upasika day in white salmon

I finally managed to work up the courage Friday night to ask someone if I could catch a ride with them to the Pacific Hermitage in White Salmon, WA, and make my first (and very long overdo) visit. After a rough few weeks and what seemed like auspicious timing (it not only being a full moon observance day, but Pavarana, the full moon marking the end of the monastic rains retreat, as well), I made the determination to attend the Upasika Day retreat at Yoga Samadhi. My hope was that spending the day meditating with monks would help me get out of the dark mental cave I've found myself in recently.

The next morning was covered in a blanket of mist, the setting moon peeking through on its way towards the horizon, and I found myself looking forward to the coming day. Scott and Joan from Portland Friends of the Dhamma were kind enough to pick me up on the way from their home in Lake Oswego to the hermitage, and the three of us set out into the October fog a little before 9am. We talked a bit on the way, and by the time we got close to the hermitage, the mist had cleared revealing a perfect fall day, brisk yet sunny, the colours of autumn painting the Columbia Gorge with a vibrant spectrum of green, yellow, orange, and bright red.

We arrived at the hermitage just after 10am, which is nestled in a beautifully forested and relatively secluded area along the Jewlett Creek. We unloaded the food we brought for the meal offering and then offered to help with anything that needed to be done around the hermitage. A few people, including a couple of the monks, spent the next hour raking leaves, while I was conscripted to mow a portion of the grounds since the Vinaya, the monastic rules of discipline, doesn't allow monks to damage or destroy plants (although it's technically only a minor offense entailing a confession to another monk). Afterwards, we gathered in the hermitage to cleanup and offer the daily meal. I ate my meal outside with Charla and Alistair (also from PFoD) and a family of quails.

Once the meal was over and everything was cleared away, we migrated to Yoga Samadhi in downtown White Salmon for the half-day retreat. I took the opportunity to walk from the hermitage to Yoga Samadhi with Alistair along the same path through the woods that the monks take on their alms round, and as we walked, he showed me some points of interest (like the monk's kutis and adjoining walking paths and the two rock formations that one of the monks humourously named Moggallana and Sariputta) and told me a bit about the land and the hermitage's history. We arrived at Yoga Samadhi a little after 1pm, just in time for the formal requesting of the precepts and morning chanting.

Chanting was followed by alternating periods of sitting and walking mediation for the next five hours. I sat. I walked. My mind ran the gambut of mental states like a monkey swinging through a forest wilderness, rarely resting on one branch for very long before swinging off the next. A good lesson on annica. My body hurt here, then there, then here and there. A good lesson on dukkha. And during the Dhamma discussion, Ajahn Sudanto mentioned that our main strategy to the experience of dukkha is to try to control and manipulate things to be other than their nature, but that's a trap. A good lesson on anatta.

happy indigenous peoples' day (my yearly columbus day rant)

Sigh. Another year, another Columbus Day and its onslaught of Columbus Day sales (a fitting way to commemorate hundreds of years of greed and oppression, don't you think?).

Why this is still a national holiday is beyond me. Out of all our national holidays, I think this one pisses me off the most. Essentially, it celebrates a man who not only 'discovered' land that was already inhabited (Hispaniola), but a person who helped to literally wipe that land of its original inhabitants, the peaceful Arawaks, through his unbelievable cruelty, and that of those who followed him to the 'New World' (which itself is a very Eurocentric designation).

The Arawaks initially greeted Columbus and his crew with gifts and open arms. Of them, Columbus himself writes things like, "They are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest—without knowledge of what is evil—nor do they murder or steal ... they love their neighbors as themselves and they have the sweetest talk in the world ... always laughing" and "They are very simple and honest and exceedingly liberal with all they have, none of them refusing anything he may possess when he is asked for it. They exhibit great love toward all others in preference to themselves." As well as things like, "They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

While simply passing judgment upon the actions of people long since dead doesn't serve much of a purpose, I think it's important to at least remember them and accept that they form an integral part of our nation's history, and a truly ugly part at that. I think this is especially important since the trend (particularly in school textbooks) has been to mythologize people like Columbus and their accomplishments while downplaying many of the negative things they also did, some of which were truly heinous acts. But these things shouldn't be glossed over, in my opinion; they should be reflected upon so that they're never forgotten—a reminder of the terrible price exacted by Mammon.

What happened to these poor people, and what eventually happened to numerous other tribes in the Americas, was nothing short of genocide; and I don't think we should celebrate the main architect of this inaugural (not to mention extremely brutal) land-grab as a hero with his own a national holiday. It not only dishonours the memory of the Arawaks and the other indigenous inhabitants who directly suffered at the hands of Columbus, his men, and those who followed, but I think it dishonours the descendants of all of the Americas' native inhabitants as well.

If anything, today should be renamed Indigenous Peoples' Day in their honour, and it should inspire us to do things to truly honour them like collectively pressuring the government to get rid of Columbus Day. Changing history text books to adequately address things such as what happened to the indigenous population of the Americas at the hands of European settlers, as well as the newly formed US, or else pressuring schools to use books like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States that do. Pressuring the government to officially apologize for the Indian Removal Act, the Trail of Tears, reneging on treaties, etc. And even more radical, pressuring the government to honour its treaties and return land that was stolen, or else fully compensate tribes for the land that was illegally taken from them.

None of that can bring back the dead, nor make up for the unimaginable amount of suffering and privation that's been inflicted upon the native inhabitants of the Americas since Columbus' arrival; but I think it's the least we can do. And for anyone reading this who may be unfamiliar with the full history behind Columbus Day, I recommend checking out this excerpt from Howard Zinn's Columbus and Western Civilization, as well as this clip from The Canary Effect and this article by Thomm Hartman. They'll give you a good idea of why today shouldn't celebrate Columbus Day, but condemn it.

no easy solutions to gun violence

More gun violence and more calls for tougher gun laws. It seems to be a regular occurrence these days, and more people are starting to ask why it's so hard to just ban guns and be done with it. "Why does this happen? Why is it so hard to get these guns off the streets? Why aren't you doing something?!"

There are a number of reasons why that's so difficult, I think. The main reason, of course, is that the right to bear arms is understood to be a constitutionally-protected right (Second Amendment), so any kind of outright ban on guns is impossible until the Constitution is amended, which takes 2/3 of the states or 2/3 of both houses of Congress to propose and 3/4 of the states to ratify. And that will probably never, ever happen. The other main reasons, however, are more complex and include issues such as poverty, low social mobility, institutionalized racism, etc.

For example, on Twitter, Boots Riley of The Coup argues that much of the gun violence in the US is, when you boil it all down, economically motivated. People who can't survive by legal means, through conventional employment (whether because there aren't enough good paying jobs available or because they have some impediment to gainful employment like a previous criminal record, etc.), are often involved in illegal businesses to survive, and gun violence is a natural outgrowth of illegal businesses regulating themselves: "All business regulates itself with violence or the threat of violence. For legal business that called the police. For illegal business, there has to be force. You can't go to the zoning commission, or to small claims court over some dope." And this, he continued, has an impact on culture. "Some folks say 'yeah but some gun violence isnt economically motivated'. Most of it is. But like any form of survival, it creates a culture How we materially survive creates the culture around it. Fishing villages create fishing songs- not the other way around (sed that before). If fighting gun violence that happens on the street is ur calling- your only hope is a mass, militant, radical labor mvmnt that raises wages."

He also notes the historical shift in how the left treats the issue of gun control, and how in his view gun control today is more about cultural allegiances of progressives attached to the Democratic Party than anything else: "The left used to champion striking miners fighting back against Pinkerton security with their guns. The first gun control laws came about from media created hysteria about the 'Negro crime waves' of the 1920s. Cops went house to house, kicking in doors of Black families and taking guns away. Gun control laws aren't aimed at White people in the country side. It's Black and Brown folks that get locked up for having guns."

And that doesn't even address problems such as mental illness, which often plays a role in many of these mass shootings. All in all, though, no matter how you view the issue of gun control (for or against), it's a complicated issue. Gun ownership is enshrined in our Constitution and there are a lot of them out there, both legal and illegal. Trying to ban guns and confiscate the ones that are already out there is political and practically impossible, in my opinion; and even if it wasn't, I think the government trying to do so would cause a serious and most-likely violent backlash. The way I see it, there's no easy solution, really.

A combination of things like better funded and easily accessible mental healthcare, stricter gun control laws, and gun safety programs may help to reduce incidents like this, but they'll never be able to completely stop them. Part of this, I think, is because the roots of much of this kind of violence within society goes much, much deeper than crazy people or prevalence of guns, and they won't be uprooted until we take a long, hard look at the society of fear and violence we've created, or that we've allowed to be created for us—a society where things like a basic guaranteed income and universal healthcare (including better funding of, and easier access to, mental healthcare) are fought against tooth and nail, and starting wars in the name of peace and dropping bombs that routinely kill innocent civilians seems as easy as buying a gun at Walmart.

It's sad that things like this happen, and I really hate hearing about them, especially because it seems like such a frequent occurrence. So I'll continue to support things like universal healthcare in the short term, and fight for a healthier, egalitarian, and less volatile society via progressive socio-economic changes in the long term. Beyond that, though, I don't know what else I can do.

binswanger has it assbacwards

I read an op-ed in Forbes that really annoyed the hell out of me last night:

Give Back? Yes, It's Time For The 99% To Give Back To The 1%

This op-ed is completely assbackwards, in my opinion. In fact, the very first paragraph reveals how easily obscured capitalist social relations are, including the origin of profit, which from the Marxist perspective arises out of the division of the workday into necessary labour and surplus labour. But as I think David Harvey persuasively argues in Limits to Capital (which I've been reading recently), since all labour appears as paid labour, it's easy for the capitalist apologist to argue that capital is the source of value (essentially separating capital as an independent and autonomous factor of production) despite the actual complexity of capitalist production and distribution, completely obscuring labour's contribution in the creation and realization of profit (46).

Production and distribution aren't discrete, autonomous spheres; they are, in the context of capitalist society, part of an organic whole. Moreover, the expansion of value in this process occurs via the production of surplus value by capitalists who employ wage labour, a social relation in which the worker — who gives up their rights to control over the production process, the product of their labour, and the value incorporated in the production — receives the value of their labour power and nothing else (42-3). And this is important because this is the point where the surplus value created in the labour process is appropriated by the capitalist, i.e., how they transform money (M) into commodities (C) and then back into money plus a surplus (M + ∆M), the added value being the result of the additional amount of labour time the capitalist can extract/contract out of the worker in excess of what it takes for them to produce the value of the wages they receive.

Hence, one could just as easily turn Harry Binswanger's comment on its head and rightly quip, "And beneath that lies the perverted Objectivist notion that wealth is accumulated by not exploiting labour and the surplus value it helps to create—as if Ford's employees were not necessary for Fords to roll off the (non-existent) assembly lines and the hundreds of thousands of workers in China and the US were not necessary for iPhones and iPads to spring into existence." The op-ed, in essence, acknowledges the equality presupposed by exchange while completely ignoring the inequality via the exploitation of labour required to gain profit, as if capital itself was some 'mystical entity' floating above the labour process, instilling value of its own accord and benevolence despite the obvious contribution of labour.

stiglitz makes some good points but misses the mark in his afl-cio speech: can't fix what isn't broken

Last week, Joseph Stiglitz, a relatively well-known, Nobel-prize winning economist, gave a speech at the 2013 AFL-CIO Convention in Los Angeles, California. On the one hand, I'm glad that Stiglitz is one of the few economists who's been talking about the growing inequality, as well as pointing towards working-class organization as a means of resisting the depredations of capital and the 1%. But on the other, I think he puts too much faith in 'the economy' and the way it 'should work,' as well as the implication that our well-functioning 'people's government' is "becoming a government of the 1%."

I think Stiglitz is partially right in that some of the wealth inequality we're currently experiencing is due to polices and laws that've weakened unions, eroded the minimum wage to the lowest level (in real terms) since the 1950s, that put Wall Street’s toxic innovations ahead of workers, etc. What I disagree with, however, is the idea that inequality isn't a result of the way capitalism functions and the social forms (including the state) that that functioning engenders. I think our politics have always been 'sick' in the sense that they've always dominated by the interests of a privileged class of wealthy, ruling class elites, whether it's been the white, male landowners of the late 1700s or the 1% of today.

Stiglitz says that our democracy is in peril, and that with economic inequality comes political inequality. But as David Harvey illustrates in Limits to Capital, part of Marx's critique in Capital details precisely how the contradictions inherent within the capitalist mode of production produces a fundamental contradiction between the equality presupposed by exchange and the inequality via the exploitation of labour required to gain profit. So from the very onset, the kernel of inequality is already present within our political-economic system. And that inequality is the basis for much of the struggle between capital and labour.

On the one hand, workers are, in principle, "free to sell their labour under whatever conditions of contract (for whatever length of working day) they please" (30), which highlights the equality, freedom, and individuality characterizing exchange relations, recalling both Aristotle's argument that "exchange cannot take place without equality" and Marx's argument that "the circulation of commodities requires the exchange of equivalents" (19).

However, workers must also compete against one another in the labour market, where capitalists who are forced to internalize the profit-seeking motive due to the coercive laws of competition purchase workers' labour time with the sole purpose being the accumulation of profit (accumulation for accumulation's sake), and who more often than not dictate the duration and conditions of labour workers must accept or else risk privation while seeking something better, putting workers at a disadvantage on an individual level. (28-30) (One of the main reasons I favour some kind of universal basic income is that it has the potential to empower workers, decommodify labour-power by helping free workers from absolute dependence on wage labour for subsistence, and enlarge the nonmarket social economy.)

And that inequality in the economic sphere is further carried into the political sphere since the accumulation of profit on the part of capital in the form of money, which itself is a form of social power, gives capital (particularly as a class) a disproportionate political advantage, putting workers at a disadvantage on a broader political level. In addition, the more workers collectively resist the depredations of capital, the "more the capitalists are forced to constitute themselves as a class to ensure collectively that the conditions for progressive accumulation are preserved" (30).

In essence, this battle between capital and labour, between the 1% and the 99%, is a continuous battle. It's easy to say that the divide between them can be fixed, that the proverbial 'divided house' can be reunited, if workers come together and organize in an effort to "restore not only democracy to Washington, but to the workplace" (or conversely, if capital, as a class, places limits upon itself). But I think that's a lot harder, if not impossible, to actually do.

We can certainly do our best to organize and push for reforms to try and limit the 1%'s power and the damage done by the 'enlightened self-interest' of capital and powerful corporations, but as Stiglitz himself notes, corporations themselves are now considered 'natural persons' and have managed to acquire certain constitutionally-protected rights. A company and a CEO can get away with things no average working-class citizen could, and that's precisely because the legal and political superstructures are built decidedly in their favour—always have been considering that the Founding Fathers themselves were mainly wealthy, ruling class elites, and the 'aristocracy of our monied corporations' that Thomas Jefferson was so worried about are simply the next evolutionary step in a long line of wealthy, ruling class elites.

Our economy was never 'well' to begin with. While circumstances have led to periods of high growth and low unemployment (the general idea of wellness), those periods were simply periodic events punctuated by periods of crisis and continuous battles between capital and labour. The 'economy' isn't just a snapshot of historical prosperity; it's the complex history of booms and busts and class struggle that's characterized the capitalist mode of production.

Basically, all this is really saying is that the economic game is rigged. To fix these problems, we need to change the rules; and to change the rules, we need to change the system. Yes, workers need to come together and organize, but not to restore democracy to Washington or the workplace—to instill democracy and freedom where it's never truly existed before. And to do that, they need to theoretically "unravel the constraints to the free application of human labour" (to steal a phrase from Harvey) in an effort to practically "'expropriate the expropriators' and so to achieve the conscious reconstruction of the value form through collective action" (38).

don't be fooled by the economic 'good news'

I've heard recently from a variety of places that 'the economy' is showing signs of 'recovery,' that the stock market, home prices, and corporate profits/consumer spending are rising while unemployment is falling (albeit relatively slowly). What I don't hear too many people talking about, however, is the shape of the so-called recovery or the effects on economic social relations, health, and well-being it's having.

For example, technically speaking — utilizing the statistics that economists and policy makers focus on like GDP, employment numbers (never mind the fact that the majority of those jobs are low-wage and/or part-time and official unemployment numbers are misleading in that they neglect under-employed people, those who have given up looking, etc.), inflation, etc. — the economy is improving and in recovery. The DOW is up and unemployment is down, after all.

That said, few seem to be noting that last year, the top 10% claimed half of total income. That's pretty staggering. The top 10% of earners took in more than half of all the country's total income—the "highest recorded level ever."

Another statistic that hasn't been mentioned much is the fact that the top 1% captured 95% (almost all) of the income gains between 2009 and 2012 (or 86% if we go all the way back to 1993, which is still massive). So from the end of the recession onwards through the recovery, while the working class was losing pensions, facing wage cuts and unemployment (or 'stagnating' in neoclassical terms), the top 1% was cleaning up and regaining their losses, further widening the income gap.

The bottom line is that wealth inequality in the US is at a historical high, with the rich getting richer, the working class still struggling to attain or re-attain some modest level of living, and the poor being completely fucked and forgotten.

And when you realize that money isn't just a means of exchange and storing value but also a form of social power, the dynamics of the disparity become even more concerning as far as its unegalitarian effects on economic social relations, health, and well-being go, not only on a broader political level but on a day-to-day, worker-employer level as well.

Sure, by one measure, the economy is on the upswing, which should be good news. (It'll all trickle down eventually, right?) But I think all of this really only serves to point out the lopsided focus of heterodox economics and mainstream economists in general since the underlying reality is the top 10% is making more and regaining lost assets while the rest of us working-class jags are, in very real terms, still struggling. Which is why I think people shouldn't be fooled by all the economic 'Good News.'

cheap chinese chicken nuggets

From NPR:

Was Your Chicken Nugget Made In China? It'll Soon Be Hard To Know

I think things like this are good examples of the growing social power of capital. Capital is adept at dissolving boundaries for itself. What most likely began as a movement to make it easier for finance capital to move freely across national borders has translated into a movement to make it easier for commodities to move just as freely. Neoliberalism has made things like protectionism a thing of the past.

Moreover, the people who make the rules nationally, such as those working for the USDA, are subservient/more apt to listen to capital than labour or the consumer because capital has the greater share of money/social power, and both the ruling class and capitalist class are often intermingled (i.e., more or less the same thing). It's simply another trend within a growing global system of production and distribution where the drive for profit is the bottom line, a trend that affects at least some aspect of almost every commodity we consume and the mode of production under which they're produced. As David Harvey notes in Limits to Capital:

Capitalists can also accumulate by capturing relative surplus value. ... A fall in the value of labour power results when the productivity of labour in the sectors producing 'wage goods' — the commodities the labourer needs — rises. The absolute standard of living, measured in terms of the quantities of material goods and services that the labourer can command, remains unchanged: only the exchange ratios (the prices) and value changes. The systematic cheapening of wage goods is, however, beyond the capacity of individual capitalists. A class strategy of some sort (subsides on basic commodities, cheap food and housing policies, etc.) is required if this form of relative surplus value is to be translated into a systematic as opposed to sporadic and uncontrolled means for accelerating accumulation. (30-1)

In general, though, many large multi-national companies, as individual capitalists, make more money by leveraging "the gap between socially necessary labour time and their own private costs of production" (31) — which includes cutting costs, whether in terms of labour or raw materials or both — than by making healthy, environmentally friendly, and/or high-quality products, particularly when it comes to the processed food industry. And those who do tend to make their products too expensive for the average, working-class person to afford because that's the only way they can make a profit. We can try to push back against things like this, but I think it's a losing battle at this point in time.

Just look at Walmart. People get all pissed and rail about the cheap, toxic Chinese-made goods, their history of gender discrimination, and their low wages, but that's also partially why it's so cheap and profitable and dominating the market right now.

Until an alternative to the present political-economic system starts to emerge, the lion's share of the working class is perpetually stuck between a rock and a hard place, i.e., between wanting something better but struggling day-to-day to afford their means of subsistence or else fearing there's no alternative and struggling day-to-day to afford their means of subsistence. Either way, they're still struggling to survive and the siren song of cheap goods is often too sweet for them to ignore, which is exactly what capital counts on. And in this particular case, poultry companies may benefit from the privatizing of USDA inspector jobs as an added bonus.

Yeah, people may possibly get sick like all those pets did from contaminated pet food. And they'll probably put into place some kind of 'better regulatory method' (which, even though it'll most likely increase deficit spending, will help the state consume superfluous capital sitting idle in a depressed economy by increasing demand for regulatory agents) if that does happen. But even that won't stop things like this from happening until we fundamentally change the ways we approach and organize production and distribution, ways that concentrate more on delivering use values while at the same time diminishing the role of exchange values.

It's easy for us to bash imported goods, but we rarely seem to question the companies who outsource production and/or sell them. In essence, the problem isn't so much with 'foreign-made' goods as it is the for-profit system under which these goods are produced. And if we move towards a more democratic and egalitarian system, people will have more of a say in what's produced and how it's produced.