Book 'em Danno!

The following clip is from Zappa's "The Untouchables" off of Broadway the Hard Way.

Oh, to dream....

I Dedicate This Verse To The Power Wardens In France AND The Rest Of The World

Come on, Come out of the rain.
Your not impressed;
your just too learned.
I took the book;
I lit the page.
Your sabbatical was burnin' !
Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet
fires in the street,
let's sully every stage.
Lick my lips;
twist my hips.
Oh Contessa,
I already did...
--Dan Bejar from 'Streets of Fire'

Q: What are Americans doing?

A: Watching it on TV.

One of the only social service projects I have heard of being added to the current U.S. budget considerations is a bill that would help Americans switch to a Digital TV format. This is in the wake of a push to switch all broadcasting to the digital format.
Cut education funding, medicaid provisions, taxes for wealthy Americans and multinational corporations
BUT, those in power will not allow for a majority of Americans to be without their TV,
no suh!

They might actually start talking to each other and discovering the truth.

Q: And what might be the 'truth'?

A: They are not the only ones suffering for lack of a decent quality of life.

So,
All you people watching and fearing for your own security.
Keep watching your digital TV.
The revolution might actually be televised.

The Economics of Security

Social and economic justice has always been the framework for my dissent with the status quo of my community and country. There has been a particularly nasty aberration of populist theory in practice since the Reagan years, whereby the resources of this country and the world have been consolidated and hoarded at the top 5% of the (inter-) national population. What I view as an unfair distribution of wealth is one of the main reasons for my entering this profession of social work. I feel that much work needs to done to reconcile the egregious inequalities of economic stratification.

There have also been times in my life when I have felt powerless over my lot in life. There have been key people (family members, friends, employers) who have been there at the right time to help me plow through the rough spots - for that I have been fortunate.

Through his participant observer research method in the book, Tell them who I am, Elliot Liebow crystallizes the analysis of our culture’s misguided ‘remedies’ for homelessness. As a culture, we start our therapy by informing the homeless person that the reason she is homeless is because of some overarching fault within her – we will help a woman who will relinquish her ‘self’ yield to the monolithic institutional roller coaster ride she is about to board.

This critique of the way in which we ‘help’ the homeless, of course implies the obverse argument – the system in which we exist is at fault. At the very end of the main text, Liebow examines why this may be a valid assessment:
…[H] omeless men and women and families are victims of the same system of free enterprise that has been so extraordinarily productive and generous to others. Viewed from the bottom, two of the most obvious system failures are the abject failure of the free market to provide minimally decent jobs and affordable housing for poor people (233).
Right. All the promises of the American Dream are only for those deemed worthy by the market. Viewed from above (that is, from a financially successful person’s perspective), unemployment and underemployment are natural occurrences in a self-adjusting economy of scarce resources, i.e., some people must be sacrificed for the good of the market (226).

It is at this point that the social worker is often found - with the duty to provide unemployed, homeless people with a way out of their predicament, yet with no real tools at his disposal. By real tools I mean jobs and a place to live (Liebow seems to agree). Sure, we are given policies that dictate who can receive what services, be they counseling, addiction treatment, skills training, etc. – and these options can help some individuals. However, this approach has been employed since LBJ’s Great society was implemented; and, notwithstanding the cuts in funding and services seen in the last 25 years, the approach is not working.

The question then remains, how do we convince a culture, like ours, besot by fear and endless war against an abstract enemy (terrorism) that we will attain that most coveted security if we simply redistribute the wealth, not only in our country, but also among the people of the world? It is only then that the people who use tactics such as suicide bombing, kidnapping, and hijacking will be less inclined to do so because their needs and their people’s needs will have been met; security will be awarded to those who allow for the security of others.

I find myself inspired by this book as a critique of systems in which social workers are pitted against poor folks in a battle over, ostensibly, scarce resources. Concurrently, I have been inspired recently by Hugo Chavez and his implementation of socioeconomic systems whereby the oil wealth of Venezuela (of which he is President) is reinvested in the people’s needs – socialized healthcare for everyone and affordable housing for the homeless. In an interview with Democracy Now! (Pacifica network radio show) he echoed his own statements to the U.N. two weeks previously, declaring, “If you want to eliminate poverty you must empower the poor – NOT treat them like beggars!” Indeed. The most salient contention I take away from reading Liebow’s Tell Them who I am is that, as social workers, we must strive to assist vulnerable populations at macro, mezzo, and micro levels. Working on a case-by-case basis is akin to the application of bandages to wounds that will never heal by simply covering them up.

Sovereignty of the People is Bad for Business

COSMETIC DEMOCRACY

As Americans, we really know how to put on a good show, don’t we? We have some form of an election at the local level every year and federal level every two years. Our representatives at the state and federal levels are becoming quite fanatical about the image they present to the public at large – wanting to appear as though they really feel our pain (or joy?) and are going to fight for policies that will raise up the majority of Americans struggling to make economic ends meet. This patina of empathy does little to hide the fact that most policies enacted by politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, favor the ‘personhood’ of corporations and their (in)vested interest in courting such companies to set up shop with tax incentives and deregulation of their beloved markets – ostensibly to create new jobs.

Oddly enough, at the turn of the last century, we were seeing corporate entities lobbying in favor of regulation for two reasons: to fund their newly forming entrepreneurial schema (especially tax dollars for ‘rough’ economic times… sound vaguely familiar?) and to create fair and competitive markets. Sure, some of these companies were building an infrastructure with the goal of serving a public want or need, e.g., utilities projects, mass communication networks, and mass transportation systems to name a few. However, as we moved into the second decade of the 20th century, fairness was replaced with the driving force of avarice in these ‘united’ states to this day – the ‘bottom line.’ And it is within this framework that one’s attention should now shift to recent socioeconomic events.

I believe, at the risk of being pegged a polemicist (ahem…), that within the past 35 years an ireful wave of populist rhetoric has infiltrated the federal and state levels of our governance (not to mention mainstream media). As Thomas Frank points out in a succession of two books (One Market Under God and What’s the Matter With Kansas?), we are treated to a grand play in the theater of our beloved infotainment media outlets that demonizes anyone who criticizes or questions policies that engender unmitigated free-market capitalism.

More specifically, as Frank points out, laissez-faire policies are apotheosized as the ultimate democratizations of the economic playing field. Therefore, any attempts to regulate or legislate ‘fair play’ within the bounds of the market is viewed (by free market ideologues) as unbridled evil – fascist elites tampering with the lives of all free Americans.

Regarding the gulf coast hurricane relief efforts, the beat goes on. Even though policies that have gutted the social safety net in this country have visibly failed, the market ideologues see this as an opportunity to experiment with even more cavalier economic policies they claim will create an ‘opportunity society.’

The robber barons of the welfare state, i.e., the leaders of many transnational corporations via their federal and state political surrogates, are offering tax incentives to contractors operating in the gulf region, elimination of environmental restrictions that will ‘hamper’ building, along with President bush’s suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act, which provides that the prevailing wage be paid to all laborers and mechanics employed by government contractors. The rest of the provisions (some even sound philanthropic. remember, read between the lines) are here - as compiled by Naomi Klein and The Nation.

Ultimately, these ‘opportunity zones’ put the wealth of funds for reconstruction into the hands of powerful business leaders (I’d like to call them ‘opportunity czars’). And when the ‘bottom line’ is printed in black numbers, who do you think will benefit from the wealth created by such massive reconstruction efforts? Furthermore, as our political leaders all vie for a spotlight in this massive relief effort to show how they really care about their economically marginalized citizens, watch for the legislation, passed and enacted, trickling right past those who ought to be empowered with the means of production and direction in rebuilding their communities.

David Brooks Equivocates, Kulanova Responds

The Bursting Point
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: September 4, 2005 NYTIMES

As Ross Douthat observed on his blog, The American Scene, Katrina was the anti-9/11.

On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged.

Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed.
The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.

And the key fact to understanding why this is such a huge cultural moment is this: Last week's national humiliation comes at the end of a string of confidence-shaking institutional failures that have cumulatively changed the nation's psyche.
Over the past few years, we have seen intelligence failures in the inability to prevent Sept. 11 and find W.M.D.'s in Iraq. We have seen incompetent postwar planning. We have seen the collapse of Enron and corruption scandals on Wall Street. We have seen scandals at our leading magazines and newspapers, steroids in baseball, the horror of Abu Ghraib.

Public confidence has been shaken too by the steady rain of suicide bombings, the grisly horror of Beslan and the world's inability to do anything about rising oil prices.

Each institutional failure and sign of helplessness is another blow to national morale. The sour mood builds on itself, the outraged and defensive reaction to one event serving as the emotional groundwork for the next.
The scrapbook of history accords but a few pages to each decade, and it is already clear that the pages devoted to this one will be grisly. There will be pictures of bodies falling from the twin towers, beheaded kidnapping victims in Iraq and corpses still floating in the waterways of New Orleans five days after the disaster that caused them.

It's already clear this will be known as the grueling decade, the Hobbesian decade. Americans have had to acknowledge dark realities that it is not in our nature to readily acknowledge: the thin veneer of civilization, the elemental violence in human nature, the lurking ferocity of the environment, the limitations on what we can plan and know, the cumbersome reactions of bureaucracies, the uncertain progress good makes over evil.

As a result, it is beginning to feel a bit like the 1970's, another decade in which people lost faith in their institutions and lost a sense of confidence about the future.

"Rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown/What a mess! This town's in tatters/I've been shattered," Mick Jagger sang in 1978.

Midge Decter woke up the morning after the night of looting during the New York blackout of 1977 feeling as if she had "been given a sudden glimpse into the foundations of one's house and seen, with horror, that it was utterly infested and rotting away."

Americans in 2005 are not quite in that bad a shape, since the fundamental realities of everyday life are good. The economy and the moral culture are strong. But there is a loss of confidence in institutions. In case after case there has been a failure of administration, of sheer competence. Hence, polls show a widespread feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are.
Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970's. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence. Maybe we are entering an age of hardheaded law and order. (Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P. nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk.) Maybe there will be call for McCainist patriotism and nonpartisan independence. All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.

We're not really at a tipping point as much as a bursting point. People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore.
E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com


Where is the 'Free-Market'?

Mr. Brooks,

I have been a reader of your column for about a year now. I am intrigued by your assertion that we have seen institutional failures at many levels in our society with the nimble and weasely analysis tacitly implying that the 'elemental violence of human nature' and 'cumbersome reactions of bureaucracies' are at least partially to blame. That you fail to mention the continuous and effective gutting of the social safety net (Nixon tried but he had other problems, didn't he?) since the robust free- market Reagan era and all of its promises of prosperity (What Happened?) is duly noted, Mr. Brooks.
Where is your beloved free-market now and its unregulated institutions which should have the economic means and lack of bureacracy to effectively end the suffering of the tens of thousands in New Orleans? - Not to mention the millions who live in abject poverty in other urban and rural communities alike.

Somebody send in WAL-MART... HURRY!

I find your commentary here equally smarmy and off-the-mark, as usual.

-chairman kulanova

THE BOLD NEW FACE OF DEMOCRACY

"We were rushed up to the front of the ballroom, where it smelled even more strongly of tobacco and whiskey. Then we were pushed into place. I almost wet my pants. A sea of faces, some hostile, some amused, ringed around us, and in the center, facing us, stood a magnificent blonde ‚– stark naked. There was dead silence. I felt a blast of cold air chill me. I tried to back away, but they were behind me and around me. Some of the boys stood with lowered heads, trembling. I felt a wave of irrational guilt and fear. My teeth chattered, my skin turned to goose flesh, my knees knocked. Yet I was strongly attracted and looked in spite of myself. Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked. The hair was yellow like that of a circus kewpie doll, the face heavily powdered and rouged, as though to form an abstract mask, the eyes hollow and smeared a cool blue, the color of a baboon‚’s butt. I felt a desire to spit upon her as my eyes brushed slowly over her body. Her breasts were firm and round as the domes of East Indian temples, and I stood so close as to see the fine skin texture and beads of pearly perspiration glistening like dew around the pink and erected buds of her nipples. I wanted at one and the same time to run from the room, to sink my eyes through the floor, or to go to her and cover her from my eyes and the eyes of the others with my body; to feel the soft thighs, to caress her and destroy her, to love her and murder her to hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed upon her belly her thighs formed a capital V."

-from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (prelude to the Battle Royal). [America the Beautiful...indeed]

Let us not forget the ugly...
There is a particularly nasty aberration of Populism that has nearly taken over this country in the past thirty years (you might have noticed... maybe not). It is interesting because though our daily lives don't operate democratically, we (as a whole) still cling to the notion these 'united' states are run with the best interests of its people in mind. Though officially a republic, many in the public are beholden to private interest.
Sure, every few months we apply an election to our rumpled visage. Our illusorily elected officials often allow for ballot initiatives - applying the 'rouge' of self-governance. Ultimately, the system under which we are ruled offers only cosmetic accoutrements in the place of true democratic rule. Until the resources and means of production are in the control of the people (economic democracy) we will continue to be ruled by corporate despots with our own government as the 'banana republic.' This is the subject of my next essay (sound familiar?). Coming soon.


David Brooks of the New York Times has already asked the question that always follows any assault on capitalism: "If not capitalism, then what economic system SHOULD we implement?" We will get there next David, we will get there...

#10 Coronation St.

I guess I missed the coronation. Again. For the first time in history the customer has achieved the status of royalty via the power of Internet communication (at least according to the Economist – April 2, 2005 ed.). This ‘consumer-king’ is another in a long line of abstractions from the reality of life, as many people know it – abstractions that form the ‘market mythos.’ It may be true that the advent of Internet technology has borne an increasingly well informed consumer and this means marketers and admen have to constantly tweak the way in which they help their brands stand out from the constant barrage of product offerings aimed at their targets… excuse me, consumer-kings.

However, stating that the consumer (I suppose this means your ‘everyday jack’) has absolute power over the availability, price, and quality of goods and services he purchases is stretching the reality of most buying situations in which he finds himself (how much are you paying for gasoline currently?). Moreover, let’s keep in mind the dramatically stratified economic class structure in which we exist. A more realistic assertion would be that the consumer is king to the extent that his income will allow him.

The Economist’s 14 page ad campaign for the idea the market is now run by the consumer is disconcerting to those of us still weary from the previous decade of propaganda promoting the unregulated free market as the only viable and efficient way to democratize our society. In that paradigm, government regulators and trade union leaders were labeled ‘elites’ whose aim was to keep the common man from getting a larger piece of the wealth pie in America – and their power to distribute wealth more equitably was, in turn, obliterated.

What the Economist and its ilk are telling us is that you don’t need to have government and unions regulating the market forces in order to insure consumer power – through the Internet and word of mouth, the market will do this on its own. ‘Now go buy your power!’

Furthermore, one might argue that this idea of a consumer-king is the culmination of the market mythos – a religion deeming the unfettered market as an infallible entity. Just as the neo-liberal economic model predicted, the market has aligned itself with the individual. Now, after you stop laughing, consider that for this to be more than a hollow concept, all consumers must have approximately equal access to this market. In a society organized with a high degree of disparity in income (as in America), those with more money have more influence in the market and the decisions made in the interest of the ‘consumer-king.’ 1

After this analysis, the question remaining is, which consumers have been crowned? The market ‘priests’ would say, “those who choose to participate.” Ah, the wonders of almighty enlightenment! Cathleen Whiting addresses the issue of marketplace choice quite tangibly here, “Living in substandard housing because it is the only way to afford adequate food for one’s children cannot be reasonably interpreted as a voluntary choice for food over adequate housing services…” 2 One might assert that this has nothing to do with the way the Internet has (or hasn’t) championed the individual in the marketplace. Notwithstanding this observation, it is also rather unlikely that the mother above would even have Internet access.

Sure, the Internet has revolutionized the way many people shop for products and services – while leaving half the population with little or no Internet access out-of-the-loop. Moreover, the Internet has not changed the inordinately disparate economic class structure in the U.S. So, before we rush the choir on stage to sing the praises a new consumer monarchy in the free market society we must first consider who is (not) being allowed to 'play store' and who owns the 'kingdom.'


Aside: I tried to access a link to the Economist article referred to above
but was told by the server that this was 'premium material' - Indeed... Anyway, if you are so inclined,it is the cover story for the April 2nd 2005 issue.

cheerio!

gp


Notes

1. Cathleen Whiting, “Income Inequality, the Income Cost of Housing and the Myth of Market Efficiency,” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology Oct. 2004 v63 i4.
2. Ibid.

EXCUSES

This is about as personal as I will get. The combination of my grandfather's ailing health and other academic commitments has left me with little time for this forum. I will be posting something within the next week.
The next topic: Has the Internet really crowned the consumer king? According to some 'cogs' in the greater world totalitarian machine, yes it has. More to follow...

kulanova