Tag: government

True Left

The Search For Direction

(Introductory note: This began as a social media status that got so long it should be an article, which got so long it needed to go into the book – most people aren’t interested in reading online articles longer than 1500 words or so. This is now an edited-down version of what will be that section of the book.)

There’s a long-standing observation about politics in the United States that we have no “true left” in our country.

This is demonstrably untrue; there are any number of individuals, events, situations, and entities proving otherwise every day, including your present author.

The underlying point of the observation – that the left we do have tends to be much closer to the center and less likely to resist or reject the prerogatives of capitalist power than in the rest of the world – has some merit. Unfortunately, that merit tends to be obscured by the gaping logical holes in the statement.

Also unfortunate is that while the observation has merit, there’s no chance of addressing it effectively head-on without first addressing the reasons it happens.

There is a much larger problem here that we seem to be refusing to see because it’s uncomfortable.

Not Looking For Harris’ Flaws

First I want to talk about Biden and Harris. I was against Biden dropping before he did it. When he did and endorsed Vice-President Harris my immediate response was “this is who we’ve got to beat Trump with, so let’s do it.”

My reasoning for this is simple: there’s absolutely nothing positive to be gained from opposing or even energetically criticizing her at this point. Of course Harris isn’t perfect or flawless, but she’s literally the only thing standing between us and absolute catastrophe – historical, global, catastrophe – in November.

I will not be so thirsty for traffic – or ersatz “street cred” among performative “leftists” – that I feed narratives to the GOP and the right wing by airing criticism here and now. The only purpose would be to draw attention to myself, and if my intentions were honorable and presented in good faith and I was successful in them by raising criticism of and opposition to Harris in public discourse, Trump would win the presidency.

Ergo, I won’t be doing that. She needs to win. There is nobody else and it’s years past when we should’ve been thinking about it if we’re going to lay credible and serious claim to thinking about it now.

Yet still, some of my friends and readers and supporters and colleagues on the left persist in discussing how Harris isn’t a true leftist and we must instead find a real progressive option and get behind them if we’re ever going to progress in this country.

All of those statements taken individually are true, but at the same time taken as an integrated part of reality they don’t change the basic equation. Harris must win this election. There is no other option.

Good Cop, It’s All Rigged, Blah Blah Blah

Is that frustrating to me? Yes. I’ve been saying – publicly – for decades, since I was in middle and high school in the Reagan 80’s, that if we continued allowing it to be okay for our presidential choices to be reduced to the worst idea imaginable versus the second-worst, eventually we would end up in exactly this situation.

Things could be much worse. There could have been a contested primary, or the DNC could have decided in some internal power struggle to go with a much worse candidate.

In circumstances where we’re lucky to have a viable opposing at all, we’re beyond fortunate to have Harris as that candidate whether I agree with her on everything or not. She’s good at her job, she’s proven already to be a great candidate who is extraordinarily popular, and in a matter of a few weeks she’s turned the entire mood of this country around.

That’s the thing that’s bugging me a ton right now about all these self-appointed experts and analysts and activists and pundits and thought leaders and influencers trying to find some way to generate traffic by criticizing Harris.

Harris and her campaign, from the minute Biden dropped out to the minute I’m writing this sentence, have done things about as perfectly as they possibly could be from a standpoint of both the merits of their positions and the results. They’ve not dropped a single ball one time nor even looked wobbly, and I’m not sure they’re going to.

Better Than Merely Lesser Evil

We’re in a very complex moment where a population that fundamentally craves stability and consistency has no stable and consistent direction to turn, and there are radical changes at hand that must be addressed and not resisted, because they benefit all of us in the end.

By the evidence to date Harris and her team are very much tuned in to all of these realities and are doing a masterful job of navigating them. That by itself is a display of leadership far superior to anything of which any Republican or most Democrats are capable.

The “official” voice in my head is thinking 300-ish electoral votes would be a good, solid finish.

The unofficial voice is increasingly convinced we could see a genuine landslide in Harris’ favor in November.

It all depends on whether we show up, which is why I’m not celebrating a lot of positive poll numbers. The only poll that matters, happens on election day, and we have to make absolutely certain the victory is so iron-clad and unambiguous that it’s simply not subject to credible challenge at any level.

Fortunately, we have a solid candidate to get behind and not just a “better than pure evil” placeholder or puppet.

Yet some persist in imposing ideological purity tests on Harris while utterly ignoring her opponent’s catastrophically evil flaws.

Right there is where that much larger problem that we’re not ready or willing to talk about has consequences, and it’s time we did the talking.

Ready for it? Here it goes:

True Left

Here is the reality of the “true left” in the United States of America in August, 2024.

First: A true leftist option isn’t going to do us any good if we’re no longer allowed to vote, or our system is retooled into a despotic facade of democratic process.

Second: This sort of ideological purity test is more often egotistical virtue signaling on the part of the speaker than it is any grounded and coherent objection worthy of the attention being asked of it.

Third: We tend to crap on true leftist options in this country.

How all that shakes out as a set of values when you filter it through a hundred or two hundred million voters doesn’t make us look very good in aggregate in terms of our national character and “who we really are.”

We’ve elected some real losers in this country and allowed plenty of others to hold power simply because we were high on our own flatulence and they kept feeding us raw vegetables.

I think until we take a hard look at that, a true leftist option isn’t going to do us any good, because the problem isn’t about a lack of truly leftist or progressive options.

It’s about our failure to live up to the world we say we want to live in.

It’s about our refusal to work genuinely to create that world to any extent beyond that which is convenient to our existing interests and privileges – and that includes social approval and the material benefits that come with it.

It’s about our willingness to be misled when it appeals to our egos, emotions, or sense of entitlement.

I know that’s not easy to hear or accept, and I’m genuinely sorry for that.

But this is the reality of our time, and we have to face it and address it because if we don’t, we’re just going to keep cycling through flirtations with autocracy until eventually one of them works and we spend a few hundred years with the human population largely impoverished and enslaved until we fight our way back to a more moral social structure.

We have to stop falling for appeals to our lesser impulses.

Baiting The Hook

That’s how they catch us, every time. “They” being the power class in any socioeconomic system and “us” being those not holding significant power. They appeal to our egos and our conviction that if we just “play ball” the right way, we too will be part of the ownership class, but we never really are. Not most of us. The things we think of as “ours,” the cars and homes and all of that stuff, they’re not really ours until we’re done making payments on them.

For most of us that day never comes.

Most of us, one way or the other, continue to both tolerate and fall for this con because we believe that by successfully participating in the con we’ve earned a share of the ill-gotten gains of the con.

Sometimes it even works. Sometimes people really do make out pretty well by being absolute bastards to other people and accruing wealth and power all their lives and dying wealthy and powerful. Not very often though; usually people who die wealthy were born that way.

They’re the ones who keep all this mess going, and they do it because the mess preserves their privileges. They don’t care about the long-term cost or the sustainability or whether someone else or thousand of other humans are being relentlessly exploited to ensure those privileges.

They encourage the rest of us to think in the same terms, making us all complicit and making it more difficult for us to change our own behavior due to feelings of guilt and shame when we look at ourselves honestly in the middle of the night.

A certain percentage of the population always seems susceptible to this notion that if they’re willing to turn a blind eye to exploitation, they’re allowed to reap the benefits of that exploitation with a clear conscience. So long as they’re not holding the whip, their hands are clean.

They con us into thinking like that, and we fall for it because we all want to be comfortable and have some power in our lives and the world around us, and we’re surrounded from birth by constant messaging that surrendering to the machine by becoming part of it is the only way to achieve that comfort and power.

They sell us on the idea that there’s no way out of the hole except by climbing over someone else at a disadvantage compared to us, they lead us to believe this is the only way to do things, and then use our guilt and shame over doing what we believe we must to survive, to keep us doing it when we realize we don’t have to.

They do it to preserve their power, and we let them do it because we believe that our cooperation will give us access to that power.

Until we fix THAT problem, all the true leftists in the world aren’t going to help.

Until we fix that problem we aren’t true leftists ourselves.

August 24, 2024
What Is The National Debt, And Why Does It Matter? (Part 2)

The Gold Standard

In part one of our series on the National Debt, we discussed what “debt” is and why in spite of well-intended contradiction the fact is that the “national debt” is a real thing and it has real meaning, just not at all the meaning we’re sold in political rhetoric.

We left off with a brief note about the gradual decoupling of the US dollar from the value of gold, beginning with FDR’s expansion of the dollar in 1933. Remember, our core purpose here is discussing debt, specifically the “national debt,” with additional necessary examination of concept of value and trade.

I don’t want to get into the weeds on side details or a bulleted list of dates, but once upon a time the US dollar was backed – that is to say, its value was derived from – a quantity of gold bullion held, physically, by the United States Government. That’s why the legendary vault at Fort Knox exists. This was known as the “gold standard,” and for centuries was the basis of money everywhere – how much gold (and other precious metals like silver and copper) did the issuer of the money have on hand?

Moving off the gold standard unfortunately started making the picture of what money “is” less clear to the average person, because the dollar was no longer backed by a tangible object. “But,” you exclaim, “it must be backed by something!” You are both right, and wrong. An important part of the wrongness is the belief that “it must be backed by something real, tangible, and with uniquely and objectively identifiable intrinsic value.“

Modern currency is backed by “the full faith and credit” of the issuer. In the US (and with some variability in any other sovereign currency system) that amounts to our GDP (gross domestic product: the sum total of value of all the holdings, goods, services, labor force, etc. created or held by a nation during a given period; if no period is given this is typically one year) plus whatever value is attached to expectations of future stability and growth.

You’re not imagining things: this is a highly speculative and complicated series of educated guesses derived from abstruse calculations of arcane data to the point some would say it’s entirely made up

They wouldn’t be wrong, but you’re also getting out of economics and into metaphysics at that point because the intrinsic value of gold is also “made up,” in the sense that human beings designated it valuable due to its properties which are useful to humans, e.g. not being prone to deteriorating through oxidation the way iron is, being easy to alloy, and being both malleable and attractive enough to work into fine art including coinage. Best not to let yourself get too deep in the weeds on what’s “made up” when you’re talking money. (If you think coinage isn’t fine art, take a good look at a nice new one through a jeweler’s loupe sometime.)

The simple fact is, all modern money is created in this way: out of thin air, at will, by the owner of that currency denomination – US dollars, British pounds, Japanese Yen, etc. Nothing more than the individual integrity of the people running the systems stops any sovereign currency issuer from simply printing the money to pay off their debts.

What induces them to maintain integrity is the impact that would have on the value of their currency and the trust placed in them by international trading partners who would be loathe to exchange goods and services with a partner known for either refusing to pay their debts or intentionally doing so in such a way that the essential value of the debt is seriously lowered. If I agree to buy your EU beef for $10US when $1 = 1 euro, but then when I pay you off $1 = .5 euro because I (as the US) arbitrarily decided to double my dollar supply thereby devaluing each dollar by half but not changing the dollar amount of our contract, you’ve lost half the EU money you thought you were going to have even though you have the same amount of dollars you expected. That’s dumb business, nobody wants to risk that.

The Eurozone
A Different Feather Of Fish
The Eurozone is a bit of a strange duck that I frankly don’t have my head entirely around yet, but as nearly as I can tell for lay purposes one may think of the European Central Bank as being analogous to our Federal Reserve, with member EU states being similar to US states albeit with more sovereign power due to the EU being a confederation of previously existing nation-states rather than one large nation consisting of new subdivision states as US history imagines to be its own case. (In reality of course there were dozens of existing nation-states on the continent before Europeans arrived, and they were subjugated and dislocated by the Europeans for the sake of American expansion westward.)

“Germany” doesn’t print its own money but “Europe” does, and “Germany” is a participating constituent part of “Europe.” I frankly don’t know how this works out in the interplay of how “your taxpayer euros are spent” – in the US at the federal level that’s a null string because “your taxpayer dollars” are never “spent,” they’re destroyed. I assume the Eurozone has a similar overarching taxation system for the same purposes of pulling Euros back out of the system, but I don’t know how that breaks down into e.g. federal infrastructure funding in the Netherlands.

The Guardrails

Each sovereign system has its own checks and balances to forestall bad actors. In the US, for instance, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

For the record, yes this means the entire concept of a debt ceiling is unconstitutional the moment that ceiling attempts to deny the validity of a public debt, which it does the moment it refuses to account for and settle any given debt. As that is precisely the purpose of a “debt ceiling,” it simply can’t exist constitutionally, but it does because it was originally implemented in 1917 and we didn’t have the proper information and experience to say “hey wait a minute, isn’t this the whole reason we’ve got a set of rules about these things? These rules, right here, the ones you’re egregiously violating?” The purpose of the debt ceiling as conceived is entirely obsolete and shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.

Additionally, it means all the games the Republicans play with refusing to sign off on the funding to pay the debt until they get the draconian social program cuts they want are also unconstitutional; they legally don’t have a chip on the felt. Yet this has been the operating dynamic of federal budget negotiations for at least half a century, long after the reasons for the original creation of a “debt ceiling” in 1917 were obsolete by our decoupling completely from gold in 1971 (Richard Nixon finalized what FDR started).

Thus the underlying purpose of this series: to help you understand the extent to which this entire “debt ceiling” argument is nonsense, but also to fill that vacuum created in your fact library by the removal of that nonsense with information that’s accurate and useful instead.

Also accurate and useful, ridding yourself of the notion that “central bankers” and “capitalists” are the same creatures. Believe it or not, the space most “central bankers” inhabit is at a computer staring at miles of data and doing their honest best to make sense of it, not some cigar-chomping back room where odious industrialists plot ways to rob people of their labor and freedom.

That’s not to say such rooms don’t exist, but that’s not generally where you find a central banker; you find them poring over spreadsheets trying to figure out exactly what percentage of the currency we’ve sent out needs to come back in order to avoid devaluation while also ensuring there’s enough money circulating for people to live and do business.

The influences of capitalism and corruption tend to be external; economists and macroeconomists (for the most part *cough* Friedman) love math and numbers and statistical trends, and tend to keep their ideology and work separated to avoid one unduly influencing the other. That’s not to say they don’t have beliefs, but like a doctor (a real one, not one in Florida) or journalist as a professional matter they must be able to set those beliefs aside and deal with manifest facts which contradict those beliefs, when such facts arise.

It’s a science, speculative and diaphanous as it may seem from the outside…and the numbers work the same regardless of whether the dollars are capitalist dollars or communist rubles or anything else; sovereign currencies have observable behavioral tendencies which are predictable and are only reliant on ideological influence to the extent that influencers motivated by ideology attempt to disrupt the existing “natural” tendencies of money flow.

This all adds up to a picture of modern economics in which a great deal of energy is expended determining just what the fair value of the “full faith and credit” of a nation really is, when denominated in currency, and those calculations, performed internally and reflecting among other things similar calculations based on known data relevant to other currencies from an “external” standpoint, constitute the guideposts for a central bank as to how much money they can safely create without risking devaluation (or having to raise taxes to avoid that risk) which functionally translates into inflation.

All of this, balanced against the behavior and predictability and stability of several dozen other currencies all denominating the same core “values” (e.g. “the consumer price of a loaf of bread”) in ways that are culturally localized.

It’s an act of juggling cats balanced on crystal wine glasses. A third of the cats are invisible and may be made of razor blades, a couple of them are marmosets, one appears to be a previously undocumented mating of a dachshund and a mountain goat, and you have an eyepatch on one side and the opposite hand tied behind your back.

That, my beloved assembled guests, is what we call “macroeconomics.”

In Part 3, we’ll talk more about that phrase “full faith and credit” and the nature of those cats!

May 19, 2023
What Is The National Debt, And Why Does It Matter? (Part 1 – What Is Debt?)
A recent social media conversation brought forth the question, “what is the ‘national debt,’ really?”

This came by way of one person’s well-intended insistence that the national debt isn’t “debt” at all, really…which, is almost right, but also so hugely wrong that deconstructing it in a useful way that wasn’t dismissive or confrontational required a good deal more than a simple comment.

More to the point, when I realized the comment was approaching 700 words and not nearly done, I thought it would make a better blog post here…

Exhibit “A” – we’re going to ignore the questionable assertion that bankers and investors no longer “control the money supply.” Pretty sure the governors of the federal reserve are still “bankers.” There’s a lot wrong here, and the problem is how much if it is based on misunderstanding or misrepresenting useful and factual information.

So let’s talk about what’s wrong about our friend’s assessment, then why, then why it matters, and hopefully we’ll all walk away having learned something useful, and we’ll be better empowered to make well-reasoned decisions at the voting booth!

We began with a comment I saw in my feed that said “the only debt the US has is treasury bonds” or something to that effect, to which I replied “not quite true; 78% of the national debt is the money in circulation.”

This is a great place to note I was a bit wrong there. In a bit of synchronicity that number turns up in the current data, but the actual information I was communicating was something else and my communication was based on outdated data; the actual number is 76.6%. The information below is compiled from the most recent “Monthly Statement Of The Public Debt,” issued by the US Treasury Department.
- 22% of the “national debt” is debt held by various departments of the government against other departments of the government. This amounts to money deliveries and exchanges that haven’t yet been completed for one reason or another.
- Of the 78% (there’s that number) that remains – called “Debt Held By the Public” or “DHBP,” – 30% is held by foreign entities.
- 78 * .3 = 23.4. 100-23.4 = 76.6% of the national debt is, one way or the other, money we owe only to ourselves.
- That other 23.4% is the number on which our friend and I agree as being “debt.”
- In the sense that it is not the same as a e.g. a household, personal, or business debt, the original poster is right, however it is debt, and it’s important to understand how and why that is, in order to understand more completely “how money works.”
So with all of that said, it’s understandable that our correspondent insists that it’s “not debt.” That’s probably more correct than the general perception that this debt represents something that must be paid from some finite store of resources. Indeed, this debt will never be “paid off” or “balanced,” nor would you want it to be?

Why? Because even though there are a lot of misunderstandings about what it means, and those misunderstandings are very much leveraged maliciously against those who subscribe to them (and the vast majority of the rest of us), in the end from a standpoint of economics a dollar bill is a debt instrument, it’s a token representing a legally binding agreement that someone owes someone for something, and unraveling that is much more important than simply engaging in some grand “pulling back the curtain AHA YOU SEE? NOTHING!” gesture. Plus the gesture’s wrong. There’s definitely something there, and it matters. Just not how you probably think…and it all adds up to the simple reality that if the national debt were “paid off,” that would mean there are no more US dollars.

There are only two ways that’s going to happen: if the US unilaterally defines and adopts a successor currency (which it sort of already did, see notes further on in this series about the “gold standard”), or the US collapses entirely and ceases to exist as an operating entity.

What your money’s really worth. Don’t get any bright ideas; destroying coinage is a more serious federal crime than you think.

A “debt” is something that is owed; a “fiat” or “token” is something that holds the place of the debt in a way that’s generally accepted as valid and enforceable by the general public. All paper currency (and most coinage now) is “fiat” currency. Currency’s not valuable in and of itself, it’s just paper (well, cloth) and ink, but it’s still valuable because we all agree to let it represent value under certain conditions and for certain purposes. (Coinage may have intrinsic value depending on the composition of the coin, but as far as I know there is currently no nation producing coins whose metal content is equal to the face value of the coin. US pennies, for instance, cost about $1.07 per dollar’s worth at current (2:18pm 15-May-23) commodity prices.)

In the case of your dollar bill (or its electronic representation in a bank computer somewhere), what it represents – what it is – is a token legally validating that “The United States” is owned, to the tune of 1/x where x= total $ in circulation, by the holder (or “owner”) of that dollar bill, whose ownership stake has not yet been converted to real property or services.

Ergo, “The United States” owes that person or entity one dollar’s worth of real property or services, which they have not yet claimed. (Note to self: stretch this into a separate short piece about the international bond market…) Unavoidably, by definition, every dollar “in circulation” is a dollar of debt.

NB: In this case ‘in circulation’ simply means it’s not in the government’s hands, nor is it in the hands of a governmental unit who is using it for trade, and includes ALL money, not just that which physically exists. About 95% of it doesn’t – around a trillion and a half of that debt is circulating currency and coinage, the rest is electronically recorded and doesn’t “really exist” at all. This is often used as a cheap-shot, elementary school rebuttal to the observation that the “national debt” is in point of fact the collected dollar savings of the United States, to the penny.

Savings accounts, the values of stocks, commercial lending, are all dollars “in circulation” in this sense, and they all represent a debt, usually on multiple levels. But getting back to dollars, the only exceptions are those which make their way into the hands of those who collect coins or currency as a hobby, or trades in those items as collectibles as a business. Then they become a “real resource” rather than a representation thereof. Even at that, the US government will happily cash in your silver and gold certificates and coinage at face value, just take it to any bank and they will replace your old worn-out five dollar bill or twenty dollar gold coin with a nice crisp new Federal Reserve Note in the amount of your bill or coin!

That is why a dollar bill is a debt, not because of some archaic and nefarious witch-doctoring by those mysterious bankers and businessmen. It’s literally a legally binding note saying the United States as a collective political entity owes you real property or services in the amount of that note, and there are very good reasons for that arrangement which are entirely without ideological or political cant; neither capitalism nor communism required.

In Part 2, we’ll take on the question of The Gold Standard, why we’re not on it, and why we definitely don’t want to be. Later we’ll talk about how you get “real value” out of your pile of notes and those ‘very good reasons’ I mentioned. See you soon!
May 15, 2023
Conspicuous Absence: My Thoughts On The Gun Debate
The Gorilla In The Living Room

Another day, another bunch of children and adults brutally murdered by handguns. The conspicuous absence of any ethics or conscience in this country related to gun control cannot continue.

Being a left-wing political writer you may wonder why you don’t see more from me about the “gun problem” in this country.

Classic WWF/WWE announce team Bobby “The Brain” Heenan and Gorilla Monsoon – probably the greatest unheralded comedy team in entertainment history, but that’s another article. Image: WWE.Com

In the pro-wrestling world there was a fella named Gorilla Monsoon, who went from being a pretty legendary “big man” wrestler in the 60’s and early 70’s to being one of the best known “straight man” voices in the business as an announcer for the then-WWF, most often with “color commentator” and “heel,” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan

I could and probably will write at least one and probably multiple articles about him in due time but what’s important here is that he was known for his little turns of phrase, like “they’re literally hanging from the rafters here in [venue/city] tonight!” when announcing live shows and pay-per-views, or “external occipital protuberance.” (Gorilla: “Looks like Big John Studd got the Hulkster right in the external occiptal protuberance…” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan: “Yeah and he got him right in the back of the head, too!”)

One phrase I’ve thought of as long as I can remember as a “Gorilla-ism” even though I’m quite certain it’s really not is the phrase “conspicuous by his/her/their absence.” “The Hulkster now in the ring with the Big Boss Man, and conspicuous by his absence is the big fella’s manager, Mouth of the South Jimmy Hart.”

One of the things that the careful observer might notice tends to be conspicuous by its absence in my work is a whole lot of talk about gun issues.

An Unspoken Agreement

I do talk about them. Just not often, relatively speaking. You’d think I would, huh? Being a leftie, quite the lil tree hugger and empath for looking all big and burly the way I do, you’d think that every time this happens I’d be right there, outraged and demanding to know why this keeps happening and why nobody’s fixing it.

Here’s why I’m not:

It’s a waste of time. I did it for decades, and I’m telling you: it’s a waste of time.

We know what needs to be done. A vast majority of Americans favor common-sense gun regulation to help mitigate two of the biggest sources of gun violence: impulse purchases made in the heat of anger or depression, and background checks to ensure we’re not selling guns to people who have shown in the past to be incompetent to be trusted with a deadly weapon one way or another.

We’ve been talking about it for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough talking.

We’ve been asking why for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough asking why.

Pictured: not a well-regulated militia. (Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com, with some artistic modification by JH)

We know why nothing’s being done: because the National Rifle Association, acting as the public relations and political lobbying arm of the gun manufacturing industry, has spent a hundred years deliberately warping the intent of the second amendment out of shape, stoking and helping to perpetuate all kinds of evil including racism, sexism, domestic violence, and especially toxic masculinity for their profit.

They pay politicians to write laws in their favor; they pay media companies to make movies that make guns look positive and strong and powerful.

None of this is a secret or a “conspiracy theory” or in any meaningful doubt; there’s a century of – ahem – smoking guns marking the trail.

Gun manufacturers have conspired for a century to constantly reinforce messaging that benefits their sales against the best interests of public safety and the operation of a truly free society.

They do enough of it directly and openly so they aren’t accused of being a secret cabal, mind you, but they do plenty of it in back-door style deals as well – think in terms of product placement in films, but this is as much “idea placement” as for any specific brand or item.

Sold, American!

Tie it to all the good old American values like rugged individualism and standing up for what’s right and of course subtextual racism and the reinforcement of paradigms and ways of thinking and behaving that benefit mostly exactly the kind of people who you’d think would definitely start pushing their way around if they had a gun in their hand. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do and so forth. (Jim Jeffries’ American accent in his bit about “protecting my family” is so perfectly the sound of that attitude…)

In this way they keep the general public from being too clear-eyed about where they got the idea that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” and other corrosive and demonstrably untrue ideas on which the industry has relied for their profit-making for over a century now…to the point that we literally have more guns than people.

I don’t talk about that much.

I don’t talk about it because I’m sick of talking about it. I’ve talked about it all my life, and we’ve spiraled into such madness with this I swear half the instapundits on the internet spend their days hoping for the next one so they can churn out some saccharine clickbait about the horror of it all and cash in on those dead bodies.

The staid speeches, the well-researched data, the well-rehearsed catchphrases and talking points…they don’t work. They don’t work because a lot of people are really not terribly bright…

It’s George Carlin, if I have to tell you the audio’s NSFW I genuinely have no idea how you found me to begin with.

…and fear is among the most basic and powerful human emotions there is. There’s always something to be afraid of, isn’t there? Wild animals, roving non-white people, the dark, your own shadow…it’s a terrifying world out there! Why a fella barely dares get a cup of coffee without being armed anymore!

We’re not going to change until we’re collectively more afraid of having guns than we are of not having them. That’s the bottom line.

Until then, all the talk is just traffic generation and marketing to appeal to various discernible groups of people and position one’s self as being among them. Another sorting chute in the never-ending corporate game of human Plinko.

It’s cheaper and more versatile than a sorting hat. Courtesy of CBS without endorsement or permission under 17 U.S. Code § 107

It’s talking heads making money for themselves, and for the most part I think fundamentally most of them don’t really care about any of it much beyond that.

Certainly nobody on the right does, but I have a hard time taking the left seriously on this too…and frankly, I’m just “American” enough myself that I’m not sure I’d want to see the levels of restriction that exist in some places, even knowing that due to mental illness including major depressive disorder and a long well-documented history of suicidal thoughts, if common-sense gun laws ever were enacted I’d likely be among the earliest groups of folks declared unfit to own one. I’m okay with that.

Getting To The Point

Frankly, though, I’m almost as sick of seeing the feeding frenzy of the pundit class every time a tragedy happens as I am of seeing tragedies related to guns on the news – more to the point, as sick as I am of gun tragedies happening.

There’s no reason for any of this madness to happen except that it’s profitable for the gun industry and we’ve ignored that for so long, in part because they convinced us to do so in ways we weren’t aware of, that we ended up letting them buy a significant portion of our government – in BOTH parties.

There’s no solution for it except us deciding that the lives of innocent people are worth more than the profits of gun manufacturers – yes, including the jobs they “create.”

We don’t want to face that honestly and deal with it honestly, and until we do rushing to be the first out of the gate with an overwrought think piece every time a school is shot up amounts to an attempt to pimp out the resulting pile of bodies just so you’ll take me seriously as a leftist or whatever. It’s gross and disgusting and it’s pandering to exactly the base and shallow human inclinations that we need to lose if we’re going to survive, and it’s nearly always done for profit.

No. If I’ve got something to say about it, I will – as I am here and now – and pandering is exactly the opposite of what I do so I don’t know why anyone would expect it on this issue. (NB: I’m burying it here so I can get an additional chuckle at the expense of people who don’t read the article, but I’ve shut all the ads off on this article precisely to avoid “making money off a tragedy.” I don’t think I can turn off the tip jar on a post-by-post basis.)

The Point

Look, I’m gonna make the point before I end up doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t.

I don’t see where there’s anything left to be said about any of this, except it’s all monstrous and horribly shameful, we created it ourselves because we let our thinking be guided by greed, fear, and selfishness, and the resulting ongoing trauma against our nation and especially our children will remain with us in the form of accumulating child corpses until we deal with that and start letting our thinking be guided by something better.

Either that or it’s time to just admit that we’re okay with a few thousand kids dying every year for our own “freedom.”

In 2022, according to the CDC, 3,597 children died by gunfire in the United States.

In 2023, those children and already probably a thousand more are conspicuous by their absence.

Since a little after Sandy Hook, when I realized that not even an elementary school full of corpses would be enough to slap the stupid out of the haploamorous contingent in this country, for the most part the gun debate has been conspicuous by its absence in my work.

Once in a while I get emotional and fire something off – to be clear, I’m not at all saying “I don’t care” – but generally I don’t talk about guns and gun control much – particularly in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting.

Students at memorial fence following shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon May, 1998. Twenty-five years ago almost exactly from the date of this article. And it’s happening far more often now. Photo courtesy Ron Olsen (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Until I see some evidence that anyone cares enough to do something REAL about it, the subject will remain largely conspicuous in my work by its absence because I won’t be part of the reason we’re secretly not doing as much as we could about it – I won’t partake in the “collateral benefit” by deliberately creating content to play to gun violence every time gun violence happens in this country. I won’t give myself a pathway to being in any way motivated in my thoughts on the matter and the expressions thereof by profit.

The reason for that – while acknowledging that I understand there are plenty of folks out there acting in good faith to do what they think is best to address the situation and I was right along with the crowd in this behavior for a long while before reconsidering my behavior – is that as far as I’m concerned the part of the cycle where everyone in my band of the spectrum lines up to spew impotent outrage is morally equivalent to ripping the bodies out of their coffins and dancing with them at the funerals, and I just can not find a reason to be involved in that.

Until I start seeing people care about all the conspicuous absences in their local elementary schools because of our negligence – Covid and guns, just in the last three and a half years, how many young lives have we just cast aside like so much used tissue in the relentless pursuit of gratifying our egos and turning a buck? and the evil bastards who do this are often the exact same people accusing women of “murdering children” when they terminate a pregnancy! – I feel strongly disinclined to take seriously any complaints about the absence of my voice in this debate.

There are enough voices in the debate for another thousand debates like it. Could stand a few conspicuous absences there.

I don’t need to add mine to the chorus, by and large – not in the least because when I do (as now) I want it to matter, and it won’t if it’s the same navel-gazing bullshit I and ten thousand other self-important twits have spewed out a thousand times each in the last ten years.

When the conscience of this nation is no longer conspicuous by its absence from gun control policy, when our children are no longer conspicuous by their absence from our lives after they’ve been stolen by the madness of unfettered capitalism and induced stupidity for profit in the form of a firearm, then perhaps we’ll have something worth talking about.

Until then, the discussion remains thus:
- we’re out of our minds on the gun thing in this country
- we don’t want to get in our minds about it because it’s profitable and the world is scary
- until we do, we’ll continue sacrificing roughly ten kids per day and climbing to the gods of profit and machismo.
Until we face that reality head on, there’s just not much to be said that will add anything of value to the conversation, no matter how well-researched, eloquent, or well-intended.

Until we face ourselves and admit that on the subject of gun control we’re absolutely off the rails and need serious re-evaluation, the most conspicuous absence in the arguments will remain our collective conscience.
May 8, 2023
The Right People

We have bad policies for combating homelessness and poverty for one reason: because the very wealthy need the very poor to keep everyone else in line.

The Right Policies

During my usual daily searches through the news for things to be worried about, I came across this letter to the editor from Jake Trimble in the Salt Lake City Tribune titled “Latest abatement shows Salt Lake City is plagued by bad homeless policy.”

Jake makes a number of excellent points and is clearly writing from a place of compassion and genuine concern. My primary issue with his letter is simply that it circles around the biggest issue – homelessness and what we’re failing to do about it – without addressing it directly. According to the latest Federal Reserve data there are about 15 million empty housing units and about half a million homeless people in this country. Perhaps another 2-5 million are housing insecure, depending on how you measure.

That means there are enough homes to not just give every homeless person two, but also every housing insecure person, and even in the “worst case scenario” you’d still have five million empty housing units left over for those who can afford two or more.

So let’s just kill this whole narrative right now: we have plenty of housing. We choose not to use it.

Why would we make that choice? Because the people who sit at the very top of the pile – the Musks and Bezoses and Waltons and Gateses – have taught us that’s the right choice to make, and it is…for them. It’s just not for anyone else.

The very wealthy, you see, need the poor to exist.

Not just “poor” but visibly oppressed, hopeless, wasted lives must be present, because they’re the biggest weapon the wealthy have to keep everyone in between them and the poor properly controlled to perpetuate the power and wealth of those at the top.

The poor must exist because without them, you wouldn’t be afraid to stand up to your abusive employer, or the broken local school system, or whatever else might be an option for you if you weren’t trained to believe, fundamentally, that doing so would cause you and those you love great harm.

The truth is the owners – the five or six hundred people who really do own nearly everything – need the poor and destitute and hopeless to exist, to keep you in line.

The Right Charities

The social, cultural, and business leaders of our world don’t want “good homeless policy” in the sense this writer means it. They only care about “good homeless policy” to the extent of “people who aren’t homeless aren’t forced to look at and deal with homeless people.”

There are BILLIONS of dollars in that valley, and plenty of room too. The only reason you don’t have a robust public housing system that more than adequately covers everybody’s needs is that you. don’t. want. one.

You can’t sit around patting yourselves on the back for how you charitably used a millionth of the available resources that you could to help some poors, if there aren’t any poors.

You can’t prop up the performative and often profit-motivated private ‘safety nets’ if the people choose to ensure all are provided for through the mechanisms of their duly elected government.

You don’t get that warm, fuzzy, patronizing feeling of cutting that check, if nobody needs it.

To actually solve these problems would end an entire system of funnels for making sure the “right people” are given the accolades and social reinforcement necessary to keep the money flowing in their direction.

The extremely wealthy *need* the very poor, because the very poor are how they keep the rest of us (the rest of YOU – I *am* very poor) complying with their prerogatives.

“You’d better stick to the program, you don’t want to become one of THEM, and we can make you one of THEM any time we want, so you keep your happy little head down and your happy little mouth shut and keep consuming AND generating profits for the producer on the products by selling your labor to them for far less than it’s worth, or else.

“Now here’s a bunch of home security systems and motion-trigger cameras and alarms and guns to keep yourself safe from all those filthy poors. Aren’t you glad we’re protecting you? Wouldn’t it be a shame if we stopped? So yeah, it’d be cool if you just cooperate. It’s so much easier than fighting back, isn’t it? Yeah, it sure is.

“Here’s a few thousand articles of pointless but emotionally stimulating bickering over the same old nonsense we’ve known how to fix for at least several generations but refuse because it’s not profitable for the ‘right people.’

“Here’s some vapid celebrity worship and pointless archaic pseudo-competition to keep your attention and a gambling industry so THAT can be used to further extract value from you too!

“Ooh and ahh at this news article about the plucky fifth grader who built a dialysis machine out of coffee cans, aquarium, tubing, and a hamster wheel because his mom can’t afford to pay for the dialysis that keeps her alive.

“Awwwwww, what a champ!”

Capitalism is nothing if not thorough.

The Right Systems

Since only the “right people” are allowed to run things and make decisions, none of it’s ever going to change, because they’re only ever going to make the most selfish decisions they can plausibly explain to the public – often with the cooperation of that segment of the public who don’t care to be bothered having to look at filthy poors.

The kicker is, for those of us who really do want to help, the only available options are those that cooperate with the whole charade.

There’s no way for someone like me to put together the knowledge I have in a way that is meaningful and accessible and available, unless I, too, go through the process of setting up a whole series of systems replicating the function of “the right people” while trying to keep the whole process honest. That’s why I created Musk For A Minute – not simply for myself but for others in my odd but not entirely unique position of being extraordinarily gifted at nearly everything except being financially stable.

Because there simply is no other way for people like us to survive and add our humanity to the world, and the world needs our humanity in it. The more of us can do our thing, the better off we’ll all be.

There’d be no need for it if we had meaningful structures in place to ensure those among us who produce non-material value are able, literally, to do so. If we were in a sane economic system – with a universal basic income + job guarantee administered by the same governments who own the money – what we call “charity” wouldn’t need to exist.

To be clear, in these hypercapitalist days what we call “charity” doesn’t simply mean “giving from the kindness of your heart to some cause which matters to you,” I’m not talking about girl scout cookies here.

I’m talking about the degree to which those who have more than they absolutely need are willing to part with some of it to help those who have less than they absolutely need because the systems and processes which are supposed to make sure everyone has what they absolutely need are badly broken and maladministered by those whose primary fealty is to the machinery of profit and exploitation.

So What’s Left?

You’re in a position of having to decide whether to support Musk For A Minute or the Red Cross or the Ukrainian military or COVID relief – or for most of us, how to effectively support them all and ourselves, just like I’m doing – because that’s how the people who own everything including the vast majority of information consumed by the average person in an average day want things to be.

The “right people” need the poor to keep everyone between them and the poor – and that’s most of you who read this – under control.

The most effective way they do this is to ensure that within that big chewy center, “right people” – people who are cooperative with the whole mess because they perceive the material or other personal benefit to them as being of more value than the ethics they’re compromising to gain that value – are nearly always selected to manage and govern and make decisions and be the foci of our attention, to create social proof for the validity of the whole system that keeps us all from being who we wanted to be back when we still believed we could.

The more willing you are to turn a blind eye to the very crimes and excesses and sins and mendacity and avarice necessary to maintain such a system, the more of a “right people” you are. The more you push back against that and demand equality of opportunity and justice and privilege (i.e. “human rights”), the less likely it is you will ever be allowed to become a “right people.”

If you get too mouthy about it, the right people will make sure you can’t even eat, so you end up with starving, unemployable geniuses running around. We’ll just dismiss them as “insane” and let them rot, we don’t need ’em. I mean after all, there’s a whole new series about Joe Exotic and that damn Carol Baskin!

And that’s what we’re calling a “free country” these days.

What can you do about it? Stop propping up clickbaiters and profiteers, and start supporting genuine voices of leadership and evolution. Having my own biases, I of course recommend Musk For A Minute.

As always: the revolution you’re looking for starts in the mirror.

February 27, 2022
Best Of A Bad Lot

When every political candidate’s best pitch is “I’m not as bad as the worst,” it’s tough to believe you’re in a truly free system.

The Frame

Over on a big Facebook page where I’m an admin, “I Loved To Wake Up In The Morning When Barack Obama Was President,” one of the other admins posted the meme you see as this article’s header image in celebration of President’s Day, with the caption “America thrives with Democratic Presidents at the helm.”

While I personally am not a Democrat and have some major problems with the party, as an independent leftist I find that to be a valid statement. I’m less inclined to “go team” and personality cultism than some – although I’d hardly be an admin of a fan page for Barack Obama if I thought he wasn’t worthy of the effort, I don’t endorse or promote anything I don’t believe in – but I don’t think in its context this image is out of place or unreasonable.

When you look at the numbers and what gets done and why, as a general rule the US does better with Democratic presidents, and ideally we’d have about a 16-year run of them with significant periods of legislative majority, while the GOP continues falling off the right end of the spectrum into flat-out Neo-fascism, the Dems continue to drift rightward, and eventually a third party rises from the left within the Democratic party to fill the “other major party” void left by the declining Republicans.

As one might expect with that sort of content in that sort of context, reaction was largely positive. There was one that caught my eye though, because it was pretty hard but not without significant merit and truth. I’ve no interest in bringing any heat on the commenter so I’ll leave their name out and not screenshot lest anyone think I’m encouraging some kind of argument with them, but the comment was thus:

The ONLY good thing about Democrats, is that they’re not Republicans. Literally it. All 3 of those men suck major donkey balls, they were just a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.
Facebook

I don’t feel as negatively as the commenter, but I also sure wish there wasn’t quite so much truth in this as there is.

What really stood out for me wasn’t the harsh criticism in the first part of the post, but rather the last phrase: “they were just a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.”

That really struck me, because that’s been the core decision-making guidance in presidential (and most congressional) elections in my lifetime.

This “best of a bad lot” game has been going on for several cycles now. I think we got fairly lucky with Obama, frankly, and I put him well above Clinton. (I’m not taking a position on Biden’s presidency as a whole until it’s over.) Any of them I’d take over any republican president in my lifetime, which would start with Nixon. Eisenhower was a different breed and I’d have to take a closer look at his policies to say how much I’d care for him versus say Clinton.

But generally in my lifetime it’s been “horrible” versus “a little less horrible,” often with so little difference “horrible” wins. When this is not the case, for profit media (“independent” or not) will work diligently to make it seem so, because underneath this whole process is a matter of conditioning us as a population to always accept “just a little better than the worst” as the only alternative to anything.

This is exactly why we end up with people like Reagan and the Bushes and McConnell and Trump and may all the gods I don’t believe in forbid whatever the GOP is queuing up to be even worse than that. We’re conditioned to not only accept that bold progressive change is impossible, but that it’s rather flighty to even suggest. Here, have a personable character who will do far less than they should. Wouldn’t you like to have a beer with them? How could you reject someone so friendly and nice? At least he’s not as bad as that OTHER one…

The Game

The first half of the game is first finding a truly odious candidate, then getting a candidate who’s just slightly different enough to be “better than THAT guy” and conditioning voters to accept that this is the best we can do because look at the alternative.

The second half is to limit the alternatives to only those candidates sufficiently friendly to existing holders of wealth and power.

We’re not allowed to have good alternatives, and when one arises – see e.g. Sanders in ’16 and ’20 – they’re excluded from the process by manipulation and artifice, usually with a big assist from the media driving narratives that deliberately – and let’s be clear, artificially – induce a sense of hopelessness and failure among those supporting the good alternative, and a wearing away of the will until you throw up your hands and go well I guess this is what we’ve got, because there literally are no other choices.

More Of The Same

Those same influences of media and commerce will then throw support behind saccharine facades of the good alternative, like Gabbard or Sinema or Manchin, and manipulate us into believing the artificial is genuine…just long enough to get them into office where they can screw things up and make a big mess and confuse the conversation, lather rinse repeat.

You can count on two hands, if that, the number of currently seated US federal legislators who aren’t to at least some degree putting up a front of populist nonsense and cheap sloganeering in the pretense of working “for the people” while as soon as the cameras are off they’re having $25K/plate fundraisers with industrial tycoons. Maybe your toes too, if I’m being optimistic.

Whatever one may think about any given President’s ideology or accomplishments, all of this seems like one damned strange way to have a free country to me, and it’s bothered me for decades.

We never should have been ON this handcart, and now nobody wants to hit the brakes because then they’d have to deal with themselves.

We’ve had warnings – loud, clear, lucid, consistent warnings from subject matter experts in every imaginable field -that this mess was coming for decades, and we ignored them all because they were uncomfortable, inconvenient, and unprofitable.

Now just look at what we’ve done with all the privilege and liberty we were born into. Corrosion, corruption, connivance, exploitation, greed, and way too many of us are STILL sitting here insisting “no wait, we don’t know FOR SURE where this handcart is headed, let’s keep going!”

Because they’ve got good seats in the handcart and they’re comfortable and they think if they stay real still and don’t upset the handcart, they’ll stay that way and by the time it gets to hell who cares they’ll be dead anyway.

That has to end.

The entire way we think about everything is a broken cobbled-together mish-mash of superstitions and emotional manipulation leveraged by the powerful against the powerless, all hiding behind the facades of good will and best wishes and thoughts and prayers. We are dragging around thousands of years of ridiculous social nonsense and mechanisms of oppression and abuse, and it’s time we faced ourselves and started letting them go.

That’s not a suggestion; it’s going to happen because the only other option is extinction. The question is whether we lean into it and grow and evolve, or whether we choose to fight back and try to cling to old systems of inequality and oppression because they benefit us materially, and find ourselves miserable and tied up for generations in decline and oppression as we teach ourselves over and over that the old ways simply don’t work anymore, to the extent that they ever did.

But for too many of us right now, it’s almost like watching hardcore addicts, people who are deep into like meth or crack or opiates. They always think they’re getting away with something, and if you call them out they’ll just stand there lying straight to your face about it until one way or the other you leave them alone about it.

Every one of us from the most powerful personalities in government and commerce to any one of the half-million or so people who go to sleep homeless every night in the United States knows that we have a serious problem of our world being largely controlled by and for narcissists, egomaniacs, and sociopaths.

In our earnest desire for fairness and equity, we allow ourselves to be painted into a corner where if we stand up against autocratic or totalitarian or fascist or otherwise oppressive and harmful ideologies, we’re accused of “intolerance” and shouted down as though that’s really a substantive point.

Worse, trapped in a fog of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, propaganda, advertising, marketing that begins assaulting our senses nearly from the moment of birth and follows us all the way to the grave, we’re often easily misled by cults of personality and pandering to our biases and egos and fears, and that goes in any direction; it’s no more rational to have unquestioning fealty to Obama or Biden or Clinton than to have any seething hate for them.

(Ah, but what about the Trumps of the world? Their whole function is to lower the basement by several dozen levels so the next fascist who shows up with table manners and less than grotesque personality will seem admirably restrained and lucid by comparison…and the one just a tiny bit less odious than that one will seem nearly messianic by comparison to the “new low.”

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.)

By failing to stand up for justice and equality, allowing our systems and processes to be corrupted because we believed ourselves beneficiaries of the corruption, we have sent the message to the most powerful and malicious people in the world that they can get away with anything, and now that’s what they’re trying to do.

So while there’s nothing wrong with showing respect for leaders you admire, it’s also well worth noting that we are in no way headed in any right direction at present, nor have we been for a very long time now, and if we don’t get serious about fixing it right now a whole lot of us are going to get hurt as the whole mess collapses on top of all of us – and it will be all of us, this isn’t just a US or “western democracy” or “modern world” thing.

The very underpinnings of human liberty are at grave risk of disappearing entirely. While it’s in no way my intention to insult or criticize memes like this one or celebrations like President’s Day or any of the particular people in the image, if we’re truly going to honor and respect our humanity in the veneration of historical figures we absolutely must reject the idea that “not as bad as the worst,” is the best we can do.

February 21, 2022
The John Henry Show – S1E022 Biden-Sanders Debate

The Biden-Sanders debate, the ongoing state of US coronavirus response, outrageous social media trolls (and the people who fall for them), and the nature of authority and expertise. Video archive at https://youtu.be/xBaHGGnXLZ4

March 17, 2020
On The Futile Delusion Of Anarchy

Mixing Messages

A page I follow on Facebook recently posted the image you (should) see at the beginning of this article among some other images generally promoting the ideology of anarchy and insisting that “government” – no qualifiers – is “dangerously evil.”. Included was the hashtag #GovernmentIsTheEnemy.

(Note: Under ordinary circumstances the image would be intact and properly credited, including the creating page’s name that was on the original. In this case however I want to avoid both provoking a direct confrontation (because there’s no point in it and it’ll just seem like petty personal crap rather than a principled criticism) and, frankly, advertising for someone this careless about their messaging, so I’ve cropped it out.)

Those of you who have been following me for a minute can probably already guess where this is going.

I commented to the effect that if this was what was going to pass for substantive dialogue, I would go ahead and see myself out…and of course, the poster immediately challenged me to provide some substantive dialogue.

And so here we are.

There are a couple of things I want to point out before we get too deep into this: first, I don’t disagree with a single letter of the first sentence. I am wholeheartedly behind the sentiment and in fact it wouldn’t surprise me if I wrote it ten or fifteen years ago and have since forgotten, that’s how much it resonates with me.

The second sentence, however, and the hashtag, render the whole thing about as basic and banal and entirely un-revolutionary as a thing can be.

The second thing I want to put up front is that my comments are predicated on the core assumption that we’re discussing life in a democratic system of some kind, and that system is at least somewhat functional – enough so that it’s not a dog and pony show to validate a dictator, such as we see under Putin in Russia. Obviously the subjects of a totalitarian government cannot take responsibility for that government short of open rebellion.

So with that said, let’s nail a few things down about this recurring fantasy – which seems to inhabit mostly young, white, fairly affluent men between 15 and 25 – that all you have to do is get rid of that darned ol’ government and everything will be a beautiful anarchist utopia.

Government: Is-es and Isn’ts

First, government is not an external entity, nor a mysterious overlord, nor an unyielding and ineffable omnipotency. If you live in a functioning democratic system – a system in which, one way or the other, the people’s voice controls who represents them and how – the government is you. If your government is acting in a way contrary to what you think best, it is up to you to get up and fix it. You vote. You lobby your representatives. You organize public demonstrations. You run for office yourself. That’s how this is supposed to work.(*)

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. – Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address
– Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

This insipid abuse of stupidity by picking words to artificially demonize is obnoxious to critical independent thought. “Government” is not some outside actor imposing its will on people. If you live in a democratic system and your government is not governing to your satisfaction, you change the government. That’s literally what democracy is for, the reason our form of government exists, to ensure that “the government” – that is, the citizens elected to represent their fellow citizens in the processes of determining the details of being a successful country – is always responsible to its citizens.

This idea that anyone does, or even CAN exist without some form of government outside a single-person vacuum is as frankly ridiculous as it gets. I’ve gone into the question of anarchy itself in a previous article that I’ll resurrect when I find it, but the key point is the simple reality that “anarchy,” this notion of free people freely choosing to live in peace without government, is a delusion. It literally can not exist. See now:

There are two people. Those two people meet. Those two people carefully approach each other, find they can communicate effectively, and arrive at some basic agreements to avoid displeasure.

You now have two governments and an international treaty. If you decide that guy is better at chopping logs but he sucks at hunting meat so you’ll trade him some of your excess meat for his excess logs, you now have an international trade agreement. You agree not to kill each other, you now have laws.

That is “government.” I’m quite sure someone reading this, and probably many of them, are thinking well you just don’t get what they mean by “no government.” That’s not my problem, frankly; what they said was “no government,” and if that’s not what they mean then they should speak more accurately.

(* After publication, a reader pointed out that any number of exigent circumstances might prevent someone from taking any of the actions I described, running for office, voting, etc. I do understand this and probably should have clarified that in the absence of an ability to do these things, at the very least you can support organizations and individuals working in your interest by sharing their content on social media, talking with your friends about these issues, and other activities that are free, easy, and take little time. Really, the effort to be a genuinely good citizen isn’t much. It just gets built up that way by the ownership class to discourage participation.

The point is, in a democratic system the government is by definition responsible to the people, and the people are responsible for their government. For instance in the 2016 election it’s pretty fair to say that at least an effort was made to subvert the process, but it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well as it did if people hadn’t cooperated by backing a status-quo candidate in a rebellion election, by tolerating the obvious dirty pool on behalf of the DNC with regard to Sanders, by not pushing back against those stunts.

The degree to which any one person in your democracy may be disenfranchised, excluded, or subverted in their political choices is precisely the degree to which you do not live in a true democracy. Even in a republic, the job of the elected representatives is to work on behalf of the best interests of the people. If they’re not doing that, get rid of them before they break the system to the point you can’t.)

Words Matter

As my late friend Sam was so fond of pointing out, words matter. I should HOPE their opposition is not to “government” but to “abuse of power.” So say that. Because the two are not equal, and attempting to equate them just makes you look like an ignorant hand-waving agitator with little if any understanding of what government even is at its most basic level.

As long as there are people, there will be government. Inescapably as there will be wetness as long as there is water and it’s above 32*F somewhere the water is. Trying to ignore or “work around” or protest that is the absolute definition of Quixotic.

It’s not that I’m telling you “you can’t because I say so,” I’m telling you “you can’t because it’s functionally impossible,” like trying to create a one-sided three dimensional object. This isn’t about “I don’t like what you’re saying,” or about “I think you” anything. It’s about the basic impossibility of the premise of having “no government.” The very second there are two sentient beings interacting, there is some kind of government, no matter how rudimentary, and that government is going to do exactly the same things in terms of function as any other: work to ensure its own survival through the easiest means available. That means you have to work out SOME kind of rule for your relationship with that other person you inhabit your planet with, even if that rule is “there will be no other rules.”

Yes, even that is a form of government. Even a two-person world in which the only rule is there will be no rules, has government. It also has authority; you just exercised your authority to negotiate “no rules” with your co-planeteer. They exercised theirs to negotiate with you. Their authority extends only over themselves inherently; to extend it over you requires either your cooperation or force. But it’s still authority; it’s still the privilege to make a decision and commit to it, and it’s still the responsibility for bearing the consequences of failing to live up to that agreement – or for that matter the consequences of succeeding – even if that consequence is nothing more formal and organized than a punch in the eye.

So we now see that simply poo-pooing government and making aggressive anti-government generalities just doesn’t float. To put it more formally it’s an ineffective, dead-end tactic for genuine reform or even revolution. All it does is mark those who fall for it as easily manipulated and not real careful thinkers.

Of course, it’s very easy to agitate people into the streets to make anger and break things. Doing the hard work of actually crafting a better idea and implementing it is a much more daunting process, and it often doesn’t fit easily into a meme or bumper sticker.

Ours is a world in which words matter, and the chest-thumping pronouncement of inflamed passion untempered by wisdom or depth of thought creates nothing but the same old stupid escalations and abuses they always did. If you’re going to take on the system, you need to know that before you even leave the house.

This is precisely why so many revolutions end up becoming tyrannical themselves.

Either you want to be rid of Orwell’s Boot, or you want to wear it. If you want to be rid of it, engaging in doublespeak and agitprop is pretty much the opposite of doing that.

That makes you no different from the power you’re supposedly fighting.

No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
George Orwell, “Animal Farm”

Any revolution predicated on the idea of “eliminating government” is automatically self-terminating.

January 19, 2020
Stop Wasting Food! (2011)

Back in 2011 I cut this video about the massive food waste that happens particularly in developed nations. This was the description of the video at the time:

Each day in this country millions of people go hungry while corporate food service throws out tons and tons of perfectly good food with excuses like “we will get sued” and “it will take away from our sales if we give this food away.” I’m calling bullshit, and challenging corporate food service to step up and do the right thing. Please join me; they will respond to public pressure, if there’s enough of it.

Now, twelve years later, we still haven’t really addressed this problem very well, but movement has happened including the French government mandating waste reduction and distribution efficiency regulations. Just like it says in that last sentence, “please join me; they will respond to public pressure if there’s enough of it.” Hardly surprising that the earliest meaningful movement we have seen on this issue is in France, one of the world’s more infamous sources of social change via public pressure.

February 15, 2011