Take Octavia Butler into the Voting Booth

“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.

To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.

To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.

To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.

To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”

― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

One Hundred Companies Are Killing Us All

The Guardian:

Just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, according to a new report. The Carbon Majors Report (pdf) “pinpoints how a relatively small set of fossil fuel producers may hold the key to systemic change on carbon emissions,” says Pedro Faria, technical director at environmental non-profit CDP, which published the report in collaboration with the Climate Accountability Institute... Compiled from a database of publicly available emissions figures, it is intended as the first in a series of publications to highlight the role companies and their investors could play in tackling climate change. The report found that more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 – the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established – can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities. The scale of historical emissions associated with these fossil fuel producers is large enough to have contributed significantly to climate change, according to the report. ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron are identified as among the highest emitting investor-owned companies since 1988. If fossil fuels continue to be extracted at the same rate over the next 28 years as they were between 1988 and 2017, says the report, global average temperatures would be on course to rise by 4C by the end of the century. This is likely to have catastrophic consequences including substantial species extinction and global food scarcity risks...

A Public Option for Financial Services

This is a great idea, to which I will append the two added notions that branches of the public bank should be located, among other places, in United States Post Offices (further embedding in the social fabric and hence better insulating these vital public services from incessant reactionary right attacks) and that a system for public financing of elections could eventually be facilitated through the dispersal of a set, equal amount of public funds to every citizen through their public banking account earmarked for expenditure on their preferred candidates...

via The Roosevelt Institute

NEW YORK, NY – In a new report, the Roosevelt Institute calls for the establishment of an alternative option to the currently privatized financial sector. The report, A Public Option as a Mode of Regulation for Household Financial Services in the United States, co-authored by Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mark Paul and Loyola Marymount University Assistant Professor Thomas Herndon, outlines why a new approach to household financial services is necessary and how it could be structured.

The report documents that a large segment of America today is badly served by the traditional financial sector, with 19.9 percent of households being under-banked. A household is deemed under-banked when it either has no access to a checking or savings account at an insured financial institution or has such unreliable access to these entities that it must rely on predatory, high-cost alternatives like payday lenders and pawnshop loans. With basic access to the financial sector a pre-requisite for full participation in the 21st century economy, these exclusions effectively leave nearly one in five households economically stranded. Communities of color are disproportionately harmed by these exclusions.

To ameliorate this economic divide, the report advocates the creation of a public option for finance in which the U.S. federal government would establish a public bank that provides basic transaction services and consumer credit. In addition to meeting the immediate needs of the under-banked, this approach would have the added benefit of setting a new baseline standard for conduct and practices of the entire financial sector. In effect, it would be a bottom-up regulatory tool based on a new and improved floor in how banks can operate and would thus encourage healthy competition in the market.

“In America, it is really expensive to be poor, and our current approach to banking reinforces this harmful dynamic,” said Mark Paul, Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and co-author of the report. “A public option for banking would empower millions of families by giving them a foothold of financial stability. It would also make it much harder for private-sector banks to continue getting away with abusive practices like excessive fees. In one major restructuring of finance, this public option would make our economy more inclusive and bring about a healthy, constructive dose of true competition.”

“Imagine a life with no direct deposit, no visits to the ATM, and no auto-pay on the monthly bills you’d rather forget,” said Thomas Herndon, co-author of the report. “These hardships are just a snapshot of what it’s like to be unbanked—a challenging reality for millions of people in the United States. During the New Deal, this country helped offset the failures of the private banking industry by creating a new set of regulations and public alternatives. By walking away from that progressive spirit and commitment, we ended up with the dysfunctional and exclusionary economy we see today. It’s past time for policymakers to act bold and meet this challenge head-on.”

For years, the Roosevelt Institute has been a leading voice calling for an overhaul of the U.S. banking industry and the need for these changes to bring about a more equitable, broadly prosperous economy. In 2016, the Institute released Untamed: How to Check Corporate, Financial, and Monopoly Power. Paul has contributed to the Institute’s research on how new rules would bring about a better economy. His recent report Don’t Fear the Robots: Why Automation Doesn’t Mean the End of Work was covered in The New York Times and Politico. Last year, Herndon released Liar’s Loans, Mortgage Fraud, and the Great Recession, which documented fraud and consumer protection abuses in the securitized mortgage industry.

This Is Penny!

Penny!

After brunch at our usual greasy spoon on Piedmont Avenue and then a walk to the Morcome Amphitheater of Roses (one of my favorite places on earth), Eric and I went by Hopalong's pet rescue on the walk back home and ended up taking home a beautiful two and a half month old gray tabby kitten with an orange spot on her head. Hence, we have named her Penny. She is an adorababy and has already suffused this quiet apartment with avid life and joy. 

Pants, Panting, Pantomine

Had to order new trousers for work for the fourth time in less than a year -- the first purchase, last February, replaced a 42-inch waist pair of khakis I'd been wearing for four years with a 38-inch waist pair. In May, I replaced those with a 36-inch pair. In July, I replaced those with a 34-inch pair. It's January, and a 32-inch pair of trousers is on its way. My body since my hospitalization back in 2016 has been in a tumult. Insomnia's vice-grip on my nights is now, thankfully, it seems, lightening back a bit into a somewhat more manageable state, two and a half hours of strobing sleeplessness for weeks on end is giving way to nights in which I sleep five or even six hours a night instead.

But in the midst of this distress, how easy it has been to retreat into my body, the living of it in minutes of time, breathing through butterflies while doing dishes in a sink, clearing my mind in something like a savasana posture at three in the morning in hopes drowsiness will cool my burning brain, a long stretch through soreness in my back after an errand, attending to little pleasures in Eric's soft hand or smile at a joke, the avid life of trees around the apartment, the gentle sardonic diversions of British detective shows.

I have little interest anymore in the broader topics that so long obsessed me here. The lies of the futurists are on everybody's tongues these days now that the singularity turns out to have been the stupid refeudalization of the postwar economy while we were distracted by the spectacle of Jeff Bezos re-inventing the Sears catalogue and google/facebook turning cyberspace, "Home of Mind," back into broadcast television. I said all that for years, and now that it may well be too late to make much difference there are plenty of folks publishing shelves of books pointing it all out again anyway.

And, then, who needs the subtle gorgeous models and methods of critical theory to grasp the idiotic awfulness and obvious lies and ugly bigotry of Trump Republicans? I have nothing smart to say about any of that, there is nothing smart to say about any of it, and I don't think finding smart things to say about it is much help to anyone anyway. It's obvious what people have to do -- vote for Democrats, the better they are the better, but vote for them all whoever they are until the Republicans are diverted from their current conspicuously authoritarian path.

As a democratic eco-socialist-feminist queer devoted to the demolition of the rancid knot of white-supremacy, eugenic-ablism, cisheternormative patriarchy, and the present planet-destroying soul-destroying capitalism of possessive-individualist-consumerism and promotional deceptions (of which the lies of the tech boosters I spent decades decrying are just one especially conspicuous and dangerous form), needless to say I think there is much more for artists, activists, thinkers, organizers to do beyond what the diverse continent-scaled coalition of the Democratic Party is devoted to, for now, even at its best.

I don't know if the Democrats can be -- or can eventually be made to be through the pressure of a new generation of organizing -- the instrument for the implementation of the ideals to which I am most devoted in my secret heart (prison abolition and community policing, fully subsidized public education and healthcare and basic income, nationalized public goods, including sustainable transportation, energy, and media infrastructure, and planetary campaigns for soil, water, and atmosphere restoration), but I daresay they are now as they have been all my life the inadequate, compromised, enraging but best actually-available tool on offer to stave off the utter ruin and war I most fear in my secret heart. This year I continue to tread water, attend to the wisdom of my body that wants to live whatever my brittle spirit declares to the contrary, struggle to reconnect with the poetry and practical usefulness of the theory I teach when I can, and see what history brings.

I'd like to think I will be inspired to delve into close readings of events once more once I see my fellow citizens manage to do the bare minimum and vote Republicans and their disgusting outrageous grotesquely unfit idiot bigot into comparative harmlessness in the mid-terms. Electing Clinton would have been the bare minimum back a year ago, and I have no faith that this country can manage even that level of self-preservation, heartening though the Resistance may occasionally have managed to be here and there, and so, for now, my focus is inward, my voice is quiet, and my duty is clear.