Anna Hamilton Reminds Me of My Grandmother

Anna Hamilton Reminds Me of My Grandmother

 

Listening to Anna Hamilton’s most recent Rant n’ Rave show on KMUD (Friday, Feb. 1, 7:00pm) reminded me of talking to my Grandmother. I love my Grandmother, God rest her soul. She was a great cook. She was full of love for her family and friends, of which she had many, but she made no secret of her bigoted, racist views, especially when she drank, which was continuously. My Grandmother’s views were extremely common among white people of her generation, and all of her friends, so far as I could tell, echoed her sentiments.

This woman is not my Grandmother and I have no reason to believe she harbors any ill will towards anyone,

These racist views were extremely common among white people, even well educated white people, before the Civil Rights Movement, but most people would find them offensive and embarrassing today. My Grandmother very much resented the Civil Rights Movement for the changes it brought to her world, and although this movement changed people’s attitudes on a broad cultural level, as a individual, my Grandmother took her bigoted, racist attitudes to the grave.

My Grandmother, a lifelong resident of South Philadelphia particularly resented the changes that the Civil Rights Movement brought to the Philadelphia Mummers Parade. The Mummers Parade, held every New Year’s Day in Philadelphia, is not unlike Mardi-Gras in New Orleans, except with less nudity, probably because it is very cold in Philadelphia in January.

The Mummers Parade features extravagant floats,

string bands in elaborate feathered, sequined and mirrored headdresses,

and brigades of clowns in brightly colored costumes carrying specially decorated, multi-tiered parasols.

People all over Philadelphia work all year on these costumes and floats to prepare for this one day of wild, drunken revelry that turns the streets of Philadelphia into a massive street party.

One major difference between Mardi-Gras and The Mummers Parade, is that Philadelphia’s Mummers are almost exclusively white, and traditionally, they would all wear black face makeup for the parade.

You can imagine how offensive Philadelphia’s Black Community found this. Thanks to the Civil Rights Movement, Philadelphia’s Mummers can no longer wear black face paint.

Many older Mummers, and white residents of Philadelphia, including my Grandmother, deeply resented the ban on black face paint in the Mummers Parade. For the first few years of the ban, people on floats refused to wave, clowns refused to dance, and string bands would play only Taps whenever the parade passed through a predominantly black neighborhood. For the Mummers, black face paint was not about racism, it was about tradition, but the ban on black face paint starkly revealed that racism was also a cherished tradition in Philadelphia.

According to my Grandmother, Caucasians were better than Black people, Hispanics and Native Americans because of civilization. White people deserved the privilege they enjoyed, not because of any genetic superiority, but because white people were more civilized than Blacks, Hispanics or Native Americans. She explained this to me many times as a child.

According to my Grandmother, Black people, Hispanics, and Native Americans all came from savage, brutal, backwards and uncivilized cultures. These people were just learning to behave in a civilized manner, and they still had a long way to go before they could be considered the equal of Whites. All of the racial violence, oppression and discrimination that non-white people faced was justified, in her eyes, because civilized people needed to beat the savagery out of them, so that they would learn their place in society. In other words, my Grandmother justified institutionalized racism on the same grounds that she justified beating her own kids.

As outrageous as this sounds today, these attitudes were extremely common 50 or 60 years ago. When Anna read the definition of “Civilization” from her 1947 dictionary, I could easily hear my Grandmother’s voice and attitudes channeled through it.

I don’t believe that Anna harbors the same kind of racist sentiment that my Grandmother did, far from it. I know that Anna is a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement and I know she believes in equal rights for everyone, but her attitudes and beliefs sound as dated and embarrassing to me today, as my Grandmother’s did in the 1970s.

Anna’s blindness to her own cultural prejudices about civilization allowed her to read that stunningly racist, and xenophobic definition of civilization without the slightest hint of self-consciousness, not unlike a Philadelphia Mummer strutting around in black face to the cheers of white onlookers lining the streets. The problem with the definition of civilization that Anna read, was that it defined civilization by who it excluded.

Anti-Japanese propaganda from WWII

According to the definition she read, civilization excludes savages, brutes, uneducated, unsophisticated, rude and unruly people, implying that only good, noble, sophisticated and well educated people could be counted among the ranks of the civilized. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Civilization is chock full of savages, brutes and rude unruly people. In fact, civilization produces them in greater numbers than any other culture in the history of humanity.

Here in California, Native Americans were deemed “savages”, and it was legal for civilized people to kill them, just a few generations ago. Elsewhere, civilized people kidnapped millions of Africans, to keep as slaves,

and just a few short years before the publication of Anna’s dictionary, civilized people exterminated seven million Jews, Blacks, Gays, Gypsies etc. in an extremely sophisticated national operation aimed at cleansing civilization of “mongrel races” and “degenerates”.

Even though we now recognize the American holocaust, the European Holocaust, the brutal history of slavery in the US, as well as thousands of other examples of institutionalized violence, as horrible atrocities, we still perceive civilization as superior to the cultures that those, oh so civilized people, so passionately and violently sought to exterminate. We somehow convince ourselves that all of these crimes against humanity were carried out by “bad apples” like Hitler, but that the core of civilization remains a paragon of high ideals, and represents the highest expression of our shared humanity.

Civilized people are like the mafia. They wear nice suits, keep their fingernails manicured, and behave like gentlemen, until they have business to attend to. Then, they become cold-blooded killers.

Here in Humboldt County, civilization looks more like the mafia than in many places, with so many greedy dope yuppies cynically using their civil and property rights to conceal their criminal activity from law enforcement and their obscene incomes from the IRS. They’ve gotten used to making a living from the violence of the drug war, and enjoy their privileged status, as white people with money, within civilization. Consequently, they remain unwilling to face the reality of their situation.

So let’s define civilization by what it is, rather than by what it calls its victims. Civilization is a way of life characterized by cities, hierarchy, division of labor, inequality, violence and environmental degradation (and writing incidentally). It’s high time that we stop pretending that civilization is something to celebrate and face the reality that civilization is an affront to indigenous cultures everywhere.

Dirtbags, Miscreants, Undesirables and Low-Lifes pt.2

Dope Yuppies Suck

 

The L.A. Times recently ran a story about Humboldt County and the marijuana industry here, and the story echoed a common myth about this area that really deserves some analysis. You will hear this myth often repeated on KMUD, and reflected in Kym Kemp’s blog Redheaded Blackbelt. They both do their best to disseminate propaganda for the marijuana industry, and between them they’ve done a pretty good job of putting their spin on things. After all, the marijuana industry is still a pretty secretive business, and news gathering has become a relatively passive activity these days, so it’s not surprising that this myth gets so much traction in the press, but it’s about time someone took a closer look at it.

So, here’s the myth: The people who moved to Southern Humboldt in the late 70′s and early 80′s, like to paint themselves as the “back to the land” movement. They moved here to escape Babylon, and built little cabins, grew organic veggies, made arts and crafts, and raised a family. They grew just enough marijuana to pay their taxes, support their favorite non-profit, and put a pair of used tires on their old truck.

On the other hand, the myth continues, if you moved here during the 90′s or, god forbid, this century, you’re only here for the money. It’s these “newcomers” who brought in the big diesel generators, and started these giant industrial mega-grows. It’s these “newcomers” who spill diesel fuel in the creeks, pump our rivers dry, and spread rat poison all over. It’s the “newcomers” who drive like maniacs on our roads, bring hard drugs into our community, and dump trash in the river.

You see, according to this myth, it’s only the people who’ve been here 30 years, not the people whose families have been here a hundred years, or the people whose ancestors have been here for thousands of years, who form the true “community” around here. If you’ve been here longer than them, you are a redneck, if you’ve arrived since them, you are a carpetbagger, but if you’ve been here for 30 years, no longer, and no shorter, you are part of the twelfth tribe of Israel. The myth tells us that the people who’ve been here 30 years, take impeccable care of their land, manage it wisely, and use the money they make to fight injustice all over the world. Don’t they sound like awesome people?

The truth is a very different story:

Back in the 70′s and 80′s, most of the people around here bought their land from a guy named Bob McKee. They all love Bob because he would buy large tracts of logged over timber land, dirt cheap, and then break them up into parcels small enough that pretty much anyone who wanted one could afford one.

You could never make a living logging these small parcels, and there weren’t any jobs, to speak of, anywhere in the vicinity, so this low priced land became attractive to artists, who don’t have to worry so much about their commute, but also don’t make much money. At one time Humboldt County had more artists per-capita, than any county in California. That’s why Summer Arts Fest is older than The Mateel. The artists in SoHum needed that outlet, more than they needed a place to party. That was 37 years ago.

Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan disrupted the flow of marijuana from South America and Mexico, and very suddenly, people started buying up those cheap parcels, specifically to grow marijuana. Bob McKee got rich, and all of a sudden, almost anyone with a green thumb, and bit of chutzpah, could make a living from the privacy that these forested mountains provide.

So, these people who moved here 30 years ago, all moved here to grow pot. They bought cheap, logged over timber land, built homes with outhouses without permits, diverted streams, and grew marijuana illegally to make money. They made pretty good money growing pot, so they started buying up the parcels around them. Their drug-dealing friends in the city, who came up here for the lavish parties these folks threw, started buying parcels as well.

Some of these people were greedier than others, some of them were more competent than others, but they all partied a lot. They brought hard drugs like heroin, cocaine and meth, which have remained epidemic ever since.

They drove like maniacs, like their kids do today, and they made huge messes up in the hills. They buried piles of car batteries. They changed their oil in their driveway, letting the spent oil seep into the ground, and they abandoned thousands of vehicles all over the hillsides of Southern Humboldt, and that was just the beginning.

 

photo credit Humboldt Sentinel
http://humboldtsentinel.com/2012/01/13/weekly-roundup-for-january-13-2012/

People who’ve owned their property since the eighties don’t really need much income anymore to cover the basics. They paid their land off decades ago, and thanks to proposition 13, many still pay less than a thousand dollars a year in property tax, at least on the parcel they actually live on.

For most of them, however, the basics were not enough. They like to party. They want to go to a dozen festivals every summer, winter in Hawaii, ride around on quads, watch movies on their big screen TVs, and if their local non-profits can pour beer, they want to support them too. You see, they just want regular “middle-class” stuff, and marijuana provides that for them, but it gets to be a chore.

Growing all of that marijuana starts to feel like work. So what do you do if you own a few parcels of land, and you want the income from all of them, but you don’t actually want to do the work of growing the marijuana? You want to hire people, but you don’t really want them show up at your place and punch a time-clock, and you really don’t want to cut them a check every week. You want them to grow pot for you, sell it, and give you the money, and you want some insulation from the risky side of the business. Here’s what you do.

You “sell” them a turnkey business. Here’s how this works. You find an up and coming drug dealer, who’s already moving a lot of weed for you. You teach him how to grow, introduce him to your clone supplier, and help him set up his generator, pump, lights and fans. You offer to “sell” him one of your SoHum parcels for a price based on the expected profits from the weed grown there in the next ten years. You draw up a land contract, and you “loan” him, the money that you expect to be payed for your share of the weed. Then you turn the operation over to him.

You see, you “sold” that parcel, that you originally traded a motorcycle for, for $250,000, to a 28 year old guy with no job, and $50,000 in small bills. There’s now a big ugly diesel scene and a giant, water sucking industrial mega-grow on it. You get all of the profits, and some drug dealing kid from the city takes all of the risk and does all of the work. He’s in possession of the land, should the cops ever raid it, so you can deny any knowledge of what goes on there, and you can legally repossess it, if he ever fails to make the payments.

Not that long ago real estate agents around here sold land, generators and lights together as a package, and advertized them in local papers. For decades now, all of the land sold around here, sells at a price based on the value of the marijuana that can be grown there, and the county happily appraises this land at the inflated prices.

So, if you moved here recently, besides paying through the nose for your land, you likely pay three times what your neighbor pays in property tax. You still can’t make a living from the timber on one of these parcels, and there are still very few jobs in the vicinity, but these parcels no longer sell at prices that artists or writers can afford. No, every parcel sells as a prime marijuana gold mine, with a price determined by how much marijuana the buyer and seller think they can pull out of it.

The people who sign those land contracts, often as not, get busted, shot to death in a drug deal gone bad, or simply fail to deliver the cash, so they lose the property, and we never see them around again. It’s a huge ripoff, and it’s just one of the ways that the people who’ve been here thirty years, feed on young people like vampires, growing ever richer, and more smug about themselves, while they destroy habitat, drive endangered species to extinction, and enslave the young.

Most of the rentals in SoHum work the same way. Landlords expect tenants to grow for them, and use the lease as legal insulation. The dope yuppies who’ve been here thirty years know how few opportunities there are for young people, and they look for desperate young people to take advantage of.

The people who’ve been here thirty years have engineered the marijuana industry here. They employ, and exploit the army of young growers, share-croppers, dealers, mules and trimmers that you see around town. They are responsible for the giant mega-grows, the water diversions, the rat poison, and all of the problems and pollution that goes along with them, and they make sure that no young people today, ever get the kind of deal that Bob McKee gave them.

Its time to legalize marijuana, and drive a stake through the heart of the dope yuppie lifestyle. Legalization would help the salmon. Legalization would help the fishers, and legalization would help everyone who likes to smoke herb, or needs it for medicine. Legalization will only hurt a small clique of people who moved here thirty years ago, got lucky, exploited the land, took advantage of people, and have gotten way too smug about it. Really, no one deserves it more.

On The Money, The View From the Top

On The Money;

Economic Advice for the 99%

The View From the Top

 

So who are the 1%, and why do they want all of your money? Don’t they have enough already? Why do they always want more, and why don’t they do something about global climate change or the rest of the environmental crisis? The fact is, the world looks very different from the top of the economy, than it does from the bottom, or even the middle, so let’s try to see it from their perspective.

 

The 1% take opulence for granted. Their consumption is limited only by their own imagination, not lack of resources. These people all have way more money than they can spend, and most of what they own, makes money, so they keep getting richer, no matter how much they spend. Still, they need a robust economy way more than you do. They need the economy, because the economy protects them from us. They use it to keep the riffraff in line. At the top of the economy, profit has less to do with making money, than it does with maintaining order, stability, and growth.

 

Order matters at the top. As solid, and resilient as our economic system seems, the 1% knows that without strict discipline, the capitalist system would collapse like a house of cards. Those 1%ers, who have become accustomed to opulence, know that the rest of us would lynch them if we knew how bad they were fucking us. So we must have cops, and standing armies, who will shoot to kill anyone who steps out of line. That’s what “order” means.

 

That’s why the military industrial complex, and the prison industrial complex form such a large part of our economy. Even though these endless stupid wars we get into, and the money we spend keeping millions of people in prison for drugs, seems like a tremendous waste of resources to the rest of us, to the 1% who control this economy, it is more important to punish disobedience, no matter how pointless and arbitrary the rule, than it is to reward obedience. The 1% never skimp on the guns, bombs, soldiers or cops.

 

All of those cops and soldiers need to get paid. That gets expensive, even for the 1%, so they make sure that we pay them. When the government has enough money from taxing working people to pay for enough cops, guns and soldiers to keep everyone in line, they call that “stability”. When we pay for our own oppression, and their protection, “order” becomes profitable, and self-sustaining, resulting in “stability”.

 

Even though we, the 99%, pay for those cops, soldiers and armaments, they invariably serve the interests of the 1%, and the 1% always find something for them to do. It’s not pretty, but it keeps them busy. The 1% likes to keep the rest of us busy too, and that isn’t pretty either. Whether its drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, contaminating groundwater in rural PA with fracking chemicals, or removing mountaintops in WV, its all ugly work, and doing it doesn’t make us any more attractive.

 

The 1% need to keep this economy growing, because that’s how they keep us busy. They give us jobs and incomes to keep us from killing them, and turn us into obedient servants. As the population grows, as unrest grows, as dissatisfaction grows, as anger grows, so too must the economy. Every year the pressure to earn money must increase, because that pressure, more so than the cops and soldiers, serves to maintain order and stability, by keeping us busy. As more people compete for fewer resources, the amount of resources necessary to maintain order and stability increases as well, so growth insures stability.

 

You see, to the 1%, the rest of us just look like so many goats and sheep. We are just livestock to them. For them, the economy acts as a domestication program. As long as they can keep the economy rolling along, we will do whatever they want. We’ll go to school to learn the material, at our own cost, then take an unpaid internship to acquire the skills, and then beg them to hire us, and accept whatever they offer. It took no small amount of effort to reduce us to this level of submissiveness and obedience, and they’ve been at it for some time.

 

“Flexibility” they call it. We have a very “flexible” workforce here in the US. We’ll do pretty much anything for a job. Relocate? No problem, Pay cut? Sure, I’m a team player. No benefits? OK, I’m healthy enough. Unpaid overtime? Yeah, I always give 110%, just because I love my job, no matter how bad it sucks. How did it come to this? When did Americans turn into such pathetic little boot-licks, and why?

 

The economy did this to us. The 1% uses the global economy to make us more obedient, docile, and trusting, all of the traits you might look for in a dog. The 1% has exploited the resources of the world, laid waste to the global ecosystem, and expropriated the content of our lives, for the primary purpose of domesticating the human race, to make us into obedient servants. The 1% uses the economy to turn us, the wolf at their door, into the dog tied up in their yard..

 

It takes a lot of energy to keep us all busy, and we destroy a lot of the environment in the process, but to the 1%, that is a small price to pay for the order, stability and security that a robust economy provides them. That’s why the 1% completely fails to address global climate change. We don’t burn so much energy because we need it to live decent lives, we burn so much energy because they need it, to control our lives. To the 1%, the 99% represents a much more immediate threat than global climate change. So, for the 1%, order, stability, and growth will always take precedence over the environment.

 

Despite the fact that all money flows toward the 1%, we must understand that the vast majority of economic activity in the world is not about making the 1% richer, the purpose of most economic activity is to keep us all too busy, and too dependent, to challenge or even question their power. As long as we stay focused on money, and will settle for a paycheck, we remain loyal servants of the 1%.

 

That’s why the 1% get so concerned about the unemployment rate. None of them work at jobs, but for them, full employment means order, stability, and growth. Order, stability and growth may sound like good things, but you should always remember what they mean. “Order” means everyone does what they are told, and almost nobody dares to step out of line. “Stability” means that tomorrow, everyone will get up in the morning and do it again, just like today, yesterday, last week, last month or last year, even though we all hate doing it and its destroying the planet. “Growth” means that every year you will pay more, and work harder for less.

 

This human domestication program they call “the economy” produces order, stability and growth, for the 1%, at the expense of the environment, our quality of life, and our humanity. Neither our lives nor our environment will improve as long as we continue to serve their interests. That’s a view of the economy, from the perspective of the 1%, that’s On The Money.

Kirk to Enterprise, What Planet Are We On?

Kirk to Enterprise, What Planet Are We On?

I listened to Eric Kirk’s radio show, this past Thursday night at 7pm on KMUD. I read a facebook post in which Eric let us know that he had invited Andy Stunich to talk about his fears that our elected officials might commit economic suicide by government. 

As a financial advice columnist, (look for my column “On The Money; Financial Advice for the Working-Class” in the current issue of Fifth Estate Magazine) I like to entertain a diversity of opinion on economic issues, but I also tire quickly of listening to the same old conventional stupidity regurgitated and rehashed.

 

I know from listening to Eric’s show in the past, and from occasionally reading his blog, that he specializes in rehashing regurgitated stupidity, and Thursday night’s show found Eric practicing his specialty yet again. Why do you fill your head with this crap, Eric?

Every time I hear you on the radio, or visit your fetid little corner of cyberspace, I feel my soul being sucked into a vortex of empty rhetoric, going nowhere. Thursday night’s show provided a prime example.

 

This show reminded me that, while “people who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it”, people who study history don’t have a clue either. If, as Frank Zappa said, “Rock music journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read”,

then the study of history is people who write too much about people who talk too much for people who read too much. While there’s always more that you can learn about history, there’s only so much that you can learn from history, especially if, by “history” you mean the history of our culture, from about 10,000 years ago to the present.

 

In reality, the ones who learn the most from “history” are the ones most eager to repeat it. Hitler learned how to engineer a genocidal holocaust by studying American history. Since the primary concern of “history” is the rise and fall of megalomaniacs, megalomaniacs can learn a lot from “history”, but what the rest of us learn from “history” is how to think like a megalomaniac.

 

We think like megalomaniacs when we imagine that we could solve the problems of society if we were in charge. Imagining that we could solve the world’s problems if we were in charge leads to pointless, inane discussions like the one I heard on KMUD Thursday night; armchair megalomaniacs endlessly debating economic policy in the most abstract terms, completely removed from the reality of life on planet Earth.

 

What do I mean by “armchair megalomaniacs”? Like I said, “history” is the story of the rise and fall of megalomaniacs. Historians endlessly examine the strategies, policies, and operational models of every megalomaniac that conquered and enslaved enough people to make the news, since written records began. On the other hand, “history” tells us almost nothing about the first three million years of the human experience, or about the thousands of tribal cultures, which survived for tens of thousands of years, until they were conquered, enslaved and annihilated by a megalomaniac and his minions.

 

Hence, American “history” begins with the “Discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus, and tends to gloss over the genocide, the slavery, the wholesale slaughter, the economic oppression and the environmental degradation, to instead focus on “The Constitution” the founding fascists, and “Democracy”. People who read too much of that crap start to believe that only megalomaniacs matter in life.

 

They start to speculate about how “history” might have gone differently if the megalomaniacs had made different decisions. For instance, they ask themselves, “What would have happened if Hitler decided not to attack Russia?” That’s what I mean by “armchair megalomaniacs”; people who aren’t particularly charismatic, or psychotically driven themselves, but like to imagine what they would do if they were Hitler, or Stalin, or Churchill, or Kennedy. As if fantasizing about being Hitler weren’t sick enough, “armchair megalomaniacs” also like to fantasize about ruling the contemporary world too.

 

“Armchair megalomaniacs” refer to their vast knowledge of “history” and “economics” (another crock of shit), and try to imagine what a megalomaniac could do to solve the world’s problems, and what kind of megalomaniac they’d like to see do it. Soon, they have pretty good idea of just what kind of megalomaniac we need in charge, and usually, its someone pretty much like them.

 

The problem with this whole line of thinking, is that “ruling the world” has been an unmitigated disaster right from the beginning, and its not getting any better. Megalomaniacs have done a terrible job of managing the Earth. The idea that we can solve the problems caused by unchecked megalomania, by putting a megalomaniac more like us in charge, is the founding fallacy of democracy, and it leads to pointless , arcane discussions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, like we heard Thursday night. In the case of last night’s show, the dancing angel was “the economy”.

 

Didn’t Eric and his guest seem to know a lot about “the economy”. They talked about “the economy” like it was a sick friend, in desperate need of immediate attention. Neither of them seemed to have a clue about the state of the global ecosystem, or the scale of environmental devastation resultant from economic activity, let alone the incredible sacrifices we all make in our quality of life, just to support unbridled profit-taking by the insatiably greedy, nor did any of that seem to matter much to them.

 

In the eyes of our “armchair megalomaniacs” Eric and his guest, the real problem we face is not the dying oceans, the melting ice-caps and the destabilization of the Earth’s climate, it’s not the growing underclass of people denied access to the basic resources of survival, and cast aside like garbage while the opulent use their economic power and influence to exploit the rest of us. No, the real problem, is that their sick friend, “the economy” might stop growing.

 

What is “the economy” anyway? “The economy” doesn’t measure the quality of people’s lives, only how much money they spend. “The economy” doesn’t measure the wealth of the planet, it only tells us how much money we got for what we stole from mother Earth, and how much we spent trying to clean up our mess. “The economy” measures how fast we liquidate the planet and our lives. “The economy” tells us how much we got paid to sacrifice our children’s future. “The economy” is a measure of how much of our lives and our birthright will be sacrificed to keep megalomania alive and well.

 

Ultimately, “the economy” is nothing but an extremely abstract set of statistics that could hardly be more difficult to gather, and couldn’t be less relevant to our day to day lives. The only reason they gather statistics on “the economy” and promote its unbridled growth, is to help megalomaniacs exploit the rest of us.

When you look at it that way, you realize that “the economy” is not your friend. The economy is an out-of-control monster ruining more of our planet, and our lives, every day. The last thing any of us really want, is for “the economy” to grow any larger. We want “the economy” off our backs.

If we survive this century, as a species, it will only be because we dramatically reduced our economic activity. Yet, as if “the economy” hasn’t already consumed enough of the world’s resources, and, as if “the economy” doesn’t already consume enough of our lives, Eric Kirk used the community airwaves to present to us, Andy Stunich’s dire warning that our current crop of megalomaniacs might slow the growth of “the economy” by spending money we don’t have on the popular programs that only exist, not unlike “the economy” itself, to serve the interests, and insure the stability of, their own regime.

 

This is like being trapped in a car with no brakes, driven by a rabid monkey at 100mph on the Pacific Coast Highway, and being warned that we might not have enough gas to keep accelerating. Running out of gas would be a blessing, but we’re not running out of gas, we’ve gone over a cliff, so the amount of gas in the tank only matters in determining how big of a fireball it will make when we crash. It’s time to stop looking at the gas gauge, turn off that idiot on the radio, and look out the window.

 

What planet do these guys live on, anyway? Obviously Eric Kirk and his guest speak to us from a world inhabited by armchair megalomaniacs, who subsist on a diet of corporate exploitation and reside in a jungle of empty rhetoric. Please Scotty, beam them back.

 

On The Money, Its the Stupid Economy

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working-Class

Its the Stupid Economy

Every media outlet in America, it seems, reports movement on the Dow, NASDAC and S+P indexes every half-hour at least. Every Friday we get the New Unemployment Claims numbers, and we now have enough monthly economic reports that we hear about one every day. If its not the monthly home foreclosure number, than its the durable goods report, the jobs survey, existing home sales, new home sales, new building permits, consumer spending or the trade deficit. And don’t forget “consumer sentiment” the number that tells us how optimistic we are about the economy.

What is there to be optimistic about? Everyone is so focused on “the economy”, not because its killing us, and the planet, but because they are so desperately afraid that it might stop growing. Have we lost our minds? This is like being in the hospital with cancer, asking your doctor how you are doing, and hearing the response: “Well, I’m afraid that tumor of yours is growing rather sluggishly right now. I think we need to suppress your immune system to see if we can encourage some more vigorous growth in that malignancy.”

The economy is killing us, and the economy is killing the planet. No one denies that. How do we manage to to ignore the breakdown of the biological support systems of the planet, and the steady decline in the quality of our lives, to instead focus on protecting the disease that is killing us? It’s completely insane, and the longer we nurture this disease, the worse it’s going to get for us, and for the rest of the community of life on planet Earth.

Its the stupid economy that fouls the air we breathe, pollutes our rivers, and fills our dumps with mountains of plastic garbage. Its the stupid economy that makes us set our blasted alarm clocks every morning and spend half of our waking hours at work, for the privilege of living paycheck to paycheck in a rented room. Every time things get better for the stupid economy, things get worse for us, so why are we so damned concerned that our gigantic global economy, with its gigantic global appetite, only get bigger?

Isn’t the stupid economy already doing enough to pry money out of your pocket? Don’t you already work hard enough, long enough, and put up with enough bullshit at your job? Think about it: Does “the economy” exist to help people trade goods and services to meet their needs, or do we exist to serve the needs of “the stupid economy?

Either way, for the stupid economy to grow, it will need to exploit more of the world’s resources, create more pollution, and consume more of our lives. Yes, in order to grow the stupid economy, we will all have to work harder, pay more, and expect less of life. In return for that sacrifice, we can marvel at the enormous and ever growing magnitude of the stupid economy, We can take pride in watching everything beautiful and natural about life, cut down, ground into currency, and funneled into the bank accounts of the richest 400 families on earth, knowing that they couldn’t have done it without us, and then we can die for them.

I’ve got a better idea: lets shrink the stupid economy till its small enough to drown in a bathtub, and instead, work on growing our lives back. There’s a view of the stupid economy that’s On The Money.

On The Money, What’s the Deal?

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working-Class

What’s the Deal?

Look, I’m not an idealist. I don’t oppose government and capital out of principle. I’m just looking for a deal I can live with. If you want my participation, especially if it involves work, I want to know… What is in it for me?  Frankly, the whole global economy/representative democracy thing looks like a pretty raw deal to me. I think I’ll opt out.

 

I can see where my parents generation might have thought they were getting a good deal, back when a guy with a high-school diploma could get a job that paid enough that he could afford a single family home, support a wife and a couple of kids, and buy an endless string of huge, tacky, unreliable cars. Sure, those jobs sucked. They involved long hours of repetitive work in dangerous, loud, hot, or otherwise unpleasant conditions, and they effectively drained people of their life force, but they provided comprehensive health coverage, pensions, and a couple weeks paid vacation every year. I could see where that might look like a deal you could live with. I don’t see anyone my age or younger getting a deal anything like that.

 

Worker productivity has risen exponentially in recent years, but workers saw no increase in wages. Instead, work became more concentrated, more demanding, and more draining, but wages did not improve. Mass layoffs and global outsourcing helped to suppress wages, while profits soared. Meanwhile, we lost health-coverage, because medicine has become such a ripoff. We lost pensions because of greedy Wall St. bloodsuckers, and we lost job security, because we’re all disposable in a global market.

Now that things like home ownership, job security, comprehensive health insurance and pensions have become relics of the past, the global economy really doesn’t offer as many “carrots” to working people anymore. These days, the motivation to work comes mostly in the form of “sticks”. Specifically, the cop’s nightstick, that he pokes into your ribcage while you are trying to get some sleep. Unless you have paid for a place to sleep, the cops will come and roust you. That is your motivation to work, these days.

Housing prices have skyrocketed in the last 30 years, while wages have stagnated. We don’t make any more money than we used to, but we come home more tired, and we pay a lot more for a place to come home to. Now that home-ownership has become a thing of the past for working people, we pay rent for a place to sleep, so we acquire no equity in our home, and as a result, we never get ahead. When it comes down to it, working for a living amounts to a kind of freelance slavery enforced by “cracker” cops on homeless patrol.

Increasingly, all over the world, people realize that the life of a worker in the global economy is not worth living. The deal is that bad. It’s so bad that at factories in China they have to lock the doors to the roof to prevent workers from leaping to their deaths. So, when you hear politicians promise more jobs, or hear talk about “the job creators”, remember what kind of jobs they create. Those jobs suck, and most of us would rather die than work at them.

It’s past time to walk away from the bargaining table. Your life is your own, and you belong on this planet. You have the right to take what you need of what you find around you, and to make your home on this green Earth. That is your birthright! That is the position you bargain from!

Don’t ever forget that its your life, and its your planet. You don’t owe them obedience to their laws, respect for their property or participation in their system. Don’t settle for the crumbs from the table. After all, its your your table, your plate, and your pie they are eating.

On The Money, The Poverty Line

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working-Class

The Poverty Line

“The poor will always be with us, but it wouldn’t take that long to exterminate the rich.”

WJSHS (What Jesus Should Have Said)

 

We hear about “the poverty line” a lot on the news. The number of children living below the poverty line, the number of families below the poverty line, jobs that pay “below poverty line” wages have all made headlines recently. What does “the poverty line” really mean?

Allegedly, this is how much it costs to get by in this country. “The poverty line” is an official statistic compiled by the OECD.  The poverty line doesn’t take into account things like the cost of housing, food, health care, utilities, transportation.  No, instead, the poverty line is based on 60% of median household income.  Ultimately, it adds up to a pretty good chunk of change.  In 2010 the poverty line for a single adult under 65 was $11,344, a lot more than I made that year.

 

While people need housing, no one needs a landlord. So a lot of the income it takes to reach “the poverty line”, just goes to greedy bloodsuckers bent on taking advantage of us. If we could get rid of greed, I think poverty would evaporate before our eyes. Really, we don’t need a metric to tell us that we are poor, especially if it only tells us that we make less than other people.  We need a metric that tells us when we are being greedy.

I suggest we use the same metric, but call it “the greed line”. Certainly “the poverty line” doesn’t cut it as a gauge of economic hardship. Some people living at the poverty line have miserable lives, while others, like myself, enjoy an enviable lifestyle. Ultimately, income doesn’t have as much to do with how happy you are, as does your health, or how you spend your time. So, we might as well call it “the greed line”, and get some practical use out of it.

 

If we want to know about economic hardship in this country, I suggest another metric all together. Call it “the slavery line” “The slavery line would take into account how much of your time and energy it takes to reach “the greed line”. If you can make “the greed line” income in less than 25 hrs a week, you’re living pretty well. If you have to work 40- 50 hours a week to reach “the poverty line” your life sucks. If you work more than 50 hours a week, at any income, you qualify as a slave. If you earn an income above “the greed line” you are a slave to greed. If you earn below the greed line, you are just a slave. It’s about time we call a slave “a slave” in this country, and it’s about time we abolish slavery in this country as well.

 

In cultures that have survived for tens of thousands of years, greed is considered a very bad thing, at best, a childish thing to be outgrown before adulthood. It’s time we outgrew it too. To outgrow greed, we need to understand it. To understand greed, we need to know where it begins, and greed begins where poverty ends. So, it makes as much sense to call it “The greed line” as “the poverty line”.

 

Actually, both of these terms have too many negative connotations. Both “the greed line” and “the poverty line” make you want to move away from them. You don’t want to be anywhere near “the poverty line”. Heavens no! You want to be well above it, but you don’t want to be accused of crossing “the greed line”. No, you want to stay below that. So, how can you live above “the poverty line” but below “the greed line? You can’t. That’s capitalism’s dirty little secret.

No, we need to call it something else altogether. Let’s just call it “enough”.

On The Money, The Founding Fascists

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working-Class

The Founding Fascists

 

Now, I could make fun of the republican presidential candidates, like everybody else, but I’ve got bigger Twinkies to flambe. If you don’t already know that the republicans are hell-bent to destroy the planet and enslave us all, you are too dumb for words, too dumb for my words at least.

Don’t get me wrong, the democrats will destroy the planet and enslave us all too, but to them, its just a job. That’s your choice, as I see it. You can vote for fanatical fascists, or you can vote for professional fascists, or you can throw your vote away, and vote for a third-party fascist. Any way you slice it, it comes up fascist.

I don’t mean that the US has become a fascist state recently, or since the Bush years, or even the Reagan years. I mean, since it’s inception. The US was founded as a fascist state, has always functioned as a fascist state, and will continue to function as a fascist state, as long as it continues to function at all.

That’s what the founding fathers had in mind. That’s why the Supreme Court decided “US vs. Citizen’s United” the way they did.

The founding fathers intended for this country to be run by the people who own it. The founding fathers didn’t think that women should have the vote. The founding fathers didn’t think Indians deserved the right to vote. The founding fathers didn’t think slaves deserved the right to vote. They didn’t even think that slaves deserved 3/5 of a vote. They thought slave-owners deserved an extra 3/5 of a vote for every slave they owned.

When they said “All men are created equal”, they meant that they no longer believed that royal genealogy, or divine rights made people better leaders. They decided that they, the land-owning business-class, should have exclusive control of government. That’s why we have the separation of church and state.

When the business-class has exclusive control of the government, that’s called fascism. The founding fathers invented it, here in the US, and it is their great contribution to the progress of civilization. Where kings, popes and pharaohs ruled with divine authority, turning to God for advice on controlling the masses, our founding fathers decided that the unruly masses could be managed more profitably by those who had proven themselves most successful at it in business.

Those successful businessmen, rather than treat the masses as royal subjects, instead, treat us as customers. A businessman needs to know his customer. A businessman needs to know his customer’s likes and dislikes, needs and desires, and his strengths and weaknesses, so the businessman can devise effective ways to convince, confuse or coerce his customer into buying his product.

That’s why we have elections. We have elections to prove that they can still sell us fascism, and that we’re still buying it. As long as it comes labeled “Democracy”, and we have two competing brands to choose from, we still listen to the moronic debates, the endless horse-race media coverage and flock to the polls in droves to vote for the same people who have been screwing us all along.

On The Money, Time v Money

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working Class

Time v Money

Anyone who says “time is money” really doesn’t recognize the value of time. Every day we have more money in the world, but we are very rapidly running out of time. Yes, time is short, and although you can sell your time, you can never buy more. While your money may multiply over time, your time only dwindles away.

 

In fact money seeks to enslave time. That’s the simple reason for an hourly wage. We don’t get paid by the calorie, or the idea, or by how efficiently we work. Working harder or faster won’t get you out of work any sooner, because they really want that one commodity that you can never replace. They want your time, and they want it all.

 

Every year, the cost of living rises, but hourly wages remain stagnant. People have to work more just to survive. Some work longer hours, some spend more time and money on education, so they can earn more per hour in the future, either way, it means more time spent for the same basic survival resources.

 

How ironic that in our modern world, full of labor saving technology, we spend more time working, just to survive, than any other culture in the history of the planet. That’s some achievement! How many “technological breakthroughs” until we achieve complete slavery? Not many I fear, in fact it might well be too late already.

 

Lets do the math:

If you multiply 7 days times 24 hrs you get 168 total hours in a week. Subtract 8 hrs of sleep a night, you get 112 waking hours a week. Now you need 3 hrs a day to prepare and eat meals, and an hour a day for personal hygiene. Everyone needs to do this basic stuff just to face the day. You might be able to cut that down a little, but not much without sacrificing your health. So, you are ready to take on the world about 84 hrs each week.

 

The average American worker currently works about 50 hrs each week. If you commute an hour to and from work each day, about average, add 10 more hours a week. Subtract 60 from 84 and you get 24 hrs each week, or about 3.4 hrs a day, for you to live the rest of your life.

 

Can you honestly call those 3.4 hrs a day, a life? Those hours mostly function as a buffer that allows you to respond more flexibly to the demands of your job. Those hours go out the window when the car breaks down and you have to deal with it, or you need new clothes for work, or have to see a doctor. Your employer won’t pay you for that time, they call that your “free time”. That’s the time you agree to give them for free, before they agree to hire you.

 

Even if you really had that 3.4 hours a day, you can barely maintain a home in that amount of time, let alone build one or raise a family. Honestly, you won’t have the energy left at the end of that grueling day to do much, but consume passive entertainment and self-medicate anyway. That sure sounds like slavery to me, no matter how well appointed the slave quarters.

 

By comparison, a Kalahari Bushman spends only about 5 hrs a day to secure his survival needs. This leaves him 11hrs a day of leisure time, and considerable energy with which to enjoy it. They love to tell stories, drum, dance and party. They are devoted parents who enjoy a lot of time with their families. They’ve lived this way for thousands of years, and they never get tired of it.

 

We high-tech Americans, on the other hand, work harder and longer for less, every year, and it only makes us more miserable. Where did we go wrong?