union democracy

i just got back from the union hall after voting in the election...it was a pretty standard sort of thing...i was approached by a number of people outside the poll who were campaigning for this candidate or that...a lot of people were running unopposed which sort of defeats the purpose of an election, but this one was really about one race for a local-wide post rather than the representative from the various areas ( the local covers a few states so it is divided into local areas each with their own union officials )...it boils down to a case of the incumbant versus the challenger...outsider versus insider ( except, of course, both candidiates are complete insiders...incumbancy is probaly more the isssue here and in 2010 incumbancy may be a really difficult onus to bear...seems you have to be strong to remain incumbant)...most likely the only people who would be significantly impacted by a change of regime would be the aforementioned union officials in the local areas...as a rank and file member and an industrial worker to boot i don't see this doing anything to change my status as a non-person, except when it comes to insurance co-pay or union dues...speaking of which...when i got in the hall and showed them my drivers license they asked for a dues receipt...i get those in the mail, and i do keep them...but when i joined this organization i signed a dues check-off agreement which allows my employer to deduct my union dues form my paycheck and remit them directly to the union...my dues are automatically paid...i paid them when i signed the agreement...if the union cannot get my employer to remit them that is their problem not mine...i signed the agreement, i am a member in good standing whether my employer pays up or not...this legal fact held no sway and i was denied a ballot untill the election officials called the main union office in indianapolis to verify my existence, even though the name and address on my license mathced their records and it's my fucking picture on the license..can you tell i'm a bit irked? something like being asked for a dues receipt at a union meeting...up yours pal...look at your records...anyway i got to vote after i gave the people in indianapolis my social secutity number...it was special...you could get the idea that i don't like unions much from reading all this, but that's not true...i don't like craft unions because they are utterly anachonistic and belong to the century before last...they are run like businesses and leadership has far more in common with management than they do with rank and file...they also have virtually no clue about the needs and intersts of industrial workers...rigidly hierarchical...almost oligarchical...they are something less than responsive to issues that do not directly involve the craft side...on the whole i think i'd rather be part of the steelworkers...or even the umw...they may be no less hierarchical, but everyone started out unskilled on the floor or in the pit...a bit more egalitarian in approach.

elites and communal behavior

"every piece of the few useful patches of land in the western and eastern settlements was owned either by some individual farm or else communally by a group of farms, which thereby held the rights to all of that land's resources, including not only its pastures and hay but also its caribou, turf, berries, and even its driftwood. hence a greenlander wanting to go it alone couldn't just go off hunting and foraging by himself. in iceland if you lost your farm or got ostracized, you could try living somewhere else-on an island, an abandoned farm, or the interior highlands. you didn't have that opportunity in greenland where there wasn't any 'somewhere else' to which to go.
the result was a tightly controlled society, in which a few chiefs of the richest farms could prevent anyone else form doing something that seemed to threaten their interests-including anyone experimenting with innovation that did not promise to help the chiefs...we shall see that this consideration may help us undrstand the eventual fate of greenland norse society."

Collapse by jared diamond p.236

elites positively sanctioning communal behavior that strengthen their positions and negatively sanctioning that which does not is nothing new anywhere. the long history of the stuggles of working people to organize themselves and have some degree of control over the terms and conditions of the work they do is well documented. the resistance to that organization by business and governmental leaders is equally well evidenced. it is partly what james madison had in mind when he cited the threat that an "interested and overbearing majority" posed to the rights of a small but economically powerful minority in Federalist X. the struggle goes on today and labor usually finds itself facing negative sanctions of their attempts to form reconized organizations. additionally there is today heated debate on the subject of climate change. those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo are usually climate change deniers, scoffing at the unsound science and arrogance of "warmers". entrenched and politically powerful due to the flourishing of the system of government by special interst enshrined in the constitution derived form the philosphical leadership of hamilton, jay , and madison, those deniers control multiple media outlets they use to proselytize their views and propagandize the masses even though real science and any small ammount of common sense tell us that things are indeed changing and not for the better. the greenland norse disappeared after a run of about five hundred years because the climate they exisited in was changing and the chiefs refused to recognize the need to change their culture in ways that would have undermined their positions. the inuit survived the change by hunting ring seal, whales, and fishing proving that adaptabillity meant survival. the greenland norse, clinging to a european culture and agriculture that they had brought with them in the face of obvious cliamte change vanished...perhaps it was a version of james axtell's "reactive change"...the english coming to america could no longer be english, but they refused to become native american and so , as a reaction, became americans...the greenland norse, in refusining to become inuit evanesced we are facing a similar dilemma with an elite that stands to lose significantly in terms of wealth and power if we undertake the necessary changes. are we going to make the same errors and suffer the same fate?

export model

"if farmers in the great rift valley ever doubted they were intricately tied to the global economy, they know now that they are. because of a volcanic eruption more than 5,000 miles away kenyan horticulture. whiich as the top foreign exchange earner is a critical piece of the national economy, is losing $3 million a day and shedding jobs."

" there is no diversionary market," mr. mbithi said. "flowers and courgettes are not something the average kenyan would buy."

from the new york times 4-20-2010

the kenyan horticultural export model is falling apart because thay can't fly their produce out to the only market they have, europe. all that wilting produce will go to feed cattle or just rot because one critical part of the machinery has failed. but it wasn't always like this. kenya has a diverse climate that is not all suitable for growing crops for export. "the country also had a strong two-tier farming culture, hundreds of large estates ( built by the british to export coffee, tea, and maize, but now owned by kenya's black elites) and an army of some ten million smallholders working tiny one and two acre plots of maize or sorghum and raising goats and chickens." [the end of food by paul roberts p. 147]. the green revolution held some promise of improving the lot of smallholders until the 1970s and the onset of rising petroleum prices, which, in turn, raised the cost of the fertilizers that powered the green revolution. the kenyan government tried to intervene by putting subsidies in place for fertilizers and instituting price supports. all this was financed by foreign borrowing and when the debt became too big to be serviced in stepped the globalitarians from the imf and world bank who insisted on kenya opening its markets and finding its "competitive advantage" niche. some prospered as being evidenced by the losses now being sustained by the export sector...but not everyone...and, perhaps, no-one will in the long term. "kenya can produce baby corn and green beans competitively, at least until jet-fuel prices rise much higher. yet such advantages aren't equally distributed across the country, but are generally held by a specific region or economic sector; in this case, large producers and exporters operating in the best growing areas. small farmers in the arid and semi-arid are simply not able to participate in the global food economy...because kenya has few barriers to imported maize, its farmers compete with producers in more developed countries whose low-cost output is unbeatable. nearly half of all kenyan farmer lack the productivity to grow maize as cheaply as their counterparts in south africa or faraway brazil who are taking mora nad more of the kenyan market as kenya's own production falls behind its massive population growth." [the end of food p.170]. so the promise of the green revolution led to the destruction of traditional farming because the debyt incured by the kenyan goverment allowed it to be leveraged open to cheap imported food. the elites that prospered by using their control of the best land to engineer an export economy are now finding that they are vulnerable too and there is no cultural base to return to in order to restore food security. we are all connected to this and we are all subject to having our illusions of security disabused. we need to think hard about the way we do things...and even harder about consequences.

drama, comedy, or farce?

the bbc said this morning that drama schools in the united kingdom are giving politicians and bureaucrats ( the home office and the military are on their client lists as well as politicians...no specific names for any of them...seems businessmen are going in for acting classes too ) lessons in lying with sincerity...stoking up their believability...not a tremendous surprise...politicians here have always been drama queens and the epitome was the eight year reign of that cretin reagan with his vicious wife and a deadly remix of nixonite cast-offs...even hitler had an opera coach to help him with his "natural" ability for oratory...politics sham and posturing...who would've thought? the cadre of professional manipulators is adding a new weapon in its battle to manufacture desire and ensure the "consent of the ruled" doesn't stray from the elite's agenda...the opening of the documentary "hitler: seducer of a nation" is footage of the first nazi rally in berlin after hitler became chancellor...it's voiced over by a p r professional who marvels at the technique that was used, from the stage setting and ritual to the fact that hitler kept the crowd waiting to build tension and used long pauses in the beginning of his speech to gauge the mood of the crowd and tailor his speech to it...the pro says something ot the effect ( i'm working from memory here)of "we are only now beginning to use these methods"...not a promising sort of testimonial to current political thinking among the media types...goebbels must be smiling in propaganda hell.

pointless...but i did it anyway

earth hour wasn't much really...an exercise in making people feel they were actually doing something...alieviating some consumerist guilt...painless..did anyone turn everything off? the only landmark from the photos i saw that looked even remotely blacked-out was the pyramids...okay, so you don't want aircraft flying into the eiffel tower (they turned off the lights on the tower, but every streetlight in town was left on)...that's fair enough...but also part of my point...did aircraft stop flying for an hour? did power plants shut down? did opec stop pumping oil? did mittal stop making steel? did everyone on the interstate highway system pull over? like five sentence mission statements, symbolic acts are too simplisitic to really give scope to the problems we face as a species...those issues are too complex to be boiled down and sloganized...energy, environment, consumption are all parts of the dilemma, and they are closely interconnected...that renders them immune to politically expedient quick fixes...that complexity and the need for a shift in cultural values is what people need to be educated to...earth hour doesn't stand a chance of doing that...a clear definition of a problem such as industrial agriculture's dependence on petrochemicals for inputs such as fuel for farm machinery, herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers and the resulting impact on the environment from the pollution of groundwater, streams, rivers, and estuaries from runoff as well as the environmental nightmares of confined animal feeding operations that run on the grain the pertochemicals produce, would illuminate both the shortsightedness of our energy policies and how a system of industrilaized, pre-packaged food and supermarket convenience shield us from the impact of our everyday actions...we expend nearly nine calories of energy to produce one calorie of food...turning out the light won't fix that...we need a new viewpoint.

payoff

the treasurer of lake county indiana has sent me a check for time and srevices renderd in the pursuit of justice in lake county superior court on the eleventh and twelfth of this month...i am still not convinced that i was a good choice for this...it was a case about someone killing a dog...i'm not overly fond of dogs and there is such a divergence in cultural norms about them that it's a tough call...there are people who eat dogs rather than keep them as pets...and people here who keep pigs a pets...and doubtlessly more who view breakfast sausage as cruelty...so who's correct? damned if i know...it's all releative and having a "big picture" overview is no help in specific, localized decisions...so i tried to stay inside the framework the judge set out since i figure she knows more about how the law is structured...but law is made by people who are the products of their cultures with all the strengths and weaknesses those cultures contain...ours is no more perfect...so i tried, uncharacteristically, to find the middle ground...an unusual outburst of aristoteliean moderation...an abberition from my usual on the bus/off the bus, no bullshit moderation stance...i tried to tell them this...it makes me unsuitable for deliberation...my downfall was an insistence on providing a cogent definition of reasonable doubt when the rookie prosecutor asked me what it was...i tried to give a reasonable answer instead of playing dumb...suddenly the long hair, ripped jeans, and sloganizing tee shirt were invisible...i had become a juror...well...the cash will go into the perennial garden project's budget...some good will come of it

post-modern jurisprudence

the truth was in the courtroom someplace...but no-one was spending much time searching for it...they were busy manufacturing simulacrums designed to bring the jury around to their way of thinking so they would achieve their desired outcome...since i was on the jury ( and was made the foreman because my fellow jurors were unwilling to read a guilty verdict in open court...whiners) i was part of the focus of all this subtle and not so subtle manipulation...half-truths, lies by omission, distortions, outright untruths, surreal moments...all of life was there to see...i've never been on a jury before so i naively thought that if i sifted through the information dilligently enough i could find it...no such luck...so many contradictions..even in testimony taken from witnesses at different times over the course of the investigation..."experts", or professionals anyway, disagreeing about facts and interpretations of events...sloppy police work...a defendant who was combative and something less than forthcoming...neighbors with grudges to settle...inept prosecutors and a weak case for the state ( a singularly surreal moment came when a member of the prosecution asked a veterinarian's assistant if a gunshot wound was consistent with wounds from a dogfight...dogs are arming themselves with colt .380's? time to do something about stricter dog licensing)...an oleagenous defense attorney, strongly reminicent of everett dirksen... in the end no-one was believable...no-one deserved to be believed...they all had an agenda and the truth was in the way of their achievement of it...it had to go...bludgeoned, battered, stunned, dazed, fatigued, and pissed off the jury split the verdict...no-one would tell the truth so no-one got entirely what they wanted...i have to say that the judge and the bailiffs were very considerate people who did their best...i wouldn't want to leave you with the impression that i thought poorly of them as people...or the lawyers, witnesses, and even the defendant for that matter...i really don't know them...but the entire system is an exercise in truth avoidance and dissembling for a purpose...so plainly obvious that i felt insulted and used...i am smarter than that people.