From Streetcars To Spaceships

Grow up. Now. The world needs adults. Not crybabies.

The next time you find yourself looking at the all too many crises out there, then, in addition to corporate fraud and all the usual suspects, you should add another thought to your reflexive response.

When hundreds of millions of adults try to live by a toddler's rules this is what you get.

We've become a nation infested with permanent children who model their behavior on what makes sense to a typical three year old. I've been saying it for years and I plan to go on saying it.

If we intend to get serious about what has caused and is causing global climate change, the rise of the Right Wing, the advancing power of monopolistic corporations, shifts to anti-reason evangelical churches, and a host of other crippling problems, then we need to get serious about this. If we don't successfully address the fundamental flaws in how people think then no number of arguments from reason add up to much more than self-congratulatory mental masturbation.

As far as I can see, ever since the 30's more and more parents have been raising their children to never grow beyond the worldview that is appropriate for a toddler and more and more of society has been adapting to validate that idiocy. Corporations, not surprisingly, love this sh*t and encourage it whenever they can. So do all too many political and religious groups. Dr. Spock played his role. So did the proud spoiling of children that so frequently is done by the first generation of a family to reach prosperity. So has the shifting nature of our schools and other educational institutions.

"We're all special in our own way"? Bugger off.

But the truth is, how it happened matters far less than what it is causing now and what it will take to reverse the trend.

To these "believers" the world is broken up into the world of We Children, which includes them, their friends, and their activities and The Grownups, which includes most property, the government, and all the Big Things done by magical Others whom one addresses with begging, Being Good, tantrums, and the like. Rarely, mind you with actions meant to substantively shift the factors that caused a thing to happen in the first place.

One is then either granted beneficences/gets one's way or is "punished" based on how effectively one has convinced The Grownups to do what one wants. Their lives are lived around the parallel goals of performatively being a Good Child ("but I tried hard!") and getting things with tantrums ("we'll make them do what we want!) And when their typical sloth and ineffectual behavior doesn't work out, they hold up the child's logic of But Don't You Love Me Anyway? and It's Not My Fault!!

To them everything in the world has agency. Somebody caused it. Intentionally. Nothing ever just happens or is an unintended consequence of some entirely differently motivated activity, let alone something caused by, you know, physics. And, as any preliterate child can tell you, if it affects them it was addressed primarily to them. If you are housemates with such a person and your moving to a new city means that they need to find a new housemate, then you are moving, first and foremost, to hurt them. They are far less interested in finding and addressing the true causes of a problem than in assigning blame. After all, if they can pull off the claim that it's somebody else's fault, then they should have a "right" to be kept immune to the consequences.

These people can be identified, as much as anything else, by the speed with which they will respond to a difficulty, or especially the prospect of work, with what other people "should" be doing instead. By which they mean what they think would be right. With little or no knowledge or interest in why the existing situation is as it is or in how or why the people responsible make the choices they do. After all, the usally rather shallowly hidden subtext is that since that other person "didn't do it right" why should the speaker have to do work to address it? After all, that would be "unfair". I never cease to be amazed at how much these idiots think that they have usefully contributed, in fact, "done their share" of solving the problem by describing, in a callow, off the cuff sentence or two, something like "well, they shouldn't be storing things there anyway."

I always tell assistants of mine that I don't want to here the word "should" coming out of their mouth in a use like that. Each and every moment spent in that kind of thing is obstructive distraction from actually addressing the problem.

On a related front, they will find just about anything acceptable (that doesn't cost them too much) if they've been told a good story about why and how it got that way. Again, I tell my assistants, just because somebody "has a reason" doesn't make it okay. Charles Manson has reasons. Sarah Palin has reasons.

These people, in terms of the issues they're even willing to face, find bare facts to be alien, incomprehensible gibberish. Even, as I said above, hostile things "meant" to hurt them to be fought back into the shadows where they won't have to risk seeing them. But, oh, they sure do love their stories. Or, as we've all grown to call it, a persuasive narrative.

As for the Bigger World out there, that's Parentland, where things are done by a magic and fundamentally unknowable web of processes.

The idea that assets and institutional frameworks are things run by people much like them that can be shifted or even acquired with things like well thought-out work is not only alien, it's anathema since such thinking is a threat to that We Little Kids worldview. Wow, will they get angry fast if they figure out that something you say weakens their structure of rationalizations and appeasements.

In my experience both certain types of Good Little Corporate Citizens and many doctrinaire Marxists tend to remarkably blatant forms of this. "All property is theft" comes naturally to people who believe that all things of value were preexisting, and that therefore anything but an "even" distribution of all material goods, with each person "getting" exactly the same as each other person is "unfair".

It frequently strikes me how blatantly such people will use the language of young children to describe policy issues. Something that is "unfair" obviously should be responded to with a tantrum, oh, I'm sorry, a "protest", to convince the Magic Adult People in government to Fix It and give everybody their Fair Share.

You know. Just like in kindergarden.

Things don't happen for reasons; they Just Are.

And, notably, they're usually real fuzzy on the details of how this collection and redistribution is supposed to take place. After all, that's the territory of Magic Adult People.

As far as I can see, the very core of most Marxist thought fits very well indeed into the Permanent Toddler way of seeing things.

To wit:

-all property is prexisting

-all labor is of equal value, to be measured solely on the basis of exertion and time used. Moving the same rock back and forth all day in a dark room for a year is of exactly the same value as the same time and degree of exertion used to build a set of chairs or succesfully raise a crop.

-therefore, all members of the manager class (i.e. "bad parents") are useless since no literal sweat raises on their brow. And, of course, management accomplishes nothing since all that they do is shift the choices of what labor is done, which we already "know" adds nothing since all labor is equal, and move capital, which we "know" should in a "fair" world just be evenly and randomly distributed anyway.

Note, by the way, that authoritarians like Rudolf Guiliani use different parts of the same logic. To idiots like that, all that it takes to be a good manager is to order people to do something and you've now "fixed" the problem. Organizational actions aren't caused by responses to scarce or ample resources. They're not caused by compensation structures or training or culture. Actions just HAPPEN. So if you want different actions to happen, you just say that you'll beat them up or give them candy based on whether they do what you want or not. Simple, right?

Bullshit. Dangerous bullshit.

Randites, whatever their problems, are generally utterly and entirely free of this kind of thing. In fact, Ayn Rand's books give all too painfully eloquent portrayals of quite a few aspects of what happens when fools like this get their way. Her endless pages of people competing for who can seem the most pathetic and helpless before various Committees of Distribution only seem exaggerated to those of you who have never dealt with any number of "consensus-based" organizations.

In 2006 I wrote a bit of a note on one aspect of this that got reproduced here.
(My letter starts right below the first image.)

This article in the Atlantic (once you get past the title) does a pretty decent job of covering a major example of how it can utterly permeate a subculture. And has. And then damage all of us through the consequences of their ill-considered actions.

And please don't say, "oh, that's magical thinking" and then dismiss it on the logically fallacious ground that by having described it (poorly, by the way), you've now put it entirely under a Somebody Else's Problem field. To describe a thing is not to "reduce it to a problem already solved". If you really think that, then say it to my face, go out there, cure a few dozen people of these behaviors, and come back to me with proof. Unless and until you can do that, pay attention. This applies to you. We are all subject to the damage this causes.

People like this, in my experience, are also real fast to judge their own work and that of their friends by the standard of "it's good enough" while judging things like products in the supermarket by a standard where any perceived inadequacy is the same as complete failure. And why bother to write in complete sentences or spell correctly? "You know what I meant!" and intent is all, you see. But a product on a store shelf that isn't perfectly vegan, and organic, and entirely free of all chemicals, GMO organisms, and on and on and on, is just the same as a factory farmed beef patty from Walmart. Unless it was made by somebody they know, a punk band, or some other variation on Little Kids Like Us, in which case all sorts of things are forgivable.

And stealing isn't bad if it's done from a large institution. Or, in fact, doing anything you want to such an institution is morally fine. After all, they're just Magic Adult People and hence have infinite resources and can't be hurt by the actions of Little Kids Like Us. Which is, of course, logically inconsistent with the stated reasons that many will give for actions like ecosabotage ("we'll hurt them so bad that they'll give up and leave!") but entirely consistent, as I've written above, with protests that are, ideally, as loud and obstructive as possible and for which coherent messages about why and what are trivial or even counterproductive. It's a logic for tantrums that any two year old would respect and agree with.

I think that we all know some of the more obvious other symptoms of this way of seeing and interacting with the world. Emo, anybody? People who have children of their own walking the streets in fuzzy pajama pants in patterns a ten year old should be ashamed to be seen in?

I have trouble even trying to explain to people under the age of thirty that the idea of walking around in costumes in the ways that so many now do (ooh, look at my authentic military camoflage shirt! Ohh! I'm wearing a jersey just like Michael Jordan's!") was, from ancient times until the 1980's, the kind of thing that people were expected to outgrow about the time they gave up bedwetting. In fact, when a show from the seventies or earlier wanted to make entirely clear that a particular child was Just A Little Boy or Little Girl, (say, as the innocent potential victim in a bank robbery) one of the classic quick signifiers was to have the child "still" wearing a cowboy hat or a pretend army jacket. After all, what surer proof could one need that this kid is barely more than a toddler?

Oh, we certainly do have our carefully worked out rationalizations these days (I'm supporting the team!) but funny how those rationalizations always neatly correlate with opportunities to Play Pretend. And, when folks are drunk or tired or simply don't expect to be judged, they sure come out with plenty of admissions of "this makes me feel like I'm a pilot in the Top Gun program" or whatever.

Personally, I wanted a leather jacket for years. For somebody who lives the life I do, they've ungawdly practical. But I did without for years because I had no willingness whatsoever to buy one with patches from some unit I've never been in, let alone a fake map as a liner meant to help the owner fantasize about being a daring pilot over WWII China.

Oh, and fwiw, I fucking well did contract work for Avirex.The co-inventors of the "bomber jacket". They offered me access to their company store and insider discount. But I had no willingness to do that sort of thing.

It's fantasy, folks. And unless you're in the business you should be ashamed of yourself.

And no, you're not a goddamn pirate. Or a ninja. Or a pro sports celebrity.

I'll come back to this subject again. As I keep saying, I'm convinced that this pattern of behavior is central to why so many people keep making such terrible decisions. I'll probably come back at some point and expand this piece. But for now I need to go out and get back to work.

Because if you're not creating useful results, you're just wanking.

Happy holidays.

-Rustin

 

Much later addendum: I just love this video. It does a wonderful job of showing that "I must be profound because I throw tantrums all the time" ethos of much of the supposedly "radical anarchist" crowd.

I also think that this article about Black Bloc does a very good job of laying out some of how these dynamics play out in practice within the Occupy movement. 

Bush is out. Fascism is more of a risk than ever.

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
- Benito Mussolini

Personally, I have found the overuse of the term "fascism" in my lifetime reprehensible. It is not "fascism" when your teacher won't let you get out early to see your friends. It isn't fascism when Walmart stops carrying some music label. Not every act of potentially capricious authority is fascism.

But some things are. And, as folks tend to forget, fascism has always been built from the ground up as partnerships between public idealogues, authoritarian movements, and corporations who have used those movements to protect and maximize their profits in return for funding and legitimizing the otherwise very unestablishment face of the movement.

In other words, whether we're talking Germany, Italy, Ethiopia, or the Klan, frankly, fascism has always had roots in the kind of people we these days call trailer trash. This has made for a very useful dynamic in the eyes of the monsters who have served as fascism's architects. The low-class, usually unemployed thugs of bottom-of-society movements have made very useful shock troops to undermine groups like farm worker unions that threaten the profits of corporations. And the quiet but increasingly public support of those corporations has provided material resources and a much-needed veneer of respectability to the otherwise socially rejected masses of those authoritarian movements. All while the least honorable among the media take their funding from the corporations while inflaming the conflict and then reaping the increased revenues from getting to feature the very violence and hatred that they helped build in the first place.

Any of this sound like what we're seeing now with the "birthers", the "teabaggers", the health insurance industry/Big Pharma, and FOX?

If you still have any doubts, I suggest that you read this piece on the recent appearance of activities in America, like the disruption of our ongoing town halls, that have always in the past been leading and reliable indicators that a country would soon be suffering a fascist regime.

I thnk that the article actually, in some ways, understates the problem. I have said from 2002 on that the TSA was designed from the get-go as a training ground and then reserve of brownshirts. Minimally-screened, recruited largely from the unemployed and underemployed, given arbitrary and intrusive powers "justified" by a fear-based logic that was made both sacrilege and dangerous to question, they have continued, with an expanding mandate, almost no supervision, and minimal training in jobs that get them used to treating the public as hostile adversaries to be controlled, questioned, and kept within ill-defined and non-negotiable limits.

Every day that somebody holds a TSA job they are further conditioned to make a trustworthy goon who will follow the unexplained and possibly counterintuitive orders of The People In Charge. They are already building adversarial dynamics with, well, real cops. The cops find them contemptable. Undertrained, puffed up, poor, and posturing. The TSA employees find the cops arrogant, uncooperative, questioning of the limits of their mandate and jurisdiction. If push comes to shove, TSA staffers will have been hardened by years of public displeasure and frustration. Trained to demand unquestioning obedience from the public, where even a joke about their techniques or concerns are considered grounds for arrest and detention.

Make no mistake. The "birthers" and their ilk are dangerous. A clear and present danger to our democracy and basic rights and principles. But if we're to look at this honestly, we need to stay vigilant about the armed, staffed, equipped army of fascism-ready bully-boys who walk our streets and control our rights of way right this very minute.

This is NOT a drill.

Promotion - when it goes wrong it's hard to see the point.

Over a year ago I created a group on facebook called Portland Publishing & Printing that was supposed to help people in the area connect. I meet many people in the area who say that they would love to have more local connections to find out about suppliers, to meet for drinks, to maybe do things like share orders for supplies that are only available by the caseload, and so on.

It's been, I say again, over a year. I have been talking this up to people at paper supply stores, to small presses, to not such small presses, to zinesters, to locally owned copy shops that say that they want to reach zinesters, and pretty much to anybody else who seems even vaguely relevant who is willing to stand still long enough for me to get my spiel in.

All of this has added up to 25 members and one post by somebody other than me.

So a few weeks ago I figured that the Portland Zine Symposium would be a perfect place to finally get this thing up and running. Designed a little flyer that, frankly, I think was pretty cool and printed up about sixty of them in full color on heavy, funky paper stock (mostly on a cover weight parchment that I thought would suit the context), handed most of them out to tablers, left a few out on the free table, and brought a few for my PZS talk on Never Go To Kinkos Again.

Also, before the symposium started, I sent a flurry of messages by email, facebook, and phone, asking (sometimes nearly begging) people to join or at least post something on the group board. This didn't seem like much of a stretch since, on top of everything else, all of these folks have new zines or something like that that they're supposedly trying to promote right about now.

So here we are. And all of this has accomplished . . .

(wait for it)

Two new members and no posts.

I know that sometimes these things take a while to show results. I've already heard about people saying that they've learned things just from checking out the member list. But c'mon.

I'm sorry, but some days I really do wonder why i get out of bed at all.

There used to be corporations I was proud to be connected to.

I was on the phone earlier with my friend Sara talking about all the trouble she's having finding furniture. Hitting the thrift stores or customizing something or any of the other ways that most people I know can route around typical corporate options just aren't viable for her anymore. She's got cerebral palsy, really does work absolutely as many hours as her body allows just to pay the bills, and lives in London, Ontario. So for her the internet, in reality, and a few carefully budgeted trips to stores are the ballgame.

And I was surprised at how long the list in my head was of places that, ten or fifteen years ago, I wouldn't really have had a problem suggesting. I think that maybe we've lost track of how many of the corporations we've grown used to loathing used to be, by and large, admirable. They used to be entities that most people I knew were proud to support and be connected to. Let's go over some of that list. I think that it's worth bringing back some concrete examples because I think that we've all been deafened a bit by our own drumbeat of more recent and justified conflict.

Remember the days when Banana Republic was a catalog with innovative hand-done drawings and detailed descriptions? One that sold clothing actually meant for traveling in the developing world? I do. We had gotten their catalog for years already but the one time I ordered from it was when I was preparing for a trip to Panama and Costa Rica in, iirc, '85 and my mother chose them on the advice of my father and friends of both of them who lived in places like rainforest research stations regularly and had found that this little catalog on rough-finished paper was a great source for when you needed The Good Stuff.

Remember when many Pier 1 employees could go on for half an hour without a break about the crafts coops in countries like Honduras who they partnered with to make many of the goods in their stores? I furnished my first places in Portland, back in '84 to '87 largely with items I was proud to buy from them. I bought more for my place in Astoria in the early nineties and, again, was proud to do it.

Remember when Lands' End had detailed essays on their production techniques in their catalog and had everything made in America? When the Conran's store was a reliable source of excellent design? When J.Crew founded their product line on the dual principles of classic clothes that wouldn't change season to season and of using all-natural materials in simple, timeless ways?

The list goes on and on and on. It really didn't used to be this bad. Marshall-Fields working to rebuild their flagship store and bring out respectful reissues of turn of the century fabrics and pottery. Crabtree & Evelyn working with glassmakers and woodworkers to make authentic, old-fashioned displays. Barnes & Noble being a book business institution that ran the best used textbook store in New York City. And so on.

Many of the eighties companies who developed the biggest and fastest reputations as admirable and responsible were never really all that great. Let's face it, Snapple always sold thinly disguised sugar water and Mrs. Fields was always a franchise system with a pretty face and a good marketing campaign. Jennifer Convertibles was racking up fraud complaints from the year they opened their doors. And plenty of famous corporations were founded with a fundamental structure built around, I'm sorry, I don't see a lot of ambiguity here, evil. General Motors and General Electric were built to win through undermining, bullying, and fraud. Microsoft was rotten from, at best, 1983 on.

These kinds of companies were architected in ways that, if our laws were fairly applied, would subject them to comprehensive dissolution, not just through antitrust laws but through the RICO statutes. [See my note below on RICO.] They were created as corrupt enterprises whose evil was written into their compensation structures, product lines, subcontractor relationships, and everything else. They are stained throughout with the taint of their original sin. And like the artifacts of J. Edgar Hoover's rapacity and prejudice that came up in the hearings about intelligence failures connected to 9/11, these things don't just drift away like mist when the founders are gone.

But I don't think that all of the companies we've grown used to fighting grew out of such parasitic ways. And, frankly, I was there for more of this than probably ninety-nine point nine percent of people alive, so I've got some small degree of confidence in my conclusions. And in those days, as those places were, I was, by and large, proud to be there. When my friend Eliza hooked me up with a job at Citibank, I was proud to get it, proud to be good at it, and proud that two years after I left they were still calling me asking me to come back. And that, by the standards of the time, was about as evil as a corporation could get. Just ask any government still trying to pay off their Citibank debt.

I'm not going to go down my long list of marquee corporations I was inside of but frankly, it's a damn long list and none of it was working at the margins. I met and worked with quite a few of the people who made these companies what they were and I do not believe that most of them were evil. Short-sighted? Yes. Self-interested? Certainly. Dismissive of approaches outside of their authority-approved playbooks? Undoubtedly. And, frankly, most of them were never terribly comfortable with having me there precisely because a lot of my job was to deal with the cracks and flaws their approaches created so I got to see a lot of how they solved problems and interacted with each other. After all, I was the guy who didn't need to play nice.

But my point is that they weren't all the same. It is wrong to treat all that they did and who they were and are as interchangeable. Make no mistake, I also dealt with Wall Streeters and Andersen Consulting staffers and various others who, if it were up to me, would be tied to posts to be slowly beaten to death by Louisiana housing project residents. And if you think that I'm not writing literally, you don't know me very well.

But I think that, as we think about what our society is and what we want to work to turn it into, it is dangerously misleading to consider Bernie Ebbers as the same as Bernie Madoff. It is dangerously misleading to conflate Whole Foods and ConAgra. They are not the same. And to sweep the broad brush of CORPORATE EVIL over it all and dismiss it all in one satisfying but stupid gesture is the kind of waste we simply can't afford.

We just ain't that rich.

I find most of the Obama Administration's stimulus spending decisions something between disappointing and repellent. I find his corporate bailouts, by and large, disgusting and grotesquely wasteful. By no means am I suggesting that we should forgive and forget.

But we should be ready and willing to do three things.

- Firstly, concede that not every organization big enough to have an ad campaign should be burned at the stake.

- Secondly, to look into these companies for things worth adopting. Did you know that McDonalds was heavy and early into efficiently and cleanly converting used oil into biofuels? They were and are.

- And thirdly, it is past time that we started paying attention to what went wrong in a way that goes beyond "wow, they suck" or movies that tell it all like horror flicks. It is more than past time that we looked at *how* they got corrupted. We need more people to talk to the executives at places like Lands' End and articulate the mechanics of why they gave up on making anything in this country and what it would take to get them to come back. We need to be looking at employee-owned companies like Bi-Mart and WinCo and engaging them. Seeing what makes them work and how. Encouraging them to cut down on the agribusiness ties and help them figure out how to make those transitions profitably. Looking into "activist" organizations that work (like Portland's own Red & Black Cafe and Freegeek, like Milwaukee and Chicago's Growing Power) and documenting in ways that the average person can understand and will find interesting what exactly is involved in running a business that isn't exploitative, that is scalable. In particular to find ways to do this without either selling stuff that's so expensive that only rich people can buy it (Real Goods and Smith & Hawken, I'm looking at you) or are occasional luxury purchases where customers have to compromise some other part of leading healthy lives to buy their goods (Ben & Jerry's, this spot is yours). Or, for that matter, is subsidized by some kind of unending and usually downplayed stream of donations.

We also, for that matter, need a hell of a lot more readable, detailed, carefully researched work on the cultures and practical power dynamics of our business schools. We've done plenty of complaining about all the asshole MBAs and the damage they do but what exactly does that mean, and what can we do about not just countering their creations but bringing more sunlight into places like the University of Chicago and the Ivies? Who do they choose? How much debt do those graduates come out with? How does that debt get paid off? Where do they end up ten years later? Twenty? Fifty? What are their conclusions about what their impact was once they're retired and can afford to be a little more open? How does this contrast wiht the conclusions of those who work with them?

It's very easy to complain. It's very easy to bemoan how terrible all those evil corporations are and how they own everything and there's nothing to do but blow it all up and start over. But it's bullshit. Not once in all of human history has that worked. The closest we've seen to a "fresh start" was the Khmer Rouge and if you think that's a model you admire then fuck you, may you die soon and you have no place in this conversation. For the rest of us it's time to not only grow up and accept a certain degree of compromise, of responsibility for what will happen now, it's time to take fields like industrial organization, the very study of how groups work and how organizations become what they do, and make them our own.

Let's be honest here. We now have plenty of people making home-brew biodiesel setups. You REALLY want to change the world? Take a couple of YEARS (yes, I said "years") and study up on some famous organization in a field you care about. Really study up, Don't just read Fast Food Nation. Talk to employees. Read newspaper articles for their hometown in the years when they were starting up. And really think about WHY did they do the things that they did? What were they thinking? What did it cost them to not do something else? What do we know they rejected? Don't spout that wussy bullshit "Oh, they're just like that." That's for cowards and the intellectually feeble. People have real world reasons for their decisions and many of them, news flash, aren't just about short term material gain. They're about the interpersonal dynamics between the decisionmakers. They're about looking good to outsiders. They're about emotional comfort. They're about all sorts of things and until we know them well and address them effectively they won't ever really change. You think that making everything you dislike illegal will "fix things"? Then you understand neither the dynamics of law enforcement (who exactly will pay for all those cops, what will keep them from corruption, and how will they detect all these things, just for starters?) nor the basics of human nature. (Shall we discuss the effectiveness of drug laws for a start?)

And then, when you know that organization the way that Green Bay residents know the Packers, start to talk about it. Partner with good writers. Become a good writer. Put stuff on YouTube. Do zines and poems and songs and bloody frackin' puppet shows if that's what it takes to get your conclusions into the heads of people who are looking to make things better.

We don't need more whiny, "well-meaning" children wating for the New Age to dawn. We need workers willing to take on the job, to mine deep into dark, lonely, and scary tunnels, and emerge with nuggets of insight and knowledge.

If we're going to build a world in which the scammers and bullies don't keep coming out on top, then the very bones and muscles and organs of our society need to be changed. I don't know how that should be done and neither do you. We need to get serious about why things keep going the way that they do and what, in the face of real world human nature, we need to create to make organizations and laws and citizen dynamics that act not just as antibodies to such scum, but keep them from having such advantages in the first place.

I'm doing my part. Will you?

-Rustin

A note on RICO - I'll bet that many of you read that and thought, yeah, there Rustin goes again, exaggerating just when it seemed like he was making a good point. But, you see, RICO isn't just supposed to be about locking up guys with Italian names for violent crimes. It's about the concept of a PATTERN OF BEHAVIOR, about organizations where criminal acts, including intimidation, blackmail, and sabotage, are  intrinsic to how the organization is run. After all, if you buy cement from a mafia-run cement company, they do have trucks. they do deliver cement. It's that the way they run is fundamentally interwoven with the illegal stuff that makes it actionable.

Let's think about that list again. Intimidation. Blackmail.  Sabotage. Hmm. You mean like what General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil did to the streetcar companies? Or what GM did to dealers who refused to use GMAC? Or the intimidation Microsoft did to Compaq when they tried to sell PCs without Windows? These are criminal enterprises. Don't let anybody tell you different.

Think I'm wrong about RICO? Go ahead, read up on it. This page isn't going anywhere. You can start here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act

And when you're done and have given it all some thought, look again at companies like Archer-Daniels-Midland. When they got busted for collusion, wasn't that evidence of a pattern of behavior? When Starbucks opens a location run below cost right across from a successful and loved local coffeehouse and, as soon as the local goes bankrupt, cuts back the hours or stops most of their specials or simply closes up, isn't that a pattern of behavior? Aren't those businesses whose model is now implictly built around sabotage and fraud and collusion engaging in racketeering?

'Cause it sure looks that way to me.

Harlan, you're fighting for us again.

The decades pass, the executives get richer, and those of us who put in our time and our creative output to keep them going generally get something between jack and shit. Even those who get paid above and beyond hourly rates get stiffed pretty reliably in direct proportion to how much they focus on creating good work instead of playing corporate politics.

If you're reading this blog, you probably already know this right down the the marrow of your bones.

But what justice there is can usually be traced back to somebody whose work was valuable, who somehow did build a certain reserve of their own wealth and power, and who is a sufficiently stubborn son of a bitch to refuse to accept "I'm sorry, we seem to have lost your letter on this matter; please send it again for our consideration" as a sufficient answer.

Right now Harlan Ellison is doing this. You can read about it here. Star Trek would never have done as well without his writing and he's demanding a fair accounting of all the products they've derived from his work, from a Christmas ornament that plays back lines he wrote to a series of books entirely built around characters he created. They've been giving him the runaround about this since Shatner had his own hair and will keep doing so forever unless this suit wins.

To which I say, GO HARLAN! All of us who have ever written for pay, all of us who have ever seen our creative output of any sort treated with off-handed contempt upon reception, recognized as lucrative internally, and then bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated for their maximum gain while the actual creators aren't even invited to the table to play a role, let alone get paid anything proportionate, should be willing to do whatever it takes to help. He is fighting for everybody who sells the products of their mind or even who has previously and now finds themselves getting nothing while gladhanding, seatwarming, frat boys congratulate each other on how much they've screwed us thinkin' folks yet again.

Once, years back, I took on a really nasty consulting job for an English magazine group that was launching a cooking magazine in the States.
The company IT manager has carried only two things away from his punk youth, expensive tattoos, and a very brownshirted insistence that everything be done his way, despite New York being just slightly different from London in, well, everything from supply relationships to voltages and software release dates. But being the young idiot and compulsive fixer I was I worked away at it anyway.

But somehow, as the weeks turned into months, once my first bill had been covered, I still wasn't being paid any of the rest. The New York office said I needed to talk (on the phone, mind you, in the early nineties) to the relevant people in the London accounting office. Those people, knowing perfectly well what each call was costing me, kept saying "the person you need just stepped out. How about you call again later?" When I finally got them on the phone they said that they needed more approvals from the folks in the New York office. And back and forth and back and forth. By this time the gig was over and, as far as I knew, my leverage was nil. And I was thousands of dollars behind, not even including expenses they were now disallowing entirely. Their lies and betrayal were leaving me unable to pay my rent.

For a while I stewed uselessly but then I talked to Martha Leinroth, a designer and photographer I knew from a consulting firm we both used to work for. She was older than me, more established, and generally more endowed with both perspective and experience about this kind of thing and she told me a story. Now, Martha was always a very elegant woman. She spoke and acted with grace and I had seen her stay composed and clear thinking through some pretty tumultuous times. So when she said that once, after a client had just absolutely refused to pay a bill, she had walked into their office, up to the relevant person's desk, kicked everything off the desk, and stood on it looking down at these weasels, saying that she would come down only when a signed check was in her hands, I believed her. And when she said that the check was soon in her hands, I understood her point.

Now, not being an elegant, black-clad, near six-foot tall, female college professor, I figured my approach should be a bit different. So I went to the magazine's offices and said that I wanted to talk to their bookkeeper about the delay in my check.

I was told that she had an appointment. I said that I would wait. I was told that it would be a long appointment. I said that was okay, and opened my bag, showing my notebook, some product literature I needed to review, and at least three books. That's fine, I said; I have plenty to keep me busy. The receptionist threatened to call security if I wouldn't leave and I said that was fine. I would then call the police and file charges of felony theft. She said that, well, then I could wait there after all. The entire exchange, mind you, spoken in plausibly polite tones.

I was still there at 6:00. I was back at 9:00. If I remember correctly, it took me about four days over the course of a little over a week. (Lost a few days to other gigs.) But eventually, a little after I had settled in for yet another day in their lobby with my copies of MacWeek, my books, my daytimer, their bookkeeper came out to the front and insisting that this had just been a trivial misunderstanding (though still trying to somehow pin all the delay on me), walked out and handed me a check. Not for the full originally promised amount, I'll grant. They got away with chiseling about a thousand of various expenses and such. But, nonetheless, most of my money and sure as hell money I wouldn't have seen at all if I had waited "politely" for them to be "reasonable".

My friend Sara Stewart and I wonder sometimes, when did it become assumed that being a progressive meant being everybody's doormat? What ever happened to all that the unions worked for to create a just fury among those who get screwed by the kind of people who take dinner dates with judges and host benefits for legislators? What softened away the righteous willingness to stand up and say that we've had enough to the faces of the scam artists who seem to be behind so much these days?

We know many of the answers to that. Corporate structures that hide every decision behind layer upon layer of "customer service" desks and 800 numbers where we're supposed to accept them as the authoritative and sufficient voice of the corporation when they're saying offensive things to us but be polite to them no matter what because, after all, "it's not their fault, they're just doing their jobs".

In person, for what it's worth, I'm not terribly big on literally raising my voice as a way to get things changed. I've generally found it more effective to calmly, implacably, refuse to go away."I'm sorry, but I can't accept that. May I speak to your manager, please?" "your manager is away? I see. Who is the store supervisor at this time. I see. Then I'll speak to them. They're busy? That's okay. I'll wait. No, I don't need a seat. I'll stand right here" (in the middle of their busiest aisle). Or sometimes, as I'm told I need to sign something or check something, to simply walk away and force them to either yield the point or need to physically attack me.

But we all need to to do this. We all need, sometimes, to refuse to "sit back down and not disturb the other customers". We all need to, as I did yesterday, walk up to the sales desk at Comcast and tie up half an hour of their time going over how it's illegal to sabotage downloads (it's called "throttling") as they have been found to do and that I will be changing my service soon. Feels good. I've had a good rant to clear my head and they'll be a little more reluctant to hang onto those jobs as corporate stooges.

Y'all mostly know about my DIY Manifesto. You know that I fight for the big battles, too. To change zoning codes and how kids are raised and how people are taxed and regulated and punished. But this stuff is crucial, too. Once you yield to a bully, you betray not only yourself, but everybody who will deal with that bully after you. And which is more polite, being calm and "understanding" while somebody fucks you over, or defending not only yourself, but those who will come after?

Make districts simple.

I write a lot, and think even more, about issues of organizational, and specifically government malfunction. There are many things one can say about this, and rest assured, I intend to keep going on at enervating length about dozens of aspects of this for as long as I have the time and access.

But there is one measure that applies to governments at all levels from town to sovereign, that is simple, very difficult to subvert, and should be capable of short and long term fundamental improvement in how governments work and how well.

Set geometric limits on the circumference to area ratios of voting districts.

It's as simple as simple gets. Simply provide a maximum numerical ratio, where the length of the line one would draw to go all the way around a voting district can only be but so complex. This simple thing would, right there, cut way down on gerrymandering, one of the most pernicious kinds of political gamesmanship. Ideally, such a law would also limit the degree of change a district could be subjected to in a given period of time. There are dozens of possible nuances that I leave as an exercise for the reader. You're smart folks, afaict; you'll see them just fine. And, as always, you're welcome to comment below.

Think about it.

I don't want to live in a society run by a bunch of Generals

Anybody who's paying attention is bound to see that every year our world is controlled by a smaller group of companies and their friends. The current crisis is just accelerating that. Twenty banks become five. Ten insurance companies become three. And it's nothing new. Since Enron we supposedly understand the importance of objective and external accounting measures. So it confuses me that nobody much seems to be upset that the once Big Eight accounting firms are now the Big Three. Big Two? Big ONE?

Well, let's step back a bit and remember that in much of America, not only is this round two or three of this kind of corporate domination (anybody remember Standard Oil? U.S. Steel?) but that many of our largest corporations were founded, not by inventors or marketers or people who cared about some particular kind of product at all. They were founded by financiers who set out from the get go to win not, fundamentally, by making better products but by owning as much of the market as they could and through techniques that are mostly illegal or should be. By beating up and marginalizing those who tried to succeed through the "naive" approach of making things that people wanted and selling them under good terms at a good price. They intended to win through sheer power and monopoly and to large extent they've succeeded.

I sound kinda vague, don't I?

Well, many of these companies have a tell. You see, they were quite open about their intent at the time, so you will find that these companies aren't named after founders or their products, or the places where they were. Nor after mythical figures or their products or any of the other types of names that show some kind of love  by those in charge for what they have wrought. Instead the names are as arrogant and dismissive of particulars as their strategies.

They're all Generals.

General Motors.

Founded in 1908 by as a holding company by William Durant, who owned two car companies by the time he had been in business a year and owned two more by a year after that.

General Dynamics.

Rebuilt by financier Isaac Rice, who, starting as the Electric Boat Company, making submarines for the Japanese, Russian, British, and Dutch militaries in the early 1900s, and then renamed and reorganized the company under the current name in 1952 when their takeovers of Canadair and Convair, paid for with the company's large post-war cash reserves, caused then to reorg and become a "modern" conglomerate.

General Foods.

Renamed General Foods in 1929 when Postum, personally being run E.F. Hutton (the guy, not the company), used money from stock sales to buy up, in quick succession, the makers of Jello, Minute Tapioca (owners of the process later used to make Minute Rice), Log Cabin Syrup, Maxwell House Company, and others.

General Electric.

Created in a merger by J.P. Morgan of the pre-existing Edison Electric Company and Thomson-Houston Electric Company (itself a result of several mergers), in effect creating a monopoly on many patents and processes for all electric devices.

If a company has a name that starts with General, they are bad people. And do I even need to get into Union? Union Carbide, perhaps?

One day soon I'll get back to this in more detail but for now remember two things:

1.) Any company named General anything can be assumed to be scum.

2.) They were founded to be scum and those scum behaviors were woven into the DNA of the firm by the day the name was first announced.

Happy Holidays.

Rustin

An antidote to the common bitch.

In a time of change like this people reach ever more for the comforting habit of complaining. Comforting, that is, for the person doing the complaining. And isn't it a shame how many people can't even articulate what they're upset about, let alone then work to fix those problems?

So, for years now I've had a consistent response to such bitching.

"So, let's say you're given twenty million dollars, two assistants, and two years to spend the money.

You can't spend the money to raise more money.

You can't just say 'I give the money to somebody who knows what to do.'

What do you do to address the problem you just talked about?"

Then you talk them through their response. If they say "I give money to candidates" then ask which ones. Early in the campaign or late? To the PAC or to the candidate directly? If they say they'll give it to (schools/police/whatever) ask which ones, to be used by whom, to be administered how? Just keep drilling down. Be helpful but don't give leading responses. If they stop and change their minds about something, be graceful, and acknowledge their right to do that. In fact, give them the respect they will then deserve for admitting in public that they were wrong. Just take them down the path from the general to the specific, from the universal to the local. Ask how their plans would cause their intended result. Help make it real to them. But never, ever loosen your vigilance and allow them to slip by a "and then a miracle occurs" step. Just calmly work to interweave the story you're expecting them to tell with consequences, telling details, clarifications. Be friendly, interested, attentive. But utterly unforgiving. If you haven't done this before you will find that this, too is a useful exercise.

I have found it amazing how well this focuses people's thinking. It weeds out the twits who just want to complain and leave all accountability and responsibility to others. Sometimes it actually does help people realize that there is something that they can do to improve things. And it generally clears the air. I have also found that the people I least want to deal with, the anti-intellectuals, the liars, the permanent children, the beery frat boy blowhards, are driven off by a calm, implacable application of this technique like vampires running from sunlight. Once I've pointed this approach at such people a few times, they never engage in their habitual dittohead tirades in my presence again. Makes going to parties much easier.

The key is that the question replaces the vague with the specific. It forces them to calculate costs. It (especially if there's an audience) put the onus on them to define the problem and take responsibility. It makes them reiterate what they've just said in a way that lays wonderfully effective traps for people who hide racism and such behind coded language. And, when asked of decent people, can even reduce the sense of helplessness that an inchoate problem of unknown scope creates in anybody. It teaches people to think like problem solvers rather than like passive observers. It helps people seize a sense of agency for the things around them. It penalizes and punishes the blowhards and rewards and aids the honorable.

In short, it makes all participants, including the person asking the question, into better citizens.

So the next time you hear somebody start to talk about "those people shouldn't be allowed to . . ." or "the (schools/buses/military/etc.) sucks" or whatever, smile politely, prepare for opposition, and simply pose for them that simple hypothetical. Just be sure to cut them no logical slack whatsoever, to never raise your voice or lower yourself to ad hominem attacks, and to keep them from changing the subject.

You may find that it will not only free you from idiocy, it can even be quite a lot of fun.

Sarah Palin - a thousand points of spite.

My friend Sarah said something perfect a couple of days ago. Sarah Palin - A thousand points of spite.  I concluded that this needed to be shared with the world. So I've now created a Cafepress store to sell stickers with this inspiring phrase on them. Go, buy stickers. Put them up where the whole world can know what you really think. But do it fast. In fifteen days my trial membership expires and unless stuff is selling I'll have to either reduce my selection to one sticker of each type or shut it down.

Happy days?

-Rustin

Re: bugout bags for activists

Reading the various articles about Minneapolis police attempting to suppress protest and, significantly, working particularly hard to prevent people from videotaping police response to protests, I had a terrifying thought.

If you're an activist and you truly suspect that you're under serious surveillance, then you need to remember one thing. If you leave because you fear that you're about to be attacked one way or another you need to assume that your bugout bag is BUGGED.

The idea of a bugout bag, of a bag containing necessities that you can just grab and go in case of sudden evac, is a great thing. I've got one myself. But if you're leaving because of law enforcement or corporate harrassment, then leave your bugout bag behind. It's the obvious place for establishment flunkies to plant a tracker on you.

Spread the word.

-Rustin