White people are so scared of black people.
They bulldoze out to the country, and put up houses on little loop-d-loop streets.
And while America gets its heart cut right out of its chest
the Berlin wall still runs down main street separating east side from west.
And nothing is stirring, not even a mouse, in the boarded up stores
and the broken down houses
So they hang colorful banners off all the street lamps
just to prove they got no manners, no mercy, and no sense.
And I wonder then what it will take for my city to rise.
First we admit our mistakes and then we open our eyes.
The ghosts of old buildings are haunting parking lots
in the city of good neighbors that history forgot.
I remember the first time I saw someone lying on the cold street
I thought, “I can’t just walk past you, this can’t just be true.”
But I learned by example to just keep moving my feet.
It’s amazing the things that we all learn to do.
So we’re led by denial like lambs to the slaughter
serving empires of style and carbonated sugar water
And the old farmroad’s a four-lane
that leads to the mall and my dreams are all guillotines waiting to fall
And I wonder then what it will take for my country to rise.
First we admit our mistakes and then we open our eyes.
‘til nation’s last taker succumbs to one last dumb decision
And America the beautiful is just one big subdivision.

–Ani Difranco

Yesterday afternoon, something very significant occured that totally changed our country. Not sure what it was, but evidence is everywhere. The republicans staged a slowdown. Hollywood worked anyways. What you see now on tv is actors working in spite of the network slowdowns. Awesome.

It’s more honest to address economic ebb-and-flow when we recognize whole swaths of individuals that participate in neither: the poor.

Of course the policy makers are running around like headless chickens to stimulate the economy. The prospect of poverty now touches more than America’s untouchables. It must boggle the minds of the poor that it took the collapse of the middle class for the government to take notice of poverty. And it must not hearten anyone at the bottom to realize that economic recovery proposals tend only to target the middle class.

Most politicians would be satiated in realizing the recovery of the middle class alone. Because some politicians think so small as to ignore the systemic nature of their decisions and confine policy to those matters directly affecting their voting constituency. After all, homeless people don’t vote, right? And Neocons have worked hard to see that minorities don’t vote. And super-capitalism has saddled the working poor with enough of a survival obstacle course to ensure they will have no time to commit to any political participation whatsoever.

For too many Americans, recession is a way of life, chronically. Why is it any more unthinkable for middle-classers to join the ranks of the poor? Who is truly losing in what we’ve only now brought ourselves to call a recession? Isn’t poverty a signal that our society never really “won” in the first place? Only now can’t we tell whether the guy sleeping on a park bench once traded on Wall Street or is one we previously wrote off as lazy. Only now do we recognize the peril in assuming people who can’t work won’t work.

Poverty is a plague on our society, and we’re now aware of its cost to the economy. Now, imagine what kind of “boom” we could experience in an economy bereft of it.

The consumer class has become exhausted at all levels. This is the freezing of the credit markets: people don’t want to consume anymore.

The fact is the money that our economy functions with has no underlying value. It’s completely imaginary. This is why the monetarist theory is failing. We can of course always print more, can’t we? I used to be a Monetarist when I worked in the securities industry. There is something very appealing to the Monetarist mindset; we can control and stablize the economy by controlling the money in the marketplace. When this money does not represent real value (be it work gold etc.) and all value is derivative we get in the situation where we are today, with a working class that wants to work and build for the future, not consume today with no future tomorrow.

Our system has failed us when we have work to be done, and people to do it, but the system actively keeps the workers from work.

Nobody wants to let go of their stack of cash, for fear that it will be worthless. It is worthless.

I’m calling on all my friends to end the consumer class. What will be the currency of our post consumer era?
 

doubleplusthanks to my sexy editor

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I bet there are some of you out there want to contribute to a political forum. Let pu.bli.sh be your forum for anything topical (writing, art, photography, strangeness, ANYTHING).

Let me know if you have any issues with login/profile creation.

Alas, I still have a 9-5 job, so I’m finding my previous schedule of 1-3 daily posts a less-than-sustainable act to follow.

Maybe I’ll get a second wind. Until then, join me!

Michael Moore hit the nail on the head in this interview with Larry King about the auto industry bailout:

And I mean those guys that were testifying today, one of — the Ford chairman is making something like $22 million a year and his company lost $2 billion last year. The G.M. chairman is making $15 million a year. His company lost $39 billion last year. And he’s rewarded with a $15 million payout.

I mean this is — this is just absolutely insane.

But I’ll tell you what it really has proven to me, Larry, is that these guys, after all of that stuff they’ve been telling us all these years about go capitalism, free market, free enterprise, they don’t believe in any of that.

They don’t believe in free enterprise or a free market. They want — they want socialism for themselves. They want a handout…

KING: Yes.

MOORE: …and a net for themselves. To hell with everybody else, but give it to them.

KING: As…

MOORE: And I think, really, what we’re seeing here right now with them, with the banks, we’re seeing the end of capitalism — the end of capitalism as we know it.

KING: Has…

MOORE: And I say good riddance.

KING: As Mel Brooks…

MOORE: It hasn’t helped the people or the planet.

KING: As Mel Brooks once classically said, where did we go right?

The rich have this view of poor people as a disease, and not knowing their take on disease, I can only assume their strategy is to ignore them and maybe they will go away. The homeless don’t make it on our census sheets. They’re not counted among the current unemployed. Their story has been untold for decades. Unfortunately that is nothing new.

Our “Free Market” social contract has been to agree on poverty as a casualty of a system skewed to protect corporations over individuals. The agreement gave the Middle class ammunition in their inevitable confrontation with poverty in their communities (assuming most Middle-classers can’t afford the upgrade to a gated community); the justification for dismissing the poor and homeless as lazy, drunk, or worse.

America’s Upper class now has more capital than any of us can even begin to wrap our heads around (Bernie Madoff just walked away from having to account for the $1,000,000, disguised as jewelry, he laundered to his family). What do they know about working for a living? What do they know about keeping a budget, making ends meet, or being self-made? It really is just easier to understand their economy in terms of an elite socialist niche, carved out for about 5% of Americans, under the guise of a “Free Market”.

Only the Middle class offers a realistic study on Capitalism as it’s been exalted. It’s the last group to walk the Capitalist line, follow the Capitalist rules, and prop up the Capitalist banks. This army marched long enough to spin their neighbor’s decline in the same way they spun poverty: to apply labels of laziness, drunkenness, and insanity in order not to empathize and potentially fall down with them. The Middle Class’s race to the bottom is marked by broken families, rising substance abuse, suicide, and a nice, stucco exterior.

Earth to Middle Class: Stop pretending you ever had an invitation to the American Capito-socialist orgy. Such an invitation comes with a shining, super-socialist safety net should you decide to run your own little Ponzi scheme. I don’t know about you guys, but my safety net is currently my Dad. What’s his?

…or are our celebrities presidents?

The broader question being: Have we become obsessed with celebrities because we haven’t had adequate leadership? (end: central leadership. Contemporarily, Obama)

…or has our desire for central leadership diminished slowly since the advent of the printing press, our attentions instead focused on an ever-growing celebrity network? (end: individual leadership, or bubble-up).

The internet has begun to blur the line between celebrity (star) and layperson. It allows us immediate biographical information, revealing that they’re “just like us”. That knowledge begins to empower the individual to stop looking outward for guidance. The emergence of Obama confirms this for us, through his embrace of technology (use of viral campaign media) and his belief in human rights (ending poverty, torture, etc.) and our constitution (one president-at-a-time). He’s a star in a different sense. His fame circulated throughout the world very quickly.

We can look to him, or look inward, to analyze ourselves and our motives.

As is my current style, I’m choosing not to fear the future and instead find promise in emerging knowledge. I think science fiction paints a traditionally morose picture of the future in a way to warn us about the dangers of using new technology unwisely. However, I don’t think we need to look into the future at all to see negative technological manifestations. What we can be sure of is that negative forces aren’t sustainable, and our species’ survival instinct will always at least try to overcome them.

One recent emerging technology is the ability to read minds, essentially. To some, this ability raises ethical questions a la Minority Report. It’s true that such use of technology is dangerously possible. But when we fear for such possibilities, we’re ignoring the more insidious ways in which we suppress human freedoms without new technology.

Consider indictment and conviction. Our legal system is imperfect at best, and imperfection promises that innocent people are put to death unjustly. Consider brainwashing. In a way, it’s a technology unto itself. Technologies that facilitate brainwashing (marketing, “news”, and religion) merely speed up and streamline the process. Brainwashing has effectively taught us to accept these systemic casualties. It has convinced us that there is a black and white answer to good vs. evil, and that if some people die unjustly in order to ensure the “real” evil is put to death, we accept that we must break human eggs to make human omelets.

So, what’s the difference? Our prison population is becoming hard to ignore in the way we’ve tried to ignore the more innocuous landfill population. Why should we be scared of a mind reading technology that might better quantify the concept of criminal justice?

I would argue, in a broader sense, that we wouldn’t focus such technology simply on convicting fellow humans. Although we consider computers to be very fast, we’re limited in how we interact with them. In order to get my thoughts into this blog, I’ve needed to speed up my typing ability to keep up with the thoughts in my brain, and alas, some of those thoughts don’t make it to the page because of what I’ve trained myself to believe is the process of (sentence, paragraph, thesis) formulation. But what about the thoughts in-between? Wouldn’t that reveal something more about what we as humans are trying to communicate with each other?

We’re concerned about mind reading, either out of embarrassment for what really goes through our minds, or out of the implications of being caught thinking something terrible. But if we’re more progressive thinkers, our awful thoughts might be the result of recognizing the atrocities inherent in our world, to the possible end of directing more energy to eradicate human suffering.