^^^ April 27, 2004         Food Not Bombs

[asfo_del]
The idea behind Food Not Bombs is to salvage food that would otherwise go to waste, cook it up into delicious [uhm, well, edible anyway] meals, and serve it free in the spirit of solidarity and mutual aid to anyone who wishes to partake, regardless of need. The only other principles of Food Not Bombs are vegetarianism [FNB food is usually vegan] and nonviolence. Anyone can start a Food Not Bombs. Anyone can distribute free food and call itself Food Not Bombs. There are over 100 chapters of FNB around the world.

Food Not Bombs is an idea that was started in the 1980s on the principle that food is a basic human right, not a privilege, and that there would be more than enough food to go around if it were not wasted, hoarded, and sometimes dumped to drive up prices. Treating food as a commodity creates artificial scarcity in order to generate profits for the large corporate interests that control the food supply. At the same time, vast resources are allocated by society and the government for destructive instruments like bombs, while insufficient priority is given to basic human necessities, like food.

In many ways, Food Not Bombs is a kind of perfect system. The food is obtained free. It's either donated or retrieved from dumpsters. [As long as it's been carefully selected and washed, fresh produce from a dumpster is no different than veggies that have been in someone's home refrigerator for a few days]. The cooks and servers are all volunteers. The facilities used are either at someone's home, a church, or a community center. Very small infusions of cash are sufficient to cover whatever incidentals are not donated. There is essentially no money involved. It's a system whereby people help each other to provide for one another and other strangers. It's how everything in the world should be.

I was a Food Not Bombs volunteer for about three years, for nearly every week of those years, usually two or three times a week. We would typically open up the kitchen around noon on a serving day, spend about three hours washing, sorting, and chopping vegetables and adding them to a 10 gallon pot of soup, along with flavorings like spices, sauteed onions, and garlic. Sometimes we made other dishes, like mashed potatoes, fancy salads or spiced apples. We would load up the soup in plastic 5 gallon buckets, and haul them into a shopping cart festooned with an FNB banner, along with serving ladles, paper cups, plastic spoons, salt, and, often, a big bag of dumpstered bagels. Sometimes we had other treats, like donated fresh juice. We wheeled the cart several blocks to a nearby city park and served the food. Anyone was welcome to it, but most of the takers were homeless people who spent a lot of time in the park. Many were regulars. We usually served about 40 or 50 cups of soup.

Although it may not have been the best or largest meal available, compared to other local soup kitchens, people appreciated FNB because it was so laid back, non-judgmental, and unassuming. The volunteers always shared in the meal, which also served as a kind of guarantee that we had confidence in what we offered. We didn't put ourselves in the guise of do-gooders. we didn't look down on anybody. One of the volunteers was himself homeless. He sometimes ate at a church right off the park that served free meals, and while their food was great, they required people to sit through a service before they were fed. The homeless folks attending the service were encouraged to speak; my friend said he stood up once and said that although he didn't believe in God, he was grateful that their belief allowed them to help him. He said they were horrified by his words. Something like that could never happen at FNB.

And although this particular FNB chapter in many ways lived up to the idyllic and near-utopian potential of Food Not Bombs, it was also plagued with persistent problems, some very bad.

There tends to be a kind of magic-thinking that is brought on by the enthusiasm that many who are involved with FNB experience just by virtue of being a part of something so wonderful and altruistic: that anything you cook, even if prepared without any real care or concern about what makes food taste good, is great; that leftovers will not rot even if left out; that vegetables will not rot even if not used promptly; that tiny plastic cups, which melt whenever a hot liquid is poured into them, are adequate for serving hot soup. These are actual issues that I and others I volunteered with had to contend with on almost weekly basis. Food Not Bombs, in general, tends to have somewhat of a reputation for serving really bad, sometimes inedible food. That's not always fair, and sometimes gets blamed on the fact that the food is vegan, which is really not fair. On the other hand, it is sometimes true.

The volunteer base ebbed and flowed. Often there were only two or three people available, and on several occasions I prepared and served the food by myself. But that was okay. Even when there were large numbers of volunteers, there was a problem with the general lack of enthusiasm for the dirty jobs, like cleaning up, mopping the floor, doing the dishes, and, most importantly, keeping the very large boxes of donated or salvaged vegetables organized, clean, put away, and picked free of rotting vegetable carcasses that created terrible smells, oozed onto the floor, and attracted insects and rats.

But even that was not entirely the fault of the FNB volunteers. Food Not Bombs cooked out of a community center which relegated FNB to a tiny kitchen, a space so ill suited for a fairly large food operation that it was hard to properly maintain. There was a refrigerator, on another floor, which could not hold all of the vegetables that were donated once a week, so many had to be stored in cardboard boxes on the floor, crammed under the counters of the little kitchen. The workspace was so cramped that everything was shoved into crannies. Although FNB had been one of only three programs that existed in the center when it started to expand, it was consistently given short shrift by the center's director, who envisioned an arts center funded by moneyed patrons who would not look kindly on stinky rotten vegetables. So we got inadequate space, were relegated to the status of guests rather than full members of the center, and had to put up with the frequent diatribes of a surly misanthrope [the center's director] with a volatile bad temper. Many of the FNB volunteers, who were generally young kids in their teens or early twenties, were afraid of even speaking to him.

Food Not Bombs has wonderful promise and a beautiful premise. I'm glad I helped to serve many meals to many appreciative people. I'm glad I met and spoke with many people who make the park where we served food their home. The volunteering itself, for FNB, was a bit of a mixed bag but in the end very much worthwhile. I'm glad that I knew many of the volunteers, although I'm not still in touch with any of them now. On the other hand, the volunteering that I did for the center itself was a theft of my time and earnest good will that I will never get back.
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For more information, see East Bay Food Not Bombs, which has a good web site and more links. This is NOT the FNB chapter that I was involved in.

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^^^ April 24, 2004    Problems with Old Ideas About the "Working Class"

[Richard]
Over at The Common Man, I posted some comments in response to an inter-blog dialogue with David Grenier covering issues about anarchism, intellectualism, and class. In particular, I was addressing The Common Man's suggestion that anarchist groups should be based in the working class (and not the middle class). In my response, I pointed out how difficult it is these days even to define "working class." I discussed some of my own confusing class background, such as having well-educated parents readily identified as "middle class" who had very fluctuating incomes (and sure can't help me out much now); growing up in The Bronx, in relatively poor or (traditionally) working class neighborhoods, but then going to the snooty University of Pennsylvania; taking the wrong turns career-wise (or no turns career-wise), and 20 years down the road, being caught in the great wave of downward mobility, and ending up a temp worker with near-poverty income and no benefits or other rights in the workplace whatsoever... As I pointed out, who is more the proletarian in this case, me, or the unionized blue collar worker with good benefits and relatively excellent job security (and pension) earning $60,000 a year? And whom would those who like to carry around the flag of the working class prefer to talk to when they're out to "organize"? Do the traditional advocates of "working class revolution" take into consideration all the new ways that people must (try to) earn a living and the new ways that both capital and labor are organized? (That's a rhetorical question, but I have my own answers to that... I think that many Marxist-Leninists and class-struggle anarchists and some general socialists and lefties share a tendency to cling to antiquated ideas about class that applied much more 50 or 100 years ago. I think that a lot of people who call themselves "autonomous Marxists" are more focused on addressing the changing nature of class in contemporary society and have much more flexible definitions of "class struggle." The problem is that much of what these people say and write -- especially if they're in academia -- is incomprehensible if you aren't acquainted with all the theories and jargon. They generally argue for self-emancipation by the rank and file of the working class, defined in the broadest senses possible, but sometimes it seems that it's impossible to understand what they're saying if you don't have a Ph.D.)

Sometimes, I like to tell people that I'm part of the "Non-Class of Post-Industrial Proletarians." This term comes from one of my favorite books about the issue of class in contemporary society, by Andre Gorz (who else?), entitled, Farewell to the Working Class. This book was written almost a quarter of a century ago (1980), but it applies even more today. For now, I'd like to leave off with a couple of very good passages (which I've quoted from before, in other contexts), from the defining chapter, "A New Historical Subject: The Non-Class of Post-Industrial Proletarians":

For workers, it is no longer a question of freeing themselves within work, putting themselves in control of work, or seizing power within the framework of their work. The point now is to free oneself from work by rejecting its nature, content, necessities and modalities. But to reject work is also to reject the traditional strategy and organizational forms of the working-class movement. It is no longer a question of winning power as a worker, but of winning the power no longer to function as a worker. The power at issue is not at all the same as before. The class has entered into a crisis....

This non-class encompasses all those who have been expelled from production by the abolition of work, or whose capacities are under-employed as a result of the industrialization (in this case, the automation and computerization) of intellectual work. It includes all the supernumeraries of present-day social production, who are potentially or actually unemployed, whether permanently or temporarily, partially or completely. It results from the decomposition of the old society based upon the dignity, value, social utility and desirability of work. It stretches into virtually every layer of society, well beyond those "lumpen" whom the Black Panthers, with remarkable prescience, compared in the late 1960s to the class of unionized, stably employed workers, protected by labor legislation and collective agreements.

The traditional working class is now no more than a privileged minority. The majority of the population now belong to the post-industrial neo-proletariat, which, with no job security or definite class identity, fills the area of probationary, contracted, casual, or temporary and part-time employment. In the not too distant future, jobs such as these will be largely elimnated by automation. Even now, their specifications are continually changing with the rapid development of technology, and their requirements bear little relation to the knowledge and skills offered by schools and universities. The neo-proletariat is generally over-qualified for the jobs it finds. It is generally condemned to under-use of its capacities when it is in work, and to unemployment itself in the longer term. Any employment seems to be accidental and provisional, every type of work purely contingent. It cannot feel any involvement with "its" work. Work no longer signifies an activity or even a major occupation; it is merely a blank interval on the margins of life, to be endured in order to earn a little money....

The only certainty, as far as they are concerned, is that they do not feel they belong to the working class, or to any other class. They do not recognize themselves in the term "worker" or in its symmetrical opposite, "unemployed." Whether they work in a bank, the civil service, a cleaning agency or a factory, neo-proletarians are basically non-workers temporarily doing something that means nothing to them.

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^^^ April 23, 2004         Being a Kid

[asfo_del]
When I was a kid, a lot of my experience was of not knowing. I've said that before. Not knowing seems to me to be the fundamental characteristic of childhood.

I spent a lot of time trying to glean information from what I saw in my daily life, but found common objects unyielding of any insights. What do you see throughout most of your day? Cars driving around. The fronts of houses and buildings. Uneven sidewalks [which mentally I always sought to realign, to square off so that they would not be crooked and bumpy] littered with random broken twigs, dirt, crushed leaves, and dingy old candy wrappers. None of these things explain themselves. They just exist; they are mute, unresponsive, and frustrating.

Our school bus, in Brazil, had bench seats upholstered with red vinyl that had glitter in it. That was in the third grade, after the seats had been refurbished. Prior to that, they had been a plain dull red. I used to assign numerical values to shapes, and these seats were valued at two by four. Two for the side and four for the front span. I'm not sure even now what that meant. I think it had to do with my sense of whether particular objects were well proportioned or ungainly. More likely, it had to do with my inability to relate to other people, so that I devoted my attention to inanimate things instead, and assigned them meaning.

On the same bus, when I was in the second grade, which was when we had just moved to Brazil from Italy and I had started going to an American school, an older girl, a very American-looking, intimidating girl with long red hair and a strong voice, demanded that I yield the seat next to mine, which held my bookbag. She simply yelled, "Move!" It's possible that she had said something prior to that, which I had not understood. It was early on, and I may not have been able to speak English yet by that time, although I certainly knew the word "move." I was so appalled by her rudeness that I refused to move my bag. She attempted to move it herself, but I slammed it back down. I didn't speak. Had I known how to formulate the words, "I'd like you to say please," I would have. But as it was, I had a created an incident which had focused the attention of everyone on the bus onto me, and nobody could understand my bizarre intransigence. Eventually a kindly lady who also rode the bus - I don't know if she was a teacher or a secretary - offered to sit with me instead of the mean girl, and I happily accepted. I can't imagine where my sister was in all of this. She was my intermediary to the world, the one who interceded for me in every situation, who talked to others on my behalf when I was too bewildered and afraid to speak. Maybe she had been too embarrassed by my strangeness to know what to do. Maybe she was sick that day. I don't remember.

This is not a story about what a sensitive and quirky child I was. A classic spin on a childhood like mine would be to make it about an introverted and socially awkward but charmingly perceptive and imaginative little girl, someone so keenly observant and delightfully odd that she is able to find interest and fascination in the dull shapes of objects and the gritty and mushy textures of sidewalk debris. My story is about being clueless and maladjusted, unable to understand the endlessly perplexing flow of daily existence. From my vantage point, I was much less able to successfully exist than others I saw at school, who were forever fussing, chatting and laughing all around me. That isn't quaint, nor is it awful. It's just how it was, the experience from inside my head looking out. In many respects it still is the same now that I'm forty years old.

Just as I assigned meanings to inanimate objects based on the way they looked, so I made up arbitrary value judgments about other kids based on their hair or clothes, or their mannerisms. Some kids seemed terribly American to me, a quality that had an inscrutable, uncomfortable otherness about it. Like kids with bright, blond-white hair, or crew cuts, or who wore the kind of typically American horn-rimmed glasses favored by American scientists in the 1950s, or kids who talked in that mewling, gum-chewing drawl that distinguishes American English from the clipped, British way of pronouncing words. Compared to Italian, all American speech sounded slurred and whiny to me. And American kids wore strange clothes, like those children's Keds that appear to immerse the feet in a thick slab of smooth white rubber that looks like milk pudding. In Italy, kids only wore tennis shoes for sports or to exercise. Sneakers were not considered proper shoes for school.

I especially disliked a kid named Brian, whose name I thought was Brain. It's possible that he had said something mean to me at some point, since it was not uncommon for these blond-headed child-troops to toss unkind, off-the-cuff remarks at you for no apparent reason [except that they may have seen you as a diffident, mute statue who eyed them with judgmental and imperious disdain], usually in a kind of fly-by, whereby someone would swoop into your face to yell something that you didn't understand anyway and then dart back to his circle of cronies, with whom he would cackle gleefully at your expense, but I think I mainly disliked him only because he looked so thoroughly American.

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^^^ April 22, 2004         Rent: Mine, Nationwide, and Worldwide

[asfo_del]
It's been a while since I've posted a list on this blog. I'm a fan of making lists of dull, factual information. Though not everyone might agree with my view, I find this kind of inventory interesting. I am very curious about other people's slice-of-life facts. And I do mean facts, unadorned. This is a list of how much I've paid for rent in the 19 years since I graduated from college.

June 1985 - July 1988:
Apartment in Providence, RI, with Bill. Total rent $250 a month. My share, $125 a month. Included no utilities.
July 1988 - August 1990:
Apartment in Northampton, MA, with Bill. Total rent the first year $400 a month. My share, $200 a month. Included no utilities. Total rent the second year $460 a month. My share, $230 a month. Included heat the second year.
September 1990 - September 1992:
Apartment in Houston, TX with Bill. Total rent the first year $350 a month. My share, $175 a month. Included all utilities. Total rent the second year $400 a month. My share, $200 a month. Included all utilities.
September 1992 - November 1993:
Apartment in Houston, TX with Bill. Total rent $350 a month. My share, $165 a month. Included no utilities.
November 1993 - September 1996:
Bought a house in Houston with Bill. No rent.
October 1996 - April 1998:
Lived with my parents in New Jersey. No rent.
May 1998:
Room in apartment in Brooklyn with three other people. Total rent $900 a month. My share, $200 a month. Included heat.
June 1998 - July 1998:
Room in apartment in Manhattan with two other people. Total rent $1200 a month. My share, $350 a month. Included heat.
August 1998 - October 1999:
Room in apartment in Brooklyn with two other people. Total rent $925 a month. My share, $308 a month. Included heat.
October 1999 - April 2001:
Room at Brooklyn YWCA. Rent $105 a week, or $455 a month. Included all utilities, even the phone.
May 2001 - January 2004:
House in Staten Island, NY, with Mike. Total rent $475 a month. My share, $237.50 a month. Included no utilities.
February 2004 to the present:
Bought a house in Staten Island, NY. No rent.
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Nationwide, rents have been rising faster than incomes, and the ability of many families to afford a place to live on what they earn is diminishing. According to a report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Out of Reach 2003:America's Housing Wage Climbs, a person living in New York state has to earn $18.87 an hour to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment, which, according to its estimates of fair market rents, costs $981 a month. More than half of the residents of New York state (57%) cannot afford a two-bedroom apartment. [Note that this is for the whole state, not just New York City, where the cost of housing is even higher.] Somebody earning the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour would have to work 147 hours a week to afford this apartment [that's 21 hours a day, seven days a week]. Even to rent just a studio, she would have to work 111 hours a week.

In the U.S., about one third of the people are renters. The figure is higher for urban areas like Washington D.C., where close to two thirds are renters. These are some examples of fair market rents, nationwide, for a studio, a one bedroom, and a two bedroom apartment:
Arizona $515 $613 $780
California $748 $878 $1,101
Colorado $557 $647 $847
Connecticut $607 $752 $936
Florida $515 $605 $742
Illinois $567 $679 $823
Kansas $370 $440 $559
Louisiana $376 $432 $538
Massachusetts $801 $934 $1,165
Mississippi $331 $387 $472
New Jersey $700 $848 $1,026
New York $740 $846 $981
North Carolina $444 $511 $603
Ohio $399 $486 $617
Oklahoma $352 $396 $510
Oregon $454 $559 $707
Rhode Island $432 $577 $698
Texas $473 $543 $695
Wisconsin $387 $481 $605

Worldwide, the housing situation is dire. "The United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS) has estimated that 1.1 billion people are living in inadequate housing conditions in urban areas alone. In Latin America, households need 5.4 times their annual income to buy a house. In Africa, they need an average of 12.5 times their annual income. Less than 20 percent of households in Africa are connected to piped water, and only 40 percent have piped water within 200 meters of their home. In the developing world, 29 percent of cities have areas considered as "inaccessible" or "dangerous" to the police. In Latin America and the Caribbean, this figure is 48 percent. Less than 35 percent of cities in the developing world have their wastewater treated. In countries with economies in transition, 75 percent of solid wastes are disposed of in open dumps."

And according to an article that appeared November 20, 2003 in the Christian Science Monitor, "the number of global urban poor has crossed the 1 billion mark, and at current rates of growth that number will double in three decades. Slum dwellers already make up almost one-third of the world's urban population, residing mostly in the developing world, where few governments have the financial resources to cope. Cairo, for example, gets 1,000 new residents every week, even though jobs are scarce and housing supplies badly strained. Nearly half of Cairo's 20 million people live in slums. Conditions in most developing world slums are beyond deplorable: hundreds of thousands of residents crammed into small areas without sewage and running water, living over stinking garbage dumps, drinking from polluted water sources. In Cairo, a vast population of squatters has moved into an ancient tomb city, turning caskets into tables and chairs in a community where the living have taken over the homes of the dead. The 300-page UN report cites a critical shortage of funding from international donors to make urban slums in places like Karachi, Pakistan; Sao Paolo, Brazil; and Jakarta, Indonesia more livable."

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^^^ April 21, 2004    Big Week In Protest History

[Richard]
This was a week to commemorate two amazing anti-corporate-globalization protests in recent history. First, there were the protests in Washington, DC, on April 16, 2000, against the meetings of the IMF and World Bank. For many of us, this was a peak of the anti-corporate-globalization movement on the East Coast. There were a few things worth noting about the A16 protests. First of all, for those of us who hadn't made it to Seattle in 1999, it was like nothing else we'd ever experienced. But it wasn't really like Seattle, either, especially not the first day. It was quite radical and militant in terms of ideas and tactics, but it was entirely nonviolent. This was also the day that the notorious black bloc (which actually is/was a very different group in each city) turned out to be protest heroes, by completely nonviolently diverting police attention away from the more vulnerable "lockdowns" who were doing that more dangerous, chain-yourself-to-the-road/door/stairs kind of civil disobedience. It was also a day when the police were relatively nice (even though they were walking around dressed like Darth Vader, they had already committed mass arrests and gross violations of civil liberties, and they ended up kicking a lot of protesters' asses the next day, after the more mainstream people had all gone home). Most significant for me, though, was the remarkable degree of spontaneity and instant solidarity that developed on that day. This happened, I might add, in spite of the fact that many people within our ranks had been at each other's throats during the tense plans leading up to the event. And it happened in spite of what I would call extreme military-type over-planning on the part of certain groups (whom I will tactfully avoid naming) who were coordinating the event. (Opposed to hierarchy, my ass!) This isn't to say that the coordinating types didn't deserve a lot of credit for doing all that they did and weren't a vital component in the protest, but when the big moment finally arrived, a lot of people got a much better feeling joining the more spontaneous (though not altogether disorganized) rank and file revolutionaries in the black bloc.

There was a lot of solidarity throughout the protest in general, and the movement was still really fresh for all of us. For a very brief time, there was this strange resurgence of a belief among all of us (so it seemed) that the (anti-authoritarian) people united could actually effect some major fundamental change by getting out into the streets. As one friend put it, "It was almost like the 1960s starting up again" -- though in ways, it was better than the '60s, because the critique of capitalism, itself, was probably more radical and fundamental than you'd find at your average '60s peace march (or any other kind of peace march) and the clothes here were cooler, too. (Actually, possibly one of the downfalls of this movement was its self-contradictory fashionableness, which often tied in with increasing egotism, attention-grabbing, and competition for celebrity -- not stuff befitting a real anti-authoritarian movement. But some of those outfits with the black hoodies did look awfully cute.)

***************

A year later, I went to the huge protests against the FTAA (and the Summit of the Americas) in Quebec City. This was centered on April 20-21, exactly three years ago. That whole week was kind of a bizarre experience for me, and sometime, I'll relate all the odd things that happened. For now, though, here's a summary that I wrote about the main days of the protest, which was posted to a few Web sites here and there:

The Quebec City anti-FTAA protest was a terrific and moving experience. Although, then again, I could have done with a little less tear gas.... I guess that was the most outrageous/disturbing feature of this experience: The cops gassed us everywhere, even when we were sitting around and not doing anything blocks away from the perimeter. They gassed at least a hundred of us while we were quietly mingling and chatting outside CMAQ (the Quebec City independent media center), and they gassed us on just about every street that we stumbled upon within several blocks of the perimeter... And that gas got stronger and stinkier as the weekend went on, burning our eyes and throats badly, even through our swimming goggles and vinegar-soaked bandanas.

Admittedly, however, confrontation with the police was fierce on the part of some protesters too, and if this had been NYC or Philadelphia, some people would probably have been shot with much more than tear gas and plastic bullets. Toward the end of the protest, activists and, especially, pissed-off locals were flinging rocks and sticks and even (so I hear) a couple of molotov cocktails. Many people in the crowd also picked up and flung back tear gas canisters. At one point, protesters damaged and turned around a water cannon... and a good contingent of militant activists ripped down the perimeter fence in at least half a dozen places.

The protest had good effects in terms of disturbing the summit as well. There were reports that the summit was delayed due to the excessive tear gas everywhere, and it became quite clear to everyone that an awful lot of people were taking major risks because of their strong opposition to the FTAA. Additionally, a lot of people publicly expressed their outrage that half of Quebec City had been turned into a fenced-in prison and then a war zone just to "protect" this highly undemocratic meeting being held by top leaders of the global ruling class.

The locals in QC seemed, for the most part, to be very supportive of the demonstration. This was true especially in the residential neighborhoods that had been inundated with tear gas. Contrary to the predictable words of the mass media, the locals did not blame the "violent protesters" for the gassing of their neighborhoods; they knew it was completely the responsibility and fault of the police and their bosses, who clearly had little regard for the residents of Quebec City.

The protest, however, was not simply limited to battles with police. Reportedly, there were 30,000 to 60,000 protestors engaged in a variety of activities by Saturday. The brief part of the legal march that I saw was tremendous -- better than any of us had expected -- though it, too, got permeated by the stench of tear gas early on.

There was some great, spontaneous creativity displayed throughout the protest. One high point was the massive percussion section formed along the highway, in which hundreds of us stood banging rocks against metal sing posts, disturbing the delegates well into the night.

Also inspiring were the bonfire parties, mostly staged by the locals, and the Temporary Autonomous Zone (an RTS-style political rave) set up in the park near the bonfires.

Looking back at all of this now, I don't have exactly the same completely glowing opinion of this protest, nor such a great remembrance of solidarity. I think that the A16 protests were more a case of people working together, while this one exhibited more symptoms of a lot of sloppy kids clashing with nasty cops (though that is a common side effect of insurrection, I suppose). Conversely, I was to discover later that a lot of these anarchists (in Canada as well as the U.S.) can be awfully authoritarian in their own way (which is something found out, unfortunately, during meetings behind the scenes -- see the Collective Book on Collective Process). And I really could have done without the endless doses of chemical warfare -- which kind of shot to hell my notion about the Canadian state being so much more humane than ours.

Although, it may be true that in the U.S. since 9-11 and the PATRIOT Act, police repression of these kinds of protests has become even more extreme -- as in the WEF disaster in New York in 2002 or the recent FTAA protests in Miami. For that reason and others -- such as the resurgence of the central focus on anti-war protests and more conventional peace marches, and the internal deterioration of the whole scene that organized the anti-corporate-globalization protests (for a whole number of reasons I've gone into elsewhere) -- that little golden moment in protest history has really come and gone in a flash. Yet, this week is a pretty good time to commemorate that moment -- with the understanding that it is history.

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P.S. For some more comments on A16, and some of my comments on those comments, go to Zoe Mitchell’s blog on the sidebar.

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^^^ April 17, 2004         Beauty

[asfo_del]
I've never been girlie, and by that I mean not at all. I don't wear make up. I don't even use lotions or moisturizers, nail polish, or scented bath products. I use a cheap shampoo. I sometimes use conditioner. For about the last year, I haven't, even though without conditioner my hair gets so tangled and ensnared that I can't even run my fingers through it, let alone a comb. But that's okay because I almost never comb my hair. I use chapstick, because my lips get dry a lot, and if I have dry patches on my face I use chapstick on them too. I cut my own hair. Ever since we moved, I haven't been able to find our scissors, so today I was cutting my hair with garden shears. I don't shave my legs or my armpits. I sometimes bleach my mustache, but not that often.

Rereading what I've written, I'm sure it sounds quite bizarre, but the way I live my girlness is not strange to me at all. I don't think I look bad. I weigh about 180 pounds at 5 foot 7, but I think my weight is fine. Why don't I run screaming to Weight Watchers like so many women in my state of fatness would? I'm not exactly sure if my attitude is one of positive self-acceptance or if there's some element of negative disregard for myself. To be honest, I think it's all positive and no negative.

When I was in Junior High, and kids first started pairing up into couples, I was out of the running because I was too ugly. I didn't care about being ugly, but it was kind of a bummer that I couldn't participate in this ritual. Now that I'm old, the way I look is called striking, and the men who have made me happy were themselves happy to appreciate me, so I have not had to forego any happiness because of my looks. I think I've actually been spared some of the most painful experiences that come with growing up as a young girl. It's hard for men to imagine what it's like to be a teenage girl and be unable to walk down the street without being the subject of intense, unsmiling, hungry stares by strangers. That didn't happen to me as much, and when it did I just didn't care, because being pretty and sexual was not part of how I identified myself. I just viewed their interest in me with puzzlement, rather than feeling naked and undressed by their stares. I thought of myself as a person, not a girl, but I had no reservations or negative associations about being a girl.

Of course, I lived in a sexist society, just like everybody else, and there were many life experiences that were denied to me, usually covertly, because I was a girl. I once did an art project in which I took a paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye and used white correction tape and a pencil to change the main character, Holden, from a boy to a girl. I changed his name to Heather, and changed all the pronouns referring to him to feminine pronouns. Holden was pretty wild as a boy, but a teenage girl doing the same things seemed almost psychotic.

I read women's and girls' magazines like Seventeen with the same detached interest I might bring to a treatise about any unfamiliar culture. I couldn't imagine having those concerns or those interests. A curious repercussion that this has brought into my adult life is that I am not acceptable to many women and girls in the feminist movement. If I do not feel the intense pressure, channeled through women's magazines, to be thin and pretty while never feeling thin or pretty enough, and if I do not measure my self-worth by the degree of my sexual attractiveness, then my voice is not wanted. My experience is not even acknowledged. I must be in denial, or lying.

When my mother was young, she was very slim and dressed in stylish designer clothes. She looked like Audrey Hepburn. She also earned a degree in electrical engineering, in 1953, in Italy. She was one of only a handful of women in her class, maybe the only one in her specialty. She worked in research and development for a large international company for eight years, before retiring to have children. The sexism she encountered on the job was intense. She never believed that being pretty was the measure of her worth, and she never handed down that message to me. However, whenever I'm visiting her, she does tell me that I should comb my hair.

[o]:[o]:[o]:[o]:[o]:[o]

^^^ April 17, 2004    Technical, Blogging Stuff

[Richard]
I hate to interrupt everything with dreary technical notes, especially if we’re on a nice roll of interesting articles. It’s kind of like being in the middle of a good film and suddenly seeing the producer or editor get in front of the camera and interrupt everything, Monty Python style, with complaints about logistics, or like being in the middle of a good book and suddenly seeing an interjection from the author that the following chapter contained some editing mistakes (I’m sure there’s an experimental novel out there somewhere that’s like that). But, I feel that technical notes are necessary right now, and I guess that’s OK, since this is “just” a blog...

Everybody should know that the Haloscan comment boxes accept only a couple of short paragraphs in a message; also, with this particular service, there’s no way we can edit the comments once they’ve gone in. I tried to post a longer comment that ChuckO had sent by e-mail (because he couldn’t fit it into the comments box) by retyping it as several comments. However, the task turned out to be a bit difficult and it was getting to be a little late in the “night” for me (7 am), so I dropped a line. And it was only after I’d noticed this had happened that I discovered there’s absolutely no way to edit comments after they’ve been posted. I hope there aren’t any other errors (I’m afraid to look back), but I think the comment still reads pretty well (and Chuck says it doesn’t matter much, so what the hell). Unfortunately, this happened within the comments to one of Asfodel’s posts of April 3. (Incidentally, now every time I call up an empty comments box, it’s got ChuckO’s info automatically planted in the “from” section. Strange.)

At any rate, if anybody wants to send us something longer, please keep in mind that we still are happy to include guest posts. If you want to send a guest post, please send it to our e-mail address with a clear note to that effect.

I’ve also started to work on my half of the book list a little again… I think we’d both been neglecting the book list because we like keeping our book reviews in the main journal, where they'll get read by a lot more people. But I noticed that some people have been visiting this list lately, so I figured it would be a shame just to abandon it. What I started to do was copy some stuff from the journal or archives into the book list. I might continue to fill up my half of the list in that way.

People may have noticed that a few new blogs have been added to the sidebar. Within the past several weeks, I’ve added The Common Man, David Grenier, Ecosocialism, Postmodern Anarchist, and This Is Class Warfare. (I’m not going to link to them in this post -- please go to the sidebar to check them out.) I’ve also re-included Conflict Girl. I dropped Little Red Cookbook because Jenny posted one note in the space of a few months saying that her life was in some kind of transition and she’d be back at some future time. I’m not sure what to do about two of my favorites, The Autonomist and Mad Prophet. The Autonomist says he’s traveling and hasn’t posted in close to two weeks; the Mad Prophet hasn’t posted anything since citing a death in the family more than a month ago. But both these blogs have enough good past information to refer to, so I may just keep them on indefinitely.

By the way, if anybody’s wondering what we’re doing “collectively” here, that’s a good question. The collective aspect isn’t as strong here as it was when we did most of the Collective Book; in fact, I think it’s kind of declined after the logistical jolts caused by moves and failed modems, etc. (I hope that Asfodel doesn’t mind that I’m coming out with this information. Please note that the band is not breaking up -- and keep that in mind when my solo album comes out.) Actually, we have always taken a sort of proprietary approach to adding or subtracting blogs on the sidebar: We will more freely subtract or add stuff on our own, but won’t subtract "each other’s" blogs without permission/consultation.

I have noticed that Thanksgiving Is Ruined (which I added a few months ago) has been posting more regularly, which I’m happy about because I find this to be a particularly interesting blog.

And I think that about covers it for now.

<~><~><~><~><~><~><~>

^^^ April 15, 2004    Favorite Letters by a Man Who Ran for President

[Richard]
I happened to be straightening out one of my old bookshelves (cleaning off years’ worth of dust) when I discovered an old book that contained some of my favorite letters ever written by a man who ran for president. So, I decided to share a couple of excerpts:

[From a letter to Upton Sinclair:]

...I know of no reason why the workers should fight for what the capitalists own or slaughter one another for countries that belong to their masters. Any kind of an army that may be organized and any kind of military establishment that may be instituted under the prevailing system and under the present government will be controlled by the ruling class and its chief function will be to keep the working class in slavery. I have not the least fear of invasion or attack from without. The invasion and attack that I want the workers to prepare to resist and put an end to comes from within, from our own predatory plutocracy right here at home. I do not know of any foreign buccaneers that could come nearer skinning the American workers to the bone than is now being [done] by the Rockefellers and their pirate pals. The workers have no country to fight for. It belongs to the capitalists and the plutocrats. Let them worry about its defense and when they declare wars as they and they alone do, let them also go out and slaughter one another on the battlefields.

[And from a letter to the Republican National Committee:]

...I should feel myself disgraced indeed to receive any testimonial of approval from the thieving, hypocritical and utterly conscienceless gang you represent. It is true that I was robbed of my citizenship by the political perverts you are seeking to keep in the offices they have befouled, but I still have my manhood and self-respect. I went to prison for a principle, but as you do not know what that is you are excusable for attempting to libel me while yourselves functioning as the servile lackeys of Wall Street, the profiteering pirates and highbinders who are looting this nation and debauching its institutions; whose putrescent filthiness was revealed in but the minutest part in the recent uncovering of the stench-pots in Washington, while their diminutive political manikan sat silent and supine in the executive chair once occupied by Lincoln, whose grave clothes have been stolen and whose memory is outraged and insulted by the grafting gang now in control of the Republican Party.

If you time-serving adepts in crooked politics were not stone-blind in the practice of your political shell game on your one hundred percent American dupes and morons you would see the hand-writing burning luridly on the wall of your ignominious political fate.

Found in Gentle Rebel: Letters of Eugene V. Debs, edited by J. Robert Constantine, University of Illinois Press.

!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!#!

^^^ April 12, 2004    Happy Easter, Patti

[Richard]
At the age of 42, I find it really nice to stumble upon music that can move me and inspire me as much as it did when I was 14. This Easter, appropriately enough, I found as much joy, sadness, and inspiration as I did some 28 years ago in the music of Patti Smith. Of course, I will appreciate her music differently now from how I appreciated it back then; now, I can actually understand a lot of the cultural/spiritual/political references that I sort of missed in my early adolescence, when I related less to the specific lyrics than the thrilling feeling I got from the mysterious and rebellious sounds that pierced my ears through my headphones while I lay awake listening to the radio late at night. (Although, I actually really did get -- and dig -- her poem to Patty Hearst, whom I had been enthusiastically rooting for when she was still on the run.) But overall, the effect is about the same, which is generally a very nice thing...

There was something so profoundly exciting and revolutionary about Patti Smith's music the first time I started hearing it early in 1976, when I was 14 years old and was already bored to tears with most of the music that I'd heard on the radio, the stuff that my classmates listened to (i.e., the crap that people later liked to throw into soundtracks of movies about the '70s U.S. adolescent experience that I definitely never had). Maybe I was cool beyond my years -- even though I was also a science-fiction-reading nerd (though not half as much of a nerd as the first Ramones fan I met, one year later) -- but when it came to mainstream '70s rock music, especially American '70s music, I just never got the point. In fact, I found that most of that stuff simply depressed me and/or put me to sleep.

Probably, though, I was also fortunate to be growing up in New York City, where I could get a lot of exposure to Patti and then all of that CBGB sound. I not only got to hear Patti's music on then-progressive stations like WNEW FM; I also got to hear her poetry readings (possibly even earlier) on WBAI. She was also one of the first (proto)punk musicians whom I got to see live, though that didn' t happen until I'd already been listening to her for a couple of years. (I finally got to see her live at the short-lived CBGB Theater in December of 1977, on a bill with Richard Hell and the Voidoids and the magnificently off-the-wall No Wave band Mars. Ah, memories...).

Her music also stuck with me pretty consistently over the years. It is true that she, herself, dropped out for a long time, and my early interest in her music actually peaked in 1976 with Radio Ethiopia (the next album, Easter, was very good but, admittedly, it wasn't my fave); then I shifted some of my own enthusiasm to that punk dream girl named Debbie Harry, then the Ramones and, later, the Sex Pistols and a hundred other bands. But every time I thought I'd finally lost interest in Patti Smith's music, I would return to it and find that I hadn’t at all; I could sort of discover it all over again.

Not that Patti Smith's perfect... There is a certain amount of corniness to some the stuff that she writes, especially when she starts getting a little too quasi-religious (at least for my tastes) and sometimes her actual message has seemed kind of vague to me (though it could be because I'm sometimes a bit too exacting and precise in terms of the demands I make on people's lyrics and messages, especially when I expect a lot from them). But in spirit, Patti Smith has always struck me as a real rock revolutionary, driven by a heart constantly yearning for a better, more fair, more just and egalitarian world. Of course, she may not have the precise revolutionary doctrine of a hundred different anarcho-punk bands (actually, since 2000, she's put her energies into backing Nader and, much to her credit, she still does today, in spite of you-know-what). But, on the other hand, she has maintained an incredible amount of integrity and consistentcy in her ideals, even after three decades.

Sometimes, I admit, I do have to wonder what kind of people actually follow her music these days. A few years back when a friend of mine took me to see her speak and perform at the 92nd Street Y, I had to deal with a bit too much of that PBS intellectual crowd. And then there was that time, about a year ago, when the entire Common Wheel Collective attended a free concert that Patti Smith gave in Battery Park City.... Maybe it was because of the neighborhood this was in, but the crowd seemed incredibly overpopulated by aging Yuppies (Muppies?), and I just couldn't get into the experience at first. (This was a far cry from seeing her perform on The Bowery 25 years before -- though who knows, maybe it was a lot of the same people; people do mysteriously change that way.) But once I heard and saw a little of the performance, I realized that she could rock as much as ever, and she became particularly endearing when she started cursing out George W. Bush. In fact, I doubt many other popular rock performers would have been as blunt as she was that afternoon, especially since this was well before the political tide had turned again. And considering that she was performing in a sort of Patriotic Park, oversaturated with American flags, just blocks from Ground Zero, it was especially daring of her to launch into a diatribe that began with the pointed question, "On September 10, 2001, would you have put up with all this shit?"

I think I'll continue to look to/listen to Patti Smith's songs when I'm feeling particularly miserable about the world, myself, and I need someone to inspire me to keep dreaming and hoping. In fact this past night, after a particularly miserable week in the life of the world, I was especially moved by a song of hers that she wrote as much as two decades after her music originally exploded on the scene. It's a song that tells us something that I still want, very much, in my heart, to believe...

People Have The Power

I was dreaming in my dreaming
of an aspect bright and fair
and my sleeping it was broken
but my dream it lingered near
in the form of shining valleys
where the pure air recognized
and my senses newly opened
I awakened to the cry
that the people / have the power
to redeem / the work of fools
upon the meek / the graces shower
it's decreed / the people rule

The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power

Vengeful aspects became suspect
and bending low as if to hear
and the armies ceased advancing
because the people had their ear
and the shepherds and the soldiers
lay beneath the stars
exchanging visions
and laying arms
to waste / in the dust
in the form of / shining valleys
where the pure air / recognized
and my senses / newly opened
I awakened / to the cry

Refrain

Where there were deserts
I saw fountains
like cream the waters rise
and we strolled there together
with none to laugh or criticize
and the leopard
and the lamb
lay together truly bound
I was hoping in my hoping
to recall what I had found
I was dreaming in my dreaming
god knows / a purer view
as I surrender to my sleeping
I commit my dream to you

Refrain

The power to dream / to rule
to wrestle the world from fools
it's decreed the people rule
it's decreed the people rule

LISTEN
I believe everything we dream
can come to pass through our union
we can turn the world around
we can turn the earth's revolution
we have the power
People have the power.

(*)(+)(*)(+)(*)(+)(*)(+)(*)

^^^ April 9, 2004    For a Basic Income Guarantee

[Richard]
Snooping around at blogs that have linked us through discussions over the past week, I noticed that there was some discussion about my mention of a guaranteed social income. There was lots of discussion about other stuff posted by both me and Asfodel over the past couple of weeks, and I am delighted to see that we've actually said things that people consider worth talking about. It seems, however, that my mention of a guaranteed social income turned out to be the most controversial idea. Apparently, lots of people cannot even fathom such a thing; in fact, it seems downright threatening to some.

I wish I had time right now to post all the reasons why I feel a guaranteed income would be such a good benefit, and why all the assumptions that influence people to scoff at this idea or dismiss it are wrong. However, my own time is limited, in part because I've got to scramble more for work, especially since the availability of work has actually been decreasing over the past couple of weeks. (Thus, I can't really enjoy the lack of wage work and spend my "spare" time doing constructive and creative things, because the drop in income causes me to consume all that extra spare time worrying about, and trying to scrape up, the much-needed lost work hours. If I were looking for a "permanent" job -- which I probably will need to do again soon -- that search for work would be taking up enormous amounts of time and energy.) Nonetheless, while I can't, at the moment, write that great essay that will convince everybody to support such a program, I can at least refer people to a couple of important sources out there.

Once again, on the democratic-socialist Storming Heaven list (which is proving to be surprisingly useful, considering that it is a tiny list to which only a few people post regularly, usually as cross-posts from other lists), I learned about the Web site for US Big: The Basic Income Guarantee Network. This is a place where you can get lots of information about a movement to establish a basic guaranteed income in the U.S. As the Web site describes in its about section:

The Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) is a government ensured guarantee that no one’s income will fall below the level necessary to meet their most basic needs for any reason. As Bertrand Russell put it in 1918, "A certain small income, sufficient for necessities, should be secured for all, whether they work or not, and that a larger income ... should be given to those who are willing to engage in some work which the community recognizes as useful. On this basis we may build further." Thus, with BIG no one is destitute but everyone has the positive incentive to work. BIG is an efficient, effective, and equitable solution to poverty that promotes individual freedom and leaves the beneficial aspects of a market economy in place.

I might add, personally speaking, that I'm not so sure I want ultimately to have a system that "leaves the beneficial aspects of a market economy in place." The basic assumption in the plan described above is that people will still need a market-based, monetary incentive to do anything useful or constructive, and that this incentive should still be offered as a sort of wage. In my opinion, our society will not go through a truly beneficial change until we are able to divorce our activities from the whole concept of wages, and until people are able to rid themselves of the socially ingrained notion that nobody is able or willing to do anything unless they are competing for money in some labor market. (Of course, this is a false notion, even in a society that constantly emphasizes monetary payment as incentive for work and as a measure of the value of work. If the notion were true, nobody in the present society would be doing volunteer work, nobody would help each other out with anything and, especially, almost nobody would do creative work. Let's not forget all the work that goes into blogs. If it were true that people are not inclined to work unless they get paid, there would be very few blogs.) Nonetheless, I would strongly advocate something like the BIG as a small step in the transformation to a better society, at least guaranteeing that no one lives in poverty. It would not be a revolutionary solution -- just a basic reform -- but it would be a welcome reform.

There is some more interesting material to be found at the excellent Web site of New Zealand's Universal Income Trust. This site is designed to explain and promote the Universal Income System, a sort of plan that is very similar to the BIG.

If there is any difference between the Universal Income System and the Basic Income Guarantee, it's in the assumptions behind the plan. The UIS actually does not at all emphasize added income/wages as the incentive for people to work but, instead, allows that people will contribute to the society how they see fit, once their basic needs are covered and they are better included as members of the society. The UIS provides much greater possibilities for autonomous activity based on the principles of democratic participation and mutual aid:

The wage/income is provided for the responsibilities each individual has for his/her role as a sovereign in a democratic society. (See Charter of UN, Article 2 for principle of equal sovereignty in a democratic society. See International Bill of Human Rights for a listing of those responsibilities.) Note, there are no work requirements or evaluations placed on individuals for this income outside of people acting on their own conscience and best sensibilities.

Regardless of how theoretically radical (or not) we want to get, any of these income systems would be a tremendous improvement in the way that our government and society address poverty. Moreover, as the UIT points out in its background page, it is actually a concept that has been very much a part of the political history in the U.S.:

The concept of a national dividend in various forms has been a part of serious election campaign platforms since the Great Depression. Huey Long, whose popularity helped win Roosevelt's election to administer the socialised "New Deal" programme in America, was a great advocate of the Universal Income. Many people at that time thought that they were voting for a Universal Income when they voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt since that was the primary Democratic campaign promoted. In 1972 it reached its most generous culmination with the Nobel laureate economist James Tobin’s "Demogrant" as part of George McGovern’s Democratic election campaign. Unfortunately he lost to Richard Nixon, who also had a limited type of Universal Income platform (although quite meaner in amounts) that lost in the Senate.

It should also be noted that the idea of guaranteed income has been floating around in South American countries for some time and a decree for guaranteed income was actually signed into law last winter by President Lula in Brazil (though I understand there is a long way to go before the decree is actually realized).

Of course, in the present, socially regressive U.S., the chances for this sort of reform seem minimal, just as unlikely as us having national healthcare. And, no doubt, major arguments would be made that we can't afford such a system given our fiscal constraints -- though we'd probably already have a lot of money for this system just by cutting so much bureaucracy from the present welfare system, where countless people are employed to try to ensure that relatively few among the poor and needy ever get adequate monetary grants. And, we could go on about so many other shifts in priorities that might enable a reform like this to be more possible -- such as a cut in corporate welfare and all the funds that are presently going to the slaughter of people in Iraq.

There definitely are a lot of changes that have to happen before even something like the BIG can be put in place. But we don't really know what kind of reforms or transformations might be possible with a swing of the political pendulum, combined with some real grassroots struggle. Assuming more and more people realize that the present supposed improvements in the economy and (most recently) the job market amount to little more than an illusion (and probably a temporary one), a guaranteed social income might become increasingly appealing. Probably, the idea should be floated around as one among many in the context of larger struggles for economic equality and direct democracy. But, certainly, it is one idea that could help us move a little closer to those goals.

*^***^***^***^***^*

^^^ April 3, 2004         The Tangled Web of Overspending

[asfo_del]
According to Juliet Schor, author of The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer, about half of Americans feel that they do not make enough money to afford the things they need. That includes 39% of people making between $50,000 and $100,000 a year.

As someone who spends about $7000 a year, I've always found it hard to understand how it is that many people have a difficult time stretching $50,000 to meet their budget. One explanation is the disconnect that is created by the media, in which an affluent lifestyle that is unaffordable to the great majority is represented as the norm. A lifestyle so affluent, in fact, that even those in the higher earning brackets cannot afford it.

The media's relentless manipulation of our collective perception has been very effective, and it's false ideals have permeated the culture. Because we're inherently social creatures, it's hard for one person to resist an overwhelming cultural trend. Driving an old, beat-up car [or - heavens! - riding the bus], shopping at thrift stores, or living in a tiny, spartan apartment makes you an eccentric, especially if you actually make enough money that you could afford to live more expensively.

Juliet Schor argues, in a recent interview, that the psychology that drives people to overspend is complex, and cannot be explained away by the desire to fulfill fantasies of wealth or create an identity. She believes that it is, first of all, class-based. "We can't really understand what our consumer practices are about without first considering the ways in which people use them to symbolically reproduce or elevate their class position." The media's misrepresentation of what constitutes the norm has ratcheted up everyone's perception of the life they "should" be able to afford at every socio-economic level. People compare their own lifestyle not only to their neighbors', the proverbial Joneses, but to the media's misleading standard, and many have come to believe that other people generally are much richer than they actually are. After all, you can see how your neighbors live but not how much debt they may have accumulated to get there.

It's a common belief that $60,000 is a relatively modest income, but in the United States, according to the Census Bureau, only 26 million people, or less than ten percent of the total population, have an annual income of $60,000 or more. The median individual income in this country is $22,000. Worldwide, only 1% earn over $25,000 a year.

Although he's not referring to consumerism, but to the public's acceptance of widening economic inequality and enormous salaries at the very top of the economic scale, Wolffbern also addresses this issue: "New class-based social norms have emerged about what constitutes a reasonable salary, and how a much a person "needs" to get by -- what upper-income groups view as necessity is of course unavailable to most people in the country. This culture [is] nurtured by new marketing campaigns advertising luxurious lifestyles and a media that more and more narrowly targets upper-income groups.

"But these riches are not available to all. Part of the culture has been the normalization and acceptance of a persistent and deepening income and wealth inequality, with the situation of middle and lower income groups largely absent from the news or popular culture."

The second factor that Schor believes leads to overconsumption is our own denial. This denial is made psychologically necessary by the combination of deep anxiety and ambition that very often drive spending. Anxiety about having spent too much or on the wrong priorities in turn leads to avoidance: people don't want to know how much money they may be frittering away, because that would deepen their feelings of dread and misgiving. We often feel both guilty and unfulfilled about how we've used our money once it's gone. [Added to that, the fairly complicated math that governs interest on borrowing makes it easier for us not to know how much money we're actually parting with.] And many of us wouldn't want to admit, even to ourselves, that we may be motivated by status-seeking or vanity, but how we perceive our status in society correlates with our measure of our own worth.

It's important not to fall into the trap of blaming the victims, the consumers themselves, who have been ensnared in a web that is not of their creation. We're familiar with apocryphal tales of welfare recipients who wallow in luxury. Conservatives gleefully spin the fiction that the overextended and struggling majority is responsible for its own poverty through the greed to consume beyond one's means. But overspending is driven by the production side of the equation, by corporations who overproduce to boost profits and then prey on our human psychology to induce us into buying into their scheme: working more to produce more, so that we can then purchase the very goods that we ourselves and our fellow exploited workers produced. "The very logic of capitalist market economies requires constantly escalating levels of consumption to absorb the expanding output of goods and services."

But it's also important not to relinquish responsibility for our own complicity in the scheme. It's true that even in the U.S. there are significant numbers who are so poor that they are barely able to subsist, and to suggest that anyone in that circumstance could somehow improve it by reducing her spending is cruel and absurd. But there are hundreds of millions of needless products and services that are produced, marketed, and ultimately purchased by tens of millions of Americans. As individuals, even in the face of the enormous pressures on each of us to perpetuate the cycle of overproduction and overconsumption, we each have the power to stop participating in this vast movement of capital, which only enriches the very corporations who oppress billions of our fellow humans. We may not be able to affect public policy at the top, where gargantuan corporate interests pull the strings [though we shouldn't stop trying], but at the middle-to-bottom of the U.S. economic pyramid all the power is in the hands, or rather, the wallets, of regular people. Corporations cannot thrive without our financial support.

["]"["]"["]"["]"["]"["]

^^^ April 3, 2004         Cars Unaffordable But Proliferating

[asfo_del]
It's understandable, given the reliance on driving that is made almost inevitable by the U.S infrastructure, that people here are upset about the current high cost of gasoline. But some of the same people who are horrified by the prices at the pump seem to have no problem with the price tag of a new car. In 1998, the average price of a new car was $23,480. Yet 17 million new cars are sold in the U.S. every year, and the average U.S. household owns 1.7 cars. This in spite of the fact that car ownership is financially devastating to the average person in the U.S., who only makes $22,000 a year. Owning a car is estimated to cost about $8000 a year for a new car, and about half of that for a used car. Although the great majority of American adults own a car, about half of them cannot reasonably afford one without cutting down on necessities or sinking into debt.

"Owning two or more cars doesn’t just leave families with higher expenses; it can cost a family the opportunity to own a home. The average family spends about 18 percent of household income on transportation, and many households in the [Southern California] region spend close to a quarter of their total income—more than on food, healthcare or clothing." How has driving a car become a higher priority than food or medical care?

Of course, this untenable situation has been intentionally created by the oil and automobile industries, who have the power to create public policy. But there are also the millions of us who choose to participate in our own oppression by overconsuming, and not just on cars, which turns over our money to the very companies that are making our lives unlivable and leaves us as individuals impoverished.

Our culture, which is largely, if not entirely, shaped by a media that is supported through the money spent by regular people on the products it is paid to advertise, is deeply steeped in the notion that owning things, especially flashy, expensive ones, is a source of pride and well-being. Therefore paying for gas is highly irritating, but paying for a gleaming, well-engineered machine is masterful and rewarding.

The counter argument is a difficult one to make, however. Walking or riding a bike in the snow, or in ninety degree heat, is a test of endurance. Young mothers who struggle to carry strollers and small children onto a city bus would much rather be able to afford a car, I'm sure. Billions of people throughout the world have to walk for miles, in all weather, or ride unsafe, decrepit, and extremely overcrowded buses and trains. Who are we to tell them that they shouldn't aspire to own a car? The answer should be to improve public transit and create communities where walking and biking are convenient, of course, but that is not where the profits of powerful corporations lie. Car ownership is climbing worldwide, in spite of what are arguably already unsustainable levels, and it is, not surprisingly, touted as a sign of progress.

In China the number of cars has been doubling every five years for the past 30 years. "China's car ownership in 2003-2010 is expected to show a growth rate of 16%-20%. The number of cars owned by the Chinese in 2010 would reach 66.5 million to 84.31 million. It is therefore hopeful that China would emerge as one of the world's most robust and largest-scale automobile markets in the first decade of the 21st century."

"The number of motor vehicles worldwide could grow from 580 million in 1990 to 816 million by 2010. The average for OECD countries, excluding the United States, is 366 cars per 1,000 residents. In the developing world, car ownership rates are ranging in 1993 from an average of about 68 cars per 1,000 residents in Latin America and the Caribbean to 29 cars per 1,000 residents in East Asia and the Pacific, to about 14 cars per 1,000 residents in Africa."

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