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Wednesday, May 16, 2007
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The Poverty Business
Says it all really,
- Tim
The Poverty Business
Inside U.S. companies' audacious drive to extract more profits from the nation's working poor
 Albuquerque known as the War Zone. She survived mostly on food stamps and welfare. The Tsosies are Navajo, and Roxanne's mother wanted to move back to a reservation in western New Mexico where the family has a dilapidated house lacking electricity and running water. Roxanne, unmarried and with four children of her own, could make out her future, and she didn't like what she saw.
With only a high school diploma, her employment options were limited. She landed a job as a home-health-care aide for the elderly and infirm. It paid $15,000 a year and required that she have a car to make her rounds of Albuquerque and its rambling desert suburbs. A friend told her about a used-car place called J.D. Byrider Systems Inc.
The bright orange car lot stands out amid a jumble of payday lenders, pawn shops, and rent-to-own electronics stores on Central Avenue in the War Zone. Signs in Spanish along the street promise "Financiamos a Todos"—Financing for All. On the same day she walked into Byrider, Tsosie drove off, jubilant, in a 1999 Saturn subcompact she bought entirely on credit. "I was starting to think I could actually get things I wanted," she says.
In recent years, a range of businesses have made financing more readily available to even the riskiest of borrowers. Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge.
Federal Reserve data show that in relative terms, that debt is getting more expensive. In 1989 households earning $30,000 or less a year paid an average annual interest rate on auto loans that was 16.8% higher than what households earning more than $90,000 a year paid. By 2004 the discrepancy had soared to 56.1%. Roughly the same thing happened with mortgage loans: a leap from a 6.4% gap to one of 25.5%. "It's not only that the poor are paying more; the poor are paying a lot more," says Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
Once, substantial businesses had little interest in chasing customers of the sort who frequent the storefronts surrounding the Byrider dealership in Albuquerque. Why bother grabbing for the few dollars in a broke man's pocket? Now there's a reason.
Armed with the latest technology for assessing credit risks—some of it so fine-tuned it picks up spending on cigarettes—ambitious corporations like Byrider see profits in those thin wallets. The liquidity lapping over all parts of the financial world also has enabled the dramatic expansion of lending to the working poor. Byrider, with financing from Bank of America Corp. (BAC ) and others, boasts 130 dealerships in 30 states. At company headquarters in Carmel, Ind., a profusion of colored pins decorates wall maps, marking the 372 additional franchises it aims to open from California to Florida. CompuCredit Corp., based in Atlanta, aggressively promotes credit cards to low-wage earners with a history of not paying their bills on time. And BlueHippo Funding, a self-described "direct response merchandise lender," has retooled the rent-to-own model to sell PCs and plasma TVs.
The recent furor over subprime mortgage loans fits into this broader story about the proliferation of subprime credit. In some instances, marketers essentially use products as the bait to hook less-well-off shoppers on expensive loans. "It's the finance business," explains Russ Darrow Jr., a Byrider franchisee in Milwaukee. "Cars happen to be the commodity that we sell." In another variation, tax-preparation services offer instant refunds, skimming off hefty fees. Attorneys general in several states say these techniques at times have violated consumer-protection laws.
Some economists applaud how the spread of credit to the tougher parts of town has raised home- and auto-ownership rates. But others warn that in the long run the development could slow upward mobility. Wages for the working poor have been stagnant for three decades. Meanwhile, their spending has consistently and significantly exceeded their income since the mid-1980s. They are making up the difference by borrowing more. From 1989 through 2004, the total amount owed by households earning $30,000 or less a year has grown 247%, to $691 billion, according to the most recent Federal Reserve data available.
"Having access to credit should be helping low-income individuals," says Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. "But instead of becoming an opportunity for upward social and economic mobility, it becomes a debt trap for many trying to move up."
HAPPY AS SHE WAS with the Saturn (GM ) she bought in December, 2005, Roxanne Tsosie soon ran into trouble paying off the loan on it. The car had 103,000 miles on the odometer. She agreed to a purchase price of $7,922, borrowing the full amount at a sky-high 24.9%. Based on her conversation with the Byrider salesman, she thought she had signed up for $150 monthly installments. The paperwork indicated she owed that amount every other week. She soon realized she couldn't manage the payments. Dejected, she agreed to give the car back, having already paid $900. "It kind of knocked me down," Tsosie says. "I felt I'd never get anywhere."
The abortive purchase meant Byrider could dust off and resell the Saturn. Nearly half of Byrider sales in Albuquerque do not result in a final payoff, and many vehicles are repossessed, says David Brotherton, managing partner of the dealership. A former factory worker, he says he sympathizes with customers who barely get by. "Many of these people are locked in a perpetual cycle" of debt, he says. "It's all motivated by self-interest, of course, but we do want to help credit-challenged people get to the finish line."
Byrider dealers say they can generally figure out which customers will pay back their loans. Salesmen, many of whom come from positions at banks and other lending companies, use proprietary software called Automated Risk Evaluator (ARE) to assess customers' financial vital signs, ranging from credit scores from major credit agencies to amounts spent on alimony and cigarettes.
Unlike traditional dealers, Byrider doesn't post prices—which average $10,200 at company-owned showrooms—directly on its cars. Salesmen, after consulting ARE, calculate the maximum that a person can afford to pay, and only then set the total price, down payment, and interest rate. Byrider calls this process fair and accurate; critics call it "opportunity pricing."
So how did Byrider figure that Tsosie had $300 a month left over from her small salary for car payments? Barely a step up from destitution, she now lives in her own cramped apartment in a dingy two-story adobe-style building. Decorated with an old bow and arrow and sepia-tinted photographs of Navajo chiefs, the apartment is also home to her new husband, Joey A. Garcia, a grocery-store stocker earning $25,000 a year, his two children from a previous marriage, and two of Tsosie's kids. She and Garcia are paying off several other high-interest loans, including one for his used car and another for the $880 wedding ring he bought her this year.
Asked by BusinessWeek to review Tsosie's file, Byrider's Brotherton raises his eyebrows, taps his keyboard, and studies the screen for a few minutes. "We probably should have spent more time explaining the terms to her," he says. Pausing, he adds that given Tsosie's finances, she should never have received a 24.9% loan for nearly $8,000.
That still leaves her $900 in Byrider's till. "No excuses; I apologize," Brotherton says. He promises to return the money (and later does). In most transactions, of course, there's no reporter on the scene asking questions.
A QUARTER-CENTURY ago, Byrider's founder, the late James F. Devoe, saw before most people the untapped profits in selling expensive, highly financed products to marginal customers. "The light went on that there was a huge market of people with subprime and unconventional credit being turned down," says Devoe's 38-year-old son, James Jr., who is now chief executive.
The formula produces profits. Last year, net income on used cars sold by outlets Byrider owns averaged $828 apiece. That compared with only $223 for used cars sold as a sideline by new-car dealers, and a $31 loss for the typical new car, according to the National Automobile Dealers Assn. Nationwide, Byrider dealerships reported sales last year of $700 million, up 7% from 2005.
"Good Cars for People Who Need Credit," the company declares in its sunny advertising, but some law enforcers say Byrider's inventive sales techniques are unfair. Joel Cruz-Esparza, director of consumer protection in the New Mexico Attorney General's Office from 2002 to 2006, says he received numerous complaints from buyers about Byrider. His office contacted the dealer, but he never went to court. "They're taking advantage of people, but it's not illegal," he says.
Officials elsewhere disagree. Attorneys general in Kentucky and Ohio have alleged in recent civil suits that opportunity pricing misleads customers. Without admitting liability, Byrider and several franchises settled the suits in 2005 and 2006, agreeing to inform buyers of "maximum retail prices." Dealers now post prices somewhere on their premises, though still not on cars. Doing so would put them "at a competitive disadvantage," says CEO Devoe. Sales reps flip through charts telling customers they have the right to know prices. Even so, Devoe says, buyers "talk to us about the price of the car less than 10% of the time."
Tsosie recently purchased a 2001 Pontiac from another dealer. She's straining to make the $277 monthly payment on a 14.9% loan.
Nobody, poor or rich, is compelled to pay a high price for a used car, a credit card, or anything else. Some see the debate ending there. "The only feasible way to run a capitalist society is to allow companies to maximize their profits," says Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. "That will sometimes include allowing them to sell things to people that will sometimes make them worse off."
Others worry, however, that the widening income gap between the wealthy and the less fortunate is being exacerbated by the spread of high-interest, high-fee financing. "People are being encouraged to live beyond their means by companies that are preying on low-income consumers," says Jacob S. Hacker, a political scientist at Yale.
Higher rates aren't deterring low-income borrowers. Payday lenders, which provide expensive cash advances due on the customer's next payday, have multiplied from 300 in the early 1990s to more than 25,000. Savvy financiers are rolling up payday businesses and pawn shops to form large chains. The stocks of five of these companies now trade publicly on the New York Stock Exchange (NYX ) and NASDAQ (NDAQ ). The investment bank Stephens Inc. estimates that the volume of "alternative financial services" provided by these sorts of businesses totals more than $250 billion a year.
Mainstream financial institutions are helping to fuel this explosion in subprime lending to the working poor. Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC ) and U.S. Bancorp (USB ) now offer their own versions of payday loans, charging $2 for every $20 borrowed. Based on a 30-day repayment period, that's an annual interest rate of 120%. (Wells Fargo says the loans are designed for emergencies, not long-term financial needs.) Bank of America's revolving credit line to Byrider provides up to $110 million. Merrill Lynch & Co. (MER ) works with CompuCredit to package credit-card receivables as securities, which are bought by hedge funds and other big investors.
Once, major banks and companies avoided the poor side of town. "The mentality was: Low income means low revenue, so let's not locate there," says Matt Fellowes, a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Now, he says, a growing number of sizable corporations are realizing that viewed in the aggregate, the working poor are a choice target. Income for the 40 million U.S. households earning $30,000 or less totaled $650 billion in 2004, according to Federal Reserve data.
John T. Hewitt, a pioneer in the tax-software industry, recognized the opportunity. The founder of Jackson Hewitt Tax Service Inc. (JTX ) says that as his company grew in the 1980s, "we focused on the low-hanging fruit: the less affluent people who wanted their money quick."
In the 1990s, Jackson Hewitt franchises blanketed lower-income neighborhoods around the country. They soaked up fees not just by preparing returns but also by loaning money to taxpayers too impatient or too desperate to wait for the government to send them their checks. During this period, Congress expanded the Earned-Income Tax Credit, a program that guarantees refunds to the working poor. Jackson Hewitt and rival tax-prep firms inserted themselves into this wealth-transfer system and became "the new welfare office," observes Kathryn Edin, a visiting professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Today, recipients of the tax credit are Jackson Hewitt's prime customers.
"Money Now," as Jackson Hewitt markets its refund-anticipation loans, comes at a steep price. Lakissisha M. Thomas learned that the hard way. For years, Thomas, 29, has bounced between government assistance and low-paying jobs catering to the wealthy of Hilton Head Island, S.C. She worked most recently as a cashier at a jewelry store, earning $8.50 an hour, until she was laid off in April. The single mother lives with her five children in a dimly lit four-bedroom apartment in a public project a few hundred yards from the manicured entrance of Indigo Run, a resort where homes sell for more than $1 million.
Thomas finances much of what she buys, but admits she usually doesn't understand the terms. "What do you call it—interest?" she asks, sounding confused. Two years ago she borrowed $400 for rent and food from Advance America Cash Advance Centers Inc. (AEA ), a payday chain. She renewed the loan every two weeks until last November, paying more than $2,500 in fees.
This January, eager for a $4,351 earned-income credit, she took out a refund-anticipation loan from Jackson Hewitt. She used the money to pay overdue rent and utility bills, she says. "I thought it would help me get back on my feet."
A public housing administrator who reviews tenants' tax returns pointed out to Thomas that Jackson Hewitt had pared $453, or 10.4%, in tax-prep fees and interest from Thomas' anticipated refund. Only then did she discover that various services for low-income consumers prepare taxes for free and promise returns in as little as a week. "Why should I pay somebody else, some big company, when I could go to the free service?" she asks.
The lack of sophistication of borrowers like Thomas helps ensure that the Money Now loan and similar offerings remain big sellers. "I don't know whether I was more bothered by the ignorance of the customers or by the company taking advantage of the ignorance of the customers," says Kehinde Powell, who worked during 2005 as a preparer at a Jackson Hewitt office in Columbus, Ohio. She changed jobs voluntarily.
State and federal law enforcers lately have objected to some of Jackson Hewitt's practices. In a settlement in January of a suit brought by the California Attorney General's Office, the company, which is based in Parsippany, N.J., agreed to pay $5 million, including $4 million in consumer restitution. The state alleged Jackson Hewitt had pressured customers to take out expensive loans rather than encourage them to wait a week or two to get refunds for free. The company denied liability. In a separate series of suits filed in April, the U.S. Justice Dept. alleged that more than 125 Jackson Hewitt outlets in Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, and the Raleigh-Durham (N.C.) area had defrauded the Treasury by seeking undeserved refunds.
Jackson Hewitt stressed that the federal suits targeted a single franchisee. The company announced an internal investigation and stopped selling one type of refund-anticipation loan, known as a preseason loan. The bulk of refund loans are unaffected. More broadly, the company said in a written statement prepared for BusinessWeek that customers are "made aware of all options available," including direct electronic filing with the IRS. Refund loan applicants, the company said, receive "a variety of both verbal and written disclosures" that include cost comparisons. Jackson Hewitt added that it provides a valuable service for people who "have a need for quick access to funds to meet a timely expense." The two franchises that served Thomas declined to comment or didn't return calls.
VINCENT HUMPHRIES, 61, has watched the evolution of low-end lending with a rueful eye. Raised in Detroit and now living in Atlanta, he never got past high school. He started work in the early 1960s at Ford Motor Co.'s hulking Rouge plant outside Detroit for a little over $2 an hour. Later he did construction, rarely earning more than $25,000 a year while supporting five children from two marriages. A masonry business he financed on credit cards collapsed. None of his children have attended college, and all hold what he calls "dead-end jobs."
Over the years he has "paid through the nose" for used cars, furniture, and appliances, he says. He has borrowed from short-term, high-interest lenders and once worked as a deliveryman for a rent-to-own store in Atlanta that allowed buyers to pay for televisions over time but ended up charging much more than a conventional retailer. "You would have paid for it three times," he says. As for himself, he adds: "I've had plenty of accounts that have gone into collection. I hope I can pay them before I die." His biggest debts now are medical bills related to a heart condition. He lives on $875 a month from Social Security.
Around the time his health problems ended his work as a bricklayer eight years ago, Humphries picked up a new hobby, computer programming. The shelves of the tidy two-room apartment where he lives alone, in a high-rise on Atlanta's crime-ridden South Side, are crammed with books on programming languages Java, C++, and HTML. He spends most days at his PC on a wooden desk nestled in the corner.
When his computer broke down in 2005, Humphries fretted that he would never be able to afford a new one. A solution appeared one night in a TV ad for a company with a catchy name. BlueHippo offered "top-of-the-line" PCs, no credit check necessary. He telephoned the next day.
He remembers the woman on the other end describing the computer in vague terms, but she was emphatic about getting his checking account information. She said BlueHippo would debit the account for $124, and Humphries then would owe 17 payments of $71.98 every other week. At the time, $800 would have bought a faster computer at Circuit City Stores, (CC ) but he didn't have the cash.
It wasn't until a week after placing his order that he realized that BlueHippo's terms meant he would pay $1,347.66 over nine months, Humphries says. He called to cancel. The company told him that would take as many as 10 days, he says. When he called again, a week later, a customer-service representative said cancellation would take an additional 15 days. "I sensed then that I had my hand in the lion's mouth," Humphries says. During his next call, a phone rep told him BlueHippo had a no-refund policy. He would lose his $124, even though he had never received a computer.
Humphries takes some responsibility for this frustrating encounter. "I should have done my homework" before ordering, he says. But he also believes he was "strong-armed" out of $124. He was angry enough to send a detailed complaint to the attorney general of Maryland, where BlueHippo is based. That led to his becoming a lead plaintiff in a private class action pending in California against the company. The suit alleges that scores of customers were similarly duped. BlueHippo denies the allegation and says it treats all customers fairly.
The attorneys general of New York and West Virginia are investigating the company, and the Illinois AG has filed a consumer-protection suit in that state. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request by BusinessWeek, the Federal Trade Commission says it has accumulated 8,000 pages of consumer complaints about BlueHippo. The FTC is investigating whether the company has engaged in deceptive practices.
Chief Executive Joseph K. Rensin started BlueHippo four years ago at the same Baltimore address where he had operated a company called Creditrust Corp. Creditrust, which bought other companies' bad customer debts, enjoyed some success but ultimately slid into Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. In 2005, Rensin and his insurer agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle shareholder allegations that he made misleading statements in an attempt to inflate Creditrust's stock. Rensin and the company denied acting improperly.
Rensin established himself anew with BlueHippo, whose cartoon mascot adorns a sign in the lobby of its Baltimore building. Most of the 200 employees inside answer phones. Call-center training materials reviewed by BusinessWeek refer to BlueHippo's prime prospects as families, "typically $25k/yr income & less" who "have had trouble getting credit."
BlueHippo sells well-known brands such as Apple Inc. (AAPL ) computers and Sony Corp. (SNE ) televisions. Gateway Inc. (GTW ) became a major supplier in December, 2003. "We've clearly been aware of their business model from the get-go," says Gateway spokesman David Hallisey. More recently, Gateway became troubled by customer complaints and decided earlier this year to sever ties with BlueHippo. Given its knowledge all along about BlueHippo's methods, why did the separation occur only this year? Hallisey explains: "We're publicly traded and trying to make a profit, so that's a consideration."
Three former workers say BlueHippo typically tries to commit consumers to regular electronic debits, then, as in the Humphries case, stalls when they cancel orders or ask about receiving shipment. Many customers give up, according to these employees. Refusing refunds, the company keeps whatever money it receives, whether or not it ships a computer, the trio of former employees say. "We knew we were misleading people. They weren't getting their computers," says Quinn Smith, a former call-center salesman who says he was fired last December after complaining about these practices. Smith has provided information to the plaintiffs in the California class action but isn't a party to the suit.
Rensin declined to comment. In a written statement, the company denied any impropriety. It said it ships purchases when promised, though it acknowledged that consumers who can purchase products outright "are better off" doing so, rather than using its "hybrid" layaway and installment financing. The company confirmed that it refuses refunds but said customers may "use any funds paid to purchase other items from BlueHippo." It added that its prices are relatively high because of the "added risk of dealing with customers who have poor credit." In contrast to its training materials, the company said its typical customer earns more than $40,000 a year.
A few months after his BlueHippo experience, Humphries did buy a new computer. He borrowed $400 from a friend and bought a General Quality PC from Fry's Electronics, a retail chain. The loan covered the purchase of a 17-inch flat-screen monitor, a DVD burner, and a desktop computer with a 40-gigabyte hard drive. Humphries tightened his belt and paid his friend back in $100 installments over four months, interest-free.
JUST LIKE EVERYONE else, the working poor find their mailboxes stuffed with "pre-approved" credit card offers. Luisa and Rose Ajuria have trouble saying no. The Ajuria sisters live in a brown-brick bungalow on Chicago's financially pressed South Side. They care for a niece named Caroline and five cats. Neither sister studied past high school or married. "Momma said I wasn't college material," says Luisa, 57. She and Rose, 54, lived most of their lives under the strict supervision of their father, Manuel, who died in 1993. A Mexican immigrant and former sheet-metal press operator, he dutifully paid all the bills. Every week, Luisa handed him her paycheck from Warshawsky & Co., an auto-parts seller where she worked as a supervisor.
The sisters now manage their finances themselves—by their own admission, badly. Their father had paid off the $60,000 mortgage. But twice in the past six years, Luisa refinanced the cluttered bungalow, using the money to pay bills and repair aging fixtures in two bathrooms and the kitchen of the 75-year-old house. Now there's a new $140,000 mortgage, with Wells Fargo charging 8% interest. The $1,130 monthly payments eat up more than half of Luisa's paycheck from her current job as a secretary at the IRS. If she also made full payments on a $9,000 home-equity line of credit from HSBC Finance Corp. (HBC ) and a half-dozen credit-card accounts, they would consume the rest. In total, Luisa owes creditors $169,585. "I don't read things. I just sign them," she says.
The debt has forced the Ajurias to consider selling their house and moving to an apartment. But it hasn't stopped companies from offering more credit. Last year, Rose received a come-on for a Tribute MasterCard. She was surprised a company would offer her credit, since she brings in only about $7,500 a year in disability benefits and wages as a part-time worker at an adult-day-care center. She signed up for the card.
Caroline, the 32-year-old niece, who is agoraphobic and rarely leaves the house, quickly ran up $1,268 in charges on the Tribute card, shopping online for Christmas and birthday gifts. Of her newest card, Rose says: "I regret this one. Truly, I do."
Terms of the Tribute MasterCard are a world away from the money-back and frequent-flier offers familiar to more prosperous cardholders. Marketed by Atlanta-based CompuCredit, a giant in the subprime card business, Tribute MasterCard offers no such fringe benefits. Rose Ajuria's card carries an interest rate of 28%, compared with about 10% on a typical card. Since she's paying only a nominal $10 a month, the debt her niece incurred is growing swiftly. "I think we've painted ourselves into a corner," Rose says. Many Tribute MasterCard customers pay a lower 20% interest, but CompuCredit typically charges them a $150 annual fee, a separate $6 monthly fee, and a one-time payment of $20 required before using the card.
This is the sort of choppy water where many of CompuCredit's customers paddle—and where the company manages to find profits. CompuCredit was co-founded 11 years ago by David G. Hanna, scion of a family that made a fortune in debt collection. Its 55-member analytics team has devised models to assess more than 200 categories of customer data, from the duration of past credit-card accounts to the number of bad debts. The algorithms apparently work: Last year, CompuCredit reported earnings of $107 million on $1.3 billion in revenue.
Whether the company will make money on Rose Ajuria's account is uncertain at this point. CompuCredit says that customers offered the Tribute MasterCard at 28% generally have middling credit histories and that it is willing to work with those who have trouble paying their bills.
Executives say the company clearly discloses interest rates and imposes fees up front so consumers won't be surprised later. But in February CompuCredit disclosed that the FTC and the FDIC had launched separate civil investigations into the marketing of one of its other credit cards. The company denies any wrongdoing. As a goodwill gesture, it says it has stopped charging late fees and interest on accounts more than 90 days past due.
On its Web sites and in its marketing brochures, CompuCredit says it helps customers "rebuild credit" by reporting all of their loan payments to credit bureaus, unlike traditional payday lenders. Not that altruism drives the operation, says co-founder Hanna. "We're not going to chase somebody where we can't make money."
EVEN FOR THOSE WHO climb above the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, a legacy of debt can threaten to undercut progress. Connie McBride, a 44-year-old computer programmer who lives near Tacoma, Wash., grew up in foster homes and has led an adult life notably lacking in stability. She has held decent jobs but sometimes has subsisted on food stamps. She earns $47,000 a year as a freelance programmer, working from the weather-beaten aluminum trailer she rents for $590 a month. Wind whistles through small holes in the walls, and she keeps warm in the winter by feeding a wood-fired stove on a cracked cement foundation.
McBride showed an early aptitude for math and received a GED at age 16. In the late 1980s, she studied computer science at Washington State University, sometimes arriving for class with her three young children. "Taking those classes, given my life, I felt this was the only way out," she says.
She graduated in 1992, owing $45,000 on student loans. That debt became her main financial burden, she says. The 9.5% interest rate isn't particularly steep, but she tended to view the payments as less pressing than putting food on the table or paying rent. Late fees piled up. Today she owes $159,991, up from $117,000 only 18 months ago. When dunning notices arrive, she tosses them in the stove.
Personal bankruptcy proceedings in 2003 dissolved dozens of McBride's liabilities. But by law her debt to student lender SLM Corp. (SLM ), better known as Sallie Mae, wasn't affected. Every month, $450 is garnisheed from her wages, reducing her take-home pay to $1,338. The garnishment doesn't even cover interest and penalties, let alone the principal. Says McBride: "There's no way this thing will ever be paid off."
New obligations are piling up. She pays $385 a month on a 21% car loan. And now she's buying baby supplies. McBride says her adult son can't deal with his 4-month-old daughter, who has medical problems. McBride can't bear the thought of her granddaughter going to a foster home. So she is postponing nonessential expenditures such as fixing a badly chipped front tooth.
McBride acknowledges her mistakes. "My life is full of bad decisions," she says. But if she had started out with the funds for college, she wonders whether she would at least be able to afford an apartment and a trip to the dentist. "If you have money to begin with, you don't have these issues or these kinds of bills," she says. "You don't have to worry about the rent or pay double for a car."
With Ben Elgin and Mara Der Hovanesian
09:32 -
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On the Web, an Advanced Carbon Calculator for Personal Use
Plus, links to the carbon calculator site and also one to an ecofootprint site (tidbit - London's is bigger than Spain!).
- Tim
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/technology/15energy.html
 On the Web, an Advanced Carbon Calculator for Personal Use
By STEVE LOHR
A new Internet tool to help individuals and communities curb their role in adding global-warming carbon emissions will be announced today at a conference in New York of mayors from around the world, said a person who built the Web technology.
Many environmental groups offer simple carbon calculators on the Web, which allow people to figure the carbon dioxide production from daily routines like driving a car or lighting a house.
"But this is serious software, serious quantitative methods and social networking technology brought to the green world," said Ron Dembo, the chief executive of Zerofootprint, a nonprofit group that provides information and services to combat global warming.
Mr. Dembo, a founder of an analytics software company and a former computer scientist at Yale University, said details of the Web service would be described today at the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit, by David Miller, the mayor of Toronto.
The Web service, called GoZero Footprint City Calculator, is a collaboration of Zerofootprint and Business Objects, a maker of business intelligence software. Bernard Liautaud, the chairman of Business Objects, said that his company had joined the project as an initial step in using its software to help people on the Web create a "collective intelligence" to address humanitarian issues.
On the interactive climate site, people will be able to enter data, see the carbon effect and how their carbon footprint compares with averages in their city and in cities worldwide. They will also be able to do what-if simulations, to see how changes in their activities affect carbon emissions. The anonymous data will be collected for analysis by climate change scientists and others.
A link to the new site, Mr. Dembo said, will be at the "initiatives" section of Zerofootprint.net.
"The idea," he said, "is something that will address millions of people and is infinitely customizable to any culture or lifestyle."
The top-down global warming policies of governments, Mr. Dembo said, like creating environmental regulations and product standards, are important. "But bottom-up is where we're really going to make progress," he said, "and this is a tool that can potentially enable a really massive carbon footprint reduction."
The mayors' summit is a four-day gathering that began yesterday with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as its host. It is partly sponsored by the Clinton Climate Initiative, a project led by former President Bill Clinton.
The meeting is the second mayors' climate summit; the first took place two years ago in London. Cities, according to the organizers, are responsible for three-quarters of the world's energy consumption, and have "a critical role to play in the reduction of carbon emissions and the reversal of dangerous climate change."
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Monday, May 14, 2007
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Let's be ungovernable! --- Alternative Libertaire
"I love you! Say it with cobblestones!"
- Tim
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/spip.php?article1081
[in English below, heathens ;-) ]
Soyons ingouvernables !
L'élection de Nicolas Sarkozy consacre la victoire d'un projet de casse sociale et de répression policière. Il aura été le candidat le plus ouvertement favorable aux patrons et à la classe dominante et il entend gouverner en servant aux mieux les intérêts du Medef. Il faut dès maintenant se préparer à riposter aux attaques à venir. Sur ce plan Sarkozy a clairement annoncé la couleur : casse du droit du travail avec le contrat unique, aménagement libéral des 35 heures, restriction du droit de grève, renforcement autoritaire du régime, durcissement sécuritaire, répression dans les quartiers populaires et intensification de la chasse aux sans-papiers.
C'est un véritable défi auquel vont être confrontés les classes populaires et le mouvement social et syndical. Face à un gouvernement et un patronat de combat il n'y a aucun crédit et aucune confiance à accorder au Parti socialiste cantonné dans une opposition parlementaire inoffensive et stérile, et qui de plus partage une bonne partie des orientations de l'UMP (casse des retraites, expulsion des sans-papiers…). Les travailleurs et les travailleuses n'ont rien à gagner à se laisser enfermer dans l'espoir hypothétique du redressement d'un Parti socialiste de plus en plus à droite.
Pour gagner plus il faudra lutter plus. La campagne électorale aura été marquée par des conflits sociaux (PSA-Aulnay, Airbus-Eads…) qui doivent inspirer les combats de demain. Mais pour mettre un coup d'arrêt au rouleau compresseur libéral il faut dépasser les batailles sans stratégie, les protestations sans lendemains et défendre une orientation autonome et unitaire des mouvements sociaux, déconnectée des calendriers politiciens et du jeu institutionnel.
Alternative libertaire, le 6 mai 2007
Let's be ungovernable! --- Alternative Libertaire
The election of Nicolas Sarkozy marks the victory of a project for social destruction and police repression. He is the candidate most openly favorable to the bosses and to the dominant class and he intends to govern in the best interests of the French employers' federation, the Medef.
We need to start preparing right away to counter the attacks to come. And Sarkozy has already clearly indicated his intentions: smashing labour law and the single contract, loosening the 35-hour week, restricting the right to strike, an authoritarian reinforcing of the regime, an increase in harsh "security" measures, repression of working-class districts and an intensification in the hunt for "sans-papiers".
The popular classes and the social and trades-union movements will now be confronted with a true challenge. Faced with a combative government and employers, no credit or confidence can be granted to a Socialist Party confined in its inoffensive and sterile parliamentary opposition, and which moreover shares many of the policies of the UMP [1] (pension reform, expulsion of "sans-papiers", etc.). Workers do not have anything to gain from allowing themselves to be chained to a hypothetical hope of a change of heart by an increasingly right-wing Socialist Party.
If we are to make any gains we will have to struggle for them. The election campaign have been marked by social conflicts (the strikes at the PSA Peugeot-Citroën factory in Aulnay-sous-Bois, Airbus-Eads, etc.) which must serve as inspirations for future fights. But to put a halt to the neo-liberal juggernaut, we need to put an end to struggles without strategy, protests without follow-ups and defend the autonomy and unity of the social movements, free from interference by the agendas of political parties and institutional games.
Alternative Libertaire
6 May 2007
Translation by FdCA-International Relations
[Translator's note:
1. Union pour un Mouvement Populaire. Sarkozy's party, the "Union for a Popular Movement".]
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Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (Radical 60s, 9)
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Sunday, May 13, 2007
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Hot Air, Cold Cash - Who are the Merchants of Fear?
I post below a piece by Alex Cockburn, who is usually fairly cogent. This time he has lost the plot entirely - so first I have posted my response to him.
Ah, when the capitalist greedheads finally acknowledge a problem that they firmly denied for decades, it must be a ploy, say the Left, in predictable fashion. Just another way to make money. Companies giving in to green ideas have "adapted to prevailing fantasies" in order to attract revenue and are really in it just for that, their 'new' willingness to be seen to be green a mere greenwash.
Reality? Well, up to a point, for sure. Of course corporations will resist things that might harm their profits, and of course, once they realise a given trend is unbuckable, the will seek to co-opt it to make money and at the same time, no doubt, water down positive measures and sow confusion on the side.
But equally, it is a partial victory for those of us on the green and anarchist left, indeed for all life on the planet - global warming as a problem driven by human activity is now at last seriously on the agenda. To gain from it we must continue pressuring government, globalised intergovernmental bodies, and corporations... but we cannot afford to be SO suspicious of their motives that we decide we are wrong about the underlying issues. That is the whole point of greenwash co-option, and exactlky why Cockburn is throwing the baby out with the bathwater in such a simplistic fashion.
One problem of the old Left - if they see the 'bad guys' start to reform, they get pissed off and seek immediately to undermine it. Otherwise how can they bring on the revolution, comrade? How can they be the vanguard of the proletariat? How can they ever hope to attain the power they crave?
I have always distrusted this elitist secretive cellular hardcore leftist fascism, as much as that of the rightists. Those of us on the anarchist left must fight both sides, and as usual end up shot by both sides, as no-one else is willing to accept piecemeal reform that doesn't annihilate the opposition.
But, a leftist agenda to resist environmental awareness that is driven by dislike of some of the seeming new allies is horrifically destructive. We will find corporations that we barely trust helping the biosphere, and the left, who we are meant to identify with, arguing for the destruction of the biosphere in a dumb tantrum.
If we put all the idiotic and destructive rhetoric aside, Cockburn has a point - CO2 is far from being the only greenhouse gas, or the worst one per volume, but right now you'd think it was. Right now, for example, you'd wonder, if you were paying attention, why groups like the UK's The Big Ask keep having public meetings to get you and I to live differently but seem to be putting bugger all (public) pressure on the structural elements of the society we have created.
So, for example, I may be asked to live close to work, walk everywhere, eat and drink and use energy in more environmentally aware ways, etc (and fair enough, we must). But without pressure on businesses to locate smaller units close to communities, instead of huge ones on the edge of town; to promote cheaper nationalised public transport; to stop trying to halt all new road build on principle rather than look at the pros's and con's of each individual scheme; to enforce affordable housing close to workplaces; to insist on eco-values for new build that are not so heavily compromised by the power of the construction lobby, etc (ie, things that are out of our hands in the current deeply economically undemocratic western societies, that are structural, and that we as individual actors cannot affect much), what they ask has no purpose as it is impossible for most of us to give without subsidy and welfare.
If the corporate world sets the agenda then the "grow-or-die" lie that the capitalists so believe will do for us all. But not because they are all lying scum that don't care about the environment a jot - some of them no doubt are, and those ones are entrenched and hidden in a system designed to ride roughshod over ordinary people. And to that extent I am one with Cockburn and the traditional Left.
But am I the only one who gets a whiff of the old Left's economic agenda being under threat, and an inkling that that might have more to do with the 'argument' below than any sense of justice or right?
The Left ideology grew out of nineteenth century values they shared with the Right. Economic growth models, science as a universal panacea, industrial wealth as an unquestioned good to be chased hard... Only differing on the way in which the ill gotten gains were shared out. An environmental awareness; an awareness that beyond a certain point growth equals death and that stable economies are not necessarily 'stagnant'; an awareness of ecological, systems ways of thinking... these and more are all missing on the Left as much as on the Right. Both seek material aggrandisment, despite the utopian visions of communist extremity. Both are outmoded and will kill us all if they have their way. Both have some ideas and concepts that are valid, and both share only some of these.
So a new political philosophy that takes from both, and neither, and is not identical to either, has been needed for a long time. One that takes on board the lessons of chaos and complexity theory, of tipping points, of critical mass, of phase change, of the stability of large complex and diverse systems over over-simplified and rigid ones. One that takes from Ormerod's The Death of Economics, Capra's The Turning Point, Bookchin's Post-Scarcity Anarchism & Towards an Ecological Society, McLuhman's Understanding Media, Lovelock's first works on Gaia, Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, some of the ideas in Herman Daly's Steady-State Economics, Robley E George's Socioeconomic Democracy, and Kevin Kelly's Out of Control to name but a very few.
That these guys are not all in agreement on ideological issues is in a way precisely the point, as it is a new ideology that is needed. The old ones are bankrupt and destroying us.
Ultimately, we need to be more mature than the global warming denier idiots. We need to refuse to let their ideas in at all. The corporates and the old left both have an interest in 'business as usual'. In the short term so do we all, but such short-term thinking is ultimately and clearly leading to our utter destruction. Do we have excessive consumption now and fuck all tomorrow? Or do we have less now and something tomorrow?
Of course global warming is real, of course it is ramping up due to human influences as well as natural ones (which, in fact, may be alleviating our actions, thus masking how dreadful they really are). Of course it is not the only issue, of course other gasses (such as, regarding climate change, methane) and industrial pollutants (such as, regarding reproductive issues for all mammals, birds, fish and amphibians, organo-chlorines) cannot be swept under the carpet with impunity. Of course industrialists will seek compromises that favour them in the short-term as that is the drive that capitalist share-holder democracy inevitably has, and of course we must fight that.
But Cockburn is attacking the facts not the misuse of the facts.
And that cannot but sow confusion where clarity is needed. He is doing the exact same thing as has been done for industry for twenty years, and is thus playing right into their hands. Those who sympathise with the climate change deniers just because it puts them at odds with those they hate must try and see more clearly and bravely and accept common ground with their enemies - and must recognise that their enemies enemy is not simplistically their ally. The left will fragment (as is traditional) over this control issue (and it is a control issue, not one about the facts), and a cohesive anti-capitalist opposition is needed - to oppose corporate capitalism and state capitalism.
Green anarchist communism has always been more in tune with what is needed (I won't use the word 'right' or 'correct', as there is much work to be done and any dogmatic ideology produced will by definition end up wrong) and has always threatened both of the powerful dominance hierarchies that surround us, left and right (as, fundamentally, they are one).
We must stand up and be counted, we must be heard, we must act - we are not alone, there are millions of us, and we must create a movement and we must attain a critical mass, and we must sideline corporate greenwash and traditional left obstinancy both.
- Tim
No response is more predictable than the reflexive squawk of the Greenhouse fearmongers that anyone questioning their claims is in the pay of the energy companies. A second, equally predictable retort contrasts the ever-diminishing number of agnostics to the growing legions of scientists now born again to the "truth" that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the earth's warming trend, the melting of the icecaps, the rising of the seas, the increase in hurricanes, the decline in penguin fertility and other horrors too numerous for individual citation.
Actually the energy companies have long since adapted to prevailing fantasies, dutifully reciting the whole catechism about carbon-neutrality, sniggering jovially over Tom Friedman's rapturous endorsement of "clean coal", repositioning themselves as eager pioneers in the search for virtuous alternative fuels, settling comfortably into new homes, such as British Petroleum's "Energy Biosciences Institute" on the UC Berkeley Campus, first fruit of a $500 million deal between the oil company and a campus whose founding family the Hearsts did after all make its pile in the mining business.
In fact, when it comes to corporate sponsorship of crackpot theories about why the world is getting warmer, the best documented conspiracy of interest is between the Greenhouser fearmongers and the nuclear industry, now largely owned by oil companies, whose prospects twenty years ago looked dark, amid headlines about the fall-out from Chernobyl, aging plants and nuclear waste dumps leaking from here to eternity. The apex Greenhouse fearmongers are well aware that the only exit from the imaginary crisis they have been sponsoring is through a door marked "nuclear power", with a servant's sidedoor labeled "clean coal". James Lovelock, the Rasputin of Gaia-dom, has said that "Nuclear power has an important contribution to make." (I refer those who rear back at the words "imaginary crisis" to my last column on this topic, where I emphasize that there is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely oversimplified computer models to finger mankind's sinful contribution.)
The world's best known hysteric and self promoter on the topic of man's physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear industry and the coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oakridge National Lab. White House "task forces" on climate change in the Clinton-Gore years were always well freighted by Gore and his adviser John Holdren with nukers like John Papay of Bechtel.
As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump up budgets and rabblerouse the voters. By the mid Nineties he positioned himself at the head of a strategic and tactical alliance formed around "the challenge of climate change", which had now stepped forward to take Communism's place in the threatosphere essential to all political life. Indeed, it was in the New Republic, a tireless publicist of the Soviet menace in the late 70s and Reagan 80s, that Gore announced in 1989 that the war on warming couldn't be won without a renewal in spiritual values.
The footsoldiers in this alliance have been the grant-guzzling climate modelers and their Internationale, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose collective scientific expertise is reverently invoked by all devotees of the Greenhouse fearmongers' catechism. Aside from the fact that the graveyard of intellectual error is stuffed with the myriad tombstones of "overwhelming scientific consensus", the IPCC has the usual army of functionaries and grant farmers, and the merest sprinkling of actual scientists with the prime qualification of being climatologists or atmospheric physicists.
To identify either the government-funded climate modelers or their political shock troops, the IPCC's panelists, with scientific rigor and objectivity is as unrealistic as detecting the same attributes in a craniologist financed by Lombroso studying a murderer's head in a nineteenth-century prison for the criminally insane. The craniologist' fingers and calipers were programmed by the usual incentives of stipends, grants and professional ego to find in the skull of that murderer ridges, bumps and depressions, each meticulously equated with an ungovernable passion, an ethnic deficit or a mental derangement. The murderer's individual head became a universal model, the particular promoted to an unassailable theory.
At least Lombroso and his retinue measured heads. All Al Gore has ever needed is a hot day or some heavy rain as opportunity to promote the unassailable theory of man-made global warming. Come a rainy summer ('95), a perfectly routine El Nino ('97) or forest fire in Florida ('98) and Gore was there for the photo op, the uplifted finger warning of worse warming to come. '97 also found Gore in Glacier National Park, pointing at Grinnell glacier and telling the press gravely that it was melting, which indeed it has been since the end of the Little Ice Age,1450 to 1800. Mid-latitude glaciers expanded then, just as they contracted in the Medieval Warming Period, hotter than today and thus so vexing to climate alarmists like Michael Mann (now a reigning weather bureaucrat at the IPCC) that they had wiped it off their historical temperature graphs, just like an editor in Stalin's time cropping a team photo of early Bolsheviks to get rid of recently anathematized undesirables.
Man-made global warming theory is fed by pseudo quantitative predictions from climate-careerists working primarily off the big, mega-computer General Circulation Models which include the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the Department of Commerce's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab, a private GCM which used to be at Oregon State before the University of Illinois lured the team away. There's another one at Livermore and one in England, at Hadley.
These are multi-billion dollar computer model programming bureaucracies as intent on self-preservation and budgetary enhancement as cognate nuclear bureaucracies at Oakridge and Los Alamos.
They are as unlikely to develop models confuting the hypothesis of human-induced global warming as is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to say the weather is possibly getting a little bit warmer but that there's no great cause for alarm and indeed some reason for rejoicing, since this warming (whose natural causes I discussed in that recent column) gives us a longer growing season and increased CO2, a potent plant fertiliser. Welcome global greening.
Back in the early 1970s, in agencies such as its Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) the UN did nourish some quite radical plans for a new international economic order, one establishing more favorable terms of trade for the poorer nations. By the late 70s all such hopes were vanishing under the neoliberal tide and the Reagan-Clinton era finished them off. By the late 1980s the UN high brass clearly perceived the "challenge" of climate change to be the horse to ride to build up the organization's increasingly threadbare moral authority, and to claim a role beyond that of being an obvious American errand boy. In 1988, the United Nations Environment Program, originally formed in 1972, was united in unholy bureaucratic matrimony with the UN's World Meteorological Organization, giving us the IPCC.
The cycle of alarmist predictions is now well established. Not so long before some new UN moot on What To Do About the Weather, a prominent fearmonger like James Hansen or Michael Mann will make a tremulous statement about the accelerating tempo and dimensions of the warming crisis.
The cry is taken up by the IPCC, (and in the 1990s, by the Clinton/Gore White House), with the press releases headlined by the New York Times, with exactly the same intentional lack of critical evaluation as that newspaper's recycling of the government's lies about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Months and years later come the qualifications and the retractions, long after new contracts and grants have been awarded, and fresh legions hired to staff the ever-expanding empires of the threatmongers. (The Pentagon has at last caught on, and instructed by a glitzy admiral-led study from the Center for Naval Analysis, is building the intellectual foundation for huge new budget increases based on hypothetical connections between global warming and burgeoning, famine-driven terrorism.)
When measured reality doesn't cooperate with the lurid model predictions, new compensating "factors" are concocted, such as the briefly popular sulfate aerosols of the 1990os, recruited to cool off the obviously excessive heat predicted by the models. Or the existing, inconvenient data are water-Xboarded into submission as happened with the ice-core samples that fail to confirm the modellers' need for record temperatures today as opposed to half a million years ago. As Richard Kerr, Science magazine's man on global warming remarked, "Climate modelers have been 'cheating' for so long it's become almost respectable."
The consequence? As with the arms spending spiral powered by the Cold War merchants of fear, vast amounts of money will be uselessly spent on programs that won't work against an enemy that doesn't exist. Meanwhile, real and curable environmental perils are scanted or ignored. Hysteria rules the day, drowning urgently needed environmental cleanup in our backyard while smoothing the way for the nuclear industry to reap its global rewards.
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Check out Justice! Apparel: Now Available!
Advertisement shocker! (No we don't get a cut!):
- Tim
Check out Justice! Apparel: Now Available!
Comrades,
Finally, Justice! Apparel is up and running locally! Were printing on American Apparel which is 100% sweatshop free garments made here in the states! All these designs are available in a variety of colors and styles including new vintage tees (my personal fav!) The shirts are available now for $20.00 +Shipping.. $5.00 from every shirt will be donated accordingly to either Amnesty International, The Chiapas Media Project, The mobilization to Free Mumia Abu Jamal, and the Leonard Peltier Defense committee. Contact me through myspace for ordering.. Justiceapparel.com coming soon as well!
Please take part in wearing the resistance!
You will receive a free burned copy of the Loose Change dvd with a purchase from Justice! Apparel. This is an independant documentary examining the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and the U.s Governments criminal negligence and probable involvement in the attacks. There is no copyright on this dvd. You are encouraged to make copies, hold public viewings, and show to this everyone before it is too late!
COLORS AVAILABLE:
    
    
Here is a Complete list of all designs available in large size so you can see what you'll be getting!
(Note: this design looks MUCH better on the actual shirt.. it is a white ransparent image so it doesn't look right with a color behind it)
(Note: this design looks MUCH better on the actual shirt.. it is a transparent image so it doesn't look right with a color behind it. i would also only recommend ordering this shirt in black for best look)
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Zapatista Stories
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Subcomandante Marcos
Release date: By 15 October, 2001
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Saturday, May 12, 2007
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Global Warming Suspicions and Confusions
- Tim
Global Warming Suspicions and Confusions
by Justin Podur
May 11, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=57&ItemID=12796
In recent years, a number of important contributions have influenced the growing debate on global warming. Paul Baer and Tom Athanasiou's book, Dead Heat, from a few years ago, was excellent. Noam Chomsky's latest book, Failed States, mentions global warming as one of the three more urgent problems humanity faces (the others being war and the lack of democratic institutions to deal with problems). George Monbiot's new book, Heat, provides a workable set of proposals for stabilizing the climate without draconian sacrifice (except commercial flight).
Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth cuts back and forth between cogent explanations of climate science and self-aggrandizement (Gore on the farm, Gore walking to the stage, Gore changing planes at the airport, Gore doing product placement typing on his Mac computer). Properly filtered, however, it provides an excellent introductory lecture on climate change. I wish that it had come from someone else, someone who hadn't vice-presided over the Iraq sanctions regime and the bombing of Yugoslavia. But the fact that Gore made it popular doesn't make it a sham. The terms of discussion for any major problem are usually set by elites, with the rest of us trying to sort out truth from falsehood and sensible policy from corporate propaganda after the fact.
Scientific issues, like any issues, take work and time to understand. Those who can't take the time to delve into the issues, and no one can delve into everything, look for credible sources. To leftists, Gore is simply not a credible source. He is seen as an apologist for the powerful interests he served while in office and callous about the people who suffered under his rule. Furthermore, leftists are suspicious of any elite consensus, including a scientific one. They know that dubious science is often trotted out to state why some regressive policy or other is justified. Leftists therefore need people credible to them to go back and do what Gore and Flannery did – to explain the basics of climate science. Much of what they would explain would be the same as Gore does, and the same ways – but it would not come from a tainted source, nor would it be tainted by political campaigning. Both Baer/Athanasiou's Dead Heat and Monbiot's Heat accept the scientific consensus on global warming and do not spend much time on the basic science, leaving that field to people like Gore and popular science writers like Tim Flannery, who wrote The Weather Makers.
The first problem for leftists trying to understand climate science is that they cannot trust Gore and they cannot automatically trust the scientific consensus. The next problem is that the best-known proposed solutions for dealing with the problem are flawed. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, is completely inadequate for stabilizing emissions. Carbon emissions trading and markets are designed to provide incentives to corporate emitters. Biofuels, in the form of palm oil and sugarcane plantations, are helping to displace peasants through paramilitary massacre in Colombia, contributing to dangerous food shortages, and in any case cause CO2 emissions just like fossil fuels do. If credible science is mixed with dubious pro-corporate policy, which is what Gore has to offer, leftists might feel the sensible thing to do is reject the whole package.
They need not do so, however. Monbiot's book, Heat, is principally about climate policy, and what policies would be necessary in order to stabilize the climate. He is not an advocate for carbon markets, which he recognizes as providing incentives to corporate polluters. What he does advocate, as Baer & Athanasiou advocated in Dead Heat, is a per-capita emissions quota, the same for everyone in the world. If only a certain amount of total CO2 emission is compatible with a stable climate, then the right to emit ought to be the same for everyone. Baer & Athanasiou's book, and their website, ecoequity.org, discuss a stabilization policy based on a per capita emissions quota. They argue that, because people in poor countries emit much less than their right and people in rich countries emit much more, a credible stabilization policy would include both reduction of emissions in the rich countries and the reduction of global inequality. Monbiot's book focuses on feasible technological and policy changes for bringing the CO2 emissions of first-world countries down to the per-capita quota. By showing that the worst emitters could achieve the necessary reduction without significant suffering, Monbiot debunks the notion that stabilizing the climate requires brutal austerity or the continuation of third-world poverty.
Monbiot is also clear on another point: that the impacts of global warming, like environmental problems in general, are not the same for everyone. Many environmentalists, including climate activists, believe that because we all have to live on the planet, we can all agree that environmental problems must be solved. But the wealthy and powerful have always been able to insulate themselves from the effects of environmental problems. They appropriate the territories and resources they want and leave others to starve or die. The hardest hit peoples, in countries like Bangladesh and Ethiopia, are those who are already suffering tremendously. Hurricane Katrina in the United States is another case of how "natural" disaster does not unite elites with people but, instead, can be used to entrench ever more regressive relations.
If elites also control the parameters of discussion on a problem such as global warming, they can be expected to advocate not solving it, as they know their interests will be served regardless. If elites are advocating solutions, they will advocate solutions that will protect their interests, whether these actually solve the problem or not. Advocacy of ignoring or denying the problem is the model for parts of the petroleum industry, right-wing politicians and movements, and their PR machinery, which Monbiot calls "the Denial Industry". Advocacy of "solutions" that serve elite interests is the model for advocates of carbon markets and watered-down versions of Kyoto.
This leaves leftists, who oppose elite agendas, with two options. First, their suspicion of the sources on the science can lead them to the position that the scientific consensus is wrong. Alternatively, they can accept the science and then reject elite proposals for dealing with the problem and propose alternative policy suggestions in light of their own values and priorities, which is what I believe Monbiot has done, and Baer/Athanasiou before him.
Recent essays by leftists Alexander Cockburn, Denis Rancourt, and David Noble, in contrast, take the first position. They are reacting to a recent change in elite strategy on the problem of global warming. The initial elite strategy was that of complete denial, and it was successful in delaying any action on climate change for crucial years. The recent change of strategy by part of the elite (prompted perhaps by increasing evidence in every field that global warming is happening) seems to be to try to co-opt and control the discussion, if not of the problem itself, then of the possible solutions for it. These three activists (Cockburn, Rancourt, & Noble, or CRN) have reasonable suspicions of this rapid change of elite strategy and its expression in media hype about climate change. Their reactions, however, are in error. If their views are adopted by many leftists, elites will be able to claim that leftists are anti-science and anti-green, when what people most need are sensible green proposals that are also in accord with values of justice, equality, and solidarity.
In an essay on Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn makes a number of claims about climate science that indicate a dismissal of the scientific consensus. He claims there is "zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend," for example. But the mechanism by which atmospheric CO2 causes warming ("the greenhouse effect") is well understood. So is the fact that anthropogenic production of CO2 is increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. And so, too, is the current warming trend, which Cockburn acknowledges. Cockburn seeks to break the chain of reasoning (from CO2 causing warming, to anthropogenic increases of CO2 in the atmosphere contributing to warming) by suggesting that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 do not change atmospheric CO2 levels. He does so by referring to some data on CO2 emissions and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere from the 1920s and 1930s that say when anthropogenic emissions were low due to the Great Depression CO2 in the atmosphere did not change. He interprets this to mean that "it is impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from human burning of fossil fuels." But it is the very fact that CO2 is long-lived in the atmosphere (compared to water vapour, for example) that makes emissions of it such a serious problem. Even if the data he presents are accurate (the most reliable records of atmospheric CO2 begin in the 1960s) they cannot be taken to mean what he says they do. They could, instead, simply mean that there is a lag between changes in CO2 emission and changes in atmospheric concentration. One analogy a reader of the article at realclimate.org suggested was this: if you are filling a bathtub and turn off the tap, the bathtub does not instantly empty, nor does the fact that it doesn't empty make it impossible to assert a connection between the tap and the amount of water in the tub.
Cockburn was also answered in more general terms by Monbiot, who cautioned against dismissing an entire body of science with a series of fairly random assertions. Some of Cockburn's specific scientific claims were answered by climate scientists at realclimate.org. Cockburn was using his scientific claims as part of a larger argument that the market in CO2 emissions was like the market in papal indulgences during medieval times – a release for people's consciences that made profits for elites (the church in medieval times, corporations today) while exploiting people's guilt (for sin then or emissions now) without fundamentally changing anything. This valid point about carbon markets is thus combined with a dismissal of climate science and global warming as a serious problem using a number of false and discredited claims as evidence. This is too bad, because it will make readers doubt his other insights, and it abets the climate deniers.
Denis Rancourt, a physics professor and activist at the University of Ottawa, published a similar essay on his blog some weeks ago. In it, he sets out some of the standard scientific claims presented by denial industry spokespeople. These include notions that water vapor and solar radiation are the real culprit, not CO2 emissions, that warming is not such a big deal, and other arguments. Realclimate.org explain how water vapor is a greenhouse gas, and an important one, but it is much more short-lived in the atmosphere than CO2, and this makes it a "feedback", not a "forcing" like CO2 is. Realclimate.org also explains solar forcing: There are fluctuations in solar radiation, but they are not sufficient to explain the warming trend, nor would even the presence of significant solar radiation fluctuations make CO2 irrelevant. They also explain the lag between CO2 and temperature in the glacial record. Another useful resource to accompany Rancourt's essay is this collection of Q/A on "How to talk to a climate skeptic", by Coby Beck.
Rancourt's essay ends with a long list of "selected supporting references", but there are no citations for his individual claims, and therefore no way of knowing what references he has selected or whether it actually supports what he is saying. In between making his own scientific claims, which we are supposed to accept on his authority as a physicist, he argues that scientists are not to be believed and the scientific consensus is not to be trusted because "scientists are simple beings" who follow the herd. There is a contradiction here, between Rancourt making scientific claims in his blog, which we are supposed to accept because he is a scientist, and his attacking all scientists and all of science as conformist and conservative, which we are to accept on his authority, perhaps because of his inside knowledge of scientists.
I disagree with Rancourt on this entire issue of science. While science can be manipulated and a few scientists can always be found to provide the right statement for the right price (whether on climate, tobacco, or pharmaceuticals) I believe there are some things that can be known about the natural world, and scientists have uncovered some of these things, including about the climate system. How this knowledge is spun or used or ignored is another matter. But the appeal of science is that, given time and effort, we can understand things about the world. While this is no reason to completely defer to scientists, it is reason to give weight to arguments that are supported by the cumulative efforts of thousands of people who have spent time and care looking into an issue - more weight, in any case, than arguments recycled from the petroleum-funded denial industry.
In contrast, Rancourt's anti-science arguments suggest that there is no way to get at an objective understanding of the climate or, by extension, any other situation. Rancourt leaves readers to accept only his authority. The political or policy core of Rancourt's essay is, again, an attack on CO2 markets. He advocates various leftist policies, and argues that leftists should advocate these without reference to CO2 emissions or global warming, which is, to him, a dangerous diversion. By combining discredited scientific claims about global warming, an attack on science itself, and leftist positions on numerous issues, Rancourt has associated decent left positions with discredited and false claims and arguments.
David Noble, a friend of Rancourt's, a professor at York University and an activist, was, according to Rancourt's blog, inspired by Rancourt to write about the "global climate coup" for Canadian Dimension. Noble's argument is that global warming politics have derailed the global justice movement and diverted it into the dead end of CO2 markets. He shows how elite think-tanks and corporations have endorsed "solutions" to global warming that will increase their profits and power. His research on the corporate connections of various groups, first of the denialist persuasion, and then of the market-solutions persuasion, is useful. But he loses most of his credibility in his introduction, which implies that global warming is a funny joke:
"Don't breathe. There's a total war on against CO2 emissions, and you are releasing CO2 with every breath. The multi-media campaign against global warming now saturating our senses, which insists that an increasing CO2 component of greenhouse gases is the enemy, takes no prisoners: you are either with us or you are with the"deniers." No one can question the new orthodoxy or dare risk the sin of emission."
His credibility is further harmed by his conclusion, in which he calls Monbiot a dupe of the elite group that is creating hype about global warming, whose message Monbiot "unwittingly peddles with such passion." Noble calls Monbiot's book "embarrassing in its funneled focus and its naive deference to the authority of science... as if there was such a thing as science that was not also politics." Unlike Cockburn and Rancourt, Noble does not get into dubious scientific claims, but he does present global warming as if it is a diversionary elite campaign, or simply a joke, and not a serious problem. He could have made his case that elites are trying to divert attention from actual solutions to the problem (the substantive part of Monbiot's book, only the introduction of which Noble quotes) and towards creating new markets and new privileges and powers for themselves without so flippantly dismissing concern about the climate, presenting that concern as nothing more than an elite agenda, or suggesting that all science was politicized. By doing so, he associates a useful critique of elite cooptation of climate politics with a misrepresentation of the problem, its urgency, and the potential for solutions.
The strength of Monbiot's book is its presentation of a set of policies that could stabilize the climate in accord with values of justice and equity. Monbiot is as hard on phony capitalist climate schemes as Cockburn, Rancourt, or Noble (CRN) are, but he does not rest his political analysis on an attack on a body of science (as Cockburn and Rancourt do), or on an attack on science itself (as Rancourt and Noble do). The problem with these authors' mixing sensible policy proposals and cautions with false scientific claims and an anti-science tone is analogous to the problem of Gore's mixing of sensible science with elite agendas. If suspicion of Gore and elite CO2 market advocacy can drive leftists like CRN towards a position denying that global warming is a problem, then a reliance on discredited science or anti-science positions by leftists like CRN can drive people away from leftists (and leftists certainly don't need more ways of driving people away). The need is for leftists to understand and explain the science of global warming and to think of and advocate proposals for solving the problem in accord with values of equality and solidarity. Both Monbiot and Baer/Athanasiou have done some of that work. Instead CRN reject the science and dismiss the solutions like Kyoto or CO2 markets not because they are inadequate (which they are) or because they serve elite agendas (which they do), but because they conclude that there is no problem to solve in the first place. CRN are trying to open the wrong debate. Rather than a debate over the validity of discredited scientific positions, what is needed is a debate on how to resist the elite agendas that have led to the warming, then to its denial, and that now seek to co-opt movements for change. On this, I hope CRN might eventually agree.
Justin Podur is a writer and editor for ZNet. He can be reached at justin@killingtrain.com.
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Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
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Friday, May 11, 2007
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Old Punks Never Die (Quinones on Biafra)
I am running here a piece from the Miami New Times on Jello Biafra. But first here is a link to a (slightly out of date and a bit quickly stuck together) web piece I did on the US Greens (including Biafra) a few years back - The Green Movement in America - and some tasters of what Biafra is about in the shape of lyrics from DK (that they have since updated to keep topical, as have, amongst others, the Disposable Heroes of HipHoprisy in their cover version) and tracks from Mojo Nixon & The Toadliquors, and Coldcut (each around 3Mb):
- Tim
 Old Punks Never Die:
Just ask former Dead Kennedy howler Jello Biafra, who remains very much alive and ready to call you out on your B.S.
By Alexandra Quiñones
Miami New Times
Published: May 10, 2007
It's a thin line between punk and poser. So how do you tell the difference? Do Mohawks, homemade tattoos, and musical elitism comprise the punk checklist? Not so much. Try: fighting censorship, singing in an influential band, and running an indie label. Those are the major accomplishments of one Eric Reed Boucher, better known by his stage name, Jello Biafra, the punk rock prototype.
At 48 years old, Biafra has a wider midsection and thinner hair than he did back in the Seventies, when he first made his name as the founder and lead singer of the seminal outfit the Dead Kennedys. His personality remains as fiery as ever. The DKs released five LPs in a brief but frenzied career, including such classic punk anthems as "California Über Alles" and "Holiday in Cambodia." After the controversial band broke up in 1986, Biafra continued to ruffle feathers with his spoken word performances.
Whether singing or speaking, Biafra has espoused the same message for almost 30 years: Our government is corrupt, war is evil, and the media lies. He is a perfectly preserved relic of the ideals that emerged from the late-Seventies/early-Eighties punk scene, his beliefs almost completely unchanged, except for one thing. "I changed my mind about voting," he tells New Times, during a recent phoner from his Bay Area home. "I was very anti-voting for a while. I did my duty and registered when I was eighteen and voted for Jimmy Carter to get the Ford/Nixon regime out of office. Not much really changed and I just got fed up with the lack of choice. But then Frank Zappa and others talked me back into voting, pointing out how important local elections are."
 The former rocker would know a thing or two about local elections: He ran for mayor of San Francisco in 1979, winning almost four percent of the votes. These days he saves the political pranksterism for his speeches. Biafra is currently touring for his latest spoken word album, In the Grip of Official Treason. After that he'll be laying down a track for a Reverend Horton Heat tribute album, playing a crooked TV evangelist in the movie Price of Pieces, and working with his label, Alternative Tentacles, which, among other things, will be releasing a double album for the notorious old school Miami punk band, the Eat.
When he's not busy on the lecture circuit, Biafra still dabbles in the occasional music project. He's collaborated with the likes of Ministry's Al Jourgenson (for the Biafra side project, Lard), D.O.A., Nomeansno, and most recently, the Melvins.
"I never have normal days," he notes. "I have abnormal days. That's the downside of being my own boss, I always have more work to do, sixteen to twenty hours a day. On the other hand, it ain't all work if there's not any boss in a suit or any Hollywood pimp telling me what to do."
While Biafra has never been one to take orders, plenty of folks have tried to muzzle the wild orator. In 1986 the Parents' Music Resource Center (PMRC) — the gang of moralist moms led by none other than Tipper Gore — objected to an allegedly obscene poster included in the Dead Kennedys album, Frankenchrist. He wound up charged by the Los Angeles District Attorney for "distribution of harmful material." Charges were eventually dropped, but not until after a long and costly legal battle intended, Biafra contends, to silence him. A few years later, the ever-combative Biafra was taken to court by his former DK bandmates, who claimed he was withholding royalties from them. Biafra lost that battle. To his disgust, many of the songs he insists he wrote alone are now credited to the entire band on various reissued albums. His former band is also able to tour without Biafra, using the notorious original Dead Kennedys name.
Nevertheless, Biafra trudges on, plying his brand of political activism via rousing spoken word performances. All of Biafra's spoken word albums are brimming with incisive moral commentary and righteous tirades. Unlike the other various demagogues yapping for attention in this age of loudmouths, Biafra makes it a point to take on radical and unpopular topics. His advocacy of the so-called "maximum wage," for instance, is a response to the greed he says he encountered in his courtroom battles.
"What causes more of a problem for this country, drug addiction or wealth addiction?" he asks. "Even in South Florida, I do believe wealth addiction is the answer. And the only way to cure addicts of their problem is rehab. I'm not talking some Communist dictatorship here," he adds quickly. "No. One or two hundred grand [per year] and cut it off. You can live really well on that kind of money." How's that for stopping our exorbitant corporate culture in its tracks?
 Like any firebrand, Biafra has also attracted his share of haters. He's been called a hypocrite and a sell-out and worse. In 1994 a gang of skinheads physically assaulted Biafra at a Berkeley rock club, sending him to the hospital with serious injuries.
To what does he owe his longevity in a world constantly at odds with him? "I had a deep inner belief in myself," Biafra says, "that I could blow some people's minds and rock and do some cool things if I ever got the chance, and punk happened just at the right time and gave me that chance. Tipper Gore claimed that music caused teenagers to commit suicide. In my case, music did exactly the opposite. It prevented suicide and it saved me from drugs. When I came to San Francisco I hardly had any money, and if I had an extra five bucks I could spend it on speed or I could spend it on records. Guess which way I went?"
His fans would agree he made the right choice.
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John Holloway - Against and Beyond the State
 Z-mag
Against and Beyond the State:
An Interview with John Holloway
by John Holloway and Marina Sitrin; Upping the Anti; May 10, 2007
John Holloway and Marina Sitrin discussed the new social movements in Latin America, power, the state, and prefigurative politics, in February of 2007. This is a continuation of a discussion that began in 2004, also on the topics of power, prefigurative politics and Latin America. (auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/1052)
MS: Our last interview/conversation was in 2004. In that we focused a great deal on the question of state power, and on not taking it in particular. We grounded most of the conversation in the autonomous social creations that have been and are taking place in Latin America. Today, in February of 2007, many people argue that much has since changed in Latin America . I am thinking in particular about the 7 "left" governments now in formal positions of power, from Bolivia and Venezuela to Ecuador and Nicaragua, and the people who say that "now" the left has arrived. Has there really been the shift that people are talking about? Is the important shift in formal power, as most commentators address? Should this even be the starting point of our conversation?
JH: Yes, I think it is a good place to start. These are not miserable times. Perhaps that is the most important point. Friends write to me from Europe sometimes and it is clear that they are thinking in terms of Johannes Agnoli's argument, that it is important to keep subversive thought alive especially in miserable times such as the present. But, living in Latin America, it is very clear that these are not miserable times. They may be awful times, frightening times (especially in Mexico at the moment), but they are not miserable: they are exciting times, full of struggle and full of hope. The importance of the rise of the "left" governments is that they are a reflection of the strength of struggle in the continent as a whole, and that is very important.
I say "reflection", but they are also a response to the rise of social struggles, a very complex and contradictory response. In all cases, they represent the attempt to statisfy the struggle, to give it a state form, which means of course to de-fuse the struggle and channel it into forms of organisation compatible with the reproduction of capital. In some cases the "left" governments are openly reformist and repressive (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay), in other cases (Venezuela, in particular), there seems to be a genuine attempt to push the state form to the limit, to open it out into real forms of popular control. How far that can be done from within state structures and from within a leader-dominated organisation I doubt very much, but certainly the trajectory of the Venezuelan government has been much more interesting than what one would have expected.
So the real importance of the "left" governments is NOT the façade but that behind the façade the continent is fizzing.
MS: It's the fizzing of the continent, and where the fizzing is located, that I want to talk more about. I agree that the real inspiration in Latin America today is behind the façade of the "left" governments, with the social movements. In particular I am thinking about the more autonomous movements, from the Zapatistas and APPO (spell out?) in Mexico, to the Coordinadora del Agua y por la Vida in Bolivia, to the autonomous unemployed workers movements in Argentina, and the hundreds of now recuperated and occupied workplaces, not only in Argentina, but also Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile etc. What effect do you think the new "left" governments have on these more autonomous movements? Do they open up more space for the movements?
JH: No, I don't think they open up spaces for the movements. Or possibly they open up spaces for what the movements want to do, but push them into a different way of doing it, into a way of doing things that blends into the system. In the best of cases, there is an expropriation of a revolution: the government carries out many of the aims of the movement, but it does it on behalf of the movement, telling the movement in effect to stay at home or convert itself into the loyal supporter of the government. This is very much the feeling I got in Bolivia, for example. Certainly the Evo Morales government means a significant break with previous governments, and it is implementing the demands of the movement that brought down the previous presidents, but it is doing so in a diluted form. And the social movements are given the option of either declaring unconditional loyalty or being marginalised by the government. So there is a real expropriation and dilution of the revolutionary movement. I think this is probably true of any really left government, understanding by "really left" a government that actually grows out of the movement itself. In other cases, of course, like Argentina, the government does not grow out of the movement, but simply offers a more liberal response to the movement than previous governments.
Is it better, then, to have a left or a right-wing government, or does it not make any difference? I think that, on the whole, it is probably better to have a left government, though not always. In the case of Mexico, I think that López Obrador would probably have been less repressive and destructive than the Calderón government is proving to be. But there would certainly have been a process of expropriation of the movement, of converting a movement pushing towards autonomy into support for a government claiming to act on behalf of the movement. The important thing is to maintain our own logic and forms of organisation, whatever the colour of the government.
MS: So, how do we do this? What does that look like? I know it is a question that people in the various movements are asking themselves and one another. Even before the elections of "left" governments, many people were questioning how to continue organizing based on their own space and time. Now the questions appear even sharper. What do you see as some possible paths? For example, in the 1990s the group HIJOS in Argentina, children of the disappeared, began to shift the discussion about the dictatorship to one of community, breaking with the idea of non-involvement (no te metas). HIJOS is a horizontal network that uses direct action and self-organization. Over the past year the Kirshner government has invited members of HIJOS to participate in legal processes that will potentially hold many responsible for the murders during the dictatorship. One of the catches is that they have to do it using representatives, and decisions are made without having the time to consult the group. The result is a challenge to the horizontal relationships and self-organization they have created. Another example of these challenges is in Bolivia, where the same autonomous movements who fought for a constituent assembly now find themselves excluded for not meeting the qualifications the State requires for participation. They cannot participate in something that came from them. What to do? How do we continue to create our own space and time?
JH: I think that's always a difficult question. It's one thing to say that we can't change the world through the state – that seems to me fairly clear. But it's very difficult to say that we will have no relation at all with the state. I am a professor in a state university and probably many of the people reading this (if there are any) receive some sort of income from the state. So it is not a question of purity – there is no purity in a capitalist society. It is a question of how we deal with the implications of our contact with the state, how we avoid falling into the state as a form of organisation. One important issue is whether movements should accept any form of state funding or subsidy. The Zapatistas (for whom I obviously have an enormous admiration) take the line that they will accept absolutely no subsidy. Given the situation in Chiapas I think they are probably right, but it does put some of their supporters in situations of deprivation that are extremely difficult to maintain. The piqueteros of Solano (for whom I also have enormous admiration) take the position that they will accept the subsidies for the unemployed – since it is simply taking back a small part of what they themselves, as workers, have created – but that they must retain collective control over the money themselves. Perhaps the important thing is not the content of the decision (whether to accept money or not) but how the decision is taken – as a genuinely horizontal decision constantly re-questioned – and therefore also the struggle to retain genuinely horizontal-democratic control over the whole process, a real mandar obedeciendo. That is how I would see the HIJOS example that you mention. The Bolivian example is slightly different, I see it more as part of the expropriation of the revolution that I mentioned in the last answer. But then, of course the question is how to fight against that expropriation.
MS: How does one fight against this intervention and expropriation? One of the challenges that I see is that the state is determining the framework of the conversation. In Bolivia the state is proposing certain things that would potentially be good for the population and the population is invited to participate in this. Do you participate? And even if you participate in the most horizontal way, as a community or collective, the discussion is one framed by the state. The state is now the beginning point of the conversation. How can this really be horizontal if the agenda is predetermined? So, for example, you are part of an autonomous community outside Cochabamba in Bolivia, of which there are now many. These communities may be discussing network-like relations to one another and alternative forms of exchange. Now the government of Evo proposes nationalization of resources in that community. How to continue to both organize autonomously and respond to the state. Can both be done? How does an autonomous community not have their path subsumed by what seems like the good intentions of the state? Can there be a relationship to the state that still allows autonomy? And, last, if the decision is to continue to organize autonomously, and not allow the state's agenda to become that of the movement or community, how does a community explain to other parts of society, who see the intentions of the state as good, why they are ignoring the state's agenda?
JH: In this interview you are setting the agenda with your questions. If I didn't like the questions (but I do, I do – I like them very much), I wouldn't just ignore the question, I would reply in a way that sought to re-impose my agenda. A conversation is always two-sided. If you tell me that you're going to nationalise gas on our behalf, then I say "Excellent, but if it's on our behalf, then let us administer it." The issue is one of form, isn't it, rather than content, the how rather than the what of politics. That is surely what we have to push all the time. The central problem with Evo and with Chávez is not so much what they're doing as the way that they are doing it, the organisational forms involved.
In other words, our relation with the state is not just against, and not just beyond, but against-and-beyond. The only autonomy we can have is an autonomy that moves against-and-beyond, with as much emphasis on the beyond as possible – getting on with our own project, but understanding that project as a movement against-and-beyond. There is no pure exodus, only contradictory movements of rupture.
MS: Where do you see these ruptures? These ruptures that are also creations? The against and beyond?
JH: All over the place. I think it is a question of opening our eyes and seeing the World not in terms of domination but in terms of insubordination. The against-and-beyond I see as refusal-and-creation: "No, we are not going to do what capital requires of us; we are going to do what we consider necessary or desirable." This is what the Zapatistas are saying: "¡Ya basta! Enough of being oppressed, we are going to get on with our own project, create our own Juntas de Buen Gobierno, our own system of health and education. And we are going to radiate and resonate outwards, we are not just going to be a closed autonomy, but a crack in the system of domination, a crack that spreads." But of course there are loads and loads of other examples. Sometimes it is because the state just isn't there that people have no alternative but to take matters into their own hands. That has been the case in El Alto in Bolivia, where the profound tradition of self-government was a major source of the strength of the movement of rebellion in recent years – again not just an autonomy but a crack in domination. Sometimes it is on a much smaller scale, a group of people getting together and deciding that they are going to dedicate their lives to what they consider important, whether it be cultivating the land or creating am alternative café. Here in Puebla, we have a wonderful Zapatista café, Espiral 7, which has become a focal point of the whole movement against-and-beyond. But often it is on a much more silent level, individuals or groups of friends deciding that they are not going to shape their lives according to the demands of money, but that they are going to set their own agenda.
Perhaps it is all about setting our own agenda. The core of capitalism is that it is a system of command over what we do. To rebel is to say "no, we shall determine what we shall do, we shall set our own agenda." In other words, within the against-and-beyond, we want the beyond to set as much as possible the direction and pace for the against. Obviously this can be very difficult in practice, but the great problem of the left is that we let capital determine the agenda most of the time, and then we follow behind, protesting. In the Otra Campaña, for example, the repression in Atenco meant that the government effectively regained control of the agenda when Marcos decided to interrupt his tour of the country. Certainly the struggle against the repression was and is crucial, but it is very important for us not to lose control of our own rhythms of struggle. This is something the Zapatistas have been very good at, on the whole, and it is a point emphasised for example by the MTD Solano, one of the most impressive piquetero groups in Argentina.
Once one begins to focus on these against-and-beyonds, these cracks in domination, then one's image of the world begins to change. We begin to see it not (or not just) as a world of domination but as a world full of refusal-and-creations, full of dignities of all kinds.
MS: Many academics, especially those writing in the English language, have been critically writing about the horizontal movements in Latin America. They claim that the movements have failed due to not understanding class and power (That they did/do not want to take it). Now these same people, James Petras or Tariq Ali for example, are writing of the victory of the left, ignoring in most cases what many people in the movements actually desire or are creating. I see this as one-sided, narrow, and historically inaccurate, taking us back to the frame of the 1960-90s. However, these are the writings that most people trying to find out about what is going on in Latin America read. Do you think this does damage to the movements?
JH: Yes, generally I'm in favour of a broad concept of comradeship, that we should regard all those who say no to capitalism as comrades (at least as comrades of the No, even if not as comrades of the Yes), but sometimes it's hard to maintain. I agree that there's an extraordinary blindness to what's happening, a sort of desperation to squeeze the struggles of today into frameworks of thought constructed in the youth of the commentators. It's as if they are wearing blinkers that simply will not allow them to see. For them the victory of the left is Chávez and Evo and sometimes even Kirchner and Lula and they don't see that these electoral successes are, at best, extremely contradictory elements in a very real surge of struggle in Latin America. I'm not sure that these writings have much effect on the movements themselves, but they do spread their blindness especially to readers outside Latin America. What we need of course is more books like your own "Horizontality" to let people hear what is actually happening and what people are doing and saying.
MS: Many reading this conversation are already inspired by the movements growing across the globe, especially in Latin America, and will likely, or have already, begun to think, ok, so how do I move against and beyond the state? What does that mean and what could it look like? Should I go and spend time with autonomous movements? What do you say to people who ask these sorts of questions?
JH: There's no recipe, is there? Certainly I meet lots of people who have spent time in Zapatista communities and I'm always very impressed by them and what they've learnt. But I think the central point is probably the Zapatista principle of starting from where we are, to fight to transform where we are: not only to build the Movement (though that may be important), but to try to set our own agenda in whatever we are doing. In Marxist terms, to struggle for use value against value, creative or useful doing against abstract labour. And very important, to look around and recognise, to learn to see all the ways in which people are already struggling against and beyond capital, struggling for dignity in their everyday lives. The most terribly destructive idea on the left is the idea that we're special, that we're different. We're not – everybody rebels in some way: our problem is to recognise rebellion and find a way of touching it. The most profound challenge of the Zapatistas is when they say "we are perfectly ordinary people, therefore rebels": that is perhaps the most important thing – to understand the everyday nature of revolution.
Perhaps a more practical answer: there's a wonderful new book coming out by the Trapese Collective called Do it Yourself (Pluto Press, London, sometime soon) with a very practical guide to what we can do, setting up community gardens, organising social centres, organising without leaders, taking charge of our own health and education, and so on.
MS: What is one of the most inspiring moments that you have seen/felt in the last year? What made it so inspiring?
JH: Two answers.
The first is not a moment but a whole lot of moments, when I've been invited to all sorts of meetings of autonomous groups in Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala, here in Mexico and the experience is often just overwhelming, meeting the people involved in the struggles and seeing their commitment and enthusiasm and the way in which different social relations are really already a reality for so many people, and seeing especially the young people and the depth of their understanding and their capacities – in Guatemala, for example, I met a fourteen-year-old from the countryside who was doing regular radio broadcasts on topics such as the proposed Free Trade Agreement. The reality is running so far ahead of any theoretical reflections we make.
The second is just a few days ago, a short concert of music from Veracruz that I happened to find myself attending, and the musicians were amazing. It suddenly made me feel that this is what communism is about, not because it was free (it was), not because of the political content of the music (there wasn't any), but just because it was a moment in which time was suspended, in which creative or useful doing took absolute priority over abstract labour, use value over value, enjoyment over obligation. Perhaps we have to think of communism (or whatever we call it) not so much (or not just) in terms of space as in terms of time, as the breaking of time and the creation, expansion and multiplication of liberated moments.
John Holloway is the author of Change the World Without Taking Power (Pluto Press, 2002) and co-author of Zapatista! Rethinking Revolution in Mexico (Pluto Press, 1998). Marina Sitrin is the editor of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (AK Press, 2006), (Spanish edition, Chilavert, Argentina, 2005) and forthcoming Insurgent Democracies: Latin America's New Powers (Citylights Press, 2007)
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Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today
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Tuesday, May 08, 2007
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Enviro Mentalists Call For Culling Of Human Population
I received this bulletin today and comment on it below.
From: Chip
Date: May 7, 2007 8:03 PM
From: Alex Jones
Date: 07 May 2007, 15:44
Enviro Mentalists Call For Culling Of Human Population
A disturbing move is afoot by several "green" groups to associate climate change with over population and suggest that the solution is to implement depopulation policies and punishments for those who flout them.
http://prisonplanet.com/articles/may2007/070507depopulation.htm
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Having read this, I had several thoughts. I'd like it to be a cut-and-dried issue - us against the Nazis population-cull fascists - the poor protected, the environment happily dealing with our expansion in a resource limited finite globe. Unfortunately it is not that simple. Why? Because we have queered the pitch in a diametrically opposed way to that required for our survival, and are nearing a time when we will have to pay the price.
Alternatives were many and we had time to act. But we said "I know we'll hit the wall one day, but really, I don't think we should brake just yet". We drove harder and faster toward that wall, saying "not my problem", and "I'll be dead before we get there, anyway"... But, hey guess what? We got closer and closer, still only neurotically looking at brake peddle now and again, not even feathering it. Now we are nearer the wall. In fact, we may be impacting, the bonnet crumpling, and ourselves leaving our seat and heading towards the windscreen. Or we may be about to hit. Or the impact may be a few decades off - the precautionary principle? F*ck that! But still the majority are saying "we're not there yet, so why spoil our fun?"
I am always suspicious of a linkage between ecology and human population. However, as ecological problems bite, the fact is that our population levels, if we are to maintain any kind of survivable balance between human needs and the needs of the biosphere (on which we depend), will drop. Whether we find a way to manage this, or just let events drive it for us, is up to us.
But the past gives some hard lessons on population and carrying capacity. Some examples from amongst many:
1] Interestingly, a large proportion of the crop failures of the last three decades are caused by a combination of desertification, soil leaching etc, and the destruction of natural nutritional balance in the soil by the methods of the 50s "green revolution" (a short term artificial boost that undermines natural ecology, where the short term is now up).
2] The UK, pre-oil, had a maximum population of about 5 million people. The high energy conversion fuels we discovered have allowed a boost in crops, transport of food over long (global) distance, etc, and thus population also. The population has grown to the point where we need to import three times more food than can be grown indigenously (as a net sum of imports and exports). A return to pre-oil era economics will fairly clearly require economic contraction, less cash to buy from abroad, less food abroad to import in the first place, more military action, curfews, and rationing. That kind of means population contraction, whether we like it or not - we simply will not be able to feed 60 million plus people here. This is one reason why Lovelock and others have begun to soften on nuclear sourced power, as a necessary alternative high energy conversion fuel - it is shit, but less shit than the alternatives, or so they argue - they may have a point, but it is natural for us to feeling negative about that.
3] The Earth was announced to be in "ecological overdraft" (where we have used one years worth of [renewable] materials in less than one year), in September last year, three-quarters of the way in, a record. That was not a spike, but the latest point on a fairly regular and distinct slope of increased usage. As resources like crops are scaled back further by monocultures, by disease linked to reduced biodiversity, and by climate change, this process will accelerate. Check out crop yields in Canada, USA and Russia to see the trend.
A debt like this will be called in, and soon. The price? I scares me to contemplate.
This is the tip of the iceberg, but you get the gist - the big picture is grim. The anti-people attitudes of a core of the over-population brigade are scummy, but unfortunately our failure to address environmental issues as they have arisen has put us in the position where, whilst we COULD have fed 9-12 billion easily in an ecologicaly sensitive global society, our own actions have begun to create a situation where that is becoming a pipe dream.
I have, for the last three decades, said that a window of opportunity opened for the human race in the about the mid-1950s, as we finally came to understand enough about ecology and environment, against a background of increased technical know-how. I also have been saying that that window would be open for between 50 and 100 years maximum, before our negative actions (making the wrong choices, not evolving politically, and socially, fast enough, etc) would slam that window shut.
So, if I'm right, we had to act, and act successfully and over the whole globe, within that period.
It seems clear that the 100 year timespan was optimistic, and the window is closing right now - not closed yet though, I hope. I would love to see major change tomorrow, but the lack of it will make the pessimists who whinge about population right by default, whether we like it or not.
My view is that those of us who ARE suspicious of the racism should take the bull by the horns and set the agenda on population change ourselves, instead of wasting energy putting off addressing the issue until the pessimist's and fascist's suggested methods become the only ones that could "work".
The racists talk about immigration, but we have seen nothing yet - at present it is mostly driven by opportunity and is in many cases an economic boon. That will change when the drivers become increasingly negative, as they will in a recession, a depression, and an ecological meltdown.
At present the US puts great pressure on those who promote contraception in Africa (for example), forcing health aid charities to back off from 'family planning' - thus undermining managed solutions; the US and IMF etc put presure on welfare economies, and welfare policies in general, undermining attempts to enhance the position of the poor, or to allow inclusion of women in education and the workforce: yet these are the things that can lower population growth rates - fairly quickly - without famine, disease and war.
Famine, disease and war are the historically 'normal' methods of "culling" "excess" population, ask any rabbit. I think that many of the core groups pushing for population control are racist scum who are fine with war, famines and disease as population control, so long as they set the agenda and they man the controls. They fit right in with neo-liberal corporations, religious fundamentalists, and right-wing politicians (which is ironic, given that the nominally left-wing "state capitalists", like Stalin, have been most "successful" with this method).
So we need to acknowledge, and address humanely, what are (unfortunately) real issues in "population vs. ecological sustainability".
Social ecology in the anarcho-left-green mold (cf Murray Bookchin); contraction and convergence; anti-capitalist action; co-operative affinity groups and communities who share positive global vision whilst acting locally; anti-militarists; those that promote renewable energy on medium to small scales; those that resist state level control-and-command economies, corporate-controlled control-and-command economics, and the 'free market' version of globalisation, etc, should lead the charge.
Those that are calling the shots now usually more-or-less squarely represent the other end of ideology (with the dishonourable exception of some "deep" ecologists and the odd Dave Foreman). And to that extent, I agree that the agenda behind the "greens" that actively support the cull idea is wholly negative and to be fought tooth and claw.
But the reality is that we must perforce take a pragmatic approach and acknowledge that nature hasn't driven the inbalance between man and environment, the poor are relative innocents in this who may bear the brunt of the short-term effects, but that nonetheless, due to human activity (and inactivity), there is a real problem that won't just go away if we ignore it or make moral protestations against it.
Sad and dangerous times are ahead of us, solutions need not be negative, but the time to act whilst avoiding the Nazis approach to the problem is limited. Piece-meal social reform, by far the most likely method of acheiving change with minimum cost, is a luxury for those with centuries to play with. Faster change, driven by circumstance and lunatics, leads to disaster.
- Tim
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Sunday, May 06, 2007
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PKD - A Prince of Pulp, Legit at Last
Nice NYT piece on the legendary PKD. One of my favourite SF authors. We all have a different favourite title - mine has long been A Scanner Darkly (the movie was OK, but the book is quite definitely better), but the wonderful distillation of is ideas on Eye in the Sky is suberb too.
'Even' his theologically inclined works are a treat, as the territory they explore is as much about inner space and subjective interpretation as it is about any 'deity', and, anyway, is theologically light-years above the dumbed down congregationalist brainwashing fodder most flocks are peddled. So, whether one agrees or disagrees with PKD's point (and he is not consitent on detail, though he gets more so with the fundamentals as he goes along), there are amazingly fertile philosophical riffs for the reader to explore in a feedback with the text.
Now that the noirish special-effects brigade have been mining the early short-stories, many set in a late fifties paranoid 'men-in-black' McCarthyite influenced future world, and a long needed advance into his more mature territories has been assailed (in Linklater's A Scanner Darkly), perhaps some deeper and less showy explorations of his ideas may find their way onto 'celluloid'.
Linklater's Waking Life is an indication that his version of Scanner is the tip of the iceberg for that director alone. Others? Well, Tarkovsky is gone, perhaps Lars von Trier might have a go at Ubik and Valis...? Any ideas?
- Tim
A Prince of Pulp, Legit at Last
By CHARLES McGRATH
 ALL his life the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick yearned for what he called the mainstream. He wanted to be a serious literary writer, not a sci-fi hack whose audience consisted, he once said, of "trolls and wackos." But Mr. Dick, who popped as many as 1,000 amphetamine pills a week, was also more than a little paranoid. In the early '70s, when he had finally achieved some standing among academic critics and literary theorists — most notably the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem — he narced on them all, writing a letter to the F.B.I. in which he claimed they were K.G.B. agents trying to take over American science fiction.
So it's hard to know what Mr. Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53, would have made of the fact that this month he has arrived at the pinnacle of literary respectability. Four of his novels from the 1960s — "The Man in the High Castle," "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and "Ubik" — are being reissued by the Library of America in that now-classic Hall of Fame format: full cloth binding, tasseled bookmark, acid-free, Bible-thin paper. He might be pleased, or he might demand to know why his 40-odd other books weren't so honored. And what about the "Exegesis," an 8,000-page journal that derived a sort of Gnostic theology from a series of religious visions he experienced during a couple of months in 1974? A wary, hard-core Dickian might argue that the Library of America volume is just a diversion, an attempt to turn a deeply subversive writer into another canonical brand name.
Another thing that would probably amuse and annoy Mr. Dick in about equal measure are the exceptional number of movies that have been made from his work, starting with "Blade Runner" (adapted from "Do Androids Dream"), 25 years old this year and available in the fall on a special "final cut" DVD. The newest, "Next," taken from a short story, "The Golden Man," starring Nicolas Cage as a magician able to see into the future and Julianne Moore as an F.B.I. agent eager to enlist his help, opened just last month. In the works is a biopic starring Paul Giamatti, who bears more than a passing physical resemblance to the author, who by the end of his life had the doughy look of a guy who didn't spend a lot of time in the daylight.
Mr. Dick died while "Blade Runner" was still in production, already unhappy about the shape the script was taking, though not the kind of money he hoped to realize. "Blade Runner" is probably the best of the Dick movies, if not the most faithful. (That honor probably belongs to "A Scanner Darkly," released last year, in which Richard Linklater's semi-animated technique suggests some of the feel of a graphic novel.)
There's no reason to think Mr. Dick would have approved any more of the others, especially "Total Recall," in which Quail, the nerdish hero of Mr. Dick's story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," turns into Quaid, a buffed-up Arnold Schwarzenegger character. Meanwhile, as several critics have noted, movies like the "Matrix" series, "The Truman Show" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," though not based on Dick material, still seem to contain his spark, and dramatize more vividly than some of the official Dick projects his essential notion that reality is just a construct or, as he liked to say, a forgery. It's as if his imaginative DNA had spread like a virus.
 Part of why Mr. Dick's work appeals so much to moviemakers is his pulpish sensibility. He grew up in California reading magazines like Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Fantastic Universe, and then, after dropping out of the University of California, Berkeley, began writing for them, often in manic 20-hour sessions fueled by booze and speed. He could type 120 words a minute, and told his third wife (third of five, and there were countless girlfriends: Mr. Dick loved women but was hell to live with), "The words come out of my hands, not my brain, I write with my hands."
His early novels, written in two weeks or less, were published in double-decker Ace paperbacks that included two books in one, with a lurid cover for each. "If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double," an editor once remarked, "it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as 'Master of Chaos' and the New Testament as 'The Thing With Three Souls.' "
So for the most part you don't read Mr. Dick for his prose. (The main exception is "The Man in the High Castle," his most sustained and most assured attempt at mainstream respectability, and it's barely a sci-fi book at all but, rather, what we would now call a "counterfactual"; its premise is that the Allies lost World War II and the United States is ruled by the Japanese in the west and the Nazis in the east.) Nor do you read him for the science, the way you do, say, Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein.
Mr. Dick was relatively uninterested in the futuristic, predictive side of science fiction and embraced the genre simply because it gave him liberty to turn his imagination loose. Except for the odd hovercar or rocket ship, there aren't many gizmos in his fiction, and many of his details are satiric, like the household appliances in "Ubik" that demand to be fed with coins all the time, or put-ons, like the bizarre clownwear that is apparently standard office garb in the same book (which is set in 1992, by the way; so much for Dick the prophet): "natty birch-bark pantaloons, hemp-rope belt, peekaboo see-through top, and train engineer's tall hat."
To a considerable extent Mr. Dick's future is a lot like our present, except a little grungier. Everything is always running down or turning into what one of the characters in "Do Androids Dream" calls "kipple": junk like match folders and gum wrappers that doubles itself overnight and fills abandoned apartments. This sense of entropy and decline is what Ridley Scott evokes so well in "Blade Runner," with its seedy, rainy streetscapes, and what Steven Spielberg misses in his slightly schizoid "Minority Report," in which Tom Cruise waves his hands at that glass console, as if it were a room-size Wii system.
The theme of "Minority Report" — pre-cognition, or the idea that certain people, "precogs," can foresee the future, with not always happy results — was an idea that Mr. Dick began exploring in the mid-'50s, along with themes of altered or repressed memory, which became the subject of "Total Recall," "Impostor" and, more recently, John Woo's "Paycheck." Most of the Dick-inspired movies come from short stories of this period — several of them, including "The Golden Man," written in the space of just a few months.
 In the '60s Mr. Dick turned his energies to novel writing, and with the exception of "Do Androids Dream" (considerably dumbed down in "Blade Runner") and "A Scanner Darkly" (published in 1977 and, incidentally, the first book Dick wrote without the assistance of drugs) the novels don't lend themselves so readily to the Hollywood imagination.
That's because they're much harder to reduce to a single concept or plot line. Three of the novels collected in the Library of America volume — "Do Androids Dream," "The Three Stigmata" and "Ubik — are arguably Mr. Dick's best. (Some diehards hold out for "VALIS," his last major work, but that's really his "Finnegans Wake" — a book more fun to talk about than to read.) All three are less gimmicky than the stories and are preoccupied with two big questions that became his obsession: How do we know what is real, and how do we know what is human? For all I know, you could be a robot, or maybe I am, merely preprogrammed to think of myself as a person, and this thing we call reality might be just a collective hallucination.
This kind of speculation — the stuff of so many hazy, bong-fed dorm-room bull sessions — takes on genuine interest in Mr. Dick's writing because he means it and because he invests the outcome with longing. His characters, like Rick Deckard, the android-chasing bounty hunter in "Do Androids Dream," desperately want something authentic to believe in, and the books suggest that the quality of belief may be more important than the degree of authenticity.
"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" and "Ubik," written five years apart, are in many ways two versions of the same story, one tragic and one mostly comic. The title character of "The Three Stigmata" (1964) is not much to look at — his stigmata are steel teeth, a robotic arm and replacement eyes — but he still possesses Godlike, or perhaps Satanic, powers, and is able, with the help of a drug called Chew-Z, to enmesh people in webs of hallucination, one within another, so slippery and perplexing that even the reader feels a little discombobulated. The book is a horror story of the imagination gone amok.
"Ubik" (1969) is more redemptive. The godlike figure here is an entrepreneur named Glen Runciter, who runs what's called a "prudence organization": for a fee, he will debug your company and rid it of "teeps," or secret-stealing telepaths. He manages to communicate with some of his former employees even when they're dead and supplies them with a salvific aerosol spray, called Ubik, that appears to at least temporarily resist the tendency of everything to regress backwards to the way it was in 1939. Mr. Dick describes Depression-era artifacts — Philco radios, Curtis Wright biplanes — with great affection, however, and in this book death turns out not to be so bad; it isn't eternal extinction, but a kind of half-life partly imagined by a restless young man (also dead) named Jory.
 Jory is a bit of menace, but Mr. Dick has a soft spot for him as a dreamer and fantasist, as he does in "The Three Stigmata" for the colonists on Mars who, bored silly, like to get stoned and play with their Perky Pat layouts, elaborate Ken and Barbie sets that let them make up nostalgic stories about life on Earth. He also likes to embed in his books still other books, emblems of imaginative possibility, like the novel in "The Man in the High Castle" that postulates an Allied victory.
There is doubtless an autobiographical element to Mr. Dick's novels; they read like the work of someone who knows from experience what it's like to hallucinate. Lawrence Sutin, who has written the definitive biography of Mr. Dick, says that he took LSD only a couple of times, and didn't particularly like it. On the other hand his regular regimen of uppers and downers, gobbled by the handful, was surely sufficient to play tricks with his head, and Mr. Dick worried more than once that he might be turning schizophrenic.
The books aren't just trippy, though. The best of them are visionary or surreal in a way that American literature, so rooted in reality and observation, seldom is. Critics have often compared Mr. Dick to Borges, Kafka, Calvino. To come up with an American analogue you have to think of someone like Emerson, but nobody would ever dream of looking to him for movie ideas. Emerson was all brain, no pulp.
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Eye in the Sky: A Novel
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