a clean city is a green city

it's been a remarkable week in a multitude of ways...the post-modern era is profoundly psychotic...reality evasion and magical thinking are emanating from the professioanl bureaucrats and pundits, and wall street is growing more disconnected from the real economy every day...the recession grinds on despite claims to the contrary...impacting everyone...(i saw an article in the n y times about the plight of the "mega rich" and how they might not ever get back to their former levels of income...imagine my distress).... i live in a mincipality that has seen better days...my water & sewage bill is laden with surcharges, and it goes up exponentially relative to the state of decay of the infrastructure...yet i got my new city garbage can and recycling bin ( ironically the garbage can is emblazoned with the seal of the city and the mayor's name...you just can't buy exposure and name recognition like that)along with detailed instructions for their use...the recycling bin is too much...i recycle privately anyway...i insist on keeping the cash for myself...but the main point of all this is that garbage pick-up will now be curbside, rendering the system of alleys obsolete...i'm thinking this is partly due to the scavengers who troll the alleys before collection day picking the recycling bins clean before the city gets to them...moving it out front will make an anti-pilfering ordinance more easily enforced...(how long, i wonder, before the city demands that i give them my valuable aluminum cans? revenue is revenue in a downturn...property rights be damned)but what about all those broken and discarded washer and driers and water heaters and vaccuums? what will the people at code enforcement say when people start dumping them in the street...or will the alleys become junkyards? i am curious to see, and will be monitoring the state of the alley...as well as thinking of the mayor whenever i chuck out the trash,

which came first, the oil or the dysfunction?

i was listening to "world update" on the bbc this morning on the way to work, and as a sidebar to secretary clinton's visit they had a discussion about the "unchecked" corruption in the nigerian government, and how that seems to be an issue in resource rich "developing countries"...one of the participants was a professor from stanford university ( sorry...didn't catch her name...i know..sloppy reporting...sue me...it was dark and i was dodging semis on route 20) who has co-authored a book on ths subject...she said that a lack of a strong democratic government and lax social institutions holding miscreants accountable were the cause...she pointed out that when norway discovered oil there was no corruption issue because the norwegians had a well developed society that could control a sudden increase in wealth...all in all this seems to me to be saying that the nigerians are substandard because of weak institutions, but is that it? didn't traditional nigerian culture have mores that would deal with anti-social behavior? i'll bet it did...so is it a failure of nigerian culture, or was that culture exploded by a sudden influx of wealth and outside ideas? subverted by the developed worlds lust for oil...why else would people flock to miserable mega-slums other than a catastophic failure of their traditional way of life? what impelled that failure? don't know, but it's worth looking into.

the paper of record

the writers at the n y times are certainly fine stenographers...subtle ( mostly) reasonably accurate (when they're not making stuff up) and in line with the editorial boards directives...one of the headers for today's on line edition says "climate change seen as a threat to u.s. security"...well...policy wonks are notorious for rationalizing the elite's desires and needs, so they take an issue that faces all humans as a species everywhere on the planet and bring an "us or them" siege mentality to it...which is probably a pretty accurate reflection of the elite's viewpoint....but it precludes reaching out and evolving responses that would help everyone...that wouldn't be butressing the elite's favored position, would it? it would, in fact, be compromising that freedom of action they so cherish ( and promise, but do not deliver to,us...unless you count a choice of rotgut fast food or anti-persperants as freedom)...so they turn the political scientists losse on it, and it becomes a "security" issue that has to be taken into account in a overall "global strategy"...risk management in the 21st century is a complex business...it could be simplified if they would pay attention to what my old friend george orwell had to say...he remarked that if we wanted to enjoy our christmas dinner in peace we would do well to insure everyone else had one too...meanwhile barbra ehrnreich is bemoaning the "criminalization" of the poor...when was the last time she actually talked to a "poor" person ( "poor" because those who lack material wealth can be remarkably rich in things that matter) and listened? they know that being "poor" makes them the "other" in the consumerist utopia...always a target for law enforcement or whatever other government racketeers come along...nothing new in this...the poverty of immigrants, women, people of color, white trash, and the young has always made them pariahs..old babs is airing her liberal guilt a bit late in the game

gladhanding the hoosier state

the president came to indiana to tell us all that things will be okay if we only believe ...magical thinking and cash for clunkers will re-inflate the ruptured housing/credit bubble and things will be back to normal...the elite will stay the elite because the system that made them so will still be intact...more debt is what's needed...that's what makes the economy grow...the feds are leading the way on that...racking up impressive spending deficits., and encouraging new car sales to bring the private sector on board... as california gets set to furlough its prison population there may be new thinking among jurists about reaganite manditory sentencing and a push to decregulate some controlled substances to stimulate the economy, broaden the tax base, and purge the number of cases on court dockets...bankruptcy, both public and private ( both economic and ethical) aknowledged or unaknowledged are piling up...millitary planners want more money and troops for afghanistan...what's a few more billion in a sea of trillions? at what point do we begin to realize that these ruptures in the consumerist utopia will continue to mount? when will the fundamental unsoundness of having social parameters set by greed become obvious to even politicians? if the elite cannot begin to think outside the box of the profit imperative and the need for continued growth and come to terms with a smaller economy geared more toward need than the production of that wealth they won't be elite much longer...they will be sealed off in their walled compounds hiding from some of the more brutish realities the rest of us will be facing..if they're lucky...or at least for as long as they can afford to pay their mercinaries...the rust-belt went through a major economic contraction in the 1970s...there are still a few of us dinosaurs working in industrial manufacturing...but nothing like it was...what used to be the middle class here went through some painful adjustments (everyone's moms and wives went to work and daycare was born...among other things)and the smart ones stayed as far out of debt as they could...creditworthiness may have been a virtue in the bubble but its an albatross now...utterly useless...when economists and policy wonks try to convince themselves (and me) that slowed economic contraction equates to the onset of recovery the illusion becomes delusion...smoke and mirrors...wishful thinking.

oh, we thought about them.

"the masses instead make do with stamped out plastic or metal objects that evince no sign that any living, breathing human ever worked on them or thought much about them."
Peak Everything p.76 by richard heinberg

i've spent the last twenty-nine years working in industrial manufacturing and i'd like to assure mr. heinberg that as a group industrial workers think quite alot about what they make at their jobs....for all the high-tech wizzardry that industialists and their shill economists like to hype to the service and information sector a great deal of manufacturing is still done by hand, and if it is primarilly mechanized people are still needed to serve as adjuncts to machines to package and quality control product...most machines in the real world are not bright enough to know when they are malfunctioning...someone still has to keep an eye on them....so for eight or ten hours a day ( at least during the recent bubble...not these days) people become extentions of machines...performing mindlessly repetetive tasks in the service of capital...this leaves a good deal of time for reflection ( a facet of proletarians little understood by management...since we perform tasks like automatons they feel that's what we are...the imagiantion and ingenuity of the shop floor continually take them by suprise)..being that workers are treated as ciphers and maligned as lazy and inefficient caretakers, that reflection usually turns to resentment and an active contempt for capital...everyone on the floor is keenly alert to the fact that the more they do the more wealth they provide for someone else...this is an empirical understanding of marx's theory of alienated labor, both psychologically and economically...all the boys and girls are natural marxisits, although they're unaware of it....even the bulk of their wages are someone else's property due to obligations in the form of monthly bills...disposable income is a luxury that is not common...so as you look at your souless toaster or that godawful refrigerator or bar stool, remember that someone somewhere put a good deal of thought into what you're using...even if, in these lean time, they spent less time doing it.