03.31.07 – The Dismal Science Redux, Wal-Mart Espionage, Deconstructing Exurbia

Deconstructing the Dismal Science
“Economic theory and economic fact have long since parted company. And since we structure the world according to the theories of economists, this imperils just about everything.” Some thoughts on the disconnect between liberal democrat notions of economic theory and the reality out here, by Barry Lind in the American Prospect. (Free subscription required)

Big (Box) Brother
“It reads like a cold war thriller: The spy follows the suspects through several countries, ending up in Guatemala City, where he takes a room across the hall from his quarry. Finally, after four days of surveillance, including some patient ear-to-the-keyhole work, he is able to report back to headquarters that he has the goods on them. They’re guilty! But this isn’t a John Le Carré novel, and the powerful institution pulling the strings wasn’t the USSR or the CIA. It was Wal-Mart, and the two suspects weren’t carrying plans for a shoulder-launched H-bomb. Their crime was “fraternization.” One of them, James W. Lynn, a Wal-Mart factory inspection manager, was traveling with a female subordinate, with whom he allegedly enjoyed some intimate moments behind closed doors. At least the company spy reported hearing “moans and sighs” within the woman’s room.Now you may wonder why a company so famously cheap that it requires its same-sex teams to share hotel rooms while on the road would invest in international espionage to ferret out mixed-sex fraternizers. Unless, as Lynn argues, they were really after him for what is a far worse crime in Wal-Mart’s books: Openly criticizing the conditions he found in Central American factories supplying Wal-Mart stores.”

I suppose Wal-Mart has the right to spy on their people, but why do they?

Exurbia: Built on Paradox and Hypocrisy
“This situation is thick with paradox and hypocrisy; in supporting a draconian immigration crackdown, right-wing white America is rebelling against the builders of the modern-day fundamentalist-anarchist paradises that so many of its voters find so enticing. Just as the Hebrew slaves built the pyramids for the pharaoh, Mexican slaves built exurbia for white, middle-class America.”

03.30.07 - Somalia: They Should've Left Well Enough Alone

The US, UN, AU and all the other meddlesome actors on the international stage, that is. I see now by this story from the BBC that the violence and chaos level in the new Somali state is way, way worse than existed when the Somalis lived in stateless anarchy. Go figger? And yet the Brit news and analysis types think this progress. Like we anarchists like to say, "the best state is no state at all."

03.30.07 - Emma Goldman Had a Pretty Smile

Emma Goldman, age 21.

Why is it I wonder that whenever Emma Goldman's pic appears in an article the author always uses images of her as a very old woman? They don't usually do this with men do they? Maybe it just bothers me more because it seems to most eyes that men age better. Is this unconscious sexism on my part or some unnamed aspect of human psycho-biology. Who knows? Anyhow, I like this pic of EG better.

03.29.07 "Good Government" Not in the GOP's DNA?

"The third is that the alternative reality conveyed by the Republican media -- Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and their ilk -- has created a Republican activist base that is genuinely not reality-based, and from which the current generation of Republican pols is disproportionately drawn. And the fourth, pertaining specifically to the inability of the administration to stop politicizing government, is that good government is just not in their DNA. Bush and Rove are no more inclined to create a government based on such impartial values as law and science than they are to set up collective farms." Says a Washington Post blogger anyhow.

But is that really such a bad thing? I am cynical enough to say that the government that runs the state, (any state), is mainly concerned about it's own organizational maintenance, the care and feeding of it's political base, and maintaining it's hold on power; any good it does after tending to those goals first is coincidence or luck. How I see it any way.

03.07.07 – Nostalgia for the “Good Old Days” is Bullsh*t

Whether it’s the 1950’s, 60’s or ‘80s that you pine for, remember this; times have always been tough for the average American. To get anywhere at all requires a lot of preparation, effort, sweat, and a good dose of luck.

“Yet the very conservatives who marvel at the efficiency of our new, more mobile economy and extol the ‘flexibility’ of our workforce", say one Washington Post blogger, "decry the flexibility of the personal lives of American workers. The right-wing ideologues who have championed outsourcing, offshoring and union-busting, who have celebrated the same changes that have condemned American workers to lives of financial instability, piously lament the decline of family stability that has followed these economic changes as the night the day.

American conservatism is a house divided against itself. It applauds the radicalism of the economic changes of the past four decades -- the dismantling, say, of the American steel industry (and the job and income security that it once provided) in the cause of greater efficiency. It decries the decline of social and familial stability over that time -- the traditional, married working-class families, say, that once filled all those churches in the hills and hollows in what is now the smaller, post-working-class Pittsburgh."

03.01.07 Some Stuff I Found After the Fact

Doesn't that always happen?

When a Stranger Calls
“I'm not comfortable with clients calling me at home. If a situation is urgent and I need to speak with a client, I'd rather call the client myself than have my home phone number distributed to people I don't have personal relationships with." This is what Businessweek’s advice columnist said to tell your boss when she gives your home phone or personal cell number to contractors, vendors, clients, and whoever-the-hell-else without asking you first. Now what pray is your rejoinder if the boss then says: “Take the *&^%* calls bitch, or you’re fired!”?

The Gospel of the Wage Slave
“First, starting way back in the 1950s, you had to be ‘positive’ to get ahead in business, i.e., ready to see the glass half full even when it was lying shattered on the floor. Then, somewhere in the first few years of the 21st century, the bar was raised to ‘passionate.’ It wasn’t good enough to feel ‘positive’ about spending your day doing cold calls to potential customers in Dayton, you be had to be ‘passionate’ about it. And now, apparently, even that isn’t good enough – you have to develop a YES! Attitude, as in throwing back your head, balling up your fists, and screaming YEESSS!!! The purveyor of this new over-the-top, fan-like, enthusiasm is Jeffrey Gitomer, in his brand new Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude. What attracted me to the display in the bookstore was the odd packaging: a hardcover, but smaller than the average paperback, with a bright red ribbon for a page-marker (a biblical touch, someone in the publishing industry explained to me.) “

02.27.07 - Vulgar Libertarianism, Chattel Slavery, and Wage Slavery Cont’d

Actually Z., the preceding essay wasn’t a response to John DeLaubenfel’s column at Strike the Root. I posted that essay so as to have an easy and simple way to get my thoughts out onto the web so that I can refer to vulgar libertarian issues with a link, when needed, and so that I don’t have to continually re-Google and then compose and type unique answers each time I get asked questions about it. However, I’ll still take the compliment; so thanks!

John feels, (if I understand him correctly), that because in America there exists a somewhat freer, (for now) market for labor, and that with the 13^th Amendment added to the USC in 1865, making involuntary servitude illegal, that (ta-dah!) my concept of “wage slavery” (and some other people’s as well) must therefore be wholly impossible. Which, by the limited reasoning he uses, seems to be true; and which to my mind is a fine example of VLA.

Here is brief and non-technical comparison of “chattel slavery” versus what it means to be a “wage slave”, that I shamelessly cribbed from a Yahoo service meant to help kids with their homework. I am not an econo-Geek, and so I’ll leave the highly technical economic jargon to the websites and writers who are. But I do know and feel oppression when I see it, and have no compunctions about saying so. Or to admitting when I think someone has proved me wrong by more convincing evidence or a better argument. So with that preamble, let me begin.

“Chattel slavery is [like] owning a person like he/she was an animal.

Wage slavery is having someone in debt to you and [who is then] forced to work it off. The person working it off only falls deeper in debt, and is never able to pay off the original debt.

In chattel slavery the owner is able to kill, rape, and torture their property. Although killing was sometimes seen as the most extreme, and rarely done. The slave was nothing more then property.

Wage slavery existed in different parts of the country during different periods in history. The sharecropper would buy his supplies from the landlord at high prices. The sharecropper would then give half of his crop to the landlord for just using his land. The rest he could sell for a profit. The profit was never able to pay off the landlord though. Thus the landlord got money for half the share of the crop, plus the money for selling supplies at higher prices. This would in turn keep the sharecropper working the land in order to pay a debt off that could never be paid off.

Another version of this works like this. A coal miner lives on company property. The only store within miles is the company store. The company store sells everything at high prices. The miner goes in debt from the company store every month. Thus is forced to work every month to pay a debt that keeps on increasing by the month.

The only similarity is that the landlord/slave owner gets work done for a minimal cost while keeping the slave/worker from being able to leave.”

Chattel slavery can only be held in place by brute force, whether by a state or a private (that is, a non-state entity) oppressor. It just won’t work any other way. So, with that understood, let’s move on to the form with which chattel slavery was contrasted with.

People in modern America society get bogged down doing jobs that they don’t really like or want to do, but really have no choice but to do them. They get into debt up to their eyeballs in order to buy crap that they only think they need or want. Needs and wants, which if they examined them just a little more closely, they’d see are more trouble than they’re worth; and leading to a craving for possessions which end up owning them. They are on a self-imposed life style which to me constitutes a kind of slavery over the free human spirit. The selling of the most precious commodity (if one care’s to think of the irreplaceable and very limited seconds, minutes and hours of one’s lifespan as a commodity), all in order to pay off VISA, make their payments on their SUV or for other such like, and all of which strikes me as being a self-imposed form of spiritual slavery levied upon our real life circumstances, in real time. Time being one thing that can never be replaced or regained, at whatever price. I wonder how much people should care what their credit report says about them after they’re dead?

Now, some people have jobs that they like and pay them well enough; and so they wholly discount the concept of slavery to debt, to greed, to unlimited desire for things and such like, as impossible. I disagree.

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