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Sacco and Vanzetti

Don’t forget this:

On August 23, 1927, the state of Massachusetts executed two Italian immigrant anarchists by the names of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti for the murder of two men in a 1920 armed robbery in South Braintree. Although the two men may or may not have been involved in the crime, as Italian anarchists, they were on trial for their beliefs as much as the murder. Despite the lack of concrete evidence and international outrage over the miscarriage of justice, the state of Massachusetts railroaded them into the electric chair.

Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists, men deeply affected by the terrible labor and social conditions of the early 20th century. Both immigrated from Italy in 1908, though they didn’t meet for nearly a decade. The seeming inability for the capitalist system to treat working people with dignity and respect drove many to desperation. By the 1890s, anarchism was a growing threat in the United States, perhaps most personified by Leon Czoglosz’s assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. Although that and other incidents convinced enough upper and middle-class Anglo-Saxons to enact limited reforms during the Progressive Era, the fundamental conditions of working-class urban life had changed little by 1920.

Sacco and Vanzetti both followed the teachings of Luigi Galleani, an anarchist theorist who advocated violence to overthrow the state. The Galleanists did in fact use violence in the United States. They were believed to be the group behind the bombing of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home in 1919. Palmer, already cracking down on radicalism with the help of his young eager assistant by the name of J. Edgar Hoover, built upon this incident to intensify the Red Scare, that nation-wide crackdown on radicalism in all forms during and after American entry into World War I.

It was in this atmosphere that men like Sacco and Vanzetti were suspects in murders like that which took place on April 15, 1920, when armed robbers attacked a company payroll, killing two men. Although the evidence was indirect, the police suspected the greater Boston anarchist community, which was suspected in a series of other robberies to fund their activities. The police also discovered that one anarchist, Mario Buda had worked in two shops subjected to similar robberies. Upon questioning, Buda let slip that the local anarchist community had an automobile under repair, leading police to stake out the repair shop. The police convinced the garage owner to notify them when the anarchists arrived to pick up the car. When 4 men did, including Buda, Sacco, and Vanzetti, they sensed a trap and fled, but Sacco and Vanzetti were soon picked up. Both had guns at their homes; Sacco having a loaded .32 Colt similar to that used in the killings.

and that’s a great series on the history of Labor by Loomis. Check it out.

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The 2012 Election

I would much rather sit out most of the run-up, especially July-September, to most elections. Usually the Greens find a way to be a way for some of these; not this time. It’s not that I’m against politics. I love it. It’s great to read and to talk about, especially if your side is doing well and ours is. And the Republicans are a bankrupt fraud.

But what that fraud leads to is discussions or articles like these about medicare:

If Medicare were a discretionary program funded through the standard authorization/appropriation process, there’d be no distinction between cutting the appropriation for program purchases and cutting the program’s funding. But Medicare isn’t a discretionary program, so what Obama did was decrease the pace at which the trust fund spends down. At earlier stages in the ACA debate, this was the focus of the great “double counting” debate since the Obama administration likes to say that the cuts both reduce the budget deficit (by reducing federal spending inside a 10-year scoring window) and increase the projected lifespan of the trust fund (because the unspent money is in some sense “in” the trust fund), which is really more a quirk of trust fund accounting than a real feature of the law. But whether one likes trust fund accounting or doesn’t, if you’re going to run around the country alleging that money is being taken from a Medicare piggy bank then you’re necessarily working from within the trust fund accounting framework. And the way it works is that Obama’s reductions of reimbursement rates keeps the piggy bank full longer, while if Romney repeals them the piggy bank will expire sooner.

On its face, a clear win for the forces of intellect and decency. Unfortunately, that’s not what we’re surrounded by.

Make it stop. I know: we just need to get motivated. I’m not that cynical and both sides don’t do it. It’s not that. It’s just that one side has decided that its best hope is to make the whole thing so stupid that no one cares or pays attention, which makes it close and they win.

Okay. Now, I’m motivated. Thanks, dumb other side.

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The Fake Issue

National_Debt_Clock_by_Matthew_Bisanz

The national debt is a fake political issue. I’ve had this conversation many times with family members with opposing political views, because it seems like the one issue on which we can at least agree. But it’s not. Because it’s only a political issue. The people who scream deficit don’t really care about it – they only want to use it to try and abolish the social safety net. You might agree with them. But using the deficit as the reason is a cowardly, dishonest way to achieve your goals.

President Clinton balanced the budget at the end of the 1990’s, and the very first thing that happened was that Republicans began screaming that The Surplus was a threat to our very existence. The deficit wasn’t mentioned again until another Democrat moved into the White House. Then suddenly, vapors.

Please note for future reference. The government is also neither a family household nor a business and should not be run like either. Anyone likening this or any government to either one is being purposefully dishonest and manipulative and should not be afforded the gravitas above that enjoyed by any random lifer in the lunch line at Marion USP, later this afternoon.

Image of the first debt clock licensed under Creative Commons.

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market speak

In an ongoing series where I answer my own question, it means we’re becoming more stupid. Besides destroying the planet, we’re losing all tether to the ability to think.

I sent this to Mrs. G, but the more I read, I realized I should share here. Seattle’s The Stranger sent its reporter Paul Constant to a startup conference and well… warning: do not drink coffee as you read this.

They have come here in herds, dressed in business casual. Below their belts, the men are an ocean of khaki, broken intermittently by a cresting pair of Very Expensive Jeans. They wear their finest button-down shirts, but they make sure that those shirts are untucked, to demonstrate their willingness to let it all hang out, to think outside the confines of belted chino. The younger ones are in hoodies, their slouches cribbed thoughtfully from Jesse Eisenberg, who cribbed his slouch thoughtfully from Mark Zuckerberg. The women have it tougher. Their business casual is neither business-minded nor all that casual, a confusing melange of sundresses and sensible slacks, gossamer sweaters tossed over spaghetti straps. They totter about in chunky summer sandals that will leave bloody welts. These women and men have come together to do brutal violence to the English language, to leave the spoken and written word bloodied and victimized on a cold cement floor, wishing for the sweet relief of death.

Or at least, that’s the unintentional result. The ostensible reason they’ve gathered in Showbox SoDo, hiding away from the sunny afternoon in a dark room lousy with power strips, is to stare at a podium and a screen and lose a whole day to PowerPoint. They’re all wearing lanyards with big plastic placards dangling around their navels, their names in huge, humpty-point type and the words “Startup Riot Seattle 2012” and “#occupystartups” at the top. Ostensibly, they’re here to take part in something like an American Idol for startups, in which thirty different entrepreneurs explain their business plans to an audience of a couple hundred people. Their pitch presentations will take three minutes or less, and each pitch will be followed by three minutes of questions from a “panel” of two judges. The winners get guaranteed “face-time” with prominent venture capitalists and support from Startup Riot’s sponsoring organizations.

But, oh, my God, the terrible things these people do to words. It’s like watching some sadist work over a baby lamb with a rusty crowbar and a broken gin bottle. The names of these startups sound like the products of an aggressive brain tumor on the frontal lobe. Crowdegy, Placeling, Kouply, QuoteRobot, Appthwack, Makegood, Onthego, Nickler, Kahal, Tanzio, Taskk. They’re all whimsical and unique in exactly the same way. One of the judges works for Storenvy. The main corporate sponsor for Startup Riot is Mailchimp, along with a flock of smaller sponsors like Uber, Gist, and Twilio. I could staple the mismatched meat of syllables together all afternoon and you wouldn’t be able to tell the legitimate businesses from the illegitimate: Mehole, Kaprah, Yimmy, Blanter, Catzap, Dunzyinonezy, Simplert, Lustaminate.

It gets worse when they start talking about the ideas behind the insipid names.

What do all these words that were seemingly invented by a wizard in a kid’s picture book do? They each solve a specific problem. You ever have trouble organizing an office softball team? Don’t you hate looking at the long list of search results that happen when you type a query into google? (“The problem is…the list.”) Isn’t it awful, having an abundance of news sources? Do you have too many tasks? One pitch begins with a simple, honest mission statement: ““There’s a big problem we all face every day: Information.”

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Hughes in peace

Not the first man you might imagine when it comes to peace, but rest now he does. The rough week continues, and while this one isn’t strictly personally, it certainly feels personal. Our favorite art critic Robert Hughes (1938-2012).

When he reached a mass audience for the first time in 1980 with his book and television series The Shock of the New, a history of modern art starting with the Eiffel Tower and graced with a title that still resounds in 100 later punning imitations, some of the BBC hierarchy greeted the proposal that Hughes should do the series with ill-favoured disdain. “Why a journalist?” they asked, remembering the urbanity of Lord Clark of Civilisation.

He gave them their answer with the best series of programmes about modern art yet made for television, low on theory, high on the the kind of epigrammatic judgment that condenses deep truths. Van Gogh, he said, “was the hinge on which 19th-century romanticism finally swung into 20th-century expressionism”. Jackson Pollock “evoked that peculiarly American landscape experience, Whitman’s ‘vast Something‘, which was part of his natural heritage as a boy in Cody, Wyoming”. And his description of the cubism of Picasso and Braque still stands as the most coherent 10-page summary in the literature.

And that’s some Hughes we can always use.

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Disposal of Interests

Someone, an actual friend, posted this on fB yesterday and I resolved to make our Friday Reading text for today. Actually, it was an easy call.

A letter from William Burroughs to Truman Capote in 1970, and I think its point is rather, um, clear.

July 23, 1970

My Dear Mr. Truman Capote

This is not a fan letter in the usual sense — unless you refer to ceiling fans in Panama. Rather call this a letter from “the reader” — vital statistics are not in capital letters — a selection from marginal notes on material submitted as all “writing” is submitted to this department. I have followed your literary development from its inception, conducting on behalf of the department I represent a series of inquiries as exhaustive as your own recent investigations in the sun flower state. I have interviewed all your characters beginning with Miriam — in her case withholding sugar over a period of several days proved sufficient inducement to render her quite communicative — I prefer to have all the facts at my disposal before taking action. Needless to say, I have read the recent exchange of genialities between Mr Kenneth Tynan and yourself. I feel that he was much too lenient. Your recent appearance before a senatorial committee on which occasion you spoke in favor of continuing the present police practice of extracting confessions by denying the accused the right of consulting consul prior to making a statement also came to my attention. In effect you were speaking in approval of standard police procedure: obtaining statements through brutality and duress, whereas an intelligent police force would rely on evidence rather than enforced confessions. You further cheapened yourself by reiterating the banal argument that echoes through letters to the editor whenever the issue of capital punishment is raised: “Why all this sympathy for the murderer and none for his innocent victims?” I have in line of duty read all your published work. The early work was in some respects promising — I refer particularly to the short stories. You were granted an area for psychic development. It seemed for a while as if you would make good use of this grant. You choose instead to sell out a talent that is not yours to sell. You have written a dull unreadable book which could have been written by any staff writer on the New Yorker — (an undercover reactionary periodical dedicated to the interests of vested American wealth). You have placed your services at the disposal of interests who are turning America into a police state by the simple device of deliberately fostering the conditions that give rise to criminality and then demanding increased police powers and the retention of capital punishment to deal with the situation they have created. You have betrayed and sold out the talent that was granted you by this department. That talent is now officially withdrawn. Enjoy your dirty money. You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished. Over and out. Are you tracking me? Know who I am? You know me, Truman. You have known me for a long time. This is my last visit.

Thanks, J-Dep.

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Social Impact Bonds

Okay, so this is so… questionable. In their thirst to find news ways of making money, the cunning quants at Goldman Sachs have hit upon an ingenious scheme in which New York City is:

embracing an experimental mechanism for financing social services that has excited and worried government reformers around the world, will allow Goldman Sachs to invest nearly $10 million in a jail program, with the pledge that the financial services giant would profit if the program succeeded in significantly reducing recidivism rates.

The city will be the first in the United States to test “social impact bonds,” also called pay-for-success bonds, which are an effort to find new ways to finance initiatives that might save governments money over the long term.

Alright, I’m going to slow pitch this one under-hand. See the ball, here it comes:

If you are going to do this, there are other ways to make money that will save a lot more than save governments money over the long run. More, as in shorelines and aquifers. How about financial incentives for people to use less energy? For power companies to sell less energy? For regions to pump less carbon into the atmosphere? Is this that difficult? I know you can get there GS, come on.

The more you read the article, the more obscene it gets, private equity dabbling in social programs. At its essence, truly obscene. But if it works, they are going to do this, rather than provide any actual societal goods, they are going to fund them through profit-taking. Fine. Whatever. It is a kind a evolution, I guess. Better than incentivizing our destruction, which is exactly what has led us so close to it. But there are all kinds of other problems to which this could be readily applied. Get ready for a very twisted society, in which late-term capitalism comes around to save itself by incentivizing positive social and environmental outcomes.

Actually, who cares why we do it, as long as we do it.  It’ll be a boon for philosophy book publishers.

The nugget:

“This will get attention as perhaps the most interesting government contract written anywhere in the world this year,” Dr. Liebman said. “People will study the contract terms, and the New York City deal will become a model for other jurisdictions.”

But social impact bonds have also worried some people in the nonprofit and philanthropy field, who say monetary incentives could distort the programs or their evaluations.

“I’m not saying that the market is evil,” said Mark Rosenman, a professor emeritus at Union Institute and University in Cincinnati, “but I am saying when we get into a situation where we are encouraging investment in order to generate private profit as a substitute for government responsibility, we’re making a big mistake.”

Mmmm. Why would you think the market is evil?

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Vidal

A man after our own hearts, and Suddenly, this summer is getting a little too sad to bear.. See the obits everywhere but I thought this was nice little nugget embedded in one.

But he was widely admired as an independent thinker — in the tradition of Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken — about literature, culture, politics and, as he liked to call it, “the birds and the bees.” He picked apart politicians, living and dead; mocked religion and prudery; opposed wars from Vietnam to Iraq and insulted his peers like no other, once observing that the three saddest words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates.” (The happiest words: “I told you so”).

Love it. The Search for the King continues.

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Funny, that

In tribute to Romney’s Doofus Abroad act, I wanted to post an excerpt from Graham Greene’s The Comedians, a comic reference to something decidedly not funny.

Of course there’s nothing online that I can find, but you should still take this as a recommendation for Greene’s famous novel about Haiti, wherein friends of Romney could find new and better ways to conduct themselves abroad. See also, The Quiet American.

So instead, we turn to John Ruskin who, in true enlightening nineteenth century fashion, has some choice words for Willard about taxes. This is from Fors Clavigera, Letter VII, 1871:

Do you see, in The Times of yesterday and the day before, 22nd and 23rd June, that the Minister of France dares not, even in this her utmost need, put on an income tax; and do you see why he dares not?

Observe, such a tax is the only honest and just one; because it tells on the rich in true proportion to the poor, and because it meets necessity in the shortest and bravest way, and without interfering with any commercial operation.

All rich people object to income tax, of course;— they like to pay as much as a poor man pays on their tea, sugar, and tobacco — nothing on their incomes.

Whereas, in true justice, the only honest and wholly right tax is one not merely on income, but property; increasing in percentage as the property is greater. And the main virtue of such a tax is that it makes publicly known what every man has, and how he gets it.

For every kind of Vagabonds, high and low, agree in their dislike to give an account of the way they get their living, still less, of how much they have got sewn up in their breeches. It does not, however, matter much to a country that it should know how its poor Vagabonds live, but it is of vital moment that it should know how its rich Vagabonds live; and that much of knowledge, it seems to me, in the present state of our education, is quite attainable.

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Lying to get to the Truth

It’s something we are not nearly smart enough to do, but some do believe they are sufficiently clever.

So apparently Greenpeace devised a fake website, twitter stream, video and accompanying ad campaign to bring to light everything Shell isn’t yet doing (but is prepared to do) in the Arctic. There are several problems with this, laid out here:

The first one is that I don’t think portraying Shell as inept is a very wise choice. If they wanted to influence public opinion, I suspect they’d pay decent money and get someone who knows what they’re doing to manage a new ad campaign and run a Twitter account. If they’re not doing that, it’s because the general public is not currently the target audience for their PR budget. But when we are, trust me: it will be a competent effort. If we’re only braced for buffoons and clowns, they’ll succeed at whatever spin they’re trying to convey.

The second, larger problem, is that Greenpeace lied to us. This wasn’t a nod-and-a-wink parody; this was a dedicated effort to deceive. They played the public for patsies and herded them like sheep. That kind of contempt for the people whose support (financial and otherwise) they need is inexcusable. For me, it puts them in a box with people like Bush and Blair, who were also flexible with the truth for the greater good.

Yes, people are very amused by the Yes Men. But adding to the general inventory of cynicism with your own disinformation campaign only lowers the value of accurate information that much further, which makes the work of Shell et al all the easier.

The boring and uncomfortable reality is that we have to be more truthful than ever about the effects of climate change and stop trying to filter it through ideas gauged to simultaneously make us feel better. Fossil fuel extraction companies are apathetic enough as it is – and attempting to shame or embarrass them through elaborate ruses only discredits the opposition and muddies the rising tides. They have no shame and cannot be embarrassed, only impacted by lower profit margins.

People already don’t know what to think because of the years of sophisticated, high gloss disinformation propelled at blinding speeds. Allowing any more vestiges of credibility to slip away intentionally is stupid and unforgivable.

And fortunately for the fossil fuel industry, sincerity already has the least currency imaginable. Think of everything it takes to keep this system in place. If you consider how difficult it would be to get millions of people to buy monster trucks that get <10 mpg and commute 50 miles to work each way each day, we’re talking at least a concerted effort, if not the addition of some magic potion. Don’t make it easier to go down.