Food and Eating and the State of the World ….

Hoo-KAY — God knows that after the 2008 election season I should be used to the robo-troll phenomena.  But, their appearance in my Sugar, Sugar post took me by surprise. So just to make it clear: The Eat4Today posts are thought pieces about issues revolving around Eating.  Which, for me are pretty much ALL issues.

And I don’t advocate ANYTHING for anyone.  What I DO advocate is that IF food is an issue for you, that you think about what you eat and when. I’m no ones nanny.  And I’m certainly not going to tell anyone that they should give up all sugar – or anything else. What you eat is your business. And, if you want to talk about it, I’d LOVE to hear from you. 

IF food isn’t an issue for you, then feel free to skip these posts.

Everyday is a new day

Eat 4 Today

The thing about my Eat4Today plan is that yesterday doesn’t count. This is a good thing when my eating habits have been weird or out of control.  But, it can be exhausting and intimidating too. I’m not working on averages here: I can’t say, “I’ll have this toast and cheese now and make up for it tomorrow”.  I can’t say, “I’ve been so goodfor a whole month now — I’m going to have toast and cheese for breakfast as a treat!” …

Nope.  Everyday, I wake up – all too often craving that toast and cheese deliciousness.

But today, I had a cup of coffee, shook out my brain and had some oatmeal. This may seem like a small victory to you.  There might not even be a very big difference in nutrients or calories between the two choices. The difference is in what it does to the rest of my day:  The oatmeal puts me in control — the cheese starts me off with a defeat. I’m guessing that for me, the ritual of fixing & eating oatmeal is a power booster.

And for me, that’s important. This is an open thread: What’s important to you?

Wednesday: Family and Medical Leave Act already compromised

I don’t know how I missed this.  It didn’t seem to get the attention that Slutgate got.  On March 21, 2012, the US Supreme Court voided part of the Family and Medical Leave Act, one of the jewels of the Clinton Administration from 1993.  In a 5-4 decision, the Court has decided that states can not be sued for violations of the leave act.  It’s an ugly ruling. From the NYTimes article on the decision:

In a 2003 decision, the court allowed suits against state employers under a part of the law that concerned leaves taken to care for family members. The case decided Tuesday concerned a part of the law that entitled eligible employees to take leaves to tend to their own serious medical conditions.

Like other parts of the law, what the court called the “self-care provision” was drafted in gender-neutral terms. The question that divided the justices was whether the law nonetheless meant to address sex discrimination.

The case was brought by a man, Daniel Coleman, who had worked for the Maryland Court of Appeals. Mr. Coleman said the state had violated law by denying him sick leave.

Maryland argued that the federal law did not apply to it because states, as sovereigns, are generally immune from lawsuits for money. In the 2003 decision, Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs, the Supreme Court rejected a similar objection from Nevada to a suit under a family leave provision.

[…]

Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said the entire Family and Medical Leave Act, or F.M.L.A. “is directed at sex discrimination.”

“Indeed,” she wrote, “the F.M.L.A. was originally envisioned as a way to guarantee — without singling out women or pregnancy — that pregnant women would not lose their jobs when they gave birth. The self-care provision achieves that aim.”

The whole law, she said, was “an appropriate response to pervasive discriminatory treatment of pregnant women.” It avoided singling out pregnancy leaves, she added, to avoid discouraging employers from hiring women.

“It would make scant sense to provide job-protected leave for a woman to care for a newborn,” Justice Ginsburg added, “but not for her recovery from delivery, a miscarriage, or the birth of a stillborn baby.”

Justice Ginsburg wrote that Tuesday’s decision was narrow or, as she put it from the bench, “at least the damage is contained.” Suits for money under the self-care provision are still allowed against private employers, she wrote, and other kinds of actions remain available against state employers.

Sooooo, you can take leave, unpaid, to care for your newborn but not to take care of yourself?  Plus, if you work for the state and you get fired for taking care of yourself (let’s say you had a complicated delivery or a stillbirth) you can’t sue the state for damages.  Theoretically, they could just fire you for not leaving the wee tot in the care of some baby nurse and getting back to work immediately, right?  You still have the right to take unpaid maternity leave but not to recover from it, have I got that right?

It should be clear by now that the worst offender on the Supreme Court is not Antonin Scalia.  It’s Anthony Kennedy.  I think Jeffrey Toobin was pretty accurate when he described Kennedy in The Nine.  He said that it took Sandra Day O’Connor to knock some sense into him.  He isn’t really a swing vote.  O’Connor, being a conservative herself, was able to talk him out of what could have been a disaster on a previous abortion bill.  But without a conservative woman on the court, Kennedy has no reason to listen to a single thing the other female justices say.  He’s into pompousness.  He loves flattery and he’s a narcissist who revels in the very idea that his one vote could mean joy or misery for millions of Americans.  He’s the Supreme Court version of He-Man standing on his desk shouting, “I have the power!”.  He’s the Joe Lieberman of justices.  Not the brightest crayon in the box but probably a bit more qualified than Thomas.  The more liberal justices will never have a chance as long as Kennedy is around.  You’ll always know where the four uber conservatives stand but as long as there’s a fleeting hope that you will be able to appeal to Kennedy’s 1950’s view of the world, that’s who all of the arguments before the court need to be pitched and we have seen time and time again that he just doesn’t think women are fully human or something.

So, here’s where we are in 2012:

1.) We have one party that is full of screaming maniacs who are definitely appealing to the white male vote and doing all they can to get women out of the workplace during tough economic times.

2.) We have another party that is also appealing to the white male vote.  Ohhoo!  You thought they were going after female voters?  No, no, no, nooooo.  See, once women got scared by Republicans acting like the Taliban, the Democrats assumed that women would come flocking to them.  So, now that they have females in their “done” pile (or so they think), they can cross women off their list of voters to get.  THAT’S why their response to the Republicans off the charts misogynism has been so tepid.  They don’t want to scare the men away.  Ladies, when are we ever going to learn to make them put their money where their mouths are before we sign on?  As long as they think you are going to their side out of fear of the Republicans, they don’t have to do anything for you.  They’ll just sit back and call Republicans meanies on your behalf and let the decimation of your rights continue with little interference.

3.) If you want to keep your job, don’t get pregnant.  Ever.

4.) If you don’t want to get pregnant, emigrate.

QED, women are fucked under both parties.

Recently, I was over at Violet’s place reading her comments section and I think her commenters, some of them may be readers here, are onto something.  Basically, the reason why women’s rights are getting eroded under Obama and why Hillary Clinton faced so much opposition among party activists is because there is this little cadre of guys in the Democratic party for whom war is THE issue.  There is no other issue that gets their attention quite so much.  Just because the hopes and dreams and civil rights of 53% of the American public are under attack does not mean that they will be deflected one iota from concentrating all of their attention on war and torture.  Now, that is not to say that war and torture are not important but I think we have given this tiny group of latent sexist assholes enough of a platform to express their views.  It’s  time they stopped bogarting the mic and realized that they are undermining their own causes when they depress and demotivate their female sympathizers.  It’s not all about them.

They are our Anthony Kennedys.

Tuesday Morning Warmup

I could be writing all day.  There’s a huge post in my head about Karen Ho’s book but I have to read Matt Taibbi’s piece in the Rolling Stone before the last piece slides into place.  But in the meantime, I wanted to post about the stupidest headline I’ve seen so far today and it’s early.

Here it is:

Bubba Watson’s courage, creativity made Masters win happen

Yes, it takes courage and creativity, not natural or practiced hand-eye coordination, to knock a small spherical object into a tiny hole in the ground.  That’s the kind of courage and creativity that ends wars, cures cancer, and gets you an invitation to join an exclusively male country club where you and your other rich and powerful male buddies can make plans to influence the lives of the everyone else in the country, including the 53% of the population who can’t possibly overhear or join in on your conversations on the back nine.

Bubba deserves a call from the President where they can talk the manly man talk and maybe even get an invitation to PBO’s next golf outing (which was only integrated with women after they made a big stink about it).

Well done, sir. Well. Done.

***********************

Remember a few weeks ago when I said that Republicans would go after the Family Leave Act and a bunch of you rolled your eyes (I know you did) and said to yourselves that RD was one tin foil hat shy of a full conspiracy?  Well, take a look at this post by Digby.  Scott Walker in Wisconsin has signed a bill repealing the state’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act.  If the Family Leave Act doesn’t start getting some attention soon from  the wingnuts as some kind of hostage for a budget deal, I’ll eat my blog.  It’s perfect.  I can almost hear the arguments now.  Unemployment is high and employers, I’m sorry, JOB CREATORS, need the flexibility (this is an important word.  Pay attention) to hire when they have a position open.  Why are we holding these empty positions open while women are on maternity leave when they could be filled by men who need jobs to feed their families?  And Rush will probably start telling everyone that we are paying these women to sit on their asses all day eating bon-bons for 6 months.

Repeal it or no raising the debt ceiling/extension of unemployment benefits/free lunch program.

You know it’s coming.  And I’m not entirely sure that Republicans are going to lose this battle.  They’re certainly going to get the attention of white males who are struggling to support their families on one income.  Plus, they get the added bonus of watching Obama twist himself into knots trying not to piss off his Wall Street crowd who think anti-discrimination laws get in the way of doing business while keeping women on his side by being “not as bad as Republicans”.  That should be interesting.  Anyone want to make a bet about just how finely Obama is going to try to thread this needle?  Let me guess: the laws will be attacked and he’ll have to disapprove but sign and then he’ll make some teensy squeak of support for women’s aspirations or some such bullshit.

BTW, has anyone noticed that atheists, the 99% and hoodied people all have marches and rallies to show their voting strength and solidarity but women are conspicuously absent with their own zillion females on the mall event?  What’s up with that?

Sugar, Sugar, Honey, Honey …

Just 4 Today, I won’t eat between meals, I won’t take seconds and I’ll try not to eat anything with added sugar.

A couple of days ago I was reading about new studies that give much more specific information than we’ve ever had about the affects of sugar on our health. The lead story in the April edition of one of my favorite magazines in the world, Nutrition Action Health Letter (Center for Science in the Public Interest.) Sugar Belly: How Much is Too Much Sugar, by Bonnie Liebman.  The story isn’t online yet (they wait a month to post their stories.) But, I want to talk about it while I’m still reeling:

The whole thing is pretty shocking.  Although to be precise, the studies in this story were all about drinking extra sugar — in soda, tea or fruit juice.

Studies find that people may “compensate” for the calories they get from solid foods by eating less later in the day. But that doesn’t seem to happen when people drink liquid calories.

“In one study, people given jelly beans consumed less at subsequent meals than those who were given the same calories as liquid sugary beverages,” says Malik.

Well, I’m here to tell you that the person they’re describing up there isn’t me.  I haven’t had a sugared drink with any regularity since the 1970s. Also, I’ve done my own studies and eating sugar disables the stop button on my appetite. I might have mentioned in the early days of this blog that there was a time in the early eighties when I’d gotten a good grip on my weight.  I was feeling good – confident even.  I think my weight was pretty stable for some number of years. Then I went to a movie and bought 1/4 pound of malted milk balls.  And the next thing I knew, I weighed 50 pounds more.

Readers, I snapped. After that it was a long, long time before I got myself together again. So, in spite of the above disclaimer  regarding the limits of the studies, I took this article very much to heart.

I’ll be going into it in more depth once it’s online but here are some of the highlights:

1. Calories from fructose (which is found only in added sugars ad fruit) may be more likely than other calories to aim for your waist
2. ….
3. The fructose in most added sugars appears to boost liver, muscle, and visceral fat. Excess fat anywhere in the body increases the risk of insulin resistance and diabetes. B;ut a fatty liver and visceral fat may increase your risk the most.
4. …
5. “Fructose gets metabolized by the liver very quickly,” says Welsh. “When there is more sugar than the liver can process it converts the sugar to fat. Some of the fat goes into the bloodstream, and that’s why we get elevated triglycerides.” …. What’s more, in Stanhope’s study, the fructose drinkers burned less fat (and more carbohydrate) “The body doesn’t make fat and burn fat at the same time,” she explains.

“The body doesn’t make fat and burn fat at the same time”

Their advise is to “Shoot for 100 calories (6-1/2 teaspoons) a day of added sugars if you’re a woman and 150 calories (9-1/2 teaspoons) a day if you’re a man.  Even less may be better for your heart.”

So that’s my plan.  Just 4 Today anyway….

 

 

 

 

 

Monday: So much going on

Update: So, TPM is trying its hand with a little expectation setting. To TPM, it is unthinkable that Hillary will get a crack at the nomination until 2016. The subtext is, “don’t even think about it, bitches”. Like we’re going to be satisfied with that. Hokay, suit yourself. But don’t expect me to vote for YOUR guy in 2012 just because you think I don’t have anywhere else to go. And if it turns out that you find you need me come late October, I’m just going to tell you to wait until 2016.

Also, Rick Warren is a dick. It now looks like both sides of the aisle are engaging in a lot of black-white thinking on welfare reform without considering that there was a right way to do it that would have been both liberal and not redistributory. Europe does it all over the place. So, you know, I reject arguments from both sides while putting myself firmly in the liberal camp. I can promise you that Hillary would never have Rick Warren at her inauguration.

Nothing good ever comes of a bad seed.
**********************************************
I’m in the local Starbucks (found a bit of serendipitous change in my pocket this am) waiting for my car to be fixed. It’s going to be painful but I can’t get around central NJ without a car, so there’s that.

There’s so much worth commenting on that I’m not quite sure where to start. Let’s start with an answer to Violet Socks’ question, “Why are we hearing so much about Hillary 2016?“. This is related to the question, “Why are we hearing so much about welfare reform?”, although at first, you might have missed the connection. In case you missed it, the NYTimes had a big piece on its frontpage yesterday about how welfare reform has left so many people without any visible means of support. It quotes some former Clinton officials who actually *resigned* over welfare reform. {{rolling eyes}} And while the abandonment of so many families during this little Depression is indeed disgraceful and horrifying, the NYTimes is most definitely slanting this story. Here’s why:

1.) Welfare Reform, or Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it” was about putting people to work. I think I’ve mentioned this before but if you’re a liberal, the last thing you want is to create a permanent underclass of people whose lives are tied up in generational poverty. What the vast majority of welfare recipients really want is a job. Yes, there are people who will never be ready for the workplace. Yes, there will be people who have problems with substance abuse or criminal behavior. We need different solutions for those people and while a job is better for people who have run afoul of the criminal justice system, there are just some poor people who shouldn’t have to work in the same way that some middle class stay at home mothers and rich heiresses don’t have to work. Some poor people may not have the emotional wherewithal to go to work each day. We need to do something about that and help them. But the vast majority of people on welfare want to work. It’s not easy to survive on a measly check each month and it’s no way to raise your kids. Putting people on the road to work is a good thing and if that’s what Clinton meant (and I’m pretty sure that it was) then a liberal should be for it.

2.) Clinton’s plan included housing vouchers, healthcare, childcare, training, all the support mechanisms you needed to put people back to work. The Republicans shot that down. Repeatedly. There are votes on the issue and you can go back and look them up. The Clinton reform bill was generous. The Republican bills were much less so. MUCH less so. Eventually, Clinton signed a bill and it was awful but he was able to soften it in his next term. But liberals seem determined to whack Clinton over this for even bringing the subject up. That’s called denial, my friends. They want to deny that welfare had a problem by trapping people in poverty. If you’re a lefty and you’re still pissed over this, get over it. Being poor forever, even if the government is giving you a check is not a life and expecting people to be grateful to you for that is delusional. In fact, you could have seen Clinton’s Welfare Reform bill as a way to strengthen the social safety net for all of us. I know I would have been delighted if after my severance bennies had run out I would have been able to sign onto a government healthcare program while I worked my way back into the middle class. Yeah, that would have been great. No wonder the Republicans were so agin’ it.

3.) In the present, there’s nothing stopping the federal and state Congresses all around the country from approving a second stimulus package for a giant jobs bill or extending welfare benefits. You could call it “emergency TANF extension” or something suitably mellifluous. We do it for unemployed people all the damn time. I am a lucky recipient of such an extension and I am extremely grateful that it has allowed me to pay my insurance bills, my heating bills, food for my adolescent eating machine. I also paid a shitload of taxes from my severance benefits so, youknow, I don’t feel the least bit guilty about this. Last year after I was laid off I still managed to support a family of four on the taxes I paid. The thing is, Republicans would like it if I wasn’t so calm right now. They would prefer it if I and my other unemployed colleagues were desperate and completely broke. Why? So I would turn on Obama and the Democrats. That’s part of their plan. The only thing that is standing between frantic welfare recipients and stability for them and their children is the fact that Republicans want us to get to the point where we are so angry we will turn on the politicians who may still have a conscience (the jury is stil out on that one.)

I’m no fan of Obama and I have plenty of reasons to vote for someone to the left of the Democratic party so what the Republicans are doing has absolutely no impact on me. I wasn’t going to vote for him under any circumstances and I sure as hell won’t vote for a Republican, whose current behavior is rapidly changing my mind about the existence of supernatural forces of evil. But what would make me change my mind about electing a Democrat to the White House? Well, it would matter a great deal to me if Obama bowed out and Hillary threw her hat in the ring. Yep. I’d vote for that ticket.

And, I suspect, there are a LOT of women who have finally woken up and smelled the coffee and realized that we need a champion for us in government. It sure as hell isn’t coming from NOW, NARAL or Planned Parenthood, who seem scared of their own shadows and afraid to rock Obama’s boat. But if they roll over for Obama and demand almost nothing from him, they’ll be completely useless to women going forward and the attacks on us will start to accelerate. So, really, women’s organizations are worse than useless. What we need is a big, dramatic thing to happen that would say loud and clear that things are about to change in a big way.

Why does it have to be Hillary? Because she is a legitimate player. If her own party hadn’t turned on her in 2008, she’d be president right now and running for her second turn. She’s been our “foreign president” and the world loves her and respects her. Even the State Department seems to be running smoothly and hers was the first department to give gay employees all the rights of their straight colleagues. AND she is unabashedly pro-female. She doesn’t shrink from this. No one has managed to shut her up about it and she’s not afraid to confront congressmen about reproductive rights in the strongest possible terms. I haven’t seen Obama even come *close* to confronting the Republicans on these issues in the way that Hillary has.

So, she’s very popular, capable, committed, competent and women are starting to see that we need her. THAT’S why Pelosi is trying to deflect pro-Hillary sentiment to 2016. You know, it’s utter bullshit to believe that Hillary will run in 2016. She’s not. By then, she really will need to dial it back and retire. And by 2016, the damage will be done to the economy, my generation and women. No matter who makes it to the White House, Obama or Romney, the result is going to be the same. On this reality, the lefties are also closing their eyes and wishing. I’m looking at reality straight in the face and you know, it’s not going to happen, guys. There is no 11 dimensional chess game. And if what I read in Karen Ho’s book is correct, we are teetering on the edge of a true catastrophe. In fact, this is not a game. To be perfectly honest, your best hope of turning things around in all respects, is Hillary.

Which is why the NYTimes rolled out that piece about Welfare Reform. The purpose was to taint the Clinton legacy. Just watch, every time people get a little wistful for the Clintons, welfare reform and banging the drums for war in Iran start to ramp up. It’s so damn predictable I rarely read the papers anymore. And you know WHY these two things keep coming up over and over again? It’s because just like right wingnuts, lefties have buttons that can be pushed and these are the two that the political operatives and wealthy know drive lefties absolutely crazy and cause them to vote against their best interests.

So, there you go, Violet. Pelosi is trying to make people wait for Hillary in a scenario she knows is never going to happen. It’s 2012 for Hillary or never. She’d prefer it was never, for reasons known only to Pelosi. I suspect that Pelosi has been in power for so long that she has lost perspective and doesn’t realize that it’s not all about her. Being a liberal doesn’t mean a damn thing if you can never vote liberal on anything. But it sounds like Pelosi is fighting a losing battle. People around her must be whispering about calling Hillary up from the bench. So, the NYTimes rolls out the welfare reform bill and makes it sound like it was all Bill’s fault. A few years ago they and the Washington Post engaged in a series of “The State Department is being run by HillaryLand” posts, remember those? Yep, we were supposed to overlook all the evidence that she was doing a great job and be suspicious of the fact that she manages the department in a different style than her predecessors.

Too late. She’s good. And she projects confidence and command everywhere she goes as the Hillary texting tumblr shows:

Now, I know that Obama doesn’t lay around on the couch texting. (*I* do that) He’s probably playing golf. But here’s the thing, lefties: there’s nothing you can do or say to make me prefer him to her. Nothing. You can call me a racist, Republican, stupid, uneducated, insane, It. Does. Not. Matter. I want HER and not him. He is not entitled to a second term. He’s a lousy president and under him, women’s rights are eroding at an alarming rate. He’s too close to Wall Street and the culture of “smartness”. I see the future, guys, and you do too. It’s not going to be good. And no matter how much Pelosi protests, I am not going to wait until 2016. What the hell does she think we are? Children? Does she think she can get all parental and say something that will make us wait and that will somehow satisfy us or make our concerns less urgent? Well, it won’t. Get Obama out and put him on some fricking speaking tour. Let *HIM* do fundraising and supporting the Democratic party loyally. Get him and Geithner and all of the rest of his Wall Street crowd out of there and give us a dramatic change. Make the Republicans cower in their holy skivvies. Give us Hillary.

Little Talks- two versions

I can’t decide which I like better:

or…

Dang, now I want to go to Iceland.

Happy Occupy Jerusalem Temple

2000 years ago, a poor Mediterranean Jewish peasant lead an unpermitted march through Jerusalem and followed it up with a rally at the Temple.  Some words were said about the priests collaborating with the imperial government and currency exchange tables were upended in an act of civil disobedience.  There was a general assembly with a people’s microphone, because back then, even if you could pay for the permit for voice amplification, um, there wasn’t any voice amplification.  The peasant said that the temple had become a place where widows and women were getting ripped off and he demanded justice. Then he and his other occupiers wouldn’t let any more commerce get conducted that day.  Maybe they linked armed and chanted, “We are the 99%”.  I’m guessing the whole incident was fairly popular.  After all, it was a busy day with lots of tourists visiting the city, tourists that probably got fleeced by those same money changers and their damn fees. Have you seen what they charge for converting dollars to euros these days?  Outrageous. There’s just no upper boundary on all of the fees, is there?  Money people get whatever they want.

Anyway, after the rally, the peasant and his buddies had some dinner and then decided to occupy a garden for the night.  It was a public garden and nobody brought tents.  They were all giddy about what a great event that was, but at the same time scared silly.  Sure enough, in the middle of the night, the head priest sent his droogs around to arrest the peasant.  When the guards arrived, the peasant told his fellow occupiers to be completely non-violent.  But one of them got a little hasty and before you knew it, one of the guards had lost an ear.  But the peasant told them to stop fighting and went with the guards peacefully.  Now, see, this is one of the parts of the story where I think the accounts were made up.  If there really had been bloodshed, the guards would have arrested everyone and thrown them in the back of some wagon with the 1st century equivalent of zip-ties.  But the fact that they only arrested the ringleader suggests that there wasn’t any violence and that the rest of his friends scattered.

The peasant was arraigned in front of the temple court and asked what the f^&* he thought he was doing and did he have any idea how much money the temple lost today?  But the dude was unflappable.  So, they handed him over to the authorities and told the governor that the guy was disturbing the peace and inconveniencing everyone.  The last thing the governor wanted was to be inconvenienced.  Plus, there was a whole city full of peasants from out of town and if they all got together and compared notes, and if that “99%” meme spread, he’d have a real riot on his hands.  There were a lot of peasants and not enough time to call in another legion of riot police.  So, the governor decided to make an example of the peasant and had him crucified.  That’ll learn’em.

The peasant’s friends went into hiding but when they heard what had happened, they were stunned.  A few days after the peasant died, a couple of them said they couldn’t find his body and that he might not be dead after all.  After that, several of them had post traumatic hallucinations about seeing him.  You know how it is, someone close to you dies and for a couple of weeks, you could *swear* you saw him going into a building or buying fruit from a street vendor or maybe you had some elaborate dream when the deceased gives you instructions or tells you not to worry.  The peasant’s message and person were so powerful that they left a deep impression on his friends.  They decided to carry on without him and spread his message of justice, equality, compassion, kindness, and non-violence.

Of course factionalism developed over time and the stories about the peasant got embellished and he started to sound like a lot of other apocalyptic magicians who rose from the dead.  But if that was all he was about, his legacy would have died out rather quickly.  Apocalyptic magicians who resurrected themselves were a dime a dozen in the 1st century.  More likely, his message of human dignity and inclusiveness for everyone was really powerful.  It was the ancient world’s version of “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent”.  That was revolutionary.  No one ever spread a message of self-worth and resistance and community action before. Before you knew it, there was an Occupy Galatia, Occupy Corinth, Occupy Thessolonica, Occupy Ephesus, Occupy Rome.  The Roman road made it so much easier for the message to spread.  And so it did.

A few centuries later, the peasant won and the Romans decided they’d rather switch than fight.  Of course, the message got co-opted and the resurrectionists won out.

{{Sigh}}

Nevertheless, the peasant’s method and message was repeated in a purer form by other revolutionaries throughout the centuries.  Francis of Assisi was one.  Gandhi and Martin Luther King were two others.  Aung San Suu Kyi is doing it as we speak.  It turns out that with patience and persistence, the method is pretty effective.

Now, there are some people who don’t believe that the peasant really existed and that the historical record is pretty thin.  But one of the later followers wrote a lot of letters and some of his interactions were with the peasant’s followers and brother.  So, there’s that.  But more than that, his revolutionary thoughts were so powerful and he is mentioned so frequently by his friends in those letters that it’s hard to believe he was just a figment of the imagination.  The execution left an impression on them of how brutally oppressive the authorities were and how unfair the whole system was on the 99%.  They vowed to do something about that.

2000 years later, the message still resonates.  And there are new groups following his lead, getting together, occupying parks and malls.  They’re speaking out about how the temples are corrupted and in collusion with the authorities and they are throwing off the old religious authorities that are denying human dignity to everyone and appealing to reason.  They are being civilly disobedient and getting their asses hauled off to jail for calling attention to the 99%.

The people are rising,

They are rising indeed.

Wall Street, your corporation and baseball

I’m about 60% through Karen Ho’s book Liquidated- An Ethnography of Wall Street and I think I’ve finally figured out what it is we can’t understand about what Wall Street has been doing to American corporations.  Think baseball.

*WE*, clueless American workers think Wall Street is playing a game of rotisserie baseball where they look at the stats of the teams and their players and they trade and swap the players in order to make up a better line up.  In this ordinary, everyday, American working stiff view of the world, what the players can do is important.  The productivity of the team has value.  Most Americans want to maximize the productivity in homeruns per game because that makes sense.  Teams with more homeruns per game than the other team have winning seasons and lots more fans turn out and they sell more tickets and hot dogs and beers and souvenirs and the team makes the playoffs and everyone benefits.

No.  No, no, no.  That’s not they way Wall Street sees it at all.

Wall Street isn’t trying to optimize the line up.  They are swapping baseball *cards*.  They want the original Honus Wagner and Pie Traynors.  They put an artificial value on the card and swap the cards with each other.  In this scenario, the team doesn’t matter.  The productivity of the team going forward doesn’t matter.  All that matters is that the card still has the shine and gloss on it and that the corners aren’t frayed and the sucker hasn’t got any creases in it.  Your job as a corporate manager is not to make the team more productive.  Your job is to make the card look as attractive as possible to the card swapper.  The reason why you cut and dismantle is not to make the company more efficient and productive.  It’s to package up a product that can be sold to another buyer for the highest possible price.  The value of the product doesn’t have anything to do with the actual productivity of the team.

Now, I’m getting into the nitty-gritty of *why* American corporations are valued less for their productivity and more for their gloss.  It has to do with the temporal nature of the banker’s job on Wall Street.  And at this point in time, it looks like Wall Street workers are the Americans most in need of a union.  At the very least they need an intervention and about 6 months at a spa where they can destress and gain some perspective.

No, I am not kidding.  It’s a mixed up, jumbled up shook up world.

Saturday Morning: Anaheim Ballet needs your votes

You guys probably know how much I love ballet videos, though it’s frustratingly difficult to find Ballanchine videos online.  Anyway, one of my favorite ballet video subscriptions is Anaheim Ballet.  Their motto is “Anaheim Ballet- more than dance” and the producer, Evan Rosenberg, has a gift for showing all of the aspects of ballet.  Ballet dancers are more than artists, they’re athletes who  strive to get as much perfection out of their imperfect bodies as they possibly can.  They’re also inspiring.  Dancers demonstrate that to master anything really well, you need to keep practicing and challenging yourself, learn to make the most of what you have and work on what isn’t so good to make it better.  So, I find a lot of inspiration from Anaheim Ballet videos because the message is so positive.  If you love to do something, put your heart into it and practice and don’t let anyone, including yourself, tell you that you can’t do it.

With that said, here’s Evan to explain what Anaheim Ballet’s current challenge is:

And here are a couple of Evan’s latest videos:

Alicia Graf Mack- Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre (I love the way she makes her body unfold like a flower)

Austin Eder-Anaheim Ballet student (The Tiny Dancer), age 12.  Simply amazing.

And here is one of my favorite of Evan’s videos of his sister, Aria Alekzander, dancer for Houston Ballet called “Live for Seconds”:

Wasn’t that a nice thing to wake up to?

Go get Karen Ho’s book and read it NOW

Last night, I read more of Karen Ho’s book, Liquidated- An Ethnography of Wall Street and it should be required reading for every literate person in America.  I am not exaggerating.  But if you read it late at night, it might just scare the bejeesus out of you so keep your light on when you go to bed.

What scares me the most is how true it rings to my own experiences at work over the past two decades.  Ho writes like an academic.  This is not a beach read.  You will have to reread passages if you’re not familiar with how finance works.  Her descriptions of capitalism and securities over the country’s history are not easy to get through.  But it’s worth the effort because “vampire squid” does not begin to describe the horror that is Wall Street and what it has done to this country. Somewhere in this book Wall Street is referred to as “parasitical and predatory” and I’d say that’s just about right. But it is precisely Ho’s detached, dry academic style that makes the details so disturbing and makes this book more effective than Occupy Wall Street at focussing our attention on the real culprit of our middle class demise.

Several times while reading this I’ve had to stop and ask myself if all this is true or if I’m just being duped by confirmation bias.  But having seen the evidence of what the pressures of Wall Street have done to Big Pharma since the 80’s, Ho’s hypothesis makes too much sense to deny.  All the pieces fit neatly into place.  And now I realize that I missed my true calling in life.  I should have been an anthropologist because I haven’t missed a thing except some of the backstory that only a person of Karen Ho’s socioeconomic privileged background would be able to ferret out.

I’m only half way through the book so I don’t know if Ho has any recommendations but I know what would get Wall Street’s attention, and I think I’ve mentioned this before: sell your 401K.  Yep, get out of the market altogether.  As long as you have investments in that thing, you and the country will never be free.  And to tell you how much Wall Street has a grip on you, that very suggestion probably made you choke on your Starbucks, right?  You’ve been told for decades that it’s the height of irresponsibility to spend your retirement account (who says you have to spend it?).  You’ve been made to feel like a stupid person eating your seed corn if you take that money out.  Or the fact that the taxes you have to pay for early withdrawal are outrageous makes you think twice about it.  Believe me, I know how you feel.  I have all of my retirement savings tied up in two 401K accounts and the thought of taking it out and paying that criminal excise tax makes my blood boil.  You can bet our buddies at the big investment banks were behind that.  They want access to your money and they want to make it as painful as possible for you to take it away from them.  And it’s not even that they want to play with your hard earned dollars at the casino, although that’s true.  It’s that trapping you and your money in the stockmarket means they can fashion this country’s political system any damn way they please.  Your agency will be harnessed to *their* political goals.  The more you give them, the less you will get back.  The whole goal is to atomize the welfare state so that each person is left completely vulnerable and on her own, a single individual plugged into the Wall Street system without any other means of support.  If the market goes down, YOU go down with it.  So, cash in the 401K if you are unemployed and stop making contributions.  Or if you can’t do that, try to get out of stock funds.  One or two people won’t make any difference to them but millions?  Yeah, that ought to make them blink.

If I and my colleagues hadn’t experienced the effects of Wall Street first hand in the most painful way possible, I would think that Ho’s book was an over the top diatribe against Wall Street.  But Ho does something that the left does not expect.  She rescues the word “corporation”.  Half way through the book, you will start to realize what I have been trying to say for a couple of years now.  Corporations that produce things and employ thousands of people are not the enemy here, or at least the people who work for them and the products are not the enemies.  Even corporate management didn’t start off as bastards, even if some of them have not been overly friendly to labor.  You might say that corporate money has too much influence in politics but as you read the book, the reasons behind that become clear.  And if lefties continue to throw themselves against the word “corporation”, they are only going to be wasting their time.  It is too imprecise.  There are industries that work through corporations and then there are the big investment banks on Wall Street and they haven’t always been the same.  Teasing the agents apart at this point in time is going to be tricky but necessary.

Anyway, just read it.  Make sure you have your Teddy Bear to clutch in the middle of the night.

One very interesting fact from Ho’s book: Wall Street investment banks recruit heavily from a handful of prestigious Ivies.  There are two in particular that the bulk of Wall Street analysts and associates come from: Harvard and Princeton.  I’m not surprised about Princeton.  A few years ago, when I was trying to get Brooke into a private school that wouldn’t drive us all crazy, I toured several in the Princeton area and was surprised to see all the cable business channels running on multiple tv screens in the student lounges.  The kid was waitlisted, probably because we asked for financial aid.  But I digress.  The investment banks seem to think that Harvard and Princeton nurture their students in a way that make them perfect for Wall Street.  They’re smart, driven, ambitious, used to the finer things in life and they are looking for the next Harvard after graduation.  A few others get their attention, like MIT and Wharton.

But investment bankers do not like to recruit from Yale.  They don’t trust Yale graduates because they think they are too liberal.

So, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that when Wall Street knew it was going down in 2007, it recruited a presidential candidate from Harvard and passed on the one from Yale.

Oh, and Ho uses the word “schmooze” to describe the front office guys (almost all of them are guys) who use their relationships and connections to get to the top.  Some of them didn’t learn a thing during their investment bank’s finance training classes.  Apparently, you don’t have to know anything about finance to climb the corporate ladder to success.  You just have to know the right people and be really good at golf.