Monkey It UP

“The last thing we need to do is monkey this up, by trying to embrace a socialist agenda, with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state” 

     -Florida GOP’s Gubernatorial Candidate.

If “monkey this up” were a phrase like “monkey business” or “throw a monkey wrench in it,” he would have some cover, but no. These days, the GOP is more into whipping it out. False equivalency is so last reich, today’s racists gotta show it off. Dog whistle? Why not just beat the dog til it does what you want?

The white dogs, I mean, the dumbasses who fall into the racist trap but still end up poor, downtrodden, seeking solace in their god and their guns. Or their opioids and meth. But the candidate obliterates the class war angle with his frontal assault on the socialist agenda.

Or maybe not so much, since he seems to think that increased revenue will drain government coffers. And he knows good and well the socialists don’t want to tax the working poor, they aim to reinstate and maybe ratchet up taxes on the wealthy, who have been getting handouts since Reagan, doing a little ratcheting of their own along the way.

The bold words are the ones he punched as he spoke, the ones he really wanted voters to key in on. Then he’d throw in an odd number of lesser syllables ere hitting another,…building a cadence that sounds right, even when it’s wrong. Fans of the subliminable may find it interesting that the syllables he really emphasized were “last…monk…huge…bank.” I mean, we already know republicans loves huge banks, but does this signal an upcoming assault on catholics, maybe buddhists? Keep an ear out.

Meanwhile in the now, whistle in his lips and rolled up newspaper in his hand, the man aims to get his dogs out and voting. For good measure, he’ll join the president in siccing the dogs on the paper and any other mainstream media. The failure of which, white people, should concern you. Already, a third or more of the population are convinced that the only real news is the regime’s propaganda. And if you mangey-ass dogs ever do figure out you’ve been had, it’ll be too late. No real news, no real justice, you can find out for yourself whether that place in the desert is a tent city or a concentration camp where the big dogs patrol.

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The Anarchy A

Recently, people keep reminding me that the Circle-A symbol is associated with anarchism,...maybe even with Anarchism.

No shit.

One woman kindly commented on a post of the above sign to let me know that the anarchist crowd uses that, and she wasn't sure if I did it on purpose.

Ahh...yup. Thanks.

A sixty-ish photographer somberly asked me if I knew what that A-in-a-circle meant as he got a shot of my daughter and I at a rally. He looked grim when I confirmed:

Si, Professor.

Maybe especially around here, people think anarchist and they envision black bloc ninjas throwing rocks through windows, but there are degrees and species of Anarchy just like there are of any other -ism.

To begin with, some reject anything but little-a anarchy.

My anarchy dropped orthodoxymoronic Anarchism years ago. My anarchy fails the purity test (I'm a government worker, for Marx's sake). My anarchy doesn't mind government  preventing corporations from poisoning the earth and ripping us off, and it knows damn well that NO government just means the armed and greedy get their way. My anarchy begins in the womb, where no government should be tolerated, and lives in a body and mind that should not be violated.

My anarchy is old and likes naps, but it ain't dead yet.

So yeah, I'll continue to march with Womxn and support Planned Parenthood and protect Mother Earth with my "Dads Against the Patriarchy" sign. Lots of people have said they liked it, shot photos, and been very supportive. Lots of them know what the A means, some of them are really supportive, and a few people get uncomfortable.

Which is good. The Circle-A hasn't lost all its power.

"Rebel Bureaucrat" (Death of an Oxymoron)

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It only took a few weeks for Congress to start elaborating on Trump’s ascendancy to dictatorship. The guy is not even in office yet, and the GOP is in a headlong over heels rush to suppress opposition and bring the government under overt, complete control of Capitalism Gone Wild.

For reasons no one can rationally explain, the 1% of the 1% are offended by the presence of a middle class. The class war we’re living through is not rich against poor—being poor means you already lost—but oligarchs against a middle class. Maybe because the middle class enjoys a blend of financial comfort and education, the super rich feel a threat, resent the money in somebody else’s pocket, or fear that cities full of college grads may not sign on to the program of extreme social conservatism and endless upward redistribution of wealth.

Whatever the cause, a major battlefield in this war is “the government,” by which people mostly mean the people who work for federal agencies and the places they control. Conservatives are not so upset by the money government grants or the things government buys—pork barrel money feeds their districts’ businesses, they like all the stuff from irrigation systems to tactical police gear that pours in, subsidies are a major part of most farming, not state funds its own disaster recovery—but they hate the strings that are attached. Being told not to over-graze, to protect a stupid little fish, and that you cannot poison the water and air insults the independence-minded sensibilities of the rank and file, and more importantly cuts into the oligarch’s profit margin.

The strategy of riling up the base, buying the politicians, and pursuing de-regulation and down-sizing of government has proceeded unhindered from Reagan right on through Bush II. Although Obama’s compromise-oriented approach and inability to overrun the barricades thrown up by Congressional Republicans fell well short of the Right’s nightmares—remember how he was going to take all the guns and socialize the economy?—they apparently feel abused and angry and ready to retaliate.

The once desultory battle over “the government,” a Cold War of cuts made vs regulations implemented, is now blowing up; the carnage is about to begin for real. The GOP controls the elected government and stole the judiciary, and already they’re acting as if they had 100% backing of the populace.

This week, the new Congress, as it does at the beginning of each session, passed its own rules. By way of inoculating itself against the accusations of corruption sure to come as they pass a slew of heavily lobbied, pro-corporate legislation, the GOP included provisions to partisanize and weaken the non-partisan Office of Congressional Ethics. Progressives garnered immediate grass-roots and politician outrage and the House Republicans backed down, comforted only by their belief that government offices are incompetent anyway.

Before the Left could claim victory, Trump tweeted and ended up getting a large share of the credit. His base seems satisfied that he is hard at work draining the swamp, when all he did was see the writing on the wall and throw some colleagues under the bus, as per his own personal ethics (which he maintains nobody is worthy of scrutinizing).

Meanwhile, the Rules package also included a much scarier provision, provided by yet another scary Virginia Congressman. This one revived a 19^th-Century rule intended to target corrupt political appointees by allowing Representatives to offer amendments reducing a person or program’s budget to $1/year. So now when a Representative disagrees with a program or needs a scapegoat for a news cycle or two, a party-line vote puts people in the poorhouse. That li’l nugget slipped right on through with no protest.

Communities nationwide have federal workers, and defunding their jobs will hurt local economies everywhere. Of course it won’t actually have that broad an effect, because no politician would pull this move in their own district. As a way to eliminate inconvenient truths, hamstring regulation, and punish a liberal district, however, it’s a win-win-win (where they get all the wins and you get nothing). That little rule is starting to look like an effective weapon, isn’t it?

Meanwhile back on the ranch—which happens to be mostly federal ground leased by settlers sons at a fraction of market rate—government employees face other threats on the battlefield. Self-proclaimed militias can show up, take over, demand snacks, trash the place, literally dig shitters through Indian sites, and incite a shootout all while broadcasting calls to arms and threatening government employees. They can do all this and they face trial but get off with no conviction.*

Which you better believe has galvanized the conviction of the Bundys and their vehemently anti-government and pro-gun ilk. These white men fee entitled above immigrants and minorities (including the tribes whose lands they occupy), but also abused and angry. Emboldened now by their victory in court, fervent in their belief that the government is an agent of evil, these yahoos put federal workers in literal danger in some of the very places where land management costs are paid by the feds and the financial benefits accrue locally.

Which brings us back to those federal employees who could suddenly find themselves making $1 a year. Few of them have the personal wealth to keep working for free, and most of them would ordinarily be plowing their moderate paychecks back into their local communities, spending their off time participating in those communities. Being middle class.

If there are people still working for the government who think they can continue to be relatively comfortable, they’d better wise up. Congress has only just begun, and Trump hasn’t even unleashed actual and imagined executive powers. The Kochs and other wealthy advocates of concentrating all wealth at the top have plenty more money and a congress begging to be, ahem, lobbied. They’ll get around to privatizing public lands—taking care of that part of “the government”—but even quicker they’ll move against unions, programs that run counter to their ideology, branches of government that impinge on unfettered capitalism, and so on, using this Rule and all the other tools at their disposal. The plutocracy is at war, and the Civil Service has been declared an enemy combatant.

And so it’s time to resist. It’s time to stand your ground, re-unite with your union, and prepare for battle. The Right feels aggrieved by the fact that you might earn a pension, outraged at how much you waste on social programs for the unworthy, tyrannized by your rules and regulations, fed up with your elitist “rationality,” and just all-round pissed about other government sins imagined and real. They are coming for you, starting with the easy targets but not stopping until the bureaucratic machinery that helps maintain free and open society is broken or repurposed to something useful, like prospecting for oil or running detention centers.

As recently as a couple of months ago, I could have imagined this was not going to happen. I could have continued being comfortable in my government job, disappointed that my salary doesn’t keep up with the cost of living, but not worried that I’d be out on the street. I could act as if being a state employee rather than a federal one, as a union member rather than “exempt,” my head is not on the chopping block at the moment.

Now, I cannot afford to sit back. Now, I can no longer think that “rebel bureaucrat” is an oxymoron.

* If they’re white. Indians protecting land at Standing Rock have been brutally attacked with tear gas, rubber bullets, percussion grenades, water cannons (in sub-freezing weather), sonic warfare, and whatever a police force with para-military toys bestowed by the feds can muster.

Streaming Fascism

Police State appliances for your home.

Being a liberal, lately I've been inundated with warnings and calls to action, boycotts and protests, petitions and pleas to click and agree,...all of them in response to the election of Trump, who shows the most overt signs yet of being our first flull-blown fascist president. (Yes, Cheney fit the bill, but technically he was only VP.)

Being an American, lately I've been inundated with adds for Amazon's Alexa and some Googly thingy that can sit in my house awaiting orders. They will do amazing things like change the thermostat so that I can have indoor snowmen, or order tape so that I won't have to seal Christmas gifts with band-aids. These are the whimsical examples that tech giants are using to sneak into our homes.

And Americans could care less.

Not that we shouldn't be wary of Drumpf's scapegoating tendencies, his lashing out at the press, his promises to sue any critics and jail the opposition. We should fight that crap tooth and nail.

But we should also resist the urge to invite mega-corporations into our homes, relinquishing increasing power month after month under the guise of convenience. Sure, in aspirational, duped-by-the-dream America, it's common to wish that you are one of the wealthy, that you have a butler, and  these devices play right into that. Never mind that to actually get the right kind of tape, you'll need to answer a bunch of questions that not only take up time but inevitably lead you to Amazon check-out.

Checking out on such mundane household chores as setting the thermostat or thinking ahead and buying groceries is not without cost, and ultimately without loss of your autonomy and freedom. Amazon and Google aren't altruistically taking over your chores--they're insinuating themselves into your life, harvesting data, tayloring their marketing until you're captured. We put up with these intrusions because they're "consumer oriented." You can play with settings still to maintain the illusion of control, but once our homes are linked into a system roamed by artificial intelligences whose goal is to sell us stuff, we've just a flipped the switch to a level of of spying that the Stasi only dreamed of, of monitoring and coercion more thorough than Orwell nightmared of.

Some of you may suspect where I'm headed with this: that such a tool in the hands of a dictator would be ominous. But actually, I think it's bad enough as is. Entities whose only goal is profit are invited to spy on us. Not only do they not pay to collect data, they get us to pay for the data-collection device, they get us to sign up for the services that will deliver our data back to us, processed into gleamingly ads rendered irresistable by virtue that they were borne of our own behavior.

Don't buy this crap. Don't buy the device, and don't buy the message. Be sovereign, un-plug, and read a book.

Your Local National Leaders

Brian Cladoosby*

America has elected its Drumpf, just as Weimar elected its Schicklgruber,** leaving many of us in a bind: Do we abide by the process? Do we accept a haranguer who hastens our  descent from international beacon of freedom to a dumb mob? Or, do we break the laws and smash the pipelines by whatever means necessary, risking another kind of dumb mob?

Maybe the answer, or at least an answer, to escaping the mobs is to look to the tribes.

Most Americans are unaware that they live on ground ceded or sold (or just stolen) from tribes that still exist. More than 550 tribes are sovereign nations, many with treaties that just happen to be supreme law of the land in the US. They are not subject to other states or even some kinds of interference from the federal government. Their own councils decide their own laws.

It's not that tribes offer some sort of arcane legal end run, or that they are some sort of haven where we could seek asylum. It's not that tribes have so much casino money that they've got political power over the rest of us, and I have no pretexts that tribes bludgeoned by our nation for centuries are all in peak condition, utterly unaffected by generations of enforced poverty and assimilation. It's not that tribal governments are always wise and never corrupt any more than tribal people are noble savages.

But it is that tribes, at least where I live and in many places I read about, are emerging as nations with talented leaders and strong visions for the future. Fawn Sharp (below), chair of the Quinault Nation on the Olympic Coast, is a national leader in addressing climate change. Beginning at home, she has worked hard to save the environment and look at how humanity as a whole can deal with climate change.

Billy Frank Jr. with Fawn Sharp

Where I live, the Squaxin, Nisqually, and Chehalis Tribes are my closest neighbors; the first two ceded the land where I live in the Treaty of Medicine Creek. All three tribes and dozens of others in what is now Washington State are active in funding projects that keep the salmon viable for all fishermen, environmental restoration projects that benefit the entire public, and public health programs that reach beyond the rez.

More fundamentally, tribes are places where the leadership has ties to the land and people that have never existed in US politics. When you serve on a council responsible for governing the small remnant of land where 500 generations of your ancestors lived, you may not feel so free to shift with the latest political winds. When your constituents include an extended family made not just of cousins and aunties, but salmon and eagles, you tend to look at the health of the whole instead of the profit of an individual. When you serve a nation that measures in the hundreds or thousands, accountability is much more immediate--it's hard to have elites who never touch the earth, who can escape the angry auntie forever.

Brian Cladoosby, pictured at the sop of this post, has risen as a leader of the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, of Puget Sound tribes, and for a few years now as President of the National Congress of American Indians. But he still participates in his community. He fought the dentists lobby to bring free dental care to his tribe. He's opposing petro-trains that pollute Swinomish lands and waters and cut the community off from the rescue squad. And he's working with a broad coalition of tribes to address pollution and climate change on national and global scales.

At Standing Rock, a less formally governed tribal super-nation has emerged. Hundreds of tribes have converged to join with the Great Sioux Nation to try and stop an oil pipeline, a great black snake that many of them have known for generations would get out of control and poison the water. Maybe because it's rooted in a particular piece of land, this encampment is more focused and ultimately more powerful than the Occupy camps of a few years ago. Maybe it's because the environmental struggle, and specifically the fight to keep oil and coal in the ground, is at once globally imperative and locally relevant. The Water Protectors are leading a non-violent and deeply revolutionary movement, and this time it's not the white career environmentalists calling the shots.

Meanwhile, back on what's left of the Reservation, Councils are mulling over what the Trump Presidency could mean. He fought dirty with certain tribes when trying to protect his Atlantic City casino interests, and he may well have animosity toward Native Americans in general for their apparent congeniality with Obama, Bernie, and Hillary. The GOP congress is inclined to cut spending, so the already watered-down federal gravy train will likely deliver even less in the future.

But then again, the Republican hatred of big government and desire for local control could result in tribes having a greater say on federal lands, especially where they neighbor reservations. Sure, the Right would prefer to just privatize everything, but tribes have long histories and deep experience with land disputes and federal courts, where they are sometimes astoundingly successful (even if it takes decades to translate into real life benefits). Many tribes have already been working with federal land managers on cooperative management of everything from huckleberry patches to wildfire response. So even if President Trump wishes to dismantle the US, tribal precedents and politicking and organization may just cut him off at the pass.

Wherever you are, find your local tribe. Learn whose land you're on, and whose descendants are protecting it. Get to know them, and what they do in your community. Visit their community, and support it. Work together to protect your part of the earth as they always have, with an eye toward generations yet unborn. Join your local sovereign nation in spirit, and our American Nation will benefit.


* My apologies to Swinomish Tribal Chairman for placing his photo next to my rant, but as a public figure this kind of thing will happen from time to time, and he's not the kind of guy to unleash a 3AM tweet-war against me, so here goes.

** Adolf Hitler's dad changed the family surname from Schicklgruber. The Donald's grand-dad anglicized Drumpf to Trump.

Guns at the Capitol

Some guy from Alabama running his mouth on the Washington State Capitol steps.

This past Saturday, our local paper reports, about 50 people showed up to protest what they see as infringement on their right to carry arms. A couple of legislators showed up to support them, and nobody was arrested. Washington state, characterized in the media as a liberal haven of pot-smokers and same-sex-marriers, turns out to also be one of the few states that does not outlaw carrying guns into its capitol building.

Still, the good voters of this state did vote last November to require background checks on all gun sales. You can still buy guns, a bunch of 'em, all kinds,...the voting public here is pretty tolerant of gun owners, but We the People decided it's reasonable to try and limit gun ownership by violent criminals and the mentally ill.

And it really pisses off a few people. Maybe the dude in the colonial outfit worries he'll be deemed as crazy as he looks. Maybe the guys covered head to foot in "tactical" paramilitary costumes genuinely believe that a background check is tantamount to tyranny.

But of course, it wasn't the legislators that passed the background check referendum. It was the neighbors of the protestors. Initiative 594 was not the work of some liberal cabal, but the result of a popular vote. Think about it for even a second, and you have to realize that many of the people who voted for the measure actually own guns themselves. No, this was not a top-down clampdown.

Some guys from Seattle standing in ordered dignity.

Not that there's not some precedent for the legislature curtailing the right to bear arms. In 1969, another protest occurred in Olympia, also making its way to the Capitol steps. That time, though, it was the Black Panthers. And that time, they were protesting a bill in the Legislature that aimed to outlaw the public display of firearms, echoing the California Legislature's act, one that was squarely aimed at the Black Panther Party. The Seattle Black Panthers stood silently on the capitol steps, rifles and shotguns aimed at the sky. When the State Patrol asked that they unload and put down their weapons, the Panthers did so, and after about an hour, they left. [Here's the firsthand account, so you don't have to take my word for it.]

To reiterate, faced with legislative action directly aimed at a political party to whom 2nd Amendment rights were a core principle, that party protested peacefully. They did not attempt to enter the Capitol building (as recent gun rights protestors have), and even allowed their weapons to be unloaded by State Troopers (as contemporary gun rights protestors swear they would never allow).

In 1969 (as in 2015, sadly) young black men were shot by policemen for minor alleged offenses. The Black Panther Party included people who had directly experienced repression by The State. Not minorly incovenienced by a referendum-passed background check, but subjected to full-on harrassment and injury at the hands of law enforcement. Break-ins, frame-ups and shootings perpetrated by local, state and federal governments, not to mention the lack of enforcement when amateurs stepped in with murders and lynchings. Thus the Panthers' belief that they needed to police the police and to arm themselves for self-protection. Thus the February 1969 protest here in Olympia.

The crowd this past Saturday did not include any black people that I could see in the available photos. They were prevented from entering the actual legislative chambers with their arsenals of handguns and assault weapons, but no legislation was passed that targeted them, or even gun owners in general. Yet their statements and signs show that these modern protesters feel that they have been grievously wronged, and are being oppressed.

If the Black Panthers had showed up with military assault weapons, would they have been treated as civilly? The 1969 photos show a bunch of guys in berets and jackets holding rifles and shotguns, hands visible and not on triggers, not handgun in sight, no paramilitary "tactical" gear at all. Had the Seattle protesters insisted that the State Patrol could unload Panther rifles once they had--in the words of Heston and any number of white NRA advocates--"pried it from my cold dead fingers," the Panthers may well have been obliged. I mean this not as a statement about the Washington State Patrol, who in fact seem to have been equally adept at diffusing tense situations then and now, but about the relative value of black and white lives then and now.

The local paper also reports that protesters this past Saturday expected to be arrested (read, "martyred") and were selling hats to cover bail that said "Fight Tyranny--Shoot Back." I'm not sure they had Michael Brown or Eric Garner in mind, but what if black men did just that? We don't have to speculate about the answer, because history provides it: those black men would be jailed, beaten, shot. In my own lifetime, I remember rowhouses in Philadephia being fire-bombed--with men, women, and children inside--because they were black nationalists. Now that's oppression. That's being Tread Upon by the iron heel of The State.

But background checks? Get real, your rights are in no danger.

Loosies, Not the Sky of Diamonds

Plenty of people are posting about racism in law enforcement, as they should. Black and brown men have reasons to worry that don't really affect a white guy like me.

"Like me," including Middle Classness, and it's class and money that I want to speak about, to add to the conversation. Plenty of poor white people also have reason to worry about law being selectively enforced, and force selectively applied, but this post is not about saying white people suffer too.

No, I just want to ask why Mike Brown (alleged cigar thief) and Eric Garner (alleged seller of single cigarettes, or "loosies") met with deadly force in the course of their alleged crimes. Even assuming that the one guy was stealing smokes and the other selling them, it's hard to imagine that these were the most serious crimes of the moment, much less offences so heinous that the perpetrators needed to be shot multiple times or choked to death.

At the same instant when Eric Garner was executed extrajudicially in a part of New York where selling single cigarettes is a survival strategy, in another part of town men who stole billions of dollars, crashed the economy to an extent where selling loosies is a thing, and then extorted the US government for bailouts walk free. Not just free, but assured that they not only will not be stopped and frisked (or, in the 1%-er analogy, forensically audited), but that were a cop to ever lay a hostile hand on them, massive lawsuit-induced windfalls would follow.

Racism is real, even if race is not. White cops using superior numbers or firepower to overwhelm brown suspects is a shame and a problem; ultimately, it's a threat to democracy.

But so is the fact that police attention is strangely affixed on petty crimes. Call in four cops to take down one alleged cigarette seller, but leave the corporate executives alone. Hell, offer the oligarchs any out conceivable: from paying fines with shareholder money, to bankorruptcy protections, to failing to convene a grand jury identify individuals for indictment. They have diamonds on the soles of their shoes, so the criminal justice system shall not touch them; the sky's the limit for them.

Meanwhile, in the mud beneath the lowest societal rungs, poor people die at the hands of the police.

Control

Republicans gain control of the Senate!

Um. I think that happened years ago. Seriously, did the Democratic senators do anything for the past six years?

The Communality Garden

It's that kind of garden.

In college, one of my first anthro classes had a focus on community gardens in DC. I was pretty weak on the fieldwork project, not good at walking up to strangers and asking them questions, but the idea of a community garden seemed pretty cool. In Honolulu, I joined a community garden, eventually sponsored by the city but initially a guerilla garden wrought by a nonagenarian local Chinese woman who'd tended it through the years, walking up Punchbowl hill with a bag of scraps from her job at the UH cafeteria. The suburbs comprising the erstwhile GOP powerhouse Eric Cantor's district, where I next lived, were not fertile ground for anything smacking of community, food sovereignty, or any other potentially anti-corporate crap, so I gardened my own quarter acre more or lessa alone. Moving to Olympia may have been my best chance to join a 'normal' community garden.

But instead, I chose one that defies the usual model of assigning each member a small rectangle within which to grow a tiny individual garden. Sprouted by Sustainable South Sound, this garden is a plot to grow food in the neighborhood where it will be consumed. And instead of a grid of little gardens, it's two big gardens, dozens of beds that everyone works on together. We all chip in to buy seed and supplies, spend Saturday mornings weeding and planting, and harvest the results, which are distributed equally. Whatever division of labor that exists is self-sorting, and although some may work a bit more than others, nobody lazily skates by.

Which is what makes me wonder, "Are we being communists?" I mean, "From each according to her abilities, to each according to her share" is how we operate; isn't that a mere paraphrase away from Marxism? I've only ever gotten one garden member to cop to anything left of Socialism, but I have to wonder.

But then I also have to think, "So What?" We're not Stalinists, there's no distant committee committing us to 5-year plans, and the garden has no gulag. We're more like the autonomous collective (not really an anarcho-syndicalist commune, as some would have you believe) in Monty Python's Holy Grail. Everything we do has a mandate from the masses, there's even an Occupy-style blocking mechanism to assure consensus. Far from a Utopian pipe-dream--because I know that's what some of you suspect this amounts to--this system works.

Indoctrinating the unsuspecting youth with corn, oats, squash, and beans.

I'm not much of a joiner, and subjugating my opinions to group-will (especially when it comes to gardening) is not always easy. But the end results are worth it: plenty of good food, cameradrie, and the sort of smug satisfaction that only bountiful locavore collectivism can justify. In Honolulu, I rose to the Presidency of the community garden, and I loved that land the way I do any place where I have time to plant roots, but it was a collection of fiefdoms, and not a communal effort. A 'president' was required to make peace between the cat-feeders and gardeners, Tongans who cooked a dog and the Chinese woman grossed out by the thought, a bi-polar woman with a point about the mission of community gardens and the man growing sesame and chiles for sale, the guy who brought in barrels of toxic adhesive for "irrigation, or something" and everyone who didn't want cancer,...that kind of stuff. "Community" gardens can sprout plots that grow weeds, cat-piss, and strife.

Many Leaves, One Head

So, I am happy to be a part of this communalist garden, or whatever it is called. As we plan for the coming year, uncertain that this piece of land will be available beyond that, it's good to know that this experiment worked for so many years. If this garden cannot remain, it's not because of the people. we'll pop up elsewhere if and when this land becomes something else. Or maybe not. Whatever happens, I am glad that this garden happened, and can walk away knowing that the soil is better than it was when I arrived. For me, that's just fine.

"Won't get Fooled Again" (Oh yeah they will)

Having drunk the kool-aid, and realizing that it doesn't work, Rep. Cantor looks ill.

Oh, there were so many choices for titles to a post about House majority leader Cantor getting offed by the even nuttier right. I was pretty close to going with "Meet the New Brat, Same as the Old Brat," but I don't yet know that will prove true.

What is true is that I'm happy as ever to have fled Virginia's 7th Congressional District. Not quite a month ago, I wrote about those of us who have joined the Virginia Diaspora, citing among other factors that Eric Cantor, former Reagan Youth stalwart and petulant obstructionist extraordinaire, was being challenged from the right. Apparently, pundits wrote off the challenge, even though the tea party and Brat brigade had recently ousted Cantor's henchmen in the state GOP convention, under-cutting the now Establishment incumbent. He managed to keep that one fairly quiet, but losing by 11 points in a primary getting national attention is not something that can be ducked. 24 hours after the election, he's already conceded the power he once had.

Which would be cause for rejoicing, if there weren't a pretty solid chance that David Brat, blindered economist, weren't now a very good bet to win the 7th District's seat in Congress. I'd like to think that the Henrico suburbs that voted for Obama might shy away form a Tea Party wing-nut, but odds are they will once again vote against their own self-interest and elect the guy. I'd love to believe that Brat won by virture of Democrats voting in the GOP primary, sabotaging the Republicans by nominating a guy too far right to win in the general election, but I know enough old-minded Virginians (the ones who show up during working hours on a mid-week primary, the ones who feel threatened by the Socialist Negro) to believe that they were the ones that made the difference. They got rid of the sharp dressing guy who compromised once, and installed a more conservative, more dogmatic, more Christian man.

None of the breathless coverage today veered into the fact that Cantor is a Jew in the GOP South. And to be honest, Richmond is the rare southern city that has been fairly accepting of its Hebraic residents (one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in the US is there, and Jeff Davis even appointed Judah Benjamin to cabinet posts), but the modern voters seem happy to go Old testament on this one, turning him out into the desert as a scapegoat. It's no longer sufficient to be for corporations and big money, the modern Republican candidate must establish his bona fides as an utterly dogmatic right-winger, never giving an inch. The emphasis on Jesus and God from the new Brat, comforting to so many Virginia Christians who imagine themselves oppressed, could have much darker echoes as the radical right gropes its way toward control of the Reichstag.

Hopefully, that dark a future is mere speculation. The bare facts, however, are bad enough. Faced with an economy in which the 0.1% reap all the benefits, and have bought Republican obstruction to anything the Democrats propose--in short, an economy guaranteed to further impoverish nearly everyone--well over 50% voted the punish the guy who they vaguely sense may have compromised somewhere along the way, replacing him with an even more strident anti-government zealot.

Will the Virginians who voted Brat in at the primary hand him a seat in Congress? Probably.

Will they one day realize that votes like that amounted to handing over their hard-earned money to oligarchs, the only ones who can afford clean water and filtered air? Probably not. They'll blame a Black man, or a Jew, or a Socialist (or a Woman, should Hillary or Elizabeth get the Democratic nod). Even if they realize that they were in fact fooled again, it will be too late.

Walk Away

A few years ago, when I delved into the morass of narcissism and even more unsavory isms that comprise facebook, I half-jokingly started a group called the Virginia Diaspora, for people like me who had been born in the Old Dominion, but had subsequently fled in search of asylum, or peace, or just a change of pace and place. Few people joined, but I did re-connect with a few dozen people I'd known from the neighborhood and school. Many still lived within a half-hour SUV ride of where we'd grown up, some had migrated elsewhere in the Commonwealth or the Mid-Atlantic, and a few had flung themselves farther.

While it was interesting (sometimes) to learn what had become of people, this virtual homecoming reminded me of why I'd left, and set me to wondering how it could have gotten worse than Reagan Era Virginia, which was what had sent me running in the first place. On display: a rainbow of bigotries, a robust sense that rich white heterosexuals were sorely victimized, worship of mammon and guns (and among some, an old white man known as "God"), and intolerance. By no means all of them acted this way, but it was enough to shake my faith in progress, and eventually to turn my back on the virtual place the same way I had on the red clay of my birth-land.

Like I say, not all of the fb "friends" (never has a word been more drained of its soul than when it became synonymous with a single reflexive click) were right-wing ogres. Some had led interesting lives, had opened themselves to more than we'd been raised to accept. A small few became people I kept up with even after the fb environs grew too creepy for me to inhabit. One, I even visited a year ago, when I made my first foray back to Virginia in half a decade.


Which is when I realized (duh) that the virtual world ain't real. The avid gardener hadn't raised more than weeds in years, and was ditching country life for sprawlburbs. Having recently inherited millions, the inheritance tax had become injustice, and people were now threatening to take advantage, including me, when I let her pay for a breakfast biscuit (or, 0.00001% of said inheritance). Roughly an hour from the malaised middle class suburb where we grew up, she was in pretty much the same place, only with more liberal-ish shopping preferences, unable to see the difference between Whole Food Inc. and sustainable foodways.

Oh well.

It would have been easier to take had I not been in shock at what had happened to my old haunts during years of absence. All the farmland and forests were gone, paved over for shopping places that will fade and fall into ruin, and for road after road after road. People doing exactly as the President said in a rare moment of candor, clinging to their god and their guns. Real profits (for a few) and false prophets (for the many) twisting the message of their nominal saviour to justify greed and hatred. Again, not everybody was this way, but enough to make a lefty evolutionist like me damned nervous.

Recently, the news has been no better. A burning trainload of oil falls into the river I once canoed and from which my relatives still get their drinking water, and still the shrill calls for end to government regulation. On Easter morning, people awoke to find eggs in their yards proclaiming racist slogans, and the response was, "Kids are too young to see this," as if it would be comprehensible in a few years. My former US Congressman, Eric Cantor, not ideologically pure enough, is being challenged from the right wing, as people laugh off the concept that there could ever be a Democrat in his position.

I could rant, and I guess I just have (and probably will again), but it would not change anything. Ever since its founding as a commercial colony to benefit the few, Virginia has been driven by wealth and "conservatism." Hell, even the leaders of the revolution against the king started out and ended up being filthy rich, retaining ownership of human beings, and controlling politics in what turned out to be a very English patrician way. Generations later, having jettisoned even the pretense of Enlightenment thinking, Virginians practiced a religion that justified slavery, and backed it up with a war that was, for even the whitest of the common folk, disastrous. From Jim Crow to Massive Resistance to demonized Welfare Queens to the Tea Party, the wealthy string-pullers have mobilized the faithful pawns to protect the interests of the few at the cost of the many.

Maybe it's chickenshit of me to do so, but I choose to be in the Virginia Diaspora rather than stick around and pay taxes to a state so bent on backwardness. I walked away, again.

Perpetuating Frank

On Monday, a hero to many of us died. Billy Frank Jr. was a veteran of the fish wars, and although his contributions were many, his efforts a big part of achievements in tribal fishing rights, protection of salmon, and environmental stewardship, he was fighting an uphill battle all the way.

Up until the day he died, it turns out, when his last installment of Being Frank (his column as head of the NW Indian Fisheries Council) was posted. In his 80's, he was getting up every day and working to improve the fisheries and the environment, benefitting not just the treaty tribes, but all of us. At an age when most of us would hope to be relaxing, he kept pushing.

His will be big shoes to fill. Maybe even too much for one person, but fortunately, Uncle Billy touched the lives of multitudes. Obituaries mentioned his associations with state and federal leaders, with presidents even, and included statements from leaders and luminaries, but he also talked with everyone else. Little school-kids, fishermen, members of many tribes, even the very bureaucrats who could make his life painful. He spoke out for what he knew to be right, for his people and for the rest of us, too.

So all of us should carry on for him. That last article of his I mentioned above was about the dangers of an oil terminal where trainloads of crude could load their cargo onto tankers at Grays Harbor. In addition to his, as always, well-reasoned arguments against permitting such nonsense, let me add my little voice: the dredging and construction required for the project would likely obliterate the ancient remains of fish weirs and other sites left by ancient people who managed fisheries successfuly.

You can add your voice by visiting his post, and heeding his call to comment against this oil terminal and other projects that put our environment at risk. His voice will reverberate for generations, but it is time for us to step up and add our own. 

Add an Extra Shot

Not a High-Res Shot. You're welcome. (Oh, and I am welcome: image courtesy of Christian Science Monitor)

Last week, Starbucks asked customers not to come in carrying firearms. Gun rights advocates were incensed, even though their manual already tells them to steer clear of possible queer places, such as Starbucks, which serves foreign-sounding drinks to liberal effetes.

I used to despise Starbucks, not so much because of their progressive yuppie vibe as for their global corporate domination, but now I live where they are legitimately a regional business, besides which they do make a point of making it corporate policy to not discriminate against same-sex enthusiasts and to request that people not come in armed. Nobody wants a caffeine-jittered finger on the trigger.

Starbucks made it clear that their request was just that, and that gun-toters could still come in and offer to the coffer their US dollars, but other businesses have gone all-out and banned guns on their premises. Places like Buffalo Wild Wings (no kidding, allowing guns in a place with men drunk on Coors and angry that there are no hooters would be a bad business model). Of course there are the upscale 'liberal' places like Whole Foods and California Pizza Kitchen where nobody would think to bring a gun in the first place. But then there are bastions of childhood like Toys R Us and Disney World (although to be honest, Disney only has that policy to discourage local crackers from getting season passes and sullying the magic kingdom for the Yankee tourists).

And therin lies the magic and doom of our market based society. The very same government despised by the right wing, the socialist-UN-nazi-Obamacare conspiracy that wants to take away our American guns is powerless to do so (precisely, and ironically given the tea party fears, because government--unlike corporations--must be reponsive to vocal minorities). But corporations sure as hell can ban, and they are. If companies really thought banning guns would hurt their bottom line in a substantial way, they would not go out on that limb, if for no other reason than the shareholders would not let them. Turns out, though, that more people feel safer with a gun ban in place than they do with the alleged deterrent of allowing every Zimmerman on the block to pack a glock. If the tea partiers have their way, public schools will be full of guns; meanwhile, the market will speak and part of boutique chic will be the metal detector at the door.

Low Expectations

Even before the jury returned it's sad verdict in the Zimmerman-killed-Martin case, news media were salivating over the net story: would those emotional black people riot if there was no conviction?

No.

It's sad that even the allegedly liberal media fell into this sick waiting game. Consider the words of Scott Simon, better known as sensitive host of NPR's news-lite program Weekend Edition than occasional war-monger or racist, as he 'interviewed' reporter Greg Allen:

"Is there concern there in Sanford, Greg, about community reaction to the verdict, especially if Zimmerman is acquitted?" (Weekend Edition July 13 transcript, retrieved from npr.org)

"Especially if Zimmerman is acquitted." Delivered as a hurried afterthought, but Simon is a radio pro, and knows that sometimes this is just the way to communicate emphasis added. What he meant is that if a non-black guy was convicted of killing a black kid, civil unrest would not be expected, but if he were let go, those emotional black people, with their hysterical mistrust of our vaunted American legal system, would probably freak out.

But they haven't.

Maybe because they're accustomed, tired, or resigned to the low value everyone else places on their young men. I dunno. I am not African American, and unlike pundits, I'm not willing to talk about what that community will do, what motivates them. All I know is that there have not been riots.

Simon and plenty of others not singled out here, including the conservative media that frame so much of our national debate on the issue of the week, feel entirely comfortable predicting that black folks, when upset at the legalized murder of one of their own, will get unreasonable, emotional, and violent.

Not once did I hear a journalist or pundit predict violence if Zimmerman were convicted, yet there are white supremacist organizations who espouse violence, faux news organizations dedicated to the premise that white people are victimized, and white Americans rich and poor who simmer under the rule of a black man. Why did the news not muse over the possibilty of violence if Zimmerman were nailed for murder?

I cannot think of a reason, other than racism.

Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (of Our Legal System)

If you didn't preface your shot by telling witnesses "I am killing this guy for no particular reason," then you are innocent.

For the people who will read this a week or more after the fact, when everyone has forgotten what happened, I'll recap: In Florida, a man was found not guilty of murder, or even manslaughter, after he shot and killed an unarmed teenage boy.

I don't doubt that the jury did the "right" thing acording to the state's "Stand Your Ground" law, which forced them to let the shooter go if he had the slightest inkling that he was in danger. Like similar laws in many states, it gives a free pass on murder, as long as the murderer says he felt threatened. Not in imminent danger of death, just threatened.

Ironically, part of the prosecution's case was that the victim, a kid, himself felt threatened by a grown man who was following him around, and that was why he punched the guy. The boy's mistake was that he attacked with his fists. Had he had a gun and shot the man, he could have claimed that he felt threatened, so murder was necessary. Stand Your Ground would then have protected him (but for the extenuating circumstance that the boy was black and the man was not).

Anyway, a killer walks free, and will be lauded by many for his firm resolve. The fact is, he was about to get his ass kicked by a kid, and instead of taking it like a man, or fighting back, the wuss whipped out a gun and killed a kid. No warning shot, no aiming for an arm or leg, but straight through the heart. Problem solved, United States of Handguns style.

Our nation has a serious problem with laws designed to permit immoral behavior. During the last presidential election, another aspect of that was on display, when super-rich candidate Romney explained that he paid all the taxes he was legally required to pay. Like Apple Computers and most corporations and wealthy individuals, he availed himself of "legal" means to hide his income and avoid paying anything close to the rate that we working people are stuck with. In the midst of the worst financial crisis in decades, with government revenues lagging far behind what it would take to emerge from trouble, corporations and 1%-ers legally availed themselves of government bailouts, incentives, and subsidies while avoiding their fair share of the burden.

Again, perfectly legal (well maybe, if the government really looked, I suspect they'd find tax havens and financial tricks that could be prosecuted, but Mitt and his ilk are not un-armed black kids, so they enjoy a certain level of immunity).

No doubt there are conservatives who look at my state and bemoan the legal pot and marriage equality. But legalizing a drug that is around anyway removes an underground, dangerous economy, removing the incentive for crimes that hurt people. Gay people getting married? That doesn't hurt anyone either. These laws just reflect changing values in society.

If laws allowing murder, possession of military firepower, and cheating on taxes also reflect where our society is headed, I worry about the future. It is legal, if you have sufficient means and the mean spirit, to deprive the poor while you increase your wealth. It is legal these days to own handguns and assault weapons, and to use them on unarmed people.

But is it right? Not by a long shot to the chest.

Freedom IS Free

It's Independence Day in the US of A, occasion for cook-outs and drinks, games and fireworks, and maybe a moment to think about how white landowners shed the yoke of tyrrany.* In fact, I just heard a collection of tourists on the DC Mall read the Declaration of Independence on NPR.

Then they cut to Boston, where coverage focused on the increased security following the marathon bombing. As in many other places, the celebration is marshalled by multiple police forces and monitored by more cameras and copters than ever. People on the street were a little bothered by this, but nobody who made it on air was upset enough to question the necessity of such measures, and one woman summed it up with the words, "Freedom isn't free."

This phrase is the teflon of the Security state, slippery doublespeak in the service of un-freedom. To enjoy our Freedom, we are told, we must accept overseas wars and sacrifice privacy at home. I feel for the kid blown apart in the Afghani mountains, or the one who survived the fight for Fallujah, but the people they were fighting weren't a threat to my Freedom. Not compared to the Patriot Act passed by our own Congress, or dismissal of freedoms including the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court, or the prerogative to listen in and even kill us claimed by the Executive. And that's not even getting to the corporations who own all of the above.

The fact is, it's bondage that isn't free. The costs of militarizing our borders and our police, maintaining force around the globe, and watching every bit of communication are enormous, both to our lofty ideals of freedom and to the bottom line. The impulse to classify so much of this activity makes it even more expensive on both accounts, especially since that secrecy compromised so easily (but selectively, and as often to achieve specific political outcomes as to shine a light on mischief). Meanwhile, my freedoms are trumped again and again by the freedom of corporations to shed the expenses of pensions or keeping air and water clean, and to use infrastructure purchased with government revenue that they themselves avoid paying (along with the environmental and social costs routinely excluded from the ledger).

And what if we stopped acting like freedom comes from guns and surveillance, and went into the rest of the world with food and music instead? We'd be pulling the recruiting rug from beneath Islamic extremists and other terrorists. What if we invested in educating citizens rather than incarcerating them? We'd have a more productive society. What if we stopped transferring our national wealth to Lockheed Martin and their ilk, or legislating on behalf of Monsanto? We'd free up money to make our chunk of earth a better place to be for generations to come. What if we tolerated diversity and dissent instead of fencing it into oxymoronic "1st Amendment Zones?" We'd have a more vibrant democracy, and more people would feel like they have a stake in freedom.

If Freedom isn't absolutely free, it sure as hell is a lot cheaper than Security as the Bush and Obama administrations have sold it to us. For every uprising against British oppression, for every beating endured in Selma, there are many more senseless dead among our own young and those unfortunate enough to be in the way of our war machine wherever it happens to be that month. There are times when protecting freedom requires a sacrifice, but rarely one that involves blood. More like talking with your kids about how the government operates (or should, anyway) instead of having another beer and blowing something up. Or deciding to get up, stand up, and speak out against complacency with AmeriCo's brand of fake Freedom.

* Setting in motion that process that would break the chains of human bondage in less than 90 years, guarantee women's right to vote after a gross 144 years, grant citizenship and voting rights to Native Americans even later, and finally protect minority voting rights from 1965 until last week.

When Your Secrecy is Gone, Shout!

Find the dangerous one.

In the past few weeks, we've learned that the US government is snooping more than they had wanted us to know. The federal intelligence community, long enamored with the potential that computers and electronic communication offer for listening in on a huge scale, snagged barrels full of AP reporter communications, and shiploads of social network and email and phone data from the rest of us.

This should come as no surprise. For quite a while, we have seen this coming: Admiral Poindexter's soul-less body reanimated to head up snooping programs with names like "carnivore" and "echelon," establishment of a goal so important that it gets an acronym (TIA = Total Information Awareness), and construction of a massive internet and phone eavesdropping center in Utah, the Patriot Act's indulgence of blanket searches, the Foreign Intelligence Security Court established pretty much for the purpose of giving the imprimatur of legitimacy to snooping, and so on and on and on...

At the same time that usually docile "news" organizations are getting their hackles up, the US government (right on up to el Presidente) is busy prosecuting leakers and complaining that the outing of its taps and intercepts will endanger security. Both sides are lying or stupid. Given our government's history of spying on perceived enemies foreign and domestic, and given the obvious potential for mass snooping presented by modern communication technology, how can any reporter with a gram of awareness think that the NSA or any other security agency would forego the opportunity?

Likewise, for the Commander-in-Chief to step up to the microphone and say that a couple of newspaper stories endanger the secrecy--and by extension, they would have us believe, the success--of intelligence-gathering efforts is complete bullshit. Maybe you hadn't inferred the existence of widespread data mining, of blanket search and seizure of your communications, but all of our supposed enemies have. The Chinese (or any other nation you want to think of as an enemy) have certainly known about PRISM for a while, and even the most podunk affiliate of al Quaeda operates on the assumption that any phone call or email is being monitored. Hell, I do too, even though I am the very model of an ineffectual internet voice.

We are stuck in a bind: if other nations, corporations, and corporate enterprises are availing themselves of big data, wouldn't the US intelligence agencies be remiss to ignore it themselves? There are plenty of reasons to distrust our government a little less than Chinese military hackers, or Russian mobsters, or web advertisers. But still, for citizens to roll over and accept searches of everything, all the time, with no real cause or case, will only embolden authoritarian tendencies. Giving the spies a pass now could come back to haunt us later, should we get an even more secretive and coercive government. Remember, Dick Cheney ain't dead yet.

Maybe the government will pretend to back off, or be more open about how and why they spy on us. In fact, I would count on there being some effort at window dressing, attempts to make it appear that the spies are held in checks and balances. But I assume, and would advise anyone using the internet in any way to also assume, that they are being listened to by the US and other major world powers like the Chinese, Russians, Facebook, and Google. If you want your communication to remain private, send handwritten letters by snail-mail. Attempting to use crypto-communications online will only draw attention, and the interceptors are more sophisticated and well-funded than you are.

Did you think that what you wrote in an email or on a comment page was confidential? That your clever fake username made you anonymous, or your phone call a secret? That you still have 4th Amendment rights? That a "liberal" president would put concern for your privacy above opportunities to take power? What you do is no more secret from the US government than it is from a determined hacker. Or, let's face it, from corporations, which harvest your data with your own permission (and by permission, I mean ignorance as to how to stop the cookies and trackers and whatever other tech means to harvest data that we users do not even know about).

Assume that nothing is private. Even if public outcry caused the US goverment to (pretend to) stop snooping, that won't do anything about other national governments or international corporations. And if you value your freedom, speak up. Post like I am now, proclaim your disgust with a spying government, tell the NSA to fuck off. The more mildy rebellious citizens and non-violent curmudgeons speak out, the more the snoopers get the message, the more their algorithms are clogged with harmlessness.

Maybe one day I will end up like Winston Smith, but I don't plan on waiting as long as he did to speak up. In case the NSA has not flagged this post thus far (they shoulda, I said "al Qaeda" and referenced US government spying), let me just say that I do not believe in the legitimacy of online spying. I think it does more to corrode democracy than to protect it. Fuck off, secret police.

From Hmm... to Huh? to Hah!

This gem is from coverage of the South Carolina Republican Party Convention, gathering place for some of the same brain trust that decided to risk a solid seat by running their persistently corrupt and disgraceful ex-governor against a smart woman who also happens to be Stephen Colbert's sister.

Hmm...
Peggy G. is onto something when she notes that a freshman Senator may not be ready for the Presidency. I'll admit that I shared her reluctance about Obama, and feel vindicated after 4 years of watching him be manipulated to protect the primacy of corporations and the war machine. 

Huh?
But this hesitancy about an unproved leader causes her to suggest...freshman Senator Rand Paul?! Yes, he is a son of a politician (although why, o Libertarians, do you not see the oxymoronic folly of a Libertarian dynasty?), but until recently the guy was an opthalmologist, while Ted Cruz has at least been in government for a few years (although why, o Birthers, would you consider a guy born in the Peoples' Republic of Canada as a candidate?). For what it's worth, Rand's potential for wide appeal by letting the Right cling to their guns and the Left pass around their joints is what scares me, although his ridiculous hair will probably keep him out of the presidency.

Hah!
And finally, Ms. Geraghty gets down to what passes for Realpolitik among the tea-steeped party faithful--that what they may need is "sparkle." Yes, she is speaking from beauty pageant country, but holy crap! "Sparkle?" I guess Rubio has some sparkle--and maybe even enough brillo to capture some of the Latino vote--but again, the guy has a hair problem. If he can keep from going bald or having an embarrassing combover before his chance, he may be President, but the smart money is against it. 

 
The Democrats are perennially disappointing, but tend to be the lesser or evils, at least domestically. So it is with Schadenfreude that I watch the GOP's base insist on idiocy: thinking that a stiff millionaire would have appeal, repeatedly insulting women and minorities and doubling down on white supremacy, going on record at every opportunity to protection billionaires and corporations while demanding sacrifice from our poorest citizens,...the list goes on and on and on. 

So thank you, Republican in South Carolina and all across the nation, for your baffling political strategies. It may just be enough to keep you out of the presidency when Obama heads into retirement.

The Minimum Wage Wager Looks Worth It

This week, President Obama proposed raising the minimum wage, causing many disdainful harrumph among the plutocracy's elephantine representatives in Congress. The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25/hour; in Washington State, it is $9.10, highest in the country. The state's bottom of the barrel, then, is 25.5% higher than it is for the US.
So-called Conservatives would argue that Washington's wage structure is a disincentive to employment, but the data don't bear that out. From 1990 until now, when Washington's minimum wage has risen most every year, the state's rate has gone up and down according to the same macro-economic forces that have affected the federal rate. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in the US was 7.8% in December, 2012. For Washington, it was 7.6%. Far from being 25.5% higher, it was lower. 

Seasonally Adjusted Unemployment Rate*

Now, let's compare two states, Washington with it's "high" minimum wage and Georgia, where the minimum wage is a paltry $5.15. This is 44% below Washington's and 35% below the federal minimum wage. Has having the lowest minimum wage led to Georgia businesses offering everyone a job? No, not even close. 

Where's the harm in a higher minimum wage?*

Georgia's unemployment rate is higher, and has exceeded that in Washington throughout the past few years of economic crisis. From 1992 to 2007, to be sure, Georgia's rate was lower (in April, 2003, the WA rate of 7.7% was half again as high as in GA), but there is no evidence to suggest that an increasing Washington minimum wage contributed to this.
In fact, lower unemployment in Washington during the Great Recession shows that a higher minimum wage does not put a halt to hiring. In fact, a minimum wage that approaches a living wage may contribute to resiliency, if you think about it. More income, particularly at the lower end of the income scale, allows more spending, largely local, that keeps the consumer economy running. Georgia's working poor are likely to be pumping 44% less into an ailing economy than Washington's.

* Data from US Bureau of Labor Statistics, charts generated on Google Public Data.

The Fractal American Moiety

From the Olympia Co-op Blog, a beautifully colored American small-scale moiety.

I'm out of my depth when it comes to anthropological theory, but this is just a blog and on this blog I've thrown around the term "moiety," so much so that it has it's own label. Here I go again, so maybe it's time to explain my loose use of the word.

In old school anthropology (and maybe today for all I know), students were taught about "moiety" in context of kinship. It means a society divided into two--not one or many, but two--kin groups. The US cannot be divided into two kin groups, but if you replace physical procreation with cultural and political affinities, you can see a dichotomous framework that looks like a moiety, right down to the use of identifying symbols. Is your state Red of Blue? Is your totem the Donkey or the Elephant?*

In our moiety system, Americans do allow for a third group of unaffiliated folks like the "independent voters" who may bend one way or the other with the winds of change, but we do not tend to abide true Third Ways. In the political dimension, for example, third parties remain too small to be important and persistent; they don't even hold the coalition-building power that small parties enjoy in some democracies. The American moiety does allow individuals to switch groups, the "convert" is a well-known character--admired by the new group and apostate among the others--but usually a more powerful figure than the iconoclast or would-be leader of a third group.

So why the pie chart depicting a vote within the Olympia Food Co-op? Aren't they Deep Blue, the Donkey's left flank? I'm not insinuating that there is an NRA sleeper cell in this august progressive co-operative, am I?

Nope.

I'm realizing that the American moiety may behave like a fractal. Specifically, it has the quality of self-similarity, meaning that the pattern repeats at any scale. On a national level, we may be red or blue. Washington state replicates that divide (blue has dominated for a while--nothing requires a moiety to be equal), even if our hues differ a little from the national average. Locally, as this graph so beautifully represents, even a liberal community can find itself divided (about evenly, assuming the "medium cost" group does not come down too far one way or another) along a dipole framework with "any cost" at one end and "no cost" at the other.

The national divorce rate suggests that a group of two experiences difficulty maintaining a functioning analog to a moiety, although it does happen. Between a group of two and a nation of 300 million or so, the affinal moiety shows up again and again.

* DISCLAIMER: Of course I don't hold that the moiety is total, or that it is even useful for all anthropological-ish musings. Like many theoretical concepts, it typically dissolves under serious examination, it can be simplistic and absurd. In other words, perfect for a blog.