These Are Our 95 Theses

I recently came across Lupe Fiasco's "Words I Never Said," and the timing is pretty good since I've been feeling quite politically powerless lately and it's reassuring to hear people expressing your concerns, so you know it's not just you.  I'm not actually that wild about the song as a musical endeavor, but the message has a lot of good stuff and/or hard facts. Here are the lyrics:

It’s so loud inside my head
With words that I should have said
As I drown in my regrets
I can’t take back the words I never said
I can’t take back the words I never said

[Lupe Fiasco]
I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit
Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets
How much money does it take to really make a full clip
9/11 building 7 did they really pull it
Uhh, And a bunch of other cover ups
Your childs future was the first to go with budget cuts
If you think that hurts then, wait here comes the uppercut
The school was garbage in the first place, that's on the up and up
Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the uppercrust
You get it then they move it so you never keeping up enough
If you turn on TV all you see’s a bunch of “what the fucks”
Dude is dating so and so blabbering bout such and such
And that ain't Jersey Shore, homie that's the news
And these the same people that supposed to be telling us the truth
Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say shit
That's why I ain't vote for him, next one either
I’ma part of the problem, my problem is I’m peaceful
And I believe in the people.

[Skylar Grey]
It’s so loud inside my head
With words that I should have said!
As I drown in my regrets
I can’t take back the words I never said
I can’t take back the words I never said

[Lupe Fiasco - Verse 2]
Now you can say it ain't our fault if we never heard it
But if we know better than we probably deserve it
Jihad is not a holy war, wheres that in the worship?
Murdering is not Islam!
And you are not observant
And you are not a muslim
Israel don’t take my side cause look how far you’ve pushed them
Walk with me into the ghetto, this where all the Kush went
Complain about the liquor store but what you drinking liquor for?
Complain about the gloom but when’d you pick a broom up?
Just listening to Pac ain't gone make it stop
A rebel in your thoughts, ain't gon make it halt
If you don’t become an actor you’ll never be a factor
Pills with million side effects
Take em when the pains felt
Wash them down with Diet soda!
Killin off your brain cells
Crooked banks around the World
Would gladly give a loan today
So if you ever miss a payment
They can take your home away!

[Skylar Grey]
It’s so loud inside my head
With words that I should have said!
As I drown in my regrets
I can’t take back the words I never said, never said
I can’t take back the words I never said

[Lupe Fiasco - Verse 3]
I think that all the silence is worse than all the violence
Fear is such a weak emotion that's why I despise it
We scared of almost everything, afraid to even tell the truth
So scared of what you think of me, I’m scared of even telling you
Sometimes I’m like the only person I feel safe to tell it to
I’m locked inside a cell in me, I know that there’s a jail in you
Consider this your bailing out, so take a breath, inhale a few
My screams is finally getting free, my thoughts is finally yelling through

[Skylar Grey]
It’s so loud Inside my head
With words that I should have said!
As I drown in my regrets
I can’t take back the words I never said 

Some of it I can't be bothered with (no, the government didn't take out building 7, stop that) but a lot of is is worryingly sound.  Here's the video.



At the end you'll notice a reference to the L.A.S.E.R. Manifesto.  Maybe it's the civil service talking but wow, people need to stop forcing their various manifestos into acronyms.  Take the time to title stuff something substantive.  In any case, here's Lupe Fiasco's:

To Every Man, Woman & Child...

1. We Want An End To The Glamorization Of Negativity In The Media.

2. We Want An End To Status Symbols Dictating Our Worth As Individuals.

3. We Want A Meaningful And Universal Education System.

4. We Want Substance In The Place Of Popularity.

5. We Will Not Compromise Who We Are To Be Accepted By The Crowd.

6. We Want The Invisible Walls That Separate By Wealth, Race & Class To Be Torn Down.

7. We Want To Think Our Own Thoughts.

8. We Will Be Responsible For Our Environment.

9. We Want Clarity & Truth From Our Elected Officials Or They Should Move Aside.

10. We Want Love Not Lies.

11. We Want An End To All Wars. Foreign & Domestic (Violence).

12. We Want An End To The Processed Culture Of Exploitation, Over-Consumption & Waste.

13. We Want Knowledge, Understanding & Peace.

14. WE WILL NOT LOSE BECAUSE WE ARE NOT LOSERS, WE ARE LASERS!!!

Lasers are the opposite of losers. Lasers are shining beams of light that burn through the darkness of ignorance. Lasers shed light on injustice and inequality. Losers stand by and let things happen. Lasers act and shape their own destinies. Lasers find meaning and direction in the mysteries all around them. Lasers stand for love and compassion. Lasers stand for peace. Lasers stand for progression. Lasers are revolutionary.

Lasers Are The Future.

So okay, there are some problems in here, least of which being the whole losers/lasers play, but how messed up is it that anyone should feel like these are things that need to be demanded?  I, for one, am down, Lupe Fiasco.  Laser or not, these are things worth fighting for.

Mayhap the Defense Budget Could Verily Use a Side Eye

The Project On Government Oversight has released the complete, unredacted Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG*) audit, and it is about as stupid as you would expect.

You can read a summary and get a link to the report itself here.

I think the natural reaction is to kind of freak out about this kind of stuff, and I don't really begrudge anyone that reaction.  Some of this is absolutely ridiculous.  My personal sense is that sanity is somewhere in the middle, towards the side of "buy it at Ace Hardware already."  The Department of Defense uses these parts in some pretty extreme environments, and even if not every helicopter is being used in the desert, it makes the most sense to make sure all or at least most helicopters can be used in the desert, in case some supply crisis evolves and they need to go to the desert.  The various pieces of hardware I can pick up at the local hardware store might not be sufficient for this kind of high-impact, high-stress application.  If I knew about fixing a car engine, and someone asked me to take a stab at fixing an airplane engine, I would start with finding a manual or doing some Google-fu to figured out if there were different stressors for parts in an aircraft engine, just to check.  The engines are essentially the same, but I would check.  Same thing for military resources - some of them may need slightly different things.  However, when every available part is marked up between 33 and 177,475 percent, I think we have a problem here.

One of my biggest problems with defense spending right now is that we seem to be very focused on high tech solutions at the expense of getting our troops' basic needs met, both in terms of comfort and in armament. 

* There is a reason one of the things I got when I started working for the government back in DC was an acronym dictionary. People would toss that shit off like it was nothing.  Alphabet soup has more coherent sentences.

Elderly Bigots Say "Haaaaaaaaaay!"

"There is substantial evidence that some of these fires are caused by people who have crossed our border illegally.  They have set fires because they signal others, they have set fires to keep warm, and they have set fires in order to divert law enforcement agents and agencies from them.  The answer to that part of the problem is to get a secure border."

- John McCain, 6/18/11

"Absolutely not, at this level.  There's no evidence that I'm aware, no evidence that's been public, indicating such a thing.”

- Tom Berglund, U.S. Forest Service spokesman, 6/19/11

Dude.  Take your racist, xenophobic douche routine and go home.  Don't THINK I haven't forgotten you're the reason I have to know who Sarah Palin is, either.

Odds Are, You're Getting Screwed

TRUE LIFE: I'm pretty law abiding, and I tend to default to the assumption that authority figures and the rules by which they abide are generally interested in my interests.  Over the past couple years, with recent acceleration, I've been trying hard to question that more often, because I simply don't believe it is the case any more.  This is harder than one might think.  Here in America, that's generally the line we get: when Abraham Lincoln said that our government was one "of the people, by the people and for the people," he was giving voice to something I think most Americans - certainly then, often now - believe.  I still believe that most people who work in government, which is to say, the civil and foreign service, who predate and outlast every Presidential Administration and Congress, are generally good, and generally want to ensure that government of, by and for the people does not perish from this Earth.  The problem is that politics are not government, and the direction of our politics have brought in another threat.  I will not go so far as to say that an encroaching corporatocracy is new - Tocqueville referred to the danger in 1835 - but I feel that it presents a greater danger now than it has before.

There are plenty of problems with corporations being granted political rights properly reserved for citizens via the offensive and ridiculous Citizens United vs. FEC decision, but not all power is political, and it is in the context of this apolitical power that my concerns emerge.  Economic oppression is a longstanding tool of those who would like to consolidate power amongst a select few, and we are in the midst of some of the most flagrant use of this tool in memory.  While Congress whines endlessly about jobs while not bringing any jobs bills to the floor, they ignore the fact that they may not have any ability to create jobs, besides the less-sustainable one-off jobs created under the auspices of government.  Corporations need to hire people, and they're not doing that.  "But they can't!  The economy!  It is bad!"  Yeah, about that:

Click to magnify

These two charts are compliments of Mother Jones' excellent collection of 12 angry-making graphs, and what you see here is a problem.  In the GDP graph, you see everyone's GDP dip in roughly the same way, and then recover roughly the same way.  In the next graph, you see unemployment dip in reaction to the general trend of the GDP drop...and everyone who isn't the United States recover in roughly the same way.  The United States has dropped and stayed dropped.  Your impulse here may be to say "but the US economy was the epicenter of the recession," and while you might be right to point to US financial fuckery as a primary driver of the recession, you would be incorrect to believe that means it is limited to the US in effect.  The three Big Bads of the recession were the housing bubble's burst, the financial sector's collapse (largely contingent on the housing issue), and the auto industry's whatever the hell that was.  These are three extremely internationalist industries; though it was the US housing market that went kablooey, the financial markets related to it were sectioning up bad mortgages to make them into "good" assets that could be poured into all kinds of financial endeavors.  (For a truly excellent summary of the housing crisis and how interwoven with the financial crash it was, I recommend NBC's documentary House of Cards.  It is presented clearly enough for even non-economics-wonks to understand.  I cannot recommend this enough.)  In any case, these were industries whose well-being affects the whole world - this is borne out by the GDP graph above - but only the US has stayed decimated by the effects.

Now, if the GDP is on the rebound [NB: I do not think that the GDP is permanently on the rebound, and I think we are on track for another recession.  No real efforts have been made to reform the systems and industries that caused the crash, and the recovery is not sustainable.  This is why Congress needs to stop fucking around and get to work.], why aren't American employers hiring more people and thus creating more jobs?  Leaving aside accusations about people relying overmuch on the government, there's a simple answer: because shit isn't that bad for people in charge.  Take a look at the increase in CEO pay to the left here.  As you can see, CEO pay has been skyrocketing since the 80s, with some kind of nitrous booster kicking in around 1995 or so.  That's (theoretically) good!  There are people making lots of money!  Prosperity! 

Not quite.

Two important things.  One is a good, hard look at what this graph is actually measuring, which is CEO pay relative to net profit, which is the money made after all the bills get paid, basically.  In 1960, for every $1 of net profit, your average CEO could expect to make about $100.  In 2000, that ratio jumped sharply, so a CEO could expect to make $500 or more per $1 net profit.  This graph also stops around the early 2000s, but the trend has continued, even into 2010, when CEO pay jumped 11%.  The second important thing is more damning, and we can see it clearly in this graph:

This graph shows us that the worker's share is doing the opposite of the CEO's share, and almost as dramatically.  It is also worth noting that recessions (shown here as the grey bands) were not a reliable indicator of workers getting screwed, and in fact were more likely to show the opposite effect...until 2010.  In 2010, we see that workers' decline in percentage of a share in profits continues its decline through the recession, and then drops even more sharply once it ends. Got a job?  Odds are you're getting screwed.

Now, there are a lot of reasons for this kind of movement, but I think most of them are addressed in Mother Jones' excellent "All Work and No Pay: the Great Speedup," which you should take a few minutes to pop over and read.  It is the article that the above-linked charts accompany.  The speedup, as the MJ article explains, is where employers demand ever more of their employees without a corresponding increase in pay.  We have given in to the dialogue that if you're not checking emails 24/7 and multitasking your face off, you are somehow lazy, ceding complete control of our lives to our work.  It is the American Dream's work ethic on every steroid imaginable and stripped of every incentive - from "with hard work and perseverance, you can gain a free life" to "you must work hard and persevere."  Our willingness to accept this has made it possible for employers to simply pile the work of laid off employees on those who survived the cuts, knowing that they will do whatever they must to complete the work shoveled onto their plates.  I saw this first hand when Rich was laid off from his employer of 15 years.  He kept in contact with his team, and they were absolutely wrecked with the sudden influx of work from having their group's population decimated.  However, they figured out some way to do it, because "at least they had jobs."  So say we all.

The "at least you have a job" argument is a compelling one, and a product of the above perversion of the American Dream.  The idea is of course that having a job is better for both soul and pocketbook, and this seems logical.  Unfortunately, our collective inattention to the preservation of a legally mandated living wage means that this is not always the case.  It feels a bit strange to link Cracked here, but they published an excellent article about "Five Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor," which describes five things that comprise the absolute tippety-top of the iceberg of economic oppression.  It's worth a read (cuss word warning, if you need such a thing).  When you are not paid a living wage, you essentially descend into a vortex of suck that makes it more or less impossible to attain any kind of existence that would give you the luxury of having a political voice. Paper after paper after study after study indicates that the people who are most likely to get out and participate politically are the ones who have the social and economic capital to do so - the ones who can miss a day of work, or make large donations to candidates or organizations.  Poor people simply do not have this luxury; when even a perfect week's work does not represent subsistence to you, you cannot afford time to read about or participate in political life, which generates the government that represents your only hope at changing your situation in a solid and permanent way.  Once you're screwed, odds are, you're staying that way.  With this in mind, is "a job" - as in, any job - really such a guaranteed blessing?

I'm not sure what the solution is - part of it is instituting a living wage requirement - but a big step would be dropping the hyperbole in which we discuss our working conditions.  Demanding that employers pay a living wage is not stealing profit from them; it's paying workers fairly for the work that makes profit possible.  Removing corporate tax loopholes and tax breaks for the richest of our society is not theft, it's investing via our government in workers who will be able to work longer, healthier, and better to - again - make profit possible.  I believe that capitalism holds the most potential for the achievement of human greatness, but that pinnacle of human excellence is not as excellent if it stands amongst the broken bodies of the rest of humanity.  Its risk is that it demands a continual fixation on the short term and a hyper-individualistic focus.  As discussed before, being poor allows money to dominate your life for the sake of a mean existence; one might argue that the rich suffer the same hobbling, continually absorbed in the quest for ever more money.  Democracy, on the other hand, relies on a concern for the common good, and consideration on the society as a whole.  We cannot realistically presume that after spending 364 days and 23.5 hours of every year driven by the economic mindset demanded by capitalism, that for the one half hour it takes to vote every year (or two, or four), we will suddenly find every American imbued with patriotic love for their fellow man, casting a vote for the most benevolent and generous politician on the ballot.

Dance Like No One is Watching (or, Alternatively, a Gigantic Russian Man)

This has been a trying week, vis a vis politics and bullshit.  There have been a lot of weeks like that lately.  It may just be the stuff I've been reading, but the fact that it exists doesn't change in response to my willingness to engage with it.  When a giant ball of bullshit falls on Capitol Hill, it makes a sound whether or not I or anyone else are listening.  If I go to a lake in the woods with nothing but flipflops, a bunch of beer and a chair, turning off my cell phone and not checking my email, the bullshit in which we live our lives will carry on affecting someone - some people I care about, some people I don't know.  That can be crushing.  The thing is, though, you have to still go to the lake by the woods.  You still have to look for the good in people and things.  You can't just ignore it, but you have to surround what stresses you with a belief that for every person intent on fucking up our world, there are a dozen who want to fix it, and who work at that goal in tiny and wonderful ways, and who sometimes change the world.  You have to be that person. It takes less than you might think.  Love your friends, love your family, seek joy, create wonder.

And perhaps most importantly, dance like a goon.

via Russian Machine Never Breaks

Have a great weekend, everyone!  Change the world every moment of it.

Sometimes People Write Stuff and You're Like "Why Didn't I Write That OH RIGHT I'M NOT A GENIUS."

One of my favorite blogs is MightyGodKing, which is written by a super-smart dude and his cohort of also super-smart people.  I like it particularly because this crew is smart about a span of things that encompasses things I really care about (Canadian politics, law), things I sort of care about (comics) and things I don't really care about but am willing to find interesting in the hands of someone smart (specific characters I don't know much about).  Christopher Bird, the titular Mighty God King, recently posted a fascinating article about DC Comics' upcoming overhaul and its incorporation of the Wildstorm Universe, which I didn't know existed until I worked some Google-fu on it.  That's interesting to a comic fan generally, but it's also interesting to me as someone interested in the creative process and the generation of complete worlds.  Bird has a lot of good stuff to say about the logic of comics and by extension long-running series, and frames this out by establishing a bipolarity between Marvel's pseudo-realistic universe (i.e. "Obviously Spiderman freaks out sometimes, he is a superhero and thus suffers great tension") and DC's more fantastical universe (i.e. "One man can clearly shoulder the burden of being Bruce Wayne and Batman while not really arousing suspicion and/or being an asshole").  It's a great take on how to make storytelling work, and it's one of my favorite topics on which to read Bird's work, because he gets it in a more elemental way than most. 

Pictured: Wildstorm universe, Josie's concern that her blog is too text-heavy.

Bird also produced a really excellent and helpful overview on Canadian politics that I think everyone should read: A Primer on Canadian Politics  Americans need to know and care about how Canada works and what's going on up there (usually, awesomeness), because we're inextricably linked, both by virtue of our geography and our economics.  Befriend your Canadian bretheren! 

Your Kid Brother is Watching You

I have a lot of concerns about Big Brother watching us through our ever accelerating technology, into which we pour our entire lives.  Even those who eschew Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (?? I don't know) and other social media must take extreme measures to truly get off the grid and out from under the eyeballs of various watchers - phones bounce off cell towers, credit and debit cards provide a map of our purchases, toll transponders note when we pass through on our way to wherever, surveillance cameras abound, electric bills lead to your home.  This all makes it ever easier for the government - or whoever - to keep tabs on us. 
 
However, it has also made us more willing to rat each other out, which may be the worst aspect of this rise of technological surveillance.  The Harvard Business Review just posted an article about people in Vancouver gleefully reporting their fellow Vancouverians via social media during the riots that followed Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.  The police, not being idiots, and recently having some trouble with not being douchebags up in the True North, seem to be concerned primarily with the volume of reports coming in.  It's a little tough, because on the one hand, you shouldn't get up to criminal mischief and set your city on fire.  That's pretty clear.  It's dangerous and it's jerky.  However, it doesn't sit well with me for the police to be able to go back to a mob scene and pick and choose the people they want to prosecute.  Even if they see criminal activity, it seems like a fishing expedition. 

I think the thing that I find upsetting is the tendency towards wanting to rat each other out, and that this surveillance eliminates our ability to resolve things without the force of law.  David Brin had a nice post the other day about the idiocy of police whining about being videotaped, in which he said he failed to understand why good cops would need privacy to do their public jobs.  I think he only gets half of the problem, because the surveillance knife cuts both ways.  On the one hand, surveillance via cell phone, etc., can protect citizens against what unfortunately is a massive law enforcement population which includes some bad cops and some bad, prejudicial operational policy.  On the other, it leads to the kind of finking that is visible in the Vancouver article, and it also - and this is more important - removes the possibility of good cops stepping in to mediate conflicts and resolve them without arrests, which is what ties police to the community and fosters cooperation and good relationships.  Bad cops remove this option by creating a paranoia within the public that prompts them to film every police interaction, because if a good cop is filmed trying to help someone without following the letter of the law, there's a chance that the good cop's job could wind up at risk because politicians and pearl-clutching citizens are jerkfaces.

We're all in this together.  No matter what, we won't be living in individual bubbles of self-sufficiency any time soon.  To live together well, we need to drop our willingness to rat each other out for every little thing, and work to resolve all we can without the blunt instrument of the law.  Don't worry so much about arresting rioters who are acting foolishly - focus on making sure those who were causing actual damage and injury are prosecuted and on getting the drunken idiot brigade home and off the streets...and then let it go.  Don't get vindictive, don't persecute people for acting the fool, just let it go.  Stop ratting out your neighbors, even if it's as easy as checking your Twitter feed.