#365 / I Would Like To Wish For Real Work

Dateline: Pili, Camarines sur province, south of Manila

February 24, 2011

Philippine environmentalists have set a world record for the most trees planted simultaneously, kickstarting an enormous reforesteration programme, organisers said Thursday. 

Nearly 7,000 people helped in the mass planting of saplings in denuded forest and grassland in the eastern province of Camrines Sur on Wednesday, said Mara Joneil Cordova, spokeswoman for El Verde (The Green) project. 

"We had 64,096 trees planted in 15 minutes. This was certified by the Guinness Book of World Records that everything was accurate and correct," Cordova told AFP. 

The effort beat the previous Guinness world record of 50,033 trees planted in India last year, she said. 

Wednesday marked the start of the provincial government-backed programme to plant 12 million trees in the logged forests of Camarines Sur by next year. 

The planting, on government-owned land, is intended to stop erosion and restore watersheds, she said. 

The forests of the Philippines are among the 10 most endangered in the world, according to global environment group Conservation International.

My wish, for the year just coming:

To Be Of Use

Marge Piercy

The people I love the best

jump into work headfirst

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

I have to say, I love those last two lines:

The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

In the shadow of extinction, these is so much real work to do!

Image Credit:
https://feed.org.ph/media-centre/press-releases-2016/land-bank-fulfils-their-promise-we-help-you-grow/img_7303/

#364 / What Should Be Our New Year Message?

"Happy New Year!" That phrase will soon be peppering our emails, social media postings, and even handwritten notes (for those who still employ the U.S. Postal Service to communicate). I feel certain that you will read exactly that sentiment on a soon-to-appear edition of this blog. 

Firing off such a New Year's greeting is certainly appropriate. As I say, I am planning to send such a message, myself. In a more profound way, however, I think we all, as citizens, should be thinking about exactly what sort of message we would like to transmit to the world, on behalf of the United States, as we look to the year ahead. 

On Monday, December 2, 2019, I read an article in The New York Times about a drone killing in Afghanistan. One of the civilian victims of our drone strike was a woman who had just given birth at a hospital. She was on her way home. Hey, Congratulations!!! Happy New Year to the little child who escaped death. That's the great news that was featured in the article. The mother died, but the child was saved. Of course, that child will now grow up, from day one, without a mother, but at least that child is alive! Let's rejoice!!

Seriously, this seems to have been the implicit message of that news article. What kind of message is that?

William Astore, a retired Lieutenant General in the United States Air Force, has written a piece worth thinking about, as we enter the New Year. He titled it, "American Exceptionalism Is Making Earth Uninhabitable." That's where I got the picture, above. 

Astore's point is not only that the unending military adventures of the United States are wreaking physical damage to the planet (though they are, and he points this out as his very first observation). But even more important than that, I think, is what Astore says right after mentioning the physical damage that our military is doing:

In waging endless war, Americans are ... mutinying against the planet. In the process, we are spoiling the last, best hope of earth: a concerted and pacific effort to meet the shared challenges of a rapidly warming and changing planet.

Astore is correct that our last, best hope is to help inspire and to work in a concerted and pacific effort to meet the challenge of global warming. Everyone on Earth needs to be involved. If we are killing mothers who just gave birth, and then expressing happiness that the mother's child was saved, the message we are sending is not good.

Sending more planes and drones, more arms and men, and continuing to kill, is more than counterproductive. Our nation - and believe me, we are all implicated, our government represents us - is converting the only dream that can save us into a vanishing hope. That is what I got from Astore's article.

"Happy New Year?"

Only if we use this year, upcoming, to transform this nation at its heart. No more "exceptionalism," that thinks not only that we are "different," but that thinks we are "better."

The Fate of all the peoples of the Earth hangs in the balance, and we need to act on the basis of what we actually know to be true: we are in this life together, all of us.

What should be our New Year message?

Can I suggest that we insist on Peace!

Image Credit:
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/american-exceptionalism-is-making-earth-uninhabitable/

#363 / New Year's Predictions?

Quartz is an online news source that sends out various emails to those who sign up. One of their regular email bulletins is called the "Quartz Daily Obsession." Quartz advertises this bulletin as an "interactive email for curious minds." By subscribing, Quartz says, we can "escape the stale news cycle with forgotten histories, surprising facts, and vital stats." 

I got one of those "Daily Obsession" emails not so long ago, and I found that Quartz was obsessing about the idea of "prediction." This does seem like an appropriate topic for an end of the year rumination on the meaning of things. Here's what Quartz had to say:

Future Tense

Humans have always been obsessed with predicting the future. By knowing what’s coming next, we’re better able to plan our actions, whether that’s saving more grain for a harsh winter, or knowing it’s a good idea to invest in a commodity because the price will go up in the future. The correct prediction guarantees success—or survival. 

There’s just one problem: We’re terrible at predicting the future. Blame psychology, evolution, or the complexity of the data, but the truth is that we mostly get in our own way.

Is it possible to get better at prediction? Or, could we create systems to do it for us? Think you know what’s coming next?

Now, this is just the first paragraph of the Quartz piece on prediction. Click on this link to read the entire article. At the end, the article advises us of the following, trying to provide us some comfort, I'd say, in the face of what seems really to be an unpredictable future: 

Our predictive skills may not be our greatest assets as humans, but they’re at least adequate. “Good enough is good enough.”

If comfort is what you are looking for, I guess that Quartz is offering up an analysis that serves the purpose. I, however, have a significant disagreement with Quartz and the way it treats "prediction." Quartz seems to believe that prediction ought to be, and theoretically could be, an accurate method of knowing the future. 

That's not the way it works, the way I understand it. If you want to know the future, and use the various tools that Quartz says are "good enough," you may well miss the future entirely. Why is that? 

That's because the only things we can really know about are the present and the past. While we can extrapolate from current trends, and thus "predict" the future based on contemporary observation and our knowledge of past history, the future, in fact, is created by what we do now, and we can always do something unexpected, and new. 

In fact,  we can't, really, "predict" the future at all. What we can do is to analyze the present. Sometimes, the inertia of existing realities carries us in a direction that we have decided is probably where the momentum of past choices is taking us. Other times, using that method is definitely not "good enough." 

I think it's worth repeating what I learned at a recent event sponsored by LandWatch Monterey County. I wrote about it in a blog posting in the middle of November: 

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Image Credit:

https://pixels.com/featured/9-hands-on-crystal-ball-and-cryptocurrency-allan-swart.html

#362 / End The Debt Penalty!

The photo above comes from a recent article posted on the Yahoo! Finance website. I think it illuminates a point worth making. 

We are encouraging young people to get a college education, and the invitation to go to college comes with an implied promise that getting that degree will be liberating to those who do pursue a college education, and that going to college will benefit students both intellectually and economically. 

Would that this were consistently true! After we disposed of real slavery in this country we still had "debt slavery." As the Encyclopedia Britiannica tells us, this form of enslavement was not practiced solely in the United States. We did, however, definitely put it into practice in a very systematic way: 

Debt slavery, also called debt servitude, debt bondage, or debt peonage, a state of indebtedness to landowners or merchant employers that limits the autonomy of producers and provides the owners of capital with cheap labour. Examples of debt slavery, indentured servitude, peonage, and other forms of forced labour exist around the world and throughout history, but the boundaries between them can be difficult to define (see slavery). It is instructive to consider one prevalent system of debt slavery as a means of identifying the characteristics typical of the condition. This article therefore describes the system that existed among sharecroppers and landowners in the American South from the 1860s until World War II.

After the end of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, many African Americans and some whites in the rural South made a living by renting small plots of land from large landowners who were usually white and pledging a percentage of their crops to the landowners at harvest—a system known as sharecropping. Landowners provided sharecroppers with land, seeds, tools, clothing, and food. Charges for the supplies were deducted from the sharecroppers’ portion of the harvest, leaving them with substantial debt to landowners in bad years. Sharecroppers would become caught in continual debt, especially during weak harvests or periods of low prices, such as when cotton prices fell in the 1880s and ’90s. Once in debt, sharecroppers were forbidden by law to leave the landowner’s property until their debt was paid, effectively putting them in a state of slavery to the landowner. Between 1880 and 1930 the proportion of Southern farms operated by the tenants increased from 36 to 55 percent (emhasis added).

Southern sharecroppers weren't the only ones, either:

Corporate oligarchs benefit when the economic system "limits the autonomy of producers and provides the owners of capital with cheap labour." We know what that means from our historical experience, and we should know that this is what our current system does, too.

Our economy requires an ever more educated workforce, and education, by itself, is indeed a route to liberation. Going to college can honestly promise benefits to those individuals who do pursue higher education, and there are immense benefits to our society as a whole. In other words, there is a good reason for our society to promote and provide a college education to all who want to pursue it. Free public education doesn't have to stop at a student's graduation from high school. Everyone benefits if students who want to go on to college are able to pursue a college degree.

Instead of recognizing the collective benefits of providing students with a college education, however, and thus integrating college into our system of free public education, we have constructed a scheme by which young people, hoping to enrich their lives, are in fact trapped into an endless round of underpaid work, all in order to discharge their "debt to society." The government has been complicit with the giant corporations, and has turned promising young students into prisoners of debt.

I am happy to see that presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have made the termination of student debt a keystone issue in their campaigns. Whatever your presidential preferences may be, I hope you will join with me (and with other voters) to demand that this system of debt slavery be ended!

Image Credit:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/student-loan-employer-pay-bill-211313540.html

#361 / Lapdogs

Eric Bohlert is a progressive political writer, and is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush. Bohlert has also written Bloggers on the Bus, about the role that blogging plays in contemporary politics.

In a recent piece published on the AlterNet website, Bohlert asks this question: "Why is the media so obsessed with what Wall Street and billionaires think of Elizabeth Warren?" Good question. Bohlert points to a host of examples that demonstrate that the news media seems never to tire of talking about what Wall Street and the financial community think about Warren's presidential campaign:

Yet again and again, journalists push the premise that it’s a big problem that Wall Street isn’t supporting a prominent Democrat this election. For instance, the Times recently interviewed “more than two dozen hedge-fund managers, private-equity and bank officials, analysts and lobbyists” to find out what they thought, and feared, about Warren’s campaign. CNBC also checked in with “hedge fund managers and private equity executives” to chronicle their Warren complaints. And I’m just wondering: On paper, is it possible to find a coalition of voters less likely to support a Democrat than hedge-fund managers, private-equity and bank officials, analysts and lobbyists? I seriously doubt it. That’s like doing a news report on how college history professors aren’t supporting Trump in 2020. Yes, and … ?

Here is Bohlert's conclusion. I think he's right:

The never-ending emphasis sends a clear message that the votes and donations of Wall Street bankers and billionaires matter more than other people’s. But they don’t. 

The votes and donations of Wall Street bankers and billionaires do NOT matter more than our votes and donations, but the fact is, it is not only the "mainstream media" that thinks that bankers and billionaires are more important than we are. All of us, to some degree or another, do give credence to the idea that those with more money matter more. And, of course, there is a reason for that. "Money talks." And money not only "talks," it buys things. 

Like elections. 

The only antidote to the oligarchy that is threatening completely to capture our politics is the active and engaged participation in politics by "ordinary people." That means you and me.

The press may be like "lapdogs," rolling over for money. We don't have to do that.

And we shouldn't!

Image Credit:
http://www.vetstreet.com/our-pet-experts/7-lap-dog-breeds-we-love

#360 / Here We Go Again

I have never been much enthused about my birthday, and am perhaps even less so, now. There is a definite mixed message when I start checking out the life expectancy tables and find that I am "expected" to have only 12.29 more birthdays. After that, I am not expected ever to have a birthday again. 

Of course, that is only one way of looking at it. Mostly, I see it the other way around, and with every additional birthday that comes along, I realize just what a blessing it has been to have been alive. 

That, not the life expectancy tables, is what I am thinking about today. And one of the blessings I count is all the people I know, and have known, colleagues, students, friends and family, those involved with me in various political engagements, and those others who may never know what joy they have brought into my life. If you happen to be reading this blog posting, that probably does include you.

I am also happy to have learned a few things from my favorite Nobel Prize Laureate. This verse, for instance, pretty much captures my thought, as I contemplate another year upcoming. You can click this link (which I highly recommend) if you'd like to hear all about it:

Well my ship’s been split to splinters 

And it’s sinking fast 

I’m drownin’ in the poison, 

Got no future, got no past 

But my heart is not weary, 

It’s light and it’s free 

I’ve got nothin’ but affection 

For all those who’ve sailed with me

Image Credit:
https://stellar.ie/trending/the-real-reason-we-put-candles-on-birthday-cakes-is-actually-pretty-cool/32087

#359 / A Barry Lopez Christmas

Christmas greetings to all, and just one more reference to that Barry Lopez interview that I have recently mentioned. 

For Christians, Christmas is one of the most important holidays. Really, there are actually only two holidays of any significance for Christians: Chrismas and Easter. Both of these Christian holidays are imbued with profound theological significance, and in celebrating them Christians make assertions that are contrary to ordinary experience and common sense. As theologians have noted, in fact, the Christian teaching that God was born of a virgin, lived a human life, was crucified, died, and then rose from the dead, is nothing less than a "scandal."

Bahnson: Earlier you mentioned prayer and ceremony. Tell me who God is for you. 

Lopez: That. [Gestures to the trees outside the window and the river beyond.] Everything outside the self. Outside the realm of “I am important”; “I” this, “I” that ... 

In our lives most of us have a longing to be included. In many Western traditions when you pray, what you are saying to God is “Include me. I want to be included.” Your life becomes seeing how to be worthy of inclusion and how to include others. 

You know, I had a Roman Catholic education. I never developed any antipathy for the Church, though most of my friends did. They were sometimes irate. They felt tricked. Duped. When I went to Notre Dame [as an undergraduate], I went to Mass three times a week in the dormitory chapel. In New York City, as an adolescent, I was in these little groups of five altar boys who went around to different churches in Manhattan to serve at High Mass because we knew all the performance detail for celebrating Easter High Mass at midnight, for example. We had all that stuff down tight. If the priest lost his way in the liturgy, we could quietly steer him back on course. We knew which pieces of incense were to be placed where in the paschal candle. We were locked in to all the details of the ceremony. 

I began to drift away from all that in my late teens, but not in anger. It was time for me to go. Time for me to get out of that comfortable place where all my classmates were white, Catholic, male, and middle-class ... There was something I couldn’t define about my education that made it feel incomplete. That soon led to coming back out west, where I grew up. I came to Oregon to get an MFA, though I quickly saw that the program was not much good — for me. I did meet some people there at the university who became very important for me — Barre Toelken [in the English department] was one of them. If there were any people of color or Native Americans or Asians in that very white town, they always turned up at the Toelken house for dinner. I thought, Yeah, this is more what I was looking for. 

Bahnson: You’d found your people. 

Lopez: Yeah. And a greater awareness that the Roman Catholic experience I’d had was bounded. (Christ, of course, was not.) What was I going to do about that? I’m still working my way through this. I don’t want to throw away half a lifetime of understanding the Divine in terms that I was comfortable with. I’m reminded of a short story I wrote called “The Letters of Heaven.” [It appears in the Fall 1997 issue of The Georgia Review. —Ed.] Historical fiction. Martín de Porres and Rosa de Lima, in that story, were more than seventeenth-century Catholic saints. They were two people participating in the ecstatic experience of the Divine in all they did. I was attracted to that. My understanding of God at that time was “Look elsewhere. Look for manifestations of the Divine that occur outside your reference points.” The sign of the Divine for me was any experience of profound love. If you experience that, it’s a sign of the presence of God. 

I still think that way. If somebody is on the paths called Hindu or Catholic or Jewish and moving toward that depth of love, I’m thrilled to see it. I was in Lebanon once, in Beirut. I asked a man if I could go to “ceremony” with him. For the first time I went to a mosque. I felt filled with love there. I felt companionship toward all the people I was with. I felt the presence of the Divine because of the serious and humble effort at prayer: to forget all the intrusions, the distractions, and concentrate on the Divine. I thought to myself, I want to be here. It’s incidental that it was a mosque. 

I wish I knew better how to communicate with people who say, “You’ve lost your faith.” I have not lost my faith. My faith has grown. [Laughs.] You know, when I say “adults” and think of what Aboriginal and Native American and Eskimo people have taught me about what it means to be a grown-up, I want that transitional experience to occur for everyone. Things like nationalism or fanatic devotion to a particular interpretation of a sacred text bring nothing but pain and criminal behavior: murder, slander, ethnic war. If only we could just exist on this plane where everybody understood that the Divine is incomprehensible but sometimes apparent. And when it is apparent, it deserves your full attention. If you’re really advanced, you know you’re in the presence of the Divine even when you’re doing the dishes. So my answer to the trouble is: Make your acquaintance with God, in whatever form that takes for you. It’s just good relations with the Divine that gets you through the wickedest trouble (emhasis added).

The "scandal" of Christianity is the assertion that the "Divine is incomprehensible but sometimes apparent." The scandal is in the assertion that there is a "divinity," however incomprehensible, that does appear in a world that we usually believe is a world that we ourselves create. Any such assertion (an assertion of the importance of the "I") is a profound misapprehension. We are "creatures," not the Creator, and we are kin to all that lives in the World of Nature. We are dependent on that mysterious divinity that brought us to life, and that does appear, "sometimes." 

As Shakespeare wrote, there is "a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we will." To accept this is to acknowledge our place in a world that God created. 

The Christmas "story," like all true and great stories, seeks to explain something that is, in fact, incomprehensible and unexplainable. Why are we here? We truly don't know. But it is not our own doing. 

That we do know.

Luke 2:13-14 King James Version

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Image Credit:
https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/jesus-was-not-born-in-a-stable/

#358 / Barry Lopez: An Interview In The Sun

I continue to be astonished and delighted by every edition of The Sun magazine. The magazine has now been publishing for forty-five years, and I am chagrined to admit that I have come very late to the party. As I always do when I mention something I have seen in The Sun, I invite others to join in me, and to subscribe to this superlative journal. Click right here to subscribe to The Sun. 

In the December 2019 issue, The Sun ran an article titled, "The World We Still Have: Barry Lopez on Restoring Our Lost Intimacy With Nature." This article is a long and very wonderful discussion between Lopez and Fred Bahnson, who is affiliated with the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. I also see that Bahnson is a resident of the little town in which my maternal grandfather was born, Brevard, North Carolina, population approximately 8,000. I have always wanted to visit!

Here are several excerpts from Bahnson's inverview with Lopez, which touch on themes I have often explored in this blog:

Lopez: I don’t feel despair. What I feel is anxiety, having put myself in a place of responsibility by writing a book. ... There are millions of people like me — writers, painters, dancers, photographers, composers — who have chosen over a long period of time, like fifty years, to pursue the arts in a way that is not self-serving, self-celebratory. Maybe it’s arrogant of me to say this. But I believe there is a difference between writing for, to put it crudely, money and fame and writing for the health of the human community, for its survival. There’s a man who’s been in a formal sense an elder to me for thirty-eight years, and when I asked him about holding that position in a community and the discouragement you can feel, he said, “The only thing to understand is that you can never quit.” You can’t ever say, “Well, this is hopeless. We’re all going to go down the tube.” No. It’s not hope or despair or optimism you’re searching for; it’s a belief in humanity. Those feelings have, for many, developed under the umbrella of organized religion — being in service to a thing greater than the self. ...

Everything large-scale business promotes is antithetical to the support of life. The major, fundamental contradiction in this country is that you can’t have a true democracy built around the goals capitalism espouses. You can’t do it. You’ve got to change it, and what a vision that is. 

Bahnson: You’ve suggested that the figure of the culture hero — Prometheus or Siddhartha Gautama or Superman — is no longer relevant in the age of an exponentially expanding human population. The scale of the problem is beyond the lone hero. What stories should replace the story of the culture hero? 

Lopez: They haven’t been written yet. When you read hero stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the Odyssey, or the Aeneid, or any of the enshrined stories by which we define our culture in the West, you see it’s great literature, and that it’s deep and profound and true. But does it serve us now? I don’t think so. Too many people are standing around waiting for a hero to appear. And the idea that a woman or a man or a child will suddenly stand up and change everything seems naive now. The world is moving too quickly. There’s real trouble on every front: Governance. Social justice. Environment. Investment. 

Bahnson: That’s a profound idea, that those stories we’ve relied on for so long aren’t working anymore. We need different narratives. 

Lopez: We need new narratives at the center of which is a concern for the fate of all people. The story can’t be about the heroism of one person. It has to be about the heroism of communities. The mathematics here dictates that. 

Bahnson: And yet we can’t hold in our minds something like “humanity.” It’s too large a concept. To have a story that places at the center the well-being of everyone seems to negate what a story does, which is to focus on the specifics of a character or group of characters. 

Lopez: But story is merely a pattern that signifies. The blueprint for our story is before us all the time. Watch a flock of starlings. When you’re driving up an interstate in an agricultural landscape like California’s Central Valley, where there’s lots of sky, lots of space, you feel like you want to pull over and watch the display of coordination as a flock of starlings changes direction overhead. It’s important to consider that the starling is a pariah bird, an “ordinary avian,” not a golden eagle or a harlequin duck. The flock is carving open space up into the most complex geometrical volumes, and you have to ask yourself, How do they do that? The answer is: No one’s giving anyone else instructions. You look to the four or five birds immediately around you. You coordinate with them. The intricacy of that lattice means that one of the birds you’re using as a guide for your own maneuvering is itself watching the birds around it to coordinate itsmovement. There’s no leader, no driver. It is an aggregate of birds. To behold them is to take in something beautiful, a coordinated effort to do something in which there’s no leader, no hero. That’s to me the way around that dilemma of scale: a much greater level of coordination and deference toward others. 

You must rid yourself of the idea that only one person knows, and understand that genius might be manifest in one man or one woman in a particular moment, but that the quality of genius that characterizes humanity is actually possessed by the community. It might rise up and become reified in a single person in a group, but it doesn’t belong solely to that person (emphasis added).

Barry Lopez is pictured below. The full discussion between Bahnson and Lopez is available right here. It is most definitely recommended!

Barry Lopez

Image Credit:

(1) - https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29599792

(2) - https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/528/the-world-we-still-have

#357 / Leftish

That is Mariana Mazucato, above, described by The New York Times as a "leftish economist." Mazucato describes herself as follows: 

I am a Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), and Founder/Director of UCL's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. My work is focused on the relationship between innovation and the direction of growth, with emphasis on rethinking the public sector’s role to ensure growth is more innovation-led, inclusive and sustainable. I work with global leaders on ‘mission oriented’ policies, which can steer solutions towards grand challenges from the battle against climate warming to building resilient health systems. My 2013 book, The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths, looks at the ‘investor of first resort’ role that the State has played in the history of technological change — from the Internet to biotech— and the lessons for a Green New Deal. In 2016 I co-edited the book Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth focussed on new economic thinking to drive more effective economic policies. My 2018 book, The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economy, brings the debate about value back to the heart of economics, so to ensure we are rewarding value creation over value extraction and destruction.

In The Times' story about Mazucato, which appears on the front page of the "Sunday Business" section on December 1, 2019, Mazucato says that "the left is losing around the world because they focus too much on redistribution and not enough of the creation of wealth." Her analysis urges an "Entrepreneurial State," and complains about the "free-market wisdom that cutting public budgets spurs economic growth." In fact, she says, "there's been kind of a strange symbiosis between mainstream economic thinking and stupid policies."

I haven't read any of Mazucato's many books, but I like what she says in the article in The Times. Is there really "a symbiosis between mainstream economic thinking and stupid policies?" Is it really true that "the state," meaning the governmental institutions that have the potential, and mission, to represent us all, collectively, are really better innovators than those motivated by selfishly directed and individualistic materialism?

I think I can buy that. Color me convinced!

Image Credit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/business/mariana-mazzucato.html

#356 / When You Can't Trust The U.S. Government

The Wall Street Journal is, I think, a "go-to" source of information for the business class. I don't qualify in that category, but I read The Wall Street Journal, too. On Friday, November 29, 2019, The Journal ran an article titled, "Boeing's Next Jet Faces Scrutiny." I think that the article is, or should be, instructive for American business, which has celebrated, for the most part, the fact that the United States government is increasingly ready to accept business claims about product safety without independently verifying their veracity.

Take Boeing's 737 MAX airplane as a prime example. The Federal Aviation Administration "delegated" safety checks of the airplane to the manufacturer, which sped the plane into service without additional pilot training, and with what turned out to be a massively defective software system that helped crash two of the planes, killing hundreds of people.

"My bad" Boeing has now admitted.

Well, it turns out that other nations have relied upon the integrity of the FAA, and have heretofore assumed that if the FAA has certified a plane as safe, then the plane is, in fact, safe. That reliance on the United States' regulatory process has significantly benefitted Boeing.

No more!

If I were a business person in the United States, I would take a lesson from this recent article, and realize that when foreign nations can't trust the United States government (which more and more, under the current administration, is removing or weakening regulatory reviews of all kinds) the end result, in a global economy, is not "good," but "bad," for American business.

I, for one, don't trust Boeing, period. And, of course, I now don't trust the FAA, either, having learned that the FAA thinks it is just fine to delegate its responsibilities to the corporations that the FAA is supposed to regulate. I guess I am now going to have to rely on foreign government airplane safety reviews, instead of safety reviews by our own government. And I don't trust those other governments very much, either. Is the fact that the world can no longer trust the integrity of the United States government good for United States corporations?

I doubt it.

Just a thought for all those corporate types - and all their lobbyists, in every industry, seeking to weaken governmental regulatory reviews!

Image Credit:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-737-max-crisis-foreign-regulators-raise-scrutiny-of-boeings-next-jet-11574870007

#355 / Spy Games

The October 12-13, 2019, edition of The Wall Street Journal included a heart-rending article with the following title: "The FBI Lost Our Son." It is a story worth reading.

Pictured above are the parents of Billy Reilly, who became enmeshed in dealings with the FBI. As best as can be determined, Billy Reilly was recruited by the FBI as an unpaid spy and double agent. He ended up trraveling to the Ukraine during the period in which active and armed conflict was underway betweeen the Ukrainian and Russian armies. It appears that Billy is now dead. 

The Journal article tells a long story, and a sad one. The last line of the article encapsulates the Reillys' agony: 

"You murdered our son," Mrs. Reilly yelled. "Don't ever talk to us again."

I think it would be fair to say that a large percentage of our population is enamored with the idea that the world is filled with spies, and counterspies. We have come to believe that this is a natural feature of the reality we inhabit - and an exciting one! A positive one! We celebrate spy culture in novels and films.

The movie Spy Games, for instance, starring Brad Pitt, "received mostly positive reviews from film critics" and did pretty well at the box office. That is an example of how we have incorporated a positive story about espionage and counter-espionage into our understanding of what our national government is doing to protect us. At least, we have come to think that all of our "security" agencies are, in fact, increasing our national security. 

We ought to think more about whether glorifying the "spy game," or even tolerating it, is actually a good thing. 

I tend to think not!

Image Credit:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbi-lost-our-son-11570806358

#354 / False Equivalencies

I continue to have problems with the word "is," as that word is often used in social, political, and economic commentary. Linguistically speaking, the word "is" identifies an "equality" of some kind, often by way of an identification of an essential characteristic, or a description of a reality that brooks no contradiction. For instance: 

• He is a man. Or, she is a woman.

• He is selfish.

• Our economy is fundamentally oligarchic.

It is impossible to function without a word that tells what is real (and that, therefore, alerts us to what is not). The statements above, as examples of how "is" is often used, can help steer us towards an understanding of what is "real" and "true." However, these statements (again as examples of many similar ones) are far from determinative. 

Walt Whitman would have understood, perfectly, for instance, modern discussions of gender identity - to pick out the first of my examples. As Whitman tells us, in his famous stanza from Song of Myself: 

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

When the word "is" is taken to articulate an uncontradicted reality, and thus to state an equivalency that we are asked to accept as the entire truth, the word "is" is almost always betraying us. 

Not only do we, and all things, "contain multitudes," including contrdictions that are essential to whatever actually "is," it is also true that what exists now, and what "is," in this exact moment, is not what will exist after we act, after we do some new thing that can change the world. 

That, particularly, is where I continue to have lots of problems with the word "is." Just because we can, with some significant precision, discover and describe what "is," right now, we often fool ourselves into thinking that this current reality states accurately what "is," inevitably, and that when something "is," right now, we know from that fact what will always and inevitably be the case. 

That is not true, however, because we each possess the gift of human freedom, and that means that we can create, as if by conjuration, something totally new, something never known or seen before. 

Ojalá that we not forget this! On this truth hangs the fate of our human civilization.

Image Credit:

https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/is-not-equal-to_262000

#353 / An Impeachment CounterPunch

Pretty much everyone I know has supported the impeachment of Donald J. Trump. In Santa Cruz County, where I live, local demonstrations urging the president's impeachment were held in both Santa Cruz and Watsonville. The Santa Cruz demonstration is pictured, above.

President Trump is a crude, narcissistic liar, who has used his position in office to advance his personal fortunes and his family business. Doing those things, along with efforts to promote notions of his personal greatness, and to support environmental and economic policies that benefit the corporations and the ultra-rich, appear to be his main objectives. Given all that, it seems obvious, to most of the people with whom I talk, that the president should have been impeached (as he now has been), and that he should be removed from office after a trial in the Senate.

Of course, the nature of the most compelling arguments against the president may also be seen as a sign of the weakness of the case for his removal from office by way of impeachment. Donald J. Trump is a political and policy disaster zone posing as a president. But this means that the strongest arguments against him are really "political" ones. "Political" arguments are supposed to be settled at the ballot box, not by impeachment. In his six-page letter to Nancy Pelosi, sent prior to the impeachment vote, this is exactly what the president argued. 

When I posted the president's letter on my Facebook page, indicating that I thought the letter was "worth evaluating for its persuasiveness," none of those who then commented on the letter thought it was "persuasive" in any way.

I tend to think that the president's letter, sent on White House stationery, did make his strongest case against impeachment. What is the president's best anti-impeachment argument? His best argument is that the whole process has been totally "political" from the outset, with calls for his impeachment having begun on the president's first day in office. The president's best argument is that the entire process demonstrates a fixed desire to impeach, based on whatever excuse can be dredged up. This leads directly to the conclusion that the specific offenses cited in the Articles of Impeachment have thus lost any claim to legitimacy. This argument may well not be "persuasive" to my Facebook friends, or to most of those living in Santa Cruz County, but it's a pretty good argument for lots of other people. 

I think it's fair to say that most of those who have strongly supported the impeachment of the president do not believe that the Senate will actually vote to remove the president from office. If that assessment proves to be accurate, it will be accurate because the argument that "this is just a Democratic Party political hatchet job" is going to be persuasive to lots of Senators (admittedly, probably all of them members of the Republican Party). Let it be said, though, that if the constituents of those Republican Senators were outraged and aggrieved at the president's conduct, and supported his removal from office, a number of Senators who are predicted to vote against the president might, in fact, vote to uphold the Articles of Impeachment, and to remove him from the presidency.

The president's argument, in his letter to Nancy Pelosi, will have succeded in its objectives, and will have proved itself persuasive, if Republican Party voters, throughout the nation, end up concluding that the impeachment process is just more "politics." That claim is the president's best defense against impeachment and removal.

My personal thoughts about impeachment leave me feeling that our current situation is very problematic. The charges advanced against the president, when they go to the Senate, will be portrayed and considered by many not as a solemn use of the Constitutional process of impeachment, but as just one more evidence that our nation is horribly divided, on "political" lines. The process, as it comes to a conclusion in the Senate, will confirm to many (in both parties) that everything about our government is "political," and that "politics" is the only thing that is going on in this entire impeachment adventure. Since "politics" does not have a very good reputation among the public, the impeachment process is likely to weaken, not strengthen, civic engagement and a commitment to the kind of political involvement that would allow us to face and surmount the considerable dangers ahead, including the existential challenge of global warming.

*****

With those thoughts as a preface, I am mostly writing this blog post to draw readers' attention to a recent (and rather long) article that appeared in CounterPunch.

Titled, "Impeachment: What Lies Beneath," the article begins with an analysis something like the one I have just provided here - though the CounterPunch version is, in my view, quite a bit more snarky.

CounterPunch and I are in agreement that impeachment, in its current form, is highly problematic, and that the current proceedings are unlikely to remove the president from office. I am concerned that the process will drive people away from the kind of political engagement that I think is vitally important. The author of the CounterPunch article, Jim Kavanagh, puts another spin on the situation. He suggests that proceeding with the impeachment does not make political sense for the Democratic Party, and so deduces that it is at least possible, if not actually "likely," that there is something else going on - something hidden "beneath" what we know about the impeachment from reading about it in the press, and from watching the hearings and debate on television.

Kavanagh admits that he is "speculating," but his speculations have a certain logic to them if you are at all suspicious of the government. He says, for instance, that a majority in the Senate may well vote to impeach the president, because the powers that really run the country, called out by President Eisenhower as the "military-industrial complex," do not find President Trump a reliable ally. Those in the government who wish to continue the United States' far-flung military adventurism are anticipating, says Kavanagh, the near-term need to use United States' military forces in the Middle East, as a war begins next spring between Israel and Iran, a war that will (the article predicts) quite possibly involve the use of nuclear weapons.

It is, again, all just "speculation," and maybe Kavanagh is a complete "kook," but I am hoping that some of the readers of this blog posting will take time to read that CounterPunch article, and to consider whether he might be right that "something is happening here," and that we "don't know what it is."

If that were true, it would behoove us all to start paying very close attention, because if Kavanagh's speculations have any reality at all, what is happening here is very, very scary.

Image Credit:

https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2019/12/18/santa-cruz-watsonville-impeachment-rallies-attract-hundreds-of-demonstrators/

#352 / Getting Guidance From The Grocery Store

Online, the article is titled, "The Grocery Store Where Produce Meets Politics." In the hard copy version, The New Yorker calls this article, "Bounty Hunters." The article is in the November 25, 2019, edition of the magazine, which has a weird picture of a Thanksgiving Turkey on the cover:

I have written in this blog about "Sports As Metaphor." This article, by Alexandra Schwartz, seems to posit "Grocery As Metaphor." The Park Slope Food Co-op, which is the subject of The New Yorker article, has 17,000+ working members. That means that they actually work in the store. According to Schwartz (and I am definitely prepared to believe her) the Park Slope Food Co-op is "the biggest food cooperative run on member labor in the country, and, most likely, the world."

One comment in the article that I particularly enjoyed was from a former member, who said that the Food Co-op was "a user-friendly way of experiencing the pitfalls of communism." Drive it before you buy, I guess! This analysis did come from a "former" member.

A more positive statement about the food co-op follows. This is Joe Holtz speaking. He is identified as the "keeper of the Co-op's institutional memory," and talks about how the Co-op got started: 

"We had a good, robust discussion of all the different models of co-ops that we knew and what we thought we should do and what problems we were trying to address,” Holtz said. “But also, if I could jump around for a minute, the bigger picture is ‘Why do we want to start a co-op?’ For me, I felt that the whole idea of American culture being all about individual success—not that I didn’t think that individual success was legitimate, but I thought that our society was too focussed on it, and not focussed enough on community success, and community institutions.”

This final observation rings true to me. Individual success is, certainly, a "legitimate" goal, but are we, in the end, "focused enough on community success, and community institutions?"

I tend to think not. 

Looks like there is a grocery store, in Brooklyn, that can give us some guidance!

Image Credits:

(1) - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/25/the-grocery-store-where-produce-meets-politics

(2) - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine

#351 / When You Lie To Survive

I am not a big "Survivor" fan, though I have been exposed to the show on occasion. For anyone not in the know, Survivor is an acclaimed television series on CBS. Jeff Probst, its host, is pictured above. "Survivor" premiered in May 2000, so it has been around a long time. Season 39 has just ended, and this last season has been very controversial. For the first time ever, a player was removed from the game - by the management. 

I found out about the controversy from a recent article in The New York Times. I recommend the article to you. Click the link to the title, below, and see if you can slip by the paper's paywall. The Times' article is headlined, "How ‘Survivor’ Failed Its #MeToo Test."

As The Times tells the story, the facts seem clear. One of the female contestants accused one of the male contestants of inappropriately touching her (and in fact, the male contestant seems to have acted inappropriately with more than one female contestant, but one contestant, in particular, complained). Because "Survivor" is "Reality TV," the incidents were all documented with filmed footage. No doubt about that inappropriate touching! The upshot was that the complaining female player was voted off the game by the other contestants, and the male offender was able to keep on playing. 

Until, that is, he was suddenly terminated by the management, maybe because he got inappropriately touchy with one of the crew members. That's the rumor that was reported in The Times.

At any rate, I enjoyed reading The Times' analysis, which pointed out that CBS has the reputation for condoning and protecting sexual harassment, even in very extreme cases. Here are the final paragraphs in the article, with some highlighted language that particularly caught my attention: 

“Survivor” loves metaphors — “On this island, fire represents life” and all that. It sometimes seems to view itself as a metaphor for, and thus separate from, the real world. Players regularly distinguish between “the game” and “real life.” Its gameplay requires a kind of moral compartmentalization, which is relatively innocuous when it involves, say, lying to someone about your vote at a tribal council.

But ultimately, “Survivor” is a real thing that exists in the world. Sexual misconduct on “Survivor” is not a metaphor for sexual misconduct. It is an actual action that happens to an actual person. “Survivor” is not a metaphor for a workplace. It is a workplace, not just for the crew and producers but for the contestants, who sign contracts, make money and contribute to the product of a multi-million-dollar business. 

For the sake of its cast and crew — as well as the message it’s sending to millions of men, women and kids in its audience — “Survivor” needs to start acting like that. It needs to confront, in its regular post-finale special, how it failed, why it was wrong and what it’s going to change. 

“Survivor” may construct its own reality for entertainment. But this isn’t a game (emphasis added).

The Times' article appeared in a "Critic's Notebook" column by James Poniewozik, so it includes "opinion," as well as "fact." Assuming that the facts are as presented, I think Poniewozik is correct in his opinion that CBS, and "Survivor," absolutely failed its #MeToo Test. However, I want to suggest that Poniewozik and The Times failed to carry through their analysis to what might have been a more complete and robust evaluation of the show. 

The sexual harassment that occurred was "real life," not a "fantasy," and should have been treated, immediately, like the real offense it was. That's the point of the article. Granted. 

But is it really true that lying, the very basis of the entire game, should be let off the hook? Should we agree that we can "compartmentalize" lying, and say that it's just fine to lie, since "Survivor" is not actually about "Reality," but is just a game? The argument seems to be that "Survivor" needs to acknowledge "Reality" in the case of sexual harassment, but that we don't need to think about "Reality" when it comes to lying.

Our president has announced that it is perfectly acceptable for him to grab women by their private parts, and that lying is just the same sort of thing, both of these being minor indiscretions, if you can even count them as indiscretions, at all. Most of my friends are appalled by the president's behavior, and by his justifications. He, too, however, is a "Reality TV" personality, and he has obviously learned that "lying" is perfectly acceptable. 

That is not my view. "Lying" isn't acceptable, ever, and a show that says that the way to win a million dollars is by being the best liar in the group of liars that make up the "tribe" is not helping our society to live long and prosper. 

If you need to "lie to survive" you ought to get off the show. But that's not the lesson that "Survivor" aims to teach. It teaches the opposite. 

Image Credit:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/arts/television/survivor-dan-spilo.html

#350 / L.F.G.

I always appreciate learning new words - and new acronyms, too! Thank goodness for the Urban Dictionary. Without it, how would I have been able to interpret the recent endorsement of Elizabeth Warren by Megan Rapinoe? Rapinoe is pictured above. Here's an excerpt from the "On Politics" bulletin I read in a recent email from The New York Times: 

Ms. Warren snagged the coveted Megan Rapinoe endorsement, and during their phone call, Ms. Rapinoe shared a women’s national soccer team saying.

“I don’t know if you can cuss on here, but it’s L.F.G., so let’s do this,” she said.

“All right, Megan, you and me,” Ms. Warren said, laughing. “L.F.G.”

Within hours, the phrase was on a T-shirt in Ms. Warren’s campaign store

Rapinoe's acronym is good advice, generally - in politics and otherwise. At least, I think so, and because of the Urban Dictionary, I didn't have to guess:

Let's Fucking Go!

Image Credits:

(1) - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/17/never-back-downhow-to-negotiate-for-a-raise-like-megan-rapinoe.html
(2) - https://twitter.com/TeamWarren/status/1205651856514523142

#349 / Horse Race Politics

"Horse race journalism," says Wikipedia, is a term used to describe a kind of political reporting that "resembles coverage of horse races because of the focus on polling data, public perception instead of candidate policy, and almost exclusive reporting on candidate differences rather than similarities." 

Just picture the debate stage at one of the recent Democratic Party Presidential Primary Debates. It kind of resembles the start of a horse race, doesn't it? Of course, the same thing was true of the Republican Party Primary Debates in 2016 - though only men in that race!

Horse racing is not called the "sport of kings" for nothing. You have to have lots of money to compete. This is a fact that should make those who are observing the periodic political horse races that determine our democratic destiny wonder "who owns the horse?" The question is pertinent. Whoever owns the winning horse is going to get the trophy, and the money, that goes to the winner. 

That is why Joe Biden's recent decision to court money from Political Action Committees, representing corporations and others with access to lots of money, is such a big deal. As reported by The Intercept, a new, pro-Biden PAC (being formed at the candidate's urging) is "being organized by corporate lobbyists for [the] health care industry, weapons makers, finance..."

John Diaz, editorial page editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, has quite legitimately bemoaned the fact that Biden switched up on his promise to "raise money the straightforward way: with donations capped at $2,800 each." That is from an October 26, 2019, editorial statement that is available online only to Chronicle subscribers.

Among the current Democratic Party front runners, both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are financing their campaigns in what Diaz calls the "straightforward way," with small dollar contributions. 

When the race is over, in November of next year, and if the Democratic Party candidate wins, it will be pertinent to ask, "who owns the horse?" If it is "the health care industry, weapons makers, and finance," then those special interests will get the benefits of that political victory. They have been backing political winners, in both parties, for a long time now. Maybe it doesn't have to be like that.

I would like to think that our next presidential horse race will wind up with ordinary people "owning the horse." It is certainly possible, and, in fact, I am absolutely certain that that's the way it's "spozed to be."

Image Credits:

(1) - https://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-los-alamitos-horse-racing-deaths-20190629-story.html

(2) - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/31/20749497/2020-democratic-debates-presidential-election-winners-losers-night-two

(3) - https://time.com/3988276/republican-debate-primetime-transcript-full-text/