dissent is patriotic

An excellent commentary, in my opinion, on the 'cheap patriotism' of the mainstream media and how the use of the word 'hero' is used to "shut down real debate about the merits of what exactly it is that all those heroes are doing out there":

Pundits, Platitudes, and Patriotism: War Heroes and Their Enemies

Coincidentally, a friend of mine was called an "unpatriotic communist" today for simply saying that she wasn't a fan of war. It's kind of a bizarre how critical our society can be towards anyone advocating or supporting nonviolence when you think about it, from the court of popular opinion to the court of law.

Back in 1918, for example, Eugene Debs (one of the greatest Americans to ever have lived, in my opinion) was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison for an anti-war speech he gave in Canton, Ohio—a sentence the Supreme Court upheld upon appeal, ruling that it had the "intention and effect of obstructing the draft and recruitment for the war [i.e., WWI]," something made illegal under the Espionage Act of 1917.

For my own part, I respect the men and women who join the military and place their lives in danger for the sake of others despite my own philosophical disagreements; and I respect the hellish things that many of them are forced to endure in the course of their service, as well as the sacrifice of those who lose their lives while serving. I also have a great deal of compassion for those who choose to serve their country, but end up regretting their decision by doing things that later weighs their conscience down, such as was the case with Howard Zinn, a WWII vet and political activist, and the realization of what he did as a bombardier in WW II.

But at the same time, I'm critical of war and the reasons nations go to war; and I have a different perspective than most on the effectiveness of nonviolent solutions to war and violence in general. Just because we have noble intentions doesn't mean that we'll always end up doing noble things. In fact, one of the main things that originally attracted me to Buddhism was its attitude towards violence, e.g.:

"He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred.

"He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred.

Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.

There are those who do not realize that one day we all must die. But those who do realize this settle their quarrels. (Dhp 1.3-6).

And:

Killing, you gain
your killer.
Conquering, you gain one
who will conquer you;
insulting, insult;
harassing, harassment.

And so, through the cycle of action,
he who has plundered
gets plundered in turn. (SN 3.15)

I think Howard Zinn came to a similar understanding — that war can't end war, that violence can't end violence — from his experiences in WWII; an idea which he expressed in part of a speech he gave in 2006:

I was talking to my barber the other day, because we always discuss world politics. And he's totally politically unpredictable, as most barbers are, you see. He said, "Howard," he said, "you know, you and I disagree on many things, but on one thing we agree: war solves nothing." And I thought, "Yeah." It's not hard for people to grasp that.

And there again, history is useful. We've had a history of war after war after war after war. What have they solved? What have they done? Even World War II, the "good war," the war in which I volunteered, the war in which I dropped bombs, the war after which, you know, I received a letter from General Marshall, general of generals, a letter addressed personally to me, and to 16 million others, in which he said, "We've won the war. It will be a new world." Well, of course, it wasn't a new world. It hasn't been a new world. War after war after war.

There are certain -- I came out of that war, the war in which I had volunteered, the war in which I was an enthusiastic bombardier, I came out of that war with certain ideas, which just developed gradually at the end of the war, ideas about war. One, that war corrupts everybody who engages in it. War poisons everybody who engages in it. You start off as the good guys, as we did in World War II. They're the bad guys. They're the fascists. What could be worse? So, they're the bad guys, we're the good guys. And as the war goes on, the good guys begin behaving like the bad guys. You can trace this back to the Peloponnesian War. You can trace it back to the good guy, the Athenians, and the bad guys, the Spartans. And after a while, the Athenians become ruthless and cruel, like the Spartans.

And we did that in World War II. We, after Hitler committed his atrocities, we committed our atrocities. You know, our killing of 600,000 civilians in Japan, our killing of probably an equal number of civilians in Germany. These, they weren't Hitler, they weren't Tojo. They weren't -- no, they were just ordinary people, like we are ordinary people living in a country that is a marauding country, and they were living in countries that were marauding countries, and they were caught up in whatever it was and afraid to speak up. And I don't know, I came to the conclusion, yes, war poisons everybody.

When it comes to the subject of war, I think we (especially us Buddhists) should always be on guard so that we don't allow ourselves be so blinded by our patriotism and the idealization of war heroes that we fall into the trap of blindly supporting militarism and nationalism, or attacking anyone who happens to have a different point of view.

People can call me all the names they want, but it's going to take a lot more than that to get me to uncritically support war and not speak out against the 'collateral damage' war inevitably leaves in its wake. As Howard Zinn once said, "While some people think that dissent is unpatriotic, I would argue that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. In fact, if patriotism means being true to the principles for which your country is supposed to stand, then certainly the right to dissent is one of those principles. And if we're exercising that right to dissent, it's a patriotic act."

hekate

A poem/hymn written in honour of Hekate.

"Hekate"

Hekate,
the Distant One,
swept over me with her flock of the dead;
my soul uplifted
on seraphim wings
to join the angelic hosts of the damned.
And with eyes wide open
in distance I see
the darkness swallowing the sky;
only the stars are able
to penetrate the void,
like tear drops standing frozen in time.
Something wicked this way comes,
an illicit temptation that I'm unable to resist;
at the crossroads meet
the Children of the Night,
inviting licentious, gothic fantasies.
And patiently I watch
as the morning dawn bursts forth
like hellfire unleashed;
Hekate,
the Queen of the Night,
so beautiful and terrible to behold.

will the real job creators please stand up

One of the key buzzwords this election season, much like it was during the last, is 'job creation.' The economy is all we ever seem to hear about lately, and politicians are jumping on the 'job creation' bandwagon in droves. House Republicans, for example, have a plan to spur job creation called "The House Republican Plan for America's Job Creators." As the title indicates, their plan for spurring job creation and economic growth focuses on the 'creators,' which unsurprisingly proposes, among other things, lower taxes and fewer regulations for businesses and the wealthy, since they're the obvious creators (read 'largest campaign contributors').

In the conversation about job creation in a predominately consumer-based economy, however, one important aspect often gets overlooked: consumers, which some see as the true job creators. Nick Hanauer, for example, a Seattle-based venture capitalist and one of the early backers of Amazon.com, suggests that consumer demand and spending is ultimately the real source of job creation, and that consumers (particularly middle class consumers) are far more responsible for job creation than capitalists like himself. In his own words from a recent (and controversial) TED talk:

I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would all have failed and all those jobs would have evaporated.

That's why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a "circle of life" like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.

But even if one disagrees with this idea for whatever reason, I think it's hard to deny that this aspect of the economic feedback loop often gets ignored in the conversation, or at least underemphasized in comparison to the business side of the equation, the mythologized 'job creators'; and in my opinion, any remotely successful plan to spur job growth can't afford to ignore working-class consumers in favour of businesses. For all the rhetoric about lowering taxes on the wealthy and drastically cutting social welfare and safety net programs in order to promote growth, the data doesn't seem to support this as an effective strategy. As Hanauer continues on to argue in the talk:

Anyone who's ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalists course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn't just inaccurate, it's disingenuous.

That's why our current policies are so upside down. When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.

Since 1980 the share of income for the richest Americans has more than tripled while effective tax rates have declined by close to 50%.

If it were true that lower tax rates and more wealth for the wealthy would lead to more job creation, then today we would be drowning in jobs. And yet unemployment and under-employment is at record highs.

While I don't think that all of our economic problems can be solved by simply raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, I do think a critical look at the same 'trickle-down economics' that have failed time and again (e.g., in the 1890s, when they called it 'the horse and sparrow theory'; 'Reaganomics' in the 1980s, which Ross Perot called 'political voodoo'; etc.) is certainly long overdue.

Giving tax breaks and the like to the wealthy actually allows very little to 'trickle down' to the average worker/consumer. The enormous amount of capital currently available isn't being used to create jobs so much as it's being hoarded or transformed into even higher record profits for the top 10%. They could use it if they really wanted to. Banks, for example, have plenty of money to lend; they're simply sitting on it. Same for large multi-national corporations. Whether it's out of fear of economic instability or whatever, lowering tax rates even more is like begging them to start doing something with their hoards of cash. We shouldn't be begging; we should be demanding—whether in the form of higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, or more extreme measures like nationalizing banks in order to provide the much-needed liquidity for the economy.

some thoughts on offshoring

Offshoring. It's a fairly complicated subject when you think about. On the one hand, capitalism thrives off of cheap labour, and requires what Karl Marx called the 'reserve army of labour' (i.e., the unemployed) to function well. Moreover, capital by nature seeks to expend as little as possible on labour because profits essential come from unpaid labour; and the less that's paid out to labour in the form of wages, as well as other expenses categorized as 'operating costs,' the more that can be kept by capital in the form of profit. By offshoring and/or offshore outsourcing, capital can benefit in a global capitalist economy by accessing a cheaper source of labour, as well as other things like less governmental regulations (e.g., more lax employee protections, environmental protections, etc.), less taxes, etc., and it can essentially work labour harder and longer for less while cutting corners in the way of safety, pollution controls, etc.

So, in one sense, capital is exploiting cheaper labour and poorer working conditions around the world while at the same time providing those people with jobs they might not otherwise have (Yay, jobs!). It's a bit of a mixed blessing, though, since both offshoring and offshore outsourcing not only compel workers in those countries to work harder and longer for less (which is an argument free market advocates actually use to support sweatshops), but it often takes away that work from someone else, forcing them back into the 'reserve army of labour.' And even if individual employers are good, well-meaning people who do their utmost to treat their employees as best they can, capital as it logically functions doesn't care about the worker, whomever that happens to be; it only truly cares about the bottom line, which is the logical outcome of what Marx termed the 'coercive laws of competition.'

As good as employers' intentions may be at the start of their respective enterprises, they're eventually forced to seek greater profits while at the same time suppressing wages as much as possible, which is the only way they can survive in a field full of competitors compelled to do the same. Quite often, employers as individuals are found to be good people, many of whom give generously to charity, etc. Nevertheless, the logic of the system forces the hand of employers to exploit labour as much as they can; and at the same time, labour is coerced into the position of working for a wage and fighting for gains that employers quickly counter in an endless battle punctuated by regular economic crises (these days better known as the 'business cycle'), creating antagonisms between capital and labour.

Moreover, protectionism (i.e., the movement to keep jobs 'at home' and make cheaper imports more expensive by imposing tariffs) isn't a full-proof solution to the problem of offshoring and rising unemployment because domestic labour forces become increasingly dependent upon cheap (and often lower quality) goods produced by places which exploit labour even more so. Here in the US, for example, Walmart is so successful because it provides super-cheap food and clothes produced in China to US workers with little in the way of disposable income, even though Walmart is well known for gender discrimination, as well as paying workers poorly and cheating them out of pay and benefits (as multiple class action lawsuits have clearly documented). Making that stuff more expensive through tariffs on cheap goods imported from China means that capital would eventually have to pay labour a lot more just so that the working class can afford to survive, which would consequently eat into potential profits and only serve to motivate capital to pick up and move somewhere else (since capital isn't as limited by national borders, unlike labour).

Offshoring, then, is ultimately a tool that can be utilized by capital to increase its own profits while simultaneously spreading unemployment and pitting members of the working class against each other, forcing them to compete in a globalized 'race to the bottom' where the lowest wages wins, and setting up a situation where employed workers get blamed by unemployed workers for the loss of their jobs. The only real winner here seems to be capital, who benefits either way, i.e., it can blackmail labour at home with the threat of offshoring and/or offshore outsourcing, using that as leverage to break unions, lower wages, and acquire uncompetitive tax breaks and regulatory exemptions, or it can simply find cheaper labour and lax regulatory standards abroad.

coffee makes you immortal! ok, not really, but it may increase life expectancy

Apparently, results from a study of 400,000 people conducted by the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study shows fairly persuasive evidence that there's "a significant inverse association between coffee consumption and mortality." In other words, despite some of its negative health effects, coffee consumption has been linked (by currently unknown means, mind you) to an increase in life expectancy. The news isn't all good, however, as the study also found that people who drink coffee tend to "smoke, drink more alcohol, eat more red meat and exercise less than non-coffee-drinkers," and there's evidence from previous research that coffee can raise bad cholesterol and blood pressure in the short term, two things that in turn can increase the risk of heart disease. So it's a bit of a mixed blessing, really, and simply drinking coffee doesn't guarantee a long life. But in combination with a healthy diet and lifestyle, a couple cups of coffee a day just might help increase your chances of seeing another day, which is good news for people like me who can't live without the stuff.

don't be afraid of the 's' word

I think John Stoehr makes a good point in his op-ed, "Face it, the US economy is socialist." When talking about socio-economic issues, many Republicans (not to mention Democrats) in positions of power like to use the bogeyman of the 'Red Menace' to frame the debate in a way that frightens people away from talking about socialism in a meaningful and constructive way, and which conveniently obscures their own support for the privatization of gains and socialization of losses — characterized by things like the Wall Street bailout — while they simultaneously criticize anyone who truly supports social and economic justice, as well as anything even remotely resembling the socialization of opportunity. Socialism isn't necessarily the monster it's often made out to be, however; and until we can talk about it in a rational way, we'll never get past the rhetoric of those who support corporate welfare over social welfare but pretend they're really looking out for the average, working-class citizen instead of their corporate benefactors. My favourite part is where he gives the example of Medicare when talking about areas in which the profit-motive is detrimental to human need, and points out that, "The older you are, the less insurable you are. In a free market, in which government coercion is completely absent from the exchange of commodities and securities, the elderly would die sooner. That's how markets work, and that's why Lyndon Johnson didn't want the elderly to be at the mercy of the markets."

in praise of "beauty"

I don't usually read much in the way of poetry, and rarely seek to analyze the pieces that I do; but I read a poem that really caught my attention yesterday while looking through some of the things posted at The Decapitated Muse Poetry Group of Detroit. It's a rather poignant poem called "beauty" by Aeva Sokeri:

beauty

almost got me kidnapped as a child
gave me at stalker at adelesence
found me preganant in highschool..
Wed me a year later
filmed me in bed
sold my image
an when beauty becomes your image
they will buy you
or be offended if you dont have a price
beauty is always trying to be captured and held at ransom..
i told you to leave me alone
and you just dont understand that i dont need your validation
no matter how many beautiful words, bills or jewels
i just do not need you
as much as you need me....

It's quite short, yet full of meaning; and the implications of each line (purposely meant or not) are strikingly conveyed almost effortlessly. I don't know what the author consciously wanted to say when she wrote it, but what I make of/take from it is:

"Beauty" begins by slicing through the common, idealistic conception of beauty by confronting the reader with some of the [presumably autobiographical] dangers and consequences of being 'beautiful,' of how beauty can be like a curse even though it's often assumed to be a gift by most.

Then it speaks of how others covet and seek to exploit that beauty, taking something which is considered almost divine by many (e.g., Plato's conception of the Form of Beauty) and debasing it, turning it into a burden for the one possessing it by transforming it into a commodity to be bought and sold by those who objectify and fetishize it in the abstract (i.e., those who drunkenly lust after beauty and attempt to make it into a material object to own and control rather than something to be admired on its own terms).

It ends by hinting at the power of beauty for the one who has become conscious of its effect on others and at the same time hasn't allowed themselves to become simply an object of beauty in spite of the advances of others constantly trying in their lustful ignorance to make them into just that.

One of the things I appreciate about it is that it has a lot more depth in its simplicity than many of the poems I've read recently. I like that it's saying something more than it says, and does so in a way that's not pretentious. It's raw, powerful, and straightforward, yet each line unfolds into a complex critique of how women are often viewed and treated in our society. It's the kind of thing I read and don't just think 'That's good,' but actually find myself analyzing my life and the world from a whole new perspective because of it.

Whether it's meant as one or not, I find it a piercing indictment of how women are objectified in its seeming condemnation of beauty. With the line, "beauty is always trying to be captured and held at ransom," I think it also raises the potentially unanswerable question of whether it's beauty that corrupts the hearts of men, or whether it's the hearts of men that ultimately corrupts beauty.

i am

I am, therefore I write.
A different combination of things you've probably already read before, perhaps;
but my existence transcends mediocrity all the same.
You read, and I am manifest;
words, dancing from my fingertips and pirouetting onto the screen,
giving my amorphous soul shape and form.
Words, floating through cyberspace,
drifting towards an unknown destination,
a time capsule of thoughts and emotions to be discovered by you.
Words, screaming 'HERE I AM!'
Subject and object merging together as one;
for at least a fleeting moment, eternity unfolds between the two us.
Words, consumed by your eyes.
Hopefully enjoyed, maybe despised;
but here I am, naked and bare, unashamed of my humanity,
my insatiable desire to be acknowledged.
It doesn't really matter what I say,
as long as I say it well enough to capture your gaze,
the gaze which validates my being,
and breathes life into my clumsily assembled vicariousness.
I write because I don't want to be alone,
even if my ephemeral companion is unknown and thousands of miles away.
Even in my solitude, I am a social creature it seems.
I write, therefore I am.

way to go, north carolina

Apparently the citizens of North Carolina passed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages, civil unions, and domestic partnerships, effectively stripping all same-sex couples of any benefits awarded with those legal partnerships whatsoever, such as the right to be there in the hospital and make important medical decisions for an incapacitated partner, federally protected family leave time to in the event of a partner's illness, receiving retirement plans and life insurance benefits for a deceased partner, etc.

Way to go, North Carolina. You can proudly say that you, along with 29 other states, have successfully managed to vote away this particular civil right, even though section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment clearly states that, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Ironically, I think this is a perfect example of the 'tyranny of the majority' conservatives so often criticize these days when giving sermons on the virtues of limited government and the inherent superiority of a constitutionally limited republic vs. a democracy; and who'd wholeheartedly agree with Thomas Jefferson in any other circumstance that "the majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society" (Letter to Dupont de Nemours, April 24, 1816).

The Constitution is supposed to prevent a majority of citizens who are united and motivated by a common interest from taking away the rights of the minority of other citizens, as James Madison argued in Federalist No. 10. Marriage is a civil right that should be available to all adult citizens equally; and as such, it shouldn't be subject to the whims of the majority (or anyone else for that matter) according to the founding principles of the Constitution. But marriage isn't just a civil right, it's a legal contract that confers certain privileges, immunities, rights, and benefits to committed couples; and in my mind, denying same-sex couples equal access to those privileges, immunities, rights, and benefits merely because of their sexual orientation and/or gender is as ridiculous and as unconstitutional as denying interracial couples the same thing.

In my opinion, sexual orientation should be considered a 'suspect category' in equal protection jurisprudence along with race because they're similar in that they're both 'minorities' that have at one time or another been unable to effectively use the political process to insure fair treatment from the majority. As Kenneth D. Wald notes in his review of The Constitutional Underclass: Gays, Lesbians, and the Failure of Class-Based Equal Protection:

What Tocqueville called "majority tyranny" is presumed most likely to be visited upon groups "who suffer from prejudice, are unable to form effective political coalitions, and are often singled out for especially unfavorable treatment by the hostile majority" (26). Laws that target such groups—what later became "suspect" classes—are in principle subject to especially rigorous review under "strict scrutiny" and are unlikely to pass judicial muster. In a series of post-CAROLENE decisions that developed less coherently than any summary can convey, the categories of race, national origin, and alien status were recognized as suspect classifications that would generate strict scrutiny. By contrast, laws that burden other groups are normally upheld with minimal scrutiny and maximum deference to the legislative branch. The Court subsequently created an intermediate category of "quasi-suspect" classes based on gender and legitimacy. Laws that burden such groups receive heightened scrutiny to insure there is some discernible "rational" purpose embedded in them. In practice, the contrast between suspect and quasi-suspect classes has become a distinction without a difference, producing what amounts to a two-tiered system.

Considering the amount of discrimination and unfair legal treatment that gays and lesbians have endured throughout the years, I think sexual orientation deserves to be placed in the same classification as race; and I wholeheartedly believe that laws targeting gays and lesbians should be subject to the same rigorous review under 'strict scrutiny' as those targeting race—even more so given that this may also be just a small part of a much larger political strategy designed to divide and discriminate, as evidenced by these unsealed memos from the National Organization for Marriage released by a judge last month (read esp. the section titled "Internationalizing The Marriage Issue: A Pan-American Strategy").

dadt as an example of ruling class ideology?

While watching the documentary The Strange History Of Don't Ask, Don't Tell today, certain events struck me as being potential real-world examples of what Marx meant when he wrote in The German Ideology, "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." For example, the Crittenden Report, an internal military study done in 1957 by the US Navy, concluded that 'homosexuals' serving in the military didn't pose any kind of security risk, with subsequent studies done in the 80s and 90s by various Department of Defense agencies (e.g., PERSEREC) and think tanks (RAND Corp.) concluding that sexual orientation is completely unrelated to, and has no bearing on, job performance. Nevertheless, the dominate view of those in charge (i.e., the ruling material force of society) was that "Homosexuality is wrong, it is evil, and it is to be branded as such" (Crittenden Report), and all such studies were classified and essentially buried, hence the ruling idea was that gays and lesbians should be barred from the military.

President Clinton's 1993 DADT policy, which was basically a compromise between his progressive campaign rhetoric and the status quo, did little more than legalize this kind of discrimination, and homosexual witch-hunts actually increased with the implementation of 'don't ask, don't tell.' Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, both scientific and empirical (esp. nations with gays and lesbians already openly serving in the military), the ruling ideas prevailed relatively unchallenged for decades; and it was only through decades of struggle, particularly on the part of the LBGTQ community, that DADT was repealed—not the facts, which were actually covered up by the powers that be because they conflicted with their ideological view of the world and challenged their ideological hegemony (a view personified in the documentary by Senator McCain).

One theory of mine about this is that the ruling class by its very nature fosters divisions within society — as in separate, competing factions à la Madison — in order to prevent a unified challenge to the institution of private property and the dominance of ruling-class ideology; and anything which tends to unite these opposing factions is perceived as a danger to those two things, as well as those it favours (i.e., the propertied and capitalist classes). Here, non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in regard to military service is a uniting force seeking to tear down a socially constructed barrier within society, which will logically help to erode discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the spheres of employment, housing, marriage, etc., thereby limiting its use as a dividing force, much the same way that struggles against discrimination on the basis of things like gender, race, etc. have attempted to do.

Of course, through constant struggle, ideas and social relations change over time; and the ruling class' ideological positions naturally must shift with them in order to compensate and insure that it maintains its control over the productive base of society, which, according to Marx's theory of base and superstructure, does a great deal to condition the rising legal and political superstructure of society. So it's expected that reforms will eventually manifest themselves, such as the allowance of gays and lesbians to openly serve in the military at the same time they're unable to legally get married in 44 of the 50 states (with none of the marriages in those 6 states being currently recognized by the federal government, by the way), and while still excluding transgendered individuals from service. And I think this particular example can not only be used to illustrate the existence of ruling class ideology, but how combating aspects of it without addressing its underlying foundation (i.e., its material/structural basis) ultimately leads to inadequate compromises and endless battles of social equality instead of truly progressive victories.