Unoccupy Wall Street

My last post expressed some doubt as to the sustainability and soundness of the Occupy protests happening. It is only fair to suggest alternatives, or be branded a do-nothing whiner.

So, let's Unoccupy Wall Street. Denizens of the financial district are not among the readers here, so we can begin by claiming success in terms of the physical place, but you know that's not what I'm getting at. Divest. Don't let your money occupy their vaults.

You live near a credit union that can take care of your banking needs from saving pennies to getting a home mortgage, and they won't Lincoln and Hamilton you to death with fees. You'll be a member, sharing in the profits and governance of a financial entity beholden to a broader ownership and longer time horizon than profit-obsessed big banks. You may also have a local bank that has a stake in a healthy community and treats its customers decently. Either choice beats parking your money in an institution prisoner to quarterly profits, sophisticated (yet still fundamentally stupid) gambles, publicly-funded bail-outs, exalted executives, and just plain greed.

But I don't need to convince you why, just that you should take that step if you already have not, and make your personal finances Unoccupy Wall Street. This November, vote with your finances. While media images of hippies and anarchists doing everything from wearing sinister masks to making love easily lend themselves to dismissal or discrediting of the Occupy movement, it would be hard to misinterpret the image of a run on the banks, a line of people in front of Bank of America waiting to withdraw their funds. If I had the audience to pull it off, I'd call for November to be Vote With Your Money month, a coordinated action. Doing an Unoccupy Wall Street event during the election month (or maybe the cyclical, slower-building version of the plan: Withdrawal Wednesdays), seems like a decent strategy to focus attention and impact on the action.

The financial effect to the big financial players would be negligible to begin with, and the power would be in the perception that we commoners are sick of playing their game. But as was the case with ending South African Apartheid, a few humble divestitures can lead to a few more, and eventually reach a tipping point where continuing business as usual becomes too costly, and real progress happens. You can be the beginning.

Meanwhile, it's a matter of retreating from the various corporate territories you occupy. Get food that was grown closer to you (your own yard would be a good place to start), and processed less; go to restaurants run by local families. Clothe yourself at thrift stores and yard sales, so even if that shirt was made for a famous name brand, they don't get a cent on the transaction. Keep driving the same old car (repaired by your unemployed neighbor or a local shop) or hop on a bike or bus. Disconnect the cable and just use your phone for phone calls instead of incessantly connecting to the corporate web. Make your gifts.

So really, unoccupying Wall Street turns out to be a bunch of small, easy steps. You'll find that you end up saving money. You will be more free of the corporate matrix, and at the same time more connected to your community and interested in its welfare. In the short term, divesting improves your life. If enough people unoccupy Wall Street, then in time our nation's life will take a turn for the better. Try it.

Occupied

A month after the Occupy Wall Street protest began, the movement has replicated on an international scale. I live in Olympia, Washington, where our own Occupation began this weekend. Wrapping up a year that began with massive labor protests ignited by Wisconsin's union-busting, I have to say it is inspiring to see people taking to the streets, speaking out, refusing to just sit back and take whatever abuse AmeriCo feels like dishing out.

But occupations are mostly doomed. In Iraq, the West Bank, Soviet satellites, and on down the list, occupiers find themselves at odds with local populations, trying to maintain order in places they do not know or understand, stuck fighting an opposition when they'd rather be home. Having chosen a military metaphor, the movement faces congruent difficulties. In the US, occupying private property touches a deep nerve; people in general may not care what you do on someone else's property, but they sure as hell don't want someone camped out on their private property, and will oppose on principal such action. Occupying a public park, on the other hand, creates an insurgency among the usual users and the municipal authorities charged with serving the general public, which may feel no common cause with an occupation force perceived as radicals and people with too much time and too little work ethic.

This may not be a fair perception, but it is sure as hell reinforced by corporate media, ranging from the all-out attacks by Fox and other right wing organs on 'un-American' protesters to the regular mention elsewhere of marijuana smoking, un-focused, and by implication unlikely-to-succeed, occupiers. Evil or addled, or maybe just plain naive as some pundits would have it, the story line rarely credits the movement with potential to create real change, and drags before the cameras an unending series of spokespeople who cite goals that are vague beyond comprehension, or have to do with grinding a very specific and odd ax, or betray ignorance. The resistance benefits greatly from the fact that a leaderless movement that worships free speech and personal autonomy can be "represented" on camera by the most idiotic among the occupiers.

Another flaw lies in the territory being occupied. In Manhattan, it is Zuccotti Park, which despite its name is not a public space at all, but the property of the Brookfield Properties corporation. Elsewhere, Occupy clones are popping up in public spaces, but it's not the county or city or state that the occupiers have a grievance with. Occupy a city park, and you may inconvenience the municipality, the people who the week before had gone there to feed pigeons or play with kids, but you do not hurt the corporations that looted our economy. In fact, you do them a favor, setting in motion a conflict between citizens who occupy the park and the civil servants responsible for maintaining it. If I were a Wall Street banker, I'd be laughing all the way to the, uh, my work, as city officials fretted and faced unplanned expenses while occupiers focused sizable effort on avoiding eviction and the remaining citizenry split into pro-, anti- and apathetic camps. Divide and divert, and meanwhile very little corporate real estate is occupied.

I support my family by working for money, which means I cannot go down an take part in the Occupation, at least not in the sense of living there day in and day out. I can lend support, bring supplies, write blogs and comments lauding this patriotic antidote to the Tea Party. But my occupation is something else, and I don't have time to occupy a city park. Instead, I'll occupy my house, which is actually just a tiny percentage mine, belonging as it does to the mortgage holder (in my case, this is a local credit union, and not a Wall Street bank, so mine is a peaceful occupation, nothing adversarial unless I chose to stop paying the bill I willingly signed on to). As much as I support civil disobedience and speaking out against our greedy, corrupted system, I do find myself wondering who it is that will have the time to occupy a park for weeks or months on end, and whether with all that time, they might have something to do that would create more tangible progress.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Will it devolve into an extended dance party that accomplishes nothing? Will people lose interest or hope and go home? Will the clampdown roll through like MacArthur's tanks through Hooverville? Will corporations see the error of unbridled capitalism and surrender?

I'm pessimistic enough to think that those question were presented in descending order of likelihood, but optimistic enough to think that beyond the Occupy movement, there may be positive change. The protest may have some deep flaws that keep it from being sustainable in its present form, but this week people are talking about issues that were buried a month ago, and maybe in a month they'll be taking more substantive measures. Occupation may prove to be a vital step on a journey that leads to a better nation.

Fission

This year, I'll end up posting about twice as often as last year, which was twice as much as the first year of Mojourner truth. There was never any focus to begin with, but the blog has grown in various directions, and that along with the increased number of posts made me decide recently to spinn off.

So now I'll have separate blogs for food, politics, the Northwest, culture, and of course procrastacriticism. As I write this, a couple of those topics stand empty (and un-linked to) and others stay hidden (and un-thinked of). Maybe I'll cross-post here, but maybe not. Some of these blogs will die on the vine. Others may live on while the Mojourner Truth fades into obscurity. Or,...something completely different.

Slow Dawn at the Tower

Brian Fagan stands out as one of the more engaging archaeological writers, but this piece in the magazine Archaeology makes him seem out of touch. He's dispensing emerital wisdom of the ilk that tells young up and comers that they've missed the Golden Age, and in so doing reveals what looks like ignorance.

You cannot count on a lifetime academic position, and the number of sites is growing perilously small, he opines. The former is true, but has been apparent for a couple of decades. Meanwhile, in the US as in other jurisdictions with the "anything over X years old is archaeology" rule (X=50 in the US, by the way), sites are multiplying every year. It may not seem fun to those who qualify as historic themselves, but the fact remains that the vast quantity of stuff left on the land in the 20th Century will keep legions busy for the foreseeable future, and they will learn dirty secrets that never made it into print. At the same time, methodological advances and migrations of technology into archaeological practice mean that we are able to discern sites that were inaccessible or invisible when young Fagan came of age. I find sites now using air photos, LiDAR, and sonar, while colleagues make use of everything from internet archives to X-ray fluorescence to find new sites and wring more data from artifacts that sat silent on shelves for decades.

He pretty much concludes that CRM (cultural resource management, which is basicvally archaeology that is done in order for someone to comply with law or get a permit) and other forms of non-academic archaeology are some other discipline, which is elitist, sadly dismissive, or both. CRM, like university-based archaeology, is what you make of it. People in both realms sit back and do little, and people in both realms make significant advances. I know genuine idiots, idealists, and geniuses in both the ivory tower and the trenches. Some of the best archaeologists are those "content to be a technician"--the fact, however, is that few of them "quietly vegetate," it's just that their utterances occur in the field and over beers, instead of in academic and upscale publications. Eventually, they are overheard by grad students who publish and "legitimize" the knowledge.

Fagan's article betrays not just the obvious academic vs. CRM bias, but a deeper elitism that just pisses me off. Citing the great discoveries of his "golden age," he reels off a list that includes an unspeakably ancient human ancestor (is there no older patheticism than the popular idea that older is automatically better?) and a couple of sites intentionally constructed to exalt ancient despots. Nothing about the vast majority of humankind that has been widely and intensively revealed in the past few decades of archaeology. And again, this idea that the leveling off of funding for purely academic archaeology is a disciplinary death knell, it suggests shameless ignorance of the vast majority of archaeology. He goes so far as to wave off young up and comers, to advise them to put their happiness before anything else, which he bizarrely equates to having a career in the insurance industry before retiring and doing archaeology. For me, years of work serving a sector that systematically rips people off before attempting fieldwork with an aged body seems like hell.

In the final paragraph, he seems to come round to sense after all, recognizing that "archaeology is what you make of it." Yet he still manages to ask questions already answered by those of us who work on the ground, like how to do archaeology without digging everything up, or can conservation be a mainstream part of archaeology. And he misses important questions like "What to indigenous cultures think we should do about archaeological sites?" or "What can archaeology teach us about adapting to climate change?"

One day, I will be old and irrelevant. I only pray that my readership will not be so broad, so my embarrassment may be minimized.

It Must Be Fall

We are in the post-Equinoctal world, Autumnal Edition. I would know this even without a calendar, because of these events:

• Rains returning to the NW
• Between clouds, the sun angles in low, below hat brims and car visors
• People searching for "heatilator" are landing at this blog again

 

Garden 11: The Hoop House

September, and tomatoes are finally ripening.

I tend to go with the flow (Disclosure: rarely in the main stream, sometimes along a flux as inscrutable as neutrinos through granite), and opt for simply ept over the fancy engineering available to today's gardener.

But the flow's so slow with the maritime Northwest Spring, especially this year. The sun may climb quickly from it's root-bound Winter Nadir to the sunshine daydream of a Salish Summer, but the clouds wet and dark rob the light and waylay the warmth. So to get some early(ish) greens and tomatoes and beans going, I decided to goose the flow a little this year. 

June 2011: The plastic comes off.

This photo shows only the hoops, but imagine it covered in clear(ish) plastic, trapping air to tap photons that make it through the clouds; these shivering ragged survivors do manage to warm things up a bit. Not enough to affect soil temps, though, which I measured frequently and never saw get past the low 40s Fahrenheit before I yanked the plastic and let the real summer in. 

Anyway, the shot from the roof there illustrates my approach, which stems from frugality and some would say lassitude, though I prefer to think it is clever(ish).

• Dig a 12 by 4 foot bed sloped slightly down south.
• Lay out a 25 foot soaker hose up and back.
• Get some skinny pvc, stick one end in the ground in a corner the bed.
• Go down the long side, planting another every 2 feet.
• With the help of a boathook or friend, bend these over and stick the other end in the ground.
• Get a roll of heavy clear plastic sheeting, and lay it over the hoops and secure the long edges.

The only thing you cut is the plastic sheet, and there's no exotic material required. Easy. Cheap.

Spring's greenhouse reborn as Summer's tomato cage.

Plastic retraction time comes when the tomatoes start pushing against it, which as luck had it this year was when we started to get real stretches of clear sky, sun showering down on chlorophyll for hours on end. At which point I took a couple of old tomato cages I'd made a while back out of leftover fencing, and laid them over the hoops. Just guide shoots up where you want them and they'll flop on top, maybe even sling a few of the branches below. Watch for fruits growing into wires, but otherwise you're pretty much done til harvest. 

South of the tomatoes, I had lettuce and spinach, some of which had an extended growing season as the growing tomatoes kept the sun from hitting tender leaves all day. To the north was a single row of string beans, climbing twine to a line strung from eave to eave on the end of the house, but that's another story.


From the post-Equinoctal perspective, the hoop house seems like a worthwhile investment. Digging the bed was by far the most labor intensive part of it, and that gets easier over time. Everything is off-the-shelf and inexpensive, and one person can make it in under an hour. The tomatoes alone pay for it the first year. I'm glad I finally did it.

Fanless

Fanless. A state of being without: a) a mechanical device for moving air, or b)  sufficiently multitudinous devotees to invey Stardom(TM)

Either one sucks. For example, "a)" sucks when you realize the hotel room you just checked into qualifies, and you ate Taco Bell on the road. Or "b)" sucks when you want stardom. 

The latter of which affects me not. This blog logs its lowest numbers, lately.  And happily I write whatever the hell I want. Like this:

That a certain national hotelier systematically lacks bathroom fans, however, bothers me. It should bother them, as it is bound to adversely affect repeat bidness among: trysters, eaters of beans, very sensitive loners, and other demographics.

 

Garden 10: Food for All, or It All Ain't Food

One of the Blueberry Guard

It only occurred to me as I vainly grasped for a clever post title that my rationalization for procrastinating myself out of any serious attempt at pest control in decades of gardening could pass as a Garden Philosophy. Maybe more, if I can pump up a fully righteous head of steam.


Meanwhile, back in the garden, a diversitude of creatures ambulate, root, hyphaeate and otherwise occupy what is in theory a controlled landscape. My monotheistic ancestors, farmers dependent on the God of Abraham (and the Holy Ghost of Agronomy), plucked bugs and pulled weeds til the cows came home, until one of those cows in it's brahmic wisdom brought forth unto these farmers a bounty of chemicals. Most tillers of soil lost out to the conglomerates who replaced stewardship with production, and had to leave the land to those who could wrench the greatest efficiencies out of topsoil tranmogrified from living organism to platform for nutrients, herbicides, and pesticides. The Holy Ghost ascended to the heavenly throne, and nations came to depend on the chemiracle to feed themselves, their armies, and their trade surpluses. (Then came genetic engineering, the chimeracle, but that's another episode...)


But those bugs and slugs flitting and crawling, the weeds stealing soil and crowding crops, the molds and fungi and microbial malevolents...they may be threatening the beans, the carrots, the squash, the tomatoes, egads--the hops! Maybe. But then again, some provide haven and ambush sites for pest-devouring preyers, diversity and distraction enough to derail disasters. The complexity of a soil only sorta weeded (not hoed and turned, much less the more harrowing experience of mechanifarming), strung through with a felt of roots, hyphae, tunnels and wee webs of creatures too multitudinous to comprehend, lacks a uniform veneer of predictability, but is a better long-term bet.


Chemfarmers gain a momentary advantage. The weevils and weeds die, the crop comes in (barring misapplication, bad weather, and the plethora of troubles that will always ace farmers). But not all the pestiferous fauna and flora die, and the survivors immediately set to breeding immunity into the population. The survivors represent a diversity-poor selection at first, theirs is a high-stakes gamble that overcoming a single chemical will result in success. But if they win, they win big, and a field becomes a field of weeds, with a single species dominating to an astonishing degree. 


Which is almost as lousy a place for the animals and fungi as was the industrial moncropland.


Meanwhile, back on the tendril of thought that started this post, my garden has no resident chemical residue. I've been known to directly expel and even violently attack a plant predator, but I don't poison anything. Which means that anything there can be food, even if not for me. If the ladybug can gobble the aphid with no worry, good. If herbivores have a plethoric buffet, so much the better for any one food plant to survive. If the fungi select out the weakest, then evolution points me in the right direction (or more precisely, away from a wrong one). I do not get miracle yields, but I get my share.

More Irony, and some Ire at Morons

Hellscape Texas (NOAA photo)

I used to have to sate my Rick Perry irony hunger by looking at the title of his book, Fed Up. It can be read in the "Up with Feds" sense, contraindicating the semi-literate rants between the covers, subliminably urging his almost-semi-literate fans (admit it, most people who buy it do so for ornamentation, not to crack it open) to support Federalism.


No? You're right. That's a ridiculous stretch.  He wants to fuck them snide lyin' sons-a-bitches (=scientists) up, and ain't gonna let no bureaucrats and technocrats tell him what to do. The guy genuinely hates government.

Or does he?


Today's events suggest that he may not believe that all gummint is bad, that in fact swaggerin' and prayin' may be usefully augmented by science-based action, funded by...taxes.


Because today, Perry could've been strutting in front of a crowd of South Carolinian Tea Partiers and the national press, railing against the liberal elite and big government. Instead, he flew back (shepherded for all the way by those helpful FAA guys Republicans would like to get rid of...again) to coordinate government response to wildfires. Making sure that state resources are applied against the thousands of fires consuming beloved Texas ground. Will he refuse federal fire crews, disaster relief? 


No. He'll avail himself of the evil he points to in the public square. 

Some would say that's hypocritical, but there's some irony in there too. And it gets better: the emergency he's dealing with is a consequence of global warming, which he denies even exists. Texas is experiencing it's worst drought ever, with record high temperatures. Don't take my word for it, I'm just quoting a report from the Office of the Texas State Climatologist


Nope, you cannot make up irony like that. A government scientist (whose data will be crucial in securing federal assistance and funding), a public employee, proving his idiot boss wrong. I hope for his sake that he's got a union.

HI NW

Maybe you knew about it all along, but it was not until I was fully grown that I learned about the Hawai'i - Northwest connection. Cook and then Vancouver sailed (and ailed and aled) between these places in the late 18th Century, and there are those who feel that certain petroglyphs in Bella Coola may demonstrate that the Hawaiians had already done so before. The Hawaiian islands provided sandalwood and firewood, provisions and crew (weary and horny Anglos jumped ship in Lahaina, and adventurous Hawaiians took their places) during the fur and silk trade. Maybe because they both loved kings, the Hawaiians and British took to each other, among the expressions of which was a minor migration of Hawaiians to the Columbia and points north, in country that was then more Brittanic (or Gallic, maybe Russki).


I moved to Hawai'i before I knew any of this, and so I was a little surprised to find that a favorite dish there, and pretty much the only local kine grind with land-based non-starchy vegetables in it was something called lomi salmon. Tomato (hard to grow in the islands since diseases and fungi caught up, but historic sources indicate it did alright soon after introduction), onion, and salt salmon. It looks like this (but tastes even better):

"Lomi" derives from lomilomi, the Hawaiian art of massage. You need to turn the ingredients together with your hands to get the  tomato juice on the salmon, to bleed onion spice into the tomato, and to spread the salmon salt throughout. 


I made this last week with the trimmings from a king salmon I'd inexpertly filleted. Salted and drained and resalted and redrained and salted again the bits o salmon. Rinsed and dried and added a diced Yakima tomato and homegrown progeny of Walla Walla onion. 


None of the girls would share it with me, because they figured the salmon was raw. True, it was never cooked, but the salt basically dehydrates it, so it does not seem so raw. Not exactly jerky tough, but the salmon ends up being a salty, slightly chewy nugget in the soft tomato matrix. The onions add crunch, sweet allium crunch. I had no ogo, but may try to get some next time. 


This dish marries the Northwest and Hawai'i Nei, transcending a swath of the world's largest ocean. To eat it is to consume history, to break open the barrel of salt fish in a Honolulu house, to hybridize cuisines in a Kanaka Village kitchen on the Columbia. To have it here and now, with a sun-ripened tomato, a sweet onion from my yard, and a salmon that swam the morning before it was salted, is delicious beyond description.

Fear and Loathing (and bliss?!) in the San Juans.

Last week, I traveled to one of the San Juan Islands. Sounds like a place in Latino Latitudes, but they are our northernmost islands, ever since I stopped counting Alaska. After S. Palin said she could see Russia from there, oligarchniks have quietly been buying back pieces of it, and they now own enough land, oil futures, and moorages to have reversed Seward's Folly.

Meanwhile, down south, I sat on the deck of a small workboat, skimming o'er glassy waters on the way to my favorite island this side of Kaua'i. It was an international expedition, more or less, there being employees of two sovereign nations aboard, but tensions were low. My coffee buzz, borne of a 4AM wake-up and 2 or 3 hours of not-quite-as-fast-as-that-douchebag-in-the-BMW driving, was gone by then, and the remainder were northwesterners, cool enough not to let their 30% caffeine bloodstream affect their behavior. 


My job was to make sure a little hilltop was an OK place--archaeologically speaking--to plant a small weather station. I knew this would only take a few minutes, but was interested in what the reps of this other nation had to say about the whereabouts of a place that all of us agree exists, but none of us has been able to locate on a map, much less on the ground. Or, too many people have been able to locate it on a map, but they don't agree. Not violently, or even vehemently, more in the manner of a loss collective.

So there was no drama. No conflict. No more to write about.

So I ambled over to a place where some workers had been, uh, working. With big machines. And they'd gone where they were not supposed to. And obliterated some stuff. 

Irrevocably. Done. Nothing more to say.

So I continued to the south beach. Solo, toward the solace of data collection. The home of a man who invented a particular kind of mill saw, reduced for the time being to notes and numbers. Measured, sketched, GPS'd, until there are hours to rediscover the stories and graft them back to this bare limbwork. Sounds dull as it gets, but the uncreative busy work soothed me just then.


Moving on, it was time to climb. 600 or so feet up is the summit of a hill called Olivine, and for part of the way I followed old miners' roads, weaving twixt boulders loosed from earth but not barged away. Higher still, heading for a bald patch where I might have left a bag carrying camera and binocs, lost on the last trip here. In the camera, a memory card holding the only images of that place that had been torn away by machines. In the binocular lenses and dark interior, lagging photons showing 21 years of birds and cliffs, of places unreachable and just plain look-worthy. Memory and data, at waypoint 680. Maybe.


But only after crumbly cliffs and a final steep ascent under a sun as glaring as it gets in these northern islands (Not saying that much, Hawaiians, but acclimated me felt hot.) And there, in the place I had sat: nothing. No camera, no binoculars. Oh well. A pretty day, views down to the island (and a camera to catch 'em), the channels, more islands and straits, ocean. Boats unzipping wakes. A bell clanging in its language, inscrutably charming to my ignorant ears.


It was all downhill from there, beginning easily enough with a trail. Becoming a trace. Then just places less tangled than others. Then ever more precipitous slope, alternating between slick bedrock and loose talus made one by a moss skin over a skeleton of roots and rot. One leg carefully lowering my entire weight, then the other. Zig-zag switch-back, starting to wonder if I'd be back to the dock on time at this gastropodean pace.


On the other hand, it gave me time to appreciate the ancient fire-scarred trees scattered in this slanted forest. Occasional grandfathers, gnarled and interesting, surrounded by young'uns. 


I was looking up at one, it's branches akimbo with codgerhood and a disregard for verticality not tolerated in the tree farms and young forests I usually travel. Hunter S. had gotten that way in his old age, and years earlier had been nearly as curmudgeonly in his dismissal of amateurs one toke over the line, scoffing that until they'd dealt with the acid bats descending near Barstow, they had nothing to whine about.


And maybe getting all worked up over a hallucination is not that big a deal either. Imaginary bats swooping from the sky may be bad, but real yellow-jackets swarming up from their nest in the depths of hell ain't no picnic either. I'd been strung three times  before my body responded. They never really entered my vision, barely nicked my consciousness as anything other than pain when I took off in a clumsy cetacean approximation of running. Another sting, and realization that I'd be stung to death and devoured by the yellow-jackets at this rate.


I either stumbled or decided to jump, who knows? In any case, I looked down-slope and saw my feet before me, plowing downhill as I slid my butt across moss and logs, bouncing off rocks, pawing and clutching at whatever could help me steer this descent, maybe keep it from accelerating out of control (any more than it was). Extreme luge...sleds and ice are for panty-wastes. My mind thinking only of getting away from bees. Eyes pitching in by trying to spot a precipice before it was too late, and managing to do so.


Stop. Stand. Stung.


Again with the mad down-ward dash. Hop and lope, slide and hope. Managing to stick most of the landings and surf over a salal patch without it clutching me. Finally finding myself having covered a lot of ground, much closer to my destination. More importantly, out of the airspace of the squadron scrambled to chase me away. Not long after, I walked onto another old road, ambling calmly dockward. About 5 stings big enough to qualify, but no gashes, serious bruises, or broken bones sticking out of my skin. 


All in all, not a bad day.

Downgrade

Why did Congress not insert a line into the budget for paying off the US credit rating agencies?

It worked for the financial firms who were busy trading toxic products that companies--including Standard and Poors, which just downgraded the US rating--winked at and rated highly, causing the economic crisis we are now in. Nobody went to jail over that, and the corrupt bastards who put in the fix made out like the bandits they are.


Reporters spill ink and bits over the rationale for the downgrade, while pundits conjure up whatever consequences will entertain their audiences. Here's a basic article from the Washington Post; you may not agree with that organization's politics, but the story mostly limits itself to the facts of the case.


While missing the point almost entirely.


The downgrade is a perfect metaphor for our government's demise. Ever since Reagan, the Depublican Party has wanted the government to shrink (in the case of ideologically driven zealots) or at least demur to The Market (in the case of the business wing). Now, a company whose complicity in massive fraud should have resulted in a decimation as the culpable employees were hauled off to prison is instead punishing the government (and along with it, the local governments and commoners who have run of the mill investments, and who must borrow money on the open market). The administration reportedly objected, but was as impotent in maintaining AAA status as it was in negotiating with the GOP.


Is there any question who is in charge?

Decades of de-regulation gave big business the freedom to make more money than ever, with less obligation than ever to society at large. The "too big to fail" myth and some well-timed extortion gave them a windfall when their filthy house of cards fell, a massive transfer of wealth from public coffers (I chipped in, and so did you, most likely) to corporations and companies. And now, just to let the government know who is in charge, the perpetrators decide it's time to downgrade the government and let the stock market dive.

Well, not entirely to punish the government. 

Because if you follow the money, you see some interesting side benefits, and maybe some structural change that makes the upper hand that business already enjoys that much stronger. The stock market was probably due for a correction anyway, having gained value more on the basis of speculation than the anemic and jobless "recovery." With no major corporate welfare on the horizon, the smart money jumped out at the opportune moment when it would punish the administration (after all, Obama only gives them 95% of what they want) and, oh yeah, make a pile of money while the suckers flounder and panic.

And now, with its less than pristine bond rating, the US government can expect to pay more to borrow that money. This is one arena where trickle down theory is likely to come true. States, counties, and municipalities are likely to see interest rates rise as well. Consumers (the name for what used to be called "citizens" in quaint times gone by), if and when financial institutions decide to start loaning more openly from their enormous reserves, can also count on paying more. 

It infuriates me to see the mastery with which this has been played by the wealthy few. They own enough representatives and senators to make sure that they are never substantially constrained in their practices, and mock the ability of regulators to keep up with their sophisticated larcenous financial instruments. When their more ridiculous gambles go awry, they demand that the government bail them out. If populist anger should tempt the congressional puppets to think twice, actions like the downgrade remind them of the big capitalist thumb holding them down.

The stated basis for the S & P downgrade--that the debt ceiling debate brinksmanship reeks of dysfunction, that there is no reason for confidence that the same clowns will come up with the majority of cuts promised, and so on--is entirely plausible. But then why did they not come to similarly wise conclusions before the private sector imploded our economy?


The takeover is complete. Now, maybe Wall Street solons will be freed from having to spend tours of duty in the cramped and underpaid offices at Treasury, Commerce, and the Federal Reserve, and just issue their orders from the board rooms where power truly resides. Unless the people demand it (and that seems unlikely so far), the government has been downgraded, and the financial leaders are fully in charge.