It’s the equal pay for equal work thing, stupid. Union strong and proud. (Bumper sticker on 1972 VW Rabbit, Vancouver, Canada).

Sure, that might be the mantra for the New Faculty Majority, but in a large sense, the fight to normalize the work, pay and benefits of part-time/contingent/temporary/migratory/irregular/at-will/auxiliary faculty, AKA “freeway fliers,” is one centered on dismantling the two-tiered system of inequitable pay and punitive treatment between tenure track faculty and non-tenure track faculty.

At one school where I recently taught, Green River Community College in Auburn, Washington, the battle for the minds and hearts of students is fought with almost 70 percent of the faculty hitched to the quasi-indentured servitude label, “adjunct.”

My fellow colleague, philosophy adjunct Keith Hoeller, lives a typical story of teaching 20 years at 10 colleges to cobble together a living. “The use of adjunct faculty is higher education’s way of outsourcing,” he recently said.

For this Puget Sound region, all 3.3 million of us, the April 20 teach-in – “The Solution to Faculty Apartheid” – was somewhat historic, so says several faculty involved in the break-away group of adjunct instructors organizing this event. A few of the GRAFA members – Green River Adjunct Faculty Association – have been teaching at GRCC for more than two decades each.

The two speakers both had global and localized perspectives on adjuncts – Frank Cosco with Vancouver Community College Faculty Association and Jack Longmate, Olympic College English instructor who is at the center of a battle with both the college and faculty union on moonlighting and academic freedom and retaliation.¹

Both are the authors of “Program for Change, 2010-2030,” a manifesto festooned to the New Faculty Movement’s impetus to activate adjuncts around the North America, Mexico and other countries, to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, since the new majority is part-time and non-tenure track faculty:

The dysfunctional state of faculty employment in post-secondary education in 2010 is well documented and well known. Over the last few decades, corporatization has fragmented faculty. It has resulted in a caste-like structure with primarily two tiers. The majority of the faculty occupies the lower tier and is recognized as performing only a portion of the job, classroom instruction; these faculty tend to be compensated at a rate of pay in violation of the principle of ―equal pay for equal work, often resulting in a poverty-level income. They work in complete insecurity. They are left to draw upon the satisfaction of working with students as their chief inspiration to continue because of their dismal working conditions and the equally dismal prospects for improvement.

Cosco is a full-time VCC faculty member in ESOL and has worked with normalizing adjuncts since the 1980s. He’s also been a key official with the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL). This GRCC teach-in was made up of students, adjuncts and full-time faculty – and three faculty union folk, two TT and one PT.

We filmed it for You Tube distribution.

Union-led and Unionist-Thinking, and Proud of It.

It was clear early on in the teach-in that the Vancouver, BC, model is the pie in the sky for many US adjuncts who cannot imagine what VCC has gained through hard-fought union collective bargaining. Frank Cosco is pugnacious, diplomatic and a man with a mission – “The very point of a union and our duty as a faculty union is to fight for those who are the least able to speak, the most vulnerable. It’s about creating one community of faculty, so when one group is disregarded, the union leadership has to fight for their inclusion.”

So, “the weakest and most vulnerable,” non-tenured, have gained equal pay for equal work, and more:

• salary and workload equity, to include immediate pay scale; pay for vacation and holidays
• paid professional development days
• hiring equity and reappointment rights, to include one hiring process per career and right to seniority reappointment after six months
• evaluation transparency, to include strong grievance procedures
• conversion right from term faculty to regular faculty, to include automatic regularization of the person, not the position
• college health and pension benefits
• seniority rights, pro-rated
• maternity leave that doesn’t disadvantage faculty
• right to participate equally in union and professional matters
• and more.

The US national percentage of “adjuncts” teaching in all institutions of higher education, including private colleges, state universities, community/technical colleges, as well as for profits and on-line schools, is reaching the 8 out 10 mark. Twenty percent of faculty now are tenure track workers.

In Washington State, just counting the 34 community and technical colleges, 46 percent of all state-supported instruction is taught by adjuncts. I think of it this way: 8,059 PT to 3,598 FT (2010, SBCTC).

Castes, Untouchables/Two tiers, Two lives

It gets worse., according to Pablo Eisenberg, senior fellow at Georgetown Policy Institute in his piece, “The ‘Untouchables’ of Higher Education.”² :

American universities and colleges are riddled with a caste system that violates our societal sense of fairness, justice, and decency. Neither the general public, nor parents, nor the large majority of students are even aware of its existence. College administrators and tenured faculty, who are acutely aware of the system, have done little or nothing to remedy the problem. It is a festering sore that threatens not only the quality of higher education but the system’s ability to recruit and retain good teachers.

Here we are, now, with a caste system, viewed as untouchables, and, for many, we are considered disposable people. Right now, more than 540,000 adjuncts fill the rosters of part-time faculties, and another 240,000 are full-time, off tenure track who are quarterly or semester by semester hired as full time, or maybe with a yearly contract.

Full-loads, Freeway Flying, One-third the Pay

I’ve taught a full load at one institution, Spokane Falls Community College, with some other college duties funded through soft money (memos of understanding). My sum total for that couple of years? Less than 50 percent of what a full-timer would have been paid. I worked on campus-wide curriculum development, served on two committees, headed up the college’s sustainability efforts, and organized one year-long series of highly public events tied to climate change and helped organize a themed year event. Oh yeah, I advised the general population of students and served as the Earth Club faculty coordinator.

Why? I love students, I love working with new focuses in cross-disciplinary communications, and I love being fully engaged in political-public-private-non-profit connections to our community colleges. Part of that motivation, too, was to try and work just at one college campus while pulling down around $28,000. The other projects I worked on included a weekly hour public affairs community radio show where I interviewed such people at Bill McKibben, David Suzuki, Naomi Wolf, Amy Goodman, authors, poets, social justice advocates and dozens of actors in the climate change and sustainability arena. Then there was a paid column in the weekly alternative newspaper. Finally, I ended up working with several City- and County-wide task forces looking at Spokane’s educational needs tied to the high dropout rate. Add to that a writer in the schools gig and my advisory role status with the large literary event, Get Lit!, part of Eastern Washington University’s week-long writing festival.

The reason for inserting this brief narrative for several of my total 10 years in Spokane is that my work was part of the larger frame of why adjuncts are more than just interchangeable, underclass workers that “help” the bottom line needs of colleges to be flexible when enrollments swell or contract: we’re professionals who in the current culture of education are whipping posts for such things as the falling achievement and performance gaps, as well as the threat against tenure.

Where I went and worked outside the college, everyone knew my college association.

Forget the fact that adjuncts publish, research, carry through with massive amounts of continuing education, present at conferences, and go onto completing other graduate degrees.

It’s the economy, stupid could be replaced with, It’s the fragmentation thing. In the eyes of by the privatizers who seem to be the soldiers of the vulture and parasitic capitalists who are emboldened by a divide and conquer program pitting TT faculty against PT faculty.

For now, the goals of adjuncts and graduate students tie into developing distinct and sometimes separate union issues since Full-time Tenure Track folk supervise us, determine how many classes we get, and where and when. It’s obvious the huge faculty unions have failed at defending this attack on higher education and failed to stop the evisceration of the collective bargaining movement. The administrations are swelling their ranks, and as a cost saver, ramping up cheap-rate and insecure jobs.

This is the time to fight “fragmentation of the time and place of work” as Ulrich Beck illustrates it in his book, The Brave New World of Work (Polity Press, 2000).

1. See Chronicle of Higher Education, April 9, 2012, “Adjunct Challenges College’s Accreditation Over Alleged Failure to Stop Union Retaliation” by Peter Schmidt.
2. Huffington Post, 29 June, 2010.
3. See Activism through Art and 2255 Films.

It’s huge – asymmetrical, shaped like two fat boomerangs meeting in midair at their mouths. The benefactors call it a campus. NBBJ architects had to design a colossal office complex of 900,000 square feet to accommodated 1,200 employees. It cost around $500 million to build.

It’s a prime piece of property in downtown Seattle, West Lake. The non-profit got the 12 acres for a song – $53 million after the land was appraised at $72 million.

Then the city of Seattle “gave” another $28 off the price, so this land ended up costing Bill and Melinda Gates – their foundation – $25 million.

More than 40 people, as part of a global day of action against Monsanto, recently marched to and around the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation “campus” in West Lake to deliver a letter asking the Foundation to divest from Monsanto (the Foundation has more than $23 million in Monsanto stock as part of a very odd mix of companies in their portfolio).

Trying to eradicate developing countries’ diseases, forcing genetically modified farming into Africa, and weighing in on and lobbying for privatizing public education are just a few of the Gates Foundation’s larger goals, largely financed by $11.9 billion, with the following five top stock holdings:

• Berkshire Hathaway Inc. – 73,997,400 shares, 49.75% of the total portfolio.
• McDonald’s Corp. – 9,372,500 shares, 5.21% of the total portfolio.
• Caterpillar Inc. – 9,590,400 shares, 4.86% of the total portfolio.
• The CocaCola Company – 10,182,000 shares, 4.31% of the total portfolio.
• Waste Management Inc. – 15,716,367 shares, 4.15% of the total portfolio.

They’ve got 500,000 shares of Goldman Sachs, 7.1 million shares of Exxon Mobile and those half a million shares of Monsanto.

Monsanto’s Chemical War on the World

What’s all the protesting about? According to Dena Hoff, a diversified family farmer in Glendive, Montana, and North American coordinator of La Via Campesina, “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust’s purchase of Monsanto shares indicates that the Gates Foundation’s interest in promoting the company’s seed is less about philanthropy than about profit-making. The Foundation is helping to open new markets for Monsanto, which is already the largest seed company in the world.”

These aren’t sour grapes about one of the richest people on earth capitalizing on stock trading. Monsanto, who created the dioxin-leeching defoliant Agents Orange and Blue, is one of the main drivers of genetically modified foods.

Heather English Day, director of Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, and one of the organizers in Seattle to bring attention to the slash and burn mentality of Monsanto, the Gates Foundation’s AGRA, sums up the recent news on GE crops and foods: “Reports are coming out weekly about impending crop failures of GE corn in Africa, pesticide resistance for GE corn grown for ethanol in the US, and about indications that Bt toxins, the primary GE pesticides, especially when in the presence with Roundup, have potential impacts on human kidney cells and mammalian testis.”

Another protestor-letter signatory is Les Berensen, a medical doctor who is also with GMO Free Washington. His concern is tied to Monsanto’s Roundup, which has the main ingredient of 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. Berensen mentions how salmon and other fish species are being affected by the huge runoffs from fields of corn, beets, soy, cotton, and potatoes that are genetically modified to take up to four or five dousings of Roundup.

He likens this day and age of Monsanto as a Frankenstein era for both species in the wild and the human species. These anti-Monsanto events are carried out regularly in many parts of the world, and they are attended by a diverse group of people. In Seattle recently, several speakers rallied us before we marched to the FOundation: Dan Trocolli, Seattle Educators Association and Social Equality Educators; Kristen Beifus, Washington Fair Trade Coalition; and William Aal, Washington Biotechnology Action Council.

One fellow holding a corn sign and getting signatures is Travis Young, UW graduate student in planning and with CAGJ and AGRA Watch. He is seeing more and more destruction of departments at UW through consolidation and outright disbanding. He’s working on food policies for several cities as part of his graduate work.

Localized Food Security, Global Food Fights

“There are already many movements around healthy local food economies. There are proven projects and farms in Africa that are both sustainable and organic. Getting people hooked on Monsanto’s seeds and pesticides with micro-loaning that they can’t pay back will result in more farms being lost and more people moving to the cities. This is not a successful formula, and the Gates Foundation should really lead by getting rid of its Monsanto stocks, as a first step.”

Many protesters wear Haz-mat suits, and many carry signs belying the fear of this giant genetically modified experiment taking place in mankind. I met Ellie Rose at one of these events; she’s working on Transition Seattle and buttressing “a culture of engagement through a group called We the People Power.”

Karen Studders came from Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, where for two months she lived in a tent. Studders, in her mid-sixties, once worked in big business, for government organizations, and with United Nations agencies, plying her legal and science degrees from the University of Minnesota. “We have to act quickly. The abuse of these corporations, which is so blatant now, has got to stop. I have a lot of hope after being part of the Occupy movement, especially after we were illegally evicted.”

She not only went from tent to tent to listen to the ideas and rebellion of the youth, but she went into a self-made retreat after the police crack down, traveling to various cities to see the Transition Town movement up close and personal.

The security at the Foundation does not accept any signed letters. We tried delivering one asking the Gates Foundation to divest from Monsanto. I talked with several Foundation employees – researchers with higher education graduate degrees and doctorates. They said that Foundation’s policy for employees is to “not let us engage in any dialogue on any issues of controversy.” Which means, nothing but the weather can be discussed? (Whoops, climate change seems to affect disease and crops). Additionally, any nice, well-crafted and footnoted handouts on Monsanto and Roundup pesticides they might be handed “will have to be handed over to security once we enter the building.”

Those three monkeys – see, hear, and speak no evil – seem anachronistic in the 21st century for a think tank outfit like the Gates Foundation. Fortunately, less than a week after Seattle’s event, dozens of protesters monkey-wrenched Monsanto’s California office in Davis, an area close to the Capitol, through vocal activism. Unlike Seattle’s event, the California activists made demands to shut down the biotech giant which has its talons in the United States government, including the Supreme Court.

“If a small group can take down their office for a day from some mild protests, a few hundred thousand can take down the entire company — permanently,” wrote journalist Anthony Gucciardi from Natural Society.

Frankenstein’s Agronomists and Etymologists

Pretty strange news these days on the Franken-crop front, also known as the genetically engineered/ genetically modified food battlefield.

A top-secret visit by Bill and Melinda Gates to Australia in December to check up on their $10 million test crop of genetically modified bananas “capable of resisting disease.” Field trials at South Johnstone, Queensland, Australia, are pointing to a GE banana with more pro-vitamin A than regular bananas.

The stuff of movies like Soylent Green or some 21st Century James Bond plot. Poor African nations are in the sights of big agri-business and biotechnology outfits like Monsanto, Bayer, Chimera, BASF, Syngenta. The Gates Foundation’s AGRA – Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa – is all about top down mandates, hyper-technology, corporate-driven solutions, and sometimes bizarre genetically modified organism in a hocus pocus that puts profits ahead of precautionary principle.

Seven Billion Guinea Pigs and counting …

Full steam ahead for outside-the-local-region solutions, and damn the local knowledge, those land races of food and crop varieties that have stood the test of time — and culture.

George Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley, the nation’s largest organic farming cooperative, which had more than $600 million in sales last year, puts it plainly: “There is a growing awareness that our [food supply] system makes us all guinea pigs of sorts.”

Story after story, incident after incident prove to more than just the organic foodies that genetic engineering isn’t the answer to famine, climate change and strengthening food security for poor and rich countries. The seed company Pioneer (owned by Dow Chemical) was developing a GE corn strain, Herculex, that had wrapped up in its DNA a toxin that would help it resist corn rootworm. The problem was, as a group of scientists working at Pioneer’s request found out, that GE corn killed ladybugs.

Here’s where the GE-Biotech story gets ugly – according to the journal Nature Biotechnology, Dow prohibited the scientists from publicizing the research and kept it from the EPA. That corn bio-tech “creation” was approved in 2003.

Now the narrative really gets close to the HG Wells story of The Island of Dr. Moreau: Nature News reported that a research team discovered two varieties of transgenic canola in the wild, plus a third variety that is a cross of the two GM breeds. One of the transgenic varieties found was Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola, – engineered to be resistant to glyphosate. The other one, from Bayer Crop Science’s Liberty Link canola, is resistant to gluphosinate.

That third cross contaminated variety contained transgenes from each of these, and, through it’s own evolutionary track, is resistant to both types of herbicide.

It doesn’t take graduate degrees in agronomy, chemistry and botany to figure out that companies like Monsanto and Syngenta have set loose into nature unnatural and untested plants that proliferate, cross-breed, and create new plants.

We have no idea what these GMOs are doing to us as biological entities eating so many foods containing GE canola, soy, corn and beet sugar used in a so many processed food products consumed by tens of millions of people.

Climate Change and Seeds

For more than two decades, and especially this past year, the alarms have been going off concerning climate change making an already difficult situation of global food security, and in Africa in particular, worse.

The climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, had all sorts of panels on food insecurity complicated by the effects of climate change. Which countries have the least capacity to adapt? Developing countries – i.e. the majority of countries.

The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – that body disregarded by Republicans and lambasted and vilified by the Tea Party and blokes like presidential aspirant, Ron Paul – recently made it clear with a convergence of dozens of scientific studies and organizations that there will be deleterious impacts of climate change on agriculture, livestock and fishing.

The Last Fish

Here’s how screwed up the GE-GMO purveyors are – genetically altered salmon, pen raised, of course, have been DNA-bombarded with the genes of a fresh water bass species so they get five times the size of “normal” farmed salmon in the same 18-month period. Feeding those Franken-salmon corn meal, soy by-products and chicken and beef renderings adds to the gross experiment.

Here’s an even more strange fact that is pushing GE technology into husbandry and fisheries sciences – a single bluefin tuna will make international headlines when it sells for more than $100,000 at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market. They are so rare now – overfished to near extinction – we have to marvel at the rapidity of the globe’s drive for wild food. Fish are probably the last wild food Americans eat. Sushi joints from Seattle to Missoula and Las Vegas are as popular as Carl’s Jr.

When I talk with sushi-eating friends about their habits, they shrug it off, saying they might as well eat the last of the wild marine protein before the world contaminated everything and shifts to GE-Everything.

Famine, Hunger, Solutions

Floods and inconsistent weather patterns affecting rainfall have impacted most parts of the world, situations worsened by the prices of fuel. Oxfam correlates this impact into hardship –climate change will help double food prices by the year 2030.

These factors, seen before and after Durban’s “Climate Conference Debacle,” are churning up the debate on genetically modified food. The Gates, Monsanto and some agricultural experts are convinced that GMOs will provide part of the answer to the long-standing hunger and food insecurity challenges that have plagued the African continent for half a century.

But civil society, social justice advocates and others from non-governmental organizations urged world leaders to focus on the importance of food security, particularly in Africa. Wilfred Miga of PELUM sees food in Africa tied directly to individual countries’ identity and sovereignty – food culture and the right to grow they’re called. PELUM is an association in Zambia giving political and technical voice to small-scale farmers in rural areas. It’s simple for people like Miga – improving livelihoods and increasing the sustainability of farming communities by empowering ecological best practices.

Miga said PELUM understands that despite the challenges the African continent faces, GMOs are not a universal answer to food insecurity. In fact, he like thousands of others in the food sovereignty movement know GMOs gut food sovereignty because those crops are patented, they are bio-manipulated to have killer or assassin genes that prevent germination without the pesticides and other artificial inputs created and marketed by the same seed companies or subsidiaries, and the crops in mass plantings will contaminate all other wild or non-GMO crops, in a worse case scenario.

Hawaii had widespread contamination of papaya crops from GM varieties, even in the seed stocks that were sold as conventional.
Jimmy Buffet and the Mosquitoes that Ate Key West

Worse yet, back to HG Wells, is the GE mosquito, in Jimmy Buffet land (maybe he’ll score a song about the Franken-squito and Margarita-ville).

UK-based Oxitec is going to release genetically-engineered mosquitoes in the Florida Keys this month, the first-ever U.S. release of these engineered bugs.

Aedes aegypti are produced by this private biotechnology company in hopes that their offspring will die at a young age in an effort to lower mosquito populations and limit the spread of dengue fever. Genetically-engineered mosquitoes were released by Oxitec in the Cayman Islands, Malaysia and Brazil. Eradicating dengue fever is laudable (I had a case of it in Guatemala, and I never deviate from calling it Break Bone Fever to this day), but the company’s claims that their GE mosquitoes are sterile and they have eradicated the fever are wrong: their mosquitoes are fertile, and no one has successfully eradicated dengue fever from any population.

So, this corporation from overseas gets to use 36-square acres near the Key West Cemetery as a testing plot (undisclosed location) for up to 10,000 genetically engineered mosquitoes.

Many questions about genetically-engineered mosquitoes remain unanswered, and since Friends of the Earth exposed this GE mosquito release story, here’s what that group has to say about the real questions behind the release:

Who’s regulating this release and who more importantly, who will be legally and financially liable if something goes wrong?

Shoot, what about the unintended consequences of decreasing in Aedes aegypti population have on the local food chain and ecosystem? Could other more dangerous bugs take its place, such as the Asian Tiger mosquito which is one of the most invasive species on the planet?

Informed consent? Will Oxitec be required to obtain the free and informed consent of Key West residents (unlike in the Cayman Islands where “no public consultation was undertaken on potential risks and informed consent was not sought from local people”)?

The super-mosquito next generation? What happens when Oxitec’s mosquitoes survive into adulthood (since 3–4 percent have been found to do just that despite the flaw engineered into their genome)?

It’s not just a male thing! Although Oxitec plans to only release male genetically engineered mosquitoes, what are the risks if female genetically engineered mosquitoes are released (since the company sorts them by hand and up to 0.5 percent of the released insects are in fact female)? Since females bite humans, how could this impact human health? Will it hamper efforts to limit the spread of dengue fever?

Do we need more corporate marketing of things like mosquitoes? Since Oxitec cannot completely eliminate a mosquito population will countries and communities become dependent on Oxitec for the indefinite future? What economic impacts will such dependence have on communities?

Two Carrots a Day … and Corporations are NOT People

This entire GMO debate has to be framed by community power over corporate power. The Occupy movement speaks to some of that, and the Move to Amend (reversing or nullifying a Jan. 2010 Supreme Court case, Citizens United) also touches upon some of this corporate malfeasance and misdeeds. But it takes a real in-the-trenches person like Richard Grossman, who died November at age 70, to cut through the bedrock of why these corporations or foundations like Gates have way too much control and power.

He started off 40 years ago talking about how corporations had taken control of our environment. He has since looked at the systemic failure of the United States federal government which has since day one been in cahoots with the oligarchy and land-holding elite:
“One simple way of comparing then and now is that I don’t talk much about corporations anymore. We live under minority rule. And the class of people who do the governing generally could be called a corporate class.

“But 180 years ago, they were the slave master class. One hundred years before that they were the propertied nobility in England. In the USA, a minority designed our structure of governance, has been making the laws, using the power and violence of the nation to deny the many, to accumulate property and wealth, to replicate their designs across generations, to groom leaders of the next generation to continue their supremacy, to create the educational systems, mythologies and celebrations to camouflage and deceive, to channel people who would be activists into realms where even if they stop or slow down a particular corporate state assault, they don’t lay a hand on systemic reality, don’t touch the structure of governance and law, don’t question the country’s great myths. For the past century or so, one such realm has been regulatory and administrative law and agencies, those vast energy sinks and diversions that eat activists for breakfast.”

So what’s for breakfast? Cassava? Friends of the Earth Nigeria is showing why even non-GMO messed-with hybrids pose problems with biodiversity. Using hybridization and selective breeding, three new yellow varieties of cassava with loads of vitamin A will supposedly help with malnutrition, blindness and death.

Can anyone in the Gates’ Foundations AGRA project understand why this supposed research breakthrough gets dismissed by groups like Friends of the Earth Nigeria (FoEN). The argument is around why the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) research team in Ibadan would be messing around with one of Nigeria’s key food crops.

It’s about biodiversity, something corporations scoff at when it comes to finding ways to “beat or speed up mother nature.” Here’s the irony with all of this agronomic meddling: two carrots can easily provide the daily vitamin A requirement.

Plain old carrots for breakfast. Easy to plant, easy to eat, and not one iota of that process is tied up in Dow, Monsanto, General Mills, or Bill Gates, or any stockholders’ greedy interests.

The foundational question all journalists – all Americans, for that matter – should be asking is: How news and information should flow through American democracy, and who can access that media? Believe it or not, the founders of the United States, through huge fits, spasms and debates, created the US Postal Office (1774) to move newspapers throughout the land, for hardly anything or nothing at all.

How times have changed since then with media monopolies lobotomizing news, the centralizing of newspaper and broadcast reporting which has created a corporate-protectorate, the looming death of independent publishers and book sellers, thanks partly to Amazon, and the evisceration of US mail delivery service, thanks to spineless Democrats, treasonous Libertarians and reckless Republicans.

In fact, much of the ugliness in the media associated with Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter, Beck and Murdoch and mainstream corporate press shills is just back to the future in this country’s media history.

Let’s flip back 400 years when the first rags, newspapers, called for the murder of the land’s aborigines, inciting the white aliens to take land, burn villages and crucify the “sculking” and “barbarous” Indigenous peoples and “rebellious Negroes.”

A new book, sort of a first-of-its-kind, takes the reader on that journey to end up here in today’s day and age of a democratic crisis largely created by who controls the media, how people access news and information, and what narratives our citizens are actually “consuming” and why those narratives are slanted, misrepresented or scrubbed altogether by the SCLM – so-called liberal media.
“It is our contention that newspapers, radio, and television played a pivotal role in perpetuating racist views among the general population,” write Juan Gonzales and Jose Torres in their new well researched and necessary book, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media (Verso, 2011).

What do Torres and Gonzales find out? The history of alternative presses – run by Indigenous peoples, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians – has all but vanished, even from the halls of journalism schools. The dig up this amazing history how the vile racism of Manifest Destiny and Empire building, and the supremacist beliefs of lawmakers, thinkers, clergy, and, of course, the editors of the white press did not always go unchallenged in a White-dominated society.

The stories are haunting, and our American history is replete with editors calling for the lynching of abolitionists, the burning and wrecking of alternative presses, and much of the motivation was embedded hatred toward Indigenous peoples, Latinos, and Blacks.

However, it’s clear early on in this book that the two Latino authors know history has repeated itself, constantly, when it comes to media and the Press: “Descriptions of ‘Sculking’ or ‘barbarous’ Indians were commonplace then, much as today’s news media use terms such as ‘wolf packs,’ ‘drug gangs,’ and ‘super-predators’ as monikers for non-white criminals…. Those early accounts thus establish a voluminous and entirely one-sided newspaper narrative: Native Americans were depicted as cunning, barbaric, and evil – and certainly undeserving of the vast lands coveted by the European settlers.”

There are so many magnificent stories in Torres and Gonzalez’ book, about brave editors trying to stop slavery through the pen and bully pulpit facing mobs, thugs, corrupt police and judges, and broken presidents.

This book is an essential read not only for journalists, students of media or those at the forefront of the Occupy Movement. This is our country’s history, scrubbed in many cases, of how people of color did fight the white color line with varying degrees of success.

It’s telling that many of the book’s jacket blurbs attest to News for All the People‘s groundbreaking resonance: “The historic inability of marginalized communities to control their own images has been devastating. News for All the People illustrates that this lack of control hasn’t been by accident. It’s a part of a greater story of media control and ownership that traces back to the creation of the United States. An essential read,” writes James Rucker, founder of ColorOfChange.org.

If it’s not already obvious to Real Change News readers, the point today is how those stories of the marginalized get into print or film or on TV or over the radio or Internet? Who controls the media? Books like People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, or anything written by Studs Terkel, or the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, in Nickle and Dimed, or the huge trilogy, Memory of Fire by Eduardo Galeano, that covers the entire history of the Americas, give voice to people of color, poor people, labor activists, civil society, slaves and those that revolted against tyranny of many types.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where media may have monopolistic might through the few corporations controlling what most Americans watch or hear to get their news:

• Disney (market value: $72.8 billion)
• AOL-Time Warner (market value: $90.7 billion)
• Viacom (market value: $53.9 billion)
• General Electric (owner of NBC, market value: $390.6 billion)
• News Corporation (market value: $56.7 billion)
• Yahoo! (market value: $40.1 billion)
• Microsoft (market value: $306.8 billion)
• Google (market value: $154.6 billion)

Gonzales and Torres go four centuries back to the present, making a clear case on how these marginalized people of color literally fought to get the funds and show the mettle to publish their papers. There were amongst them contradictions, to be sure. Many Indigenous editors held slaves. Some of the white Hispanic editors were proponents of “Indian Removal.” Some elegant cases, though, are part of that story Torres and Gonzalez give us. People like escaped slave Frederick Douglass not only employed black male writers at his newspapers, he was a feminist who employed dozens of female writers.

The authors give us the case of the Cherokee, John Rollin Ridge, a writer and novelist, who wrote a novel about Joaquín Murieta, the California so-called bandit, but who moved to California and founded the Sacramento Bee. Here is that paper’s first editor and publisher, an Indigenous person, who has virtually disappeared from history. He sold the paper to James McClatchy, one of his employees. McClatchy developed the Sacramento Bee into the flagship newspaper of the McClatchy newspaper chain.

Now this is what’s so superb about Torres and Gonzalez’ work – they find on the McClatchy website, their official history, no mention that a Cherokee was the founder of their flagship paper. “They make it seem like James McClatchy actually started the Bee. But it’s this kind of expunging of the actual history of African Americans and Latinos and Native Americans in the development of the American press that is what really—another major theme of our book is to resurrect that history and have a more inclusive history of how our press developed, that there were all kinds of folks who have played pivotal roles, and actually heroic roles, in the development of a free press in America that have been expunged from the official histories,” Gonzales said recently in an interview on Democracy Now.

Gonzalez co-founded Democracy Now in 1996; currently, this daily news show – The War and Peace Report – is on more than 950 TV and radio stations. Here’s Democracy Now‘s vision statement: “For true democracy to work, people need easy access to independent, diverse sources of news and information.” This ties into the under girder of the Torres/Gonzalez book.

As one of Democracy Now‘s founders, Gonzalez has codified his own 30 years working in corporate media and 15 years with Democracy Now into this seven-year book project with Torres, a journalist, a former National Association of Hispanic Journalists deputy director, and adviser for the media reform organization, Free Press.

To reiterate: News for All the People is a tribute to the powerful independence of Black, Indigenous, Latino, and Asian people in attempting to bring to their communities news and perspectives counter to the white supremacist, expansionist, and war-mongering system that stole hundreds of millions of acres of land from Indigenous peoples, Mexicans, and Tejanos. It is a criticism of supremacist editors who aided and abetted the lynchings and murders of not only Blacks, but Mexicans and Asians, and not just in some backwater on the Delta, but in the center of Los Angeles.

Gonzalez synthesizes why this project was galvanized in the first place during an interview on his own show, Democracy Now, speaking with Amy Goodman: “I never was able to clearly understand why our media system is the way it is. The American people love to hate the media, in terms of their constant frustration with how newspapers and television and radio don’t provide accurate coverage. But it’s especially true among people of color. African Americans and Latinos and Native Americans and Asians have always felt denigrated and somehow misrepresented, deeply, by the American media system.”

What is it to be an American? That question has been wrested away from all the “other” races and ethnicities and from those of the female gender, as well as all the people deemed “The Other,” who are not part of the white race, or part of the one percent, or part of the monied elite with the ears of judges, politicians and CEOs glued to their every word.

In many ways, this book, also traces with aplomb the history of newspapers in this country, vaunting the lives, struggles and voices of publishers and editors who stuck their necks out. Key to this book’s foundation and keen story telling is a deep look at the evolution of newspapers and the press in this country’s history before, during and after the country’s founding.

The very first newspaper on this continent was Publick Occurrences, founded in 1690 in Boston. This was a three-page sheet, the first newspaper, which was was suppressed by the Massachusetts Council after one issue, “because it had some provocative articles in it,” Gonzales said.

“And all of the articles were about the threats of Native Americans, except there was one positive article. And that was about how some Christianized Indians in Plymouth were giving thanks to God on Thanksgiving. But generally—and so, Publick Occurrences set the prototype for how race would be covered in America, because every newspaper subsequent to that, throughout the colonial period, a huge portion of the content of newspapers was for the settlers to know what the Indians were up to.”

This book is replete with the stories that have not just been printed on the back pages of history books, but in some cases disregarded – scrubbed – completely. Those people of color running and writing for the Press were in many cases also anti-war and anti-imperialist. Frederick Douglass was the editor of several African-American newspapers throughout his lifetime and the most vocal opponent of the U.S. war against Mexico (1846-48).

In his papers, Douglass was railing against this war on Mexico. Here’s a quote from one of his articles that appeared 18 months into the Mexican-American War: “We have seen for eighteen months, the work of mutilation, crime and death go on, each advancing step sunk deeper in human gore. By every mail has come some new deed of violence. Cities have been attacked, and the cry of helpless women and children has risen, amid the shrieks and agony of death and dishonor. The living have gone forth, and dead corpses encased in lead have returned. Thousands of widows and orphans have sent up to the heavens their pitiful wail… And yet all is quiet as under the most perfect despotism. There is no united appeal, which would make the rulers tremble; no thronging voices of petition, no indignant rebuke, no prayer, ‘Lord, how long?’”

Finally, News for All the People takes us into the modern era of Latinos, Asian, Indigenous peoples, and Blacks fighting for their own voices in media. They get into the debates about how free and open the Internet will stay, if it ever was free/open in the first place. Both authors are clear about the need for an alternative press and more debate and discussion of the news for and by the corporate war state.

“One of the things that we’ve uncovered is that this fundamental debate that is constantly occurring is: does our nation need a centralized system of news and information, or does it need a decentralized, autonomous system? And which serves democracy best?” González said. “It turns out that in those periods of time when the government has opted for a decentralized or autonomous system, democracy has had a better opportunity to flourish, racial minorities have been able to be heard more often and to establish their own press. In those periods of the nation’s history when policies have fostered centralized news and information, that’s when dissident voices, racial minorities, marginalized groups in society are excluded from the media system.”

This book will help contextualize how bastardized, propagandized and mean media outlets like Fox News or Clear Channel have become, how the limited number of publishers controlling a majority of printed materials is bad for democracy, and what gave rise to those pugnacious independent writers and alternative periodicals fighting to expose the government-corporate role in stifling debate.

In These Times, the Texas Observer, Mother Jones, ProPublica, The Nation, Truthout, Yes Magazine, Orion Magazine and Democracy Now, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Truthdig, et al. give us some hope that an alternative press – hence mainstream – will gain favor over the profit-driven drivel and war-promoting yammering going on in the white media.

The film Urbanized tackles the complexities of cities, with just a few of the rough edges and little of the persnickety organic flow of how cities do, should and will evolve.

Sometimes, a movie “review” is a catharsis, or just both barrels aimed at the aimless prognostication of filmmakers co-opted by the growth paradigm and enamored by the so-called “creative class.”

I’ll tackle both hernia-inducing topics in several more stories to come, but first some observations while going to and leaving the film, Urbanized.

Irony: Going to see the film Urbanized, at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle and witnessing in just a few miles of driving from Beacon Hill during the Snow-ageddon of 2012  tow trucks lifting hybrid autos onto flatbeds; Seattle PD patrol vehicles slipping and sliding; a few ice falls by pedestrians; the dull roar of Interstate 5 muted significantly because Seattle shuts down after three-quarters of an inch of snow.

Reality: City life, with pho venders literally raking the sidewalks with garden tools, kids using sled discs to get airtime on unplowed streets normally clogged with Amazon.com employees, and lots of people out and about taking snapshots of their snow-covered automobiles (only three inches of the white stuff!) in this rare winter wonderland.

Observation: Cool, hip Capitol Hill, with all the trendy coats, boots and Dr. Zeuss hats on a growing legion of lifestylism experts who yak it up about their love of Obama, how that civet defecated coffee is “so decadent” at $600 a pound, and how Thomas Friedman is really a smart guy. The only thing missing this night at the movies? The lower half of the 99 percent huddling in drafty apartments trying to keep down the obscene Puget Sound Electric bills; the homeless guys with pretty pun-filled “will wash your SUV for a fee” cardboard signs pissing off metro-sexual guys on their way to pedicures; the feral cats and dogs looking for out-of-date sushi dumped out back. Even the rats were smart enough to hunker down.

As a journalist who’s seen Tucson, Phoenix, El Paso, New Mexico and much of Southern California turn into  metastasized suburban sprawl nightmares;  someone who’s tried to crack the code of  less than creative bureaucratic, careerist city planners and engineers as a beat reporter; and a planning practitioner who ended up with a graduate degree in urban and regional planning emphasizing sustainability –  going to an 80-minute film about our urban world ( more than 50 percent of global population is living in cities as of 2011) is going to be wrought with skepticism.

The 2011 Gary Hustwit film, titled Urbanized,  has a few strengths and many gaps, not so much attributed to which cities were featured and not highlighted, but hobbled by how the filmmaker sheds light on the urban reality of city planners, architects, the Mayor Bloombergs or Dalys of the world, and all those developers and their sycophants in the Chamber of Commerce who are beholding to Wall Street and “the” banks.

That collective build-pave-raze elan is under-girdered in an undying faith in unsustainable growth (economic and population) paradigms in Hustwit’s  documentary. The confidence in the minds and motives of the vaunted few making decisions for several billion citizens’ well beings (or our increasingly impoverished lives) not just pertaining to the here and now or the immediate future, but seven generations out, is grotesque.

The film could have been oh so much more at this bizarre time of the vanguard still blathering on about incrementalism when it comes to planning cities around the inevitable – peak oil, food shortages, Diasporas, climate instability and resource hoarding.

It’s difficult for me to sit still in a film like Urbanized, or when viewing the PBS series, e² , what was touted as “a critically acclaimed, multipart PBS series about the innovators and pioneers who envision a better quality of life on earth: socially, culturally, economically and ecologically.”

It’s because I started out as a 16-year-old (1973) in Tucson working against the rampant scouring of the Sonora desert, all the way into the magnificent Santa Catalina Mountains, where I hiked alongside black bear, puma, mule deer, dozens of reptile and avian species in what has to be the most diverse and abundant desert in the world. We’re talking about canyons and season springs and caves and immense verdant miles and miles of ocotillo and palos verdes.

I began seeing the light when informed, well-spoken community groups hit stonewall after stonewall going to politicians and land use departments demanding an end to the bulldozing and fracturing of vital, abundant ecosystems (Center for Biological Diversity started in Tucson).

I’ve been on tasks forces looking at sustainability, peak oil, food security and climate change up in the Pacific Northwest.  I’ve had some killer guests on my radio show which ran on a community radio FM radio station, the last and largest population-wise license approved by “There is Yellow Cake” Colin Powell’s son the old FCC chairman, Michael Powell.

Folk like Richard Heinberg (Peak Everything) and Post-Carbon Institute’s David Lerch talked about sustainability and sustainability-lite. James Howard Kunstler (Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency) and Bill McKibben (The End of Nature) talked about the political realities of a one-party America never forcing the issue of true economic and urban development. David Suzuki (renowned Canadian author, environmentalist, and documentarian) and Tim Flannery (The Weather Makers) talked about how far away the average Westerner was to understanding the truly monumental problems cities will face because of climate change.

I’m seeing more and more limited sight and broken thinking tied to so-called renewable energy and climate change and sustainability initiatives by corporations and municipalities. But documentary-makers?

How can people with film-making credentials and the backing miss so much in a film? Those were the underlying questions I had throughout the 80 minutes of Urbanized. I could not stop thinking about what all the greenwashing cities and proponents of smart growth have done over the past thirty years, skewing even more the conversation about cities’ survival.

Hell, I was wondering where the dystopia of The Road could fit into Urbanized.

All these emotions flooded me in my frustration while watching the film, especially since I had just spent a week in Vancouver, Canada, attending what is called The UBC Summer Institute on Sustainability Leadership. It was there where I ran into the same kind of thinking – technology and the hyper-developers and architects will get us all out of climate change’s way.  That’s another essay in DV, soon to come.

The stuff I’d been working on tied to this idea of “the new black is green” that eco-pornographers and the corporate-modeled environmental groups like the Sierra Club are shilling I couldn’t shake while sitting through the film.

The film Urbanized is really looking at cities from the One percent/Twenty-nine percent perspective (I’ve come to come up with the Thirty Percenters as the dividing line in my frame for this Occupy movement). The fact is so much could have been learned by Urbanized’s director from the great trilogy by Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger.

Glawogger looked at the the underclass in Mexico City, Bombay, Moscow and New York in Megacities (1998); and then manual labor at the beginning of  this century through the blood, sweat and tears of coal miners in the Ukraine, ship dismantlers in Pakistan, slaughterers in a Nigerian stockyard and sulfur harvesters on an Indonesian mountain in Working Man’s Death  (2005); and then in Glawogger’s  latest feature, Whores’ Glory, he explored the streets of New York, Mumbai, Moscow, and Mexico City — the “megacities” in his three-punch uppercut to view the new realities of the 21st Century.

We’re turning into urban dwellers, human rats, farther and farther away from farming and what could have been intentional communities far and wide, sustainable, compact, supported by agrarian ingenuity and smaller and smaller human footprints with dynamic, active cultural structures.

Instead, we are in a rush to get wired-in, carting our families and belongings into the centers of employment, and some of the outfall is more anxiety  about being out in rural-scapes. The Thirty Percent has facilitated this uneven takeover of our lives. Small towns are drying up all over North America, and what were small towns near cities have turned into gated communities and suburban ghettos about to be annexed into bigger and bigger concentrations of people moving endlessly in cars to cobble together a living working two or three part-time jobs.

This is the 70 percent I consider the real defining group that the Occupy movement alludes to by invoking the 99 Percent jingo.

As an out of work planner in  Seattle – a city not very dynamic when it comes to outside the box thinking in terms of “urban and regional planning” – I understand one back story: throughout the 1970s and 1980s many city planning offices were gutted and the smart practitioners and innovators ended up in private development. So, it’s not so surprising to see how  developers have been setting the agenda for city planning,  especially in smaller towns or Sun Belt cities.

The film Urbanized is a broad brush stroke canvas expression of the design and development of urban centers, touching briefly on the hot button issues Seattlites know so very well – transportation, crime, public spaces, city planning, architecture, energy consumption. Hustwit adds to that the bastard child created from the union of  “free trade,” unbridled capitalism,  consumer-driven development, and corporatocracy – slums, both inner-city  and on the outskirts of the world’s most highly populated and growing cities.

Here’s the missing debate in films like Urbanized: while a total of 227 million people rose out of slum conditions from 2000 to 2010, thanks largely to policies in China and India, according to the UN Human Settlements Programme, also called UN-Habitat, slums are the biggest “impediment” for urban developers.

For some, this is a rare success in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As such, MDG 7, Target 11, UN members pledged to “achieve significant improvement” in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.

These incremental steps, or the one step forward, two steps back, looks pretty tough on the poorest of city dwellers:  from 2000-2010, the absolute numbers of slum dwellers increased from 776.7 million to 827.6 million.

“Cities are growing faster than the slum improvement rate,” said Gora Mboup, a Senegalese who co-authored the report, State of the World Cities 2010/11: Bridging the Urban Divide, issued two years ago.

Half of the increase of 55 million extra slum dwellers came from population growth in existing slum homes; a quarter by rural flight to the cities; and a quarter by people living on the edge of cities whose homes became engulfed by urban expansion. It’s this urban ballooning that both creates slums and threatens those slum dwellers who at least in some cases have patched-together roofs over their heads in these communities that end up taking hold, like the parachuting seeds of dandelions.

Along the US-Mexico border, they are called colonias.

UN-Habitat warned in March 2010:

Short of drastic action, the world slum population will probably grow by six million each year, or another 61 million people, to hit a total of 889 million by 2020.

We’ve been talking about these basic urban topics for decades in the planning and community development fields:

• in 40 years – 2050 – 75 percent of the world’s population will live in cities;
• infrastructure and city services in most cities were designed for people who were middle income or higher;
• cities have been prioritized for private space and automobiles;
• there is a movement toward greater citizen involvement – participatory planning;
• resiliency is key in order for civilization to shift into new living arrangements precipitated by resource shortages, climate change and pollution;
• progressive action and plans have to be contained in not only the planner’s toolbox, but in the politician’s and CEO’s as well; and,
• cities account for 75 percent of energy used/burned and 75 percent of global greenhouse gasses.

For a general audience, Urbanized might be news or compelling, though too much in the documentary comes from the mouths of architects, engineers, politicians and planners, and not enough from community groups and citizen participants in their cities’ designs.

Gary Hustwit understands the limitations of working on a film dealing with the “morphology of cities” with so much of the back story left out:

There are so many cities we couldn’t go to that are not in the film. Our approach with ‘Urbanized’ was not to look at specific cities. It was to look at specific, universal issues and then look at specific projects around the world. Universal issues that face all cities: We all need a roof over our head, we need clean water and sanitation, we need mobility and ways to get around, we need some place to work and we need places to relax. Whatever you want to talk about in a city, it all pretty much boils down to one of those five issues. Then we look at how different cities are dealing with them. In a way, we are making a composite city. I couldn’t think of any other way to structure it.

The film doesn’t look at the price of depopulating rural villages and towns. The concept of permaculture and permanent cultures tied to agrarian work, marketing and food processing is never touched upon. What about the price of urbanization around the absolutely astounding farmer suicide rate in India –  where a quarter of a million farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years? Think of one farmer committing suicide every 30 minutes. Why? City life, city thinking.

Agriculture in India is subject to global markets in this push for  economic liberalization. Emphasis has been placed on building and retrofitting cities in India, so removal of agricultural subsidies and the opening of Indian agriculture to the global market have increased costs – through bigger and bigger farmer loans — while also reducing yields and profits for many farmers. Some of that is tied to seed and biotech fascism around such companies as Monsanto, or the heavy price pumping water from historically significant aquifers for bottling companies like Nestle and CocaCola?

In the film, we do see Paris, New York, the slums of Mumbai, the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, the bike lanes of Bogotá, Colombia, lighted walkways in Apartheid-cleaved townships on the outskirts of Cape Town, a new housing project in Santiago, Chile, the depopulating Detroit (once 1.4 million folk, down to 386,000) and the shame of New Orleans almost seven years after a category three hurricane hit..

It’s no criticism of the film that it was finished before the public power of the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement, but Hustwit in a recent interview ramified the impact of public participation in public spheres:

Attitudes about what the priorities of a city should be and whom city space should benefit are changing. And it had to come as a result of people literally taking the space back. All the public-private plazas in New York City are a perfect example of space being sold off to the highest bidder, when really the city should step in and preserve more of this space for public use.

It’s clear that Seattle should have tackled the issues Jim Diers brought to the fore as Seattle’s  first director of Department of Neighborhoods in 1988 and serving under three mayors for 14 years. His book, Neighborhood Power: Building Community the Seattle Way, is about community participation and organizing, Sal Alinsky-style. His book and philosophy has been scrutinized by other cities, including Austin, Texas.

Alas, community now is about defined locations of gentrification, gated communities, and the poor and lower middle class in the suburbs, making huge emotional, economic and sustainability sacrifices at the hands of sub-living wages, two or three jobs and a closed loop of driving from the hinterlands – those suburban ghettos – to places in the metropolitan areas for work.

Movies about the welfare of culture, mankind, our organizing tools to stave off war, injustice, environmental calamity and die off should be long, provocative and from the heart. Urbanized seems 20 years behind the times in many ways, sort of a peek into the minds of rarefied designers, architects and planners.

Those planners and designers and wonks are living in a Richard Florida fantasy land of this creative class of high tech gurus and support engineers who supposedly make cities work, and make them interesting, artistic, bohemian, and where all the “cool, hip, liberal Obama-supporting types” create the great cities of the present and future.

This is not a film that posits much from Jane Jacobs thinking, either from her work in 1961, Death and Life of Great American Cities or Dark Age Ahead (2004).

In this latter book, her main focus is on “the five pillars of our culture that we depend on to stand firm.” Those pillars can be applied to most Westernized or non-Western societies — the nuclear family (but also community); education; science; representational government and taxes; and corporate and professional accountability. While Dark Age Ahead is pessimistic in a good way, her conclusion is more buoyant than all of her critique up to that point:

At a given time it is hard to tell whether forces of cultural life or death are in the ascendancy. Is suburban sprawl, with its murders of communities and wastes of land, time, and energy, a sign of decay? Or is rising interest in means of overcoming sprawl a sign of vigor and adaptability in North American culture? Arguably, either could turn out to be true.

We live in a time when on one hand a mayor like Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel may speak the new urbanism language of developers, architects, and strategic planners, but he is Occupy Chicago’s worst enemy, using mass arrests, suspension of the valued one phone call in prison and distaste for nurses and teachers to “plan his city.”

Emanuel is like many mayors in the US, tied to the machinations of developers, financiers, and  private planners: lots of talk about enterprise zones/urban cores, carbon footprints, sustainable jobs, green infrastructure, and smart growth, but also, as Emanuel is proposing, criminalizing the act of expressing dissent, minimizing the time and place where people can protest, giving police more authority to suppress protesters, and adding extensive rules and restrictions that bureaucratize the process of obtaining a permit and severely limits the “fluidity” of demonstrations.

Urbanized barely scratches the surface, and no matter how “cool” or technologically awe-inspiring some aspects of  mega cities of the world seem, a few billion people are protesting the toil, pollution, lack of wages, and unbelievably inhumane treatment galvanized by this  creative class Gary Hustwit highlights in his film who seem to think they have the final say in the plans for our world’s cities’ futures.

Hell, most places in the US are so broken more and more college graduates are lining up at food banks, a 100 million feral dogs and cats roaming the streets just might be subject to police shoot-to-kill policies as animal control units are gutted (see Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s plan for stray dogs), and grand schemes like a $4.2 billion deep bore tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle get approved to placate the waterfront-lusting developers.

The irony behind Urbanized’s implicit ending, as illustrated in an October 2011 interview of Hustwit in the journal  Design Observer, is a  case study in  his next documentary, a subject caught in the shadow in the towering skyscrapers of our urbanized world – rural life.

When I went to interview Rem Koolhaas [world-renowned Dutch Architect] — and it took months and months for us to get him scheduled — we finally sat down, and we talked a little before the interview started. And I said we are going to talk about cities. And the first thing Rem says is: You know I’m not really thinking about cities anymore. Now that 51 percent of people live in cities, what I’m really interested in is all these spaces that we are leaving behind in the countryside.

This maybe a fun projection of the next movie to come for Hustwit, but the absurdity of our times are underway when it comes to the ultimate city, as Will Doig of Salon.com writes in a piece, “Science Fiction No More: The Perfect City is Under Construction”:

And so it will be with cities like PlanIT Valley, currently being built from scratch in northern Portugal. Slated for completion in 2015, PlanIT Valley won’t be a mere “smart city” — it will be a sentient city, with 100 million sensors embedded throughout, running on the same technology that’s in the Formula One cars, each sensor sending a stream of data through the city’s trademarked Urban Operating System (UOS), which will run the city with minimal human intervention.

We saw an opportunity … to go create something that was starting with a blank sheet,” said PlanIT Valley creator Steve Lewis, “thinking from a systems-wide process in the same way we would think about computing technologies.

Oh no, that’s a whole other essay-article I’ve got to get my arms around and pen, and soon. The entire creative class and knowledge worker saving the world mentality of our time, at least in many of the megacities and smaller ones like Seattle or San Francisco, ties into this PlanIT Valley hyper-homeland security, nanny-sitting, dead-creativity world of the blasé.

This is the very thinking that Jacobs decried and James Howard Kunstler dissects. Is this really the world’s attitude toward modern technology and city-building and city-living, as Mark Shepard, an architect and the author of Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, states?

“From a tech perspective, we’re not really selling products and services anymore. We’re selling lifestyles,” he says.

See Urbanized  after you rent the movie, The Age of Stupid. After you watch, The End of Suburbia. It’s easy to end a movie review about planning with a thousand quotes, but I’ll put two down from creative folks, real ones, and not planners:

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

— Edward Abbey, writer, essayist, novelist (1927-1989)

A common mistake people make when trying to design something foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

— Douglas Adams, author, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1952-2001)

What does a group of 30 “sustainability” professionals do when they run into a pair of two-story-tall common house sparrows? Most of them admire the anatomically correct metal sculptures; a few wonder what’s happening to the actual birds in this neighborhood.

It’s July and we’re in a planned community in the heart of Vancouver: green roofs, solar powered trash compactors, LEED gold and platinum architecture. It’s also a Thursday afternoon and hardly anyone is outside. Even with a building occupancy rate of over 70 percent, there is no public activity. No one is around but us and the two 19-foot tall birds, perfectly scaled sentinels of a morphing city.

The visit is part of the University of British Columbia’s Summer Institute in Sustainability Leadership, a week-long course for professional planners in July. We are hoofing it around the grounds of the Vancouver Olympic Village, the largest LEED-certified platinum neighborhood in North America—also called the world’s greenest athletic facility. The group includes planners, environmental and sustainability directors, landscape architects, social planners, energy experts, a coffee services manager, a yoga clothing manager, a Unilever middle manager—most of them from Canada, several from Korea, one from Brazil, and, me, the lone Yankee.

The developers and the City of Vancouver are trying to sell Southeast False Creek, the site of the Olympic Village, to a build-out of 16,000 people, with 250 affordable housing units—and ecology is part of the marketing campaign.

But the sparrows so lovingly depicted by Vancouver artist Myfanwy MacLeod are also a testament to humanity’s constant threat to biodiversity. Eight pairs of sparrows were first released on this continent in the spring of 1851, in Brooklyn, New York. They are now one of the most common birds in North America, the world for that matter. MacLeod’s artwork—commissioned for the 2010 Olympics and Paralympics—speaks volumes about the state of the planet and the current marketing around sustainability.

One of my conclusions from the sustainability institute is that green is in, but greenwashing reigns. James Howard Kunstler, a friend and colleague—and the author of Geography of Nowhere—is working on a new book about the limits of technology. In no uncertain terms, he tells us that inventing and selling us new stuff won’t fix our environmental problems. “The ‘green’ campaign has largely become a money-grubbing project based on extremely unrealistic wishful thinking about technology, along with a sort of therapy campaign to make us feel better,” he says.

Taking the pulse

My role at the Institute’s summer course was to take the pulse of a province, city, and university known as the most advanced green places on earth. I went in looking for a chance to frame the concept called greenwashing—or sustainability lite, as Judy Layzer calls it. Layzer is an associate professor of environmental policy and the director of MIT’s urban sustainability project.

I quickly found that many of the leaders in sustainable city movements across Canada and the U.S. tend to duck the really tough questions any planner might ask: Don’t we have to “do” deep sustainability at the municipal and regional levels to truly affect change? How does the planning profession promote greenwashing? If the poor have no safety nets and the middle class is struggling, what is the point of LEED platinum certified communities?

Many sustainability action plans call for superficial fixes. “Local policies such as plastic bag bans, restricting lawn watering, and tree-planting must be evaluated to judge their actual outcomes in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the quality of city life,” says Anthony Flint, director of public affairs at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Flint was more than open in explaining in email exchanges what we have to do to get sustainability implemented and greenwashing quashed:

“In my chapter in This Land (2006), I looked at the then-nascent green building movement, where municipal officials and others were contemplating requiring green standards as part of urban development agreements, essentially as part of codes,” Flint told me.

“The early examples got some of the basic stuff out of the way — encouraging the use of stairs, using natural light and ventilation, efficient lighting, bike lockers, stormwater treatment and water management, landscaping beyond lawns that need to be watered, composting/recycling ( both operational and in the construction process), the now ubiquitous green roof. Now just about every developer and architect is green, as a standard. It’s no longer news to have a LEED certified building, but rather an expectation.”

Flint, like others, sees the “greenest part” of any building as its location – “a redevelopment of an urban site, access to transit, walkability context.” So, a great LEED-gold building in a suburban office park that has to be accessed by car is not green by any stretch of the imagination.

Many cities are on that bandwagon: Tearing down old buildings and putting up new- fangled green dreams—the silver, gold, platinum, and beyond platinum goals of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design architecture administrated through the U.S. Green Building Council.

But are green points the answer to global warming?

“All rating systems are flawed and completely depend on the assumptions and inputs used to get the output. And once you have them, what do they really tell us?” asks Mike Lydon, a principal for the Street Plans Collaborative, a consulting firm that helps clients improve the viability of active transportation and smart growth. Lydon is also co-author of The Smart Growth Manual (2009), with Andres Duany and Jeff Speck.

“Take LEED, for example,” Lydon continues. “The new urbanists and other likeminded people helped awaken the world to the fact that a LEED platinum building is really not as great an accomplishment as a fully walkable, transit-served neighborhood. So, while we can rate buildings, it’s critically important to look holistically at their context and how people access them.”

How do these buildings perform? Joseph Lstiburek in the Journal of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers calls to task the architects and engineers who go after the brass ring embedded in those LEED points. He calls these “green motives” that have little to do with long-term energy savings. Some of these designs use more energy than they save.

A much larger question grows out of this sustainability and greenwashing discourse.

What is a sustainable city exactly?

“Cities are at their core consumptive networks,” says Todd Reisz, an Amsterdam-based architect and co-editor of the recently published Al manakh 2: Gulf Continued, which looks at the Persian Gulf region, from both historical and contemporary perspectives.

“They consume the most energy, not only in terms of fuels but also in terms of food and natural and manufactured materials.”

Suddenly cities seem cleaner, Reisz tells me, but that’s not exactly true. Both the U.S. and Canada have sent (or lost) their carbon-heavy industries to other nations. “Manufacturing and other unappealing uses have been moved elsewhere, either to an industrial park beyond the public’s eye or to another continent altogether.” But does the ranking of the “greenest” communities, he asks, “include the CO2 emissions required to manufacture that city’s computers in China, the energy required to grow its bananas in Costa Rica?”

Many planners and analysts look for guidance from architect and designer Steve Mouzon, who has defined what real sustainability means in the built and natural environments. Among his major points for the average citizen to live by, separate from what a city planner or architect has to do for sustainability, are laid out by Lloyd Alter, architect, developer, inventor, and builder of prefab housing. He writes for TreeHugger and is an Associate Professor at Ryerson University teaching sustainable design.

• Choose it for longer than you’ll use it
• Live where you can walk to the grocery
• Live where you can make a living
• Choose smaller stuff with double duty

But in his book The Original Green—a must read—Mouzon also coins the term “gizmo green.” We can’t rely on technological solutions to our global warming crisis. Instead, Mouzon says, we should stop relying on a few experts like architects, planners and engineers and designers.

“Think about this for a moment: if millions of the best minds around the world work for years to figure out the mysteries of true sustainability, how ridiculous would it be to expect each significant architect to reformulate sustainability in the image of their own personal style? Asking a single person to reformulate years of work by millions of the best minds goes beyond the absurd… to the globally treasonous! We must be allowed to share wisdom.”

For people like Anthony Flint, he weighs the practical with the philosophical when it comes to sustainability. Flint’s a journalist and author: Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City (2009) and This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America (2006).

“So one divide is between what Steve Mouzon and others refer to as ‘gizmo green’ and urban development — with the emphasis on urban — that is almost by definition green. Skanska’s [USA division of Swedish giant, Skanska AB] retrofit of the Empire State Building is a good example of combining the two — the location green by definition, and cutting-edge construction processes and green technologies that result in the long-term energy savings that building owners covet.”

In the end, as the Vancouver Olympic Village architects and Mouzon and others tell us, the places that are sustainable have to build community involvement and love for place.

Lydon agrees. “We need to make places worth caring deeply about, and that requires far more than aggregating net zero building, bullet trains, or bike lanes,” he says. “Indeed, a million net zero homes that require their inhabitants to drive 30 miles a day probably aren’t as ecological as a million homes that aren’t net zero, but which are in places that don’t require driving.”

So, how can we in the sustainability movement start looking at sustainability in a much more holistic way?

“This is a good question and a challenge,” says Moura Quayle, former chair of Vancouver’s Urban Landscape Task Force, which gave birth to the city’s Neighborhood Greenways program, a true community-based sustainability tool utilizing small-scale, local connections for pedestrians and cyclists, linking parks, natural areas, historic sites, amenities and commercial streets. As the City of Vancouver’s web site explains:

“Neighbourhood Greenways provide opportunities to express the unique character of the neighbourhood and often include public art which adds further interest and distinctiveness to the project.”

Again, these projects in the Greenways Program are initiated by residents and are partnered with the City. The community is expected to take the lead and maintain the space, while the City of Vancouver assists with the design, development and construction of the project.

“We are facing it in Vancouver as we talk [about being the] ‘greenest city’ and mean much more than environmental sustainability.” For Vancouver, Quayle insists, place identity also fits into the concept of “green.”

“Place identity as a third component of community sentiment opens the discussion to a host of related disciplines, such as humanist geography and environmental psychology. These disciplines seek to investigate the meaning of place to human experience. Place identity consists of cognitions about the physical world, including memories, ideas, feelings, attitudes, values, preferences, meanings, and conceptions of behavior and experience which relate to the variety and complexity of physical settings that define the day-to-day existence of every human being.”

There are planners who see sustainability as a market-driven solution to community challenges tied to climate change, peak oil and heavy urbanization of our globe’s cities.

Mark Holland, a Vancouver city planner who now manages the Sustainability Office, has little tolerance for environmentalism and social justice driving sustainability.

“Sustainability was co-opted by the environmentalist and social justice movements and was quickly branded in the minds of those not personally identified with those movements as just another leftist radical stance.,” he says. “Sustainability is simply the only context which our economy can function in this century, and it needs to be loudly rebranded as that.”

What’s next?

How will we cope when the world has nine billion people (about 30 years from now)? Different visions for how we might operate were set forth in the report, “Our Common Future,” known more commonly as the Brundtland Report, published in 1987. The report—a gargantuan multi-government and multi-disciplinary effort—recognized holism and systems thinking as forces to solve a universal problem.

All sectors of society, according to the report, must be active participants and decision makers in a world moving into crisis mode. But it is only now that cities, counties, and states might be attempting collectively and strategically to come together after more than 24 years since that much quoted definition of sustainable development was penned by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland: “…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

A bioregional framework that represents a “whole scale nature-human linked system as a place-based approach to promote scientific understanding, planning, and action to regenerate our communities and other living systems” still is way beyond the average politician and citizen operational model.

However, it’s becoming clearer to planners and politicians alike that places like the Cascade Bioregion or the Napa Valley Bioregion, for example, each call for unique investigative practices that will bring forth planning, design, and management skills that will make the bioregion resilient through these unique sets of landscape-human patterns.

Despite a general acceptance that sustainable development calls for a convergence between the three rails of economic development, social equity, and environmental protection, the concept remains elusive. For many like Kunstler and Mouzon, the grip of technological, political, and other constraints creates a fertile ground for the greenwasher to thrive.
When I am with fellow educators, sustainability planners, and professionals looking for ways to be change agents in sustainability, I understand the learning curve is steep for those who have not immersed themselves in climate change, sustainability, and social justice and grassroots movements.

At the Sustainability Leadership class, it is clear that many of the facilitators did not want to tackle the big E in the triple bottom line: equity. In fact, there is dissonance with these leaders when I challenge their assertions that Wal-Mart is the model for sustainability.

Many in sustainability circles want solar, LEED, wind turbines, some metering for energy use and carbon emissions, but they do not question the “corportacracy” that many in the deep sustainability movement in U.S. and other countries are challenging.

We’ll use Wal-Mart as an example of a company trying to use sustainability as a tool for the corporation’s profit drive. Many times I’ve heard folk cite this new book, Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution (2011) by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Edward Humes.

The problem with Wal-Mart is endemic of a large predatory corporation that is attempting to corner the world’s retail market, whose CEO (Lee Scott) made $24 million last year in pay and another $8 million in stock options, and whose corporate policy is to give money to GOP and Blue Dog democrats as part of a lobbying effort.

Using solar panels made in China and selling organic produce from Chile do not make a sustainable company when one figures the wage gap issue –

According to the April 2011 “Living Wage Policies and Big-Box Retail” report by Center for Labor Research and Education at UC Berkeley, the retailer could easily pay associates $12 per hour. Even if Wal- Mart passed the total cost to customers, 46 cents per WalMart visit would be added to one’s tab.

Then there’s the issue of Wal-Mart’s “Love, Earth” line of jewelry, that, according to Wal-Mart meets environmental criteria and meets social criteria. The idea that these criteria are meaningful is refuted by the Broward-Palm Beach New Times article that examined “Love, Earth” from the mine to the store.

Think $50 a month paid to Bolivian miners for this line of Wal-Mart stuff. Or the cyanide heap-leaching process of mining the silver and gold.

Maybe the local city planner won’t be hosting a film night using Robert Greenwald’s Wal-Mart: High Cost of Low Price or the film, Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town as a jumping off point, I’ve hosted a few in Spokane as a graduate planning student at Eastern Washington University. A few off the record voiced what Al Norman of Sprawl-Busters had to say about Store Wars:

Store Wars takes you inside the grassroots politics of Ashland, Virginia, and inside a campaign by Wal-Mart to overpower the town. It is not pretty, but it lays out why Wal-Mart has become the most reviled corporation in America today.

Planners seem to be caught somewhere in the middle of theory and practice, and pitted against politics and economics. So where does planning fit in?

“Planning’s greatest strength is its greatest weakness: It knows change does not come quickly,” says Reitz. “It also assumes there will be a continuously corrective process. And when a planner says it cannot be done quickly, he is let go. This is a broad generalization, but it happens.” Change can come neighborhood by neighborhood and still be effective, he adds. “I don’t see anything wrong in that.”

Michael Harcourt — former mayor of Vancouver and then, later, premier of British Columbia who is now a speaker and author of the book, A Measure of Defiance, and co-author of two books, Plan B: one Man’s Journey from Tragedy to Triumph and City Making in Paradise — sees sustainability as a spectrum. “I don’t use terms like greenwashing. I prefer to look on sustainability policies and practices as a continuum from easy to do, to very hard to accomplish without major structural, attitudinal, political changes.”

Also thinking along those lines is Moura Quayle, Deputy Minister of BC’s Ministry of Advanced Education as well as UBC Sauder School of Business professor. She helped save some valuable farmland on the UBC campus for what is now the ideal showcase for sustainability: the UBC Farm, where land, food, and community learning reign at the 24 hectare farm.

“My field has shifted from being focused on the built environment to a focus on leadership and transformation of the way people think. And I am quite pragmatic,” she says. “For example, I’ve tried to figure out (in the past) how to be practical about how communities can build their own environments—for social and environmental benefits.”

Another example of a seemingly fundamental shift: Will Chicago’s move to plant southern swamp oaks and sweet gum trees be considered deep sustainability or green panic? With permanent heat waves forecast in 50 to 100 years—and thermal imaging already showing the hottest spots—the city is ripping up pavement and putting in green roofs. Is putting in AC for all 750 public schools greenwashing, green scare, or impractical?

Chicago’s deputy commissioner of Department of Environment, Aaron Dumbaugh, has told the US Press many times that “cities adapt or they go away” to justify the Windy City’s green dream: to be the greenest city on the planet.

Steve Mouzon from Miami thinks about sustainability at the community level. It’s about “building sustainable places, so that it then makes sense to build sustainable buildings within them,” he says. “Sustainable places should be nourishable, accessible, serviceable, and securable. Sustainable buildings should be lovable, durable, flexible, and frugal.”

“Today, most discussions on sustainability focus on gizmo green, which is the proposition that we can achieve sustainability simply by using better equipment and better materials,” Mouzon says. “We do need better equipment and better materials, but this is only a small part of the whole equation. Focusing on gizmo green misses the big picture entirely.”

Designing with nature (think, Ian McHard, 1969, Design with Nature) might also be a salient point here, as ornithologists and amateurs alike know the common sparrow is in great decline in Europe. Maybe Canadian artist Myfanwy MacLeod gets greenwashing best through her artwork: “Locating this artwork in an urban plaza not only highlights what has become the ‘natural’ environment of the sparrow, it also reinforces the ‘small’ problem of introducing a foreign species and the subsequent havoc wreaked upon our ecosystems.”

Green Cities and Green Washing Sources
http://www.chicagoclimateaction.org/
http://ourgreencities.co
http://www.siemens.com/entry/cc/en/greencityindex.htm
http://www.originalgreen.org/OG/Home.html
http://vancouver.ca/greenestcity/
http://rmc.sierraclub.org/energy/library/sustainablecities.pdf
http://coolcitiesde.us/about.html
http://www.monocle.com/specials/35_cities/
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/11/the_global_cities_index_2010
http://ourblocks.net/neighborhood-based-community-building-handbooks-recommended-by-jim-diers/
http://home.comcast.net/~jimdiers/
http://www.naturalstep.org/
http://www.naturalstepusa.org/
http://www.citiesforpeople.net/cities/curitiba.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRD3l3rlMpo&feature=related
http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/mothincarnate/24900/how-greenwashing-really-can-make-difference
http://www.greenwashingindex.com/index.php
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/smart-takes/greenwashings-toll-americans-get-green-fatigue/13392
http://www.pewclimate.org/
http://www.greenerchoices.org/eco-labels/eco-home.cfm
http://blog.terrachoice.com/2010/03/18/what-does-all-natural-really-mean/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=greenwashing-green-energy-hoffman
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=greenwashing-environmental-marketing

Jason F. McLennan, CEO of the International Living Future Institute (home of the Living Building Challenge, a standard launched by the Cascadia chapter of the Green Building Council in 2006 and intended to push beyond LEED at the time). He just published a memoir about his own effort to live green, Zugunruhe: The Inner Migration to Profound Environmental Change (published by the ILFI’s Ecotone Publishing, 2010)

I spoke with Jason about green washing, what the cities of Vancouver, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and others are attempting to do with architecture and urban design. We discussed how difficult it is to launch into a larger discussion about quicker, more all-encompassing ways to mitigate, plan for and design livability for a world that some like James Hansen calls, a world without ice.

He just spoke at a BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), business conference that brought “together independent business owners and innovators, local living economy entrepreneurs, community investors, government economic development professionals and sustainability leaders.” McLennon understands that restlessness folk in various forms of the sustainability movement are displaying. His book’s main title describes the grumbling and undertow some of the deep sustainability folk have just prior to a period of great migration, or change. Certain species display agitation and restlessness — a phenomenon referred to by scientists as “zugunruhe,” which McLennan identifies with, shaped by this current zugunruhe pattern emerging among people yearning for a sustainable future.

“Zugunruhe is a work of creative genius that draws us into an engaging journey of self-discovery, brings the biggest and most frightening issues of our time up close, and invites our engagement,” notes David Korten, “It will leave you envisioning human possibilities you never previously imagined.”

Paul K. Haeder: Why aren’t communities taking charge of sustainability when it comes to cities’ decision?

Jason F. McLennan: “We’ve moved backward as a population on these issues of climate change and sustainability. A large percentage of Americans do not believe it’s real. Cities will have to make more substantial progress. We still have our eyes closed using these old sets of laws, regulations. In every community there are people working on making better, sustainable cities. The problem is the cities – planners, architects, engineers, politicians – can only push sustainability … as far as where society can accept it.”

PKH: Why are we stuck in this incremental change mindset, in planning, in development, in sustainability programs?

JFM: Changes will happen for reasons not in our control. But it’s best to put into place models of what we think success is. We need to continue speaking to the choir. We need as many people in our musical group able to play the sustainability part. Look at us as little conductors with little orchestras. We have to spend time focusing on those that do sustainability and teach them to play, and then pull them into deeper commitments to sustainability. We can’t leave people in a place of shame, hopelessness. We have to envision success and a positive end game. People aren’t wanting to hear about the impending catastrophe … about Kunstler’s ‘long emergency.’”

PKH: What’s your take on LEED-washing?

JFM: LEED can be a powerful tool for powerful change … most of the time. However, it doesn’t get used that way. People are trying to game the system. The larger question is why did that group use LEED? Do I think that LEED is perfect? Absolutely not. No system is perfect. And yes, some criticism is deserved – and needed – to keep improving what has become the most dominant green building program in the world. But there is a big difference in criticism that is intended to make the program stronger – so that it can continue to contribute to lowering environmental impact and changing the building culture – and criticism that is intended to tear down and destroy something that I believe has done a lot of good in the world.¹

PKH: Can planners do more to both encourage sustainability in their work and help designing cities under political constraints to take it on more vigorously?

JFM: It will take investment, large sums of money shifting into deep sustainability. The whole paradigm needs to change. It is going to take a lot of people who made money under the old paradigm — who have profited the most – to create the economic conditions for this new paradigm.

PKH: Sustainability lite or green washing. What do you have to say about those issues?

JFM: “We wish Vancouver was doing more. We feel hamstrung at times when we go in as consultants. How far can that mayor push? Not very far. Until there’s a groundswell from the communities. I will say that if we are serious about cutting greenhouse gas emissions, then we need a World War Two effort to retrofit America’s housing. We’d be cutting greenhouse emissions thirty to fifty percent in two years with the right investment – money – very little time, and significant behavioral change.”

Where Is the Planning Profession on Sustainability and Green Washing?

I spoke with John Robinson, Executive Director, UBC Sustainability Initiative; Professor, Institute of Resources, Environment and Sustainability and in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. My biggest concern at the sustainability leadership school was the skirting of social justice and social sustainability throughout the week.

I asked him a question so many others ducked: How can we in this sustainability movement who want net zero waste and living buildings and other sustainability designs to be the way of the future start looking at sustainability on a much more holistic and socially just and deep ecological frame?

Robinson was clear: “This is a real issue, but again I am optimistic. I think the social leg of the sustainability stool is much less well developed, but I also think it is coming. In the academic realm, fields like political ecology put it front and centre; on the activist front, and it is getting increasing attention in NGOs like DSF and Pembina (look at the Transition Towns movement in the UK, for example). Business is a bit slower and government the slowest but I believe it is coming, especially at the local level.”

We also talked about green washing.

“As someone remarked in about 1995 ‘the growth industry of the 1990s is green bullshit.’ This is not a new problem,” Robinson says. “But what is sometimes overlooked is that this growth is accompanied by an equivalent or perhaps even faster growth in our ability to measure and monitor sustainability (metrics, indicators, monitoring systems, etc.) In the 1990s at the University of Waterloo, I asked an engineering class to tell me what was better from an environmental point of view: electric hand dryers or paper towels. They couldn’t answer the question because they couldn’t find lifecycle data on the materials involved. Today, you can easily find the relevant data on the web. So green washing is, over time, self-limiting, I think, as we get better and better at measuring and detecting it.”

We toured Robinson’s brainchild, the hallmark of sustainability on any campus, right smack on the UBC campus: The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS). It is being billed as a net positive building, or at least Robinson and others want to see it that way. It will open in Summer 2011. One compelling feature are two by fours turned into ceilings – wood from Alberta’s millions of acres of pine beetle damaged timberland. It is mostly discolored, harvested before it becomes a net positive carbon releaser.

Contrasting views of the planning profession with James Howard Kunstler, John Robinson, Mark Holland (a Vancouver city planner who now manages the Sustainability Office) and Bill Rees (his four-decade career at UBC has been marked by a prolific output of writings, a resume of over 80 pages and the development of the ecological footprint concept, while helping to found numerous organizations such as the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, and the International Society for Ecological Economics) is revealing.²

Kunstler:

I do not believe the planning profession as we know it will exist institutionally much longer. It rests on assumptions that to me are just not true – for instance, the idea that we can continue living within the current armatures of daily life, including the metroplex city and the suburbs. I believe our big cities will contract severely back to their old centers and waterfronts (if they are lucky enough to have them), and that the process will be very messy, with ethnic conflict, fights over ownership, massive capital losses, and infrastructure that we will be unable to maintain. Hence, I think the “action” will move to our smaller cities and towns, especially places with a meaningful relationship to agriculture. I see our economy becoming much more internally focused (within North America). Since trucking and commercial aviation are toast, the inland waterways will regain importance. It’s unclear whether we will have the capital or the will to reconstruct our regular rail system (forget about High Speed). These represent epochal shifts. Some parts of the USA (e.g. the Southwest, Florida) may become uninhabitable. This is a scenario that does not admit much of a role for conventional bureaucratic planners who sit in air-conditioned offices drawing charts based on reliable metrics.

Robinson:

I think we are the vanguard of the future and the route to real innovation and increased well being, for both the planet and ourselves. We’ll see who is right. The old sustainability agenda is about being less bad, about limits, and about sacrifice. The new sustainability agenda is about innovation, opportunity and improved well-being (the regenerative concept). I think that is an exciting and empowering concept that will catch on and become irresistible.

Holland:

We proceeded with planning according to a paradigm of modernism and no planetary limits during the massive build out of the 20th Century. The planning profession is getting its head around the new 21st Century reality of constraints and change quickly – but the cities we build and the regulations we have in place (mostly engineering regulations not connected to planners) change very slowly, especially in an atmosphere of recession, financial constraints and fear As we change and accept the global stewardship mandate of the 21st Century and change our rules development, our cities will slowly change. They’ll change a lot faster once the plateau of peak oil is over in a few years and the cost of the factors that have caused our 20th Century cities to become unsustainable become less tenable.

Ironically, the entire week of speakers, workshops, site visit and team building ended with one of the gurus of sustainability, as in the ecological footprint, William Rees. His words stirred the participants after a week of hard work, huge learning curves and spiritual bonding.

Rees: “De-growth is going to be the major issue of the century. While the energy crisis will have severe economic impacts, it is not fundamentally about economics. It is about human ecology and the limits of growth.” Rees is the author of Our Ecological Footprint. Rees is also affiliated with UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning. There is a movement, De-Growth Vancouver, working with Rees and others on what this kind of city might look like.

Rees also is on the advisory board of the Carrying Capacity Network with such notables as Herman Daly (theorist of the steady-state economy) and Thomas Lovejoy (who introduced the concept of biological diversity). This larger push to tie immigration to climate change is part of a population control ploy — greenwashing nativism — which has been written about extensively, recently in a Nation magazine piece by Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU, and author of Nice Work if You Can Get It.

The threat of global warming will increasingly be used to shape immigration policies around a vision of affluent nations or regions as heavily fortified resource islands. Is this mentality already at work? Internationally, the ugly side of the debate about emissions has centered on who has the right to go on polluting and which portions of the world’s population will be sacrificed. Even as cities in affluent countries compete with one another in the sustainability rankings, the same kinds of triage calculations are being made locally, and as resources tighten, the most vulnerable citizens and migrants are cut loose.

Sustain the Sustainable – Where Sustainability Is Going

Here is an interesting contrast in perspective by the leader in sustainability, Gro Harlem Brundtland’s words in the preface of “Our Common Future,” published in 1987, 1999, and then officially 20 years after its publication, 2007:

1987

Many critical survival issues are related to uneven development, poverty, and population growth. They all place unprecedented pressures on the planet’s lands, waters, forests, and other natural resources, not least in the developing countries. The downward spiral of poverty and environmental degradation is a waste of opportunities and of resources. In particular, it is a waste of human resources. These links between poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation formed a major theme in our analysis and recommendations. What is needed now is a new era of economic growth – growth that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable.³

1999

Well, first of all, we should maybe be reminded of the key definition that we formulated: that sustainable development amounts to meeting the demands of the present generations while preserving the rights of future generations to meet their own needs. I think that concept is important to be reminded of, because that illustrates the environmental dimension of sustainable development. In fact, if we misuse nature, and the relationship between man and nature, we will not be in a situation one generation from now, or two generations from now, for them who live then, to have choices and opportunities in life to have a healthy and prosperous future. So, that intergenerational picture and very clear link came forward in that report Our Common Future, and I think that was really what made the strongest impression on people, the other one, the clear links between poverty and environment, which also means between poverty and development. If people are poor, they don’t have choices. They are not empowered, often neither by knowledge, or by health, or by choices in their daily lives, to take care of the future of their children, and the next generations, because the immediate need dominates their lives and their choices. That also made an impression on many people. And the fact that this is not only a national question inside each nation, but also a global challenge, because of the big gaps, both inside countries and between countries. So, the global perspective of being in this together came very strongly forward in 1987 when the report was delivered. And those dimensions are as relevant today as they were in 1987.⁴

2007

We were very clear in 1987 that the responsibility for dealing with these problems building up in the atmosphere, that responsibility belongs to the industrialized world. We have to clean up our problems, and at the same time we have to help the developing world have new technologies to make it possible for them to jump over the polluting stages that we have been through.

We have no time to lose. The data are now clearly presented and have very high confidence levels. There is no question anymore about scientific disagreement. So many things are easily done and lead to improved energy efficiency and a number of other benefits.

Unless we start immediately fulfilling the Kyoto Protocol and then continuing with a broader basis with all countries involved, this is going to get completely out of control and we will not be able to cap carbon dioxide levels. It’s a drama playing itself out in front of us, where we are still able to change a very dangerous scenario but we cannot wait for another 5 or 10 years. We must be active now.⁵

1. Go to, “Defending LEED,” by McLennan.
2. For more on Bill Rees.
3. 1987 – Our Common Future, one small part of Chairwoman’s Foreword, Oslo, 20 March 1987.
4. Interview by Patricia Morales and Ann Ferrara, WHO Report Making a Difference,” 1999.
5. Andrew C. Revkin, “20 Years Later, Again Assigned to Fight Climate Change,” New York Times, May 8, 2007.

(Note – this is the first in a series of news reports, analysis pieces and interview and op-ed (from  former Amazon warehouse “picker” Nichole Gracely, who’s from Pennsylvania and who was part of the Lehigh newpaper Morning Call’s great expose of Amazon’s sweatshop in the Keystone State that hit the newsstands September 18, 2011. So, hold onto your seats – this first one starts off mellow as I focus on a design review meeting recently held in the Emerald City to allow architects to present to the public more Amazon “building madness” in downtown Seattle.)

Sometimes these land use, transportation, design review, and economic development meetings in Seattle make me feel as if I had just been pushed out of some policy wonk’s Leer jet 35,000 feet up, without a parachute or O2. They all have these great raster maps and scatter plots, the visual language of geographical information systems, the “urban lingo” to advance their techniques and typology-loving aspirations.

That is the problem – no, isn’t it!  Another group of silo-ed people self-replicating and forcing through with their elitist and non-community participatory design stuff that is the staff of their lives: making money as developers, architects and builders from the Titans of industry like Amazon’s $19.3 billion dollar wonder Jeff Bezos or the bio-tech-Frankencrop monster called Monsanto.

I listen and wonder where all my planning classes and community development practice sessions as a lowly master’s candidate finishing up with an urban planning degree will go when I listen to one wonk after another wonk tell the crowd all these great things about three skyscrapers coming to Seattle’s skyline.

You see, they are  planning only for “use” as opposed to planning for people, and when I ask the lowly city planner questions to this effect, she cites “this isn’t the proper meeting to discuss those issues . . . that public planning process already took place.”

Post modern sensibilities have shunted the sides of the same coin into entirely different realms of emphasis and possibilities. Inevitably, one and most important one  – social planning – gets the short shrift.

What I have learned, all planning activities should serve the needs and interests of people; however, the modern reductionist tendencies have  sluiced the disciplines, professions, and thinking into distinct troughs of specialization. Continually, I run into this attitude on the part of planners (and developers, elected officials, and other community “stakeholders”) that not only follows the money, but takes on the  “land use, not people” approach.

Social dimensions from most planning activities are then stripped away, so the meetings almost always focus on financial (profit risks) , technological, material, and environmental considerations. For any sensible person, we should be fully encompassing the underlying needs and behaviors of human beings. That should apply to ALL planning – community, land use, transportation, education, environmental and agricultural.

There are incredible amounts of data mining these young Turks do in order to make a case for this type of urban development or that sort of transportation corridor. Sometimes this leaves the engaged viewer – public – way off the scale of where they fit in, where communities tie in.

These planning wonks, in their high-tech offices, produce some of the most colorful, detailed and smart-looking reports and plans from their 35,000 foot perches.

One recent case illustrates how planning today – architecture, too – might be working two sides of very different tracks. The project planned for downtown Seattle, the so-called Denny Triangle, is 3.3 million square feet of Amazon.dot office-headquarters buildings, squeezed into the West Lake area, near the other dozen or so Amazon buildings in the area that add up to a million square feet of whatever Amazonians do.

Let’s look at the Seattle Downtown Design Review Board meeting where the public was seated and standing in a packed City Hall room to see for the first time an anchor project for the downtown West Lake area – Amazon’s campus expansion. We’re talking more than 3.3 million square feet, with three 500-foot high rises in an area that has seen in the past 17 years a huge influx of techy types, from IT to biotechnology.

Restaurants have proliferated, including three from notable Tom Douglas. Bar tabs have risen. The price of housing has gone out the roof. The level of hubris inside the offices and at the businesses frequented by these so-called knowledge workers, the misanthropically-dennoted “creative class” of Richard Florida fame (see – Rise of the Creative Class and another, Cities and the Creative Class,  is stupifying.

While the Amazon warehouse fiasco had already been published months earlier in both Lehigh, Pennsylvania’s Morning Call and Mother Jones magazine and then just recently here, by the Seattle Times, this event was attended by mostly planning and architect types.

However, there were a few in attendance unwilling to let Amazon off the hook even at this staid and rather all-business design meeting. Some in the crowd I knew, and I was with them, as well as being there as a private citizen with some planning background. Working Washington – an offshoot of SEIU – positioned around eight activists in the crowd.

The City’s land use planner in attendance, Lisa Ritzick, seemed a bit taken aback by the throng of people hovering over the architectural renderings and maps of the proposed Amazon base that includes a 2,000 seat auditorium. She reiterated the downtown design guidelines would only encompass architectural design elements, and not environmental or community elements, or lack thereof.

The architect, John Savo, representing NBBJ, the same firm that designed the Gates Foundation’s $500 million campus nearby, plowed through these three block locations, discussing with unabashed confidence FARs (floor area ratios), Class One  & Two Pedestrian Street categories, sun pockets, urban rooms, and view blockages.

NBBJ, an international firm, had its Power Point ready and the three dimensional scaled down models, with interchangeable blocks representing three main alternatives/possibilities.

One big contentious issue seemed to be the vacation of alleyways in the design features. Since the zoning permits buildings of 500-foot heights, and since the three blocks are a bit smaller than traditional city blocks, the idea of being a good neighbor played into the NBBJ design work, Savo said.

We’re talking about views of the Puget Sound and Olympics, 3,000 underground parking spaces and thousands of additional people employed by the Internet retailer. NBBJ’s two presenters harped on the idea of small (insignificant) public spaces that would “allow” passage around the three block complexes.

Some in the crowd, during the public discussion, were concerned about what Amazon-NBBJ was doing to either “make or demolish” the community around the proposed sites part of the plan. Pagnesh Parikh, an architect on the Seattle Design Review Board, posited the questions about how NBBJ and Amazon intended to address the effects of the proposed campus site on surrounding buildings and the community.  The query seemed to stump the two NBBJ architects.

Another interested public attendee who works in a building near the proposed site –  which would include demolition of several buildings — was concerned about the large area of effacement on the three high rises and just how inviting the public spaces would be.

My questions were more pointed, as I addressed the Design Review Board to continue pressing several issues:

a) stronger design and architectural features that would create much more public space, both in size and breadth, maybe even green spaces atop two smaller buildings;

b) the issue of how the public could engage in or use the auditorium; and,

c) whether Amazon would consider finding several locations in the Seattle area to site their retail offices and incubators, sort of an economic development model seeding in some strong neighborhoods like Beacon Hill or Rainer Beach that would benefit from Amazon’s presence as a multiplier for housing, retail and activities.

Then, my brothers in arms from Working Washington went at the design review board with humorous questions about Amazon’s business practices tied to recent stories of Amazon warehouses in Pennsylvania and Nevada functioning like sweatshops. Several pressed the architects and Design Review Board to check on the Amazon’s amazingly small annual tax rate of 5.5 percent.

I was wondering where those lingering questions would come from, those tied to the absolutely odd nature of Amazon.dot.com fighting paying sales taxes while bricks and mortar stores keep paying to help fund the very same infrastructure Amazon uses to package and ship their goods. Or where the community activists were to demand more concessions from Amazon to do much better and innovative “things” for the public in these proposed blocks.

As a final note, I take a bit from the Project for Public Places about the problems dealing with high rises:

Tall buildings affect cities in two different ways that have almost nothing to do with each other. One is as sculptural objects framed in the sky, where their impact is artistic or symbolic. The other is where the buildings meet the ground and create either pleasant or oppressive spaces where people walk and congregate. Architects regularly misfire with big buildings that are bad by both measures, but the tendency is to fail more often and more egregiously at street level.

One reason is that it’s fairly difficult to make a 500-foot-high building seem humane and welcoming to a 5-foot-something biped approaching it. The other is that a building’s owners are naturally more concerned with the way the building reads in the skyline, because that’s where its marketable image gets fixed in the public eye.

Seattle’s skyline and view-shed keep changing, and many older timers think its not for the best, no matter how dense the downtown gets.

Nichole Gracely has the inside scoop on demerits, humiliation, and the work ethic Amazon warehouses demand (think: Columbus’ marauders taking their pound of flesh from the Taino).

Overview (5 w’s): I worked in their Lehigh Valley Fulfillment Center for a year altogether and I served as Morning Call reporter Spencer Soper’s inside informant before, during, and after the investigation ran. Check this out if you haven’t already. I’m proud to have been a part of this story, perhaps the first anti-Amazon piece that really stuck.

Paul K. Haeder: Why’d you become a source for a news expose on this Amazon policy of sweatshop labor?

Nichole Gracely: I wanted to see Amazon exposed and I lacked the time and resources to write my own story. Peak 2010 was a nightmare and I accumulated demerit points due to snow-related absences and was terminated in February 2011.

Here I reference a story — “Erroneous emails lead some applicants to believe they had jobs when they didn’t.

July 23, 2011 by Spencer Soper, The Morning Call

“If you apply for a job at Amazon.com’s Lehigh Valley shipping hub, be careful. Especially if you’re about to quit a different job to work there.”

I contacted Soper immediately after I read the above article and urged him to investigate further. He later contacted me as a source and I requested anonymity because I planned to return to Amazon in August as an ISS temp for Peak 2011. I trusted him immediately because of the questions he asked when we first spoke.

I was inside Amazon’s warehouse to witness management’s damage control measures in the wake of the bombshell expose. “Inside Amazon’s Warehouse” ran on Sep 18, 2011 and I was hired directly by Amazon in October.

The following is my anonymous contribution to the story:

One temporary warehouse worker who started last year said a major selling point was that the assignment could lead to a permanent job with Amazon. Workers had meetings with their ISS managers at the start of each shift. During those meetings, Amazon managers would come and deliver a pep talk, encouraging the temporary workers who wore white badges to work hard if they wanted to get permanent positions and wear a blue badge, she said.

“They said, ‘We don’t care if you’ve been here for two months or for two weeks. If you work hard, we’ll notice and you’ll get converted to a blue badge,’ ” she said.

The number of permanent positions available was always vague, and it was difficult to get a straight answer about hiring, she said. Managers would say Amazon would be hiring “a significant number” of ISS employees to permanent positions.

“They said it on a semi-daily basis,” she said. “They really dangled it and made it seem like this wonderful possibility if we just worked harder … especially when there were a bunch of new hires hungry for a new job.”

She worked in the warehouse for six months and didn’t see any of her temporary colleagues converted.
ISS promoted her to ambassador, a position that trains new workers. Still, she was terminated shortly after the holiday rush ended for missing work during snowstorms, she said.

“It became clear that they did not want to hire people. They wanted to let people go,” she said. “They said they wanted the best people for ambassadors. I was an ambassador and I was not hired.”

I was pleased with how he handled my contribution, thankful to him and the editors at the Morning Call for the story, and amazed that it received national attention. Amazon has been protested for myriad reasons and the Morning Call ran the first article that crashed corporate’s party. Amazon’s arrogance was staggering and I still can’t believe that they did not envision any potential repercussions for the way they had abused thousands of workers. Amazon clearly enjoys immunity on so many levels so the arrogance fits neatly into a much larger, violent class structure.

The heat and cold received too much emphasis, and it was easy for callous detractors to mention kitchens and other hot workplaces while the more egregious offenses, the systemic issues, were obscured. I know that other workers have it worse, and even I’ve had jobs that were worse. There is something deeply unsettling about Amazon, and I was most profoundly distressed on a psychological and spiritual level while I worked there. Misanthropy and dehumanization; bitter class struggle; intelligence routinely insulted; mocked; punished for our powerlessness. The way Amazon handled the heat, fire pulls, and arson certainly demonstrates its ability to disregard workers’ humanity, and very poor decisions were made. There is so much more to the story! I don’t believe that greater compensation alone would improve Amazon’s workplace, though it would definitely be a start because most workers’ entire paychecks are spent before payday.

PKH: What does Amazon’s policies in the warehouse say about Amazon on a larger frame?

NG: Amazon is misanthropic to the core. Immature, destructive, sociopathic. Everything is for the shoppers and shareholders. Anyone with money is lavished in excess, workers are squeezed and punished for their powerlessness. Amazon is launching the People’s Production Company? Here we have another instance of Amazon’s Orwellian abuse of language –Amazon is not for the People in any way. They should focus on what they do best. Why do they try to be everything to everyone? What is this game Amazon (Bezos)? Amazon could be a life-giving river. Now, everything they do is toxic –venture capitalists and other nefarious influences decide for Amazon.

PKH: How can we get people to fight back and to blow the lid on this sort of corporate abuse when most Americans—150 million—are living at or near poverty?

NG: I honestly don’t know, and that is why I must connect with anyone who will fight against injustice. I don’t have much fear these days. Acquiescence is not an option. We must improve our social bonds. I’m most hopeful because I don’t see youth falling into the same race-baiting traps as their forbears. Racism is manufactured by the elite, at least that is my view. The kids are alright! We must improve literacy, however. Literacy is imperative and I am most troubled by America’s lack of literacy. We’re also terribly fragmented and our relations are less than harmonious and that is a problem. Families, communities, and schools are weak and must be strengthened.

PKH: What are your goals for the next few years, personally and as far as activism goes?

NG: Work with workers for improved conditions. Learn Spanish. Live and write. People tell me stories, and you would not believe what I hear. I’d like to write a series similar to Studs Terkels’ Hard Times because I hear more and more that must be documented. Keep an eye on AFRICOM and Academi. Strengthen bonds. Find my people. No more isolation. No more abuse. Community gardening. I believe that every connection forged against all odds is a potential revolution.

PKH: Is there a “typical worker” at these warehouses, or some common demographic or character list you can pinpoint? If so, what is that?

NG: Amazon’s warehouse is the most diverse work setting I have ever experience, and that is what I liked about it most. Anyone working there as a temp, or even an Amazon associate to a lesser extent, is disenfranchised and powerless – that’s what we all had in common.

PKH: What’s it like back east, in Penn., for youth, for people of color, women, the labor movement?

NG: All are threatened. Pennsylvania Governor Corbett is most pro-biz and his budget cuts are savage. I think that his support may have something to do with Amazon’s arrogance. Look into fracking in Pennsylvania for further proof that our state is being whored out to the big interests.

Story – “Amazon.com Sends Corbett a ‘Thank You’ for PA Budget”

“Supporting the growth of Pennsylvania’s economy and specifically the creation of secure jobs for our residents is a high priority,” said Kelli Roberts, a spokeswoman for Governor Tom Corbett. “This begins with the recent passage of a responsible state budget that does not raise taxes and the passage of tort reform. Both give business the stability they need to stay, relocate and grow in the commonwealth.”

PKH: Any comments about the Amazon pieces in the Morning Call and Mother Jones or Seattle Times that you’d like to illuminate?

NG: They are remarkably accurate.

PKH: What sort of transformation, if any, has this entire news report(s) thing done to you?

NG: I followed the discussion boards closely and it was heartening to read that a significant number of people were truly outraged by what they read, and that they planned to boycott. The return to investigative journalism is exciting and I hope that the success of these stories will compel smaller, community-oriented publications to investigate and report corporate and workplace abuse. I was also amazed by how quickly the Morning Call story spread and the attention it received. Soper could have written the same article ten, twenty years ago and it may not have been read outside the Lehigh Valley. Technology facilitated connections and I was able to connect with reporters and participate in labor discussions. It was all very exciting. I don’t place complete faith in technology and activists must have networks in place to stem the threat of executive decisions and potential communications’ disruptions. I’m done with Facebook after it goes public.

Amazon’s workers are no longer invisible. Foxconn’s workers are no longer invisible. The public now knows that the Tech industry utilizes a tremendous amount of human labor and that these corporations that everyone thought were so hip and cutting edge are really no different than the old bosses. I’m sure that a lot of middle-class liberals were dismayed to hear that it is no more ethical to shop Amazon than it is Wal Mart.

Name — Nichole Gracely
Age — 35
Hometown — Grew up outside Schnecksville, Pa. I taught ESL in South Korea for more than two years, traveled Asia, been around the Caribbean and zig-zagged the U.S. I worked at the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the Chicago Brauhau. I was a Sales Representative at REI in Eugene, Oregon. I currently live in Bethlehem, Pa. I’ve been around. The east coast is definitely not for me and it’s time to move.
Family — My mother passed away in February 2007 and her passing (combined with a mean economy) was a terrible setback. And so I went to Amazon with a positive attitude because I liked Amazon before I worked there. I like to do physical labor, feel comfortable among other laborers, and the pay was comparable to what I would have earned in an office at the time.
School(s) –MA in American Studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.(2011). BS in Journalism at West Virginia University in Morgantown, W.Va.(1998). News-editorial focus, Sociology minor.
Immediate goals — Find my voice.
Down the road goals — Share.
Definition of social justice — Dignity for workers. Dignity for all. No rights should be granted to one group at the expense of another. It is more than mere economics — we’ve got to recognize our shared humanity. Working at Amazon felt a little too much like H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. One day I overheard a young girl on Amazon’s warehouse floor ask: “Why they be hating on us?” Good question.
Define “living wage” to the One Percent — We work hard and deserve more than a meager existence. Workers should not live paycheck to paycheck and constantly worry that everything can be taken away at any time for whatever reason. We need a national healthcare system. Now!

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

— John Steinbeck (1902-1968), East of Eden

I’ve been thinking about those angels/devils after contemplating the death of Carlos Fuentes. I spent time with him in El Paso, Juarez and Las Cruces. I’ve been thinking about my years in Latin America; thinking about those international bridge blockades against wars in Central America, against NAFTA, against the first Iraq oil war. What Fuentes said above and all that he has been oft-quoted tying to some of the same political things Octavio Paz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Pablo Neruda and others have said over time about the United States: What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.

That’s what I am thinking now – how my fellow Seattlites have spent countless billions knowing themselves as giant wind bags of consumption and self-actualization and highly self-regarded as masters of their digital universe.

I’m also thinking about this high-tech town, the new provisos at the federal level to allow the cops here to deploy unmanned drones, the obsession with Facebook going public, the constant silly treadmill of the next generation iPad, the next new digital thing that ramps up the paranoia complex that is tied to almost anything around digital commerce, digital thinking, digital systems and digital organization.

People in Seattle have contorted nature and used nano-technology to insert silicon skin cells and digitized eyes into their offspring.

I can think of other things apropos now, things that Fuentes said a long time ago; in an 1998 interview, Fuentes may have been lambasting Ronald Reagan, but the caricature  still fits so many white politicians and military men:

While Fuentes toured Nicaragua, President Reagan asked Congress to approve increased  military aid to his freedom fighters. “There is an obsessive old man in Washington, dreaming of  movie scripts which never happened actually, looking for lost lines, consumed by his personal  fears,” Fuentes fumed when we finally caught up with him for an interview. “I hope that when he leaves, his fears and obsessions and paranoia will leave with him, too.”¹

It’s a town of Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, Amazon, unending biotechnology innovations (sic) and “knowledge” services tied to surveillance, micro-processing, and academia. It’s white and full of guys and gals with graduate degrees and PhD’s; one of  the highest college-educated cities in the nation, per capita. People in gated communities in Bellevue seemingly “know themselves” (as Fuentes said of all Americans) but know very few others in the 3.3 million Puget Sound area.

People running the tax-dodging Boeing and running the military servicing contracts know nothing about the places that pay for those bombs and tools of repression with the death of citizens and cultures.

People on the West side of the Cascades don’t even know their fellow Washingtonians on the East Side of the state, deferring to the epithets “rural bumpkins” and “red side of the state voters” (we’re not talking commies).

This Fuentes observation has become a truism for the US in general – we love those iPads, but never mind the suicide prevention nets around those Chinese factories. We love instantaneous Google searches producing a million hits on how to breed Peruvian hairless dogs, but screw the environmental impact of all those servers. It’s the delusion of our times – disconnecting commerce, oil, food, consumption, capitalism to anything other than “externalities, necessary means of doing business, collateral damage, unintended negative consequences … etc.”

Slow Food, Fast Money, Sloppy Thinking

Consumerism is king in Seattle; it’s just packaged differently. Shop at REI, that’s cool. End up at a Wal-Mart in one of those outlier suburbs, that’s wrong. Hand-crafted chocolate from Theo’s, that’s great; KFC, that’s for Somalis. The height of reverse snobbery are those $4.50 PBRs in chic pubs where you can bring your German-command-trained Belgium shepherds for burgers and fries (and maybe a Pabst Blue Ribbon, too).

Slow food, lots of non-profits looking for walkable and bike-able communities, even some dealing with poverty and public education — that’s another Seattle. Endless discussion about marriage equality. Obama’s many trips to the Emerald City (he’s here all the time, pocketing millions each trip). Seattle is all those “We Love Obama . . . Yes We Can” signs lining the streets when Secret Service and Homeland Security close the links to Capitol Hill when Obama and Michelle hang with Bill and Melinda.

It’s the city that called the young Frances Farmer a “heathen” when she won a high school award for her essay, “God Dies.” Four years later, at U of Washington, Farmer won a trip to the Soviet Union by out-selling everyone hawking a leftist newspaper.

During that time time, 1931, many Seattle  churches held special meetings to confront “rampant atheism” in the public schools. “If the young people of this city are going to hell,” one Baptist minister reportedly told his congregation, “Frances Farmer is surely leading them there.”

Like the tens of thousands of techies [knowledge workers, AKA “creative class” (sic)] who come from mostly states where land-grant schools provided them with those opportunities to start and finish degrees in economics, engineering, IT management, Farmer stayed for a while, and then left.

She had a storied career, but at the peak of her film career, Farmer told tabloids that the Seattle reaction to her high school essay became a major turning point in her life. “It was pretty sad,” she said, “because for the first time I found how stupid people could be. It sort of made me feel alone in the world. The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it.”

The Insipid Space Needle and the Half Century Party Recognizing the World’s Fair, 1962

Luckily, Seattle’s small black community also gained the same sort of “turning points” the Hollywood start got from the Emerald City’s oppression.

That was forty-four years ago when Judge James Dore sentenced Aaron Dixon, Larry Gossett, and Carl Miller to six months in jail for unlawful assembly during a March 29, 1968 sit-in at Franklin High School. The newspapers call what followed, “… riots in Seattle’s Central Area.” But, hundreds of young African Americans gathered at Garfield High School for a protest rally. Rock throwing in Seattle is more than just protest – like this 2012 May Day, when the airwaves were full of bubble brain TV reporters  (sic) screaming about three or six Black Bloc anarchists smashing in a few bank windows and another few vehicle windows. The city goes crazy. The planned march for Trayvon Martin was charged with hundreds of cops with their grizzly-bear pepper spray canisters strapped to their Volcano mountain bikes. Helicopters, paddy wagons, huge military police presence. For a few windows busted.

The mayor – Sierra Club liberal – says the cops have the power on May Day 2012 to arrest anyone they deem carrying anything that might be used for a weapon. That new Canon Rebel my fiance just got for her birthday? My motorcycle “murse?” Heavy anatomy and physiology college books? Weapons … right! Private protection agencies – Seattle Police Department – guarding Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Gucci.

Seattle Police gave their orders to disperse then arrested six people during five hours of protest July 1, 1968. But now, every day, the airwaves are abuzz about how Seattle brought the world into the 21st Century during the 1962 World’s Fair. The entire city is washing that event in a glow of nostalgia rarely seen in this moody city.

We’re a city that will tear down a viaduct that moves hundreds of thousands of cars a week to be replaced by a tunnel, the $4.3 billion deep bore project, whereby the prime property near Pike Place and Pioneer Square will be open again for those multimillion dollar views of the Sound and Olympics. Yet school lunch programs and child care services are being axed.

This a city where the very rich have 20,000 square foot bungalows spreading out to their private boat docks where multimillion dollar yachts shine in that every-rare afternoon glint. A city where ancient Chinese grannies shuttle in the International District wearing black pajamas and conical hats while hoisting shoulder poles (biǎndans) chok full of tin cans.

Six thousand dollar bicycles and a continuous parade of chugging vehicles gridlocked on Seattle’s freeways. The new toll bridge that goes into Bellevue (think Microsoft and Gates-people) is an excuse to keep poor, riff-raff out of that city where big homes and big yachts grow like cancer along the edge of Lake Washington.

This is a city that has so many poor people living paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet. Garbage collection runs around $150 a month. Electricity bills run $150 in the winter. Natural gas costs for small old rentals go as high as $500 a month.

It’s a city of schizophrenia, in a state that is in the Paul Ryan “cut, cut, cut and fire, fire, fire teachers and public workers mode.”

Homelessness in One of USA’s Most Expensive Cities

There’s also the old issue of Nickelsville – An encampment of pink tents created during Mayor Greg Nickels mayoralship in 2008;  it’s been forced to move more than 15 times, forced by city “fathers” and the cops. It’s right back to where it started out, though. Hundreds live there. Thousands of homeless  battle that Amazon.com smile ethos – lots of $120 K a year jobs right out of graduate school, and $9 an hour barrista jobs pulling shots. There have been several weddings held at Nickelsville.

How is it 103 million Americans are living double below the federal poverty wage of $36,000 a year for a family of four? Or that the medium wealth of Hispanics and blacks dropped 66 percent and 53 percent respectively over the past decade? Yet, in Seattle, people talk about their weekly trips to Silver Mountain ski resort and hitting the beaches of Hawaii once a month?

We Are Being Told that Poverty is Our Fault, That We Spend too Much on Junk, On Homes, on Education Loans to Buy Big Screen TVs and Brand New Ford Mustangs

Maybe the other pithy thing Steinbeck said – man is the only varmint that sets his own trap, baits it and steps right on it – is more apropos in Seattle since we never learn from history; corporations are disempowering us all with the junk it carts out each year and the political power it purchases through trillions in bribes; and how basically humanity has evolved from “apes with sticks and termites” into “apes with nuclear warheads, dildos and high fructose corn syrup.”

You know, much of the crap on-line retailer Amazon.com sells at Christmas time is that sex toy stuff, not just electronics, books, and personal savior exercise equipment.

My intersection with Amazon.com happened in 1994 when the company came about. I never bought into monopolies then or now, and I already had down pat “the planning and economic development thing/angle” of supporting mom and pops and small businesses.  Never bought anything from Amazon, and I never will.

But, I have that one stock – purchased with union organizing money – so I can bang on the stockholders’ meeting Thursday, May 24. The past year, I’ve been in contact with unions and organizers who are protesting the company. I know that pie cutter they sell at Amazon – one big radial cutter with all those even piece pieces – is symbolic of the lack of evenness in Bezos’ business plan, all those  millions spent on fighting fair sales taxation in states where bricks and mortar shops pay for each commercial-retail exchange while Amazon skirts its duty to pay its fair share. I know that a company that pays 2.5 percent in taxes is on the same level as those other 265 corporations bilking the taxpayer and US safety nets.

I have friends of friends who have been to my house who think Amazon.com is the model of the century, who think corporations have already won, that revolution will never happen, and who call the Occupy Movement “a bunch of flea-baggers.”

These Amazon-techies are wielding their electrical engineering and MBA certificates from state schools, many back east and in the south, and point blank they defend Bezos for taking over retail, taking over publishing and for having warehouses with wage slaves in them. They believe the world has always been feudal, and that Bezos is not evil, just a good businessman.

They think youth with education loans averaging $25,000 are chumps, and they can’t wait for Humanities teachers (and the like) to shrivel up and die.

These kids, or twenty-somethings, rather,  laugh that some fifty-something is an out of work humanities-English teacher with all those writing clips and stories of adventure in Latin America. They actually think the job market is theirs to manipulate, and that fifty- and sixty-somethings without a chance for a living wage is part of the deal.

It makes sense to them that the few haves have a lot and the haves not are the new majority.

They actually think writers and authors groups are dead wrong about publishing’s demise and the affects that Amazon has on the publishing world. They are arrogant because they got out of rust belt Pennsylvania or Bubba-land Alabama and have that oh-so hip Seattle townhouse and the endless junk and the stock options that define success, minimal power and the straight and narrow way toward early retirement.

Funny thing is, even those $120 TO $200 K a year wunderkinds burn out after 10 years, 15 years,  end up buying some hobby farm in the area raising fungi and blueberries.

Alas, they are the products of the schools I taught at, and they are contemptuous of liberals, humanities teachers, anything to do with ethics or social justice, and they have all the information at their Google fingertips, so they are the ones “in” on the real climate change story, the real “financial disaster” story, the real story on Bradley Manning, Wiki-leaks and how the world runs, will run and will never run.

Arrogance isn’t a Strong Enough Word to Characterize Them when Schlepping for a Job

I know why Scott Turow and other writers are mad as hell at Amazon for what it’s doing to the publishing-writing worlds.  Just listen to the best-selling author and President of the Authors Guild:

It isn’t the sum you get, it’s how much you can buy with it, that’s the important thing; and it’s that that tells whether your wages are high in fact or only high in name.

— Mark Twain,  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

If we have ever had a chance to stand back and take inventory on what exactly it means to  be an American, Westerner, North American participant, first-world-post-industrialized human being – someone who pays taxes for a trillion dollar 2013 US military budget (not counting black ops and secret outside the lines militarism and spy operations) and is expected to accept the same fiscal year’s funding of $64 billion for US federal total expenditures for education – now is the time.

This is the land where everyone is looking for a deal, looking to sell hoarded unopened Pez dispensers on e-Bay for just the right customer, for just the right “killing,” waiting for days in tents and using gutters for defecation and urination for the next X-box to roll out, pushing and shoving people to death at Target or Wal-Mart or Best Buy for that $79 laptop on Black Friday (the day after National Day of Sorrow – AKA, thanks and no giving where food, more food, washed down with Red Bull and Miller lite gusto, after more tortilla chips and nacho stuff come bubbling out of the Hello Kitty microwave, are the communal national event of the year).

If ever there was a time to sit back and smell the Columbia-sweatshop roses or Ivory Coast little boy slave picked coffee, now is it.

If ever there was a time to just have that nasty conversation with each and every person around so jaded that any amount of push back or campaigning or letter writing or occupying public space or blogging or revolt is considered treason in the US of A (A for Acquisition, Atomized-thinking, Acquiescence, Amorality, Agnotology, Army-of-merchants, Anorexic-functioning, Anti-intellectual, Amoebic-running), now is the time.

Can we live in this new skin, with this new morphing DNA that is evolutionarily motivated by lifestyle-ism, food-ism, me-ism, consumer-ism, expansion-ism, entertainment-ism all pulled and pushed by that ever lobotomizing media with a small “m” and anchored to the American corpus that has always believed their very existence is so special that there is no limit to the amount of self-gratification and self-actualization we deserve?

Think about how soft we have become and how tied to the buy-buy-buy hamster wheel, how fixated we are to the next credit card transaction bonus buying points. Think about how the super-sized cups are now 64 ounces and fit into our bed-liner-outfitted, scratch-less pick-up trucks; how the Club Med resorts have introduced reinforced wicker chairs for Size 20 women and those Deep Fried Fellas; how United Airline bills us for extra luggage and charges two tickets for those diabetic-drenched triple-decked asses.

Amazing how the Western diet, Western screen-saver view of “the other,” how hyper-caffeinated our dreams are, how we do endless extra job after extra job to not stay too idled, how we demand live streaming cock fights and survivor shows 24/7 … 365, how we demand electricity for every transistor-fed machine and electronic device, how we freak out with more than 20 minutes of electrical storm black out, how all those toilets and faucets are motion activated in a mentally motionless society where, when things get tough, today’s generation and all the others will die of thirst while wading through their own excrement.

Think hard. That’s what I have been doing.

I have been with Tarahumaras (Copper Canyon), with Seris (Tiburon Island), with Highland Maya (Guatemala), with  ethnic tribes (Vietnam, Laos) and with any number of First Nations people in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and even with poor white trash in the backwoods of New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, and Washington. Absolutely amazing how resourceful, how sharp with their hands, how deft with tools, and how in-synch with how to grow and prepare their own food they still are, how smart they are about plants and avian creatures, and how they can read the wind and even the wrinkles on any man’s or woman’s face.

Yet, they are doomed.

Doomed to the dust bin of those left behind or pushed aside or forced into isolation – all because Homo Anthropocene is building the next new thing and getting it rushed shipped next day delivery.

This is a world made by and for every commercial transaction and all things digital.

It’s that reverse Darwinism – you know, a Dick Cheney living until the nuclear isotopes in his mechanical heart and that virgin’s blood split in half and finally coagulates. His huffing and chubby days as a 30-something have been transferred to his 71 year-old felonious self, while African tribes and powerful jungle people in the Amazon just melt like fire-spitted pig skins during this unending pathogen that is capitalism and consumerism.

It’s happening in Canada, and in Australia, and the EU – spurred by US of A Super-sized.

Every last cardboard, bubble-wrapped item coming to us via overnight shipping; every single cargo jet- delivered and container ship-unloaded thing coming at us through a global electronic catalog that would have caused instant cardiac arrest for Sears (Richard) and  Roebuck (Alvah) had they been given the chance to meet that pre-congealed buck named Jeff Bezos will be the death of the planet (that’s another essay).

Bezos –  one of those super-computing wunderkinds who might last a week humping 100-pound sacks of spuds in Peruvian mountains,  given the right Bow-flex workouts and personal training coaching – wants to rule his world, and the world of Western and global retail sales, rule us all.

He is the new mercado, the new digital Mall of the Globe, the new rag man, the new voice and brain behind instant purchasing and immediate shipping.

His enterprise – and the Faustian bargain the majority of us have made with his ilk – will guarantee pretty much the complete homogenizing of anything interesting, good and sustainable about economic transactions.

We need to kneel to this Princeton graduate, this all-American Rockwell portrait of a kid who traveled in Air Stream caravans with his grandparents as a young whipper snapper.

Bow to the new algorithm – the new math – the new philosophy – the new nano-engineered human.

Here’s what he told a graduating class of underclassmen at Princeton in 2010. While on one of those middle class RV rendezvouses, the young Jeff calculated the mortality formula for smoking cigarettes, a past-time of his grandmother. He blurted out –

“At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”

Here’s what he told that rapt audience in New Jersey waiting to leave the graduate ceremony to get back to some virtual urban exploring and shopping on Amazon.com:

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. ‘Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.’ That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, ‘Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.’

On May 24, 2012, in downtown Seattle, Jeff Bezos in that 50- minute shareholder meeting was neither clever or kind. Let me explain.

Osama got that “blow-back” thing, but will Amazon.com’s smile turn into jagged Hunger Games Vampire teeth?

What is the blow-back to a country that has been so corporatized that almost each member of this society’s working class, poverty class, elite class, one percent class, and all those falling out of the great middle class and even those in the revolutionary class, even the class of the Una Bomber kind, every nickle and dimed person has been colonized by the viruses and parasites tied to capitalism and consumerism in a world of complete deregulation chaos and self-torture, self-flagellation, impotence, fear, and “see, hear, speak no evil” mentality when the devil is not just at the doorstep, but has water-boarded us into a frenzy of checkmate after checkmate from the industrial military, judicial, education, surveillance, finance, media, energy, political and religious complex thugs that are shells of people afraid of each and every new proviso by these new mafias?

Whew, a mouth full (thanks, Gabriel Garcia Marquez). I know — and I was just trying to get to the meat of the matter, that pink slime of a human whose genetically modified mentality and super-charged computing soul is doing what many Americans fought hard to prevent – fascism.

Corporate-political-consumer fascism. The facilitation of the hostile monopolizing of  every x, y, and z widget or service. The vultures stealing patents and fleecing any inventor’s or entrepreneur’s profits.

Amazon.com.

This alien project is headed up by a pre-fetal alien who stares right through people at his company’s shareholder meetings; he can’t even recognize the trillion-cell sentient being before him asking him direct questions about corporate responsibility.

Jeff Bezos is the new coin of the realm, the new Time magazine boy of the year, the new “in” thinker of the Century. And there are a whole lot of young Turks and digitally creative types who want that Midas elixir running through their own guts. No amount of grumbling about how Amazon should not have stopped serving Wiki-leaks after Joe Lieberman ordered the boss, Bezos, to end that free speech venture, (and what many of us see as an heroic whistle blowing service to humanity); and no amount of hand-wringing or anonymous blogging will help these grads of our elite and not-so-elite institutions of higher learning (sans higher reasoning) erase the Faustian deal they made with this devil-angel.

Those tens of thousands of Amazon workers may come from hacker roots, but Bezos and his Super-computation world – he has the 42nd fastest computer on Earth – but those roots have been doused with a dose of spiritual- and ethics-killing Round-up Ready. Latent memories now, and these college graduates and genius-level computational whiz kids  can only think of how to zip-drive their passions now toward helping Bezos and Company gain supreme domination of what still is just a five and dime enterprise (but without the Italian soda counter, blue light specials and all that stuff to physically wade through … oh yeah, and those cool old men and women associates).

His goal is to funnel, filter and financially-foment every single thought elicited, word typed, song sung, idea presented, necessary and unnecessary product and service invented, all our personal credit data and Facebook rants and consumer ratings ranked, all those things that can’t be captured by the swatch of DNA the government and corporations seem to want test-tubed, labeled and cryogenic-archived in a vault in Utah or Nevada or wherever their carnivore programs and servers are bubbling their memory banks to capture every last gasp of innocuous and revolutionary zeroes and ones these bloody typing memory machines produce.

Shareholders are following Kurtz into the Heart of Darkness

We are peddling freedom to the world and daring them to oppose it and bribing them kindly to accept it and dropping death on those who refuse it.

— W.E.B. Du Bois, scholar, educator, author

Two shareholders – seventy-somethings, Caucasian, full of that golfer’s melanoma – rose up at this shareholders meeting, two of three lone voices supporting Amazon.  I am not sure how many shares they hold, but the reality is that one percent of most shareholders of any corporation hold at least 50 percent of all the common stock. Bezos has around 19.9 percent of all shares in Amazon. When the voting happens, there is no popular vote, or Electoral College thing. You have 88 million shares, you get 88 million votes. One share, one vote.

Most of the so-called 99 Percent do not have stocks, especially in companies trading each stock slip at $239. Think in aggregate form – 99 Percent in the USA owns 39.4 percent of all stocks. That’s not the lower half of the 99 Percent, for sure, but as we have this rallying cry of, “We are the Ninety-nine Percent,” I’ll have to lump us all together.

It’s Bezos and company I’m trying to “guillotine” or cut to the bone now, but just replace Jeff Bezos with blank _____?  (no, not with Jesus or Gandhi). Koch brothers, anyone? Think hard. The former head of HP, or that Steve Jobs kind of Apple maggot guy. Sam Walton’s begotten and their green team (sic); Monsanto’s CEO; or how about NYC Mayor Bloomberg, the Murdoch gene pool, or T Bone Pickens, Warren Buffet, or Alan Greenspan? US Supreme Court?

Or… every graduate degree-holding land grant school attendee working to prop up the dirty digital dealings of all manner of DARPA-inspired wet dream imaginable leaking from the paranoid factories that once bred that bulldog of a man paranoia zygote, J. Edgar Hoover?

Jeff Bezos and his legions of supporters, his backers trolling on the blogs and news comments threads, add those into the mix, and they are in the 99 Percent, at the top, sure, but in the game we collectively rally as Us (99 Percent) against Them (One Percent).

What about his shareholders, small and large? Or all of us with retirement mutual funds with Amazon stock mixed in? His politicians who glad-hand him?

This is the way of corporatization – infect every transaction, every movement, every social justice campaign, every environmental measure, each and every commerce law and civil tort claim, every human transaction, including sex and death, with the bottom line logic that all corporations have a right to make any decision or do anything that adds to the stockholders’ chances at 5%, 10%, 20%, hell, 50-percent increase in original invested value.

This is what occurs at Amazon.com’s meeting, at other meetings. Amazon, like Exxon, is trying to carve out a niche whereby special laws and special politicians and special maneuvers and special economic principles are used to move their companies’ leveraging to a level where there will be no competition, just a semblance of dog-eat-dog business – in a world of Free Trade and off-shore banking and magnificent tax evasion through every sort of legal and illegal system of gaming the system possible.

Solutions sound good on a Day of Action when Goliath tells David that no more ALEC support and new A/C units for some warehouse are the orders of the day

So those two proud old shareholders that got to speak waxed poetic about how Amazon saved their families’ lives, how the Kindle is the next best thing since holy water, and how it isn’t fair that Amazon buckled under demagoguery and pointed anti-ALEC lobbying.

“ALEC does some wonderful things,” the one seventy-something stockholder said.

Really, how hard is it for those multiple million shareholders whose multi-million votes probably voted down a majority of individual shareholders’ wishes to be more transparent in terms of corporate structure and supporting x, y, and z political “thing”/measure as well as more work on climate change to understand they are really a minority – one percent of one percent – dictating to a majority?

History will repeat itself with those sorts of odds and hubris running Amazon.com.

We know the solutions are there on EVERY level – Chalmers Johnson, Howard Zinn, Alice Walker, Marion Nestle, David Suzuki, Janine Benyus, Woody Task, Zoe Weil, Wes Jackson, Wangari Maathai, Vanadana Shiva, Wendell Berry, Manfred Max-Neef, the genuine progress index, permaculture, slow food, slow money, voluntary simplicity, even voluntary extinction, James Hansen, Bill McKibben, Winona LaDuke, Arundhati Roy, James Francis, Tm Flannery, Post Carbon Institute, Architecture 2030, Via Campesina, and countless others.

Do those One-Percent-of-One-Percenters not realize all of those paradigm busters and grand thinkers listed above – their writings – are shilled at Amazon.com?

Seeking signs of extraterrestrial life – journalists as jesters

I’ve been to dozens of alternative being events in my lifetime before Amazon.com’s shareholders’ dog and pony show – more like slug and snail show – at the Seattle Art Museum May 24, 2012.

I was there as a reporter when Arizona Governor Ev Mecham tried to explain his racist self away – you know the guy: he canceled the Martin Luther King holiday, told reporters that hard working women cause divorce, and thought calling black children “pickaninnies” was just fine. I was told to sit down when I asked him questions about what he might call Hispanic children and what he thought of the world’s oldest profession as a righteous job for women.

So much for humor in the ranks of the Press.

I won’t go on and on about Texas Governor George W. Bush’s stupidity in El Paso during several press conferences (he visited 18 times during his presidential runs and never got the Hispanic vote). I will say when I asked him twice about why he, the governor of the Lone Star state, was smirking on TV when asked about putting to death a mentally retarded black man. I asked him both in English and in Spanish (he was fooling around in Span-lish with reporters) but two fellow journalists (sic) told me to give it a rest, even grabbed my elbow while Guv Bush said: “Where are we all eating tamales today? Or is it enchiladas this time?”

What about another order of ulterior existence extreme species at another press conference during the Texas governor’s race with Ann Richards. Ann’s main opponent, Clayton Williams, had produced this grand bit of stupidity when the oil and gas man’s true brothel colors got the best of him:   ”If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.” What alternative life form was Williams referring to? A “joke” likening rape to bad weather — just relax and enjoy it.

I was told to shut up, but didn’t, thanks to my own lack of recognition of alternative life forms like Williams, who, by the way, narrowly got beat in Tex-ass by Ann Richards.

I’ve been with a County Sheriff in Arizona – a Mormon whiskey drinker – who took me to the infamous “first” drug tunnel between Douglas and Naco. Hell, he told me his department knew about it for a year, but DEA told him to let it go.

I’ve  been with other alternative life forms – like Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy. I spoke up during his spiel at UT-El Paso on that famous circuit of paying felons like Liddy tens of thousands of dollars to do a one-hour song and dance at a state college. When I stood up, I said, “You’ve made a lot of fun of the Watergate prosecutors, heroes like Daniel Ellsberg, Judge Sirica, but, honestly, you’re a convicted felon speaking to young students who really need those role models you just defamed to set your make-belief history straight.”

A few claps, for sure, and hoots, sure, but his own security team came to my chair. I stood them down, and then two days later I was called into the provost’s office to have my talking to as an adjunct faculty. Sure, that was another bout with an invertebrate, but the point is, there are so many times I’ve met the ulterior, the masters of the universe creeps, the alternative human forms that unfortunately don’t just end up as funny asides by Philip Roth or Hunter S. Thompson.

Anything crazier than Bob Coors of the Coors Brewing dynasty  telling me as a college reporter that journalists just “need to go out target shooting more … just to see what if feels like to plug a few illegals … just kidding now, kid … just kidding … don’t print that, son.” It was in reference to a question about Coors being hit with a discrimination suit against the company by various Hispanic groups.

Ha, ha, ha. These slick millionaires have their own gravity fields to worry about, and they certainly aren’t a species I recognize as fully-evolved Homo erectus.

Bezos and the four and a half pound Gummy Bear

Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

— Helen Keller, educator, socialist activist

As we learn in the other stories on Amazon printed diligently at Dissident Voice, the company is bankrupt emotionally, ethically and spiritually. Yet, is it the supreme model of success, as are Princeton graduate Jeff Bezos and his betrothed MaKenzie Tuttle, creative writing grad of Princeton who studied under Toni Morrison, by the majority of people in the USA?

Is the answer tied to letting your money do the talking/shopping? How the company started off as an idea by a financial worker named Jeff Bezos who wanted to think up something that could utilize his fun genius with numbers and  algorithms tied to his interest in dominating something in the world dealing with economics, commerce, and digitizing humanity?

The American drive for the power of economies of scale to dominate any sort of business; or this drive to downsize for profit or cut public workers despite the negative consequences to communities; this respect of the vulture capitalism that ends up gobbling up the pickings after hostile takeovers have ended good wage jobs; monopolizing goods and services as a way to deliver 40 or 50 percent of all sales; socializing the costs of bad business (which is good business sense to economists) and privatizing the profits; using today’s workforce as the worker ants propping up the machinations of meglomaniacs who want more work for less pay, more stuff delivered from fewer messy employees (think warehouse wage slaves who are complaining about work conditions and wage so the master of the universe decides to get into robotics; or, think about those $300 K a year tech engineers who are developing more and more super-computing ways to replace human work lives for computing minutes).

In Seattle, the One Percent and their 29 Percent Petty Officer corps just love to bash anyone complaining about $12 an hour jobs, or those of us questioning the viability of more Amazon offices and “campuses” (500 foot towers) built in an already congested part of the city, or legions of people who think Amazon has a responsibility to pay taxes.

This is the order of the day in Blue Cities like Seattle propped up by the Red Politics of Corporations Who Pay the Ferryman and Torpedo-man equally. This Heckle and that Jeckel get the same bribe-lobby-war chest check equally.

It’s Amazon and the other Fortune 500′s hedging their bets and playing both sides of the football field.

So, let’s recap the economic model Bezos is proud of and most shareholders seem to demand of Amazon:

• Amazon treats its warehouse employees like dirt, from 12 hour working days, to $12 an hour temp positions with no benefits;
• the company is screwing with publishing big time, making it harder and harder for authors to make it without submitting to the bottom line loyalty oath Bezos extracts;
• the company pays less than most companies in federal taxes, at 2.6 percent last year;
• it’s a tax dodging model that puts the burden on cities and states and small and other size businesses to foot the bill of the costs it takes to get business into the business of doing bricks and mortar commerce;
• it’s monopolizing business; i.e., retail and not just on-line business;
• it is investing in technology that will take the worker out of work, reducing the number of employees at both ends of the chain, from warehouse pickers to high-tech engineers;
• it will not abide by a modicum measure to work on climate change and energy consumption and carbon emissions tied to its business;
• it will not abide by a pledge and working model of transparency in the company’s books – where money is going; and
• it supports the pathetic groups like ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council.

Venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American Empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king.

— Arundhati Roy

I will go into more detail about Jeff Bezos’ high school Power Point at the 2012 shareholders meeting – he seemed to think Shift Happens was his idea.

I will go into the huge force of Seattle PD dressed in SWAT gear, many on their black Volcano mountain bikes outside, and paddy wagons on all four corners, and the three dozen private security hired on to assist the 70 Amazon security.

Count 20 protestors inside plus another 50 clapping for us in the audience. Count 150 to 300 people outside with bull-horns and funny anti-Amazon signs.

Now add dozens of vehicles and maybe 75 Seattle Police added to the dozens of security. That’s probably one cop-guard-security-Blackwater type for every one Amazon.com protestor.

Interesting economy of scale and proportionality.

I will go into some aspects of this farcical event, really, where the activists – me, included – went through security checks then metal detectors then more screening, a few forms to sign, then kettled into an area where we were supposed to vote  for all the board of directors the vote sheet insisted was recommended, and then vote against two initiatives around corporate transparency and climate change.

Then this small theater in the Seattle Art Museum, again, with cops all around. Small, in that Amazon is based in Seattle, and, well, if this is a shareholders’ meeting to beat the drum for Amazon, for all those new buildings planned and warehouses to lease; to conjure up positive things;  to thank the public shareholders of the corporation for jockeying it in its $239 a share position as of April 29, well, then, this was the bum’s rush. I counted us – more than 20. I counted another 100 techie types – really, I recognized many of them from Whole Foods and bars around the Amazon campus. So, for a room holding 200, who else made up the 80 left?

Well, when I started the applause for the Calvert Social Investing representative who talked about the need to have Amazon at least begin reporting on and assessing climate change within the company’s many tentacles of its business operations; how there is over $10 trillion total worth of companies — 100 corporations total –  already in the Investor Network on Climate Risk initiative or how companies like e-Bay, Google and 70 percent of S & P corporations are pledged to global carbon disclosure – more than 60 people applauded.

Lots of skinny white men with long faces, a few old geezers but mostly twenty-somethings (in Washington, if you are twenty-something, white, male, you already are old in attitude, old in thought, old in political bent by 26 years), careened their necks to see what all the commotion was about.

One urban and community planner technique I’ve picked up over the years, in Tucson, El Paso, Juarez, and Spokane, elsewhere, is to always find some grub and colored or carbonated hydration for the attendees and you might end up with less cantankerousness.

Bezos doesn’t have class.

Remember, people in the insider shareholder protest group had already stood up and complained about some of those Amazon points in the bullet points above.

Then Bruce Herbert, founder and CEO of Newground Social Investment, read aloud the political disclosure resolution he authored.

The resolution calls for this funny thing called transparency, you know, “disclosure and review of all corporate political contributions” and who they were paid to and other information to be posted on the Amazon.com website.

Of  course, the Amazon board of directors declined to recommend its passage, just as they declined the Calvert resolution on carbon footprint disclosure and plans to go for renewable, more efficient and greener ways to go about fulfilling that Amazon smile.

Jeff Bezos was all pasty faced, the lasik surgery folded openings he possesses to contain these digital eyes were even wider than their normal bug-eyed gaze. He was nervous, not engaged, and almost deadened by the fact (I can only hope, heartened by and afraid of the protesters) his little shareholders meeting had to have so many cops in overt and covert mode.

Really, a company that did $38 billion in total revenues last year, and this was it? No high-rollers, no Maserati coupes idling outside, no helicopters landing on the Well Fargo building nearby?

I stood up and challenged Amazon – Jeff Bezos directly – to account to me, lone single shareholder that I may be – why Amazon is so behind the times, and outside the learning curve on both socially responsible investing guidelines and climate change action. I informed him that as a college instructor I actually worked on sustainability campus-wide and at a nationwide level through the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. I reminded him that there is power in numbers, like those 1,450-plus institutes of higher learning. I reminded him that those 1,450 schools have this amazing power in getting young and older students smart about climate change and corporate responsibility.

I asked that Amazon not go by these two powerhouse votes against social responsibility and climate change action.

He barely looked at me. He looked around at the techies, at some of the protestors. He tried looking past me or right through me. In the end, he deferred to another Amazon executive (or press flak) who just yammered on how Amazon was considering climate change initiatives.

Infantile Behavior, and Defaulting to Supersize Thinking

But back to the 72-ounce Gummy Bear – Jeff Bezos left that one number – 72 ounces  – for very last in his goofy Power Point show of putting one number up, then following each one with a slide explaining the context and value of said number.

Really, it was sophomoric for a shareholders’ meeting. I have my personal belief that this event was a staged show wherein the news of our planned protestations and inside shareholding action had already been mitigated in this poor man’s/poor woman’s 50 minutes of rambling Bezos. I believe that we were all being filmed live and beamed into the penthouse where the high rollers, the big stockholders, mingled with those bottles of Old Raj and Hendricks at the ready for some late morning dirty martinis. Bezos and Company denies there is even a recorded archive  of the shareholders’ meeting. Odd.

His “My Amazon Tour by the Numbers Presention” was a yawn –

89 = highest customer satisfaction index ever

14,000,000 = total number of items sold for free two-day shipping

17,000 = the number of on-demand  streaming movies and TV shows available to Prime customers

45,000 = total number of people added to Amazon’s payroll since September 2008

#1 Rank = top GI (military) job hirer

500,000 = total items now offered by Amazon Industrial

30% = the percentage more Amazon pays warehouse workers compared to “industry standards”

Then, drum roll, with narey a Botox-pulled back smirk cracking, 72 oz. came onto the screen and then Bezos’ child-like voice — “I bet nobody can guess what this number means.” Dead silence. Then, giggles as the inspid slide of the Amazon.com site with the 4.5 pound gummy bear photograph projected overhead. This gooey  thing sold at Amazon with free shipping, free gift wrapping and a hundred percent return policy thrown in was his big finale.

The 72 ounce Gummy Bear was his best shot at humor. His coup de grace?

Wow. I was floored with Bezos’ so empathetic, classy, and deep style. Princeton graduate and all. And not once did he talk directly to anyone standing up who were asking the company to pay fair wages, to pay taxes – 2.5 percent last year doesn’t cut it – and to make warehouse jobs better.

Instead, he threw that number up — $52 million – and then said:

The total number Amazon is spending to retrofit Fulfillment Centers with air conditioning. It’s completely unusual to do this to warehouses. And it’s not easy to retrofit old buildings.

Okay, so you get a C for the warehouses – I think maybe “102 degrees” isn’t a good number for all the electronics, foodstuffs, and yes, Gummy Bears (who wants a melted Gummy Bear that looks like a fluorescent cow pie for her birthday?).

Then, I guess “$14,000” isn’t a good number either, the total Amazon.com put into ALEC last year. So, Bezos had his communication gal read off the statement again – “Amazon is not putting money into the American Legislative Exchange Council next year.”

I wonder if 2013 is a good number. Or if POTUS and Romney is a good combination for libertarian Bezos.

Taken from the 2010 Princeton talk – frat-boy and all

This is not a done deal, final word, fait accompli – from Amazon.com or from me writing about them.

But I have to end with some of those final comments Bezos threw at the young minds sitting outside with their Princeton sheepskins in the 2010 Commencement (purchased, I am sure, from Amazon.com):

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

Funny how words and actions come back in boomerang fashion. Sometime in life. Maybe at death’s door … or through the next generation. All those questions seemed so apropos for the gritty Somali tax-drivers and Latino baggage handlers and working class whites sitting in that bright Seattle Art Museum theater-auditorium just waiting for Jeff Bezos to spit out one act of kindness. To just directly answer one of their questions. To “be there” in this community – Seattle – which has given him the red carpet treatment.

Just there, in that 50-minute time span, those unionists and Occupiers and other activists did what Bezos asked his Princeton elite to do.

If he could have even once glanced at the humanity in the shareholders’ meeting – women, people of color, young students – and really feel their mettle, and absorb their passion for a just world – to listen to them give Amazon.com all the free advice money can’t buy.

I’ve been foisting around books for weeks trying to get them finished to self-educate and then try out a little bit of pontification a la book reviews-analysis articles for Dissident Voice.

I’ve been like a Sherpa retreating to glaciers my entire life, hauling books into the jungles of Guatemala, Vietnam; to the bottom of Sunset Crater in Arizona; the very edge of my other world on a boat in Belize; inside the palatial subways of Moscow; at the bottom of Copper Canyon in Chihuahua; in a yurt in British Columbia; while hanging out with nuns, priests and activists in lock-up in El Paso County Jail awaiting arraignment for our righteous collective protests against NAFTA.

Reading books and promoting them has been more than a past-time.

I once had a job in El Paso, for years, working regularly on the Sunday morning book pages for the El Paso Times (1881), a Gannett (1923) paper.

Call it my tribal beat. I wasn’t in the game to just crank out some 800-word review, or two 700-word book perspectives, containing boiler plate bs and all set up in inverse triangle J-school fashion so people reading in between televised football games and big wiener roasts would be able to guess at the crux of my diatribes or harangues in two-easy minutes. I knew I had an audience – man, I had taught in a medium security federal penitentiary, at the US military enlisted academy, at UT-El Paso, at various community college campuses, across the border line in Juarez at two maquiladoras; and I wrote stuff for a non-profit organization helping with refugees from Central America and Mexico, Annunciation House, and had a pretty active literary gig getting flash fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry in regional and national journals. I even taught in barrios and for the Center for Lifelong Learning, a community school-continuing ed school at University of Texas.

I even had my own little gigs with the Times‘ competition, the evening newspaper – the now defunct El Paso Herald Post (1881) – as a features writer.¹

I also was in the news because I had a mouth, causes, and juevos. In the news, though, mostly because I put words to those three character flaws and got published.

I knew the demographics – largely Hispanic, but the readers of the newspaper were mostly non-Hispanics. Texans with a bit of West Texas bluster. Many got their toast and tortillas buttered by the US government in the form of military industrial complex feed-trough and war profiteering and policing. Something about all of that, plus the one-horse-town thing about a city almost a million strong, got my own juices going.

Then, this weird hatred – or for some, at least this looking down upon attitude – for the Mexican sisters and brothers just a Copenhagen chew’s spit away in Juarez. Mexican-Americans, too, deriding the Juarez people. Even the joint operating agreement with Fire Fighters on the US side helping the infernos on the Juarez side ended.

US firefighters would watch in utter horror and shame as buildings burned just across the river, over the flow of El Rio Bravo, AKA The Rio Grande, because the rule of law said they couldn’t cross the border line to save property or save lives.

So much for the brotherhood of nations. So much for Mexico, our second largest trading partner back then.

Add to that the Border Patrol growing into a group of thugs, two-bit criminals, led by now US Congressman Silvestre Reyes, Obama’s guy.

Man did I piss off a lot of folk with my book choices and my style. I still do. In America, people can only take their goddamned whiskey straight or with a load of fizzy high fructose corn syrup. Make that a Coors or a hoppy micro-brew. Slim pickings for anything way outside the proscribed thinking, left or right.

In my gig, I wanted the Christian zealots taking aim at my writing, at the choices I made as a reader-reviewer. I wanted the brown shirts of the military machine to take their best shots. I wanted the effete members of the literati to take aim with their sling-shots. I wanted to mix it up along the border, where the circus of the surreal is a 24/7 show that would make Dali happy.

I’d take a book like Darwin’s Ghost or Mean Genes and begin riffing with the author(s) and ideas. Sometimes, hell, I’d email an author, or call him or her, and get a few pithy comments. The problem wasn’t mine – I almost always picked books I wanted to read. Most of the books I picked, like the radio show guests I’ve had on my radio show, I respected and wanted “out there,” known, possibly read.

Many libraries (my pieces were syndicated, sort of, in an assortment of Gannett-owned newspapers) took my reviews as cues to purchase each respective book I illuminated in my prose. Those emails and letters made my day.

When it came to some pufferfish of an author trying to rationalize the heroics of the Alamo, my goal was to find the book countering that narrative and review it.

The few times I ended up with a book a friend of a friend wanted reviewed, or from an author coming to El Paso to talk at a creative writing department inspired program (first mistake) who thought I should glad-hand the work of fiction or non-fiction, I didn’t hold back.

My time, my reading hours, my extra-extra low paid gig writing up something profound for a multimillionaire newspaper mogul, well, I had to have some sort of autonomy or ax to grind.

I was going with some themes – science, evolution, histories critiquing those delusions of empire by US of A in the “third world” and my own hemisphere. Poets like Sapphire. Fiction writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. An interview with Denise Levertov about Vietnam. Books about Vietnam. More science and natural history. Eclectic. Short story collections by Rick Demarinis. Books by John Rechy.

So, I know how to read a lot and quickly. I write a lot, too, both as fiction writer and journalist of every stripe. I have my former planning professor’s book manuscript he is getting published by Earthscan/Routledge, on no-growth, the genuine progress index, steady state economics. His ms, the No-Growth Imperative, was sent to me because some people credit me for “getting it,” and also know I won’t hold back any punches or head-locks.

Books, Close Reading, The Art of Recommendations without Regurgitation – Life is Not a Transaction

For almost a month, now, I’ve been wanting to pen for DV several book analyses – David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, or Richard Heinberg’s new one, The End of Growth, or a 2007 book I am reading along with Gabriel Marquez’s autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, and The World Without Us, written by Alan Weisman.

Those reviews and opinion pieces are still coming.

It’s just that I can’t erase that Amazon.com shareholders’ stench on my skin. No matter how many miles I run in Seattle, that May 24 billionaire’s miasma has stuck to me. Jeff Bezos as model of the new American, the new 21st Centurion, it’s like the 250 million gallons of oil and 500,000 tons of natural gas British Petroleum criminally let spew in the Gulf of Mexico on Earth Day, 2010. There is no amount of dispersant, Corexit, that can get that Bezos slime from my skin.

Then it got to me – all those stories on DV, at Z Net, in Dissent, in any number of magazines and blogs I read, those stories are all double-helix strands in my brain. Deja vu isn’t the term. What is it that I keep seeing, hearing? Those stories need to stay here forever, out there, in cyber-land, on a pile of mimeographs, anywhere.

What DV does is more important that any millions of orders filled by eBay or Amazon.

DV is outside that new America, post-Willie Loman paradigm. What about that Bezos and the millions upon millions who buy, buy, buy, who believe that any contract drawn up by the law and rule and order of big business is holy? Or that the customer, no matter what, is always right?

The American mind is on a staticky frequency that is driven to push every transaction with man, woman, child, animal, dimensional space and self into a buying contract, some agreement that posits that all things important can be rounded up to the next $.99 or should be electronically signed in digital plastic.

It’s that billionaire-presence, the same sort of sickening one I tasted when I saw Bill Gates speak a few years ago. They are corrupted, broken from humanity, and their version of economics is driven by their credo – make as much as quickly as possible and with as large a force as possible.

Buy American, and Blame the Chinese if it Breaks

Remember when Japanese cars were vandalized – and “Buy American” was the saying of the day keyed into Toyota paint? Now, Wally-World, all those off-shored jobs industry, business, telecommunications, medical services, financial services, sweatshop after steel mill crated off, we are not paying for it, and the stockholder’s bottom line is paying off for them.

All those things that Larry Summers — Clinton’s man and Obama’s and now Harvard’s — feels is good business, like having our waste and by-products and DDT shipped to those LDC’s – less developed countries – is the SOP of big business, whether it’s iPhone magic or Lycra yoga pants. For Summers — who helped Greenspan and Rubin and the lot take the banking system down — putting the price of a Calcutta resident down to $60 for a life makes all sorts of economic and moral sense.

I-V-Y educated Summers, and Bezos and the lot of them, that’s their reasoning. It’s best shown here in this memo by Larry Summers – a memo that is emblematic of the kind of thinking American capitalists, from Steve Jobs, to Charles Koch, to Bezos, and the Walton family, continue to defaecate on the world.

December 12, 1991, then the chief economist for the World Bank, Lawrence Summers, wrote an internal memo that was leaked to the environmental community. That community publicized it, but with little lasting effect. This memo remains relevant today, forever.
Summers – the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Department, then onto President Clinton’s Mr. Wall Street as U.S. Treasury Secretary. His free trade (sic) slash-and-burn economics have had a lasting toxic cost on people and the environment. They have been the death of millions upon millions of acres of ecosystems.

The death of communities. The death of heterogeneity. Of cultures. The death of the language of love.

In 1994, most other countries in the world broke with the Harvard-trained “economic logic” about dumping rich countries’ poisons on their poorer neighbors, agreeing to ban the export of hazardous wastes from OECD to non-OECD countries under the Basel Convention. The United States was one of the few countries that did not ratify the Basel Convention or the Basel Convention’s Ban Amendment on the export of hazardous wastes from OECD to non-OECD countries.

THE MEMO

DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers “Subject: GEP

‘Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

Pretty amazing and typical stuff coming from the pickled brains of the elite, the vanguard, the wizards of finance.

These I-V-Y league characters wonder why “they hate our American lifestyle.”

As just one jumping off point to illustrate why “they” (AKA, the other, the LDCs, humanity) hate us, hate Western culture, I’ll use one of those most censored stories (2009) tied directly to Summers’ thesis – Somali pirates are actually in the business of fighting polluters.²

I’ll let the Project Censored story, #3 in the 2009 line-up, speak for itself, because it does SPEAK for us, USA, the west, the MDDNs, Most Developed-Deceitful Nations:

–In 1991, when the government of Somalia collapsed, foreign interests seized the opportunity to begin looting the country’s food supply and using the country’s unguarded waters as a dumping ground for nuclear and other toxic waste.

According to the High Seas Task Force (HSTF), there were over 800 IUU fishing vessels in Somali waters at one time in 2005, taking advantage of Somalia’s inability to police and control its own waters and fishing grounds. The IUUs poach an estimated $450 million in seafood from Somali waters annually. In so doing, they steal an invaluable protein source from some of the world’s poorest people and ruin the livelihoods of legitimate fishermen.

Allegations of the dumping of toxic waste, as well as illegal fishing, have circulated since the early 1990s, but hard evidence emerged when the tsunami of 2004 hit the country. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reported that the tsunami washed rusting containers of toxic waste onto the shores of Puntland, northern Somalia.

Nick Nuttall, a UNEP spokesman, told Al Jazeera that when the barrels were smashed open by the force of the waves, the containers exposed a “frightening activity” that had been going on for more than a decade. “Somalia has been used as a dumping ground for hazardous waste starting in the early 1990s, and continuing through the civil war there,” he said. “The waste is many different kinds. There is uranium radioactive waste. There is lead, and heavy metals like cadmium and mercury. There is also industrial waste, and there are hospital wastes, chemical wastes—you name it.”

Nuttall also said that since the containers came ashore, hundreds of residents have fallen ill, suffering from mouth and abdominal bleeding, skin infections and other ailments. “What is most alarming here is that nuclear waste is being dumped. Radioactive uranium waste that is potentially killing Somalis and completely destroying the ocean,” he said.

“The price of doing business … the CLEE’s — the Countries Least Evolved Ethically – business contract … the gift of the white race … collateral damage … the cost of getting in the way of progress … only the elites and IVY league types understand these complexities … dog-eat-dog … survival of the fittest … American exceptionalism.”

Seattle as Microcosm of What isn’t Working

The caffeine yawl I get in Seattle, in Phoenix, in Austin, in any number of USA “mall cities,” is the same – What am I supposed to do about sweatshops in India and polluted cities in China? I have my own problems to worry about. Why do I always have to hear about the negative things in life. Zen means to me that I can overcome the horrors of the world by meditating and listening to the sound of wind in maple leaves.

You get it. Yet, can we ever get back to the sanity of, “Mark My Words, I am not a crook …”?

If only the days of Richard Nixon were back upon us. Yes, they are all crooks, everyone of them, and so too are any of us who propagate their riches, or participate in the game of stock speculation and finance. We are not the largesse of the investors, but the 99 percent – let’s pretend it’s the 30 percent minus the top one percent minus the 69 percent in the working class-lower class category – holds stocks vis-a-vis not just minor mutual funds and sketchy retirement funds, but by continually wanting more for less, something for nothing.

We get what we sow. Kids are the most injured in the workplace and most subject to injury because they are afraid to complain to bosses, managers. It’s a irect result of profit motives for all those corporations behind the golden arches or the Chipotle jalapeno. There are no unions for fast-food workers. We lambaste the possible $64 billion in federal support for education in 2013, but we never bat an eye at the $935 billion for war junk, war plans, war welfare kings and queens that same year gets appropriated.

So, we fail the test – we can’t produce youth or politicians or the great masses of working class who can connect those dots, can see the causation, can dream of abstracting why there is no right-to-work with dignity and living wages in the “right to work” states, that our human lobby is supposed to be the backbone of democracy and the public good, will, health and safety of the majority, that there are no human cells or intelligence-craving brains in a corporation.

These masters of the universe have some stinky, oily residue coming from their mouths, and like that shaman’s toad spores, the spewing brings forth mesmerized Americans, gringos and others turning into zombie shopping cart pushers. Instant gratification. Instant messaging. Mainline eating. Flip-cam education. Drone after drone. Every little copper widget and microprocessor and toilet plumbed and hot-dog served going to the military-surveillance-prison-finance monster that is what Jeff Bezos always dreamed of while sitting in the back of grandpa’s station wagon with Air Stream in tow and telling his grandmother that for each cigarette she was smoking, she was taking off a week of life at the end of life.

That’s their end game. Show us how we are royally screwed by boxing up junk, shipping that junk from sweatshops run by military specialists who can’t wait for the day to salute robots each and every day they go to work.

These billionaires have so much time on their hands, so much power at their fingertips, so much micro-processing at their will, so many compliant and energized college grads at their disposal, so many in the 30 percent wanting some form of that doughy charisma a Bezos may or may not possess.

Each second in each day is monitored, crunched into algorithms, and designed for a new app for a new purchase 24/7, 365 days a year.

Bezos, GE, Google, Wally-World, Exxon, you name it, every company is now involved up to their elbows in each of the 7 billion Homo economicuses‘ 31,536,000 seconds lived each year.

They know everything about us, and it’s at the center of what Seattle would like us all to call “the creative class,” “knowledge workers,” “information managers,” telecommunication wizards.” Digital planet is death by silicon.

If they work for those who know how to run an anti-trust corporation like Microsoft or communications empire like Fox News, then those bosses MUST know about education, community development, municipal government, environmental programs, climate change, energy, how the world should shape up in their Dungeons and Dragons world of beyond oxygen thinking.

If it’s I-V-Y league, it must be touched by Midas, the thing of genius, the next panacea, the future, the end game. How much do I put down to get into the game?

Seattle, a Bubble, for Obama, By Obama, From Obama

So, get this – Seattle cuts the free bus ride area downtown. Seattle wants twice a month garbage pick-up. Two narratives from two different but similar organizations – Futurewise which is working on “smart growth” and urban growth management, and Puget Sound SAGE, working on housing, transportation and urban issues around people of poverty, low income and color.

So, the light rail idea was pushed by Futurewise, and SAGE worried about the real applications of transportation oriented development; worried as in fearing gentrification, housing stock prices going up, rents out the roof, general lack of planning for working class jobs and the families that are supported by them.³

So, Seattle liberal-lite, populated by pro-business democrats, and others just can’t wrap their heads around the fact that poor people can’t afford the exorbitant rents and housing prices. They move to suburbs. This is called ghettoization of suburbs — not a racist term at all but a descriptor used to illustrate how poor families have to deal with 2500-square foot homes designed around a plain of lawns, and the long trips to jobs, and the high cost of taxes and gasoline and insurance.

Poor people are being ripped off on all sides of the playing field in Seattle, and in the end, Seattle wants a world of Aspen, Colorado? Where all those service people serving those Tuscan meals live in trailer parks, where first grade and high school science teachers have to have smaller and smaller abodes to barely afford to be public teachers, or, even more interestingly, communities – including city governments and state entities and private sector players – have to subsidize housing so these rich class types can go about their lifestyles and play-styles while still getting services delivered by the lower 50 of the 99 Percent.

This is the schizophrenia of the non-profit, social activism community in Seattle with “Obama 2012” bumper stickers plastered on Prius plastic – within Futurewise wanting smart growth and urban boundaries and growth management, Puget Sound Sage wanting smart growth and urban boundaries and growth management.

Yet, they are worlds apart, colors apart, and in the end, one non-profit plans for buildings and traffic – Futurewise – while the other plans for people – Sage.

In Seattle, and elsewhere in America, “I’ll get mine and you’ll get yours” is the order of the day. Everywhere, people are intoning – You better pick a major in college that pays off those loans, … better become an engineer … own your own business … be your own boss … run a coffee shop … look to the future, Baby Boomers are aging … be a 30-hour a week physical therapist and clear $150K a year … double down on that by marrying .. legalizing that dual-income … shelter the proceeds … raise a family so you can take it off on your taxes.

Every day in Seattle, Spokane, San Francisco, San Diego, Sarasota, South Carolina, it’s – “Get on with the program and settle in on a second and third and fourth income. Dog eat dog, and the crows get the slim pickings. Live the American dream.”

It’s in Seattle, that attitude, this blue town, this Obama-is-so-Ivy-League-Kaluha-and-cream-colored-cool. In the end, they have been colonized by consumption, by consumerism, by capital, by the dissonance of ennui and lifestylism and checkbook and credit card impotence and the silos they all erect to shade and buffer themselves from reality and their inability to articulate how the entire consumer thing is mixed up with someone else’s pain as they flee from debates and arguments while turning back into infants who would rather never see or hear anything that counters their narratives or threatens to tear a box-cutter hole in their comfort zone.

If ever we were a divided, broken, a PTSD-riddled society, flowing from broken dreams to promised land of the Lotto fantasies, America is it NOW… and “it ain’t no different in Seattle.” Don’t let the Starbucks’ siren fool you, and, yes, the mermaid got cleaned up thanks to Starbucks Global Goal of Complete Domination and Propriety.

This is the primacy of corporations – sell, sell, clean up, sweep up, never fold the hand, and always bluff for more in the potty.

Agnostics are not into Agnotology

Okay, so I will wind down by bringing up the idea of agnotology which is bound to appear in future articles.
So what is it?

Here’s an easy book title (and another one on my list to review) that says it all: Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance by Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, and thus, the quick blurb opener:

What don’t we know, and why don’t we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? Agnotology—the study of ignorance—provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about “how we know” to ask: Why don’t we know what we don’t know? The essays assembled in Agnotology show that ignorance is often more than just an absence of knowledge; it can also be the outcome of cultural and political struggles. Ignorance has a history and a political geography, but there are also things people don’t want you to know (“Doubt is our product” is the tobacco industry slogan).

Think about it this way – abortifacients, like the peacock flower, got Schiebinger going: “Flos pavonis, literally ‘peacock flower,’ is an abortifacient: The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds [of this plant] to abort their children, so that they will not become slaves like themselves. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. … They told me this themselves.”⁴

Ahh, this is so important in this day and age of Wiki-leaks, Wikipedia, Google, Amazon, DARPA, PR, Edward Bernays, and the lot of the psy-ops guys and gals. That knowledge is erased, discarded, scrubbed from books, vanished from memory.

Who wouldn’t want to know the secret of an abortifacient in light of the attack on reproductive rights, when medical doctors get assassinated eating breakfast with their families in their kitchens?

Why was-is-will this knowledge disappear? Ahh, readers can easily surmise.

What is that dead language saying about things long forgotten? Heck, the movie, Sir, No Sir, illustrates true invention tied to the idea of agnotology. The bedraggled returning Vietnam soldiers being spat upon by hippie girls. Rambo says it via Stallone. John McCain said it when running against Bush and Kerry.

In the film, we find out there were no returning soldiers at the San Fran airport, no people right there within a spitting distance of disembarking soldiers, that there were no articles in any newspapers printed about said incidents of hippie girls spitting at soldiers and calling them baby killers on the tarmac of airports. Soldiers did not return home that way. Not one published account!

Girls usually do not — at least in the sixties and early seventies — spit out loogies. Yet, the myth was taken by prognosticators, politicians, Hollywood writers and actors, and worse yet by newspaper editors years later, and they ran with it, so it became fake history.

Sort of like how Ralph Nader was responsible for 8 years of George W. Bush. Not that 8 million registered democrats (or is that 11 million) voted for George AWOL Bush. Again, Bush won because he stole the election, Gore wimped out, and Democrats voted for Bush.

Last Word Ends with a Bumper Sticker

I usually always start off any piece I write with some handy-dandy quote. I thought I’d be starting off this piece with a lone one or maybe two from these powerful quotes below– the kind that get the juices flowing and mind moving:

“The politician wants men to know how to die courageously; the poet wants men to live courageously.” – Salvatore Quasimodo

“Societies and economies can be destroyed by bombs. Societies can also be destroyed by locking every aspect of life like provision of food and water through an economic war.” – Vandana Shiva

“Write what should not be forgotten.” – Isabel Allende

“A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.” – Margaret Atwood⁵

“The heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good; and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burdens of the past.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” – GGM

“The walls are the publishers of the poor.” – Eduardo Galeano

“I am astonished each time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America or about the world. It’s quite blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S.” – Eduardo Galeano

But, instead, I will end with a crude bumper sticker, plastered all neat and centered on a metallic-blue Ford Bronco, the old model, all jacked up and gargantuan and outfitted with oversized goat-killing tires. Right outside one of those 1920s 1200-square-foot homes on Beacon Hill, Seattle, going for, oh $400,000, shag carpet and avocado appliances included.

Parked next to a small clinic and across from a Baptist Church. I noticed it on one of my daily runs, while dodging those IT-Creative Class-Knowledge Worker types racing in his/her BMW SUV or little boxy Hyundai through stop signs.

“A Jeep is like a Tampon … Every pussy needs one.”

Yep, with the Ford logo in the center. On the back window. Proud American bumper sticker, says it all.

What is that “all”? I own the world, and the last man with the most toys wins, and this vehicle is protected by Smith and Wesson, and my other half works for Boeing, and I have a tiger in my tank, thanks, Exxon, and, the only good liberal is a dead REI shopper.

It’s not that common in Seattle, but those stickers do pop up regularly. As did the Ron Paul for President signs on lawns.

You know, a brick through the window of the Ford Bronco couldn’t hurt, though there’d have to be note attached, so the yahoo would know the nature of the vandalism and not blame the blacks or browns or yellows who are “taking over our neighborhood.”

Magic marker on the logo? What would that teach the guy?

These tipping points are already happening, and it all comes down to a world of One Percent, 29 or 30 percent, and the rest of the 70 percent of us trying to make something out of the American landscape.

Words mean so much, and those writers above, no matter how much their fiction gets us to ask the right questions, all those thinkers dead and gone and sure to come, they will be at the hands of Microsoft (still paying millions for anti-trust breaches), Bezos (net worth, $19.3 billion), and Wally-World (largest firearms seller in USA), or at the whim of on-line-next-day shipping, and after the power of the stockholder and his or her master takes over every waking and sleeping human moment?

What gets read is why I write for Dissident Voice. What gets seen, well, I am no Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Margaret Atwood.

But I read them, and I take my cues from them, and what I feel, see, hear, taste, think, well, something has to break under the weight of so much consumer cacophony, so much of the world dependent upon consumer confidence or lack thereof.

So much rides on that bumper sticker – A Jeep is like a … Bought from and sold by, well, you know who.

1. See “Thank a Reporter,” The Inlander and “Down for the Count,” The Inlander.
2. See “Censored 2009: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007-08,” FORA.tv and “3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates,” Project Censored, 8 May 2010.
3. See, Cienna Madrid, “Railroaded: Is Light Rail Driving Racial Minorities Out of Rainier Valley?” The Stranger, 22 May 2012 and “Light Rail and Racial Justice in Seattle,” Sightline, 15 May 2012.
4. See Londa Schiebinger, “Exotic abortifacients and lost knowledge,” Lancet, 371(9614), 1 March 2008: 718-719.
5. For more on Atwood’s convictions on silence and powerless, read Jennifer Matsui, “Margaret Atwood Cashes In,” Dissident Voice, 17 May 2010.

It is so easy to enter the quagmire of “death by numbers,” but I’ve taken my lesson from Seattle artist Chris Jordan, whose photography implodes many aspects of our modern industrial-hyper consumptive society in his many huge works of photograph manipulation.

His images are also a testament to the power of digital eye, that perspective we get in such things as the number of plastic cups used and tossed away each six hours on US airline – one million total, that is, and they do not get recycled.

Running the numbers as an exceptional practice is not so uncommon in this day and age with our AI and computer-generated motives — and in Jordan’s case – a visual and artistic motif to show why the planet “is cooked” under all existing and so-called mitigatory systems and plans hatched up with the law-disobeying corporate shills called US and Company, whose armies, navies, air forces and police-surveillance forces have set upon the world with the help of prostituting politicians a species of man bent on consuming himself and herself to death.

No matter how hard we might try, citizens — AKA, consumers or targets or marks or schmucks — cannot push any initiative or plan or grand idea for social justice-environmental sanity-community engagement without the long-arm of capitalism’s law interfering and moving us like paper mache marionettes in their house of horrors drama.

Take a look at these numbers, and more –

Car Keys, 2011, 60×86″ – Depicts 260,000 car keys, equal to the number of gallons of gasoline burned in motor vehicles in the US every minute.

Or, Over the Moon, 2011, 44×44″ – Depicts 29,000 credit cards, equal to the average number of personal bankruptcy filings every week in the US in 2010.

Or, Cell Phones, 2007, 60×100″ – Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.

So, yes, unfortunately, we live in a numbers game, no matter what side of the border line or political line or human line you find yourself leaning away or toward.

For instance, take the recent finding that the average house in Seattle goes for $420,000. You have to put this in perspective: tens of thousands of daycare workers and Sea-Tac airport workers make $10 an hour in my city. Hundreds of thousands in the Puget Sound area are not making more than $30,000 a year. College teachers make $45,000 after years teaching. I see jobs all the time advertised, looking for people with undergraduate degrees and higher degrees, with all sorts of multiple experiences and people and hard skills required, in Seattle and the region, for, the whooping $28,000 to $36,000 a year salary range.

That number – $420,000 – make any sense? How does it connect to other costs of living in Seattle? Maybe rental units are in high demand, and in this supply and demand society, those costs go up exponentially? Are the housing costs and rental demands sustainable?

Compare the lack of subsidized, rent-control, public-private housing strategies, to, oh, another numbers game: Guess what the amount for each Afghanistan invader, US soldier, that is, to be outfitted, maintained, reinforced, supplied each year at a the cost to US tax coffers? Oh, $800,000 to a million dollars.

One soldier, one year. Do the math.

E’s of Sustainability, No Numbers Game When it Comes to Planetary Survival

What about one of the five e’s of sustainability – e for energy (education, environment, equity and economy being the other “e” measures) – thrown into running the numbers game? Here’s an example: The “easy oil” is getting pretty tapped out. Those oil fields holding that cheap oil will probably lose three-quarters of their productive capacity over the next two and half decades. That’s taking out 52 million barrels per day from world supply. Or, 75% of current world crude oil output.¹

Want more simple stats on oil and disconnect, or the energy to retrieve and process/refine per barrel? What is it now? Three barrels of energy equivalent for one barrel of energy expended? In 1900, it was something like 30 barrels of crude energy equivalent mined-harvested-drilled to one barrel crude energy equivalent to get it and process it.

The Canadian Energy Research Institute predicts Alberta’s oil sands over the same two and a half decade period will burn up $218 billion of “investment” (that’s a low ball figure that also does not take into consideration United States’ expenditures for pipelines, such as the Keystone XL, to get the goo to refineries).

More on how serious we all are about renewable energy and climate change? U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) says Arctic Circle oil makes up an estimated 13 percent of the total planet’s remaining crude and much more of the natural gas.

The results of that great new oil, tar sands, natural gas and bitumen consumption? Global emissions of carbon dioxide will rise by 43 percent in those same two and a half decades. That’s 30.2 billion to 43.2 billion metric tons.

Climate change’s connection to these oil numbers? Come on. Did we put those numbers together yet? No hope of averting all those heavy consequences of planetary warming? Sorry.

Lots of running the numbers in this new Nature report.

The climate numbers are downright discouraging. The world pumped 22.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 1990, the baseline year under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. By 2010 that amount had increased roughly 45% to 33 billion tonnes. Carbon dioxide emissions skyrocketed by more than 5% in 2010 alone, marking the fastest growth in more than two decades as the global economy recovered from its slump. And despite constant deliberations under the convention, the overall growth rate of global emissions hasn’t changed much since 1970.

This entire numbers game is highlighted in this month’s Nature journal, (“Second Chance for the Planet”) ahead of the Rio+20 environmental summit in Brazil later in June. In a nutshell, this study deals with the combined effects of global warming, population growth and continued environmental degradation. Real collapse, bigger than anything Ray Bradbury could have imagined in his books and stories, more than neo-conservatives and libertarians could even begin to deny. In just five generations, total collapse of “the ecosystem”?

Here’s what head of the U.N. Environment Program, Achim Steiner, has to say about scientific study after scientific study and all those numbers: “I would like those activists who are preparing to come to Rio+20, to protest and to also lament the little action that we have seen; to open up a second fund and to take a report like this and tell them: ‘Answer to the public, why are we not moving ahead in these issues.’”

Which US lawmaker, which multinational corporation, which Western culture, which industrializing nation will fight tooth and nail these climate change-global ecosystems numbers? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Koch Brothers and Fox News laugh at these numbers. Liberals just scratch their heads and fly off to Brazil to be “in the numbers game in person, up close, Copacabana or Bust.”

You fight global warming, you are a new terrorist. See Will Potter’s, The New Red is Green.

Before we look at steady state economics, the culture of art, and what behavioral scientists have to “say” about these mind-strafing numbers, let’s look at what I consider the bulwark of sustainability. Education.

What about the numbers tied to education? You know, education, that other “e” in the five e’s of sustainability. Education, which is being attacked from all sides of the human equation – corporations hate it if it’s not facilitating a fast-track for compliant workers to pump up their numbers game; governments hate it because they can’t allow too many smart people to get a whiff of their malfeasance and cooked numbers game; superstition-driven religions hate it for subverting that control over man-woman when 15 billion years of geologic time kills their numbers game; war profiteers hate it because their own histories will be recorded by it, each and every number of killed, maimed, missing in their wars of empire numbers game.

In the USA, going to the education numbers game … with drum roll, please: more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country.

Two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients borrow money to attend college, from the government or private lenders, according to a Department of Education.

The total number of borrowers is definitely much higher since the survey does not track borrowing from family members.
Contrasting the 1992-93 graduates – 45 percent borrowed money, and that survey included family borrowing as well as government and private loans.

For all borrowers, the average debt in 2011 was $23,300; 10 percent owed more than $54,000; 3 percent more than $100,000, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports.

Lots and lots of numbers to parse and project, and what do our staid and smart education sector folk have to say? I have been pursuing the Inside Higher Education and Chronicle of Higher Education web pages, as well as Alternet‘s special “education” pages. The two former frames have sickening after sickening story of the broken paradigm of “nations in debt must do things to cut, cut, cut the public sector, public safety nets” repeated in infinite ways through infinite disciplinary lenses. I see so many angry, anti-liberal arts, anti-intellectual, anti-humanities commenters saying all the arts, diversity classes, ethnic studies, multiple interdisciplinary programs and degrees have been a total waste of good taxpayers’ money.

I am seeing liberals and conservatives stiff arm saluting privatizing and the corporate model of education, daily. I am seeing the blame put on the current generation and the 30-something generation for opting out of the heavy, most important subjects in the world – STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) – for foolish things like American studies, environmental planning, sociology, liberal arts in general.

Time and time again, more and more people are shifting the baseline, daily, almost, gathering steam and sticks and stones to throw at the “idiotic students and families who would be so economically-challenged to have gotten so up to their proverbial necks in debt … now suck it up and just pay that debt with interest off now … pay your debt you owe to the greatest generation ever … your debt to Bezos, Gates, Koch, GE, Boeing and the wise old wizards of Wall Street and high finance … it’s because of them you can even breathe and eat and live your rotten hippie, alternative, film studies and art school and community development lives.”

I am serious, more serious than a hyperventilating sentence to try and get a laugh. These writers, journalists, academicians, education planners, the wonks, and the front-line faculty and staffers, all of them, they are in retreat, on the defensive, and confused and disorganized.

So that shifting the baseline for them occurs daily. Like what ecologists, scientists, and environmentalists (usually all three are in one) fear – too many people, even scientists of today, have shifted baselines. Especially, though, the American, Western people. More so the corporatists and governments protecting them.

The lines and baselines have moved. That’s out death. Let me explain.

Pretty simple explanation on shifting baselines tied to ecology. Oh, like 90 million beavers in the continental United States before 1700. Now? Less than a million, yet, today, beavers are considered worse than varmints, trapped and removed and culled so property owners can have their lawns and cute invasive trees and shrubs. The problem is baseline beaver populations in 1700 and for centuries before created streams, rivers and vital wetlands, thanks to the beaver dams.

Now, we are going back to the future with beaver restoration. Read here on the magnificent of beavers and groups that are “into” re-shifting baselines, as in restorative conservation, a sort of ecological restorative justice movement.

Unfortunately, community activists, urban planners, public policy organizations, and, yes, even marine biologists tend to shift baselines as more is lost, less is gained and our internal psychologies and external behaviors have to dull the realities of our own actions and those of the resource industries and consumptive businesses we have fed to continue our lifestyles.

So, yes, lots of numbers, lots of GIS maps of every cross section of humanity, the earth, ecosystems. All those numbers to worry over.

The problem isn’t the numbers but rather it’s the narrative frames, the psychological impact of in utero conditions on who comes out afraid to face facts, change, and those who want facts, change; because new science says you can tell a scaredy-cat conservative reactionary in the playpen. What our society is, especially US and British, or any Caucasian ones, well, we know that there is the open, holistic, multilingual, multi-contextual abstract thinker versus the xenophobic, paranoid, compliant-to-authority, father-figure seeking conservative.

It happens, conservative or liberal at birth, in the playpen, in the school yard.

How those numbers, those contexts, those specific narratives around and defining those numbers differ depending on which thinker is considering the exact same information.

As more and more things get more and more controlled by fewer and fewer controlling entities, the fewer free agents will exist on the planet, which means fewer and fewer enlightenments – problems anticipated and solutions given – will occur. The human species is naturally conditioned to be restrained, stuck in group-think, and to stay within the proscribed norms of any thousands of proscriptive realms or groups and sub-cultures.

People hate the Bradley Mannings of the world. Despise the Rachel Carsons. Revile the Ellsbergs, Naders, Maria Gunnoes of the world.

Yet, it all comes down to e-d-u-c-a-t-i-o-n.
It all comes down to c-u-l-t-u-r-e.
And it all comes down to c-h-a-n-g-e in b-e-h-a-v-i-o-r.

BF Skinner Anyone?

Get this – so, my fiance’s a teacher – reading and math and arts – at a non-profit private school in the shadow of Amazon.com’s campus in downtown Seattle. Plenty of children from whole families, some from broken ones. Many are adopted. Some from other countries. Interesting and challenging work, with students who are way behind the reading, writing, math, learning curves.

Special education with a twist – work is intense, small-group-engaged, and tied to direct instruction and behavioral psychology and other modalities to effect real progress with students, some of whom are on the various learning disability spectrums, like autism.

So, that organization, ABAI, Association for Behavior Analysis International, had its 38th annual convention in Seattle. Her school’s various stakeholders attended and presented. Interesting, bizarre, erudite, and sometimes chilling workshops and presentations by the dozens. One struck me, and it ties into so many studies I have been mining tied to climate change, risk analysis and behavior (and PR, messaging, selling, marketing climate change).

Here’s one in the popular press to eschew.

Here’s one compelling paragraph form it that sets up what I bring up next:

But now a growing number of social scientists are offering their expertise in behavioral decision making, risk analysis, and evolutionary influences on human behavior to explain our limited responses to global warming. Among the most significant factors they point to: The way we’re psychologically wired and socially conditioned to respond to crises makes us ill-suited to react to the abstract and seemingly remote threat posed by global warming. Their insights are also leading to some intriguing recommendations about how to get people to take action-including the potentially dangerous prospect of playing on people’s fears.

What makes the ABAI presenter, Lyle K. Grant from Alberta, Canada, compelling to me is not that he reduced his climate-carbon footprint to a DVD-presentation in absentia at the Seattle Convention Center while two present panelists also presented at the workshop. It’s that this researcher and professor for 31 years at Athabasca University is looking at some old work around a society based on permaculture, the arts, less work, and skilled living and skilled consumption.

Obviously, Grant covers much of the research behind this human behavior of putting off the consequences of one’s action today without thinking about the future intended and unintended consequences; the idea of lag time catching up to future generations because of current generations’ near-sightedness; and the continual mythology and embedded reinforcers of a growth economy, one predicated on each new generation getting more, having to work harder to get more; one where population – at least those in developed societies – can grow because growth means more innovation, more people with solutions and more consumers and customers to extract profits from.

His premise, though, is to inculcate a culture of learning and one of arts and culture.

People are highly capable of adapting to various types of environmental and other challenges once those challenges are encountered in concrete form rather than as an abstract idea (Grant, 2007; Swim et al., 2009). Most successful behavioral interventions are indeed based on simply giving people direct practice that allows them to acquire or perfect skills (e.g., Cooper, Heron, & Heward, 2007; Martin & Pear, 2003). The problem with economic growth and overconsumption is that direct practice is not possible because the harmful consequences only occur when shortages in a finite natural resource appear or the Earth’s ability to absorb waste products is exceeded. Archaeological and other historical evidence indicates that several ancient cultures failed because they outgrew their carrying capacity or otherwise failed to adapt to changing environmental conditions (Diamond, 2005; Redman, 1999). However, these consequences were encountered only by people who lived centuries ago. As a result, these consequences do not act directly upon anyone’s current behavior and instead act only indirectly through application of derived rules or instructive analogies, weakening their relative effectiveness (Malott, 1986).

Harmful Delayed Consequences

The effectiveness of behavioral consequences on behavior change is lessened when they are delayed (Ainslie, 2001; Rachlin, 2000) and some of the harmful consequences of a growth economy are likely to be delayed by as long as several decades before they actually materialize. This principle is often described in terms of temporal discounting: The effectiveness of a consequence on behavior is lessened or discounted the more it is delayed. Sustainability is difficult in part because the consequences at issue are delayed and currently unapparent. Harmful effects such as climate change, overpopulation, shortages of fossil fuels and fresh water, are all delayed consequences that are less effective than they would be if they were current.

It’s important that I get Grant’s work right, so another long quote stream is necessary because, a) I already have these ideas down and feel overpowered by them; and, b) I’ve been yammering for four decades to various audiences about the power of the arts, of the humanities, of writing, of the poet. Finally, for my last bit, c) I have studied the world of environmentalism and the regulatory process, whereby not one thing has been gained in the environmental movement – just shifting baselines and the allowance of more and more loss of land, loss of clean air, loss of clean water, loss of marine ecosystems, loss of community will, loss of a noiseless world.

It’s the old fighting the box store from coming into my neighborhood battle. Those meetings and all the extra time to fight say a 125,000 square foot Wal-mart or Home Depot getting everything they want in their design plans, well, all that work, all that huffing and puffing, self-educating in the planning and zoning and design world, all of that, including traffic studies, it’s ALL to the corporation’s liking because the individuals – the community – are expending extra time and hard-pressed funds to get a few tweaks to a building’s facade and some amenities like bike lanes and landscaping.

The box store gets delays, and free work, and free insights, for little or no cost to the corporation. The box store still gets built.

The process is stacked against substantive change. It’s allowing one corporation – sometimes one small polluting business – dictate the future of a community. Corporate personhood came way before Citizens United.

As late as 1840, state legislators closely supervised the operation of corporations, allowing them to be created only for very specific public benefits, such as the building of a highway or a canal. Corporations were subject to a variety of limitations: a finite period of existence, limits to the amount of property they could own, and prohibitions against one corporation owning another. After a period of time deemed sufficient for investors to recoup a fair profit, the assets of a business would often revert to public ownership. In some states, it was even a felony for a corporation to donate to a political campaign.

But in the headlong rush into the Industrial Age, legislators and the courts stripped away almost all of those limitations. By the 1860s, most states had granted owners limited liability, waiving virtually all personal accountability for an institution’s cumulative actions. In 1886, without comment, the United States Supreme Court ruled for corporate owners in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, allowing corporations to be considered “persons,” thereby opening the door to free speech and other civil rights under the Bill of Rights; and by the early 1890s, states had largely eliminated restrictions on corporations owning each other. By 1904, 318 corporations owned forty percent of all manufacturing assets. Corporate owners were replacing de Tocqueville’s “equality of conditions” with what one writer of the time, W. J. Ghent, called “the new feudalism… characterized by a class dependence rather than by a personal dependence.”

What It Means to Be a Dead Liberal

Part of that education about land-holders and corporations taking control of participatory, people-generated democracy is tied to the last 30 to 50 years many see as the death of liberal thinkers, the mass suicide of the entire liberal class, much detailed in Chris Hedges’ book, The Death of the Liberal Class.

I’ve seen that liberal class clash with radical and revolutionary critiques of America, of business, of the role of dissent and upheaval in American life. That death has been part of the consumer supply-demand-marketing-demand/supply operating system I’ve experienced since being a high school student in 1971 in Tucson, Arizona, when a small town got big and out of control because of the marketing of the American dream vis-a-vis air conditioning and the personal internal combustion machine.

To expect Lyle’s behavioral analyst’s sustainability and art education thesis to be heard, let alone adopted on a large scale, well, how can education and educated people draw from any wellspring when we do not even know the basic roots of our democracy, neither the people’s history nor the Constitution’s?

I’ve run into this “education” problem and this “narrative framing” issue and this “shifting baselines” reality for decades in the so-called sustainability movement. Here, in Seattle, via DVD-projected talk, Lyle K. Grant explains the role of education changing behavior:

Beyond simply using education to establish greater awareness of sustainability issues is an imperative to shift the maintenance of behavior from overconsumed to underconsumed reinforcers by teaching consumption skills. The consumption skills implicit in Mill’s art of living, in Walden Two’s Golden Age, and in Scitovsky’s prescription for cultural invigoration are all acquired tastes established as reinforcers only through informal or formal educational experiences. The recognition that the arts are a potential means of furthering sustainability dramatically reframes educational and other public-policy priorities. As Scitovsky (1989b) points out:

… the argument just presented favours subsidies, not to the arts or access to the arts, but to the process of learning to enjoy them. Such subsidies therefore should be immune to the criticism often leveled at public support for the arts on the ground that it represents a regressive redistribution of income from taxpayers to the elite that forms the bulk of theatre, opera and concert audiences. For the purpose of art education is to increase and keep increasing membership in that elite until it ceases to be an elite. (p. 157)

To further arts education, Scitovsky (1992) advocated a broad education throughout the curriculum that encompasses arts instruction. His promotion of arts education is based in part on avoiding the harmful effects (i.e., negative externalities) of alternative reward-seeking behaviors, which include crime, violence and drug use, in addition to squandering natural resources (Scitovsky, 1977; 1992). He cited the teaching of arts in kindergarten and the elementary grades as an exemplary practice because only there students are given freedom to pursue aesthetic challenges and pleasures independently of vocational considerations. He further suggested that existing practices in promoting athletics in schools are “a fine example that cultural education easily could and ideally ought to follow” (p. 301). Scitovsky (1992) envisioned formal arts education as an important supplement to domestic life, pointing out that children acquire an enjoyment of literature and music relatively effortlessly when grow up in literary and musical families. Under no illusions of the difficulties in making a transition to an arts-centered society, Scitovsky (1989b) anticipated that the process would “be a matter of generations rather than of years” (p. 158).

The connection between sustainability and arts education has important implications for behavioral interventions. Programs to teach aesthetic and other consumption skills should be clearly recognized as green interventions alongside those (e.g., bike riding, recycling, etc.) that are traditionally associated with sustainability and are in certain respects preferable to energy-efficiency interventions, which are potentially compromised by longer-term Jevons effects. Consumption-skill interventions address core issues of time allocation to resource-free and resource-light activities. Such interventions have the potential to produce enduring behavior changes though contact with natural reinforcers (Ferster, 1967) and natural maintaining contingencies (Stokes & Baer, 1977).

There is a tendency in the developed world to turn to historically successful scientific technologies to solve problems, an impulse that often leads only to improvements in energy efficiency. Purchases of hybrid cars and development of expansive wind and solar infrastructure projects, for example, are reassuring to many in part because they provide concrete visible evidence that we are addressing problems of sustainability. Yet, these salient interventions are by themselves severely limited due to Jevons effects unless paired with broader changes in lifestyle. Behavioral and cultural solutions, especially those focused on consumption skills, arts education, and movement toward an aesthetically based culture initially seem counterintuitive, irrelevant and insubstantial when juxtaposed with the powerful technologies science and engineering have to offer. This perception, seen even among those sympathetic to issues of sustainability, represents the persistence of the material values that have precipitated a crisis in sustainability. Behavioral, cultural and aesthetic solutions can, in contrast, alter the fundamental motivation to seek material rewards and solutions, break the cycle of work-to-consume and achieve genuine progress toward sustainability.

So while behavioral modification and social engineering and political correctness may be chilling in this day and age of shifting baselines, where $10 an hour, 10 hours a day, at 70 hours a week is the new normal, the new okay, and in a time when we don’t even balk at each powerful single industry monopolizing everything from toothpaste to air travel, something needs changing, and it has to be more education, more commitment to teaching little Johnny not to hit, smack, knife, shoot his way out of an argument. To teach kids to not give up or opt out or drop out or get so cynical and jaded that by age 10 that all they think about is retiring at 30 in some Willy Wonka delirium of HFCS shock and joystick apoplexy.

Schools are under attack, and therefore so is cognition — systems thinking, holistic thinking, and the entire shooting match is at the whim of Bill Gates, the Walton family, Fox un-News, prostituting politicians and now technology and the shifting baselines of our times.

Like I said earlier, education is being assaulted, and the general gist is a part-time nation of fearful faculty, and overpaid administrators that sell/buy technology fixes (sic) and on-line curriculum delivery (sic) wherever the privatizer seeks his or her best opportunity to dumb down education with the mantra of, “Quicker, Easier, Streamlined, Nuts and Bolts, All the Bells and Whistles Unnecessary.”

We are in a time where pontificating educational experts write essays about “how much is a college education worth” and “what is need” and then a truly revolutionary mindset, a truly solutions-based, permaculture-set and consumer-skilled society gets pummeled in the waves after wave of undulating stupidity… shifting baselines.²

One Shot at the Pinata and then What? Pennies from Heaven? Beyond Hope?

Sure, I’d probably not want that Wizard of Oz chance at being reborn in another era, oh, say, 1830s, and then spinning the globe blindfolded and stuck with the closest land mass where my pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey-finger might hit. “That’s where you get to do the roll of the dice, baby – 1830s Congo, brother.”

These might not be the best of times if you are (fill in the blank on your own) ___________ . I can put in a few, such as journalist, writer, educator, unionist, socialist, poet, environmentalist, social justice advocate, American-white-male-against-the-prevailing-paradigms-of-US-imperialism.

Not the best of times, but what’s my option?

The old conundrum of “the grass is greener (stronger) on the other side of the street (hemisphere) never fit me.

I’ve been trying to convince friends, foes and students to be ready to engage NOW, and to confront the injustices happening NOW, because, of course, now is the only time unless you are lucky enough to make a living at being a big time Hollywood movie maker — or you’re stuck in some bi-polar limbo, maybe just another Chance in the 1979 movie, Being There.

That’s a gardener who was birthed and lived on and then left an estate when the owner dies leaving Chance nothing – cloistered since birth from the outside city crumbling around him, but brought up with TV as his companion. Chance Gardener voices inanities gleaned from television shows, advertisements, news things, and, eventually, with so many powerful people listening to his repetitious nonsense, well, he will become the president of the United States.

Walk on water, that end shot form the movie.

Jerzy Kosinski wrote the book, 1971, that the Hal Ashby movie was based on. You know, Chance (the) Gardener, the tabla rasa of American modernism, politics, culture, consumerism, TV-land – a commentary on MUCH of what we now face, some 40 years later – just replace TV with “media” or “the world-wide web.”

The Net-generation morphing into the i-generation. What’s next, Uncle Sam?

That entire Kosinski life, and the fact he was a second generation survivor of the Holocaust – he was born five days after Hitler’s rise to power – is a microcosm of much of American life, and the life of art-mixed-with-pop-culture-mixed-with-message-mixed-with-duplicity-mixed-with-PT Barnum-madness. Plagiarizing accusations, and, well, a suicide after sex, drugs, and Hollywood rock-n’roll. Jerzy and his book/film, Being There, are emblematic of so so much about America exposed and exploited and exploiting. He wrote a Holocaust novel, The Painted Bird, explained by an English prof.

The Painted Bird is notorious for its horrors: eyeballs are gouged out of sockets, animals are tortured, women are violated with bottles holding manure, men are devoured by rats. “The Germans puzzled me,” the boy says. “Was such a destitute, cruel world worth ruling?”

This is the question that Kosinski’s whole life was given over to answering. That he died by his own hand suggests that his answer, finally, was No. And so Kosinski joined a line of Holocaust writers–Tadeusz Borowski, Jean Amery, Paul Celan, Primo Levi–who by committing suicide testified that the world was beyond repair. Although The Painted Bird may not be directly about the Holocaust, although it may not be based on Kosinski’s own experiences during the Holocaust, it is nevertheless an indispensable document of the Holocaust. It is perhaps the greatest example of what is coming to be known as a “second-generation” book: a contemporary report of the hell in which a survivor of the Holocaust must live, one generation after the event.

History repeats” itself ain’t a Nike ad

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Quaint words indeed.

I’ll probably get to the Scott Walker win in Wisconsin, all that hand-wringing by the Democrats-scared-of-their-own-shadows Obama-ites are doing fearful of a Romney Parasite Mitt win (Obamaite — type of mineral; many sided fool’s gold; melts when held close in hand), more and more evidence of Europe which is going the way of the “G” in P.I.G.S. and it means to the USA, but in another essay, not today’s.

First, though, is this odd feeling many I know who dread hearing “bad” news, who can’t take another loss like that recall election, who can’t hear another report about cheese causing cancer or TV piece on all the Ridley turtles drowning on six-pack CocaCola rings and ghost nets.

They’re always looking for some moment in Netflix time when the days were halcyon, when wine and roses made a real woman shine, and when a man was a man and a woman was a woman. They sort of want another Bruce Willis moment saving the day, or maybe they see all zombies in their dreams to be the angels of their hopes.

More than 50 percent of Americans believe-know-hold to the evidence of Old Testament that humans today are exactly how humans looked when they were “put on earth,” whether that’s 6,800 years ago, or earlier – 20 million years ago for the new wave of intelligent design aficionados – and even some who understand the earth to be 15 billion years old still think Homo sapiens always had our guts perpendicular to the roads we built and our eyes set exactly where they are in order to see from afar the Burger King menu or special advertised at Jack-in-the-Box.

More than 89 percent consider themselves Christian, and more than 75 percent believe-know-hope-have heard that angels are real and that they abide on earth and each one of those god-fearing and Jesus-loving folk has at least one fighting Angel looking out for him or her, even if its against mad dogs from Chase or Bank of America.

There will be salvation, Iron Man saving the day, or the day of rapture tele-porting: when all the repentants, sans Big and Tall workout outfits, get pulled into the vortex of the trinity nude so they all can all munch at the all-you-can-eat cafeteria heaven will be serving 24/7 for all eternity.

“If only I was born when the Great Plains had all those native grasses and buffalo; if only I was born when Da Vinci was around; if only ….” You get the point.

Angels will save the day, protect us from glacial melt down.

I’ve been speaking the reality game for, oh, since my early teens when I balked at the military brat life, when I was lucky enough to have heard from real Vietnam combat vets the stupidity of that war-on-more-brown-people-farmers. I fought my old man’s professional army officer status, and I hadn’t talked to him or written to him for the first six months he was on his first tour in Vietnam.

I hadn’t communicated with my old man until that Chinese carbine slug entered the helicopter pilot’s skull, and another came sizzling in from the rice paddies into my old man’s shoulder, a close three inches form his heart.

“Mrs. Haeder … Over … Your husband Chief Warrant Officer Marvin Haeder has been shot … Over … airlifted out of Vietnam and is in Japan … Over…”

How many times that Purple Heart call has been made? How many times to the hundredth power has nothing of the sort ever happened when entire families have been mowed over with supersonic jets and villages vaporized with smart bombs and towns juiced up with napalm and white phosphorous and depleted uranium?

Death, thanks to US of Acquisition, US of Military, sending out that love overtly and covertly in order for us to take what is ours, what will be ours, what will and always be our way of life, thanks apple pie, mom and red, white and blue contract with corporation x, y and z.

Every single time I’ve been that bastard who had to put the negative spin on things, who had to see the unintended consequences, who had to see the negative in all things. “Why so negative, dude?” Or some variation on that theme.

Shoot, when I stopped eating jumbo Guyamas shrimp as a teen scuba diver because of the destruction those shrimpers were doing to the very waters I dove in, and then had to explain to my fellow divers, even then, 1975, they were saying – “This isn’t going to last very long anyways, with all those Japs and Chinese getting a taste for this yummy stuff. Why not be the ones eating it when it’s going to be exported anyways?”

Well, something along those lines. Same today, with Peak Oil and Climate Change conferences or calls into my old radio show – “India and China are going after all that hydrocarbon energy. Are we, America, supposed to sit by and stop our economy because it’s the so-called ‘right thing’ to do according to a bunch of pretentious environmentalists while China and India kick our proverbial butt?”

On a day-to-day basis, dealing with friends, audiences, students, those are easy points to defeat or illuminate as broken thinking. But when all those stories combine and flare up into this convoluted hot air bleed off, well, the answers seem daunting, because, we’ve allowed each new discipline, each new avocation and profession to compartmentalize and build silo after specialization silo, making connecting the dots that more difficult.

Too many times we’ve allowed the generalist mindset go by the wayside forever in favor of blinders and silo thinking. Specialization and serious disconnection.

Like David Suzuki told me recently – “You had all these emergency room visits one summer in Vancouver. Literally hundreds of parents coming to hospitals with asthmatic children, running in from their air conditioned SUVs idling in the emergency ambulance lane, and sure, they couldn’t put together the fact that the heavy ozone and air pollution coupled with the heat were caused by their very lifestyle, the very internal combustion machines they rushed to the hospitals with their babies in. The news reports wondered why so many kids were being struck with asthma attacks. That’s human myopia to the max.”

Funny Times: Where is Joe Bageant when we need him?

Okay, it’s my own personal literary and journalist labyrinth, this essay, sorry … but I will come back to the Big Lebowski just to prove I can book-end something. Eventually, these discourses do peter out (or come together like a series of Rorschach ink blots). First, let’s think about Deer Hunting with Jesus writer, Joe Bageant (okay, no bowling analogy – Bowling for Jesus?).

Yeah, he was called a “left-neck,” and his voice made its way into Americans’ hearts and minds through the internet, radio, web TV. He was loved by those outside his West Virginia hometown, loved all the way from Paris, Texas, to Paris, France.

Born 1946 in Winchester VA, USA. US Navy Vietnam era veteran.
After stint in Navy became anti-war hippie, ran off to the West Coast … lived in communes, hippie school buses… started writing about holy men, countercultural figures, rock stars and the American scene in 1971 … lived in Boulder Colorado until mid 1980s … 14 years in all … became a Marxist and a half-assed Buddhist … Traveled to Central America to write about third World issues…
Moved to the Coeur d’Alene Indian reservation in Idaho, built a cabin, lived without electricity, farmed with horses for seven years … tended reservation bar (The Bald Eagle Bar), wrote for regional newspapers… generally festered on life in America … Moved to Moscow, Idaho, worked on third rate newspaper there … Then moved to Eugene Oregon, worked for an international magazine corporation pushing insecticides and pesticides to farmers worldwide.
Then back to hometown of Winchester VA to settle some scores with the bigoted, murderous redneck town I grew up in. I love’em but they need a good ass kicking.
Died in 2000 when George Bush got elected … died along with 275 million other Americans … Plan to rise again from the dead when he is tossed out …maybe reincarnate as a Commie terrorist on Wall Street … maybe as a sex worker in Amsterdam … can’t decide … both have their advantages. Joe Bageant (1946-2011)

He was funny as hell. Still is, in print. Check out his stuff on the web site created by a fan. Listen to his interviews. We need Joe now – especially now in this sick, slick TV-web era – at every city council meeting. We need him on the board of directors of highfalutin environmental organizations. We need guys and gals like him on MCNBC, CNN and Fox UnNews. We need him teaching in schools and running for office.

Because his very character is American, and there is not another country in the world that could produce this kind of character, thinker, and guy. He moved to Belize because he couldn’t justify paying taxes on America’s illegal wars. He wrote, thought, and was a sort of rural Studs Terkel.

So, I end with a few “deer hunting” quotes from Bageant. Yeah, the Coen Brothers’ Big Lebowksi is plot-less sometimes, and the cast of characters is typical Los Angeles zoo. But I was watching it the other night, the flick that is …. And that was after reading a lot of articles on behavioral psychology. On a special topic – how to make computers human, or what does it mean to be human? Pretty arcane and synapse-layered stuff.

What “the dude” represents is America, truly. College-educated, formerly an activist, formerly engaged in community; a pot-smoking, White Russian-drinking “dude” living the dream in LA. Only in America could that have happened, could he have existed. Maybe not anymore, but there was a time … and “the dude” is not an example of faux bohemian lifestyle. Hang overs, cloudless infinity, shooting the bull, endless mixed up language. A cast of screwed up, aimless American characters. Bowling, too. Remember that book, 2000, titled – Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of America Community, by R.D. Putman?

It’s a good read, even if you aren’t an urban planner type.

Well, I end with Bageant because he’s on my mind. After watching the Coen Brothers’ flick. I don’t know why exactly, but the books coming up for review will be my next missives for DV, I promise. Debt, The World Without Us, and, maybe, Bowling Alone. I don’t know.

You got a lot on Amazon.com from me lately. And on that front, more and more news about Amazon hits the airwaves and dribbles on a sea of digital flotsam almost daily. I might get to some of that later. Though Amazon.com is not a theme of mine. It’s one boring corporation with equally milquetoast workers at the top and in the middle. It’s difficult to get all jazzed up about Amazon.com.

For now, adios – keep it real on the summer solstice (June 16). From Deer Hunting with (the dude) Jesus –I sure wish the Coens would make a movie from that manuscript!

“If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in a prison unless you try the door.”

(or)
“The four cornerstones of the American political psyche are 1) emotion substituted for thought, 2) fear, 3) ignorance and 4) propaganda”

(or)
“Republican or Democrat, this nation’s affluent urban and suburban classes understand their bread is buttered on the corporate side. The primary difference between the two parties is that the Republicans pretty much admit that they grasp and even endorse some of the nastiest facts of life in America. Republicans honestly tell the world: “Listen in on my phone calls, piss-test me until I’m blind, kill and eat all of my neighbors right in front of my eyes, but show me the money! Let me escape with every cent I can kick out of the suckers, the taxpayers, and anybody else I can get a headlock on, legally or otherwise.” Democrats, in contrast, seem content to catalog the GOP’s outrages against the Republic, showing proper indignation while laughing at episodes of The Daily Show. But they stand behind the American brand: imperialism. They “support our troops,” though you will be hard put to find any of them who have served alongside them or who would send one of their own kids off to lose an eye or an arm in Iraq. They play the imperial game, maintain their credit ratings, and plan to keep the beach house and the retirement investments if it means sacrificing every damned Lynndie England in West Virginia.”

(or)
“Man! Can you believe they actually allow this stuff to be sold over there? Glad we got laws against that crap in this country.” I remind him that the socialist party is probably the largest political party on the planet. “Aw bullshit!” he said. I asked, “Then what the hell do you think is the largest party?” “The Republican Party of course! We’re the only country with real political parties.” Now this is from a guy who has an MBA from one of the South’s universities, holds local office, and has influenced public affairs.”

(or, finally)
“Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin’s photograph, I think to myself: You’ve finally done it. It took four generations, but you’ve finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes trial, which they say was one of many burrs under your saddle until your last breath. Well, rejoice, old man, because your tribes have gathered around America’s oldest magical hairball of ignorance and superstition, Christian fundamentalism, and their numbers have enabled them to suck so much oxygen out of the political atmosphere that they are now acknowledged as a mainstream force in politics. Episcopalians, Jews, and affluent suburban Methodists and Catholics, they are all now scratching their heads, sweating, and swearing loudly that this pack of lower-class zealots cannot possibly represent the mainstream–not the mainstream they learned about in their fancy sociology classes or were so comfortably reassured about by media commentators who were people like themselves. Goodnight, Grandpa Baldwin. I’ll toast you from hell.”

1. See Michael Klare, “America’s Fossil Fuel Fever,” Nation, 19 March 2012.
2. See Dean Dad, “Need,” Inside Higher Ed; “What Should a Year of College Cost?” Inside Higher Ed.

Those of us in education and working on “causes” – like not just putting a headlock on corporations, but frog-marching them to their own private dungeons – have this bilely reflux when we have to confront the evil doers, you know, the supremacists and global haters.

For me, in a classroom or in a public space, it’s a piece of cake to do a double-fly-over takedown. However, I will admit it is still nauseatingly toxic to have to see them trolling on blog sites, community forums and when they contact my email.

They end up in digital delete boxes or in the middle of the road, screaming, or taunting, but with the same critique: Without Western Civilization, Without the White Man, Without the US of Imperial A, all other cultures and races and ethnic groups would be slinging cassava gruel and defecating in the streets. Just as troubling in the holistic sense, I’ve had a slew of them in college and high school classes, and have met a few in my work as a journalist and while being around professional thugs like military, police and feds.

I’m not saying none were nuanced in their thinking, and maybe fair in their assessment of our role in planetary collapse. In the end, though, I find most racists and white apologists for the corporations and their great gifts to mankind leaky. Nihilistic. Evangelical or just plain hardened working class. Many of the masters of the universe and naysayers are degreed guys and gals, who think they lifted themselves all by themselves into their suburban McMansions and endless Red Bull fun with no help from mama or the great socialist state.

For them, there is no commons, no carrying capacity issue, no universal human or ecological rights; no international courts to abide by; no global vision to hold to advocating something a hell of a lot better than this dog-eat-dog world of the 30 percent looking down on the other strata that leave us middle class, poor, homeless.

Their world is one where homeless people, if smeared on the road by our holy automobiles, should just go to the side of the road, out of their view, maybe under a bunch of hedges, and just curl up like a radial-splayed raccoon and die without anymore drain on the welfare system. Good riddance, and not one centimeter’s worth of skin off the state’s back.

Sink or swim, asshole. And sometimes these yahoos end up just going dark and look to paleolithic man, or farther back, as these cavemen and cavewomen who have zero scruples, zero concern for life outside their family-clan unit, and who are in it all for the calories, fire, cave and sex. These people are dead emotionally and creatively.

These Yankee-Doodle-Dandies and Mason-Dixon-Dudes just know beyond a reasoned doubt that anything to do with culture, diversity, racial fairness, equity, anything like that, well, it speaks to the fact that the white man is being attacked into extinction. Thanks to the Mexicans, Africans, Chinese and Jews.

I can’t make this stuff up, or, well, I won’t try today.

These people have their own personal fax machines and Tweets to almighty Prometheus and Jesus Christ him-her-it-self. Anti-intellectual, anti-liberal arts, anti-real science. They are out there, and for some reason, they think that a majority of poor white trash and poor white working class hate every single word and idea emanating from a newsletter like Dissident Voice.

Given that, I welcome any of those reprobates, those me-myself-and-I armchair Everyman types, to read and huff and puff themselves into a blue-faced coma or frothing seizure. Because, you know, they are part of the problem, really, and not just some ignorance-can-be-cured problem for us.

I bring this up because I have been around some really amazing people – geologists who just finished a book on one of the more amazing geological events of the planet – the Ice Age Floods that changed the very surface of Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Imagine a wall of water 1,000 feet tall, moving at 65 miles an hour, covering entire half-states in 300 feet of water and icebergs. Maybe happening 80 to a hundred times over a five thousand year period.

Think about 20,000 to 15,000 years ago when a lake covering 3,000 square miles in Montana rose over 2,500 feet deep and held one half the volume of water of Lake Michigan from glacial melt. It took a 125 years to fill that lake, and, when an ice-dam failed, it took less than a week to empty.

These geologists and a woman who has been writing science curriculum for over 65 years for both K-12 and college classes, as well as an artist and many people working for a small Sandpoint, Idaho press that publishes these types of books, they all have their minds and hearts immersed into this great Ice Age story. We are talking about people who face those naysayers who hate the very idea of geology making it to the forefront; hate the very idea of real books with real photos still being cranked out by small presses; and hate the idea that schools want to adopt hands-on work to get youth to learn about the world’s natural history.

Each and every time I speak with folk like these scientists and creative artists and educators, they repeat how the constant attack by religious zealots or by anti-intellectuals of the tea party-libertarian-white supremacist variety gets tiring, old. It’s to the point where young people have no idea about real history and have no idea what an ice age is, and really have no passion around learning about how the physical-chemical-biological-planetary worlds work.

We can’t blame Johnny or Juanita or the schools, really. Blame what it is to be an America, a know-it-all, a person glued to liberal-hate TV and sucked into the cult of personality-missing billionaires serving them their daily supply of junk food, junk entertainment, junk sports, junk religion, and plain old combustible, consumable junk.

Talking and writing about books, for these anti-intellectuals, have zero bottom line appeal, and “what’s in it for me” just never gets satiated for them.

Life 101 is Not an App for that Smart Phone

We live in strange times, when smart and caring and far-thinking people are on the planet in many more numbers than ever before …. Yet we have a new age of climate tipping points in a world of people who believe the rapture is near and hope that their god has all the rules down to prevent heathens and atheists and scientists and gays and uppity people of color from ever cluttering their heaven.

For them, there is no climate change, or, if they do believe the science, they many times take it upon themselves to opt out or cop out. They become the detritus of the modern consumer-fueled age.

Climate of man. The anthropocene era. Homo sapiens petrolerus. The weather makers.

We have to hand it to these writers and thinkers looking out the windshield of speeding time, and postulating what it all means, and how we will manage in a world without ice.

The list is growing daily. You know that group – writers of climate change, natural history, sustainability, tipping points, peak oil-soil-water-strategic metals-food – Peak Everything, collapse, the economies of scale, both human and planetary.

We sort of lump them all together, from Jared Diamond, to Elizabeth Kolbert, Peter Ward, David Suzuki, Bill McKibben, James Lovelock, James Hansen, Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan, and the list goes on and on, almost endless. Hell, how many even know about Derrick Jensen and his work, Deep Green Resistance, co-authored by Lierre Keith and Aric McBay?

Writing about and discussing anything tied to sustainability unleashes these polarities of passion and persistent paranoia. In the end, how we view our race of animal, Homo sapiens economicus, depends how one looks at the very clear statement by Turkish Sufi master Abdulhamit Cakmut:

The world exists to serve people, because man is the most honorable of all creatures. There are cycles in life. From the seed comes the tree, from the tree comes the fruit we eat, and we give back as humans. Everything is meant to serve man. If people are gone from this cycle, nature itself will be over.

This is near the end of Alan Weisman’s The World without Us, a 2007 thought experiment that takes us through various places around the world, touched by man, and others, well, a bit more rural or wild. With the premise that some sort of rapture or human-ending virus or tele-porting magic happens and the world ends up population-free in an instant.

The book is not about all those religious and philosophical practices, like the Muslim dervish of Cakmut – “the recognition that everything, from atoms to our galaxy, whirls in cycles, including nature as it continually regenerates – at least until now,” Weisman writes.

This Sufi warns Weisman of calamity, the end time. “We see the signs. Harmony is broken. The good are outnumbered. There is more injustice, exploitation, corruption, pollution. We are facing it now.”

While we enter the next round of delusion coming up – Rio+20 Climate Summit – it’s clear that we have failed collectively at the basic premise of taking care of the planet analogy to nourishing and building our bodies: “We take care of our bodies to live a longer life. We should do the same for the world. If we cherish it, make it last as long as possible, we can postpone judgment day,” says the Sufi.

Interesting mystical stuff, but the reality in The World Without Us might be a lot closer to James Lovelock’s, the Gaia theorist, who also adds prophesies to the mix by saying that unless things change soon, “we’d better stash essential human knowledge at the poles in a medium that doesn’t require electricity.”

Funny stuff, the founder of Earth First!, Dave Foreman, who headed up the guerrillas who had pretty much given up on humans deserving a place in the ecosystem, now directs a think tank on restorative and conservation biology called The Rewilding Institute.

It’s a proposition that is all bundled up in hope. What Derrick Jensen splayed in a 2006 piece, “Beyond Hope,” where he called on people to stop hoping Obama does the right thing or that Exxon does the correct thing, or that by hoping hard enough, the salmon will come back.

Here’s the end of that piece by Jensen:

When you give up on hope—when you are dead in this way, and by so being are really alive—you make yourself no longer vulnerable to the cooption of rationality and fear that Nazis inflicted on Jews and others, that abusers like my father inflict on their victims, that the dominant culture inflicts on all of us. Or is it rather the case that these exploiters frame physical, social, and emotional circumstances such that victims perceive themselves as having no choice but to inflict this cooption on themselves?

But when you give up on hope, this exploiter/victim relationship is broken. You become like the Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear.

And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.

In case you’re wondering, that’s a very good thing.

World War III – War of Ideas

We’ll get back to Jensen, but first, the Weisman book: He starts it off in Rio Conambu, 2004. Tributary of the upper Amazon River. The family is speaking Quicha and the almost-vanished language, Zapara. They are drinking chicha, sour beer from cassava pulp and fermented with the saliva of the women.

The Zapra are barely creeping into the Stone Age. Once 200,000 strong, but something far away happened early in the 1900s – Henry Ford started mass producing automobiles so the demand for inflatable tubes and tires generated that European claim of their ancestral land holding rubber trees where the European businessmen with swords, crosses, and steel seized laborers to tap them. The evangelized Quicha from earlier invasions of Spanish missionaries helped chain those “heathens.” Zapara women and girls, taken as breeders or sex slaves, were raped to death.

This three-page opening is eye-opening for some DV readers I’ve “tangled with” lately who have trolled the Internet, used some IT algorithm to find key words they just hunt for, and ended up on my pieces and then emailing me with their retrograde, prune-shaped thinking patterns of racism and hate and anti-teacher/anti-intellectual bombast.

The Zapara had to hide from the rubber genocide, and they were officially declared extinct by the Ecuadoran government in the 1970s. In 1999 a Peruvian Zapara shaman was found walking in the Ecuadoran jungle. “He had come, he said, to finally meet his relatives.”

Now, they are mostly tipsy, and the men walk for days without finding tapirs or even quail. The have resorted to shooting spider monkeys. Weisman follows Ana Maria, who pushes away the monkey flesh stew offered her – flesh formerly taboo. “When we’re down to eating our ancestors,” she asked, “what is left?”

Weisman puts the earth through an experiment – would it be different if we vanished? “Nature has been through worse losses before, and refilled empty niches…. With our passing, might some lost contribution of ours leave the planet a bit more impoverished? Is it possible that, instead of heaving a huge sign of relief, the world without us would miss us?”

It’s a “cool” book in many ways, because it is an experiment of what might happen to all that we have created and jiggered and morphed, and what might happen in the rewilding process. Here’s how the book breaks down:

Part I

1. a lingering scent of Eden; 2. unbuilding our home; 3. the city without us; 4. the world just before us; 5. the lost menagerie; the African paradox

Part II

7. what falls apart; 8. what lasts; 9. polymers are forever; 10. the petro patch; 11. the world without farms

Part III

12. the fate of ancient and modern wonders of the world; 13. the world without war; 14. wings without us; 15. hot legacy; 16. our geologic record

Part IV

17. where do we do we go from here?; 18. art beyond us; 19. the sea cradle

So Weisman ventures to see what we have done to the world with our own deserved title of “invasive species geological, biological, atmospheric strafing machine eater.” What happens is easily imagined when it comes to dams, farms, nuclear power plants, all those guts by the thousands of miles running underneath Houston to keep going the petro/petro-chemical profits rolling and raw materials for goods we all rush to Wal-mart to buy.

The book looks at bridges, a place like Houston with thousands of miles of petro-chemical pipes under the ancient swamp. He looks at what might happen to our cities of steel and glass. He looks at bridges, even the overbuilt Brooklyn Bridge, and what would happen if man disappeared. We’re talking thaw-freeze cycles, bird shit eroding rivets, and other stresses toppling the bridge.

He also looks at the first Indigenous peoples, around 13,325 years ago, the Clovis people. Paul Martin, who looks for all those clues in The Desert Laboratory in southern Arizona, is also highlighted in a chapter. His Blitzkrieg extinction theory looks at the the explosion of extinctions starting about 13,000 years ago. Fascinating stuff. “It’s pretty simple. When people got out of Africa and Asia and reached other parts of the world, all hell broke loose,” Martin tells Weisman.

The idea is if Homo sapiens had never evolved, “North America would have three times as many animals over one ton as Africa today,” Martin says.

Attack on Higher Education by the Consumer-high Corporatists

Short and sweet, Weisman’s book is worth the read. Plenty on history, and plenty on man’s settlement patterns and resource extraction modes to support a world without us that would eventually go back to something very different than before man ended up as flotsam and walking seed spreaders crisscrossing the planet.

While the Mannahatta Project looks at what the original Manhattan forest might look like, but interestingly enough, most of the flora is invasive, ornamentals from other countries, and others that were unintended products of ships and crates of imported fruits, vegetables and grains.

“The ecosystem here will be a human artifact that will persist in our absence, a cosmopolitan botanical mixture that would never have occurred without us.”

This book analysis takes me back to the basic theme of what the hell we are doing attacking education, gutting it, making fools of ourselves in the name of goods and services delivered next-day by the cretins of the Amazon.com and Walmart variety. Here’s how dumb we are – gutting education and turning it into a private money machine for rotten people who know zilch about education, the whole person, the whole shooting match. Those privatizers want to turn it all into an on-line delivery system of stale, testable, easy-to-learn stuff you can pick up at home while having both your computer screens open and the speaker volume turned up.

So, Eugene Kiver, 30-plus years teaching geology at Eastern Washington University, and his student, Bruce Bjornstad, a geologist at Hanford, at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, wrote this book, On the Trail of the Ice Age Floods – The Northern Reaches. A project of passion and love, and, one incubated because they both went to schools, state schools, land grand universities. The degrees, the interest in geology, and the books would never have been written, I GUARANTEE it, if these two had never had a chance at real schools, real breathing teachers, real guides into geological space, real peers coxing them on.

Ideas, books, dreams, significant discourse, and the push-pull of thinking beings just can’t be matched at Target or at some call center, or even in a rarefied place like a surgical unit in some for-profit hospital. Thinkers and doers and creators just are not coming from the ranks of board rooms and CEO management classes out there, in the consumer-propped world.

So, get this: a University of Washington professor, John Marzluff, and his equal, artist and bird guy, Tony Angell, presented to 400 people the basis of their new book, Gifts of the Crow at Town Hall, in Seattle.

This book explores so much about crows (and ravens, black birds, stellar jays, magpies) that the crowd was astounded by the bird’s lack of a bird brain. Crows remember faces for life, even after one run-in. Not only can they get food out of a tube using a tool, they know how and do bend the tool to get the morsels. They have funeral gatherings for fellow deceased buddies. They wind surf in thermals by grabbing pieces of surfboard-shaped pine bark and hang eight (only eight, not ten). One crow, after two years with a human host, was given up to a zoo. That crow lived five years there, and, after the fifth year, the previous human host showed up for the first time, and when the human poked in at the window where that crow was, the crow said, “Hi Bob.”

Yep, never said that before in his human-hosted life. Just heard it for two years when buddies greeted the human host.

So, Marzluff with his PhD and petering out grants and dwindling state support, does all this work on crows for the greater good of knowledge, not for some Saran-wrapped next-day-shipping product to fulfill those seratonin rushes our evolved consumer human seem to desire.

It’s why Weisman looks at the proposition of what happens to the world if we go. He interviews so many of those same sort of “crow guys” – people who are products of education, formal and on-the-fly and on-the-scene. We need Weisman, Paul Martin, and guys like Peter Ward whose Under a Green Sky blows some holes in the Alvarez theory of dinosaurs’ extinction vis-a-vis meteorites. For this UW professor, Ward gives us the climate change evidence, both paleobiologic and geologic, as well as chemical.

It’s the main message here – how do we wrestle out of this consumer-driven drivel without the minds of people mucking about in the arts, languages, sciences, humanities, et al? Boeing won’t produce innovation. Starbucks won’t get us into a climate change adaptation mode. Westinghouse and Toyota are not running think tanks with any greater good and glory for all mankind.

It’s profit, and dirty money laundering.

Back-and-forth these One Percenters go, and nobody knows where the bottle will stop spinning.

I’ll end on Derrick Jensen, who also wrote, The End Game. The reason ending on him is important ties into the critiques we need in this time of imperial America and transnational big oil.

Only zero emissions can prevent a warmer planet,” one pair of climatologists declared.⁴ Or James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, who states bluntly that global warming has passed the tipping point, carbon offsetting is a joke, and that “individual lifestyle adjustments” are “a deluded fantasy.”⁵ It’s all true. And self–evident. “Simple living” should start with simple observation: if burning fossil fuels will kill the planet, then stop burning them.

But that conclusion, in all its stark clarity, is not the one anyone’s drawing, from the policy makers to the environmental groups. When they start offering solutions is the exact moment when they stop telling the truth, inconvenient or otherwise. Google “global warming solutions.” The first paid sponsor, www.CampaignEarth.org, urges “No doom and gloom!! When was the last time depression got you really motivated? We’re here to inspire realistic action steps and stories of success.” By “realistic” they don’t mean solutions that actually match the scale of the problem. They mean the usual consumer choices—cloth shopping bags, travel mugs, and misguided dietary advice—which will do exactly nothing to disrupt the troika of industrialization, capitalism, and patriarchy that is skinning the planet alive. But since these actions also won’t disrupt anyone’s life, they’re declared both realistic and a success.

The next site offers the ever–crucial Global Warming Bracelets and, more importantly, Flip Flops. Polar bears everywhere are weeping with relief. The site’s Take Action page includes the usual buying light bulbs, inflating tires, filling dishwashers, shortening showers, and rearranging the deck chairs.

The first non–commercial site is the Union of Concerned Scientists. As one might expect, there’s no explanation points but instead a statement that “[t]he burning of fossil fuel (oil, coal, and natural gas) alone counts for about 75 percent of annual CO2 emissions.” This is followed by a list of Five Sensible Steps. Step #1 is—no, not stop burning fossil fuel—but “Make Better Cars and SUVs.” Never mind that the automobile itself is the pollution, with its demands—for space, for speed, for fuel—in complete opposition to the needs of both a viable human community and a living planet. Like all the others, the scientists refuse to call industrial civilization into question. We can have a living planet and the consumption that’s killing the planet, can’t we?

So who is going to look at this shell game, this flimflam of eco-pornography and greenwashing marketing other than the Jensens of the world, and Derrick gets his traction going at colleges and universities. He’s not invited to GE boardrooms or the stockholder meetings of General Dynamics or Valero Oil. Who else will look at the facts of a society that is insane, one that relies on non-renewable everything to continue down a road of constant growth? Who is going to call that spade a spade, one of Whole Foods’ vice presidents?

Who the hell is going to see that rage and anger and despair are evolved traits, and that healing and lifestylism and political games on TV? Who the hell is going to allow for that lucid moment from the film Network?– I am mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore?

Not the middle management of Bank of America. Not the privates and corporals in the US military thrown into wars for the profit-empire’s oil-gas stratagem. Maybe our last hope is education – if we can wrestle and pummel the privatizers and the faux liberals who cannot understand that every breathing moment on earth is a battle of atoms, DNA, evolution, cranial chemicals, and birth aftershock.

Jensen:

This culture leaves us ill–prepared to face the crisis of planetary biocide that greets us daily with its own grim dawn. The facts are not conducive to an open–hearted state of wonder. To confront the truth as adults, not as faux–children, requires an adult fortitude and courage, grounded in our adult responsibilities to the world. It requires those things because the situation is horrific and living with that knowledge will hurt. Meanwhile, I have been to workshops where global warming is treated as an opportunity for personal growth, and no one but me sees a problem with that.

Remember on this one thing, said Badger. The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memories. This is how people care for themselves.

― Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel

Amazingly, more than 300 people sat in their seats and listened to two bird people talk about their new work, Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans, with a one-two punch delivery that truly was amazing. How many politicians out there could stand in front of a Seattle crowd and talk about real things and have real science and culture not only at their intellectual fingertips but under their skin? How many planning departments could even begin to frame neighborhood development and community design with so many gifts of the narrative and of the intelligence scientist John Marzluff and artist-naturalist Tony Angell mustered?

From my humble opinion, few if any.

Not one in the crowd was scrolling on their screens looking for the latest friends’ update or some nonsense story about a 100-pound scrotum sack guy going on Howard Stern to talk about his testicular fame.

These two fellows were miked and had their Power Point slides down, their video clips fresh and all that crow art work ready.

I’m pondering those corvids – crows, ravens, jays – who have messed with my cook kits in the middle of pinon pines in New Mexico or stole the “o” rings from my scuba tanks and the snorkels left on the gunnels of my dive boat in the Sea of Cortez. DV readers I am sure have their own crow stories.

Marzluff is a University of Washington wildlife professor who uses hi-tech PET scans to look at the brain of the big black birds. Angell is a naturalist who does amazing line drawings of the birds he sees and some of those in the stories they’ve collected from around the world. He’s helped with over a dozen books on natural history.

My buddy Dale Sanderson teaches hang gliding in Washington state, and he’s told me that many times when he’s up lifting there in a maze of chimneys pushing thermals into the heavens getting some mean air time along comes a crow or two, shadowing right alongside Dale, sometimes upside down.

We’ve got crows that grab surfboard-shaped bark and use the wood to wind surf. Crows that bunch up and toboggan down snow slopes. Crows that clatter and cluck when another in the flock dies. Crow funerals? Crows that end up in zoos and then five years after being dumped off say “Hello Bob” to the guy who raised him for two years when his conscience finally forced the human to check up on his ex-pet.

Five years passed, and, three quick crow salutations: “Hello, Bob. Hello, there, Bob. Hi, Bob.” New Caledonia crows that are videotaped using copper wire to not only attempt to poke and skewer a piece of food from a tubular piece of glass, but who wrap the wire around the circumference to fashion a hook to get at the morsel. And they do get it.

Crows that give the neighborhood animal loving food-giver not just shiny objects as appreciation, but clothespins and then the next and next day, panties and bras.

Why all this crow allusion? Their book, subtitled, How Perception, Emotion, Thought Allow Birds to Behave Like Humans, looks at the very un-bird brain cognition and forethought of these animals. They bloody calculate the speed, range, height and line of an on-coming 65 mph truck and duck while letting the vehicle swoosh over them unscathed.

Birds, and yet do our fellow species act like humans, really? Rio+20 proves the utter myopia and apocalyptic nature of humans, and our inability at forethought. Preparing for that planet 20, 30 or 50 years down the road. Nah!

I heard David Suzuki speak to several news outlets last week while witnessing the most obscene, inept and impotent world leaders and their ministers fail to have the humanity – the bird brain raw smarts – to put their collective feet down and stop the assault of our very survival and the razing of nature’s gifts by the energy fascists and corporate armies.

What a waste of fossil fuel and paper for inane reports. The pinnacle of collective human mismanagement and eco-pornography. When are these carbon-intensive charades going to end? When will the youth finally get it that corporations and government heads and their ministries of water, air, ag, oceans, and forests are broken undereducated creatures of the bureaucracy of ineptitude and smarmy-mouthed triple speech?

Here’s what David Suzuki said on Democracy Now:

If we don’t come together and say, ‘Look, let’s start with the agreement that we are biological creatures, and if you don’t have air for more than three or four minutes, you’re dead; if you don’t have clean air, you’re sick,’ so, surely, air, the atmosphere that provides us with the seasons, the weather, the climate, that has to be our highest priority. Before anything economic or political, that has to be the highest priority.

But what you’re getting is a huge gathering, as we saw in Copenhagen two years ago, a huge gathering of countries trying to negotiate something that doesn’t belong to anyone, through the lenses of all of the political boundaries and the economic priorities, and we try to shoehorn nature into our agenda. And it’s simply not going to work. A meeting like this is doomed to fail, because we haven’t left our vested interests outside the door and come together as a single species and agreed what the fundamental needs are for all of humanity. So we’re going to sacrifice the air, the water, the biodiversity, all in the sake of human political and economic interest. They’re doomed.

I remember when I spent time with Suzuki, both in person when I introduced him as a speaker-author at the Spokane, Washington, Eastern Washington University Press (now defunct as part of that budget-cutting-if-it-has-anything-to-do-with-the-humanities/arts/classics-it-must-go mentality) literary extravaganza, Get Lit! And on my radio show, Tipping Points: Voices from the Edge.

He reiterated how tired he was of coming onto radio shows where call-in yahoos would just rant and scream at Suzuki the scientist who also is an incredible international figure in popularizing science by making stars of the researchers and putting the dozens of disciplines they work in on his CBC science series. This is the century of the dumb-as-dirt legislators and the evangelists of commerce who want to believe the world is as old as the Bible says. This is the moment of the “I-read-it-on-a-blog-and-Fox-News-told-me-so” mostly gringo Caucasian male archetype blathering on about sun spots or a new The Day After ice age cometh.

That’s where we’ve devolved as the world burns. That’s where we are in this state of strafed higher education and lobotomized primary and secondary public education. That’s where we are heading in this age of hyper consumerism and lascivious lifestylism. We are in a world where youth are facing 10 and 12 hour work days until the skin is 75 years slack. We are in the perpetual endless series of stupid money grubbing leaders and their corporate generals gutting whatever it takes to protect the public health, safety and spirit from falling into that long, empty dark path toward extinction.

It’s a time when birds need to be the models for humanity to even begin to act compassionate. While that fun little hour and a half with two crow experts in Seattle’s Town Hall did add a bit of buoyancy to the concept of Homo sapiens the creative, the interested, the caring and the balanced species, the reality is the professor’s job is on the line because he’s studying the wrong thing – crows, human relationships to them and the crows’ incredible memory and self-correcting and culture-making ways.

The study is on the chopping block in this bifurcated political circus, where both parties have succumbed to the virus of corporate psychology and power politics around who gets the money, when and how much of it. That is the political gambit many a progressive piddles with.

All this high-five slapping after the most ruthless force of legal failure, the US Supreme Court, deems Citizens United oh so fair or just a few days later rules how the insurance companies will reign supreme as Affordable Care Act puts more people into a mandatory insurance-extortion racket.

Talk about bird brains – privatizing health care, education, prisons, public infrastructure and public services.

All my friends working on social justice campaigns high-fiving when Obama gives those same sex couples marriage confetti while his administration has opened up the spigots allowing energy mafioso to not only externalize most of the costs of drilling off shore or moving sludge from Alberta, Canada, to Texas, he’s letting that good old cowboy Ken Salazar (remember this Secretary of the Interior’s botched job with the Gulf of Mexico’s felon, British Petroleum?) make proclamations that Shell in the Arctic will be oh such a good neighbor – toxin-free and spill-free too boot.

Amazing how many in the so-called human justice movement have not read Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth, or Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change or Peter Ward’s Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us about Our Future. Or the stuff on the GOM – Antonia Juhasz’s book, Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill.¹

The mass of us can’t see the forest for the trees, can’t step back from our consumer myopia to abstract things which are very immediate in our behavioral horizon and for which the consequences are not far off, certainly not many generations down the line.

They are all high-fiving because these sycophants and elites in the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to keep intact Obama Care, allowing the insurance industry to capitalize on millions more Americans who daily choose from putting food on the family table or now paying for health insurance.

That Royal Astronomer, Sir Martin Rees, was asked by the BBC to put in his odds as one of the country’s leading scientists in Britain about the “chances that human beings will survive to the end of this century?”

His answer was 50-50.

And still the Raven, never flitting, Still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas Just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming Of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamplight o’er him streaming Throws his shadow on the floor, And my soul from out that shadow, That lies floating on the floor, Shall be lifted–nevermore.

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”

1. See Paul Haeder, “Revisiting the Gulf two years later,” dte, 30 May 2012 and “Amount of biological damage, loss in Gulf still unknown,” dte, 12 June 2012.

Energy In, Energy Out-sourced

I’m thinking about energy these days. Oil, tar sands, the amount put into Homo industrious‘ lifestyle and wars for extraction. All the globalized harvesting of proteins from the collapsing seas. Forests cut down for soy beans. Millions of acres of grass prairie torn up to fuel cattle and cars.

Japan is giving the green light to ratcheting up their Fukishima-based economic growth model. More nuclear energy, at what cost? Shell Oil drilling in the Arctic and Australian/Canadian mining firms pushing into all of Latin America.

It’s the small stories on National Petroleum-Pesticide-Pharmaceutical Radio (NPR) that catalyze my thinking about how out of scale our daily lives are, largely because we’ve collectively allowed corporations to determine our lives – where and how and why communities, CITIES, grow. Things have gotten so out of whack that every waking and sleeping hour is determined by the heart of the monsters at Dow, Exxon, Monsanto, General Dynamics, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Bechtel, BP, Halliburton, JP Morgan Chase, and all the sycophants coming from elite schools to push the money eaters’ agendas.

So the NPR affiliate in Seattle gives out a little blurb on how corporate officials from Alberta, Canada, are in Seattle for a week to recruit a myriad of American workers to fill the gap or shortage of laborers and skilled workers up North to harvest the sludge of tar out of the province’s bowels.

No critical look at why the process of tar sand extraction-cooking is so damaging. How it is so tied to a broken dream of corporations, governments and under-educated masses just ignoring the reality of carbon dioxide pollution and atmospheric destabilization and all the attendant climatic disorders that come with global warming. Nothing of the First Nations people’s being thrown on the proverbial heap of exploitation, extinction, and extermination that is the way of white man-woman in his-her pursuit of profits and this unsustainable corporate grand larceny of water, air, the very DNA fiber of human life.

Just trippy, happy reporting, and PR flaks from Alberta just being fawned over by the reporter (sic) who throws softball questions at her while the Alberta-or-Bust lady went on and on about the great opportunities for Seattle-area workers making a new life in Alberta. And who knows, “… some might just want to stay permanently … and live the dream that is $20 and $30 an hour job part of the endless humanity polluting industries.”

In the Eye of the Beholder

What’s Seattle got to say about cyclists? Here’s from a recent comments section out of the Seattle Times: “Until the cyclistas agree to be licensed on the same basis and at the same fees as motorcyclists, I am against any spending on them, period.”

Typical comments lobbed around here, really, on a daily basis, but, thankfully, plenty of comebacks, illustrated by this keen thinker:

Right now half of all road costs are paid from general taxes. Gasoline is subsidized by the general taxpayer via ethanol and oil company subsidies. Add to that the cost of wars to maintain U.S. access to mid-east oil ($2.51 for every gallon of gas consumed in the U.S.). Add to that my inflated health care insurance premiums that subsidize treatment of asthma due to high levels of particulate matter in the air and treatment for the obesity and diabetes epidemic in the US resulting from bad diets and sedentary lifestyles. Since the lion’s share is funded through local, state, and federal taxes and fees, quite the opposite is true; the cost to non-drivers is grossly higher. This includes maintenance, expansion, building new, and providing police forces, emergency personnel and equipment. Then there’s a lifetime effect of road deaths (40,000+/year) and injuries, watershed destruction, groundwater and run-off pollution, excess asthma rates, higher incidence of heart disease, negative effects for those living near highways, noise pollution, congestion, CO2 emissions, etc.

Two very different narratives, or psychological frames, or consciousnesses. Ahh, but the retrogrades thinking bicycling is bad are outnumbering the alternative. Think Texas Republicans taking out critical thinking from their state platform – and then you get the picture:

Texas Republicans are saying that their 2012 platform’s opposition to “critical thinking skills” was a mistake—but that mistake is now the formal policy of the Republican Party of Texas until 2014. The stated reasoning behind opposition to critical thinking skills was that such education programs “focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.” As Hunter described this logic:

Critical thinking, of course, is what allows a person to differentiate between fact and hokum. I will assume that this is the peeve being addressed by the party plank (which, as it turns out, doubles as a handy paddlin’ board). Differentiating between fact and hokum sounds all fine and good until it leads to questioning your elders. When elders spout hokum, now that needs to be properly respected. If your elders say the Loch Ness Monster is proof that evolution never happened and that Noah’s Ark was actually a hovercraft, you had better damn well not start using your newfound critical thinking skills on picking apart that. Believing something contrary to your parents counts as behavior modification only if the original behavior was a full-on brainwashing.

I’ve Got Mine and You’ve Got Yours – the $8 an Hour Social Darwinism Polka

Amazing, walking the two dogs on Beacon Hill while hearing thunder claps in the middle of the day in July (nah, no climate change here) while a steady stream of commercial airlines line up to fall to earth, to that strip of land near Renton that is Sea-Tac International Airport (sure, we can absorb another 20 percent increase in air traffic by 2030). All those travelers embarking/disembarking into the lives of the awaiting low wage job holders who are the new immigrants, those wheelchair tenders, baggage handlers, taxi drivers, and food handlers and Sky Caps.

What delusions – Seattle expects to live off the nitrous oxide of its high tech-creative class-knowledge worker bubble. Constant steady growth of Amazon.com and the retailer’s new campus towers in downtown. A $4.2 billion deep bore tunnel to expand the opportunities of developers and the building industry elites. More yammering about having the city paying for the pro-basketball team to return, along with a hockey club. All these endless clever growth parodies, as if the party never ends.

Land and water locked city, in a state where support for the big colleges like UW and WSU is floundering, let along all the community colleges and small ones like Eastern Washington U which are having more of that party favor fun – cut classes, gutted departments, eviscerated programs, larger classrooms, more firings, and the constant and steady growth of contingent faculty in their every precarious majority status of faculty of the realm and the onward ho of creating more and more virtual tinkering as on-line “communities” are exploding as the new educational think.

Did I say a billion bucks from taxpayers to pay for a new waterfront park and amenities so those land developers can feel good about their investments matched by public investments in the form of levies and other funding sources? That’s what a new tunnel does, after the perfectly okay viaduct gets completely torn down.

Meanwhile, politicians are attacking the right to collective bargaining and the value of higher education instructors, a la Wisconsin. Expect more teacher layoffs as more and more of the tax pie, those tax revenues that are not only regressive but insane, vanish thanks to corporate and political malfeasance. You know, revenue streams tied to the crap we buy and the homes we own. Never serious talk about having corporations pay for all those externalities they create, all those operating expenses and R & D bucks and pollution mitigating programs vis-a-vis us, US taxpayers.

We’ve ended up in this miasma of failing to call a spade a working class person, or really stalling our ability to go deep into a critique by finally seeing that the elites, the One Percent, and those doing their bidding have set upon this land a slash and burn class warfare that for almost 99 percent of journalists is an impossible concept to not just broadcast and report on, but to grasp.

Dueling Banjos, Dueling Consciousnesses

It’s the dual consciousness W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about for blacks having to have two completely operating systems in America – one for their own community and one while in the white dominion of male Caucasian privilege. We’ve all been co-opted by bifurcated thinking, this dual consciousness. It’s the only way to survive daily.

Our work when we are in the employ of the prison industrial complex, or those closely aligned to the military industries and the industries of misery fueled by the school-to-prison pipeline, is the work of the un-brave, the unworthy, of the incapacitated and cynical consumer-gestating breeders of unraveling social and spiritual cohesion. Sort of contrary to why we are on earth, no? To protect the lives of all people, including the very poor, the very babies the imperialists use to fuel their engines of harvest.

If you drink the Kool-Aid quick enough, and long enough, Seattle might seem like a trailblazing city. It’s not, though. Traffic is absurd. Cyclists are called cyclistas and derided and threatened all the time by all those car wanderers. Nothing too gory in the news about those college grads with student loans and countless opportunities to make it big with those MA’s and PhD’s cooking slow food specialties at their restaurant jobs or serving up $8 drafts mugs of organic Heffeweizen.

There are out of work families, tremendous fissures in the suburbs turning into the new ghettos, and constant unbelievable rents and mortgages that sap the two-income families of even those making upward of $120,000 combined income.

Money (investments), food (trendy, decadent), music (new, undiscovered), yoga (hot or nude or both) and the perennial extracurricular conversation (“where you heading for the weekend… ?”) occupy the lives of Seattlites more than one might imagine. Yes, you can catch Jane Goodall or David Suzuki or Chris Hedges at a Town Hall, and there are unions fighting for a fair economy rumbling in West Lake Plaza, and there are pedestrian and green roof advocates, but in the end, the city and entire Puget Sound “area” are captured by the illusions of the rich, the regattas floating lazily on the blue water, the cozy weather of a laid back July evening. All those lights and the endless luminescent rivers composed of vehicles coming and going on I-5; the floating bridges leading to the Cascades; the canopy of maples and cedars like a dot of verdant safety on the dust bowl planet; all those container ships lighting up the waterfront in a spotlight of falsified positive economic growth; well, all of that, and the Space Needle, they are all part of this big eyes sort of feel to this Emerald City.

It’s an illusion. I’ve written about it before for DV, and, not surprisingly, in contemplating the “value of this place,” I see Seattle is a microcosm of broken dreams and usurped lives. I can find similar cases elsewhere in this continuous USA scam.

Supersonic Contrails Lead to Tax Dodgers, Chamber of Commerce, Military Industry

Not surprisingly, as I write this column, after taking those dogs up the hill to the park where Somali women eat chicken out of a bag, Salvadorans slam Cokes to wash down their pupusas, and eighty-something Chinese men and women do Tai Chi, out of the wispy clouds comes ricocheting several F-18′s, afterburners fully lit up, the rapid hot breath of their engines sounding like giant tree chippers on steroids. For whatever reason, the USAF jet jockeys flared into my neighborhood’s atmosphere and shot toward Boeing Field, a slingshot maneuver back in the direction of the supercharged civilian-military-industrial complex king Boeing’s Everett headquarters.

Those F-18s and A-10s have been flying around for two days, forcing sonic booms into our weekend as they practice for the biggest show on earth – the Boeing SeaFair air show next month. More self-esteem raising for the masses, thanking Uncle Sam and the industrialists for sucking up our public coffers for the military junk and metal supersonic birds stamped Made in the USA, Made for Death.

Boeing, this region’s sacred cow. Lockheed Martin, another sacred corporation spending like spendthrifts US tax money to mess around with its F-22 stealth bomber. The entire military spending party is as obscene as drug kingpins dipping victims in sulfuric acid. Half of all of Boeing’s profits come from its military machine – the F-18 Hornet, F-15, tankers, the Apache helicopter, huge cargo jets and behemoth helicopters. All that hardware manufactured in Mesa, Arizona, cities in Pennsylvania and California, our own Everett, and St. Louis Missouri, to name a few. All those Democratic and Republican politicians fawning over these mega-corporations like Boeing. The boards of education and college presidents bending over as if Boeing’s proctologists are their dominatrixes, promising ever more tech programs and more graduates to get those “good-paying manufacturing jobs.” Lobbyist after financial fascist line up and ply the trade of the military-prison industrial complex, centered around the industrial food-energy-mineral extraction complexes.

Forget that just three months ago we had another illustrative fine monumental ripoff in the USA with tax day – as these companies like Amazon, Verizon, Boeing, GE, and hundreds of others, had their own personal jubilees, thanks to legions of accountants, lawyers and insiders helping their respective companies to avoid their fair taxes or dodge them altogether.

Another military industrial complex under girder, General Electric, which made pre-tax profits of $44 billion from 2008 to 2010, received almost $5 billion in refunds. A GE spokesperson added, “We are committed to acting with integrity in relation to our tax obligations.” GE’s largess is around its energy and financial global services.

The close second for tax dodging goes to a country and political system of its own, ExxonMobil, with this nation’s highest pre-tax earnings three years in a row. Wow, they didn’t get off too easy with a 2% federal income tax payment rate. Here’s a PR spin from Exxon: “Any claim we don’t pay taxes is absurd… ExxonMobil is a leading U.S. taxpayer.”

So, back to Seattle’s own Boeing: along with Verizon, Dow and DuPont, all of whom made profits three years in a row, the Seattle company paid zero taxes over the three-year period. Just a few more tax evaders – Citigroup and Bank of America, with combined pretax earnings in 2009 and 2010 of $8 billion, each paid zero taxes two years in a row. Two in the 5 percent club, Chevron and Merck, paid that rate from 2008-2010. Two techies like Hewlett-Packard and IBM paid 3% and 2% respectively.

Those Carnival cruise ships mucking up Puget Sound, well, the corporation as a whole paid a whooping 1% in taxes last year.
Our supercharged and patriotic corporations and their sweet deals; the sweetness of Citizens United; the sweeter taste of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs and Barclay’s scamming us all – oh, how saccharine the one percent are tasting these days as their corporate thuggery and their continuous extortion rackets, inside trading deals, and infinite lobbyists-a la-pimps bulking up politicians into high paid tricks transform them into the new army of fascism.

Soon the display of both hubris and imperial death will be in the air as the militarists and their civilian masters will be in the sky overlooking the Cascades and Olympic mountains.

The Ultimate Fly-over – A Trillion Dollars Later and Women in Afghanistan Still Shovel Shit

How many weepy eyed Seattlites will be craning their necks skyward as the three-day obscene display of military might and corporate felony displays the reason for crumbling cities, dead schools, no health care for all and dwindling safety nets.

Here’s how the big air show – Sea Fair – will play out in Seattle, and one can bet the closed floating bridge, all the extra security, all the other asides and fanfare crap will come from Seattle and King County coffers. Hell, in Seattle, the sweatshop Wal-Mart of the internet, Amazon.com, gets kudos for throwing in on the July 4th fireworks display on Lake Union. What a winner, Mr. Bezos is.
Check this out, one day of the three-day air military orgasm fest –

August 3, 2012

8:30 a.m. GATES OPEN
8:30 a.m. H1 Unlimited Hydroplane Testing Session
10:00 a.m. F1 PROP Tour Testing Session
10:00 a.m. Hyperlite Wakeboard Experience
11:10 a.m. Vintage Hydroplanes
11:20 a.m. U.S. Coast Guard – HH65 Search & Rescue Demonstration
11:25 a.m. Boeing Air Show
11:35 a.m. U.S. Air Force C-17 Fly Over
11:40 a.m. Flying Heritage Collection Fly Over
11:50 a.m. Red Eagle Air Sports presented by PPG Aerospace Demonstration
12:00 p.m. Main Stage: Navy Band Northwest
12:05 p.m. T-38 Fly Over
12:10 p.m. Red Bull Air Force Demonstration
12:30 p.m. U.S. Air Force A-10 Fly Over
12:35 p.m. Sean Tucker Team Oracle Challenger Bi-plane Demonstration
1:00 p.m. F/A 18 Super Hornet Flight Demonstration
1:15 p.m. CH-47 Helicopter & Special Forces Demonstration
1:30 p.m. Fat Albert – C130 Demonstration
1:40 p.m. U.S. Navy Blue Angels Demonstration
2:30 p.m. Hyperlite Wakeboard Experience
2:30 p.m. Main Stage: UC7
2:40 p.m. Vintage Hydroplanes
2:50 p.m. H1 Unlimited Hydroplane Qualifying Session
4:00 p.m. Main Stage: School of Rock
5:00 p.m. F1 PROP Tour Qualifying Session
6:00 p.m. GATES CLOSE

Three days of little kids, families and military rah-rah types in Seattle, the supposedly highest educated and most “liberal” joint on the planet watching jets and air vehicles go whoosh and zoom while schools crumble, roads are full of potholes, and the rats of Seattle hunker down for yet more feasts as garbage pick-up shifts to twice a month.

Here’s a break down of the highest costing air metal the US pumps out, from fighter jets to huge helicopters and spy planes – F/A-18 Hornet: $94 million; EA-18G Growler: $102 million ; V-22 Osprey: $118 million; F-35 Lightning II: $122 million; E-2D Advanced Hawkeye: $232 million; VH-71 Kestrel: $241 million; P-8A Poseidon: $290 million; C17A Globemaster III: $328 million; F-22 Raptor: $350 million; B-2 Spirit: $2.4 billion.

This, of course, is just a big drop in the bucket, since we have to have 300 of everything, and these costs for those air programs above do not include all the cost overruns and other pyramid schemes defense contractors squeeze from the US tax coffers.

And forget about the black budget-black ops crap the USA spreads across the globe. The drone program’s budget or just how much those UMV’s cost? Just the Unmanned drone, the Predator, costs $4.5 million each.

the costs of the CIA managed Predator and Reaper RPV “drone” surveillance and strike program in Pakistan (and Yemen, where strikes have also occurred). This “black” budget item is inside the Pentagon budget and includes the costs of the drones, the operators, fuel, and weapons, and is not publicly known. We cannot say if expenditures for the drone program are entirely contained in the accounting of Pentagon spending for the wars or also partly in the “base” portion of the Pentagon budget. We can say this about the Air Force version of the drone program. As the New York Times reported in 2009, “Air Force officials acknowledge that more than a third of their unmanned Predator spy planes — which are 27 feet long, powered by a high-performance snowmobile engine, and cost $4.5 million apiece — have crashed, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Real Costs of Being an American – War, GNP – gross national pain

It’s so easy to get caught up in the monetary costs of war machines. Or how much those budgets drain the budgets of American communities from sea to shining sea. Or the costs to the US actors in those wars using that equipment we all paid up the ass to see on those “all you can be” TV PSAs.

Do we ever really understand the costs of war, the costs of empire, the costs of protecting and hoarding and harvesting energy, minerals, trees, marine flesh, water on the people we in the West invade? That’s an entirely other story, something akin to the costs of drug use and the drug war on the Mexican people and country, recently laid out by Rebecca Solnit, “Apologies to Mexico: The Drug Trade and GNP (Gross National Pain)”

Dear Mexico,

I apologize. There are so many things I could apologize for, from the way the U.S. biotech corporation Monsanto has contaminated your corn to the way Arizona and Alabama are persecuting your citizens, but right now I’d like to apologize for the drug war, the 10,000 waking nightmares that make the news and the rest that don’t.

You’ve heard the stories about the five severed heads rolled onto the floor of a Michoacan nightclub in 2006, the 300 bodies dissolved in acid by a servant of one drug lord, the 49 mutilated bodies found in plastic bags by the side of the road in Monterrey in May, the nine bodies found hanging from an overpass in Nuevo Laredo just last month, the Zeta Cartel’s videotaped beheadings just two weeks ago, the carnage that has taken tens of thousands of Mexican lives in the last decade and has terrorized a whole nation. I’ve read them and so many more. I am sorry 50,000 times over.

The drug war is fueled by many things, and maybe the worst drug of all is money, to which so many are so addicted that they can never get enough. It’s a drug for which they will kill, destroying communities and ecologies, even societies, whether for the sake of making drones, Wall Street profits, or massive heroin sales. Then there are the actual drugs, to which so many others turn for numbness.

These conversations never go well in Seattle or in Phoenix or anywhere along the Gun Belt or Air Conditioning Belt, AKA Sun Belt – “everything we do and consumer and say and feel and hold dear fuck up the rest of the world …” We have a more difficult time as educators and journalists discussing the realities of making money – having neighborhoods, homes, cars, families, dogs, picket fences, vacations and retirement funds – from our industries of death and destruction. Calling Boeing on the carpet for anything in Seattle turns those asparagus-and-Copper River-salmon-loving NPR liberals into seething mad men and women.

O.I.L – Operation Individualistic Liberation

Do we want to calculate the carbon footprint for that SeaFair air show, or how many pounds of jet fuel will be expended? Is it a worthy exercise, or is it just the external costs of being a fat and happy American? Oh, all those filled hotel rooms, Burger Kings flipped, lattes pulled, and parking lot spaces sold during this spectacle of worthless air equipment – that’s the benefit of war.
But here’s a little tidbit on the actual oil consumption by (and protected by) our men and women in uniform: “Oil Wars Transforming the American Military into a Global Oil-Protection Service” by Michael T. Klare:

The DoD uses 360,000 barrels of oil each day. This amount makes the DoD the single largest oil consumer in the world. There are only 35 countries in the world consuming more oil than DoD. The U.S. Air Force is the largest oil consumer within the DoD services.
Less than half of DoD oil consumption occurs in the continental U.S., and the rest is consumed overseas. According to Sharon E. Burke, the Pentagon’s director of operational energy plans and programs, the Defense Logistics Agency delivers more than 170,000 barrels of oil each day to the war theaters, at a cost of $9.6 billion last year.

Although energy costs represent less than 2 percent of the DoD budget, indirect costs such as those for transporting fuel to battlefields and distributing it to the end-user add to the total. When the average American is paying $3 per gallon of gasoline, the price can soar to $42 a gallon for military grade jet fuel delivered through aerial refueling.

America’s dependence on imported petroleum has been growing steadily since 1972, when domestic output reached its maximum (or “peak”) output of 11.6 million barrels per day (mbd). Domestic production is now running at about 9 mbd and is expected to continue to decline as older fields are depleted. (Even if some oil is eventually extracted from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, as the Bush administration desires, this downward trend will not be reversed.) Yet our total oil consumption remains on an upward course; now approximating 20 mbd, it’s projected to reach 29 mbd by 2025. This means ever more of the nation’s total petroleum supply will have to be imported — 11 mbd today (about 55% of total U.S. consumption) but 20 mbd in 2025 (69% of consumption).

More significant than this growing reliance on foreign oil, an increasing share of that oil will come from hostile, war-torn countries in the developing world, not from friendly, stable countries like Canada or Norway. This is the case because the older industrialized countries have already consumed a large share of their oil inheritance, while many producers in the developing world still possess vast reserves of untapped petroleum. As a result, we are seeing a historic shift in the center of gravity for world oil production — from the industrialized countries of the global North to the developing nations of the global South, which are often politically unstable, torn by ethnic and religious conflicts, home to extremist organizations, or some combination of all three.

Give the Marines and Army the Green Combat Award

Forget about tallying all those direct monetary costs of running our military on steroids – those numbers are off the charts. Yet in this day and age, we have serious discussions about Earth Day celebrations centered around how generals and admirals are going to turn the US military into a green fighting machine. We have lost the intellectual contest when we get stories like this in alternative media – Yes magazine via Alternet:

One hell of a bizarre headline – “Why The US Military Is Leading The Charge For Green Energy Our generals see our dependence on oil as a huge vulnerability, and climate change as a ‘threat multiplier.’ Can their leadership make a difference?”

Absolutely delusional and so greenie weenie, trying to calculate the green rating of the US military machine. Again, sometimes the obvious and profound can come from more mainstream media, like the Atlantic – “Unaccountable Killing Machines: The True Cost of U.S. Drones”

And then, leave it to Stan Cox, ex-military, to clearly parse exactly what this idea of “reducing dependence on fossil fuels” means:

Two days before Earth Day 2010, the Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate released a report on efforts by the U.S. military to “reduce dependence on fossil fuels and cut global warming pollution by enhancing energy efficiency and harnessing clean energy technologies.”

The Navy, in one of Pew’s examples, “is developing a ‘green’ carrier strike group to run completely on alternative fuels by 2016.” And they scheduled an Earth Day demonstration of “the ‘Green Hornet’, an F/A-18 Super Hornet powered by a 50/50 biofuel blend.”

That as much as anything reveals the shallowness of America’s reaction to the many environmental crises we face. Were our society actually interested in becoming more ecologically sound, we could make immediate, long strides simply by eliminating those activities that are most dangerous and destructive in their own right, starting with the bloated war-making apparatus. To attempt instead a “greening” of the U.S. military-industrial complex will only boost its killing power.

The technology of destruction can’t be tamed by laying improved environmental technology over the top of it. An instructive if unlikely example is provided by that most routine of technologies, air-conditioning, and the role it plays in military conquest.

It’s this constant eco-pornography and sustainability lite coming from this generation and the previous one, and the one I am from, Baby Boomer-lite. All we are collectively after, generally speaking, is one tweak after the next of our lifestyles – reusable and recycled, 50 percent post consumer content or whatever. But it’s still about being plugged in and turned on.

The Wired City, The Wired Mind

Here’s what futurist Glen Hiemstra has to say about the cities of the future:

It’s quite clear in 20 to 30 years from now that everything will be much more connected. I’m still frustrated I can’t walk out onto the street and ask my phone, “Where’s the bus?” and then within a second it tells me every public transit vehicle around and how to catch it.

The online and offline worlds will fully merge so the concept of going offline will have left our conscious and language, unless you specifically unplug from the network by going into the wilderness. You’ll always be online. That’s just a generational change of accepting it as reality. The younger generation doesn’t perceive the difference all that much already.

The new human, online 24/7, every cell in the body flickering with silicon charge? Then, the very idea that Millennials are driving the future migration to the cities is also another prescient piece of news reporting worthy of further analysis:

Just after the close of World War II, the last Great Migration in the United States — the move from the city to the new suburbs — began to emerge, fueled by new roads, low congestion, and modest energy costs. It was a new beginning, a chance to shake off the past, and it came complete with the promise of more privacy, more safety, and easier financing.

Not surprisingly, Americans bought in.

After that, it didn’t take long for the preferred retailers to do likewise, abandoning the city and following their customers to the suburbs. The suburban single family home on a large lot became synonymous with the American Dream.

After 60 years, many commentators have announced that the American Dream is poised to make its next great shift — this time from the suburbs to the urban core of our cities. Indeed, at the recent New Partners for Smart Growth Conference in San Diego, Chris Nelson, Joe Molinaro and Shyam Kannan made it clear that a radical shift in preferences is on the horizon.

They’re not alone in that position.

Just last week, Robert Shiller of the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index made the dramatic statement that, with our growing shift to renting and city living, suburban home prices may never rebound in our lifetime.

Why such pronounced findings? According to researchers, it lies in the preferences of our largest generation since the Boomers, the under 30 Generation Y.

But, why?

What’s been left out is a country divided, aging, and young people still handcuffed by the corporate monsters that control lives and propel the imperial wars of consumption.

Education as Entertainment … or Massively On-line Open Courses (MOOCs), Teachers Be Damned!

Thus far, the country has reverted to entertaining ourselves into oblivion. Another person telling me about Katie Holmes or Lance Armstrong or some woman in China forced to abort at seven months gestation will get clocked.

What in hell have we been doing as educators and journalists, two roles I’ve had since before 1979? Why is it my one-hour radio interviews are so 1990s? Why is it books are so passe? Why is it so progressive to know all the characters’ names in Sons of Anarchy, Mad Men, and Modern Family, or why Curb Your Enthusiasm is so pointedly pointless therefore pointedly profound?

This is how it comes at us, the endless bombardment of meaningless nonsense and consumer-directed drivel. It takes a few sorties over my hood by Colorado Springs Academy grads in our fancy killing machines to unleash a column that started out as a commentary on education, on what James Howard Kunslter pointed out in his short column, “Strange Jubilee,” published here at DV.

It’s this hypnotic thing in Seattle and other places where downtowns and urban density are the attractions and operating principles created largely from the ennui of the suburbs and lack of creative class folk in the ‘burbs. Mass consumption, though, at the Wal-mart and Home Depot, has been replaced though other forms of consumption. Lifestylism in the cities costs money, and the jobs and the debts from higher education might not be fueling these creative classes of knowledge workers brought out in these short, punchy pieces that leave so much behind.

Well, that’s another post, but to reiterate the meaning here, it all comes down to education, and relentless truth, relentless critical thinking, relentless putting the pieces together and connecting the dots. It’s so much bigger than just finding a strip of land and worthy skills to live nearly off or completely off the grid from as subsistence farmers. How to husband chickens and goats. How to cure meat. How to dig a well and tend a garden. How to fix machines and mend broken bones.

There are just too many of us to expect seven billion little kingdoms, serfdoms, fiefdoms of smart, strong, hard-working young people who will know how to build fences and live off the land, away from a reliable grid or completely unhooked to technology and electricity.

What are our roles as educators and journalists, then? Teaching students that they can have a role in revolutionary change? How easy is it to even slice one-tenth of the corporate cancer from our collective selves? One-quarter? Let alone one hundred percent.

That’s where we are at now, complete subservience to the corporate will, vulnerable to the hucksterism, flailed by amnesia and those shifting baselines – no one will remember the day when people lived without smart phones or completely on-line schools.

Can we with all our force just bombard youth with the idea that “throwing the bums out” is a nostalgic moment in American collective mythological conscience, because, in reality – not having to delve too deeply in The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn – that option seemed sketchy from the start of this country’s inglorious Manifest Destiny bulldozing?

Letting them know that it is more than just a simple choice of picking the Twiddly-Dee or the Twiddly-Dum in our political juggernaut. What is it that has replaced thinking and critical dialogue for money and the fool’s game of throwing the dice at the popular media pundits while self-manipulation and agnotology delude the modern thinker into believing her or she has some prime choice of self-imposed agency?

What’s the role of education in this flummoxed collective consumption society whose ruling class seems to resemble tin-horn merchandisers of smutty thinking and slackened morality?

Do we as educators and proponents of both a publicly-controlled, publicly-centered PK-12 educational frame and a dynamic and robust state-funded system of public four-year universities and two-year colleges continue to support a system of castes and multiple-underclass frames for corporations, government and elite to plunder?

Are we supposed to allow government paralysis and the death of a populist movement define our class of instructors, this new faculty majority of precarious and contingent workers called adjuncts? Do we have a place in this struggle to push America toward its final spasms of privatizing seizures?

Education as Revolt and Tearing Down the Walls – Recycling with War as Background Noise

It’s telling that just a few weeks ago in the Emerald City Chris Hedges spoke to a rarefied crowd, at Town Hall, live author events sponsored by none other than Boeing. He made it clear that he’d be out there protesting Boeing like he did Goldman Sachs. If you have chance, listen to his essay near the end, after the Q & A session. It reiterates what I have found after years of protesting, including the most recent protests – inside job as a shareholder – of Amazon.com. The same sort of ruthlessly disconnected treatment from low and mid-level workers looking at us as if we are aliens – snapping photos of us while eating their arugula and sipping Kombucha tea:

“Chris Hedges’ Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt June 29th 2012 Seattle”

He presses the points coming from his books, The Death of the Liberal Class, and from his new one, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt illustrated by Joe Sacco.

His words recently published in the Boston Review are tied to how corrupted our society has become in honoring war and the profiteers of death:

We condition the poor and the working class to go to war. We promise them honor, status, glory, and adventure. We promise boys they will become men. We hold these promises up against the dead-end jobs of small-town life, the financial dislocations, credit card debt, bad marriages, lack of health insurance, and dread of unemployment. The military is the call of the Sirens, the enticement that has for generations seduced young Americans working in fast food restaurants or behind the counters of Walmarts to fight and die for war profiteers and elites.

The poor embrace the military because every other cul-de-sac in their lives breaks their spirit and their dignity. Pick up Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front or James Jones’s From Here to Eternity. Read Henry IV. Turn to the Iliad. The allure of combat is a trap, a ploy, an old, dirty game of deception in which the powerful, who do not go to war, promise a mirage to those who do.

I saw this in my own family. At the age of ten I was given a scholarship to a top New England boarding school. I spent my adolescence in the schizophrenic embrace of the wealthy, on the playing fields and in the dorms and classrooms that condition boys and girls for privilege, and came back to my working-class relations in the depressed former mill towns in Maine. I traveled between two universes: one where everyone got chance after chance after chance, where connections and money and influence almost guaranteed that you would not fail; the other where no one ever got a second try. I learned at an early age that when the poor fall no one picks them up, while the rich stumble and trip their way to the top.

Those I knew in prep school did not seek out the military and were not sought by it. But in the impoverished enclaves of central Maine, where I had relatives living in trailers, nearly everyone was a veteran. My grandfather. My uncles. My cousins. My second cousins. They were all in the military. Some of them—including my Uncle Morris, who fought in the infantry in the South Pacific during World War II—were destroyed by the war. Uncle Morris drank himself to death in his trailer. He sold the hunting rifle my grandfather had given to me to buy booze.

He was not alone. After World War II, thousands of families struggled with broken men who, because they could never read the approved lines from the patriotic script, had been discarded. They were not trotted out for red-white-and-blue love fests on the Fourth of July or Veterans Day.

My first intent was to carry on with James Howard Kunstler’s basic premise that our Millennials holding certificates of higher education to nowhere … post-secondary degrees for the price of two arms and two legs should just march into the hydrogen sulfide air of the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions and put to fire those notes that are now collectively amassed to the tune of more than a trillion dollars.

His blog was titled, “Strange Jubilee,” and in it, reprinted here at DV, he goes to the themes Jim has been developing in his decades-long “long emergency sepia” but this time advancing the idea that the education system screwed these youth several ways – prostrating the American family with loans, and creating an American student whose hundreds of billions in outstanding loan debts have been for naught, useless degrees and majors leading them into a world of perpetual collapse and failure.

But to tell the truth, I started off this column first looking at the Center for Biological Diversity web site, perusing those pages where one flashpoint moves to the next flashpoint in the realm of environmental destruction. Then, I was beginning to think about the smallest seahorse in America, the dwarf seahorse, which is part of a campaign by the Center.

How it faces big time problems: like water quality degradation in the Gulf of Mexico, pollution from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and cleanup and, of utmost importance, the loss of their seagrass habitat.

As a metaphor, dwarf seahorses are like many of our fellow species who we call First Nations or Indigenous peoples. They are habitat specialists. When seagrasses disappear, the seahorses vanish with them. For the past six decades, more than 50 percent of Florida’s seagrasses have been destroyed. These one-inch-long fish are not the only wildlife that depends on seagrass to survive, but they are the interestingly emblematic of many animals species – they form monogamous pair bonds. Every morning they end up congregating to do this greeting dance. Seahorse females place eggs inside the males’ pouches. The males then give birth to miniatures of adults.

Enter humans – boat propellers, shrimp trawlers and ocean acidification are all harming the seagrass ecosystem these animals need to survive.

Then, thoughts of who the hell would give a squat about those sea horses without the superstructure of education and all those soft skills degrees and “unnecessary fields” prompting youth to flare out into a world disconnected to the corporate stiff arm salute to all things empirical and tied to free (sic) markets and unbridled corporatism.

The plight of the dwarf seahorse, like the plight of us, humanity, is dependent upon education – feeling, thinking, emotional, creative people. Life moving forward will not be cemented to those debts to be repaid (and they shouldn’t be repaid – sort of a truth and reconciliation thing for those barbarous and felonious financial institutions).

Educators have to stick it to the administrative class, stick it to the technology fiends, stick it to the virtual reality dealers. We have to dance and sing and break bread in the same space, on the same dimension, in the same web of love.

I’ll defer to Hedges again to end this lumbering piece:

Human imagination, the capacity to have vision, to build a life of meaning rather than utilitarianism, is as delicate as a flower. And if it is crushed, if a Shakespeare or a Sophocles is no longer deemed useful in the empirical world of business, careerism and corporate power, if universities think a Milton Friedman or a Friedrich Hayek is more important to their students than a Virginia Woolf or an Anton Chekhov, then we become barbarians. We assure our own extinction. Students who are denied the wisdom of the great oracles of human civilization—visionaries who urge us not to worship ourselves, not to kneel before the base human emotion of greed—cannot be educated. They cannot think.

It’s better to die upon your feet than to live upon your knees!

– Emiliano Zapata¹

100,000 Years of Mystical Magical Realism Inside the jade-eye of the Jaguar

Election Fraud. Narco-terrorism. Neo-liberal Shock Doctrine. Disaster Capitalism. The one of the One Percent Running Roughshod on the Entire Culture. The Brazilianization of La Gente. Total Infrastructure Chaos. Marginalization of Academics. The Highest Bidder Wins the Resource Lottery. Thuggery. Peasant Culture Imploded by High Fructose Invaders, the Plastic People of the West — and endless spewing internal combustion hell.

One massive gusano sucking the languages to their knees, to the bottom line of business, selling souls and lifting products. One giant skeleton rendezvous around the bonfire of the One Percent’s vanity, as cultures flare into the putrid air of nationalized-privatized PEMEX spewing gasses from Tampico all the way to the Gulf of Mexico’s stilled waters of BP’s Corexit bleed. The alchemy of Chac mool catching the tears of slaves, the entire carnival of peasant life mixed with the ripped up DNA of invasions and rapes, that history, that Mexican hope for a destiny of peoples who listen to iguanas and feel stars in their bones, those folk who had entire planned and sophisticated cities of 2100 years before the present, when Homo economicus of the East were flailing around pitch and peat fires mortified by eclipses, they are the fodder of the neo-liberal syphilitics.

Que capacidad! Viva Mejico.

Asked about his book on Mexico City, John Ross told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, the war and peace report, this about the book’s title:

El Monstruo, because Mexico City is a monster of a city, largest megalopolis in the Americas and possibly in the world, 23 million people living on a piece of land that does not really support them, where there is no water, where there is very bad air — no air — and their struggle to stay on this land, I think, has been epic. And the city is a monstruo in itself.

The Aztecs actually characterized the beginnings of El Monstruo, it was called Tenochtitlan, as an animal itself, and as the population grew, it acquired this name, El Monstruo. But it’s our querido monstruo, it’s our beloved monstruo, and this new book is really a defensive place of a totally indefensible place.

He lived and died (Jan. 17, 2011) with the daggers of Mexico deep in his spleen. Each and every child ripped up from the soil. 20,000 tons of garbage hauled or tossed each day in the big city, Mexico DF. Those ancient corn lines, the very gods and corpuscles of the people of Mexico, thrown into the conveyor belt of engineered and split DNA. Monsanto’s thugs scrap Mexico’s soil like the mouths of rapists tested for their crimes.

The soiled image of mother, La Malinche giving the Conquistadors the very key to the people’s identity. The very whoring of a nation by Cortes and his steel, guns, cross, germs and syphilitic genes. La Llorona and her endless tears as she drowns her children – Mexico – for the chance at death riches of the West, the invaders, us. She haunts waters, rivers, scares the crap out of children, as her wails are heard over the rumble and drone of endless bulldozers, cement mixers and speeding taxis.

Raped by Catholicism. Brutalized by ricos. Sodomized by the West. Yanqui invasions. The spasms and fornications of French, Spaniards, et al and their empirical blindness leading them to their albino gods.

Mexico. The Memory of Fire. The twisted root, the flawed giant clam, the shark tooth stuck in the side of Cabeza de Vaca.

One guy years ago – at the edge of a reef, on the Quintana Roo coast, right before we toked a wet joint, right before we headed into star-spinning blue endlessness, with the pact of holding in that big, long toke and exhaling at a hundred and twenty feet, before the deeper dive at the 230 foot level, at the spleen edge, the drop off of 1,500 feet, or more, he told me that Mexico – his country, the place where he lifted brass orgasm from his fugal horn and traveled coastlines, into Costa Rica and Panama with salsa bands, where he made extra money in Acapulco as a diver for tourists and then as gigolo for the cruise ship wanderers — he told me the stories of myth and history and blended political science and revolution and pathetic despotism and machismo; told me that the apparent miasma of eternal and internal pain I was writing about as a journalist a la dive bum, all of that undulating psychological mysticism I was internalizing, all the shit and crap and suffering of his people, of the mountain tribes laid to waste by corrupt cops, federalies, soldiers, governors, presidents, all those indigenous ones living on cactus roots and peyote and hidden green waters of the xenote who were rounded up and slaughtered, he said, for so many blessed years, the pacification and violence, all of that, the distraction from what really needed to be done to expunge the white rats of empire, well, the numbing and pacification and rioting come from all the cheap booze managed by the government and retailers, the endless fiestas-festivals-carnivals lighting up zocalos and village stockyards, and Catholic self- flagellation and prostration and penetration by bishops who flick the pendulum of torture to the meek and poor and the smart and strong. The state, controlled by the group of 300 or 3000, controlled by the G-8, held hostage by the world of enterprise and the Chicago Boys and those Chinese timber and soy lovers, all those entrances into the country of Mexico, from Baja to Jalapa, from Creel to Palenque, they are waiting with their gas guns and chain saws and earth eaters.

The fucking oil eaters leaving the detritus of our vaunted little children and our children’s children’s lifestyles of the lascivious. It is me, it is you, it is Yanqui.

Tu madre … chinga tu madre … madre mia.

Teacher-Teacher, Just Go Away

Consumer culture, a culture of disconnectedness, trains us to believe things just happen. Incapable of recalling its origins, the present paints the future as a repetition of itself; tomorrow is just another name for today. The unequal organization of the world, which beggars the human condition, is part of eternity, and injustice is a fact of life we have no choice but to accept.
– Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World Eduardo Galeano

I wrangled a trip to Mexico, DF, August 6-13 to not just attend the Tenth bi-annual conference of Committee on Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), but to begin the push to organize adjunct/part-time/precarious workers. Teachers in community and technical colleges. In four-year small liberal arts colleges – non-profits. In state universities and in Research One institutions.

Get this – UNAM, National Autonomous University of Mexico – is part of the neo-liberal plan of eviscerating education at the highest level. More than 70 percent of faculty are precarious, at-will, perennially part-time, making one-fourth the income, or less, than full time faculty.

This country is looking at 50 percent of all faculty as part-time with an added 20 more percent as precarious in their full-time teaching loads with no vetting, no tenure, no guarantee of work beyond a year or two contract.

That’s 1.5 million faculty in the USA lumped together in this treadmill world of administrators and bean counters lifting education from schools and replacing it with servicing – customers for the giant Bezos-Boeing-Bill Gates drone factory of consumption and endless obsolescence.

It gets worse – academics is top heavy with administrators and useless PR folk, many, many deans and VPs and department heads of endless internal research organs. Sports, total chaos in terms of the mission of education when it comes to the top heavy brass and a few super-star highly paid faculty.

Put into the mix those for profits like the Art Institutes of the world or University of Phoenix and another 28 big ones that have been bilking federal education loan programs, the GI-bill system, and the students they lure into crappy classes, dead-end academic advising – worthless credits — and a numbing experience of no contact with human beings in the three-dimensional world.

We are all being primed for the giant plug-in – collective servicing the digital world, every waking and breathing day planned out by algorithms and out of orbit planets of silicon.

Oh yeah, these for-profits hire hucksters whose job is to lure students into the viper pit of student loan hell. Even Iowa senator Tom Harkin in his most recent two-year investigation of these shysters had some blood curdling verbiage in assessing the damage these for profits – run by bloodless hedge fund and investment schemers – have done to families, communities, the very fabric of our culture.

Welcome the traitors of the nation – money-grubbing power trippers who have sold common collective power of the people to the One Percenters and their flabby thinking who have over the past decades transformed politics into a knife-throwing contest of the sleaziest kind.

Welcome their clones in Mexico, who feed off their billions and send their slicked up children to Ivy League master training centers on the very system that will eat their people inside out, like a cancer regurgitated from the shadow of Cortes and his lunatic bastard children.

Hell, the time is now to pry open the termite hives of adjunct faculty and teachers and coaches and librarians and counselors and the entire range of part-time academic workers in those places one might never associate with part-time labor: language schools, driver’s education, adult education, community education, the performance arts, heck, even part-time is the new green for administrators and boards when it comes to their own ilk. Part-time college presidents, AKA, Human Resources directors as guns for hire.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Cuidado. This is a multi-part exploration, bigger than my unexplored brain can tackle in one mere session, so stay tuned for part two here at DV.

Again, Galeano:

There are successful countries and people and there are failed countries and people because the efficient deserve rewards and the useless deserve punishment. To turn infamies into feats, the memory of the North is divorced from the memory of the South, accumulation is detached from despoliation, opulence has nothing to do with plunder. Broken memory leads us to believe that wealth is innocent of poverty. Wealth and poverty emerge from eternity and toward eternity they march, and that’s the way things are because God or custom prefers it that way.

Fecund Ferocity of Children of the Sun, Corn, Tomato, Chile, Cocoa

“There are two ways to lose you sanity in Juarez. One is to believe the violence results from a cartel war. The other is to claim to understand what is behind each murder.”
― Charles Bowden, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields

I’m building a bridge to that next part of this story, where the collusion of cartel after cartel – not just the colluders of cocaine and meth and heroin and their deliveries and peddlers, not just the cartels of white-brown-black-yellow sex slavers, not just the middle men of wanton environmental rape cartels , not just the three-piece suited white Mexicans of oil-gas-mineable rock cartel, not just the thugs in uniforms and guns tequila and mescal hardened cartels, not just the Wall Street insider job boys who are their own cartel within a cartel, not just the post-industrial military complex cartels or the Karl Roves and slack mouthed tea bagger cartels — is up against the forces of light, some dramatic last stand, people, artists, revolutionaries, teachers, archeologists, people who want earth to never bleeds from murder-rape-immolation.

This is a story about to begin around what is Mexico, what is light, and what is the mud of their passage away from solidarity with squid-armadillo-quetzal-poinsettia-vanilla-flattened corn-habanera-the shrieking parrots. Education. The reason why we are learning from Mexico, Puerto Rico-Germany – we all are the precariate – the new word for precarious worker and proletariat. Marginalized. Flexible. At the will-whim-wishes of the one percent. Contingent-broken-forever slave waging for more of that consumer crack.

For now, a poem. Mine:

Solstice at Tulum

Roberto swore by the postcard
signed by Sgt. Dan Crowe, USMC
patina light from Havana’s Avenida de Maceo
old Dodges and Chevys in the background

“Buddy, we made it all the way to Cuba. One heck of a drift
dive. Something like five days. Caught incredible currents. Tony and Juan
they have it all covered. Snuck this out with some missionary. Mormon.
No bad blood I hope, Roberto. You showed us the reefs with style. Man, black coral
like my aunt Sylvia’s Christmas grand fir. Never will forget that barracuda school

you turned us onto. Even Cuba doesn’t have schools that big. The sponge, whatever you called it, it’s an 8×10 above this paint-peeling hotel room. Man, the women, here, the life, the food, everything here, even with Fidel, it’s one fucking amazing dream. The bullshit back home, the bullshit in schools. They taught us wrong, my amigo friend. No hard feelings, man. We shall return to Cozumel one day. We didn’t die like those Japanese anime freaks. If there’s anything we can do to take the heat off, well, you know the routine, senor divemaster – we are incognito.”

endless night dives, parrot fish like pit bulls, lobsters blazed
by our lights, and Roberto, at midnight, or closer to the next
tourista trip to the reef, he went on and on about those
Marines, floating deeper and deeper. An impossible 280 feet
gone, breathless, Roberto flecked with the twinge of nitrogen
as he banged and banged knife to tank … until the three vanished in
the ink of the reef drop.

I met him a second time, and he believed me for what I was
nothing linked to Norte Americanos, broken but not dispirited
by my birth nation
called me socialista — the butterflies coming from his mouth
his Russian pretty impressive, the military tattoos
on his broad shoulders … lifting and packing
each depressurized chamber where he put sheaves
onto three kilo tubes, stuffed into the scuba tanks
held down with a paraffin barrier

tanks destined for the cruise boats, destined for LA, San Francisco, Miami, Seattle
his little secret with the island’s cartel
his little dive shop and trips to Russia and Italy
his poetry books and the photos of Roberto and his Refrescos salsa band
on this and that cruise ship
the bottles of fake air filled with coke
his only lesson in materialism
supply and demand

how did those three guys make it from the reef lid of Cozumel
all the way to Cuba, Americans, ex-Marines, no less
some hoax, some funny guys freaking Roberto out
fake postcard, something just to make him more paranoid
of the drift dives, the night dives
people spending money and their souls for a taste of the Caribbean

the hammerheads and dorado, all those reef fish
like a water heaven, Roberto, reading Marx and Kant
the very essence of his mixed blood – Spanish-French-Oaxaca-Zapotec
what the ladies from Houston and Denver lust for
in their five-day sojourns away from air conditioned
Subaru’s and fifty cubic inches of freezer space
some break from their money bags husbands
the football loving Hooters boys
some wild fling with a partial Indian

Roberto, who knows all the reefs, who even has had
actresses and singers in the Biblical way
the Mexico of his dreams so far from the neon Senor Frogs
and bottomless Margaritas
flaming shrimp served to flaming blondes and their
pectoral heavy beaus

old ladies, Mayans, just out of the glare of the parties
waiting for Discos to close so the putrid toilets get cleaned
men carrying wet cement on backs, waiting to fill the holes
punched and kicked by the Yanquis during drinking contests
all those people listening to the reverb of Yanquis
all those “where did all the Mayans go” people
cruise ship folk think are for hire, or for photo shoots

they watch ships, the nuclear light show of a Princess line
triple-decker – all those thousands upon thousands of Yanquis
floating by, waiting for the next shopping port, the next bottomless
Daiquiri, they too know when lunar light pulls the sperm
from millions of squid, or where the shoals of sardines
go after a storm

the sacrifice is still, like a kid, a shivering white goat
these monsters with credit cards, their suburban souls
trapped in endless confusion and caloric ecstasy
they wait too, for some heaven to come crashing on them
each day like a renewal, while the memory of Mayans, all
tribes, is passed on, deeper into the channels of time

If the thing really happened that way, three ex-Marines
back from Honduras, back from Desert Shield, back from
the coca fields of Columbia, taking a vacation in Mexico,
ending up with Roberto of all people, even if they made it to Cuba
something Roberto will always believe, the rest of us
just consider impossible – physically and oceanographically –
the story gets told and retold, with each disembarking and embarking
from and into all-you-can-eat buffet, the sweat, all the ham fisted hugs
caught in the eye of Mayan storm, one more story of magic realism
they bring back to their lawn parties, another brown man
trapped by the weight of mysticism and the birth of Yanqui

imperialism

1. As quoted in Liberation Theologies in North America and Europe‎ (1979) by Gerald H. Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky, p. 281.

It’s the “lifestyle thing,” stupid

Bend, Oregon, is right smack in the middle of several geologic, climatic and cultural zones. Sage, yucca, and the Deschutes River and the Two Sisters Peaks.

There’s an extinct volcano in the middle of town.

A mountain biker’s heaven. Kayaker’s nirvana. Snow lover’s orgasmic stomping grounds. Lots of retirees, lots of outdoor enthusiasts. Expensive clothing and rec stores. Many breweries. Restaurants galore.

I spent time there helping the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) rejigger the union vote the more than 600 employees — $9.50 an hour food service workers, housekeepers, CNAs, lab technicians, and others considered non-nurses – had accomplished March 2011.

It was a vote of 206 to 200 to unionize. A vote that meant workers would be at the bargaining table, working to have step raises, to have a say in staffing decisions, to make sure health care benefits were not degraded.

You see, some employees sought out SEIU Local 49 in Portland, Oregon, because they had seen nurses go through the same battle with the same management blokes a year before. The nurses organized, voted, and they too had management drag its feet and harass workers. In that process, nurses at St. Charles Hospital and the one in Prineville up the road coalesced, picketed and came together with 80 percent voting yes to a union.

Unionizing meant finding leaders, using media to air issues, and enlisting the support of the public.

At the table, the nurses got an 8.9 percent raise. They also got safety in numbers. They also created an environment of collectivism across the state, regularizing the wages and benefits and workplace conditions nurses elsewhere in Oregon already had bargained for through their Oregon Nurses Association.

Ya Can’t Do What You Never Learned

This sort of workforce empowerment is a no-brainer, but in a time of attacks on collective will and coalesced people power gleefully reported on mainstream media, we live in a culture of precarious work. It’s a time when students have no idea how the eight-hour work week came about, or what a living wage is, or why folk like Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate, or Ralph Nader, have called for an across-the-board rise in the federal minimum wage to $10 an hour, or more, $15.

This is a time when teachers can’t teach about labor history, about another narrative not bred from hocus-pocus religious cultism, or the bombast of elite North America fiction, or the exceptionalist mentality of an Empire on the wane. This is a time when up is down, double speak rules, and common sense is possibly dredged from the American collective consciousness through diets high in fructose, deep fried tacos-potato skins-Twinkies-turkey drumsticks, iPads, screen viewing, and flabby journalism and self-loathing democrats.

While teachers and janitors fight for students and wages, and while those in Colorado are fighting Romney’s Bain Capital parasite free marketing style; while a few get bashed for blockading Keystone pipeline construction, the bottom line is we as a country are scared of our own shadows.

In Bend, a place that was the life, blood, consciousness of native peoples – now there’s a Warm Springs reservation with a casino attacked to it – the great American delusion of Ron Paul heroism and Bush-Cheney intellectualism is constantly played out by buggers who think they are the epitome of rugged individualism and self-reliance. They just can’t get it how much more rural and isolated communities depend on the federal and state dole than the more congested urban centers.. With Romney-Ryan signs up throughout the rural community as testaments to a flabby white man/woman’s racism, the community’s largest employer – St. Charles Medical Center – “won” the fight to recertify the union for frontline low skill and skilled workers.

That win is everyone else’s loss – those that are the 70 percent of the 99 Percent.

Here’s a look at Bend’s top employers:

1. St. Charles Medical Center, 2,337 employees
2. Bright Wood Corporation, 1,466 employees
3. Les Schwab Tire Center, 1,142 employees
4. Sunriver Resort, 870 seasonal employees
5. Mt. Bachelor, Inc., 750 seasonal employees

The New Normal — $9 an hour at three jobs a week

I talked with workers who said they were just glad to have a $9.50 an hour job. Others said that management had a right to want to make money: “America’s about making profits, and if they got to the top, then they deserve the top wages.” The irony is St. Charles is the most profitable non-profit hospital in Oregon. Administrators have been padding their ranks and raking in 15 percent pay raises while the employees have seen wages stagnate for five years.

Management is organized, preened, educated, tutored in communications and messaging, and they have power and money to denigrate unions and to confuse scared Americans who try to prop up a family in over-mortgage- laden homes, trailers in the middle of sagebrush, or in rundown apartments.

While St. Charles’ history goes back to 1922, tied to the Sisters of St. Joseph of Tipton, Indiana, the Catholics let the power go to a management team – non-profit, right !@# — who came in like university administrators ready to attack the vanguard – nurses, day-to-day workers – while putting style over substance, shunting patient care to the backburner in favor of overworking nurses and CNAs and disincentivizing patient care by killing raises and flagging steady schedules.

St. Charles represents the new normal – high paid administrators, constant hacking at the main stem of a business or operation – The Workers. Administrators could give squat about what the nurses have to say, or what dieticians have to say, or what CNAs across the state are saying.

The doctors grumble under their breaths but enjoy the lifestyle of skiing, river- running, mountain biking and foodie lifestyles.

The unionizing in a nutshell involves workers seeking redress, seeking a union like SEIU which represents janitors, hotel workers, day care providers, home health care professionals, lab techs at college, and now higher education part-time workers.

Those first few brave St. Charles workers came to SEIU, and then the hard work began. Involving secret organizing and finding the key leaders and the ready activists, the project is a simple one – get people organized to get a vote ready for the entire bargaining group.

In the meantime, the boss fight might include firing folk, threatening folk and putting propagandists on the payroll in order to confuse, lie and flag the movement to bring workers together, with the help of a union’s organizing machinery.

The management pukes spent a year dragging their feet and threatening folk instead of bargaining at the table on what the main stem of the hospital knew were key issues in patient care improvement and workplace solidarity. Wages and benefits were part of the bargaining, but like true capitalists, the administration’s take was: ”We know what’s best for us, the highly paid, for what we consider the best for patients, and, what we are willing to dole out to workers, the obviously weak link in our plan to capitulate with bankers and maximize our profits.”

The Takers and the Givers: Another Ishmael Narrative

This is an old story in unionizing history – workers come together and the bosses fight them. Here, at St. Charles, the management hired a law firm from California known as a union-busting outfit, and, then, just a month ago, another one, second to none, from NYC, Burke and Company. These high paid legal thugs and merchandizing creeps are experts in eviscerating righteous workers and valid collectivism. The stoop low to do almost anything to stop a yes vote for the union.

They, like the St. Charles Admin folk, are the takers of the world.

Doctors who have jelly for spine and the misinformed misanthropes who wave the anti-union red, white, blue flag of corporate fascism, well, they too play into the hands of fumbling small-town newspaper publishers and rotting-at-the-core wise use-spouting Chambers of Commerce.

What’s good for business in places like Bend, Oregon, are wages that hit $9.50 an hour, overworked hospital folk, and a workforce that continually sees the wage gap grow, hoofing it in a town set up for the 1 percent and their sycophants of the 19 percent.

Young CNAs I talked with work bizarre hours while juggling nursing school. Bend is just another lifestyle place where beer tasting contests and ski fashion shows and a new kayak water park will draw more out of towners and newly transplanted folk who got it rich or near rich on selling off parents’ homes and coming to town with bags of money.

America’s new main street is a cotton candy world of boutiques, exotic foods, $500 vases, $10,000 alpaca rugs, and endless titanium junk to enable the new American recreationist plenty of tools to conquer fresh snow, class five rapids and endless desert single track paths.

The people healing these folk, wiping their butts when they are waylaid in the hospital, those x-raying broken hips, those prepping for liposuction and Botox reconfiguring, all those people slopping food for docs and pushing mops for the administration’s new ash hardwood, all of those and more vote for the candidates and CEOs who never have or will have their best interests in mind.

Now, the union is busted, and, ironically, the health care plan will be junked, forcing employees to go through a mandatory wellness plan that will include fat pinchers to bust the overweight and a smokilizer to catch the Marlboro aficionados. For them, insurance rates quadruple.

For the compliant, who stay thin and forego cigs and pot and booze, they will find premiums going up, family members’ coverage reduced, work schedules tweaked, Draconian cuts, permanent part-time categorization and a climate of fear.

One Percent and their 19 Percent Sycophants

Bend, Oregon, grows weekly, the county expands, breweries thrive, organic sandwich shops pop up, and used ski gear galore.

While charcuteries open up, pawn shops pop up. More and more Americans living on two sides of the divide – that One Percent Plus 19 percent More, up against the realities of the 70 percent working three jobs.

St. Charles is glad to beat back the union. Happy that CNAs flip burgers, albeit grass-fed buffalo patties, to make ends meet.
The CEOs and Chamber of Commerce folk wine and dine and talk about kids at Smith College, weekend trips to Maui, home improvement projects on their 7,500 square foot bungalows.

This is the face of agnotology – look it up. See how it plays out in America, the land of PT Barnum, hucksters, tinsel, plastic surgery and endless Black Fridays.

Here’s Robert Procto, Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor, on Agnotology:

When it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases.
Proctor has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is “the study of culturally constructed ignorance.

As Proctor argues, when society doesn’t know something, it’s often because special interests work hard to create confusion. Anti-Obama groups likely spent millions insisting he’s a Muslim; church groups have shelled out even more pushing creationism. The oil and auto industries carefully seed doubt about the causes of global warming. And when the dust settles, society knows less than it did before.

“People always assume that if someone doesn’t know something, it’s because they haven’t paid attention or haven’t yet figured it out,” Proctor says. “But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what’s true and what’s not.”

So, leaving Bend, Oregon, last month, I saw the writing on the wall. It was obvious to me that these poor folk I talked to at their apartment and trailer doors, trying to see the union solution to stagnation, poor work conditions, rotten guidance, arbitrary discipline, and rotten benefits, many have been the products of culturally constructed ignorance.

And this fawning over people who drive BMWs, live in lavish luxury, who wine and dine the famous, who stand tall in Brooks Brothers suits and Bill Blass dresses. If they quack like a One Percent Quack, Oink like a Rich Pig, Bark like a Beast of the Vanities, then, hell, they must deserve everything they worked so hard to earn.

Where’s mine?

Not in the union brand. Not through collective action. Not through a group of workers coming together and believing that sharing power with management will lift their lives collectively.

In Bend, just like in Madison,” shared power” is a phrase akin to “”pinko fag to the One Percent.

In so many ways, what is happening to our communities throughout the United States – from transnational energy companies writing the rules for hydro-fracturing in Podunk towns; to schools closing down or clamoring like ants nests with way too many kids and too few teachers; to park hours being cut or entire monkey gym sets being bulldozed; to bus service reductions and free ride zones ending; to the gutting of community policing programs while SWAT teams get the buzz-high of military grade drone warfare junk; to buildings staying empty and vacant for years while families are tossed out of subsidized housing for the next asphalt jungle; to prison GED programs for young women getting cut while zero tolerance programs expel girls for fist-fighting; to police departments Gestapo-ing communities of color, Occupy movements, and unionists; to film departments and ethnic studies programs being axed by the smirking chimps of both political carnie shows – all these individual blasphemies of the smallest degree add up to massive systems thinking melt-down.

The end result is a privatizing tsunami where every blinking, drooling, hobbling, stumbling, heaving, ticking moment of human creativity, depravity, gesticulation, micturation, socialization, defecation, ingestion is put on a ledger and amortized by the charlatans of “free” capital. We are the weather makers and plastic eaters who are a tribe of debtors.

Leftists and true socialists have tried to construct and announce those connections to a web of life unraveling, or that web of economic strangulation and web of cultural ecosystem collapse by showing how the acting local and thinking global equations are all of our duties to resist, protest, act and continue questioning the vanguard, status quo and media insanity.

We’ve failed in our teetering attraction to the implosion and imposition of our bourgeois culture.

To put it plainly — We get co-opted by the money conveyor belt – the endless flotilla of money changers defining even our radical lives as we slip-stream in the madness of money grubbing.

It’s an old story – when the music dies, or the programs get eviscerated. We are in a time when even those in our society we place in a place of high regard are looking at a future of flagging respectability within the economic model of the all-you-can-buy warehouse thinking of the capitalists who don’t give a shit if they get their millions vis-à-vis the implosion of the bricks and mortar public spaces and communities that still make us semi-sociable creature, or if they get it via the tapping out of the glowing flat-screen existence of buying, selling, learning, fornicating, and frolicking though the world wide web.

One of my towns I’ve called home base – Spokane – represents a colluding nexus of struggle, reaffirmation, and bombed-out political disuse that other towns I’ve called home – Tucson, Las Cruces, El Paso, Seattle, Vancouver, Bisbee, Tombstone, Austin – are also struggling through.

The haves and the haves not, that constant struggle to justify existence beyond the market-driven algebra of the worth of a human’s orchestration of a hundred trillion healthy, damaged, mutating, evolving, atrophying cells.

Just a months ago, not only Spokane residents have been noticing the silence in the Fox Theater downtown, or the striking musicians’ sign capturing the sign of our universal times: “Build the Fox, tear down the orchestra?!”

Imagine this: An Art Deco movie theater part of the Fox Film Corp. empire, opened in 1931 in Spokane, designed by the guy who had his creative impulses realized in the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone Park.

Films are shown at the Fox until Sept 21 2000, after Ridley Scott’s Gladiator runs its engagement. Then, some of those stalwarts of the good old boys club wanted to buy it and then demolish it for a parking garage. Save by the Spokane Symphony, a restoration campaign kicks in.

Some $31 million later, the 1,700 seat Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox (named after the father of a $3 million donor) is re-opened for the Spokane Symphony with Tony Bennett crooning with orchestra.

The untold story is one of workers who make things work, the backbone of the elite class’ gambit of investments and returns – the musicians. They are paid starvation wages. A more precise version of their story will unfold in a minute. Again, bear with me in seeing this not as punctuated and parochial one only known to a community like Spokane, but one felt in cities like Minneapolis, Detroit, New Orleans, Seattle, all over the world.

First a little music history: The stuff Beethoven and Mozart were writing was considered vulgar in their time. The average age today of a symphony-goer is 55. When push comes to shove, more and more young people are going into classical music while fewer kiesters are filling those padded audience chairs.

Is any of this sustainable in a dog-eat-dog, consumer-motivated world of superficial entertainment?

For many, seeing Spokane’s musicians striking and picketing Friday and Saturday nights outside the Fox Theater rather than performing “The Rite of Spring” was akin to witnessing teachers walking out of their fourth graders’ classrooms: Is Spokane really going to hell in a hand basket?

There is no arguing that to be a performer in, say, “Handel’s Messiah” one has to master many sets of skills way outside anything a standardized test asks one to accomplish. That person also must have patience and perseverance not easily found in our instant gratification society.

Musicians (artists in toto?) of all people supersede the adage: “You get what you pay for.” They’ve been underfed and undercompensated for millennia. However, when cities lose their ballet, opera, orchestra and theater troupes, many can imagine the crows ready to pick at the last remnants of culture.

What that odd fellow Richard Florida might call one of the points in the creative class’s great contribution to the new, up and coming urban cores – the arts! Better yet, let’s look at what a contemporary Romanian born super-musician has to say about the arts being more than just one chink of the armor of human civilization.

If you look right now at the vestiges of the Roman Empire or the Greek Civilization, the first things you encounter are objects of art. They tell you the history of the time. They set trends in the world. You don’t see the generals, the armies; you don’t see the politics, you see the art. And I think it is a shame to cut that. Any major civilization has invested in art, in music. It is a shame that a country like the US, which is still very wealthy — at least the one percent of the population that doesn’t pay the taxes — they would rather not invest heavily in the arts. That’s how the cities go to pieces, when you don’t have the institutions there, when you don’t have a heartbeat. There are many cities like this.

Pretty heady stuff, and not surprisingly, this sort of discourse centers around the life and death of the arts in cities like Detroit, Indianapolis, Bucharest and, yes, back to 390,000 pop. Spokane. This is what Detroit Symphony Orchestra violinist Marian Tanau recently said as he reflected on the strike he and his fellow musicians approved two years ago.

Sour Notes – Unfair Labor Practice

The Spokane Symphony management and the rank and file musicians hit an impasse, and that existential disagreement centers on more than the paltry wages musicians here in Spokane get, and on much more than the limitations their contract places on them as performers seeking other gigs outside the Inland Northwest.

This is a tale of two cities, a tale of two narratives that have been clashing in our democracy since the nation was established. This is a battle of definitions: What exactly is a living wage, and, what price we as a culture, society, community, and as a people are willing to pay to make sure arts and the more humanistic side of our species thrive?

Does Spokane want to go back decades when there were no professionals tickling music from their instruments; no orchestra, no pops and holiday concerts, and no concerts in our parks, like the perennial Comstock end-of-the-summer concert?

From the sight of the overflow crowd at a large local high school, Shadle HS, on Nov. 17 — at a benefit concert performed by SSO musicians to help with their strike relief fund — citizens stood in the aisles and lobby to hear Verdi, Mozart, and Beethoven’s 5th.

Adam Wallstein is an archetypal classical musician who ended up spending years practicing instruments and in school and university on the East Coast, learning the trade of music, to end up in Spokane. Some folk like Yo-Yo Ma, the celebrity cellist and virtuoso, calculate the number of skill hours necessary to be a symphony-level professional artist at 10,000 hours or more.

Wallstein agrees. He’s been leading the negotiations with the Spokane Symphony Board on the other side of the bargaining table around wages that have been frozen since 2008 and proposed cuts to the already embarrassing low salary of $17,460 a year. For him, this argument goes beyond a paycheck — this city is where he and his wife, fellow symphony musician Alaina Bercilla, put down roots. He’s been with the Spokane Symphony for 10 years and is chair of the orchestra committee.

Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail stops the musicians from striking

Some 30 other fellow musicians and symphony aficionados braved the snow November 9 to picket out in front of the Fox Theater.
Passersby honked for the musicians, supporting their position of not having their pay knocked down to $15,400 a year. Members of the New Orleans Symphony called in some local Pizza Rita goodness for all those present — including the tuba player — as they used sidewalk politics to show the public why they have reached their philosophical and economical wits end.

Another community member handed out hot cocoa from a curbside trailer. Supporters carrying signs that said, “Save Our Symphony,” were on the street encouraging drivers to honk.

The marquee blinked: “Spokane Symphony Superpops Cancelled.” This is a big thing in small town, one-horse or chariot-full.

The Spokane Symphony is more than just weekend concerts attended by long-in-the tooth men and women donned in suits and furs listening to Beethoven and Vivaldi before nightcaps and tapas are served. The musicians of this symphony represent the power of music to transform youth and adults, to give some glimmer of hope to a community like ours suffering from that class divide of the extremely poor and the extremely wealthy. Music, like poetry, possesses these magical binding elements allowing our species to transcend the divisions inherent in a capitalistic society.

“I think people often assume that what we do is all about the privileged and the elite; this is too bad, since great music really shouldn’t be a class thing at all. I’m sure many people don’t realize just how working class the musicians are. Cobbling together several small sources of income on one hand; trying to pay off debt from considerable student loans and instrument expenses on the other,” Wallstein told me.

That “cobbling together” includes private music lessons, picking up teaching gigs as adjunct instructors at Whitworth or Gonzaga universities, and maybe a few guest appearances at other orchestras, like the Seattle Symphony. Pulling shots of coffee and waiting tables also fill the gap.

“We’re not in this to get rich,” he said. “The musicians are asking for a salary that might be a foundation to be sufficient enough to begin making a livelihood.”

I’ve helped organize adjunct faculty throughout Washington State and elsewhere, and that shame – all colleges, universities, whether public, for-profit, non-profit – is that the majority of faculty in the USA, 70-plu percent as of 2012, are contingent, temporary, unprotected by anything like a long-term contract, ethical links, let alone “tenure”!

Music programs rely largely on adjunct faculty – struggling musicians. In some cases, 90 percent of music lessons, one-on-one’s, even theory classes are taught by adjunct faculty, AKA, Musicians for Hire.

Wallstein and Bercilla are not the only husband and wife couple in our city’s symphony. Count nine total performing Mozart and sharing lives outside the orchestra pit or stage.

What’s typical is a timpani player’s narrative: A 2002 graduate of a performing arts college, Boston Fine Arts, Adam Wallstein was recruited to come to Spokane to play right after completing his bachelor’s degree. For a decade now he has invested his life in the Spokane Symphony. Many musicians are coming out of masters and doctoral programs (26 and 5 respectively for Spokane Symphony Orchestra musicians) with tens of thousands of dollars of loans and the same prospects for salaries Spokane Symphony management has straddled our artists with.

Of course, while this story has reached not only national prominence but is sort of a bellwether for musicians in Canada and in Europe, there are several sides to the coin, or at least that is what we are led to believe in this world of false balance, false dichotomies, manufactured consent and concisement.

Do we really believe that management – the uber rich, the upper class – has an equal position in this equation? So, we have 70 musicians, then some of the substitutes, and then all those music schools, all those teachers, all those in the audience, all those incalculable benefits of good drama, good classical orchestras, good jazz and hip-hop performance locations, good parks, good sidewalks, good public amenities, good mass transportation, good schools.

It there really just another side that is equally weighted with a few robber barons and outside forces that call themselves the benefactors of the arts? Black and white America?

Is it just another boss attempting to break the back of the union?

I spoke with Peter Moye, chair of the Spokane Symphony Society (board). He’s with an international law firm, K & L Gates, which is a multinational corporation working on legal issues tied to financing and banking worldwide. His negotiating stance is focused on the Board’s 13.3 percent proposed cut to those already frozen 2008 wages and measures to reduce guaranteed services – rehearsals and performances – from 180 to 156 per season. “The board is not going to run deficit budgets,” Moye said.

While Moye has not been in any of the contract negotiations with Wallstein, the other musicians, and representative from the American Federal of Musicians, Local 105, he counts his wife Catherine Moye as chief negotiator in these meetings. She is currently secretary of the national League of Orchestras and was past president of the Spokane Symphony Society.

The lawyer Moye said that the board has made “major concessions,” but the musicians, Tina Morrison, who has been with AFM Local 105 for 14 years and been the president of this union of 230 musicians for seven years, and others fail to see the olive branch and fair negotiation process Peter Moye was intimating during my interview.

“Moye’s philosophy strikes me as consistent with what Chicago-based lawyer Kevin Case calls the ‘commoditization of classical musicians’ where parts are replaceable/interchangeable. There are so many musicians, so many administrators feel they can unplug a handful and plug in a different handful without trouble. In larger orchestras this is sort of like replacing all but a handful of your NFL team and expecting they’ll all be dialed into one another … same as your last batch,” so says David Beem. He’s been covering orchestra news and music for several years, after years as a professional classic musician. His pieces in the Huffington Post – and the one detailing the Spokane case – have gone viral.

His October 30 article, “Spokane Symphony: Stranded,” strikes many common themes in today’s new normal for the arts: Draconian labor cuts, inhumane lockouts by boards, musicians opting for their last resort, a strike, and “a management culture with declining human values.”

For Tina Morrison, she sees more and more difficult negotiations with musicians of orchestras in Detroit, St. Paul, Minneapolis, even Seattle against these new for profit management types who are guided by the Orchestra League of America, which charges $15,000 to $20,000 in annual dues for orchestras our city’s size.

“This language of ‘Draconian measures are necessary’ and this model of unsustainable cuts is kind of a virus,” she said. “We understand the give and take. We are trying to work through this new philanthropy where more and more targeted giving controls every penny. The important thing is to have a living, breathing live music experience here in Spokane. There has to be a respectful relationship between musicians and management.”

Music Under the Stars and Other Concerts

So, the community supports these musicians, and for many lovers of Brahms, this public campaign the musicians are engaged in has exposed the poverty level wages this cadre of artists makes.

“I was working out at a 24-hour Fitness, and this guy who attends the symphony came up to me and said, ‘I am ashamed … I had no idea how little you people make,” Wallstein said.

Management has the power of lawyers, communication spinners and the vanguard of the business community to come to their aid. The problem is that people need to live, and the economy is bouncing back. No matter how topsy-turvy it might appear in various sectors, well, the economic backbone is not slipping for the Spokane orchestra – they balanced their budget last year with robust ticket sales.

Do we drive away talent from Spokane and expect doctors and lawyers and others to come in and fill the void of a professional symphony? For almost any member of any stratified community within a community here, Spokane’s economy and spiritual well being are actually enhanced by things like professional orchestras, theater, and sports.

The value of music and the arts is not only measured in how far the community’s social and cultural well being can grow, but also to the musicians who are in the community as not just performers, but as neighbors, teachers, and engaged citizens. They are more than spikey points in Richard Florida’s hypothesis of what the creative class (knowledge workers – Yuk!) gives to a community, city.¹

“The community certainly appreciates us,” Wallstein said. “For me, performing — being a part of this amazing music — is really an endeavor that transcends space (and even time). Not to seem too new-agey, but this music provides a transformative effect, connecting me to humanity on a grand, universal scale. It seems to me that this type of artistic/spiritual service is essential for the citizens of Spokane.”

The reality is, though, that members of Women’s Leagues and Chambers of Commerce, and the elite from the legal and medical professions, they do enjoy the sounds of professional musicians. To pay fairly for such a gift takes leadership, management skills and outreach and hard work as guild and board members.

When they hobnob with the class of species known to me as Moloch horridus (politicians, cement, road, and construction barons) and then cave at their job as “creative money entrepreneurs” for the very community that serves them, well, they can call themselves whatever they want to – Rotarians, Chamber of Commercians, Trustees, Advisory Boardmen/women, Arts Guildsmen/women, Founding Fathers, The Circle-jerks – but in the end they are the ultimate failures because they scam a dime a nanosecond and rake in millions and gut communities.

They do this easily because they believe the gilded toilet seats installed in their 1,000-square-foot bathrooms keep their shit from smelling and their personal Dow Jones ticker board mounted in their surround-sound rooms make them gods.

Having people between a rock and a hard place – musicians who ended up coming to Spokane to engage in this profession, who have invested in homes, who are raising families in some cases – is just not honorable or sustainable.

“In smaller orchestras, like Spokane, it’s a bit trickier. These folks are in a tough spot. Hard to leave financially, now that they’ve been ‘enticed’ to move there. But it’s also hard to stay. Importing new folks will be hard for management since there isn’t much financial incentive, and regional musicians playing the ‘freeway philharmonic’ may find Spokane too remote and too cheap to bother with,” Beem told me.

From the Lips of a Musician

I’ve spent many years covering labor issues, writing about the arts and education, and I myself have worked to organize disenfranchised graduate students when I was one and then part-time faculty when I transitioned into that breed of educator. I know many musicians from many different tribes and avocations who find themselves in many different economic and creative situations.
Adam Wallstein represents the strong and the forward thinking, but he is not deluded to think that all of a sudden US society – Spokane particularly – will see the light and pay an equitable wage for the work he does or what I do as a fiction writer.

DV: How can anyone want to go into music with those low wages and those cost cutting programs the Symphony Society here has unleashed?

AW: Most of the musicians who come here to play do so, not with the notion that they’ll be here forever, but that this would be a good first job, and a type of ‘stepping-stone’ within a broader career. Sometimes, these plans pan out, sometimes not. What we need to protect is the ability of our musicians to maintain and sustain their livelihoods while they’re here living and working in Spokane. Ideally, it would be a situation in which they could have a real life — start a family … buy a house … save for retirement! This is asking quite a bit. What we’re clinging to at the moment is the ability to stay afloat, so that the services we provide (on and off the stage) remain available for us and to the community.

DV: Striking takes an existential leap in confidence in a time when the average person in the USA thinks striking is bad behavior, at the least, revolutionary, at the most. What does striking mean to you?

AW: Striking means simply that the terms the administration were offering (and insisting upon, seeking to impose) simply aren’t acceptable. Individually, we can’t live with them; so we collectively made the decision to refuse to work under them. It’s a truly unfortunate turn of events, and we’re eager to get back to work as soon as a livable compromise can be reached. Simply put, it was a contract which would have been voted down by any self-respecting worker.

Tidying Up America’s Rhetoric: “If you don’t work your fingers to the bone and ass kiss the Boss, what the hell are you doing in my town, my country? You want to make a living? Then make a killing – sacrificial lambs my ass! Put in your 80 hours a week and reap it or weep!”

Okay, one last foray from David Beem, making some of his own cellist licks at Huffington Post (gotta read this piece at Counterpunch on HuffPo by Christopher Ketcham — but that is yet another story! — “Jaron Lanier, the reformed computer geek and neo-Luddite author of You Are Not A Gadget, offers a devastating analysis of the “free” information aggregators, such as HuffPo, that masquerade as pioneers of a new dispensation.”

Slash and burn

So, as I look to my friends in Louisville, whose families are suffering in the wake of the unconscionable decisions of the management of the Louisville Orchestra, and as I read some of the ignorant and hateful remarks in the comment section of various news pieces I’ve read over the past few years, presumably made by some Louisville residents, I have to wonder how that community’s classical musicians have become so vilified. How did it happen that they’ve been characterized as lazy, greedy, overpaid, conniving and ruthless? (“Eat their young” was one quote that comes to mind.)

I can only think it is related to the tenor of the national debate about politics in general, and unions and free market values specifically. And if that’s true, then the conclusion I make is that the remaining full-time musicians in the LO are losing their jobs because of the conviction that “one size fits all” for our nation’s talking points. Nonprofit is fundamentally different from Big Business. Always has been, always will be. And the American Federation of Musicians isn’t exactly like the auto union. The two industries are completely different.

As orchestras continue to fold across the nation, musicians too join the ranks of the unemployed, attending to our national self-loathing and self-fulfilling prophecy, “collecting handouts,” and creating more lazy, smelly, good-for-nothings to carry a sign and march on Washington. Smacking down your local orchestra taught someone a lesson, for sure. What the lesson was is anyone’s guess.

1. Expect an upcoming DV article parsing and dissecting and desiccating the BS meat substitute Florida is dishing out – but for now, see here.

It’s finally hitting the mainstream – The New Faculty Majority Is – off-the-tenure-track see these (my bibliography on this topic is 40 pages):

“From Graduate School to Welfare”
or “The Closing of American Academia”
or “Decline of the Tenure Track Raises Concern”
or “Lazy Faculty?”
or Adjunct Project

Preamble:

The Adjunct Project exists for the growing number of graduate degree holders who are unemployed and underemployed. Many of these highly educated and passionate people are being forced to take jobs dramatically below their achievement and earning potential. Budget cuts and hiring constraints have pushed colleges to adopt a new university faculty model that many would argue exploitatively devalues the classroom professor. As a result, the use of contingent faculty, or adjunct professors, now dominates the college teaching profession. Adjunct professors are temporary employees who earn a very meager salary. This website was designed collaboratively by the new majority of motivated, intelligent, and driven academics who are struggling to use their experience and knowledge in a meaningful way that benefits both themselves and society.

Or any number of other ways to discuss this shame of perma-temp, precarious-centered, part-time, slave-wage faculty teaching in our country’s several thousand colleges, tech schools, universities (Yep, it’s the same and worse in Mexico or Italy, after having many conversations with folk around the world August 2012 at the tenth COCAL Conference in Mexico City – Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor.)

And then here and
“The Abysmal State of Adjunct Pay and Actions to Create Change”
“Caste System in Higher Education”
Report – Who is Professor “Staff”?

So, all of this copy on the plights and work conditions of contingents, and all those digital dervishes proclaiming the righteousness of my brethren – college faculty, part-time and/or contingent — and all the condemnations of administrators and privatizers like Washington Post’s Kaplan University and the entire on-line teaching stiff arm toward complete poverty and non-existence, where does it take us?

I’m an English instructor – a broad term for teaching reading classes, sentence skills workshops, composition and research writing course, introduction to literature, poetry, fiction, drama, film, or business and technical writing sections, or introduction to news reporting, or intro to the novel, or even adult education classes, and even preparing for the job interview as a fluid power specialist.

That’s what I teach, and while teaching I’ve cobbled together a life and a living as a professional journalist, a freelance magazine writer, a book reviewer, a special projects environmental blogger, a radio personality, a climate change and sustainability wonk, an activist, a radical, a member of x, y, z communities.

I’ve taught in prisons, on Army and Air Force installations, in rural communities, at community college campuses, on an Indian reservation, in a twin plant in Juarez, at an alternative high school, at a prestigious private non-profit Jesuit school, at several state universities, and for non-profits and in youth programs, from gifted and talented to at-risk gang-associated populations of higher school kids, to LGBTQ programs for outdoor education.

You think maybe I’d get a key to some college or university after having done this since 1983, from El Paso to Guatemala, from Spokane to Tombstone.

Nope. It’s all about that path, those steps as a part-timer, freeway flyer, who never, ever let the vanguards or gatekeepers or mollified or the fearsome or fearful define me as a man, human, world traveler, writer, artist and radical. Precarious worker!

Each day was magnificent teaching parents and children from El Salvador life skills and basic survival English in El Paso. Or the times I had night classes teaching the foundation to all life, all college learning — First-year Composition … With 15 year old high school kids teaming up with ex-Meth-head bikers, ladies from Vietnam, Ukraine, Mexico, ex-convicts, victims of poverty, old and young, successful construction workers with flagging bones, traditional students wanting to get out of English and move into sophomore, junior even graduate classes. All in the same classroom, all together, in person, not-on-line, all collected with our foibles and strengths and biases and resentments and varying degrees of competencies.

What a motley crew, what engaging times, what struggle, what content, what learning and sharing, what life lessons and nitty-gritty of a failed K12 system like an IED every single day in their faces; what debates about the value of patriotism or the mythology of capitalism. What incredible moments students gave me, facilitating me, this adjunct faculty, to tackle major campus-wide and city-wide projects like the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon (end of the Vietnam Conflict) or the Year of Sustainability, or Earth Day 40th Anniversary.

Speaker after project after special conference after outside-the-classroom activity, I was always on the outside changing the inside; always way left of the middle road of faculty thinking and framing; way beyond the reach of the downtrodden bourgeois; way past the fear moments that would someday catch up to me. Revolutionary may sound glib or self-important or even over-the-top hyperbole. It is what it is.

Let’s frame some things here first — before I tackle a rather interesting professional journal article about the death of the community college, death of the English Department, and, well, the death of me, I guess, ipso facto!

The Journal – Teaching English in the Two-Year College (TETYC)
Author – Keith Kroll
Title – “The End of the Community College English Professions”
Digital pdf

Let’s make this absolutely clear: I have been on a pathway toward earning that label – professor, maestro, sensei, teacher.

Paideia

It’s tied to what Cornel West told a group of teachers just like me.

Princeton professor, author and activist Cornel West urged the 300 people who gathered for his Nov. 16 talk at Green River Community College to go beyond getting credentialed and pursue a “deep education.”

It would not be easy, he warned his audience, about half of them students: “In the process of being educated you have to learn how to die in order to live.”

Drawing on Plato and Malcom X, West said the death process is part of real education—paideia—a concept developed by Socrates that means deep, critical thinking.

It is the antithesis of contemporary culture: “The problem in American society is we are a culture of death-denying, death-dodging… a joyless culture where pleasure-seeking replaces what it means to be human.”

Fresh from a trip to Occupy Seattle earlier in the day, West praised the movement, which he said represents “a deep democratic awakening where people are finding the courage to find their voice.”

Greed has corroded society, he said.

“Market moralities and mentalities—fueled by economic imperatives to make a profit at nearly any cost—yield unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation and sadness. Our public life lies in shambles, shot through with icy cynicism and paralyzing pessimism. To put it bluntly, beneath the record-breaking stock markets on Wall Street and bipartisan budget-balancing deals in the White House, lurk ominous clouds of despair across this nation.”

Yeah, I wrote the above, gigging free in Seattle for the street (homeless) newspaper, Real Change News, while freeway flying from Beacon Hill (Seattle) to Auburn, WA, to teach basic writing and composition at Green River Community College.

You can get a sense of some of the shenanigans going on at GRCC that are emblematic and symbolic around this issue of Part-Time Academic Labor: “(American Federation of Teachers) AFT Washington Affiliate Tries to Block Release of Public Documents Relating to Union Leader’s Embezzlement of Funds.”

So, before diving into this issue of a Brave New World of Work that sociologist Ulrich Beck writes about, let’s get some of the curriculum vitae done!

Today’s date: January 1, 2013.
Age: 55
DOB: Feb. 6, 1957
Born: San Pedro, California
Places Lived: Maryland, British Columbia, Paris/France, Munich, Edinburgh, Tucson/Arizona, Bisbee & Tombstone, Spokane/WA, Seattle, Vancouver, Merida/Yucatan, more
Education: Dive Master, 1978; AA Fine Arts, Photography; BA English-Journalism; MA English-Rhetoric; MURP – masters in planning
Languages: English, Spanish
Forgotten Languages: French, Portuguese, German
Work: see above, to include daily newspaper beat reporter, manager of southwest furniture company, part-owner of art and framing company, landscape freelancer

I’m going to tackle in the next DV installment issue tethered to what a brave new world of work means, specifically around what Keith Kroll posits in his TETYC piece, “The End of the Community College English Profession.” Of course, you will soon learn that the death of the community college (and higher education) was harkened decades ago. The proclamations Kroll makes challenging us to see a very new and different world of English Departments, Humanities programs, et al., say, in 15 or 20 years, centers around several factors:

• the speeding up of technology’s bombarding of the blood-brain barrier and the limitless tools of the digital devils who find the silicon syringe and holograms of future tap-dancing deliverers of pabulum and vocational corporate user manuals;
• the reactionary forces of the center-right corporate-thinking deciders at the top of the academic ladder who are the reason for the fall of the faculty – read Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters;
• the inability of faculty and left-leaning forces to reframe the narrative around why community of place and acting locally and thinking globally ARE the only ways to stave off economic, ecological, energy, equity-education collapse;
• allowing digital technology and artificial communities in digital space define the future and define our value as human thinkers and actors;
• why collectivism and communitarian action have always been counter to the PT Barnum hucksterism of a colonizing-genocidal culture that defines USA and North American in general;
• the force of neoliberalism as a way to build a world on economies of scale at the McDonald’s and Walmart level while pushing further and further back the power and reality of personal, individual, and group agency through what and how we have evolved into over several million years – social, hands on, confronting and conflicting and comforting species

In some sense my critique and analysis and opining on Kroll’s thesis and prognostications will cut to the very essence of some of our collective faults as harbingers of culture and society. Here’s his lynchpin to his piece.

I am arguing that their three main recommendations for saving the academic function of the community college — strengthening the faculty culture, overcoming student disarticulation with academic disciplines, and strengthening academic rigor — have not only not happened, but the “academic crisis” they described has worsened in the past twenty years as a result of the neoliberal economic and political policy that now informs higher education. Neoliberalism imagines community college curricula as business-driven and focused on job (re)training; defines those who attend community colleges as economic entities: “customers,” “workers,” and a “workforce”; and marks the end of a full-time faculty profession.

The devastating effects of neoliberal economic and political policy on community colleges are evident in a number of ways:

(1) the increasing influence of the business community on curricula;

(2) the perception of those enrolled in community colleges as economic entities: “customers,” “workers,” a “workforce,” rather than as students and citizens;

(3) the severe budget crisis, both in a lack of funding and in severe funding cuts, facing community college campuses and systems throughout the country since the beginning of the economic recession in 2007;

(4) the “privatization” of the community college as exemplified in the growth of community college fee-based “academies” where students enroll in “get them in, get them out” career training, and that move community colleges away from public institutions and closer to the private, for-profits that now feature prominently in higher education;

(5) the increasing use of part-time faculty;

(6) the de-skilling of faculty, including English faculty.

To think the community college is on its way out singularly in the vacuum of K12 and university education is naïve, and I won’t attribute that naiveté to Kroll. Maybe this entire empowered self-reflection and trumpeting of the New Faculty Majority’s point of view is an exercise in exorcism, but the realities of higher education gutted and hollowed out are the realities of a society that has inevitably been intellectually and ethically decamping way before the emergence of the great community college system created in America and growth of land grant schools after the end of World War Two.¹

So, alas, January 1, 2013 is a good day to be a pilgrim – as the wanderer, walk-about master as one member of the new majority in America, the precariat class. It is a good day to die-off the rusty thinking of a world dominated by the builders of empire, the empire’s sycophants, the merchants of death, the merchandisers of the cluttered and earth-eating dreams of consumer capitalism.

Part two of this introductory piece will be– “What the Majority Is to the Minority: One Percent Dreaming and the Dread of a Cormac McCarthy Novel on Wage Slaves and the Coming of the Four Horsemen of the Economic Apocalypse”!

Sure! Whew. And to dovetail to my January 1, 2013, piece, I will digress on a term Kim Petersen and I email debated over – “concision.” I let words fly too quickly on my union of musicians piece and used the term, “concisement.” What a blunder on my part. However, “concision” is a valuable term that Noam Chomsky illustrates as the reason why articles like mine and better ones here at DV are never the point of mainstream journalism.

Or why when I ran my show on a community radio station – Tipping Points: Voices from the Edge – my shows were 57 minutes each, as one-on-one’s with such thinkers as Jeremy Scahill, Naomi Wolf, Winona LaDuke, Bill McKibben, Tim Flannery, and David Suzuki.

AND so many mainstreamers (mainliners) found it was so unusual to have that much time spent with one person talking about his or her ideas – think James Howard Kunslter telling me about his urban planning theories around his book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century or even Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human pushing the edge of anthropology’s “meat made us big brained lots theory.”

So, Nightline would never have on a Chomsky or Galeano or Naomi Klein because they lack “concision.” Again, DV is everything antithetical to “concision” – getting something said on TV between commercials, in one or two minute bursts. Nothing in American thought could go outside that two minutes, so what that two minutes means is an America devoid of not just critical thinking, but deep consideration of narratives and histories outside their realm of consumption of media/The Press.

So, I will end now with this final idea of concision and how that might tie into Keith Kroll’s piece on the death of the community college as we know it.

That final punctuation is this connection to my journeyman’s work – journalism. As I state above, the foundation to ALL modern humanity is communication, albeit, writing, composition, English if you will, or, for all those other countries embarking on communication in all those languages, rhetoric and narrative.

There is a great series in Chronicle of Higher Education on, “Academe and the Decline of News Media.”

I will succumb to the Ivy Leaguer and give DV readers a little look at what I find as a true analysis of why many of my students (yes, community college) are smart but fail to follow (or get to) the bottom of things. Concision for sure! So, how in hell can the average person understand that precarious work IS NOT the goal of a society or globe working to make human rights and the rights of nature the operating manuals for our survival? How can anyone influenced by the dumb downing and concision in journalism, high school curriculum, the general workplace, even in community and family conversations see that NO, the market should not be the driver of how precarious college educated and non-college degreed folk get paid and treated? There are forces greater and more powerful than the market, yet, can anyone really articulate what those are and how they get rounded up and framed in the media, in Obama’s head, in Tea Partiers’ gullets, in the fabric of K12 and higher education, in the workplace?

We’ll discuss Kroll’s piece next time, but for now, note that there is magic thinking here, that when print media go, then the university will be a new anchor for community and citizen journalism. As I alluded to in my January 1, 2013 piece, about the parasitic nature of aggregators like Huffington Post, we who write are now called the producerists – and so, why not the same for adjunct faculty, or all faculty? Teachers for hire, but go to that corner, power up the Mac, and shut up and do your duty on line, efficiently, at home, and, forget bennies and forget a living wage, fine educated fellow and madam! Why not teach for free!?@#$

Jill Lepore, Professor of American history, Harvard University:

I talk to my students about the news every chance I get. They’re so smart; they’re so curious. I’m fascinated by how they get their news. What shocks me is that so many of them so rarely follow a story to its bottom. They can talk about anything, brilliantly, for five minutes. Guantánamo, those damned Yankees, health-care reform, Afghanistan. But they can’t talk about very much for a half-hour, unless it’s to bluster.

I realize that scanning the headlines, as a way of “reading” the newspaper, has a long history. I know I do it all the time. But, for lots of undergraduates, the headlines, the snippets of text they can read on their iPhones, are the news. They read headlines, and they read opinion; I don’t think they read reported stories. I have also got a pet theory, purely impressionistic and altogether cantankerous: Students who are dedicated opinion bloggers (rather than, say, students who write for the school newspaper or who write edited blogs that contain original reporting, and who work with editors) don’t take criticism well. They like to put their views out into the world, offhand, unedited, and unquestioned. They don’t like to be queried; they don’t like to get their papers back marked up; they don’t like to be asked to investigate further, or to revise. They want to stand on top of something, and say what they think about it, instead of digging down to its bottom, to find out what’s true. That, I worry, is what the death of the newspaper has cost them.

A lot of people seem to think or hope that when print newspapers and magazines are gone, the university will be long-form journalism’s new home. I guess the idea here has three parts: First, universities could support some of these dying publications out of their endowments; second, more academics could work like reporters, covering the deeper angles on news stories, as they relate to their own areas of expertise; and third, out-of-work reporters could find jobs teaching in universities, which would allow them to keep writing, if not for newspapers and magazines, at least writing, somehow, for the public. Each of those propositions strikes me as fanciful.

First, some universities, somewhere, might have flush endowments just now, but I don’t know of them and, more important, moving market-driven journalism into the academy is a dodgy proposition; it raises all sorts of issues relating to the freedom of the press and academic freedom, too. Second, the standards by which scholars achieve promotion are designed, quite frankly, to punish scholars who work or write like journalists; unless that changes, scholars who attempt it will be asked to pay a cost most are unwilling to bear. For junior faculty, that cost normally includes not getting tenure. Third, reporters holding teaching posts sounds good, but a professorship isn’t a day job, and, at least insofar as I’ve observed, it means that reporters who become teachers stop writing; it also leaves unanswered the question of what, in the age of new media, old-media reporters will be teaching, and who their students would be. The university, I fear, is not journalism’s Valhalla.

1. Read: James L. Ratcliff “Seven Streams in the Historical Development of the Modern American Community College” A Handbook Of The Community College In America. Ed. George A. Baker III & Stephen Brint and Jerome Karabel, The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985. (New York: Oxford University Press,1989), 19.

New Census Bureau figures released September 2012  show that 15 to 17 percent of the U.S.  population lived in poverty in 2011. Over 50 million Americans lived at or below the poverty threshold of a household income of $23,201 per year for a family of four. One in five of our children live in poverty and over one-third of black and Latino children are struggling through  impoverishment.

Pathetic, really, that we’ve vaunted the one percent –  the disgusting oligarchs and rip-off artists and welfare cheats called the US Corporations, Wall Street, Banks, military hardware purveyors, energy mafia, and we have failed to notice our own enslavement –  and their trumpeters into every aspect of our pathetic 70 percent (no 99 Percent for me) lives.

Absolutely bizarre that now some of the most educated (college-wise) are slowly recognizing that they too are part of the proletariat; the largest group of debtors sliding; the white middle class kids and Baby Boomers now seeing and feeling a little bit of what blacks, Latinos and other people of the non-white race have faced since DAY one of the federation.

Faculty — have they really been the vanguard, or the first line of defense in stupidity and disconnect? Who knows, but the reality is that the new majority is part-time and contingent – at-will and flogged by a constant drumbeat of privatizers threatening cuts to programs, threatening to mess with education to such a point that delivery to customers might just be facilitated by a giant hissing ether net of canned and flashy correspondence courses piped into people’s PCs, iPads and phones.

Is the death of education here, near, inevitable? Is it worth it now to go to college? What’s the end game? Debt on top of more debt? See here what the student loan fraud is all about.

I started this analysis and critique with Part One, all tied to teaching and adjunctification, the so-called ad-cons of the precariat kind! We are the “other,” when, in fact, the full-time tenured faculty are the minority, the other. We are supposed to be invisible, victims, inferior. Bunk. Read here on one former tenured faculty’s emancipation from the elite highbrow narrative of self-imposed importance.

This series has been predicated on reading Keith Kroll’s piece, that posits, “As a result of neoliberalism, the  ‘grand experiment’ of the community college, as that of ‘Democracy’s college,’ is coming to an end.” I’m really wondering if the new faculty majority has been facilitated to become as inept, unorganized, broken, disconnected and impotent as we are through the overt and covert plans of the  masters of the academic  universe – professional administrators who jump from college to college as parasitic bean counters and program cutters and tuition raisers and hobnobbers with the One Percent and their 29 percent armies of poverty creators?

We are poor, and yet, we have failed to garner allegiances with our students, their communities, their families, and the local business people who depend on our work, on the public physical, emotional, intellectual and symbolic spaces a good two-year state college and state university campus can provide.

We should have been blasting away at our stories four decades ago, when the majority in the teaching profession were permanent teachers with some semblance of tenure or vetting process. We are poor and deeply experienced in navigating that poverty, selling ourselves a load of crap, even with our advanced college degrees and publications and service in and out of the public sector.

We are poor, and we are about to become POORER.

Read the entire Kroll piece.¹

I will be pugilistic with Kroll’s thesis and sub-points, but first a little tough love from Barbara Ehrenreich, who was asked by Amy Dean of Truthout why oh why have the mainstream media underreported and bastardized the truth of unemployment and poverty and the disconnect between worthy skills and education not having a snowball’s chance in hell of convincing a multinational corporation the value of our struggle.  We stay at slave wage levels because we are afraid of the truth in our poverty. And that truth unfortunately has been occluded by a vapid and seriously psychologically in tune mass media and failing Press.

It’s always been something of a problem for two reasons. The first reason I  discovered in my years as a freelance writer in the 1980s and 90s. That is: magazines  and newspapers want to please their advertisers. Their advertisers want to think they  are reaching wealthy people, people who will buy the products. They don’t want really  depressing articles about misery and hardship near their ads.

The other reason is that typically the gatekeepers in these media outlets, the top editors  and producers, have been from a social class quite far removed from what we are  talking  about. They have no clue. I found that this could be very, very dispiriting.

I remember pitching a story to an editor in the 1980s. It had something to do with working-class men. The editor said, ‘Well, can they talk?’

It’s almost otherworldly. The editors would use the word ‘articulate,’  as in, ‘Could you find someone articulate?’ Like the rest of the people are just going around grunting.  Those are two long-standing structural forces against good coverage in the media.

So, basically, the overarching view that Kroll takes is that the community college – a true proletarian college of the people, for the people and by the people in many regards; a community centered experiment, for sure; a leaping place where all diversity and contexts meet and encamp; where the ideals of, say, the Clemente Course, run smoothly into the ideals of skills for the under-fed intellectually – is on its way out … Sayonara … hasta la vista, baby … don’t let the door slam you on your way out!

Remember the Clemente Course? What a magnificent experiment. I doubt the Obamas or Bidens or Gates or the rest of the captive capitalists have heard of it.

The humanities are a foundation for getting along in the world, for thinking, for learning to reflect on the world instead of just reacting to whatever force is turned against you. I think the  humanities are one of the ways to become political…

— Earl Shorris, Clemente Course founder,  Riches for the Poor

Remember, the humanities is everything Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are against. They need programmers, warehouse workers, and technologists with their hearts in numbers and algorithms, not altruism. So no matter where I taught – medium security at La Tuna Federal Corrections Institute, Gonzaga University, on the fire line of Fairchild Air Force Base, at the Sergeants Major Academy, night school in Segundo Barrio, or day classes at the University of Texas — those ideals I sculpted as a community college teacher flourished, up against the demeaning and detritus-like admonitions of deans, VPs, department chairs and others who never-ever really took the mission of education seriously enough to empower themselves to be part of the change needed to stop neoliberal policies.

It was democracy school and Clemente Course all the way wherever I taught, and that pissed off a lot of people. Content, delivery, process, engagement, cross-pollination, end products, outreach, media publicity. How I did and the degree for which I conquered student apathy and ignorance, well, that’s what got me in trouble.

Here’s what Bard College says of the Clemente course, which has been replicated in other places, including one of my abodes, Spokane, at Gonzaga University:

The Clemente Course provides college level instruction in the humanities, with the award of college credits, to economically and educationally disadvantaged individuals at no cost and in an accessible and welcoming community setting. Participants study four disciplines: literature, art history, moral philosophy, and American history. Like their more affluent contemporaries, students explore great works of fiction, poetry, drama, painting, sculpture, architecture, and philosophy, while learning also about the events that define America as a nation. The course also offers instruction in writing and critical thinking, while the seminar style of the classes and dialectical investigation encourage an appreciation for reasoned dialogue.

Isn’t that the about-face of Cormac McCarthy’s vision of The Road or No Country for Old Men? Truly, the discourse and dialogue only come from that edge of seeing the light, that place that Kroll alludes to by offering up Edward Said’s look at what the role of intellectual (artist, activist, community organizer, civil society, and, yes, adjunct freeway flyer) has IN SOCIETY and in COMMUNITY:

Edward Said argued that the public intellectual must function within institutions, in part, as an exile, as someone whose ‘place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or  corporations.’ From this perspective, the educator as public intellectual becomes responsible  for linking the diverse experiences that produce knowledge, identities, and social values in the  university to the quality of moral and political life in the wider society; and he or she does so by  entering into public conversations unafraid of controversy or of taking a critical stand (Giroux  140).

Embarrassing, confrontational, against orthodoxy, skeptical and against dogma, government and business defying. Wow, is it possible most adjuncts and full-timers never even crossed one of those Rubicons?

Here’s what Cormac McCarthy, who I knew when I taught and worked and rabble-roused in El Paso, has to say about the coming age of apocalypse and the technocrats working for the MBAs on their project of final economies of scale obsolescence of the general human species as conveyor of life. McCarthy was there, on the fringes, landed in El Paso just because he thought it would be a place where he wouldn’t be harangued by his celebrity.

He is the epitome of the dispossessed, acerbic, and contingent spiritually and nationally – here, an excerpt from a NYT article 21 years ago:

Since 1976 he has lived mainly in El Paso, which sprawls along the concrete-lined Rio Grande, across the border from Juarez, Mexico. A gregarious recluse, McCarthy has lots  of friends who know that he likes to be left alone. A few years ago The El Paso Herald-Post held a dinner in his honor. He politely warned them that he wouldn’t attend, and  didn’t. The plaque now hangs in the office of his lawyer.

For many years he had no walls to hang anything on. When he heard the news about his MacArthur, he was living in a motel in Knoxville, Tenn. Such accommodations have been his home so routinely that he has learned to travel with a high-watt light bulb in a lens case to assure better illumination for reading and writing. In 1982 he bought a tiny, whitewashed stone cottage behind a shopping center in El Paso. But he wouldn’t take  me inside. Renovation, which began a few years ago, has stopped for lack of  funds. “It’s barely habitable,’ he says. He cuts his own hair, eats his meals off a hot plate or in cafeterias and does his wash at the Laundromat.

McCarthy estimates that he owns about 7,000 books, nearly all of them in storage lockers. ‘He has more intellectual interests than anyone I’ve ever met,’ says the director  Richard Pearce, who tracked down McCarthy in 1974 and remains one of his few ‘artistic’ friends. Pearce asked him to write the screenplay for ‘The Gardener’s Son,’ a  television drama about the murder of a South Carolina mill owner in the 1870′s by a  disturbed boy with a wooden leg. In typical McCarthy style, the amputation of the boy’s  leg and his slow execution by hanging are the moments from the show that linger in the mind.

McCarthy has never shown interest in a steady job, a trait that seems to have annoyed both his ex-wives. ‘We lived in total poverty,’ says the second, Annie DeLisle, now a  restaurateur in Florida. For nearly eight years they lived in a dairy barn outside Knoxville. ‘We were bathing in the lake,’ she says with some nostalgia. ‘Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he  would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.’

McCarthy would rather talk about rattlesnakes, molecular computers, country music, Wittgenstein — anything — than himself or his books. ‘Of all the subjects I’m interested  in, it would be extremely difficult to find one I wasn’t,’ he growls. ‘Writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list.’

His hostility to the literary world seems both genuine (“teaching writing is a hustle”) and a tactic to screen out distractions. At the MacArthur reunions he spends his time with scientists, like the physicist Murray Gell-Mann and the whale biologist Roger Payne, rather than other writers. One of the few he acknowledges having known at all was the novelist and ecological crusader Edward Abbey. Shortly before Abbey’s death in 1989,  they discussed a covert operation to reintroduce the wolf to southern Arizona.

Discontented, disconnected, drawn-away from the very thing that now has made McCarthy a multi-millionaire. Pure asshole stuff, separating himself from anyone interested in taking a stab at his work. No interest in budding writers. Just a tragic guy with money, fame and an open ticket to Oprah’s show. But his books have things to say about us, this fragmented and earth eating and weather changing culture of fossil fuel gobbling … about our future …  about the wicked side of those who declare there will be blood on every business deal imaginable!

McCarthy used to regularly eat at a cafeteria in El Paso. A few times I spoke with him about the so-called drug war – drug tunnels, bodies dumped outside Juarez, Ollie North and contras. A discreet and inconsequential guy. No fanfare. Not much of a community player. Never would talk to my students at UT-El Paso’s creative writing program.  But, in that solitude, McCarthy gets what Kroll might be crawling toward in his piece about the oblivion of future community colleges – the seppuku inherent in schooling, teaching as a profession. McCarthy is a product of nihilism promoted by our neo-cons and neo-liberals.

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won’t even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted.  It’s more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it’s just a matter of figuring out the wiring.²

Yes, of course, the wiring is being figured out every day, and each gigabyte of information scrambling in those digital clouds and ether nets and IT Guantanamo’s will be the next new Reich of Education as Propaganda – MOOCs, or, Massive Open Online Courses. Who needs community colleges indeed? Or teachers?

Yes, the McDonaldization of higher education, thank you very much: See

You think maybe some of us already woke up to that calamity, that possibility, years ago? Here’s the opening of McCarthy’s The Road:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the  child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand  rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable  swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where  the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and  the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a  black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders.  It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching  there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind  it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from  side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly  into the dark.

Truly, the struggle with adjuncts-contingents-temporary-at-will faculty is that we have not been able to collectively embrace poverty and collectively act against the defamation of our humanity. Yes, defamation by some Full-timers, by dumb-downing deans, VPs and provosts, the CFOs and presidents, all those folk who perpetuate a class system, some would call apartheid lite for academics. Some giant “cold glaucoma dimming away the world” ?

Kroll advances a clarion call to us all:

In other words, we must act beyond the walls of our classrooms—in our  colleges, in our local communities, in our states, and at the national level—and resist the neoliberal dismantling of education that directly threatens the academic function of the community college. We have to model for our students the very same values and beliefs that we teach in the classroom. We  need to stand up and fight for faculty rights and resist any political and administrative actions  that threaten our ability to teach. We need to fight for more full-time faculty, while at the same time fighting the exploitation of part-time faculty. We need to work to strengthen our unions  and to fight for more faculty inclusion in college governance.

Indeed, we must fight to stop poverty, the huge wage imbalance, injustice in our communities, foreclosures on futures, disenfranchisement, and the money-lenders and wealthy class of folk who are hell bent on collapsing communities within the community wherever their stench follows them.  Maybe a little revolution, MLK, Jr. style?

King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a  reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation  of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.  — Cornel West

Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, amongst a crew of folk traveling in a week 3,000 miles to record the poverty, education, struggle in America  – thanks to the republicrats – came up with these five installments in October 2011.³

The precariat class of working professional teachers at the country’s colleges and universities may now exceed 1.5 million contingents – the New Faculty Majority –  and even more teachers who muck about with personal training, in corporations as coaches and teachers, and throughout our society where “teaching skills and thinking and fluency in things” is necessary to the bottom line of the bottom feeders of humanity – the privatizers.

But the world is perma-temp or at least a large chunk of it is, and “community of place” is being quickly replaced by a thinking that is global in reach – “community of purpose.” That is, for instance, working as a part-time or full-time employee for, say, the Bank of America or Walmart model – as a worker in these transnational and multi-national companies, you end up paying allegiance to the purpose of the company: profit and all actions motivated to please shareholders. Those potential economic blessings of the transnational corporation while living in those respective physical communities like Spokane, WA, or Cleveland or Tucson, where there are huge chunks of the cities that are flagging and deteriorating because no mom and pop or middle-sized market venture can compete with the economies of scale the McDonalds wield.  There is no real multiplier effect from Bank of America in Salem, Oregon, nor is there a commitment to growing families and communities within the community. What’s the value added of BoA when it pulls up stakes? When it, in fact, is a perpetrator in the community it functions in?

Take a look at what this economic hardship looks like.

Note the organization’s founding mother, someone not invited on the mainstream media or in any administration, red or blue or yellow striped.

Founding Editor: Barbara Ehrenreich, acclaimed journalist, author and Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, has worked with her IPS colleagues to synthesize and catalyze a broad consensus among working journalists, community organizers, service providers and policy analysts: the U.S. public and its policymakers need help confronting and addressing the scope and depth of economic hardship in the wake of the economic collapse of 2008 and its continuing reverberations. Her leadership role in EHRP is twofold.  She is writing big picture analytic pieces that remind us of the basics that the national conversation often ignores. Barbara is also working closely with other Project contributors as they develop and research their stories.

“Community” has never been a foundation to the very notion of “community college,” and that has been facilitated by the dog-eat-dog mentality of North Americans, saddled with the curse of genocide in its project of empire, manifest destiny and colonizing.

Maybe the Kroll essay was never meant to look at the prescient commentators who knew what the writing on the ledgers pointed to decades ago –  those neo-imperial cum liberal policies set down by the Chicago Boys, the World Bank, IMF, hell, the United Fruit Company and Coca Cola Inc.

I’m thinking of Jane Jacobs, Chris Hedges,  Eduardo Galeano’s trilogy, Memory of Fire or historian Fritz Stern and his The Politics of Cultural Despair. Hedges points out how powerful Cultural Despair is a: “… book on the rise of fascism in Germany, warns repeatedly of the danger of a bankrupt liberalism. Stern, who sees the same dark, irrational forces at work today that he watched as a boy in Nazi Germany, argues that the spiritually and politically alienated are the prime recruits for a politics centered around cultural hatreds and personal resentments.”

They attacked liberalism [fascists gaining power in 1930s Germany]  because it seemed  to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sense in liberalism the source of  all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new  national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from  their imaginary past, and from their faith.

— Fritz Stern

I’d say the very idea that community colleges ever held strong sway over the case for activist faculty, interested community partners, functional participatory democracy, smart leadership and a holistic approach to community development through engaged citizens, caring and supporting businesses, and keen and far-thinking policy makers and politicians is a bit thin at most, mythological at best.

Sure, some of us worked hard – AGAINST the corporate systems, the unending agnotology and amnesia of the middle road of academe, and even against the somewhat working class vestiges of a community college experience, say, in places like El Paso or Spokane.

In the end, in my 30 years teaching, from military installations, to federal penitentiaries, to community colleges, maquiladoras, four-year state Research 1 universities and a small private Jesuit non-profit college, I’ve faced off with despicable deans, disastrous department chairs, obscene administrators, balloon-brained boards, repugnant regents and, unfortunately, back-stabbing and anti-education/anti-student educators.

Fortunately, my experiences were not limited to this negative caricature, but rather full of exciting, dynamic and community-inspiring teachers, deans, students and active community supporters of the colleges I’ve worked for.

In the end, though, I’ve found faculty not capable enough to be the people they want students to be, to be those people they vaunt as they impart knowledge and critical thinking to a variety of folk encompassing some of the most diverse populations one will ever encounter on a daily basis in the United States. That is the fabric of old time community colleges!

We’ve unfortunately become the zits on the rear-end of capitalism, stripped of humanity as we colonize minds, cultures and entire ecosystems with our ennui and endless shopping cart nightmare.

“Twin totalitarianisms plague the world — the dictatorships of consumer society and  obligatory injustice,” Eduardo Galeano writes lamentably in Upside Down: A Primer for  the Looking-Glass World, a poetic, turbulent and clear survey of political and economic  systems of control around the world.

“Consumer culture, a culture of disconnectedness, trains us to believe things just  happen. Incapable of recalling its origins, the present paints the future as a repetition of  itself; tomorrow is just another name for today. The unequal organization of the world, which beggars the human condition, is part of eternity, and injustice is a fact of life we  have no choice but to accept.”

It’s a much defined role American consumer culture has had on faculty, on administrators, on the grand schemers of higher education as this panoply of tools for completing that business model of buy, buy, need,  need, seek, seek, want, want the soon to be obsolete and the viciously vain and unnecessary crap that defines not only a Walmartization of communities but of academe.

That’s the failure of education, whether we call it a community college or top rank Ivy League University. This consumer culture tied to empire and resource hording, the constant need to be something more than imagined history, that is what is breeding fascism of the soul.

I’ll wrap up Part Two of this screed with a connection to another DV voice, a piece published January 2, 2013 along with my “I am an English Teacher and I Don’t Need Not Stinking Badge … And I’m not going to take it anymore” piece, or whatever morphing title I find appropriate hours or days later.

It’s the academic freedom and banging your head against the wall as a teacher “thing.” Read it.

“How to Not Teach Physics” by Denis Rancourt. Just a little grist for that mill called higher education. Or K12. That administrator class of species. Those deans and department heads. Those purveyors of sneaking behind backs, derailing real education, culling the brain stems of students.

Note Rancourt’s battle when you hit the blog he’s set up fighting the black-booted smear his University of Ottawa leadership unleashed like the scum of the McCarthy era, or the Screen Actors Guild Ronald Reagan and his tattle-telling of lies against fellow actors and directors.

How is it then, tenured and in the trenches for twenty years, Rancourt gets libeled, smeared and little Eichmann-ed into persona non grata? SO much for the myth of academic freedom. Tenure for life.

Now multiply Rancourt’s pain and dismissal by a factor of 1.5 million. Or more. Part-time, at will, contracted for a year, maybe on three-year contracts, contingent faculty indeed will be the University of Ottawa’s dream team of subservient, submissive, schizophrenic teachers who fear the very shadow lurking in the hallways because alas making $2000 a class, or even $4500, at three or four classes allowable a year ($6-8K or $13500 to $18000 with PhD or Master’s) means always having to say Sir, Yes, Sir. Mama, of course, si, Senora!

Ya think innovation will happen under those conditions? Paradigm shift? Solution-based thinking? Just seeing Rancourt’s physics conundrum certainly brings up all sorts of examples I have as journalism, creative writing, literature, composition, research writing teacher. Certainly, I know science teachers at colleges in the US who have to give alternative assignments to students in biology classes or geology, WHEN those students come at them with fundamentalist fictions about the un-Holy Bible trumping all science.

Colleges that have young earth geology courses. Colleges that accept creationism AKA intelligent design as a valid form of scientific inquiry. I kid you not.

Is it any wonder that we are in a brave new world of work, a brave new world of double think and magical thinking and blighted critical thinking skills? Is it any wonder we have K12 teachers ending careers because they can’t TEACH?

So, what do we get when Juan or Jane or Kim Sung come to class? A deep and worthy k12 education under their belts … where teachers and community and students explore the systems of human-cultural-environmental-political-artistic ecologies? Nope.

So, yes, having my classes hit the ground running since 1983, with all sorts of varying narratives and propositions when these kids and adults would write persuasive papers, you bet I was the thorn in their asses, in their daddies’ asses, in the asses of the marketing spin doctors of religion, consumption, and war, in the asses of two-bit fornicating ministers and priests, or the laughable bosses who always wanted to run roughshod over their young employees’ college careers.

One big thorn in the administrative class of people who are a tribe of little Eichmann’s all to themselves.

Next stop – Part Three:

“Why Naomi Wolf Gasped When One Meat-head Tried Muscling an Adjunct Faculty Who Decided to Arm Lock Him to the Back of the Line” (Is it always this violent in Spokane? she asks).

• Read Part One.

1. “The End of the Community College English Profession,” TETYC, Dec 2012.
2. Cormac McCarthy, Wall Street Journal,  November 20, 2009.
3. Watch Part 1 – “Suffering to Speak”

   “I Had Everything”
   Part 2 of the series puts the spotlight on the new poor. Tavis also talks with Vicki B. Escarra, CEO of Feeding America.

   “No Room at the Inn”
   Part 3 focuses on the housing crisis. The conversation continues with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

   “Nothing Moves Without Us”
   Part 4 examines jobs and the unemployment crisis. Tavis also talks with the director of Columbia’s Earth Institute and co-founder of Millennium Promise Alliance Jeffrey Sachs.

   “The Fight of the Poor” The final installment of the series looks at the movement to end poverty across the country. Tavis also talks with Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners magazine.