom and the UBI, which is, for him, the main reason why it should be done.

Van Parijs says that "the main moral objection was that basic income would be giving people something for nothing, and that it amounted to systematic legitimation of free riding on the part of the idlers at the expense of the hard workers. And so that forced me to spell out why, fundamentally, I thought this was such a good and fair idea." He calls on the concepts of "formal freedom" and "real freedom." Formal freedom, basically, says you have the right to do as you might wish. Real freedom includes formal freedom as a subset, but addresses the means that are required for you to do what you wish to do. If you find yourself daydreaming often that you'd really like to do this rather than that, but you can't afford to...you're probably a wage slave. You have much more formal freedom than real freedom. Obviously, other life conditions mitigate the argument that, say, even though you were an orphan till age 14 then ran away to the circus and never learned to read, that you want to own your own casino in Las Vegas and so you should be given enough guaranteed to do that. We need to stay in "reality" here, folks. Think of some real freedom ideas that seem within the realm of possibility for you; this is what Philippe Van Parijs wants. And so do you.

But right now you might be mired in formal freedom and not real freedom.

And doesn't that sorta just piss you off, especially when you look at the careers of people like these CEOs?

If you'd like to be able to quit your job and take care of a sick relative but can't afford it because you'd fall into poverty...you'd be able to if there was a UBI. And not only caring for others (which is real work, if unpaid), but you could afford to gain better training or retraining for your job with a UBI (if your current bosses don't fund your education, which in Unistat they are less and less likely to do). You can become more socially and politically active with a UBI. Young people will be less likely to leave their families for a job elsewhere if they had UBI. It's a boon to artists, would-be entrepreneurs, and other creative types. It's a massive boon to the ever-increasing precariate class.

In Van Parijs's and most of the pro-UBI thinkers I've studied, the income is unconditional. Bill Gates would get a check every month. So would that guy sleeping behind a dumpster at the liquor store. The libertarian Unistatian thinker Charles Murray - who hates welfare - is for it. He's thought about it and wants to end poverty for Unistatians by giving $10,000 to every fellow Unistatian over 21 who is a citizen and not in prison.

Back to Philippe Van Parijs: besides real freedom he was moved to pursue his UBI lines of thought by "A grand reflection about the fate of mankind and the way mankind should be heading." He also saw it in the spirit of socialism, but not by doing that whole takeover of the means of production stuff. In this, he saw UBI as an "attractive alternative to socialism."

Here are two videos by major world thinkers in UBI, the first an interview with Guy Standing. It's about 8 minutes long. He mentions the term "social dividend" which reminded me of some thinkers that influenced Ezra Pound and Robert Anton Wilson, particularly the engineer and economic thinker C.H. Douglas. We should receive a UBI, says Standing, due to the "social dividend from all the investments that previous generations have made." Standing also mentions Thomas Paine, who had this idea in the 18th century. Standing also talks about experiments and successes with UBI in selected areas of India, Africa, and Latin America, and mentions Lula's Brazil and the Bolsa Familia: 60 million on a version of UBI and a smashing success: increased work and productivity!:

And here's Philippe Van Parijs from what looks like earlier this year. It's 6 and a half minutes, and my favorite part takes off at 4:00, when he gets the question about "parasites" that would sit around and live off other people's work. Basically, 1.) you might not have a job but be doing useful work, like housekeeping or taking care of children, etc; 2.) some paid work is not useful, as for example making weapons; 3.) many highly paid jobs are being done by "free riders"! Wha? Yep: it's incorporated in their jobs: they've received massive gifts "from nature," they benefit from rapid technological advances that they themselves are not responsible for achieving, and they benefit from a highly organized society. This last reason reminds me of the spirit of the "social dividend." Van Parijs has spoken at length about this in other interviews.

We create reality by talking about it.

March 1997 interview with Philippe Van Parijs

July 2002 interview with Philippe Van Parijs

I'd previously spewed blog on the Universal Basic Income HERE and HERE.

Rise of the Robots and Technological Unemployment

When I was in grammar school and high school I'd often ditch class and go to the library. One of the things I'd learned was good for laffs and the imagination: look at microfilm of old Life magazines, or if the library had bound versions of the entire year for old magazines I'd love to read those. The ads in magazines like Colliers that showed a doctor saying he prefers these cigarettes over all others because of their fine, smooth taste. His stethoscope around his neck, smiling. Wow! How things had changed since...1952!

Always wondrous were ads for gadgets that would eliminate drudgery and free up the woman of the house (it was always a woman) to live a life of leisure. The rhetoric of machines that would eliminate soul-numbing work captured my attention at a very early age because all you had to do was extrapolate...wouldn't it be cool if dad didn't have to go to work and he and mom would be there when I got home from school...doing...whatever it was they wanted to do? What would my world be like when I was an old man of 30?

As I began to study the history of the Industrial Revolution up to present days, I found this rhetoric of labor and machines a constant: at some point in the future - possibly my own future - we would enter another Epoch: robots and computers (same thing) would do all the horrible work, leaving humans to create, socialize, dream. How would the bills get paid? I didn't know, never having paid bills. I figured the money went to others...who worked. But: their work would have gone away too, right?

Everyone would be playing games, painting, writing poetry or learned papers and books, learning new languages or music, or joyously goofing off.

         "Because everything in her house in waterproof, the housewife of 2000..." Wow!

It doesn't look like it's going to happen like They Promised, does it? Why?

Well, the simple answer: instead of the populace understanding that any machine that puts people out of work was invented not only by a genius and his team, but the genius and his team built upon millions of hours of previous work by previous toilers and tinkerers and basic scientific research funded by everyone - all of who were supported by farmers and mothers - we instead allowed the idea that whoever could buy the biggest and fastest machines, owned All Of That.

There seem to be a few hundred choice entry points to tell this story to myself and y'all, but for now I'll cut to December of 2012.

Paul Krugman
In one of his shorter posts for the NYT, Krugman published "Rise of the Robots" on December 8, 2012. He notes that the "college premium" had been stagnant for a few years. In other words, the payoff for getting a degree was not showing its previous earning power in the marketplace. When he first started writing about income inequality twenty years earlier, it was about the gap between laborers and CEOs and other assholes, like hedge fund managers. Now it seems to be between workers and capital...and OMG Marxism! The dreaded Karl Marx, hibernating for a hundred years, suddenly stirs. Production rises, income of labor stays the same and then begins to lose. Why? Automation. Read the article. "If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom on reducing inequality." Education won't help when what we really have are a few people who own machines. The biggest and fastest machines. Those with the biggest and fastest machines are reaping all the rewards; everyone else gets the shaft. You buy the biggest machines, you pay 100-1000 of the brightest PhDs to collect data, write algorithms, maintain the data servers...you win! Everyone else is fucked.

Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier, computer whiz/prodigy/generalist/genius says he was there (and he was, as numerous books on the history of Silicon Valley attest to) when this really got going and he and his famous friends thought it was going to be this incredible "information is free" thing that would make everyone's lives better. Now he says they were horribly wrong. Because it turns out that the NSA, Wal-Mart, Facebook, Goldman Sachs...all bought the biggest, fastest computers and hired an army of gifted geeks. He has ideas about how to save us, and I think they're good to begin our thinking with.

I've followed Lanier's career for a long time. I think he's one of the best and most interesting thinkers in the world, but rather than talk about his ideas, I'd rather you took the time to watch what he's saying about the existential situation we're in now:

Here's 4 minutes on "Why Facebook isn't free."

Here he is interviewed by Andrew Keen, about Lanier's book Who Owns The Future? It's about 10 minutes and 40 seconds:

Finally, for 27 minutes or so - I think you'll find it well worthwhile - he's interviewed about his books and his changed thinking and what we might do to remedy this "jobless recovery" situation. NB around 5:20 to 6:00, in talking about the structural changes from Kodak to Instagram: "We pretend that the people who do the work don't exist." Another notable moment: from around 8:00 on: "honesty in accounting" could solve the mess the middle class is in. Also a fascinating point: around 11:30: "levies" and their history:

I have a bee in my bonnet and I'm afraid you're going to be hearing more from the OG on income inequality, American fascism, mob mentality, robots/automation/computers, Real Wealth vs. Money, the college loan bubble, Missing Public Discussions, and social fallout of Winner-Take-All Hypercapitalism and Privateeing, and ideas about how we might extricate ourselves from rising misery.

Synthetic Biology: Potentials Perilous and Promising

"Synbio," or synthetic biology, is here. It's alive!:

It's already been three years since Craig Venter's team made a species that was self-replicating...and its parents were not a mom and dad, but a computer.

In 2003 the human genome was sequenced. It costed billions of dollars to sequence and took up the energies of people in over 160 labs. Now you can buy a sequencing machine for a few thousand and sequence your own genome overnight. Or pay 23 and Me $99. By this time next year it'll probably be half that.

Synthetic biology, according to Venter, will change everyone's life at some point. Its upside: we can make microbes that eat carbon dioxide. We can generate flu vaccines almost overnight. Tiny critters that generate clean biofuels that are cheaper and as efficient as fossil fuels seem possible. The brilliant Drew Endy of Stanford is gung-ho about genetic engineering and synthetic biology, claiming it already constitutes 2% of the Unistat economy and is growing at 12% annually.

Venter commissioned a panel to study the potential issues in public health and national security arising from synbio. Two big problems jumped out at us:

1. Synthetic biological work had become so cheap that most of the people who were doing it weren't even trained biologists, so there was no understood consensus about standards, ethics or safety.

2.) What standards existed by governments and international bodies were ten years old and so may as well have been 100 years old.

You're probably wondering what I'm wondering: when will someone get hold of some genome of a relatively benign virus or bacteria, tweak it using known methods, then use it as a bioweapon?

You can email a genetic sequence to someone else. You need to buy a few things to tinker with, but it's doable. I'm trying to spook you for Halloween. Is it working yet?

In the 18th century, Giambattista Vico, countering Rene Descartes, asserted that humans can only know what they have made. Only true understanding can come from something the mind makes, and Descartes's notion about "distinct ideas" in the mind as a basis for philosophy was flawed because we did not make the mind; Descartes was doing metaphysics. Vico called his principle, verum factum. That which is true and that which is made convert into each other; anything else is an abstraction. (I linked Vico's idea to Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics HERE, in case anyone wants to see how bent I can get.)

Back to biology, there's the GOF, which is also growing at an exponential rate, or at least ultra-quickly. It's short for Gain Of Function. Here's how it applies to the Pandora's Box of synbio: biologists attempt to combat some potential horrific pathogen by creating it in the lab, so then they can figure out a way to develop a vaccine for it. We can only know what we have made, as Vico said.

At a conference for scientists a researcher said that he'd tinkered with the H5N1 virus then being talked about as a potential killer of millions, if it mutated. It's a simple coronavirus, but he tinkered with it so a host could infect another via transmission through the air. Then another researcher said he'd done the same thing. They both published their papers, in bigtime journals Science and Nature. They knew what they had done could be interpreted as reckless, and indeed: both journals were persuaded to omit the part of each biologist's work that detailed the techniques by which they took a dangerous virus and made it far more dangerous, because who knows which band of deranged and sick mo fos would read this stuff and get ideas? And carry it off? (Beside The State, of course, by which I mean Google "Tuskegee Syphilis Study.")

But...can you really keep info under wraps? ("Paging Mr. Snowden! Mr. Edward Snowden; Please come to the white courtesy phone...")

In reading about the uncooperative governments (SARS in China, anyone?), the paranoia about Western governmental power (read up on Indonesia and their lethal coronaviral outbreaks), governmental snafus, international differences between countries, and just how hopelessly behind the curve biosecurity experts are in Unistat alone...I'm not sanguine, friends. It's only a matter of time. Let us pray the international bioterrorists make a crucial mistake and the deaths are limited.

However, when it does happen? There's nothing more paranoia-inducing than a massively-social-mediated group of people terrified of the invisible death-bringing entities that may be in the very air they're breathing. All bets are off, and it seems just the thing to get Ted Cruz elected President. (Then: watch out, "liberals": all that NSA data could be gunnin' fer ya!)

With seven billion on the planet now, even if a pandemic arose "naturally" and killed off 3-5% of the population (like the Spanish Flu of 1918 did), how much more paranoid are we now than then? Many people who didn't die will go to their grave convinced the Other was responsible...

I hope you're scared now, or I'm not doing my job, on this, October 29...

The old Biology: you observed life from outside that life, wondered about details and behavior and then dissected to see how it worked, or placed the life in some environment and observed.

The new Biology: You're an engineer: you know the life-form because you created it, from genomic information and computer models. Now you watch to see how it plays out. If it moves, eats, respirates and replicates, you've created a new species!

So...yea. The scary part is anyone with a serious political beef, or simple hatred, can align with others and send away for stuff and do what's called 4-D printing: those microbes that were just info on a screen are now ready to be released into your enemy's territory. You send away for stuff, you use steganography (al-Qaeda left a code in a porn video). Sequencers are cheap. The data is there. One fleeting problem: many biotech companies are keeping track of "nucleotides of concern": any known dangerous sequences are tracked: who is it that wants this info?

So: we have bioterror security experts who aren't sure how to determine threats, or if a threat is all that important; they don't know how to surveil those who'd go the whole nine and release something unspeakable, and they're not sure how to combat the pathogens anyway. Supposedly the International community is getting their act together along these lines. But...let's recall some sobering facts: in 2002 at SUNY Stony Brook, researchers took the genetic code for polio and made that virus. Because...verum factum, and Gain Of Function (GOF). If we truly know these bad boys we stand a chance of combating them when they come at us.

And let's not forget that in 2005 researchers sequenced the 1918 Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people. They sequenced it...and then of course they made it. And the speed and cost of doing this is becoming ever-quicker and ever-cheaper. Just think: the Spanish Flu killed 50 million, but its lethality was only 2.5%. On the other hand, the H5N1 killed 59% of the people it infected. Can you imagine a huge batch of H5N1 tweaked (like two researchers have already done) to become transmissible via air?

(By the way: now is not the time to read this article about how Unistat labs are insecure. Just don't read this, or it might even bum your Halloween.)

Other Bad Signs: in Unistat the CDC and NIH don't have the infrastructure to develop massive amounts of vaccine for something that might appear. How many would need that magic shot or pill? Not as many as those hundreds of millions who'd take Lipitor or Viagra, paying for it all and making investors happy. Big Pharma is in the Big Money game; they cannot afford to spend an estimated $700 million to $1 billion to develop a vaccine or pill, when maybe after the bioterror attack quarantine and international cooperation stops the spread. There's no money in that! (SARS was stifled largely because of quarantine and cooperation.)

To sum up: synbio offers incredible promise, but just one really "successful" bioterror attack by angry young men who take their own version of a merciless God and some old border dispute very seriously...and life on Earth will have truly changed, and not in a good way. Because we have cops and monitors on one hand, but cheap technology, sheer fluid-like information and motivated ingenuity on the other hand. (Please make sure you wash both hands, thoroughly, when you're done reading this morose report.)

Dr. Frankenstein's imperative makes every day from here on out all the more fraught with drama, eh?

Happy Halloween! Muahahahahaha<cough>ahamuahahaha! Okay that's it: I may have failed to scare you, but in writing this - consulting 13 articles and taking notes - I've grown pallid, anemic and weak in my anxiety attack, and it further sickens me to say, "Well, I just hope that all happens after I'm dead and gone, 'cuz..." What kind of morality is that? It's like saying, "I hope all-out nuclear war happens after I'm dead, while your children are still around to experience it."

Now if you'll excuse me. I need to go rest. Oy! (No, but seriously: don't drink and drive on Halloween.)

Some Very Recent Forms of "The Dialectic" (?)

[I've still got a nasty cold/cough and I'm in a general(ist?) state of bile and snark, so please forgive the odd tones, I beseech thee! I'm experiencing full-on phlegmaticness! Not fun. This article is about some brief tiffs between late 2011 reality-based communitarians in Unistat vs. entrenched interests and what I might deem - in my current moment of snark-bile state - the "reality-impaired." Have fun! - the OG]

There are many definitions of "dialectic." Plato thought only educated men talking to each other about ideas can reach an ever-higher level of understanding of True Being. More specifically for Plato and his followers, it was the process of defining terms and ideas and how they interrelate and have to do with One ultimate idea, which emanates from an Ideal World of Perfect Forms. Dialectic was spotted being used in English in the 14th century, in a sense that we would now call "logic." It had migrated rather scholastically into the art of discussion and debate, or argument...among school-churchmen who assumed Aristotle and the Bible were the ultimate wellsprings of Truth. <cough>

                                        Plato, looking stoned, from file photos. This was obviously after a night on the town. The wine 
                                        those guys drank was ultra-strong, and who knows what drugs were used for 
                                        the Eleusinian Mysteries. Man, I've heard of bloodshot eyes, but whiteshot eyes?
                                                     
Sometime around the early 18th century, in or near present-day Germany, the term dialectic began to be discussed in terms of contradictions and disputes not only in discussions but in "reality." I will not go into an excursion of the term in Kant, Hegel, and Marx. I am using the term in this particular blog post in a rather grandiose way that persnickety scholars might call debased, but aside from that I mean something like: clashes of political ideas in late 2011 Unistat between what I consider people in what one George W. Bush official told journalist Ronald Suskind was the "reality-based community,"(Suskind's) and...whatever the Birthers and right wing billionaires/Americans For Prosperity and Heritage Foundation and Tea Party rank-and-file and John Birch Society, et.al call their "reality."

(I'm guessing they'd call their "reality" the One True Reality, but that's only a guess, and I am being unfair in lumping all those people together, as no doubt we will find at times substantial differences among all those who'd self-identify with one of more of those groups. They all seem to hate Obama, though.)

First up: A wonderful post from earlier today by a Maryland-based blogger-colleague of mine, Annabel Lee, denizen of the reality-based community, who tells us of her surprising experience at a Tea Party rally in Durham, North Carolina very recently. There's also something not-very-surprising. In the context of dialectic this speaks to a down-and-dirty overall story about the current state of beastly mundane and debased political discourse in Unistat, late 2011:
When a Liberal Visits a Tea Party Rally,What Happens? from Annabel Lee's razor-sharp blog Double Dip Politics. Of all the dialectical clashes in this OG post, this one from DDP contains a kernel of hope for something truly revolutionary: Occupyers and Tea Partiers (and those cheering for either group, from the sidelines) making common cause. (Note I said a "kernel.")

                            Co-Founder of the Yippies, self-described Investigative Satirist Paul Krassner.
                                     He did LSD with, among others and at different times, Groucho Marx and 
                                     Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme. Read his books!

Next up: Somehow Playboy got Paul Krassner and Andrew Breitbart into a conversation. It seems to me the more one knows about Breitbart and Krassner the more fascinating this exchange seems, but all I'm perhaps biased because I know Krassner's books, his biography, his history so well, and I love him. Krassner's one of my favorite Unistatians of the 20th century, born in 1931, if memory serves, and the founder of The Realist, and by dint of that, often introduced as "The Father of the Counterculture,"or "Father of the Underground press," for which he'd always yell out, "I demand a paternity test!" All I know of Breitbart is his appearances on TV, and he just seems like another Angry White Male with deep emotional issues. There's my bias. At any rate: primo dialectico!...but are the two of them really trying to get to the truth? Or uncover a new layer of truth? Your call...

Third - these things come in threes, as Pythagoras and Plato and Jeanne Dixon always asserted - comes what appears to be an editorial by Keith Olbermann, heaping vitriol on Michael Bloomberg while interspersing the castigation with ironic gratitude. There is a basic strong rhetorical style - immanent critique, comparisons, use of a thesaurus, clipped rhythms, about Olbermann. He's witty and angry and righteous and seems a justified heir to his broadcasting hero Murrow. (And Olbermann has a voice and seasoned telegenic mannerisms that shapes his rhetoric in a way that shouldn't be underestimated.) But within the context of dialectic please take Olbermann here and consider almost everything you see and hear tonally from the mainstream corporate electronic media about WHO the Occupiers are and what they want, and how the laws and Constitution comes into play. I invite you to consider this special comment-rant as a dialectic with, say, what Fox News is saying about the same situation:

Sooooo...how is this all playing from the vantage point of dialectic? Where are the misunderstandings? How can we model these chasms of understandings about, oh...I don't know...."facts"? What's The Reader's favorite way to model this...errr..."problem"?

I'm sure everything will work its way onward and upward, towards some Golden Mean of grace and empathic understanding and then we will All realize our common humanity and there will be no hungry, no homeless, no jobless, no health-insurance-less and everyone has access to World of Warcraft. Just as Plato and his dialectic said it would.

 <bittersarcasm-mode OFF>

#OWS and Origins, My Delusion, Taking Pulse of Zeitgeist

I've known possibly too much about the problems Unistat has fallen into for, oh, about 23 years now. And in a consciously unrelated event, after reading about the practical purposes of having a blog from fellow writers, I started one on May 6 of this year. At the time, what I saw in national politics was utterly dismal, and if anything, politicians were talking about making things worse (in their special language). If they were talking about solving problems at all.

I never thought I'd write about the all-but-hopeless political situation on this blog, but events led me to feel compelled to. It seemed only left-ish online magazines and blogs were talking about the same political problems I'd seen and cared about, and they were addressing possible solutions in a way that made sense to me, or at least seemed legitimate. There was virtually nothing in the corporate media.

So I wrote for awhile about what a sham I thought the Economics game was. (See here, and there, and over there, up on that branch, down here in this bog.) I could do another 15 like that, easily, but then the Intergalactic Committee for Legitimate Generalists might revoke my license, and you really don't want that, do you? I know I don't want that.

I'll have to space out my Potshots from here on in.

Along those lines - of politics and economics and money and slander and vituperation and Who Gets What (which reminds me of a funny line from Timothy Leary, who said the only honest way to talk about politics with someone else is when you're both down on all fours) - I started writing about what I thought were Missing Public Discussions. The ideas were, as I saw them, being discussed only in far-flung hamlets of Internet, and not on, say, the Six O'Clock Newshour with Pretty Blonde and Good Hair. (See here, here, here, here, and a few other places, for example.)

Now here's the funny thing: I did most - if not all of those - before Occupy Wall Street hit the news. Suddenly, most of those discussions started to show up in "public."

Naturally, I thought I caused it all. I was the Tipping Point or something. Maybe the groundswell was building, people were angry, desperate, scared, at wit's end...then the Overweening Generalist showed up and straw/camel's back...BLAMMO!: We had ourselves a Movement, buckaroo.

                                          The Great Canadians at AdBusters came up with this one

Now, I really didn't believe I had anything to do with it. It was a felicitous delusion. I had simply tapped into the zeitgeist. Those ideas were in the air. Part of the basic job description of the relatively unattached, free-floating intellectual is to articulate what's not being said yet.

But there was a primitive part of my brain that I think we all have which has to do with causality, observing that first this happens, then that happens, so this first must have "caused" that. It's a very primitive circuit and it no doubt did well by us for at least a million years. Which made me laff. My primate brain at work! There were millions of others articulating those ideas. And I'm glad we're talking about them. Very glad. (The discussions about automation replacing many jobs forever, what does work "mean" now?, what are alternate ways we can exchange value now?...these discussions still seem in the remote vanguard. But they will appear, as things accelerate toward some sort of - hopefully benign - eschaton.) The real work can finally begin, at any rate.

Now I've seen a few Origin stories about OWS, and I'll link to two of them here and here. These timelines/narrative of origin help sober me up...

49 million in poverty in Unistat, the richest country in the world...and we only have a little over 300 million. I find that disgusting and shameful. This should lead the Six O'Clock News every night in a sane society. But we do not have a sane society. We currently have something like a kleptocratic-plutocratic oligarchy that likes to call itself a democratic republic. We have to change that. And as long as money is in politics in the way it is now, not much will change. So we have to change that.

I was planning a long Missing Public Discussion on Ending Corporate Personhood, and one on Publicly Financed Elections, but then the Occupy movement started, I went down to the ones in Oakland and Berkeley, and those ideas were on the minds of most.

(This blog and its writer are overweening in their chauvinism. They seem to only care about Unistat's economic worries. Yes, it's true, the OG is ethnocentric and self-centered. But we DO care about England, and follow what's going on there. We DO care about the Euro and Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain. And we're trying to imagine the mindset of the Germans right now. We are greatly concerned about our cousins to the Great White North. All of us want to end the War on Certain People Who Use Certain Drugs, if only to stop the headless corpses on playgrounds in Mexico. We care about South American, Malaysia, Indonesia, and maybe especially Japan. I'm sorry to all our brothers and sisters in countries I haven't named. Believe it or not, we do care! But even an overweening generalist has his limitations, if only of space.)

A recent poll of 1005 people (not a very large sample, granted) had Occupy at a 35% favorable rating, with Wall Street and corporations at 16%. The Tea Party was at 16%, too. There are polls galore out there to Google or Bing or Yahoo. Things are moving fast. Things are exciting. Maybe at times a bit too exciting, but hey, you go with what brung ya. (<-----what the hell does that even mean?)

There was my delusional episode. There are timelines of origins in the links I provided above. But I think the second President of Unistat had the better perspective on these moments in history.

John Adams, long out of office, in 1815 received a letter from Dr. J. Morse asking for information about the American Revolution, its origins, causes and course. This information was to be used for a history of that period. And Adams wrote back:

A history of military operations...is not a history of the American Revolution, any more than the Marquis  of Quincy's military history of Louis XIV...is a history of the reign of that monarch. The revolution was in the minds and the hearts of the people, and in the union of the colonies; both of which were substantially effected before hostilities commenced.


In subsequent years Adams uttered variations of this. The Revolution took place in the minds and hearts of the people 15 years before a shot was fired.

Let us hope for a relatively peaceful adjustment. The revolution is now borderless. I fear for what hopes and dreams we were allowed to legitimately carry within us until December of 2000, September of 2001, March of 2003, August of 2008...whenever my Dear Reader thinks we truly began to be loose our tether.  But let's not give up hope; we need to preserve capitalism for its tremendous dynamic, creative force, but we need rules in place, and those rules enforced. We need a safety net...or what are our values? The values of Las Vegas?

I personally don't know anyone who wants that. Carry on!

Reinstall Glass-Steagall

Among the many reforms made by FDR in the desperate attempt to assuage the suffering of the Great Depression was what's commonly called the Glass-Steagall Act, which was germinated in 1933 and went into effect in 1934. Probably the major cause of the Crash was rampant speculation, and Glass-Steagall put into effect the FDIC and separated the commercial banking operations and the securities biz.

And, when the dust cleared after WWII it worked pretty well, until 1999.

In listening to the brain trusts (this is a diffuse network, but I define them as the ones who, when you wander around an Occupy site, are mentally equipped to explain in depth what's needed to happen to revive the world economy, if not the Unistat economy, for example, see the video at the end of this post), you will hear calls to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, or the "Financial Modernization Act". What was that? Isn't "modernization" good? (Yet another way words hypnotize us. Or are supposed to hypnotize us.)

It was the move sponsored by three Republicans to effectively get rid of Glass-Steagall. If you listen to this partisan d-bag (Max Keiser, first couple minutes), his assholic simple-minded message is that the Democrats deserve most of the blame and caused the problems actuated by the demise of Glass-Steagall. True, it was repealed under Clinton, but let's not pretend the three guys whose names are on the bill were not Republicans! Just who was supposed to be the targeted audience of dipshit Keiser's tired old line that the Republicans are the adults who understand money and the Democrats don't? This is really offensive, and I'm calling this asshole out, right here. Gramm (R-Texas). Leach (R-Iowa). Bliley (R-Virginia). Then the Hillbilly With a Perpetual Hard-on (D-Arkansas) signed it into law. There's plenty of bought-off blame to go around. We want to fix the problems, alleviate the sufferings and injustices and level the playing fields.

Oh yea: Check out North Dakota Democrat Byron "The Seer" Dorgan (3 mins):

Sidebar Here: What is it about North Dakota and their stark, staring SANE banking practices? HERE's a 2009 article from Mother Jones that lends some decent insight.

Dorgan (U.S. Senate, 1992-2011) deserves more credit for his fiscal responsibility.
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On the other hand, the "Gramm" in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that got rid of Glass-Steagall? That's one Phil Gramm, a U.S. Senator from Texas from 1985-2002. A Texas Republican "economist" who became a politician. Hey, what could go wrong there?

He made Time mag's "25 People To Blame For The Financial Crisis." Another, more nuanced analysis of Gramm's yeoman work for the 1% is HERE.

Righteously rubbing yet more salt into Gramm's deservedly tarnished cred, see #4 on THIS LIST of the 10 worst capitalists who helped bring on the economic collapse of 2008.
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During the S&L debacle of the late 1980s, early 1990s, possibly the one thing that kept that mess from being far worse was the Glass-Steagall laws, which were still in place. The idea that, less than ten years later no lessons were learned and the law was gutted, should be something culturally memorable, aye?
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This idea - gaining a lot of traction in Occupy encampments - of repealing Gramm-Leach-Bliley and reinstating Glass-Steagall is something more tangible (than "Make The Banksters Pay!") that can be done. It's possible, ladies and germs!

Sorry to point out that the corporate media haven't seemed to want to touch this (do you still wonder why?), but let's make the Missing Public Discussion about H.R.1489, The Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2011, sponsored by Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), a tad less Missing. You can follow the progress of the bill HERE. As you follow along, note what I predict will be the Usual Suspects fighting tooth and nail so that the bill dies, or becomes inert, de-fanged. This too, should be no surprise. But if we pressure our Congressentities enough and talk about the bill enough, maybe, just maybe we can get this bit of elephant out of the room, leave us a bit more breathing space. It's a long road to hoe, and we know it. But we gotta, right?

Two Occupy manifestoes of clamor for reinstating Glass-Steagall provisions (proto-pro H.R. 1489 statements?) are HERE and HERE.

Has deregulation ever been a good idea? I'm willing to listen to arguments for deregulations in the comments section, but by and large I agree with Double Dip Politics.

YES on H.R. 1489, the Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2011!
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Here's yet another dirty, stoned hippie from Occupy Wall Street, patiently explaining to the cops what the repeal of Glass-Steagall wrought:

Occupy Wall Street/the 99%ers/ Missing Public Discussions/A Broad 10-Point Plan!

Buncha hippies? NOT! Check out this.

So far, the mainstream corporate media doesn't seem to know how to spin this story. They tried the They're a Bunch of Hippies thing. They tried Some of Them Have Legit Gripes, But Others Seem to Have Been Misinformed Radiohead Was Going to Appear. Oh, there have been a few other spins. If you're a talking head at CNN or ABC News, someone who flunked out of acting school and are reading what's on the teleprompter, what would you say?

You wouldn't be reading this blog, that's for sure.

The "gotcha" criticism seems to be that there's no coherent reason behind the massively growing protest. Which is bullshit. There are more and more coherent manifestoes flowing out of the movement. The two major themes are: hopelessness and rampant corporate unaccountability. And a third: everyone wants hopelessness to stop and they want banks and corporations to answer for what they've done.

True, many of the protesters have specific issues and grievances for which they seek redress. The truth is: things are so fucked up in the world's richest country that a lot of us have wondered most about not why the massive protests, but why did it take so long to get going?

And I'm with them. The 99ers, that is.

Here are a few items which I consider No-Brainers which should be done Yesterday, or Decades Ago, if not Tomorrow or Next Tuesday After Lunch or ASAP:

1.) Get rid of the Bush Tax Cuts. Are you fucking KIDDING ME? The economy is getting worse and worse, every REAL economic look shows that if you get rid of the Bush cuts and make the rich pay what they did under neo-liberal Bill Clinton - about a 4-6% "raise" in rate - then you start to heal, albeit slowly. But the Republicans, who never met a billionaire they didn't love and want to go to the barricades for (figuratively speaking) can't even do that. No: they think the Poor should pay more! And Obama has been relatively invertebrate on this, considering the stakes, the justice in the situation...And it's NOT a "raise" of taxes on the rich, either! The NeoCons said cutting taxes on the wealthy would create jobs. It didn't. It never has. It never will. It's exactly what Dumya's  daddy (AKA Bush 41) called Reagan's idea for cutting taxes on the rich: "voodoo economics." That's the only thing a guy named Bush ever said that made sense to me. When you hear a talking head say that making the rich pay more taxes will "hurt the economy," it has about the same philosophical status now as the question from the medieval period: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? In other words: it's like Church dogma. To put it plainly, it's unadulterated bullshit.

On second thought, the Angel question seems far more interesting. The tax cuts for the rich is just stale, dead, moronic. It's for morons. The only rich people who create jobs are that tiny minority who gamble and fund start-ups. Read more HERE.

Letting corporations pay next to nothing (after taking advantage of loopholes) was a very popular idea in Europe between 1922 and 1945, which is a polite way of saying it's a fascist idea.

2.) Cut war spending in half. At least! Unistat has let the "Military Industrial Complex" that Eisenhower warned us about get completely out of control. We spend as much if not more on war than all other countries of the world COMBINED. And there is a company in almost every single congressional district, and many have guaranteed cost-overrun contracts, and political sway in their district. No politician, Democrat or Republican, wants to be on the local branch of the Pentagon-tentacle's bad side. We must let these technicians keep their jobs, but there must be far less spending on junk and weaponry and killingry and illth, and more on wealth: better materials, more efficient energy systems, better mass transit systems, smarter ways to ephemeralize (i.e, doing more with less) the use of natural resources, especially in our cities. Use the massive cuts to fund rebuilding of the infrastructure (roads, bridges, hospitals).

The Pentagon system and its massive waste was mostly a way to subsidize high-tech industry; this was always very inefficient. (How did Japan recover after 1945, and by 1965 become a serious competitor? They gave massive amounts to the corporations/zaibatsu to make things humans actually wanted to buy. They didn't first scare their citizenry that a Russian bear was gonna get 'em and stare at them long enough until they turned into horrendous zombie commies, and then went on to build weapons for megadeath/trash in an effort to keep the economy afloat!) And we're seeing the results of that, now. No intercontinental ballistic missile is going to save us from some dedicated nutjobs with a dirty bomb that works in downtown NYC, Chicago, LA. We need to be smarter.

This one's going to be difficult, because it's an elephant in the room problem.

3.) This goes along with number two above: government, in conjunction with universities, our allies in other countries, private industry, and those former defense contractors need to wage a Manhattan Project for renewable energy. I have too much to say on this, so will save it for a future post, but let this suffice.

4.) Publicly financed elections. If you get enough signatures to qualify, you're on the ballot and will receive equal time on TV and radio as all the other candidates. Also: every candidate gets to appear in the debates. We want to hear as many ideas as possible, even if they're "crazy" ideas. The airwaves are owned by We, the People. Not corporations. Basically, we must get money out of politics as much as possible. The rich will always be there, trying for special favors, buying their way in. We can lessen this greatly.

4a.) It may need a Constitutional amendment, but we must get rid of corporate personhood.

5.) Fer crissakes and in the name of anything and everything that one would consider "holy": End the War on Certain People Who Use Certain Drugs. It's a waste in every sense.

6.) Medicare For All. I've read many studies that indicate we will pay less per person and have healthcare at least as good as those who are insured now have it. But it will be for everyone, and it's in line with what we say we hold as a value.

7.) Big bankers go to jail. You want me to name names, and why they should be behind bars? There are a few guys who really ought not be too big to fail.

8.) The NeoCons who lied their way into a $3 trillion war in Iraq, and tortured, etc: need to be tried for Crimes Against Humanity. None of these people are too big to jail. Or let's see them have their day in court.

9.) Expose the Bush-Cheney Halliburton/Blackwater/gargantuanly bloated Dept.of Homeland Security and their privateering offshoots. Those should be government jobs, held by Americans, beholden to the American people. "Of" and "by" the people, remember? You don't take my taxes, give it to private corporations, and have them spy on me in the name of "national security." And there are so many of these little spy agencies now that none of them know what the others are doing. That's fucking sick and wrong in so many ways...Read William Arkin and  Dana Priest on this.

10.) We need to start a long, serious discussion about the future and jobs. Collectively, we have developed a world in which drudgery in work has increasingly been eliminated by cybernetic automation. There will be no jobs, even for healthy, young, very-well-educated people. Are jobs a way of life? Or is "life" about something other than working a job, any job? We need to talk about Negative Income Taxes, Guaranteed Annual Wages, Government-Subsidized Low-Wage Jobs, Universal Basic Incomes, etc.

Okay, there's a Magical, Mythical Ten. One for each finger. If you don't like me for bringing up one of these ideas - or all of them - I have a special finger, just for you.

And oh yea: I've been a low or no-paid intellectual drone for a long time, but I do read in an exceedingly high number of corners of social "reality." With the 99%ers on the streets and growing, I think I know enough of that part of the corporate American Mind that is fascist to predict that we will in time find out there are/were at least one group who sought to round up every one of the Bad People who protest, because they are "leeches" or "un-American," this last epithet being one of the most ironic terms I see widely used. In fact, I'm not waiting so much to see who it was that wanted these people/me and my wider circle of friends eliminated; I want to see how much money and traction they had. And who was bankrolling 'em...Let us now reflect on Joe Hill, not mourning, but organizing.

Who knows? Maybe the fascists will succeed. If so, I hope you've enjoyed the OG, and I'll see you in the camps!

Have a pleasant day.

Missing Public Discussions: Higher Education Seems Near-Broken in Unistat

Let me start with a story you guys and gals (and the always-welcome "Other,""Decline to State," and those transitioning between gender poles) may have heard about, the Berkeley Republican Diversity Bake Sale. Here's a story on it. From The Daily Mail here. And here...in case you missed it while you were out at the opera, or engaged in a marathon reading of Finnegans Wake, or bowling for dollars.

Okay, my politics are pretty far from these young College Republicans, but it's a perennial debate, always heated, I see merits for both sides of the argument, and these were some Republicans who were at least trying to use satire to get their point across. And most of the backlash seemed to me to feed into every negative stereotype about liberal PC histrionic humorlessness.

I noted one commenter on some blog saying what I had thought: I live in Berkeley. The Asian baked goods should've been the most expensive. The closer you get to the campus, the more you see beautiful bright young Asians walking around. Because their cultural inheritance is about kicking ass in homework, studying hard. Especially the Hard Stuff, like math. I know it's a classic stereotype: Asians are good at math. (Yea, but ask the working poor Laotians, Thai, Vietnamese. We're really talking Chinese here, folks. And some Japanese and Indian.)

I look at some kid walking down Durant towards Telegraph and think, "Whoa...I bet she aced Advanced Fluid Dynamics With Topological Applications when she was only 15, just for fun, and I don't even know what that means!" 

I know I'm generalizing wildly, but those kids got into UC Berkeley because their grades were over 4.0. A perfect score on the SATs is 1600, and that kid over there somehow managed to score a 1670; I don't know how, but let it rest with this: these kids are not only freaky good at math, they study - very many subjects other than math, too - like there's no tomorrow. (Or more accurately: like there IS a tomorrow.) I wonder what his Tiger Mom looks like, but I digress...

And I say: good luck to any kid who gets in, whether under some version of Affirmative Action or not. Study your ass off and try and enjoy it. And try and go the extra mile, do the really smart thing and be born into a well-off family. Which is where my point(s) come in...

Widely ranked as the best (or near it) public university in Unistat, in the 1960s you got into Berkeley if you were in the very top of your high school class in California. And believe it or not, tuition was free. Kids under that system started the Free Speech Movement. O! Our fallen world!

Skipping ahead...

By the late 1970s/early 1980s, universities started to run along something like the health care system in the US. You know, "managed care." And look where that's gotten Unistatians: depending on which data sets you look at but I'll even it out, Unistat is around 30th in the world in overall health care, factoring in quality, cost, life expectancy, and other items. It seems Costa Rica is always a country or three ahead of us. We pay more per capita than any other country in the world and we're around numero 30. (I could go on, but that's for some other rant.)

In November, 2010, there were protests at Berkeley because the Board of Regents approved an 8% fee hike to raise the annual tuition from $10,302 to $11,214. And earlier this month, the Regents pretty much said this hike would go on, year after year, until the fees are $22,068 by the school year 2015/16.

This doesn't cover all the other costs, like housing, books, beer, marijuana, Sigur Ros, Radiohead, and Opeth on iTunes, food, ecstasy, transportation, cell phone bills, etc.

(According to one source the average cost of a four year private school is nearly $37,000.)

I don't even want to know how much it costs to go to hoity and private Bennington for a year. It seems like only ten years ago I read that it was the most expensive in Unistat, at a then-stratospheric $23 grand a year...which is what public Berkeley will cost in a mere five years. Insanity! I tells ya!

Studying what you love is great. But unless you're in a totally killer computer science or biotech major, watch out when you graduate. Here's where it gets truly ugly and dire.

Student loan debt is approaching $1,000,000,000,000. Sorta feels Housing-Bubble-ish, doesn't it? And I don't know about you, fellow Unistatian, but lately, every time I'm forced to say the word "trillion" it's surrounded on all sides by Really Bad News. The student loan debt is more than national credit card debt. This has never happened. Better pay that down, twentysomethings!

But they can't. There aren't any jobs. (Wait a minute: did we all wake up one day in a Samuel Beckett play? Because that would explain a lot...)

"Only 56% of 2010 college graduates said they were able to find employment by spring. Even more disheartening, only half of these positions required a college degree." (Full article here.)

(Just try to not think of the other 44%. But I have tangentially discussed a possible some of them previously on the OG. See here. )

I'd say they might get a job driving a cab, but Google - of all people! - seems intent on phasing that delightful and time-honored job out. What? You haven't heard? Check this out.

Just one of very, very, very many jobs that are going away. For good. (I mentioned your computer science degree. You'd better be really good, because India, China, and South Korea have kids that score higher in math than Unistatians, and they'll innovate and program for cheaper. You've been warned.)

A recent study by the worldwide Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development says the US is losing ground in higher education. Most kids enter unprepared, they drop out ("attrition"), and besides, it's a rip-off:

The OECD factors this way: Unistat has the highest (by far) tuition rates in the world. They figure $70K for four years. But then they estimate the young person loses $39K while studying and not working, for a total of over $100K. The OECD average for other industrial countries: $50K. That's not good.

There's a welter of maddening books that show how "administrative bloat," university presidents who make $2 million a year - this is why I compared it to managed care - and moronic things like brand new football stadiums are splurged upon by the upper echelon, while you and your kid (who just moved back in with mum and dad a month after graduating) are saddled with a huge loan (a chance to lessen that burden was squashed by the Republicans in late 2010, while they fought to keep oil subsidies for an industry that saw record profits) and no jobs in sight.

Oh yes: it's become, since 1980 or so, ever-increasingly difficult to get tenure. The tenured professors? I suggest we lump them in with the administrative bloat. Because they - supposedly liberal and for equality and fraternity (in the French sense) - fight mercilessly for their privileges, which are extensive. (I think they are ones most happy this is one Public Discussion that stays Missing...I am being unfair: some tenured professors have spoken out against The System, but they are the brave few.)

The OECD report showed Unistat, among 34 countries studied:
-14th in reading
-17th in science
-25th in math

WOOHOO USA! USA! USA! WE KICK ASS! WE'RE NUMBER ONE! (in military expenditures)

Ahem...

Here's a final little tidbit before I shuffle off for beer:

"According to economist Andrew Sum, the number of college graduates under 25 who are 'underutilized' (e.g, working part-time, working at a job that requires no college degree, like bartending or waiting tables, or just plain unemployed), is over 3 million." (Get a load of the whole article here.)

The rot I barely touched on here is the iceberg-tip.  (Yes, it's a rotting iceberg. You too can mix metaphors grandly. Ask me how!) And I think it qualifies as a Missing Public Discussion. Don't you?

In closing, all my best to the Berkeley Young Republicans Club (or whatever they call themselves), and every kid that gets in to that Hallowed Institution, no matter what factored in. You're gonna need it. Hell, around 75% of the entire population is gonna need it. When a bright kid makes it into the best public school in the country, studies her ass off, gets good grades and graduates magna something or other...and then waits tables while living with mom? That's a telling symptom, folks. And I don't think we can just "walk it off."