Happy Human Rights Day!

http://www.humanrightsactioncenter.org/petition/index.php

Here's an idea: along with all that crap our rulers think we need to carry with us whenever they deign to let us move around on our own home planet, how about carrying something valuable and humane (even eye-opening, since the US won't recognize the economic rights that are part of the UDHR, signed or not, and of course routinely violates other parts or supports violations, which amounts to the same thing).

More free time? Instead of squishing your butt into the couch in front of the TV, how about calling Congress at 877-331-1223 and telling them, while we're bailing the corporate "artificial persons" who created this mess we're in, to bail out the people who are this country.

Tell them we need a Social Monetary Fund, not IMF-style Friedmanomics. Tell them to get those damn troops home yesterday - all of them! And tell them to close down Guantanamo and every othet torture camp in the world, CIA or otherwise. And tell them if we don't want to be the world's favorite target, we could start helping the struggling peoples of the world instead of propping up their murderous, torturing governments and manipulating their economies to serve us (and by "us" I mean primarily "the rich who are not us, but who want us to think they are.")

Win for workers!

AP is reporting: UE workers occupying the Republic Windows plant in Chicago have won a major victory! Bailout recipient Bank of America has finally agreed - under intense pressure - to lend the company the money to pay the workers.

About time!

As always there is more they might have won: the right to run the plant themselves, as a co-op or something, for example. But this win is significant, and it might be just the beginning.

Certainly the Illinois Governor and US President-elect seem to see it that way. (Could it be that the economic crunch looks just bad enuf, like it might be ushering in a trend of plant closings, that the spirit of M. Keynes advises settling with workers fast, when their demands are confined to "the money we're owed" - in other words, before workers start demanding to keep their plants? That could still be next.)

Hold your butts!

OK, if you haven't seen this yet, brace yourself; it's worse than expected (and we expected pretty bad):

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081205/ap_on_bi_go_ec_fi/financial_meltdown

“[…] employers slashed 533,000 jobs in November, the most in 34 years […]"

By the way, that's around twice what the experts were predicting. And the most dire warnings had us around 300,000 job losses per month by the end of the year - optimistic, it seems!

“As companies throttled back hiring, the unemployment rate bolted from 6.5 percent in October to 6.7 percent last month, a 15-year high."

Remember, that's official unemployment, which doesn't count millions of people by design.

“These numbers are shocking," said economist Joel Naroff [… And ...] The unemployment rate would have moved even higher if not for the exodus of 422,000 people from the work force. […]”

That means they gave up, so the feds just stop counting them. That happens every month, but usually not this many. With "underemployment" estimated around 11%, the real deal is a whole lot spookier than these spooky numbers!

A few Obama DO's and DONT's

http://www.ucimc.org/content/obama-should-make-clean-break-past-latin-america

Sometimes it's good just to run down the list. It is hard to imagine Obama being as bad as the W. (And this is just Latin America.)

Florida tomato pickers still want Obama to visit Immokalee, though. (See link below.) Slavery is still alive and well in America. So are a lot of things most people don't know about, especially in the fields.

More good news from Immokalee!

Subway agrees to farmworkers demands! Subway-bashing canceled nationwide!

http://www.ciw-online.org/

Once again the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, those impoverished, mostly immigrant and largely non-English-speaking farmworkers from the Southeastern US, are showing us all the way.

Their patient, direct grassroots organizing, combined with smart, media-savvy coalition-building and corporate consumer campaigns have paid off again and again. The effect of meeting the workers themselves, in person - and the message that human slavery and other horrendous conditions exist right now in the US - is powerful. But so is the dedication of these workers, who come from Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti and from the Southern US. They've built their own organization, and nobody tells them how to run it.

Yet they are excellent listeners. They have worked closely with students, building on the anti-sweatshop and anti-corporate globalization movements, and the result has been a symbiosis that has developed power and energy and understanding on all sides.

First Taco Bell in 2005, then McDonald's in 2007, Burger King this year, and a few others along the way like Pizza Hut and KFC, then Whole Foods, and now the third largest fast food chain!

Go CIW!

Depression, by any other name ...

“Private employers cut 250,000 jobs in November, the most in seven years, a report by a private employment service said on Wednesday, (Reuters 12-3-08).”

context & thanksgiving

Context, as they say, is all-important.

That’s probably why the dominant culture generally tends to omit context. Take the Thanksgiving holiday for example. Criticism of the holiday often elicits a response from well-meaning liberals (the pro-Chief take on it isn’t worth discussing) that goes something like this: Yes, the apocalyptic genocide of the original Americans was a terrible thing. But that first Thanksgiving was a humanitarian oasis in the midst of the insanity, a time when both populations put aside their differences and shared in their common humanity.

Green but not Soylent Green

"It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people."
- "Soylent Green" (Richard Fleischer, 1973)

For as long as there have been bailouts, people have known that bailouts suck. The rich play, we pay. "Privatized profit, socialized risk," it's called. Now, with more bailout requests in the pipeline and the President-Elect promising the mother of all stimuli, critics are girding for battle - and rightly so - but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The bailouts have many critics on the left - not just the nutcases on the right who still believe in "free enterprise" - but some are seeming more insightful than others. US Sen. Bernie Sanders says if a corporation is "too big to fail," it's "too big to exist." He says the government should break them up. Sanders also says, "let the rich bail out the rich" by paying a surcharge on income over $1 million to cover the costs. Jobs With Justice, ACORN and others in the grassroots left are calling for a "People's Bail-Out." All good ideas. Then there's my personal broken record: a comprehensive Social Monetary Fund to restructure the whole ball of wax.

But some of our friends, in their haste to fund "green infrastructure," sometimes forget who the effort is for.

Reede Stockton of Global Exchange, writes in an article on Common Dreams about a "new green economy" with massive public expenditure to rebuild the nation's rail network and support free public transportation using all clean energy. It's a great idea, but he says we should do it instead of rescuing the auto industry.

The US economy is on track to lose as many as a million and a half jobs by the new year. If even one of the Big Three car companies goes under, that failure and its ripple effects could add another 2-3 million jobs lost next year - not counting other job losses, already estimated as high as 300,000 a month by year's end. But they can go anywhere they want to go for free.

To be fair, the public investment in infrastructure Stockton proposes would create some jobs. But these are different jobs, very different. A comprehensive plan is needed, with public money for retraining, provisions for people who can't make the transition so easily - retirement, maybe a kind of G.I. bill for veteran of the workforce - etc.

But if the government decided to now turn its back and let an integral part of the economy collapse, millions of people fall into the dustbin of redundancy, buildings and machines tossed in the landfill or left to obstruct new development, that would be recklessly destructive. And it would gain the "new green economy" a generation of enemies that could have been allies. Why throw away the product of a hundred years of public subsidy and entrepreneurial ingenuity (albeit not "free")? The car industry could help, with the proper realistic incentives.

If we can put a man on the moon - if we can put an intelligent, well-spoken man in the White House (a black man no less, whose middle name is Hussein) - we can do this.

Piven: Obama needs a protest movement

Sociologist and activist Frances Fox Piven is wonderful as always:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/15-0

Piven's Regulating the Poor is an absolute epiphany. But you can read Poor People's Movements for a broader vision of Piven's and political scientist Richard A Cloward's rare method. Why American's Don't Vote and Why Americans Still Don't Vote are now slightly dated in terms of some of the voting obstacles they discuss, but the history is instructive, and in fact most of what they write about is timely. I was lucky enough to interview Piven a couple years ago:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1015-29.htm

Her analysis expressed in that conversation is also still instructive.

Say it ain't so, Barack!

Obama's gang is telling us today (anonymously - how slick) that the new Prez might delay tax cuts to the rich ... because (incredibly) of the economic "downturn" (AP, 11-23-08).

WRONG! The "downturn" - economists sometimes call it a "correction" (or a "major correction") - is the best reason that's come along in a long time to increase taxes on the rich. In the immortal words of the esteemed Senator from Vermont: "Let the rich bail out the rich!"

Sanders's 10% on incomes over a million ($500,00 for individuals) won't be enough, but he's on the right track.

It is true, I have to admit, that income tax is not the best way to do it, not even a progressive income tax, which we barely still have. (The Bushies lowered the top bracket from 39% to 35% - a long drop from the 77% I recall from my pre-Reagan youth, as if in a dream.) A wealth tax would be better, according to the really smart people. In other words, we ought to tax what we don't want, not what we do. That is, we want production, not speculation, etc.

But in the short run, income tax is what we've got. Somebody has to pay, not just for the bailouts, but for all this stimulus ... and those of who are losing income, prospects, and so on, should not be the ones, nor should our children.

My point? Obama's apparently feeling a lot of pressure from the Dark Side - let's give him some from our side!

State capitalism ascendant

Apparently when a new president enters the Oval Office and eases his butt into the big chair for the first time, on his desk is a copy of something called a "Global Trend Report" prepared by the National Intelligence Council, a sort of crystal ball for the CIA et al. Now, the NIC is no ordinary think-tank with a bone to pick. They answer to the Director of National Intelligence, and their job is to assess trends, not hopes or dreams, in as unbiased a way as possible. The prez and the chief spooks need the real stuff, whatever they try to sell us.

According to NIC Chairman Thomas Finger, this year's Global Trend Report predicts that in 2025 the US will no longer sit atop the world, and "state capitalism of the kind they have in Russia and China will be ascendant." This is like the polar opposite of the report they turned in last time around.

The so-called "Western model," they now say, hasn't worked out so well for most of the world. Imagine that!

Now, after we all say, "I told you so" (1-2-3 ... "I told you so!"), let's all say the next part again: Social Monetary Fund.

Course there's always the prison call center model.

Structured by cows

"It could be structured by cows and we would rate it": another fascinating peek into the parallel universe that, unfortunately in the end, did intersect with ours ...

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/11/it_could_be_structured_by_cows.php

Maybe it’s the whole economy that was structured by cows. The focus has been Wall Street, and there’s plenty of craziness there to focus on. People buy and sell hogs that aren’t born yet, fer chrissakes! Crops that haven’t grown yet, all kinds of insanity. They take bets – essentially bets – on which loans will go bad, and so on. It’s nuts, and that’s even with regulation. Without regulation it gets downright bestial.

But it’s obviously much more than Wall Street.

There’s been a lot of talk about debt – private debt, public debt – and how it’s been ballooning for 30 years. It was already considered problematic when Reagan, the balance-the-budget president, jacked the federal deficit to record levels. And as we all know, Bush had to pull out all the stops. Jack Rasmus (Z, Nov. 08) has a very thorough rundown of US debt accumulated during the ‘W’ years, including $8 trillion in new debts to banks (speculative, etc., added to $6 trillion in household mortgages), $1 trillion to credit card companies (largely because people don’t earn enough to pay bills), $3 trillion in government debt (Iraq mostly) and over $3 trillion in “non-financial” business debt: it adds up to around $21 trillion in new debt just since 2000.

Credit card and mortgage companies are now pushing new debt with ads that center around the bailouts!

Yesterday the Senate killed the vote on the auto bailout - playing 'chicken' with maybe 2 million jobs, and possible economic depression - but they keep talking about this the wrong way. It isn't clear at all to the American people why these humongous companies are in debt in the first place. It isn't just because sales have been declining. And it isn't really, except just in the immediate, because of the Wall Street crunch. Why would that bother big manufacturers? Don’t they have money? Or if they don’t, why didn’t they realize it before now?

It’s the way they run their businesses, by trading on their status - in a way that small businesses can never do, so really on their size. (Similar, you have to admit, to the way the big financial institutions were running: these are not bad loans, not irresponsible reckless screwball cowboy ventures, we wouldn’t risk our business that way, we’re big and well respected!)

Turns out, really big businesses don’t run the show on the money they take in, or on their savings or cash reserves, or even on loans that they plan for and include in annual or even monthly budgets. It’s more proof, in case we needed it, that capitalism doesn’t actually work, at least not without passing a giant collection plate around the plebes, sometimes (and always at least indirectly) at the point of a gun – serfs, Native Americans, African slaves, taxpayers, somebody has to prop up this façade at all times.

The dirty secret is, the Captains of Industry keep their show on the road by borrowing money, tens of millions, on a near-daily basis, and pay it back almost daily, too, usually. Your typical manufacturing giant or other towering edifice of capitalist potency will have, secreted away in the bowels of the organism, a small office that swings into action at the end of every business day, or at some point near the end. The function of this office is to check the daily balance – take versus layout – and if there’s a shortfall, borrow, say, $10 million or so, over the phone, just to tide the big boss over until tomorrow. Or, on days when there’s a surplus, pay it out.

There was a recent episode of “This American Life” that told the story, and jaws hit the ground in kitchens and living rooms all over America. They depend on these day-to-day loans so heavily that, in the case of the carmakers (and others), when the loans locked up, the businesses started to bleed out immediately. That’s why the crisis seems to have exploded out of nowhere with every major institution, bar some, whimpering about mountains of debt – mountains of debt that moreover continue to grow at least arithmetically even as they struggle to slow it down. They can’t stop it. They have no other resources. They have been operating miles beyond their actual capacities for decades. Their very capital, the physical existence of the corporation itself is constructed out of this fact. It is literally who they are.

For some like GM the unwinding is happening so fast, they may code by the new year or soon after, taking 2 million or so jobs with them (in addition to the million-plus already down the crapper this year). That’s a lot like a depression, folks.

Talk about a house of cards.

But it’s an inescapable fact, it seems to me, that the kind of free money the carmakers are or were hoping for, sans fundamental restructuring, is just feeding the bad wolf. It wouldn’t even seem to delay the inevitable very long, maybe just long enough for stockholders to pull out but probably not long enough for 10-plus year employees to find another home, especially not nowadays. So the “free” marketeers don’t like it because it enables bad practice. But there’s a good reason for social progressives not to like it either: we could wind up paying them to kick people out of work.

And I know I’ve said it before, but we need to pay them to put people back to work. We need the opposite of an IMF, something like a Social Monetary Fund, and it needs to be one with a vision beyond the WPA or CCC. It needs to encourage investment in what economists might call “externalities”: infrastructure needs; gainful employment, yes, but also alternatives – a kind of social diversification – renewable energy, public transportation, etc.; we need to encourage freight to move by rail, not over public roads; so many things.

Now, GM can’t do that alone, no matter how much we lend them. But that’s where the Fund’s management comes in, a sort of coordinating function – “planning” you might call it. GM, for example, gets a bailout and it required to participate in restructuring, not just internal restructuring but external restructuring, of the whole economic mess.

It doesn’t have to be structured by cows. We are smarter than cows, in theory. The economy can be structured by people. It is anyway, just not by the right people, and not by enough people.

Pirates and emperors

NPR is repeating today that the Indian Navy has claimed victory in a reported “sea battle” with Somali pirates and even sank one of the pirates’ “mother ships.” A US Naval College professor interviewed this morning told Robert Siegel that piracy had now become a major threat to the world’s energy resources!

Presumably the professor was referring specifically to sea piracy – he didn’t mention the big corporate land pirates – and in fact the interview never brought up any pirates other than Somali ones. They discussed some Saudi tankers recently seized or threatened by the former Somali fishermen. Again, the context was decidedly not the right of the inhabitants to control or benefit from the resources of their lands – we’re against that, aren’t we? – but the threat to rich (white) people’s profits derived from said resources.

Here’s a more informed take (thanks to my friend Bob Naiman):

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-somalia-pirates_salopek1oct10,0,6155016.story

Reminds me of a story that Noam Chomsky attributes to St. Augustine. Alexander ‘the Great’ it seems once captured a rather mouthy pirate. Alexander: Who are you to molest the seas? Pirate: Who are you to molest the whole world? I have one ship, and you call me a pirate. You have a whole navy, and they call you emperor.

Not that India is the biggest emperor in the picture these days – that would be us. India has been in the news a lot lately, as have Somali pirates. India even landed a probe on the moon earlier this month. The pirates haven’t managed any moon shots yet, as far as we know.

But the Horn of Africa is one of those regions where Washington thinkers and oil company executives like to play Risk. After all, the Persian Gulf is right there. (You didn’t think all that Black Hawk stuff in Mogadishu was really about humanitarian concerns, did you?) And ever since the implosion of the USSR, India has been a lot more amenable to US scheming. A lot more. The rise of the Hindu Nationalists probably hasn’t hurt, either. The Indian government has had its own conflicts with Islamic populations at home and abroad for many years, complete with suicide bombings and military deployments, even a nuclear arms race with Pakistan. According to international opinion polls after the World Trade Center attacks, India was the only country that ranked higher than the US in saying “war is the answer.”

Who knows? It’s always hard to predict what new schemes will erupt from the fevered brains in Washington’s closed door sessions. But given the way clusters of stories like this so frequently precede ‘humanitarian interventions’ (as well as the other kind), such attention is always reason for concern.

Government officials can plant or encourage such attention , and so do think tanks and influence hopefuls like the Council on Foreign Policy and the notorious Neocon Richard Perle (before he was in, then out). These guys always have plans, like the ones Bush & Co. reached for in Fall 2001, and they know how to prime the public to accept them – or at least, how to prime the media to understand them. It’s a subtler form of PR, available only to the big boys with enough pull in the press pool.

Stories of German soldiers tossing babies up and catching them on bayonets in the leadup to World War I are classic examples, of course, with precedents dating back centuries. The fake incubator story, in which Kuwaiti babies were supposedly left to die in an Iraqi-occupied hospital (ca. 1991), and of course the infamous “weapons of mass destruction,” are just the recent most familiar. Somewhat more neglected examples include the Taliban destruction of ancient Buddhist statues: disgusting, but would we have cared before they started giving us trouble about the pipeline we wanted to build through their country and a spinoff of our CIA-trained mujahadeen set up shop in their backyard? And what about Kosovo? Hook, line and sinker.

Manuel Noriega got a lot of media attention once, between gigs as CIA ally and US jailbird, just before his former patron state announced that he had declared war on the US (he hadn’t, although the major US media went along with the gag) and illegally invaded and occupied Panama. The Canal Zone, on the eve of returning to Panamanian control about 100 years after the US had snatched it, was occupied any way. The poorest, blackest neighborhoods in Panama City were just bombed to smithereens. Most of the country was ignored. The drug traffic identified with Noriega continued of course after US soldiers chased him down and shipped him off to a US prison. (If they can do that, can’t Spain or somebody round up Bush and Cheney? Please?)

Noriega had naturally been very little in the news during his days on the CIA payroll. When his predecessor’s plane mysteriously went down in the mountains and Noriega stepped onto the presidential balcony, everything was fine. It was when he got the idea that he might have graduated from US bag man to independent Latin American leader – that he might even could refuse to use the Panamanian National Guard to bolster another US proxy, the Nicaraguan contras – that he stepped in it, and deep.

All of sudden, he was a dictator who had come to power under suspicious circumstances. (We had no idea!) And that idiot Carter had agreed to let Our Canal revert to these savages? A crazy “Pineapple Head” like Noriega could interfere with US ‘interests’, like, when we seriously need to cream some foreigners and our ships can’t get through Our Canal (that *we* built, duh!), or when a shipload of Christmas presents needs to get through to the West Coast... Oh, and he’s “involved” in th einternational drug trade, like Castro and everybody else we hate (the Taliban will be, later).

But the straw that broke the camel’s back: Panamanian police had the nerve to pull over a US Army vehicle, just because a few of the soldiers were drinking and firing their weapons into the air around Panama City – and one of the dirty guards Panamanian, obviously a pawn of Noriega and probably “involved” in the international drug trade (our babies!) himself, even forgot his station and *insulted* the wife of an American officer! Bomb them! Smash them! Obliterate them! Raze the place to the ground!

It was really just icing on the cake when Old Pineapple Head, using the specious excuse of US military buildup and behavior in and around his country, together with US diplomatic and media sabre-rattling, complained that the US was already effectively in a state of war with Panama … There! You see? He declared war on us! Cha-a-arge!

How to Save Capitalism - in case we want to

I’ve just been reading Harper’s Magazine –which I don’t usually do. But this month there are a number of articles on “How to Save Capitalism” – which I don’t normally advocate, either. But it seemed pertinent, and there are quite a few interesting ideas.

Joseph Stiglitz (“The Three Trillion Dollar War”), who I think some of our friends were praying would be Obama’s Treasury Secretary, has an almost impenetrable article on Wall Street and tulip mania in the 1600s – arguing that the long-neglected purpose of financial institutions is to *manage* risk, not just auction it off for fun and profit. That sounds hard to argue with. He has ideas about fixing this, like requiring the troublemakers to invest their own money with ours, but he doesn’t seem to me to get at the larger picture we’re grappling with at the moment.

(From the revised job loss figures for late summer (even more people kicked out of work even before this fall than they told us, which was already a lot), as if we didn’t already know it, that the recession was locked in well before the Fannie & Freddie extravanganza. Well over a million jobs lost this year – job losses may hit 300,000 a month by the end of December. Merry Christmas!)

Similarly Barry Lynn (“The Rise and Coming Fall of Global Capitalism”), who advocates abolishing stock options or at least reforming them so that corporate managers don’t get quite so much encouragement for short-term profits while if not giving away then selling (low) the proverbial store (e.g. GE CEO proposal to sell off their R&D! That must be right up there with a passenger on the Titanic selling his spot on a lifeboat?) Again, I think he makes a good case for the reform he’s advocating – it just doesn’t seem like enough.

And, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi (“The Two-Income Trap”) suggest something like a Consumer Product Safety Commission for financial ‘products’ – a “Financial Product Safety Commission” – to detoxify the financial environment. Probably a great idea, but the most interesting part to me was their story that “each year millions of credit-card offers go out with tiny print detailing ‘double-cycle billing’ and ‘trailing interest,’ terms which have enormous financial implications but are meaningless to most people.” Include me. What the hell?

Then they get more radical.

Michael Hudson (“Super Imperialism”) – after a short history of the rise and untimely demise of the progressive income tax – says tax the land. He says tax breaks on property and capital gains, plus tax deductions for mortgage interest amount to “powerful incentives for buyers to go into debt.” He says we should be taxing the privilege of owning land, not socially useful activities like producing and earning money. Especially, he says, tax “’unproductive’ incomes” like hereditary estates and monopolies – e.g. currently privatized natural resources, public airwaves, etc.

At first I thought, wait a minute! No tax deductions for mortgage interest? What will we struggling homeowners do? Then I remembered: those of us who are struggling don’t actually earn enough to itemize deductions anyway. Not sure how this ‘tax the airwaves’ idea would affect small operations like WEFT and WRFU, etc. but I’m sure there’s a way to tweak it. The solution might be as simple as a kind of standard deduction that effectively exempts small operations. Same could work for the land tax, really, when it comes to lower-middle-income folks trying to buy their first house … not their first *ten*, of course. (Can you really live in ten houses?)

James Galbraith (“The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should, Too”) jut comes right out and says we should “plan.” Dude!

No kidding, Galbraith is pointing out once again that the myth of ‘free enterprise’ is just that. It doesn’t exist. The trick is to acknowledge, I think he means officially, that the government always has and of necessity must and should intervene to manage and shape the direction of the economy. It isn’t clear to me exactly how he thinks we should do this, except that he says his idea “is not coercive” but based on budget priorities and such – to encourage the *kinds* of development we want. Clearly, I think, he’s right.

He seems a little short on what exactly those kinds of development are, too, but he mentions one example: a Federal Department of Energy and Climate, which would be “independent” of lobbyists and other evildoers – even Congress – (how?) and (miraculously) free to evaluate new ideas for renewable energy, etc. Our local experience, which may or may not be a useful guide, I think is that the ‘independence’ part is a humongous ‘if.’ To the extent to which city planners around here have been ‘independent’ of elected officials it seems to me they have been ‘independent’ of social considerations, even more than the elected officials: they just listened to developers and trusted their business school training. To the extent to which the planners have been ‘dependent’, well, it has depended on who was in office and what their (election-dependent) priorities were. I just don’t see it working this way.

Galbraith may have some great ideas, and he’s certainly right on about the faith-based nature of “free enterprise”. But it seems to me he’s trying to take a shortcut around the truly back-breaking work of this thing: the organizing, the building of public or cultural or national will, the social will, the social demand for radical changes like these. Maybe it’s because in the process a lot of good ideas will be shitcanned because the huddled masses don’t get them – in favor of gettig paid now. But that is the uphill battle. The biggest public relations industry in human history is against us, not to mention the monopolies on resources and organized violence currently aligned (maybe a little more loosely since last month) with property interests and so on. Tough question, but we can’t just skip it, IMO.

Finally, Eric Janzen (pres., iTulip Inc.) and Bill McKibben (“The End of Nature”) have I think related but different suggestions all to do with what kinds of development we want to foster. Janzen says we have to “reindustrialize”: and he’s talking innovative startups, publicly encouraged. McKibben says “localize”: farmer’s markets and other smaller, more localized economic developments make more sense (as we run out of oil, he says – not so sure that we are any time soon, but) and are much more deserving of public investment – *social* investment again – that ADM and the oil industry & co.

Janzen presents a more destructive version of a similar notion, in my view, advocating that we allow the financial and insurance sector, and the 4-million-job US auto industry to sink or swim on its own. Now. He’s not even just saying don’t bail them out; he’s saying withdraw the subsidies we already give them. No weaning, no methadone. Economic Armageddon.

I think that’s an even steeper ramp down to economic (and medical) depression, myself. You have to remember why we bother to discuss this at all. It’s not a board game. It’s people’s lives. And we don’t want to destroy this village in order to save it.

But in the long run I think Janzen’s got something there: he says in essence that our economy needs to be based on producing things and not just on insuring things that other people make and lending money to buy things that other people make, and then gambling on who will lose the most money when it all comes crashing down. Hm, you think?

He has a zillion ideas for startup businesses – that’s what he *does* – and the model is “public-private partnerships” (i.e. joint ownership). I’m skeptical of this on the scale and with the suddenness he seems to be proposing, at least in the contemporary capitalist context; seems like a tender box. I see armies of scam artists swarming to make living while the tourists wander the burning cities in a daze. But I think we can begin to reorganize our society along lines that are at least informed by these sorts of ideas.

McKibben, for example, addresses the human cost of some of these proposed changes. We don’t want to “beggar the populace,” he says. He’s a little slim on the specifics, but he says there are all sorts of schemes for rebates and discounts and things to ease the burden of yanking the carpet out from under tens of millions of individuals and families. They’d better be damn good ones, is all I can say. I like a lot of these ideas, but we must keep perspective. The biggest problem with the solutions we keep seeing come out of Washington (and downtown Manhattan, and Detroit, etc.) is that they ignore who they are (at least allegedly) *for*.

We must be the nagging reminders.

Better than Bush, but ...

[...] The Democrats' bill would require companies to submit a plan for long-term viability, share a portion of future profits with the Government and reimburse taxpayers before any other shareholder. [- AP 11/14/08]

Still need to hear more about what "viability" means - the looking out for Number One sense, or the we all exist as members of a society sense - and to get the damn thing passed - without giving away the store!

Auto bailout: gas guzzlers guzzle more than gas

So the "news" today is that incoming Pres. Obama wants Congress to fork over "as much as $50 billion to save cash-starved U.S. automakers" like GM, in the news recently for plummeting stock prices. But will it burn up on re-entry? Obama and a bunch of politicians from car-building states seem to think so, that the Big Three could fall into bankruptcy without this cash.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aBlCucXR33Jw

True, if even one of the Three go down the ripple effect could be deadly. Overall wages, benefits, and possibly working conditions could be dragged into the sinkhole. But what keeps getting lost in these rushes to bailout the big boys is what the taxpayer (or the folks who are too poor to pay taxes) get out of it.

In the bank bailout, the US decided to buy up stock, in the end, but non-voting stock (not like the UK). And no new regulations in the deal. Not good enough. For the kind of money we are shelling out, we need a say in how these companies decide to blow it all.

Same goes for the car industry. The bailout needs to have a price, a real price,a useful price. At a minimum, the deal needs to be linked to this policy both parties supposedly have called "reducing our dependence on foreign oil," or some such. The Big Three have played a very nasty game in this respect, aided by the Republicans - and "Who Killed the Electric Car" went way too easy on them. If we bail them out this time, we need some signatures on some dotted lines about affordable electric cars, hybrids, something.

But that won't help most people, who can't afford a new car no matter what it runs on. Poor folks in this country need to get to work, or at least to get in to look for work. And the history of car-making companies blocking public transportation could provide a clue to how the Big Three ought to be helping: put it in reverse.

As late as this summer the Three were focussed on luring people away from public transportation, instead of investing in it. This situation is untenable, and backasswards. What the government needs to do, if it has to bail out these big boys, is use it as leverage. Test the urgency. We need to get the Big Three working on our agenda if they are going to be working with our money.

ACORN better than Obama

The 2008 elections made me realize I've never been prouder that I worked for ACORN.