Maximum Wage

Portrait of Australian Mining Billionaire Gina Rinehart by acclaimed artist Vincent Namatjira.  National Gallery of Australia has refused to accede to Rinehart's demand for it to be taken down.

What if the highest annual compensation for anyone in any company could be no more than ten times the salary of the lowest paid employee?  What if no one could make more than a million dollars a year or have more than ten million in assets.   Easy!  You say.  Entrepreneurialism would die.  Creativity would die. Why try if you could never get rich trying?   It's obvious!  Only it's wrong.  I’ll tell you what would happen. The incentives to be head of a company would change.  Those motivated only by money would be relegated to the dustbins of history and because of it, the world would become a much better place.  Now the incentive for  a person to be head of an enterprise would be not a thirst for Power and money and dominance. That would be impossible. They would instead be motivated by a desire to do the work. The mission of companies would change from unlimited growth at the expense of everything and everybody else to fulfillment of a need. 

In truth there have been periods even in American history in which salaries were limited by a tax rate designed to take the burden for funding the public projects that are the domain of our shared government off the backs of the lowest paid in the county and place it where it more properly belongs, off of those who make more money than any person has a moral right to make. The tax rate in the Eisenhower years was 90% for the top bracket.  That forced civility was responsible for the building of our interstate system and infrastructure, for a general prosperity of large working and middle classes and for the building of our space program from scratch.  The tax rate of the top bracket was 70% when Ronald Reagan took office and 30% when term limits mercifully ejected him.   (Yes that was B-movie has-been Ronald Reagan dogging around the worst developments of recent history yet again).  Today in the US, the limit on the amount that the top paid can be taxed is 37%.  Thanks to loopholes, exceptions, deductions and finaglings of what philosopher Ingrid Robeyns calls the "wealth defense industry", many many of our most heavily salaried and the corporations they run pay next to nothing.  This means the burden for keeping our shoestring government together falls on those who are among the most financially precarious themselves.

Robeyns's new book Limitarianism makes the case that unlimited wealth for the tiny minority is not merely immoral for many certifiable reasons but an extravagance that the species and the planet can no longer afford and the cause of the majority of our most urgent crises.  The top 1% in income (78 million people) are responsible for the same amount of global warming pollution as the bottom two-thirds (roughly 5 billion of the planet's 7.8 billion people).  The top 10% (780 million) are responsible for as much as the other 90%.  Through their investments, their wealth and their extravagant lifestyles, Billionaires (of whom there are currently around 2781) are responsible for more than a million times the global warming of those in the bottom 90%.

The extent of the problem of the overpaid is poorly understood (probably on purpose).  Robeyns describes an experiment in which people are asked to guess their own place on the spectrum of wealth; to estimate what percentage of wealth is owned by each of the 5 quintiles of the world's population organized by wealth; and to assess a more equitable distribution.

The perfectly equal distribution gave each of the five groups exactly 20 percent of all wealth. A somewhat less equal distribution gave each of the quintiles a different share of the total wealth. They received, respectively, 36 percent, 21 percent, 18 percent, 15 percent, and 11 percent of all wealth. The last option was the actual wealth distribution in America in 2005, with the five groups holding 84 percent, 11 percent, 4 percent, and virtually nothing for the last two groups. A whopping 92 percent of respondents choose the second option.

The top 20 percent of the population at the time of the study had 84.4 percent of wealth, but respondents thought it was 58 percent. They wanted it to be even smaller, namely 31 percent. The bottom 20 percent had almost no wealth (0.1 percent, to be precise), yet participants in the study thought they had 3 percent, and would want them to have about 11 percent

Robeyns theorizes, probably accurately that people identify with the wealthy and advantage them in the study as they would like themselves to be advantaged should they attain the wealth to which we are all born to aspire.  Similar logic applies to why inheritance taxes are so unpopular even though they are structured to mitigate the unearned advantage that offspring of the wealthiest have by virtue of being "born on third base."  While we like to think our own children will not be penalized for whatever meager wealth we can pass on to them, inheritance tax loopholes are designed to keep money that does not belong in the concentration that the wealthy have it in away from the type of government program that could do the most public good.  The "trickle up" nature of our economy that funnels the meager earnings we can make down here to the already bursting coffers of the wealthy up there is designed to make it ever harder for those at the bottom of the pyramid to ever scale the walls.  This rigged system nevertheless produces a class of wealth hoarder who thinks his wealth is earned.  But as Robeyns writes: 

It is fodder for psychologists why so many people have such a great urge to believe that they are strong, capable of life on their own. We are not. None of us can survive very long without other human beings

As Robeyns asks:

How can Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple and who became a billionaire thanks to Apple, sleep peacefully at night knowing about the poor, sometimes horrendous, working conditions endured by men and women in the assembly line of Apple’s Chinese factories?

Fortunately the target of capitalistic excess is a huge one and Robeyns offers several attacks to undertake to bring us closer to a more egalitarian world:

Dismantle neoliberal ideology - It's beyond time to end the hegemony of the well-funded, deviously strategic but ultimately intellectually impoverished neoliberals-- the single greatest cause of our nearly universal misery and a persistent obstacle to a better future for all.

Reduce class segregation - Robeyns suggests that the ultra-wealthy, being rightfully paranoid about mingling with the masses whose lifeblood enriches them by the minute and willfully ignorant of the misery their greed breeds, might not be able to withstand their choices if confronted more regularly with people not of their own class.  Likewise exposure to the lifestyles of the rich and famous could be an eye-opening experience for the many who live with the cognitive dissonance of our chosen disparity by tamping down an appreciation of the extent of the injustice being perpetrated against them daily by the slim minority.

Establish a balance of economic power  - As most of the nominal democracies of the world have set up balances of political power between the branches of government to keep any of them from dominance over the others, Robeyns proposes the establishment of regulations, laws and institutions to balance the currently unbridled power of the wealth-defending financial sector of the economy.

Restore the government’s fiscal agency - specifically to return to the saner progressive tax rates of the Eisenhower era and beyond.  It is high time to end the party at our expense, and to once again begin to expect the kind of service and public good of our government that we deserve and that our current structure-- dependent as it is on our own broke asses-- deprives us of.

Confiscate dirty money and pay reparations for past harms - Robeyns returns again and again to the theme of dirty money (a la Tim Cook, or the mediocre in every way except luck descendants of the many who made their fortunes leaving a trail of broken, dead bodies in their wake).  Most of the super wealthy are unclean, but they could purify themselves by repairing the harm they or their forebears did.

Make the international economic architecture fair - The more you know about the behavior of Americans and other Western powers in the world, the clearer it is that our might has almost never been right.  The vampiric International Monetary Fund; our campaigns of anti-communist terror; our excursions into every corner in order to assert our dominance.  Our superiority is in the way we brandish our gall.  We are the free riders.  It needs to stop and it needs to be reversed so that the planet can breathe free at last.

Limit executive pay  - In essence establish a maximum wage.  Some have thought that every billionaire being a policy failure, $1 Billion is the nice round number we should use.  Too high says Robeyns who suggests $10 Million as a starter figure (a maximum from which she thinks we should only go down.)  I say why stop at $10 Million.  Convince me it needs to be more than $1 Million.

Lastly, Halt the intergenerational transmission of wealth - If it rids the world of the billionaire class by attrition, perhaps we should do it first.

A pandemic of fun

Squardle

The world was in a state of flux.  It was supposed to be the end of history, but a 'novel' virus had forced a restructuring of the day if not of society, and it felt for a moment as if anything was possible.  Anything was possible.  There was talk of abolishing the police for a minute.  Juneteenth became a federal holiday. 

But what happened next was Joe Biden.  Sure there was an insurrection.  Russia invaded Ukraine.  Many of us are now earning our daily bread without leaving the house.  Who would have thought even 1 month before?  But I think the most revolutionary thing that came out of that period of flux was Wordle.  You heard me.  A simple online game developed by a Welsh software engineer named Wardle.  Almost echoing the trajectory of the novel coronavirus of 2019, it debuted in October 2021 but almost without warning by February of 2022 it had conquered the planet, once again altering people's days.  The rules were reminiscent of the old board game for two, Word Mastermind, although it was now human versus a computer generated puzzle.  The object is simple.  The player uses 5 letter words to guess a 5 letter word of the day and has 6 tries to guess.  With each guess the player learns through color coded clues how close their guess has come to the mystery word-- yellow indicating a correct letter in the wrong position, green indicating a correct letter in the correct position and grey meaning the letter is not in the mystery word.  The mystery words tend to be common words known to all, but to add to the level of difficulty, letters can repeat (as in EVERY, KAYAK, POPPY).  To a novice, the challenge can be daunting, but both the list of valid guess words and of mystery words is finite (guess words have a larger list and can include plurals and past tense-- mystery words tend not to be plural or past tense), and experience quickly teaches you that the puzzle can be solved usually without a lot of difficulty.  In spite of its simplicity or because of it, the game spread like a disease.

It instantly spawned a genre of YouTubers who turned a solitary pastime into a spectator sport.  The game itself inspired a proliferation of imitators to devise variations on the theme. Every time you turned around a new game popped up-- among them, Dordle in which the object was to solve 2 words simultaneously with the same clue; Xordle for solving 2 words with no overlapping letters within a single grid; Quordle for a 4-grid, 4-word solve; Octordle for an 8 word solve; and the more inscrutably named Sedecordle and Duotrigordle for 16 and 32 word puzzles respectively.  There were likewise variations in the length of the mystery word including an up-to-11-letter puzzle and variations in the rules and in  the degree to which the results of each guess helped or hindered  the solve. The most elaborate variation was perhaps Squardle with 6 words in multiple directions to solve within 10 guesses (plus a bonus guess for each solve) and an elaborate system for communicating in each direction the closeness of each guess to any of the mystery words. Speaking for  myself, the new class of puzzle came to dominate my leisure time.  Aside from Wordle, all the variations continue to be free; the only compensation an occasional appeal from the games' developers for a voluntary donation -- a "cup of coffee"-- for those enjoying the site.

After a year of obsession with doing every offshoot, I have finally settled into a more manageable routine involving only the most wordle-like variants, which I call the wordle multiples.  Somehow the smaller the solution set, the more nerve-wracking the experience.  Wordle isn't such a problem anymore, but I sweat it out through Dordle, Quordle and Octordle.  By the time I get to the 16-word Sedecordle I've hit a sort of stride with the solve, and am usually able to achieve a Zen-like state with the 32 word Duotrigordle.  At least that was the case until a recent update to the latter.  

Wordle being the offering of the staid NY Times, its solution words tend toward the palatable for mass consumption.  The same holds true for all but the 32-word variant.  For some reason (I was guessing a function of either the exponentially larger demand for 5-letter solution words or the presumed youth of its creator?), Duotrigordle's list of words included a larger share of words defying "The Breakfast Test"-- body parts and bodily functions, and an especially large list of double entendres that in some contexts could be considered ethnic, ableist or homophobic slurs.  I have never said I'm not a prude*, but when it comes to censorship, I like to think I am capable of setting aside my own delicate sensibilities for the sake of free thought.  For this reason, I put up with the expanded list (expanded list or not, words will repeat eventually for a 32-word puzzle), but I had to admit, the slurs ate at me.  A thought experiment clarified for me why this was a different category of offense than the carnal and the scatological.  

The thread that bound the slurs as a category was their punching down quality.  I had not encountered any words that could be taken as a slur against the white, male or wealthy.  I imagined the letter I would write to the developers of the game broaching the topic, and it occured to me that rather than asking for the slurs that I objected to to be removed,  I could suggest that the missing slurs be added.  I imagined this would be a clever demonstration to the game's developer that some words could be construed as hurtful and should be removed.  But in truth, even if the developer took my suggestion at face value and added slurs for the white, wealthy and male,  this would be an acceptable compromise that would not involve "censorship" or "wokeness".   I was not exactly prepared to stop playing the game on a regular basis regardless of the outcome (even if I was completely ignored), but this approach I decided was something I could live with.  

Before I could get it together to write the suggestion, however, I happened to notice a major revision of the game.  Among the features, the developer listed a revised "family friendly" vocabulary.   Several words that could be perceived as objectionable had been removed.  Meanwhile 350 new words had been added that would enhance the enjoyment of the game.   Had a fellow prude anticipated my strategem and made a persuasive case?  Whatever!  I could cross writing to the developer off of my list.

As I continued to play the game, however, I discovered that the developer has "enhanced" the word list by adding random proper nouns, arbitrarily acceptable plurals and past tenses and obscure computer jargon, thus increasing the difficulty of the game to nearly an unenjoyable level.   What's more, it was clear that while body parts and bodily functions had been removed, some of my least favorite punching down slurs continued to appear in the puzzles.  I'm not ready to give up the game just yet.  But I may have bought the developer his last cup of coffee for a while.

~~~~~

* I'm not a prude by choice mind you.  I'm also not the kind of prude who thinks people should kowtow to my delicate sensibilities.  On the contrary, I am convinced that prudery, something I may have been born with or that was foisted on me as the result of trauma of some kind, is my flaw that I need to protect undamaged people from.

Nätse Jummal / Kesköö

Ansambel Triskele sings an 18th Century Estonian folk hymn:

Estonian (Eesti Keel):

Nätse Jummal, siin ma rummal,
heida enda põlvile
henga rikmist too ma sinole.
Las’ hend’ löüdä, las’ hend’ löüdä
minost, kes ma patane.
Kae no jälle, minno pääle,
Issand ole armulik!
Sinno püvvä mina, mullatükk.
Las’ hend’ löüdä, las’ hend’ löüdä
ole mulle armulik.
Ei ma püvvä, ei ka nõvva
muud, kui sino halestust:
seda saa’ kel’ näütät armastust.
Las’ hend’ löüdä, las’ hend’ löüdä
sinost saa ma õnnistust.
Taiva selgus, henge valgus,
ilma-süütä voonaken!
Havvan heng käüp otsma peioken’.
Las’ hend’ löüdä, las’ hend’ löüdä
väkev Jummal-inemin’!
Issand, kuule, kui mu huule
valusaste laulva sull’.
Alandusel käüb mu matal hääl:
las hend löüdä, las’ hend’ löüdä
Jeesust himmostap mu meel!
Tühi kära, ilma vara,
lihahimo, au nink lust
saadap mulle vallu, kannatust.
Las’ hend’ löüdä, las’ hend’ löüdä
anna õiget valmistust. 

English (I've done my best):

Good God, kneeling down before you I am stupid,

Deliver me from corruption.

Let me find him , what a sinner I am.

Come on again, let's go

Lord have mercy!

That is me, piece of dirt.

Let him find me, let him find me

be kind to me.

I don't care, I don't care

for anything but your pity:

that's what you get when you show love.

Let him find me, let him find me

I will be blessed by you.

The clarity of the sky, the henge light,

darkness outside the window!

I run breathless to the window.

Let him find me, let him find me

mighty God-man!

Lord, hear my lips

it hurts to sing to you.

In humiliation my low voice goes:

let him find me, let him find me

My heart loves Jesus!

Empty noise, no property,

No lust for flesh, joyful thanks 

send me strength, patience.

Let him find me, let him find me

give me proper preparation.

~~~~~

As a bonus, another "folk hymn".  This one from 1970's Soviet Estonia.  Kesköö (Midnight), presented by Els Himma:

Kesköö:

Mõni hetk on nukrust täis

Ja ajab närvi mind –

Tundub justkui oleks keegi

Lihtsalt ära peitnud sind

Kui ma päeval viibin

Sinust eemal teiste seas

On mul siiski olla hea

Pole muremõtteid peas

Aga tõuseb kuu

Ja järsku värisen kui haab

Nagu mingi rumal hirm

Siis mu üle võimust saab

REFR.: Kesköö on see aeg

Pikk öö ootab eel

Kesköö on see aeg –

Uus päev kaugel veel...

Õhtutaeva kaar

On nagu apelsinilõik

Vaikses pargis särab tiik

Ja hinges mul on hästi kõik

Jälle oled kaugel...

Õnnetähte usun ma –

Tean ju küll, et iga hetk

Mu juures olla sa ei saa

Kuid siis koju pöördun

Varjud mustad juba maas

Minu järel sulgub uks

Lööb kell ja kartus algab taas

Midnight:

Some moments are full of sadness

And it makes me nervous -

It seems as if someone

Just didn't hide you

When I stay in the day

Away from you among others

I still have to be good

No worries in mind

But the moon rises

And suddenly I'm shaking like an aspen

Like some stupid fear

That I will be overpowered

REFR.: Midnight is the time

A long night awaits

Midnight is the time -

A new day is far away...

The arc of the evening sky

It's like an orange slice

A pond shines in a quiet park

And in my soul, everything is fine

You are far away again...

I believe in a lucky star -

I know that any moment

You can't be with me

But then I return home

The shadows are already black

The door closes behind me

The clock strikes and the fear begins again

Patriots and Immigrants

Have you, like me, observed a disconnect between the student protests we're seeing on college campuses across the country against  Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and against the investiture of their academic institutions in the munitions and policy industries that make the genocide possible and the response of those universities and the mainstream media to the protests as though they were contextless outpourings of a burgeoning anti-semitism among college and university students?  Considering that the organizers and participants in these demonstrations are to a great extent Jewish themselves, you would be forgiven for thinking that something else is going on with the response of the elites.  And you  would not be wrong.  What we are seeing, specifically, is cowardice.  Those college presidents who are across the board involving local constabularies and militias to strongarm and clampdown on what have started out as peaceful protests are performing a sleight of hand to try to distract you from their suppression of their student's timeless impulse to apply their growing knowledge of the world's injustices to a plea for something different, and an assault on their right to say it.  The attention of these presidents to what is happening on their campuses is selective.  By tradition, they’re modeling their concern to the specifications of the biggest pains in their ass; they’re proxying for the pains they can’t defeat, the pains that can ruin them (and probably still will regardless) and that have no doubt demanded the response that we're seeing, and they’re focusing their clampdowns on the gnats (they think) they can defeat who in any case can’t do shit about it.  It couldn’t be clearer how venal and cowardly the presidents are being.  I don't believe for a second that they have given a thought to what is right.  I don’t think it figures into the calculation.  I don’t think they care how they are coming across to anybody who isn’t the Lobby (thanks to which they are getting abundant support from a compliant media that is helpfully mis-seeing what is so plain to those of us who don't have AIPAC shouting into our ears.)  But the timidity of college and university presidents should not be a complete surprise.  It wasn’t long ago that 3 presidents who were visibly annoyed at the bullshit-- and clueless as to how to navigate it-- got taken down in the blink of an eye.

The shoddy conflation of condemnation of Israel's mass murder of Palestinian civilians who it deems collateral damage in the one-sided revenge war it is waging as a feeble pretext for its designs on the beachfront real estate of Gaza with antisemitism is merely one example of the belaboring that is increasingly required to maintain the fallacies of our neoliberal era and Israel and the West's colonial project in Palestine.  It feels as if the façade of lies that have masked the true workings of our institutions and the power elite that run them-- lies that we have obediently never questioned if never outright believed-- have been toppling one by one.  It's a wall of dominoes that has no end.  It’s hard to find a stopping place for a starting point.  Gaza is one example but our truly bizarre election of 2024 is another.   

I was thinking recently that in the US there are really 2 classes-- Patriots and Immigrants.  Patriots are the mostly white, male, Anglo, Christian colonists (and their womenfolk) who think they are the inheritors and guardians of the American mission.  The American revolution was a bit of theatre to establish the US as something new, but it was really a continuation of what had been going on in Europe.  What was new was the birth of an elite that was not beholden to a nobility. The Patriots are the product and re-producers of that revolution.  As zealous adherents to a doctrine of their own exceptionalism, Patriots are particularly bad citizens of the world (case in point their adventurism in the third world; case in point their leadership in doing nothing about global warming other than making it worse; case in point their enabling of Israel's violence). 

The Immigrants is everybody else (including yours truly though the immigration that my forebears did was generations ago-- the immigrant can't be washed away by dropping babies on American soil; including also the descendants of those were immigrated against their will to supply free labor for the Patriots; including also those who were here before the Patriots came, whose ancestors' otherness exiled them before the Patriots established their foothold across the Atlantic from Europe with the help of their own colonizing genocide).  Some immigrants assimilate and fancy themselves Patriots and either serve the Patriots as constables or as military proxies for their adventures, and in some cases are allowed to assume Patriot identities for purposes of swelling the Patriot’s numbers.  But otherwise immigrants pollute America with nuance and foreign ideas and “enlightenment”.  They’ve been tolerated because they do supply the fodder and the reserve army of labor, but now that their number threatens the Patriot core we are starting to see some real unhinged bs from the Patriots.  

University presidents used to be Patriots but more and more they are Immigrants (and women-- the Columbia President is not just an Egyptian born British and American academic but a baroness who is on leave from the British House of Lords) -- but there is a large class of immigrants that have been fooling themselves into thinking they can merit inclusion in the Patriot class-- which I think has been “true enough” (meaning not true at all but not worth caring about from a Patriot perspective) but now that the immigrant meritocracy has infiltrated society I think we’re seeing it clash up against the Patriot core.

 Biden and Trump are both Patriots and in their doddering unstable persistence in clinging to the reins of power (and in their insistent preoccupation with Anti-Immigrant posturing), fitting symbols of that class's decrepitude.  The mission of the immigrants is to abandon the course of ascension by what the Patriot's would bestow on them as merit.  The response of the mostly immigrant class youth on our nations' campuses to the call to dissent in recent days is a hopeful sign of different days to come.  They can't get here soon enough.

Vote This Mess Around

I thought I knew what I was going to do when it came time to vote in my state primary this year. I live in a closed primary state so must vote in the democratic primary if I bother to vote at all.  After spending most of my adult life (since Bill Clinton's presidency at any rate) as a registered independent, I registered Democrat in 2016 to vote for Bernie Sanders.  I was happy to vote for Bernie in 2016, and in 2020, and I've remained a Democrat in hopes that I could vote for him again in 2024, but alas that was not to be.  Nevertheless on the theory of "Not Me. Us", in order to cast a protest against Biden's bid for re-election (just the latest Democratic Party example of what's wrong with this entrenched oligarchic duopoly and with electoral politics in general as practiced in this incredibly dysfunctional shambles of a country), I was content to vote for the 2024 challenger whose platform most closely adhered to Bernie's.  That would be Marianne Williamson for those who missed it.  Not a perfect substitute for Bernie by any means, just the only substitute-- and an adequate one.  

When Williamson suspended her campaign after dismally poor showings in the first 3 primary states (see my explanation here for why this was not a surprise), Michigan had not yet happened.  Before Michigan, as long as I had a preference, I saw no reason to consider changing my plans simply because my candidate stopped campaigning.  But in Michigan, the push for voters unhappy with Biden's continued support of Israel's slaughter of Gazans under a pretext of "war against Hamas" to vote for "Uncommitted" in the primary  registered enough votes (over 100,000 or 13%) to send two Uncommitted delegates out of 117 for the state to the Democratic convention, wildly exceeding anyone's expectations. It was the first alternative option to give Biden a run for his money in his party's primary.  Moreover, occurring as it did in a battleground state, it appeared to have had the demonstrable in-the-moment effect of changing the national conversation around Israel which to that point had been content to pretend that any dissent among rank-and-file Democrats toward Biden's support of Israel's assault on Gaza was not a threat to his re-election.

The question for me became, do I stick with my original plan to cast a rather ineffectual vote for Marianne Williamson's platform as a faint protest against Biden's re-election in spite of a lack of support congealing around her ?  Or do I sacrifice  the expression of a desire for a new direction for the country embodied in the rich multi-plank platform that Marianne Williamson is running on in order to join  a groundswell of support for voting "Uncommitted" for the single issue of Gaza?  Should my symbolism be an almost whimsical expression of my individual desires or should it reflect solidarity with a growing number of people on a single issue that I care deeply about-- and in a way that for a moment appeared to be making a difference?*  This remained the question even after Marianne Williamson, inspired by the success of "Uncommitted" in Michigan, unsuspended her campaign following Super Tuesday.  While I was never able to fully commit, I was leaning rather precariously toward solidarity.

And then something pissed me off.  It started with watching a fairly recent appearance of Marianne Williamson on Briahna Joy Gray's Bad Faith podcast, in which Gray sought Williamson's response to a rather unhinged rant against her by Norman Finkelstein on Sabby Sabs' show.  While Gray's selection of clips from the interview did not clarify Finkelstein's vehement and visceral objection to Marianne Williamson, Gray implied it had largely to do with Williamson's stance on Israel.  While she condemns Hamas's October 7 attack on Israeli civilians unlike Finkelstein (both deplore the violence, but Finkelstein, for well-explained reasons, refuses to condemn it) Williamson, like Finkelstein, has been for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza from the first day of Israel's response.  Finkelstein, like Williamson thinks a single state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is unachievable and that a two state solution must be sought to bring an end to the conflict.  (I, being a naïf, have not abandoned hope for a single-state solution.)  The distinction that makes the difference for Finkelstein appears to be in Williamson's hope for a place for Israel in whatever peace that comes.  In the interview with Briahna Joy Gray, Williamson refused to call herself a Zionist in spite of her preference for Israel to continue to exist.  But was this rather common attitude of Williamson's toward Israel (particularly for her and Finkelstein's generation)  the primary source of Finkelstein's rage against her?  While I share his anti-Zionism, I believe in Williamson's sincerity in the hope for peace between Israelis and Palestinians and forgive her honestly come-by feelings for the Israel of her imagination.

The snapping point for me came a few days later watching a podcast I was unfamiliar with of 2 rather pleased with themselves self-labeled dissidents in which they were commenting on another episode of Bad Faith-- this one a conversation between Gray and Finkelstein apparently from mid-October of last year in which the latter at the end of what appeared to have been a pleasant and fruitful conversation on the topic of Gaza ventured to offer an unsolicited opinion on Gray's apparent continued intention to vote for Marianne Williamson in her primary that he knew she would not like to hear.  Gray would not have it.  In trying to rush an end to the conversation before things got heated, Gray protested that she could not understand why anyone would have problems with someone voting for Marianne Williamson in the Democratic primary and Cornel West in the General Election.  She did not give Finkelstein space to explain himself, but the self-proclaimed dissidents discussing the incident by whose auspices I was watching the exchange between Finkelstein and Gray did not hesitate to conjecture that Finkelstein's objection (especially in light of events in Gaza)  was that Marianne Williamson was an unserious flake, a dilettante who didn't know a thing about Israel-Palestine let alone about winning a campaign and therefore must have been in it, as a disgruntled ex-staffer publicly surmised, just to sell books.  The glee of two self-styled "leftists" in dismissing Williamson as a valid prism for Gray's prerogative to use her primary vote as a protest while neglecting to advocate for anything to do instead was the smugness that may have pushed me over the edge.

Honestly, what is with the so-called left?  Everyone has a bitter, dismissive criticism, and no one has a vision.  When someone shows up who does, leftists fall over themselves to see who can be the most apathetic toward it.  No one bothers to explain themselves anymore.  No one bothers with persuasion.  Every correct position has an admission price of a priori knowledge of its correctness.  Everyone agrees that electoral politics is bad, but almost no one concludes that something needs to be done about it, other than abandoning it to the wolves.  This isn't even about Marianne Williamson anymore.  It's about what is the plan for our immediate future.

There’s a theory that things like patriotism, nationalism, fundamentalism, racism, sexism, etc. etc. etc. are lizard things lying around waiting to be exploited by lords and chancellors and what not who use them to appeal to splinters of society to keep society in splinters which is how they get and hold power.  Donald Trump for instance is quite adept at this tactic. Once splintered by these things it’s very hard to get people back into the whole. But it can be done by finding common causes.  Bernie Sanders was uncommonly good at this.  I don’t know if people really appreciate what Bernie Sanders did-- my guess is he didn’t fully appreciate it either.  It was just easy and natural for him when he needed it to be.  The secret is that we always need it to be.   Even those splintered people.  Their vision of themselves is busted, it’s filtered down into a very narrow beleaguered fragment of humanity where they see the people on the immediate outside of their small warrens as threats and the very distant and removed people who keep them and other like warrens fragmented from their neighbors as their only hope.

Those purists on the “left” who exclusively obsess themselves and try to obsess you with the flaws of Marianne Williamson and Bernie and AOC and Sam Seder and &c  while totally ignoring / downplaying / promoting the dysfunctions of Donald Trump, MTG, MAGA, Jimmy Dore, Alex Jones -- it’s not like they’re always wrong those motherfuckers.  The issue I have with them is that they can’t do nuance or gray or rethinking / parsing / analysis.  It can’t be the case, for them, that both Bernie Sanders betrayed the left (which I do not believe but just for the sake of argument) and that Donald Trump is not the alternative.  It can’t be the case that Bernie Sanders betrayed the left but a person can be on your side and disagree with you about that.  It can’t be the case that when it came to the general election Bernie thought Joe Biden was a lesser evil worth supporting over Trump and that Bernie should have won the primary anyway.   This is what makes them so annoying.  It’s a virtuous obtuseness.  I have noticed recently that when someone bumps into me accidentally my first thought is, “They must be so embarrassed that they didn’t know I was in their way.” But 9 times out of 10 when I bump into someone accidentally their first thought is, “Watch where you’re going!”  Maybe people are just naturally too stupid and selfish to form solidarities!  But that’s what’s so extra annoying about those motherfuckers who think their purity (“You bumped into me!  I didn’t bump into you!”) is itself a virtue.

As for what I'm doing in the primary?  None of your business!

~~~~~

* In the meantime, while Biden's support of Israel continues to weaken his already feeble case for re-election, the Democrats seem to have saturated their capacity to learn from the "Uncommited" vote and in any case to have absorbed whatever power it might have once had into its rationale for staying the course in Israel.

De-Growth as Class War?

Planetary Boundaries (Graphic by Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre)

Researchers at the University of Washington have begun testing a geoengineering solution to global warming called marine cloud brightening. It's a process by which sea water is collected and sprayed in a fine mist over the ocean on the theory that its microparticles will seed marine based clouds and increase the albedo of cloud cover and thus help to mitigate the effects of global warming, particularly over the ocean .  It's a long term proposition, but after initial skepticism on its proposal in 1990 by John Latham, a British physicist,  its time has come and it is now among the few and most promising attempts at engineering a global warming solution.

Meanwhile on the left front in the climate change battle, a fierce debate is underway between Green New Deal advocates and a theory propounded by the philosopher in ecology and political economy Kohei Saito and described in Capital in the Anthropocene, Saito's surprise 2020 bestseller in Japan that's recently been translated and published in the US as Slow Down,  that he dubs De-growth Communism.  The debate between the major players has been playing out in the left press, in articles in Jacobin and The Nation.

The antipathy that Green New Dealers and De-growthers have for each other's approaches is palpable.  In a recent conversation with his guest Matt Huber on the Left Reckoning podcast, David Griscom said of de-growth Marxism that it was kind of like "the 2010s all over again but with a bad slogan." By the 2010s Griscom is referring to failed post-Marxist politics à la the Podemos Party in Spain (i.e., leftist politics without labor; after a meteoric start among online leftists mid-decade, Podemos had fizzled out among voters by last summer's elections).  As for the bad slogan ("De-growth!"), Griscom has got a point.  For his part, Saito in his Nation article called the Green New Deal "the Opiate of the Masses"-- popular with politicians and the masses, but in its continued pursuit of growth in a rapidly depleting planet a dangerous distraction from the realities that we are facing.

In 2021's Climate Change as Class War, Matt Huber advocates for a multi-pronged approach to fighting climate change that entails implementation of the Green New Deal.  Huber is decidedly against degrowth as a strategy on the basis that in requiring a reduction in the  manner of living of an already beleaguered class it is austerity in sheep's clothing and for this reason a hard sell for working people.  Huber uses Marxist theory to promote an alternative.  Capitalism is seen as a necessary evil-- the origination of much of the technology that will ultimately be its own undoing at the point at which the working class seizes the means of production.  In the meantime, since capitalism has demonstrably missed every chance to save us from the climate crisis it has engendered, Huber sees labor as the historic force for change that can be organized and activated to force the current owning class to develop and adopt carbon reducing technologies particularly in the fueling of the economy.  Additionally, Huber sees a varied approach involving labor, alternate clean power sources such as wind, solar, hydro and nuclear.  In essence, after Marx, Huber sees capitalism as still having a role in combatting climate change (particularly being impelled by class self-interest through the eventual profitability of publicly seeded advances in clean technology for instance, and through coercion form the working class in the form of strikes and other actions to force capitalists to adopt clean technology) without requiring a reduction in the life style of the working class.

Saito on the other hand believes that for those enjoying what he calls an Imperial Mode of Living in the Global North-- i.e., one of comfort that is dependent on exploitation and deprivations of the Global South-- de-growth is not just morally desirable but a necessity if we are to meet the carbon reduction requirements determined by the projections of climate scientists.  To bolster his argument, Saito's own study of late Marxist writings draws the conclusion that contrary to the impression put forth by Marx's collaborator and posthumous editor, Friedrich Engels (a factory owner's son, Saito is eager to remind us) Marx, inspired by Russian peasant organizations and third-world agriculture had rejected historical and technological determinism in favor of a more de-growth friendly communism.  The conclusion is controversial, but as Saito describes it, in the transition to a society more amenable to a carbonless future, any losses experienced in the reduction in personal automobiles and the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed in the Global North, would be more than made up for by revisions of the capitalist lifestyle,  as in a shorter working week with no commute, and an increase in such "commons" as free access to healthcare, plentiful and free transportation, and a guaranteed basic income.  With production localized, scaled down and centered not on profit and growth and more and more things, but on people's needs, our lives according to Saito would naturally become more meaningful and more in tune with and  less punishing on the planet that nurtures us.

While Saito's work is based on a science of natural limits, Huber suggests (descriptively, not prescriptively) that the history of technology and resource management has shown time and again that limits while real are meant to be broken, either through the engineering of efficiencies, discovery of new resources (he suggests for instance that in this age, it's not unreasonable to think space might prove to be a frontier for the discovery of additional or alternative resources for those that that are dwindling on earth) or technologies for extracting earth bound resources (e.g., fracking).*  Marine cloud brightening could well be the latest example of the type of innovation and undertaking that capitalism is capable of enabling, albeit given the uncertainty of the connection of mitigation of anthropogenic climate change to a profit motive, it is rare.  It is therefore incumbent on workers to organize in order to influence the course that growth takes-- and specifically to mobilize for cleaner energy sources and regulation that protects workers and the environment while ensuring that the abundance made possible by labor and technology are equitably shared by those of the Global North with the Global South.

To Saito, this sort of thinking is "greenwashing"-- substituting a palatable political solution for the hard work that must be done to undo the impact of 300 years of Industrial Capitalism.  In Slow Down, Saito writes: 

Giving up on the wishful thinking of green economic growth entails making a series of hard choices. How serious are we about reducing carbon dioxide emissions? Who will shoulder the cost? What sort of reparations are we willing to make to the Global South for everything taken from it by the Imperial Mode of Living? What are we prepared to do about the additional environmental destruction caused by the very process of transitioning to a sustainable economy?

As I read this sort of entreaty though, I can't help but ask myself, "Who is we?"  To whom does de-growth appeal outside of a small group of earnest academics and concerned leftists comfortable enough to withstand some affliction in the name of saving the planet.  How does it happen if it must be left up to a thin band of powerless, albeit decent enough electric car owners and avid recyclers of the professional managerial class?  The strength of the Green New Deal is its appeal to the power in numbers of the working class, to a theory of history and to the romanticism of a populist notion of change.  If only it could be married to the upheaval of a system whose engine is growth for growth's sake and replacement of it with a return to a cosmopolitanized 21st century commons centered around the simple fulfillment of needs across the globe.

How about a better slogan?

From The Green New Deal Is the Opiate of the Masses, Kohei Saito, The Nation.  According to Saito, thanks to our "Imperial Mode of Living" we in the Global North-- wealthy or not--  are in the top 20% above.

~~~~~~

 * Techno-optimism without the optimism?

Tinfoil Hat Territory

Landscape - Ivan Rabuzin (1960)

Ready for a crackpot conspiracy theory?  I have one!  Two years ago, it was Critical Race Theory.  Last year, it was Gender affirming care and Trans Rights.   This year it's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  It's as if every year about this time, some council decides what diversionary tactic is going to be used this year to keep the heat off of endtimes capitalism as the major culprit in its own and our society's death. That might be just a little bit nutty, but to really slather on the almond sauce, what if the same neoliberal forces of the elite that introduce these concepts to the corporate workplace and to our national discourse-- the convenient nebulous scapegoat of the populistic rightist social media bloviation machine as well as their tailers on the horseshoe left-- are in fact actually in cahoots with those who annually seek some new ruse to rile up and muddy the waters with?  What if namby pamby liberal neoliberalism is itself a plot of the far right-- the avant garde for the development and testing of loathsomely performative and transparently self-serving versions of legitimate leftist theory and concerns.  No neoliberal has to actually believe in the ostentatiously obnoxious albeit toothless formulations of social justice that they are creating additions to the C-Suite for in order to implement, just as no mouth-foaming conservative talking head has to actually believe that the latest liberal fad has anything to do with the deterioration of standards in the pursuit of corporate profit.  All that is needed is a steady supply of fodder for the diversionary spectacle of rightwing blather and an army of loudmouths to highjack the conversation with it. 

Frankly, with DEI, I think they have hit the bottom of the barrel.   DEI is being blamed on the right for the rash of safety failures on airplanes in flight and now for the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse.  In both cases, the company at fault (Boeing in the first case, Maersk in the second) has demonstrably put profits over safety -- the new American way-- explicitly cutting corners for the bottom line for their shareholders, and in each case, right on cue the right-wing talk machine has chimed in in unison to divert attention from the true cause to DEI as what is behind the decline in quality.  "What?!" you may well ask.  Elon Musk tried to explain the ruse in his recent contentious conversation with Don Lemon in the fifteen minutes of their public association before Musk booted Lemon's new venture off of his platform.  Two more perfect representatives of the bloviating right and the simpering neoliberal left respectively could hardly be imagined.  In this frustrating exchange (which I've extracted and edited for space), Lemon unfortunately interrupts Musk at the point at which his badgering questioning gets closest to getting Musk to having to put his money where his mouth is (bolded and italicized below):

Don Lemon (45:59): Okay, so listen. After the door blew off this midflight and this Alaskan airline flight, do you remember that you responded [with] a post claiming that the average HBCU grad was less intelligent than the average airline pilot and stated that it will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE? I don’t know if you… misspelled it on purpose, which should be DEI. Do you believe that women and minority pilots are inherently less intelligent and less skilled than white male pilots?
Elon Musk (46:37):  No. I’m just saying that we should not lower the standards for them.
Don Lemon (46:41): Okay. But there’s no evidence that standards are being lowered when it comes to the airline industry.  
Elon Musk (47:00):  The incentive structure I believe at Boeing changed to include DEI as a fundamental executive incentive, but in my view, it should be purely about passenger safety.
Don Lemon (48:06):  Okay, but do you understand how by saying just that standards are being lowered, that you’re implying that they’re being lowered because people are less skilled and less intelligent and you’re talking about people of color and or women?
Elon Musk (48:24): Look, I’m saying we should not lower standards, that’s it.
Don Lemon (48:33): But you’re implying that they’re lowering standards because of people of color or women because someone is not a white male. You’re saying that they’re less skilled and less intelligent, that’s what you’re saying?
Elon Musk (48:42):  No, I’m not saying that. I’m simply saying that they are-
Don Lemon (48:43): Then why would they be lowering the standards?
Elon Musk (48:45):  I don’t know. Why are they lowering the standards?
Don Lemon (49:01): Well, you’re saying that the standards are being lowered because of certain people. You don’t believe in DEI, right? Do you not believe in diversity, equity and inclusion?
Elon Musk (50:17): Like I said, my view is that the only basis for promoting somebody should be [their] skills, talents, and their integrity. And that’s it.

What Musk meant to say was that the performative promotion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in a company that hires pilots or engineers who are not white males gives cover to the bigot in all of us to overlook the profit incentive as what is behind the lowering of safety and quality standards of American corporations in late stage capitalism. The beauty of the trick is taking a problem that any two observers can agree on (the decline of quality and safety in capitalist enterprises) and tarnishing a handy liberal project (the promotion of diversity in boardrooms and in the workplace) with it by eliding a spurious association.  The outrageous non sequitur nature of it demands a change in subject from the problem that can be agreed on to the spurious association that can only inspire intense wheel-spinning debate.  

Both sides of the debate are happy!  Meanwhile, actual critical race theory, actual trans rights and healthcare, and actual diversity equality and inclusion are weakened and diminished by being on the attack for the sins of the ersatz corporate versions of them.   And the swelling of corporate coffers and the decline of safety and standards continues apace.

A Good Life

I don't mean to be an ingrate.  I have a lovely wife and a wonderful daughter.  I live in a good enough house in a nice enough town.  I have a job that pays nearly well enough and that I could possibly eventually retire from if I live long enough and they don't decide they don't need me. I have a hobby that keeps me somewhat active and that could occasionally even be considered rewarding in itself. I have a nice dog and two delightful cats.  I have health.  I have a good enough life. 

But do I have a good life?  Does anyone?  Is a good life possible in our present circumstances.

Our society is such that in order for most to have a good life-- let's define it as a rich, rewarding life free of worry and care-- we have to do harm.  If more than enough money is the minimum requirement for a good life (and it's not clear that it alone is), then we either have to have more money than we know what to do with or we have to need less than most people need.  If we have more than enough money, wealth and goods, we have necessarily in this economy starved someone else to get it.  Capitalism depends on most people not having enough to live on.  In times of crisis this becomes explicit as our economic ministers openly devise policies to inflict pain at the overpopulated bottom of the pyramid so that ease continues flowing to the narrow top.  This is the gushing up reality that gives the lie to The Trickle Down Theory.  They do this by making living more expensive for the property-poor or by making ways to earn a living more scarce or more meager. 

Even in good economic times for most, when the truly miserable shut-outs of society are fewer, the cheap material effects of a good enough life in the wealthiest lands of the planet are made from the blood and ruin of the most immiserated and exploited parts of the world that we are privileged not to see. Blindness to the violence that makes even our modest comfort possible is a luxury and the prerogative of the Free. But the harm we do without lifting a finger has ways of intruding on our consciousness from time to time-- in the increase in extraordinary life threatening weather events, in the proliferation of random shootings and terror, in the massing of migrants seeking refuge at our borders, in the wars and conflagrations in distant places that we hear about on the news or that our leaders too frequently engage us in.  In this world, it's a luxury to preoccupy ourselves with cancel culture and wokeness.  But we have to preoccupy ourselves with silliness to distract us from the lie we all live: that if we are not living the good life it is by choice and not by the violence enforced  inequalities built into our system.

We seem to have strayed far afield from our original question, but I would argue that the system that depends on the misery of the many makes a good life for any but a very few out of the question.  Who are the few?  Is it those at the top who inflict misery on the rest?  Is it those in the middle who live a good enough life thanks to the meager graces of the few at the top and the invisible misery of the many at the bottom?  It is neither of these.  It is rather the unicorns who need less than most people need and have the means to get it.  For some people-- perhaps for you, dear reader if you are deeply satisfied with your life and not merely deluded or consciously unconscious about the casual harm that is required of others for you to be so-- it is a disposition.  To give an extreme example, it might be the bohemian who doesn't need to possess or consume something to be enriched by it, who somehow always has enough money to get by without selling her soul to a career or a job, who feels passionately and engages in causes and activities and creativities that give to the world.  Or it could simply be the person who has the most modest of needs that are easily met and a place in his community. 

A good life it seems to me is one that does not begrudge or preclude a good life for others.  And this is the main point I would like to make today.  In our current system of economics and politics, we do not center our concerns around the ability of people to have a good life.  In fact, too often, the inequalities of our way of life require us to lie to ourselves about the culpability that people have for their own quality of life.  We pretend that those worse off than us have chosen their misery even though if we examine our own life it should be abundantly clear that our comfort was chosen for us and that maintaining it has forced a meanness on the way we conduct ourselves and a smallness in the pursuit of our goals that is preoccupied with adherence to the shallow values of an artificially unequal society imposed from above on all of us.   

A society that is not about securing a good life for all of its citizens--not just for the "right kind" of citizen-- isn't worth a damn.  By this criterion, it should be obvious to all but the willfully self-deluded that the one we live in, as expensive and gaudy and daunting as it is is a worthless shameful sham.  We could go a long way toward redeeming ourselves by doing whatever it takes-- even increasing the misery at the top; they can afford it-- to ensure the basics for all citizens: good meaningful work in a democratic workplace when we need it at not just a living wage but a "good living" wage; health care on demand; as much quality education as we need and want; a home that doesn't bankrupt us; abundant means of public transportation; art, science and technology for all of us; bridges that don't collapse when they bump up against the forces of capitalism.   Paid in advance by each of us for all of us so it's there when we need it.  To enable this will undoubtedly take some major adjustments to our political system.  We could start with some tweaks to the current system: setting limits on the terms of all public officials; removing obstacles to democracy such as the electoral college in order to make our choices at the voting booth a reflection of the popular vote;  installing a more parliamentary form of government with more voter-responsive parties that would force the make-up of our legislative bodies to be a reflection of the vote rather than a winner-take-all farce in which the losing party gets no representation.  Or we could cut to the chase and replace our current system with one of sortition in which our representatives are selected randomly by lot from among all of us for short, non-consecutive terms.  Whatever we do, we must do something if we are to begin the road to redemption.

When the needs of the many are no longer knobs for the few to play with in order to ensure the fulfillments of their own many wants, but rather the shared concern of all, the question of what is a good life reverts to the one living it.

Pendulum Ride

I was recently watching Glenn Greenwald (of System Update) and Matt Taibbi (of the Twitter Files) talking  about :"why free speech has become a right wing issue".  I’m a masochist is why.  The conversation was occasioned by the Supreme Court's recent surprising indication in oral arguments to Murtha v Missouri that it could be favorable to letting the government freely communicate its displeasure about content on social media platforms with the Big Tech companies that run them. At first, it seemed to me that Greenwald and Taibbi were as usual eliding the fact that these platforms are not public entities, not even traditional businesses but something new entirely*,  and that the relationship of the government to Big Tech is deeply contractual. In other words, Elon Musk doesn’t need the CDC to tell him to boot someone off of X for speech he doesn't like, and if it does he’s free to ignore it, but he might find it in his interest to do so if he wants to continue to receive public funding for his ventures.  In my view there is no one to root for in this scenario.  The hypothetical anti-vax poster’s speech that is offensive to the federal agency was never free, it was always donated nonchalantly to Twitter which could always do as it pleased with it (and often did.)  (Note: I'm being hypothetical.  Any similarity to the actual case before the SCOTUS would be coincidental.)  It just mystifies me (not) how Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, beneficiaries of the largesse of Big Tech billionaires, worry us with this stuff but have nothing to say† about for instance Tennessee making it an offense punishable by a $1-$5 million fine for a teacher employed by any school system to discuss race, sex or class in a classroom setting in any way that offends a white male student (read: at all).

Having now watched the whole conversation, and read the NY Times article they discuss and Taibbi’s response to it, I concede the value of the main point they want to express which has not nothing but less to do with the fact of government insinuation into Big Tech’s affairs (contra my first critique of it) than with the nature of what government officials are interfering about.  I.e., Greenwald and Taibbi are not on about the government officials (or ex-officials sock-puppeting for the deep state) leaning on Twitter executives to remove disinformation about Russian interference in US elections or about COVID health precautions and statistics-- they’re trying to draw focus on the government declaring its officials experts on  “disinformation” and arbiters of what to do with it.  Unwanted speech is protected; “disinformation” being the purview of experts is certified not to be.  

Their point about “liberals” (by which they mean not just neoliberal government officials and the deep state but also the anti-Trump left) is that labelling unwanted speech “disinformation” gives cover to allow censorship.  Liberals are all for censorship if it hurts Trump.  Trump is bad because he somehow slipped through the cracks to become president-- thanks to strategically welling popular support in just the right places-- and subverted the neoliberal agenda.  As continuous with the neo-liberal establishment as his first term wound up being,  there’s no guarantee his second term will continue to be (strong signs indicate that it won’t), and as much as I truly fear what a second Trump term portends and for that reason will do at least the bare minimum I can to avoid it (which could at this point even be just not moving to a swing state and voting against Biden), I think Greenwald and Taibbi are right to point out the troubling nature of government (and mainstream media; and citizens sympathetic to the status quo) practicing a new framework for censorship and thought control.  I don’t want to give them credit beyond this, but I think this is significant credit that they deserve. 

They mostly refer to the would be thought police as “liberals”-- at least Greenwald does.  But he also repeats that by not opposing this sleight of hand that turns unwanted speech into “disinformation” the left cedes Free Speech advocacy to the right.  He compares the state of things 20 years ago when Noam Chomsky led the charge to defend the right of Nazis to deny the holocaust against the FBI which was criticized for interfering, to today when the Twitter files are called a "nothingburger" and liberals clamor for their government to police their social media platforms into banning Trumpist disinformation.  Greenwald sees the main conflict today as being not between right and left but rather as between the separate sides of those inside or on the side of the liberal Beltway establishment (the perpetrators of this harm to freedom of speech and thought) and those outside and opposed to it.

Having conceded their point, I have swung back a bit this way on the value of this discourse -- actually I’m trying to sort out the mess.  One thing you’ll note about free speech.  The people we’re most often compelled to have to protect are basically saying unwanted, odious speech-- i.e., right wing talking points (frequently expressed as perverted subversions of valid leftist arguments), racist, sexist, homophobic, classist porn, or corporate lies.  Much disinformation is paid for by right wing think tanks expressly to mislead and obfuscate and undermine the spread of leftist ideas.  So we rarely find either Greenwald or Taibbi vociferously attacking the government or right wing media for the way it treats speech from the actual left-- basically shunting it to dark unseen corners when it’s not dismissing, mischaracterizing, vilifying, missing the point or advocating for (and often succeeding at) banning it.  Both former heros and allies are 100% of the time now critiquing the left (barely concealed behind the slur of “The Liberals”) for the authoritarianism that is actually actively being crusaded for by the most nefarious elements of the right--- many of whom fund the outlets for such critiques of the left as Greenwald and Taibbi provide.  So Greenwald saying it’s not right v left but inside v outside when he is 100% of the time attacking the left is infuriating.  

However!1  The New York Times article they were discussing was absolutely pushing a false narrative about Matt Taibbi and the Twitter files --i.e., that Taibbi found and reported no government collusion with Twitter execs to censor tweets among the Twitter files until March 2023 when he met the Trumpist crackpot conspiracy theorist (or propagandist) Mike Benz who has lately been pushing the Taylor Swift hysteria shortly before Taibbi's testimony before Congress about the Twitter files, with the insinuation that Benz must have planted the idea of government collusion.  As I vividly remember, the government collusion angle was in Taibbi's Twitter file reporting early on, in December 2022, so the NYT is just wrong about that (and almost certainly knows it).  Plus the same article, as Greenwald very capably demonstrates, repeatedly bemoans the caution with which government disinformation specialists now have to proceed since the Twitter files were exposed and the deleterious effect it has had on the government’s ability to stay ahead of disinformation on social media.  It’s actually disgusting frankly.  

Like I say, there are no good guys.  Or rather the good guys are shut out of the conversation.  But I would like to remind us that the already free don't need freedom.  It's the rest of us who could use some liberation.

~~~~~

*  YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Substack, Rumble, Racket, Bluesky, etc are not public squares where speech must not be infringed.  They are “marketplaces of ideas”-- and not in any good way.  They are at best imperfect restricted spaces where speech is heavily regulated by market forces.   (They’re actually queen bees whose users and visitors are slaves willfully creating their value for them without their having to do jack diddly.)

† Taibbi at least is happy to talk about how the right should fine tune its attack on woke education if it wants to be less buffoonish.

Room for Improvement

Another in a series of examples of facts lying around deliberately unseen...

Capitalism is often presented, even by anti-capitalists, as the system of production and distribution whose perfection was forged by centuries of progress, whose emergence across Europe from the cocoon of the pre-capitalist marketplace was a pinnacle of human discovery-- in a time of decreasing evidence of heavenly insinuation into daily human affairs, an advanced and worthy object of devotion*-- made possible by advances in human knowledge and technology that unfettered capitalism from the mere potentiality inherent in the market.  

The story that Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism tells, based as it is on a study of the facts is quite different and to my mind, far more plausible.  While the market always existed, it was historically used primarily for luxuries,  for trade of resources originating in one part of the world for resources plentiful in another, and for artisanal goods and crafts.  The explosion of mercantilism in the 17th century that brought wealth and maritime adventurism to the Netherlands was not and did not engender capitalism according to Wood.  Instead, capitalism had its origins in agriculture in England.  

The twin engines of this innovation were the two innocuous sounding concepts of enclosure and improvement.  Under feudalism, peasants lived on and worked the land for themselves.  Annually they were taxed a portion of their yield to the king or local lord for the privilege of keeping their kneecaps intact.  By the sixteenth century, this had changed as the practice of enclosure in which -- under the auspices of government and with the aid of government forces-- common lands were sealed off from the peasants who had worked them as a concept of property ownership caught vogue among the idle upper classes.  Now, the right to work and live off of arable land had to be leased from a landlord, forcing all but the most successful farmers into homeless vagrancy. In order to remain viable as tenants of the land, farmers engaged in a process of "improvement"-- literally devising ways to increase the profitability of the land through greater yields with less labor.  This drove the search for better technology, and for the first time markets for the sale of factory farm-produced crops and meat.  

The peasantry that was driven from the common lands, now homeless and impoverished was forced into cities where they were now required to sell their labor in return for meager sustenance  (procured now exclusively from the marketplace) and cramped shelter in vast tenements.  The production of food needed to live was thereby taken from the masses and given to a class of agrarian capitalist.  The locus for the procurement of food was now transferred from one's own garden to the marketplace, which became also the primary seller of all household goods, such as pottery and clothing, now manufactured in the largely urban enterprises that hired the landless masses. 

The transition from feudalism to capitalism gave England an edge in the international trade of goods that had to be maintained by transplanting the agrarian revolution to Ireland and other overseas colonies; moreover it raised the stakes on the continent to follow England's lead with varying degrees of difficulty and success. In time, the capitalist forces and relations of production, circulation and reproduction were everywhere. The priorities of the owning and political classes became centered the world over on profit, and capital "improvement".  As Wood notes at the conclusion of her history,

Then there are the corollaries of ‘improvement’: productivity and the ability to feed a vast population set against the subordination of all other considerations to the imperatives of profit. This means, among other things, that people who could be fed are often left to starve. There is, in general, a great disparity between the productive capacities of capitalism and the quality of life it delivers. The ethic of ‘improvement’ in its original sense, in which production is inseparable from profit, is also the ethic of exploitation, poverty, and homelessness.

Capitalists have claimed the Enlightenment for capitalism, but Wood, without going into a lot of detail puts this notion to bed, saying that although capitalist England contributed to the enlightenment (via Newton, Bacon and Locke in particular) it was basically a product of the non-capitalist continent, which is why its most salient values-- individual freedom and rationality-- have little to do with business and more to do with human progress.  In fact, the consequences and prerequisites of capitalism-- inequality, growth for growth’s sake, poverty and homelessness-- are antithetical to enlightenment values. The whole book is basically a reminder that capitalism is just a societal organization that originated as an accommodation to the particular circumstances of an insular European province, that then trended-- not the apotheosis of human history.  The trick for all of us (and it’s a tough one unfortunately) is extracting the world from the organization that capitalism requires.

~~~~~

* See The Enchantments of Mammon by Eugene McCarraher.

Free Won't

Abridged from https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/app/summaryData/deaths/byYearManner (click image to enlarge)

As it happens, the book I am reading about Free Will-- Determined, by Robert Sapolsky- has indeed changed my mind.  It's not a case of going from belief in Free Will to disbelief in it.  My mind is not a switch.*  On the contrary, I have gone from disbelief in the relevance of the question in everyday life (and annoyance at the smug, self-satisfied certainty of the "You have no free will" camp) to an understanding of the mechanical basis on which such a belief could be based and acknowledgement of its relevance and usefulness in the guidance of such public policy questions dear to my heart as criminal justice reform and mitigation of inequality.

Right off the bat, Sapolsky softened me up by dismissing the importance to the question of those Libetian studies in which researchers, by reading brainwaves of subjects tasked with randomly choosing whether to push one of two buttons, claimed to detect the outcome of the decision microseconds before the subject was conscious of it, thereby supposedly disproving the existence of conscious free will.  In Sapolsky's formulation, the Libetian timespan-- aside from being too trivial and on account of flaws in the experiment, overstated-- is the end of a chain of events and circumstances in the button pressing subject's life stretching back seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, a lifetime, hingeing on the absence or presence of traumas, advantages, disadvantages experienced in childhood, in the womb, in the culture and society and species that the subject was born into and beyond, back to the very origins of the universe.†  The nature of the universe, given random fluctuations and uncertainties is not such that one could. by calculating the trajectories of each bit of matter starting from the big bang, predict the button that Subject 22 will pick Tuesday morning at 9:43 am, Chicago time says Sapolsky-- indeed, "determined does not mean predictable."   Rather, humans (like all organisms faced with the matter of survival) are decision making machines, the quality of whose choices (indeed of what choices confront them) will depend very much on circumstances of their birth, the place of their parents in society, the stigmas or privileges of their ethnicities, the culture that they were born into (and sometimes, in the case of immigrants, whatever it is that drives them to switch cultures).  

As for cultural questions, Sapolsky notes that the choices of those born in the individualistic cultures of America, Europe and the West will be demonstrably different from those from the collectivist cultures of Asia and Africa.  Whereas someone from Dallas might be expected to opt in a way to gain advantage for himself or his nuclears, someone from Shanghai might be primarily motivated by considerations of extended family,  social group, society as a whole, or indeed global neighborhood, species, planet.  Indeed, the primacy of others in the cultural values of Asian societies is foundational in its religious traditions.  As an extreme example, the practice of self-immolation in Buddhism is considered not suicide but an act of selfless sacrifice-- as Americans were horrified to learn through images and news reports of the monk Thích Quảng Đức's 1963 protest  in the streets of Saigon against  American ally and Catholic South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm's anti-Buddhist persecutions at the start of American involvement in the region.  Indeed, Quảng Đức's was the first of many Buddhist self-immolations which culminated in a crisis from which Diệm could not prevail.  Weakened by the opposition to his out of touch autocracy, Diệm died in the military coup that replaced him by the end of the year. As extreme a choice as the Buddhist monks' was, it is in keeping with a culture that emphasizes sacrifice for the group over glory for the self.

While martyrdom has a rich and glorious history in the west, no tradition of self-immolation exists in Western religions, which prefer meek acquiescence to those at the top of the hierarchy if armed confrontation will not do.  But ever since the potent image of Quảng Đức's act spread across the planet, the practice has been applied to a number of protests in the West over the years, most recently this week, in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, as a protest against the US's enabling of Israel's war on Palestinians in Gaza  by Air Force Cybersecurity specialist Aaron Bushnell who died from his injuries later that day.  Bushnell live-streamed the act on Twitch and prefaced it by saying:

I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit to genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

On Facebook, Bushnell had written:

Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you're doing it. Right now.

The clarity of Bushnell's explanation of his act notwithstanding, the image of a US serviceman  in uniform screaming "Free Palestine" as flames consumed his body was such an unwelcome enormity that it was under-reported by being under-explained in the mainstream media.  Instead it was characterized as a suicidal act of madness-- the type of behavior for which an individual cannot be held responsible.  Indeed, suicide has been the annual leading cause of death among Active military personnel for 6 of the last 10 years.  Given the nature of the adventurism that our military involves itself in, the death of American soldiers in combat tends to benefit the owners and ruling class referenced in Bushnell's live-stream.  What sets Bushnell's act apart (though it turns out it is actually the second such protest on American soil since Israel's assault on Gaza began in October) is the collectivist nature of it-- an act undertaken to make flesh the suffering of Gazans before us-- undoubtedly inculcated in him as part of his upbringing in the Community of Jesus in Massachusetts. 

It is tempting to attribute the power of the protest (in this case, the assertion of a 'Won't' rather than a 'Will') to Bushnell's freedom to choose it.  But the degree to which the choice was actually free or one determined by Bushnell's biology, station in life and life story is not necessary in order to appreciate the power of it to change minds. Inspired as it certainly was by the selfless sacrifice of  Thích Quảng Đức's prototype act  60 years prior, it must not be viewed as a tragedy but as a crystal clear communication that it is hoped will be etched in Joe Biden's mind as he comes to grips with what he must do as the world's most powerful man to bring Israel's genocide in Gaza to a close.  Free will or not, though I deeply regret the magnitude and finality of it, I thank Andrew Bushnell for his service.

~~~~~

* Or is it?

† I have never had trouble attributing crime to formative circumstances beyond one's control rather than to freely chosen "criminality" of, say, a person who suffered Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in the womb, was born into poverty and abused by adults throughout childhood, and Sapolsky of course bolsters this view by absolving such persons of responsibility for their crimes.  No problem for me.  But the life changing consequences of the abolishment of free will follows a path along the lines of: if genetics and environment and deprivations and trauma and abuse make a person a criminal, what does punishment have to do with anything?  And if that’s true about crime isn’t it also true about just bad behavior or stupidity or what have you? And if it’s true about someone else’s stupidity and bad choices, what about mine?  And if it’s true about my bad choices what about my good choices?  Etc.

Don't keep me in suspense

By the time I read Bernie Sanders'  It's OK to be Angry About Capitalism last winter, it was clear that he was not going to be making another run for the presidency.  The reason was obvious-- he was not going to challenge Joe Biden who by a year ago had finally decided (to near universal dismay) to run for re-election.  Joe Biden's fault again.  But as I read Bernie's book, it was not hard to see it as a testament for the campaign that never was. I read it with some sadness at what could have been.  

About the same time, I happened to catch the historian Prof Harvey J Kaye of Wisconsin on some program singing praises for the campaign of Marianne Williamson whom he was advising in an informal capacity.  Apparently Williamson, the spiritual author, 2020 also-ran and ultimately Bernie Sanders surrogate, was also something of a student of American history who had a belief that a course correction for the ills plaguing America and the world could start from the unrealized ideals of the American Revolution, particularly as expressed by the radical, Thomas Paine--  a subject of study for Kaye.  As the professor was also an authority on FDR who had urged the revival of the longest serving president's unfulfilled ambition to establish an Economic Bill of Rights for Americans, Williamson had engaged Kaye to advise on how she could make FDR's dream a cornerstone of her 2024 campaign.  Kaye's unabashed enthusiasm for Williamson as the only progressive challenging Joe Biden from within his party piqued my interest, and ultimately won me over.  There was not exactly a clamor among other progressives to join the Democratic race.  I felt sure that an irresistible momentum behind Williamson's campaign was only a matter of time in coming.  

Alas, it never came.  From her initial 10% share in the early polling of likely Democratic voters, she never rose above 15%.  Trounced by Biden and outdone by the only other challenger, the billionaire moderate Dean Phillips in the first three contests, Williamson suspended her campaign.  Several factors worked against her.  First, a near total media shutout limited voter access to Williamson to her social media accounts and those were not exactly catching fire (aside from some reported excitement on TikTok of all places among a constituency she alone seemed to be courting: Gen Z).  The press she did get -- even on left media sites-- when it came at all was negative, often about drama within her organization.  Some of her progressive thunder was stolen by the party hopping picaresque entry into the race of Cornel West.  As other progressives joined the din of longshot candidates outside the 2 parties of the duopoly, there came to be an unspoken but somewhat rumbled and growing consensus among the many fragmented factions of the left that presidential politics in 2024 was not where it was at. If there was any spark for Marianne Williamson left, it could be found only in the uninhabited corners of the web, such as this.

Some chaotic thoughts, then about the obstacles that Marianne Williamson's 2024 campaign could not seem to overcome at the conclusion of her campaign:

Management Problems - A running theme of the explications of left media for the poverty of their coverage of Marianne Williamson's campaign were rumors of mis- and/or micromanagement, insane tantrums, Non-Disclosure Agreements. The candidate was reportedly closed to traditional concerns of the campaign-hardened series of managers she ate through -- concerns like ballot access, endorsements, coalitions. She was on record saying NDA's seemed to her a standard common sense step for an organization to take.   These only seemed to make the scorched earth that disgruntled staffers left in their wake anonymous.  At times, being asked to defend her temper even in friendly forums seemed enough to throw her off balance and bring out the surliness.  She became increasingly unable to conceal her bitterness about both her lack of mainstream media access and the inability of even left media to resist the behind the scenes drama or to focus on the message of her campaign.  Was there plausibility to the charges that the Bernie revolution was being carried on by a flaky high-strung out-of-control diva?  Okay.  Did it matter? I'm not so sure.  No one died working for the campaign.  After a rough shakedown, the organization seemed to settle by late summer.  Were its priorities of the early states of New Hampshire and South Carolina to the exclusion of every of other state malpractice?  It wasn't really that kind of campaign.  Plenty of campaigns that behave exactly as the pundits and experts tell us they should go down in flames before the first primary vote is cast.  Marianne Williamson is not doing it like everybody else has ever done it?  So what?  What kind of outsider does?

Money - There is no good way to fund elections.  Letting billionaires do it gives us the shit hole we live in.  But the alternative-- me and you doing it-- hurts like a motherfucker speaking for myself.  You and I should not be funding elections, so if you have already come to that conclusion, you're not wrong.  Nevertheless those of us who do shell out until we bleed for lack of any better ideas are not being taken.  We are buying a tiny morsel of peace of mind.  MW was not a grifter.  Her funders were not dupes-- if they thought they were getting something in return, I don't think it's MW's fault that they didn't.  But it sure is convenient to fault her.

Primary -  There is a time for complaining about your choices and a time for making a choice.  They can take turns every minute, but it seems to me in this case that the poorness of the choice was exaggerated whereas the reasons for choosing the only truly progressive candidate were aggressively downplayed.  

Given that Joe Biden was never going to lose the primary, I fail to understand how it mattered that an alternative came to be before you as long as you had an alternative. The choice that Marianne Williamson represented was not Perfect Guru in chief-- it was for an agenda sorely missing from the conversation.  I can't blame voters.  But I do blame the media shutout nearly across the spectrum.  I do blame the flakiness of the left in 2024.

What now? - Marianne Williamson is on 31 ballots, 3 of which have already happened.  As of today there are 27 of those states remaining (along with whatever others are left after the Dems are done pre-emptively cancelling them).  As the primaries approached, the decidedly dead momentum for Marianne Williamson or any other human challenger to Joe Biden* inspired some creative write-ins.  In New Hampshire there was a movement to write-in Ceasefire.   In Michigan there is hope that the write-in candidate Uncommitted will give Joe Biden a run for his money.  If it's true that a stick would be preferable to Biden in his toxic, passively pro-genocide, doddering state, then why not a concept like Ceasefire or Uncommitted?

I think it's fine if this is what people do.  Ceasefire got half the votes of Marianne Williamson in New Hampshire though.  It was not listed in the final official results.  As a social media candidate, it turned out to have no advantage that Marianne Williamson didn't.  I believe on the whole the smaller Joe Biden's percentage the better; and the symbolism of him losing to Anything Else has an aesthetic appeal, but it does not call for commitment to any single opponent.  Therefore vote for or write-in who or whatever you choose (including Marianne Williamson in the states she did not get ballot access to) and we'll see what happens.

For myself, an expression of the bankruptcy of the duopoly is not enough to vote for.  I am voting for Marianne Williamson's Economic Bill of Rights.

~~~~~

* And at this stage, the only challengers that matter are on the democratic primary ballot.