Adrian Smith's YouCut Video Is Wrong About NSF

I called Congressman Smith's office (202) 225-6435, spoke with "Nate" and asked him to forward this message:

My wife risks her life everyday conducting research that brings hope to the families of those stricken with neurodegenerative diseases, specifically Parkinson's disease (PD).

She is a postdoctoral fellow at the leading PD research lab in the world. It's not in Japan (we've worked there), and it's not in New Zealand (she's worked there, too), and it's not in Italy (where another researcher actually memorized my wife's paper and quoted it to her at a recent conference). The best lab in the world for what she does is here, in the U.S.

And it is the U.S. that continues to lead in scientific innovation because of the nature of the funding structures that exists at places like NIH, NIDA, and NSF.

The funding mechanisms in the U.S. work well. If you ask any scientist that's worth their salt, they will tell you that they actively seek more public participation in the process of research innovation and creation. That's what Cornell's Doug James and Northwestern's Luis Amaral (the two scientists whose work is singled-out in the above video) even said in this article.

My wife's research is dangerous. Everyday she could potentially die from conducting her research. Her colleagues are regularly threatened and intimated by activists. In fact, at the recent Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego, there was a bomb threat at her hotel.

When people learn that my wife's a neuroscientist they tend to think that she's two things: 1) a neurosurgeon and 2) rich. She is neither. She would make more money if she was managing a coffee shop.

So why should she risk being killed by the work she does, or being killed by some disgruntled populist? She'll quietly tell you that she does this work because she believes in serving the greater good.

And shame on Adrian Smith for stirring-up public ill-will with a campaign like this.

As someone who sits on the Committee on Science & Technology, Rep. Smith has an obligation to foster participation in promoting science, not fomenting distrust.

new post at the avant guardian

this week's popOp installation continues the discussion of relational aesthetics.

if relational aesthetics, a mode of art production, can be understood to achieve political action it is only coherent if we explore what i am terming spectacular agency.

over the past six months i've been developing a discussion of spectaclism, a term that results from my reading of Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Agamben's essay What Is an Apparatus? i'm hoping that in these discussions we are palpating a mode of sovereignty that is noncoercive in its relations with power.

enjoy!

New Post at the avant guardian

This week on popOp we look at doctors performing experiments on the recipients of torture from the U.S. government (you're welcome, torture victims, I'm sure you find solace in knowing that future victims will have a more effective and efficient mode delivered to them). How would Hannah Arendt think about it, would it look anything like what Confucius taught?

Things that make you go hmmm.

popOp!

New Post at the avant guardian

In this week's installment of popOp we drop that delicious album from Spiritualized and just before we nod out we consider the crucial role that "drugs" has had in structuring the Western imagination since the Ancient Greeks.

Go ahead, take a little read - it won't kill you and you won't get hooked. Promise.

Desubjectification

My friend, Ryland, asked me a great question tonight:
"Every time you talk about desubjectification in yr popOp, I don't understand what you mean. What do you mean by desubjectification?"

In reponse:

I think a great place to look would be in Foucault as this is where Agamben (from whom I learned the term) gets it. He gives a fairly good account of it in an interview in 1978 with Le Bitoux (Mec, 1988, trans. Savran, 1992). The idea seems fairly similar to D&G's discussion of the BwO - a zone of intensity, no longer a representation of an ontic being. 

Foucault states, in that interview:

[in the bath houses] you meet men who are like you, who are like what you are for them....You cease to be imprisoned in your own face, in your own past, in your own identity."
So desubjectification can be an affirmation of non-identity. A means by which to become a multiplicity, a communal being.

Immediately I don't feel much of a resonance with the idea of an emancipatory strategy in this sort of situation, it seems a bit too much plaisir and less jouissance. But then I read this article "Overcoming Masturbation" by Light Planet, a mormon proselytizing organ. Now I see why desubjectification as a strategy would be of use to someone.

I'm fairly surprised that 1) these people think there is something wrong with masturbation 2) the problem will be "cured" by not "admiring oneself" nor touching one's body, and 3) one strategy for overcoming the problem of enjoying oneself a-sexually is to eat a snack "even if you're not hungry" and finally 4) don't even pray about it.

Seriously? You believe that prayer, the direct means of access to the Lord of all Creation (including masturbation, mind you!) is actually a bad thing when you're trying to overcome what God created us to do?

I'm with you, Foucault:

It is regrettable that such sites of erotic experience do not exist for heterosexuals. Wouldn't it be a marvelous state of affairs for them to be able to, at any hour of the day or night, enter into a place furnished with all the comforts and with all the possibilities they could imagine...?

I am writing this week's popOp about addictions (even masturbation, I guess) and the centrality of this concept to the very notion of how we think of the universe. I'm referencing, of course, Plato's Phaedrus and the discussion of pharmakon-pharmakeia-pharmakeus-(pharmakos); thanks, Derrida!

New Post at the avant guardian

Musical guests? The Wu-Tang Clan (a la 36 Chambers) and Sigur Ros (performing "( )" in its entirety).

This week's popOp tries to understand the closing of Middlesex University's Philosophy department (home of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy), as well as the possibility of communicating that which resists being communicated.

Head on over for fun.

New Post at the avant guardian

I've been rocking back and forth in a corner for the last couple of weeks as I consume the MSM news and now it's time to get off that trip and into something more real.

So, I share with you my thinking on the nature of the 24 hour news cycle, the need for a reconsideration of the difference between time and experience, how political agents become spectral (if Debord and Agamben are correct), and Rand Paul. I assume he goes by Rand (rather than Randal) because he really wants to drive home his libertarian views and these were sadly combined with that doofus Ayn Rand. Rand Paul: you're a jerk. Stop being such a weasel.

Enjoy popOp! it's the Real thing.

Spectacular Agency - A political theory for everyone and no one

April has been a crazy month!

First I presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology's annual meeting in Merida, Mexico.
Then we headed off to Grenoble, France for our dear friends' wedding (felicitations!)
Next week I will be presenting two papers at the Southern Sociology Society's annual meeting.
Last week my best friend got hitched (congratulations, y'all!), and I presented this paper at the North Georgia Student Philosophy Conference.

Those of you that are reading my weekly popOp articles at the avant guardian will recognize some of these images. The popOp writings are my practice for preparing my thesis for The European Graduate School, and what's included here is the outline of my central hypothesis:

Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, stated that the spectacle, the idiomatic mode of human relatedness in late Western modernity, is presented as an instrument of unification, but, “the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.” This model of sociality, problematic in itself, troubles the possibility of sovereignty. Nonetheless, the works of Debord and the Situationist International have received much-deserved attention in the last decade precisely because investigating spectaclist economic relations provides an evocative analytic for palpating the contours of that new mode of agency required in the fruition of globalization. In this paper is discussed the commodification of memory by examining appropriation-based art practices (e.g. Girl Talk or Kutiman's “Thru You”) and appropriation-based activism (Anonymous) with an eye toward developing further the possibility of agency within these increasingly-isolating relations.

I am calling this mode of sovereignty "spectacular agency," and what follows are some considerations of the sites of this mode of sovereignty as well as a (brief) consideration of the possibility of political action within this mode.

Here's the slide show that went with the talk - apologies, but scribd doesn't share the animations that were present in the original so some of the comedic effect is lost.

Sites of Spectacular Agency: A political theory for everyone and no one

New Post at The Avant Guardian

I've just posted a new little ditty over at the avant guardian, this week's installment of popOp.

Something about Nietzsche vs. hyphy vs. snap vs. Bob Fosse (?)

Checka out.

It Costs More To Be Poor

It's true: living costs poor people more than the not poor. I bring this up because I read this headline and the supporting report today:

"Study finds median wealth for single black women at $5"

(here's the report upon which the article is based)

Here's a report from the Washington Post that discusses this counter-intuitive truth "The High Cost of Poverty"

Also, here's a report from the Brookings Institutes, almost exactly a year before the WaPo article, discussing the financial costs of being poor, "Public Policies to Alter the Use of Alternative Financial Services among Low-Income Households"

The poor pay more to have access to their income:

• for example -- if you cannot pass a Chex Systems report, then you likely cannot get a bank account, which means you will pay someone to cash your check. If you're not familiar with this concept, the poor will pay somebody money to give them access to the money they earned.

The poor have to pay in terms of housing:

• if you are poor, you likely have a poor credit history, based on this you will not qualify for standard financing for your mortgage. You might be offered a subprime loan, and since about 2006 we've seen what that leads to: massive financial hemorrhaging that can only be stopped by giving the ultra wealthy of the world all the money they want.
• Some might say, "don't buy a house if you can't get good financing." But, of course, paying rent (as everyone who tries to sell housing initiatives to the public typically brings up), means not building wealth and again, loosing that money.

The poor have to pay more for transportation:

• Not unlike financing a home, if you are poor you will likely pay a more punitive interest rate for that car loan...
• ...Unless, of course, you don't buy a car and instead use public transportation. As a regular user of the bus and train services in Atlanta, I can assure you that although our system is very efficient (despite what most white people in the metro area suspect) - public transit's real cost must also include the time spent waiting for transfers and connecting service. This is really a drag now since it seems likely that half the bus routes in the city will be cut soon.

The poor have to pay more for health care:

• The poor tend to work in industries that do not provide things like health care, but they may qualify for limited assistance from programs like Medicaid (maybe)
• The leading reason people (62% of those who filed) filed bankruptcy in 2007 because of medical debts. 92% of those who listed this as their primary reason for filing had $5000 of medical debt or more, this representing more than 10% of their gross income (from the American Journal of Medicine)

But the real cost of being poor vis-a-vis health care is more subtle - because the Federal Poverty Rate as it is, being poor is likely also going to cause a life time of health problems such as diabetes and heart disease.

The Federal poverty rate is not determined by your income, the cost of your housing, the cost of transportation; it doesn't consider medical debt, nor student loan debt, and certainly not consumer debt (credit cards or pay day loans). The Federal poverty rate is a measure of how much it costs to get a certain number of calories (not nutrients, just calories). I've talked about this before, here.

To refresh you: the Federal poverty rate seeks to find the cheapest cost for the individual to get calories. This means that the individual is encouraged to consume the foods that would have the richest calorie pay-off - since you're only given a limited amount of money to spend, you'd better buy the most food at the cheapest cost.

This is why you will see in really poor neighborhoods signs at the (freaking) convenience stores and gas stations that state "Food Stamps Accepted Here."

What foods have the best pay-off? Foods that have been heavily-processed and contain high-fructose corn syrup. They are typically foods that also have really large amounts of fat and calories from fat.

Of course, poverty doesn't fall out of the sky and like lightning strike you: you're typically born into poverty or at the threshold of being lower-middle class. This likely means also that your recipe book (as it were) is filled with foods that made sense to eat two generations ago when your forebears were working the fields and mines - more likely to die from work injuries than live long enough to develop diabetes or heart disease.

More on this later....

Cynico-Anarchist

Some of you may have noticed that I have a soft spot for dogs. To quote Jason Wirth, they are Nature's mute ciphers.

I named my dog Chino Zapata Moreno de Guevara about 12 years ago when I was really feeling the EZLN (and the deftones).

Some of you may be aware that Alexander the Great was a student of Aristotle. Did you know that Alexander also sought the teachings of Diogenes of Sinope? He was called Diogenes the Dog because he lived without concern for social decorum, choosing to sleep in a tub and sun bathing. If I heard correctly, Diogenes was sunbathing when approached by Alexander. Diogenes effectively told him, "You're standing in my Sun," and set him away.

It is from Diogenes that we have inherited the term cynical (related to the Greek word for dog). And really, the whole reason I'm even posting today is because my friend, Jay sent me this amazing link to what appears to be the same dog in a series of riots that have been rocking Athens over the last several years.

Behold! (The following images are from the 12oz. prophet site)

This is my favorite one, for sure.

Rancière's "Misadventures of Universality"

Rancière's talk from the Second Moscow Biennial is available at their site, here.

The central concern in the talk is "the way in which the universality of the human rights or people's autonomy appears to be absorbed by [...] a certain idea of the universality of the commodity." To illustrate what he means by this, Rancière brings up Godard's Masculin/Feminin (view the trailer below):

the film where we are introduced to the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. He does this to point toward a newer problem, that during the 60s the protests were supposedly in solidarity and identification with the children in Vietnam, today there is no identification possible because there is only the caricature of who is exploiting whom.

In the 70s Martha Rosler's collages were perhaps powerful critiques, but today this technique doesn't seem to have the same force. The mode is tired. These sorts of collages seem to be just one of millions of such images. Perhaps this is because the Vietnam war was so pervasive in the American dining room - the family could be on the front lines of the jungle warfare while eating tv dinners.

Today this proximity to warfare is a primary means of providing entertainment.

ABOVE: Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).
RIGHT: Martha Rosler, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (2004).
BELOW: Martha Rosler, The Grey Drape (2008).

Today, while it might be satisfying on some level to throw a brick through a Starbucks window it just doesn't seem to convey any form of urgency to political action. Indeed, on a personal level I can relate a story of exactly this. While there was some sense of political excitement in the Battle of Seattle as the anti-globalization movement began to really ramp-up and a brick in a Starbucks while wearing a vinegar-soaked bandanna seemed a viable political action; only a few years later the gesture became impotent one night in Athens, Georgia when my friend had her store window busted-in by UGA party boys. No bandanna, not purpose other than the thrill of simple vandalism. In short, no universal principle being advocated, except that joy of being rebellious.

The result of this commensurability (you can invoke the same bandanna worn in the Battle of Seattle by purchasing it at Urban Outfitters) as Rancière states it is, "[u]ltimately terrorism and consumption, protest and spectacle are shown as part of the same process, a process governed by the law of the commodity which is the law of equivalence."

He then proceeds in the talk to outline both sides of the political spectrum, primarily focusing on the shortcomings of the contemporary left. The right he simply passes over characterizing it as full of rage at the ambivalences in today's world.

With the left there is talk of the impotence of its melancholic prediction which is, "not about verifiable facts. It is just about the lie hidden in any truth. Melancholy thus turns into a kind of cynical wisdom. It only says: things are not what you think they are." We should perhaps clarify this as, perhaps, an incomplete melancholia. As Judith Butler pointed out in her "Melancholy Gender", Freud saw an ego-accumulating aspect inherent to melancholia - an incorporative dimension in the ego's seeking the lost object. Perhaps this, too, is a universalism that Rancière would characterize as misadventure...

So on the one hand there is this "rupture predicated on the historical assimilation of a critical knowledge of the system by the powerful material collectivity," but also this rupture is the natural result of what Marx stated was capital's ability to dematerialize previous material relations by subsuming them to the demands of market exchange.

To be continued tonight at the Poncey-Highlands Reading Group...

Refund Anticipation Loans Are Killing Us

It's tax season in the U.S. again and I'm glad to be involved with a group offering VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) for low and moderate income households as a part of my internship with the International Rescue Committee. The VITA program is vital to the most successful poverty alleviation program the Fed has found so far: the Earned Income Tax Credit. When I was working with ACCIÓN USA I had the good fortune to be present at the first convening of the Atlanta Prosperity Campaign's Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) task force and I'm glad to see that the campaign is in full swing a few years later.

You might recall that we've discussed the EITC a few times here on the blog.

It's been credited as very successful in assisting those of low and moderate incomes to develop assets, that is, wealth building.  

Started in 1975, the Earned Income Tax Credit is a refundable federal tax credit designed to reduce the tax burden on low- and moderate-income workers and encourage participation in the labor force. In 2006, EITC benefited 22.4 million people with an average credit of $1,951. Research has shown that the EITC is often used to pay off debt, but it can also present an opportunity for wealth building.

I copy + pasted the last three sentences from a study recently released from the Woodstock Institute, a Chicago-based research and policy organization. They go on to point out that the "primary consumers of Refund Anticipation Loans (RALs) are recipients of the Earned Income Tax Credit. According to the National Consumer Law Center, 63 percent of the 8.67 million people who received a refund anticipation loan in 2007 also received the EITC."

RALs are those loans that tax prep sites (like H&R Block, Liberty Tax, Jackson Hewitt, etc.) offer to folks that want their tax return refunds ASAP. As they state:

While RALs give borrowers rapid access to their tax return, they do so at a significant cost to borrowers. According to a February 2009 report on the RAL industry produced by the National Consumer Law Center and the Consumer Federation of America, fees for a RAL in 2007 ranged from $104 to $111 per loan, with an average fee of $107.50. Lenders charged additional fees to borrowers who wanted their loans processed in one day. These costs are substantial when considering the size of the loan. For a refund anticipation loan of $3,000, annual percentage rates (APRs) ranged from 77 to 140 percent. On top of these RAL fees, an estimated 20 percent of RALs included additional application fees which can add another $40 to the cost of the loan. In addition, borrowers pay tax preparation fees that average as much as $183 at one nationwide vendor.

They then quote the National Consumer Law Center study that states that, "EITC recipients generated $525 million in fees for refund anticipation loans in 2002." Then citing a Brookings Institute study stating, "the complexities of the EITC qualification and application process appear to drive low-income taxpayers to use paid tax preparers. The means by which tax preparers are compensated for generating RALs rewards steering. A tax preparer is compensated for each loan they generate, and in some cases receive additional bonuses for meeting the quotas of the lender."

The Woodstock researchers point out that there is evidence for a motivation toward tax fraud present in these Refund Anticipation Loans, "In 1994, the IRS estimated that 92 percent of fraudulent returns filed electronically involved refund anticipation loans. In an effort to reduce fraud, the IRS stopped providing tax preparers with information on outstanding tax debt, a function called the Debt Indicator. Both RAL volume and RAL fraud dramatically declined after the elimination of the Debt Indicator. However, the IRS reinstated the Debt Indicator in 1999, after which RAL fraud rates increased."

So who are the folks making these RALs possible? According to the National Consumer Law Center it's: JP Morgan Chase (with 13,000 independent tax preparers), HSBC (H&R Block's RAL provider), and Pacific Capital Bancorp - the parent company of Santa Barbara Bank & Trust. According to the NCLC's recent press release, "RALs drained the refunds of about 8.4 million American taxpayers in 2008, costing them in the neighborhood of $738 million in loan fees, plus over $68 million in other fees." It's obviously popular to complain about the Wall Street Bailouts, but here is an annual bilking of Main Street.


Weirdly, the IRS doesn't require any kind of regulation of tax preparers, until this year, as the NCLC reports this year, "On January 4, 2010, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced its plans to finally regulate the tax preparation industry. Currently, most tax preparers are not subject to any sort of licensing, competency or minimum educational requirements, a fact long criticized by consumer advocates and others, such as the National Taxpayer Advocate."

While it would be great if the EITC was used to build assets among those that qualify, the reality is that the recipients are often on the business end of a host of predatory lending practices (such as RALs, Title Loans, Pay Day Loans, Check Cashing services, Rent-to-Own schemes, etc.) and so the monies that are allocated with EITC are usually spent servicing debts. As the National Consumer Law Center points out, if you're considering a debt repayment program, caveat emptor (buyer beware):

[D]ebt settlement companies usually take out all of their fees, ranging from 14 to 20 percent of the total debt, within the first half of the contract. For debts totaling $20,000, a consumer could pay fees of $2,800 to $4,000.

"Debt settlement companies usually collect most or all of their fees from consumers long before they have eliminated any of their debts, and consumers pay these high fees regardless of whether their debts are settled or not," said Susan Grant, Consumer Federation of America’s Director of Consumer Protection.

"There is no guarantee that your debts will be settled," said Gail Hillebrand, Financial Services Campaign Manager at Consumers Union. "The industry’s own statistics show that debt settlement doesn’t eliminate all of the debt for most consumers. The full fee can be deducted from your savings even if you are still stuck with your debts."

The drop-out rate for debt settlement services is very high; a study of one company’s customers revealed that 60 percent had cancelled within 5 to 6 months after starting debt settlement. Claims for success rates can be very misleading because they often don’t take into consideration the cost of the fees consumer pay or the size of those debts that are never settled.

The NCLC is an excellent source for those of us that don't have much money and don't know how the credit and financial systems are set-up (and how they're predisposed to bleed us).

Who Needs Time?

There is a great article written by John Cox over at Wired's Epicenter blog.

My wife's always teasing me because I've got this blog (plus another), I've got a myspace account (what a waste - almost as bad as monster.com), facebook, twitter, linkedin, academia.edu, and then a wordpress blog and fan page on Facebook for our reading group. What's the point of all this self-promotion? Right now, really very little actually. But, as this Epicenter article points-out, understanding how these platforms work and developing attention from the right people makes all the difference. These are ways of manipulating your relationship with the world virtually to effect changes in actuality.

What the article doesn't discuss, and maybe it isn't the place of that blog, is the kind of relationships that the people who voted for Brown. Who had the time to get to know him?

In some ways I wonder if this was an exciting opportunity for many people in Massachusetts but campaigning and public service isn't something that many want to do for sustained amounts of time? Maybe not - maybe the shame would be that so many people could become involved so rapidly and decisively and then not be allowed to continue to interface with the political process. That's been my overall experience with the Obama Administration's web portal.

Rather than a means to participate in democracy, the Internet continues to be hamstrung by those in a position to do so (RIAA, NSA, AT&T, et al.) I've been told that voting is mandatory in Australia and to make sure there is compliance, people can vote very easily with a proximity to polling place that would put the U.S. to shame. The U.S., miraculously, can develop technology that allows me to do all my banking virtually (there isn't even a bank branch in my state), I can bank nearly anywhere in the world. Yet some how we can't get a little voter card that would work like an ATM card? C'mon.

New Post at The Avant Guardian

I've written a little sumpin'-sum at that place of internet jocularity we like to call The Avant Guardian.

There seems to be an arc developing in these pieces: something about social relations and how they've been shifting.

I thank you for your generosity in reading.

Also, many, many thanks to Tom Maxwell for turning me on to the two new blogs I've added over in the side bar there:

• A Journey Around My Skull
• BibliOdyssey

The strawman image here on our left is an illustration from "Za Lahko Noč" Ančka Gošnik-Godec (1964) which I found on A Journey Around My Skull.

Commodification of the Self

In preparation for tomorrow's essay at The Avant Guardian I'll share a little something I learned about.

Prior to the 14th century social stratification in Europe was of three forms: those who worked (the peasants), those who prayed (the clergy), and those who fought (the aristocracy). And this was all-good. For some reason I had this other image of the peasants as basically struggling for millenia just wishing they could shrug off the yoke of repression, getting burninated on by Trogdor. Now I have to revisit the image of the peasant as portrayed in Monty Python's Holy Grail.

All three categories were of a Great Chain of Being which was an attempt to understand how all the universe was, in essence, gradations of God. At the bottom of this ladder was the earth itself, which had only the property of existence, in the center was humanity (between the angels and the animals), and at the top was God. All of reality fit within a gradation of godliness. This would become undone, however, during the vicious cycle of famine, warfare, and plague that obliterated most of Western Europe. In the wake of lived apocalypse, people began seeking positive expression of God's existence, this pursuit of positive knowledge lead to the era now called the Enlightenment.

As you may recall I've been discussing the aesthetics of personhood over at TAG: that "who I am" is is an accumulation of responses to traumatic events, that "who I am" is possibly an agglomeration of pieces of other examples of who I could be, and that a central component to the currently-developing economic relationship called spectaclism is the exploitation of a sense of dissolution in celebrity and anonymity.

Tomorrow we're going to extend that conversation a bit and discuss someone in this video:

The Militarization of Intellectual Capital in Spectaclist Economics

I'm in day two of a gnarly cold and am just laying in bed. Thanks to a good friend I have a movie to watch and thanks to Hulu I watched a great documentary, RiP! A Remix Manifesto.

Also, the Pentagon released it's budget for the next year and its Black Ops budget is around $56 billion. You can read a little about that here. Also, check out Trevor Paglen's books. Paglen was recently here in Atlanta for a talk sponsored by ART PAPERS (where I am interning).

While a documentary about copyright vs. copy left and this black budget may seem unrelated, I think that if you watch RiP you'll see that they're not so far removed at all.

As one former Clinton Administration discusses it, the U.S. in the 80s and 90s made a serious movement away from domestic manufacturing initiatives and changed its focus to developing intellectual capital in the country. The thinking was that the U.S. would outsource all of these manufacturing jobs overseas (where they'd be made cheaper - a boon to the owners of manufacturing interests, but a bane to the working poor of the U.S.), and with this movement overseas the U.S. work force would be reeducated so as to create things abstractly. For this to work, the developing nations where these manufacturing jobs went would have to adopt intellectual property rights like what the U.S. has today.

This black budget is primarily accounting for the most advanced research (intellectual capital) in the world; although it also is accounting for the cost of torturing suspected people that the U.S. has kidnapped (such as Omar Deghayes) as well. The militarization of intellectual capital is becoming a reality (check it out) and I suspect it is a symptom of a structural change that is the result of that shift from capitalism the way Marx described it to spectaclism today.

Poverty Is Claiming the Suburbs

The image of the city as the place where the poor lives has to be changed because this masks the rapidly-growing poverty in the suburbs, where poverty will continue to become a pernicious problem. Over the past ten years I've said to myself that the nouveau-riche suburbs of Atlanta are going to be the Golden Ghettoes of the near future. If we're lucky we'll see more areas like the international sections of Buford Highway in Chamblee: alive with diversity (some of the best eating in the city is here), but clearly starved of critical infrastructure (this should be the most pedestrian-friendly area in the city, but it's a six-lane highway lined with apartments).

According to the new Brookings Institute report, suburban areas in the U.S. grew at a rate of 25% between 2000 and 2008, this is five times faster than the rate in primary cities. By 2008, one-third of the nation's poor lived in the suburbs.

We have to keep in mind that this is data as of 2008, we're still awaiting official unemployment data for 2009. I've written a bit about poverty in the U.S. here (a central concern for me).

Below I am embedding a video featuring David Shipler. I wanted to link to a Nightline episode (On the Edge: America's Working Poor, 2004) but I can't find a link. Their report was based on Shipler's work for the New York Times so it's like going to the source in some ways.

Poverty, Healthcare, & Agriculture

To somewhat flesh-out some of what I was saying yesterday about how the poverty level is determined, today I am sharing some great reads.

My friend from the AccionUSA days, Tina Valverde, pointed me to a great article asking, "Why are libertarian rightists defending a dysfunctional, state-engineered food system?"

While I'm not at all interested in Libertarian politics (I'm vehemently opposed often), it's a great article chock-full of excellent links to articles offering a history of food subsidies and pointing out the unintended harms of maintaining this corporate welfare.

An oldy, but goody, from the CATO Institute presents a case against Archer Daniels Midland (ack! two links to libertarian-aligned articles! what strange bedfellows).

Then there is this great article form the New Yorker from last year that discusses the intersections of health care policy and agricultural policy.

And to be fair, here's a public relations piece "a farmer in Missouri who will spend the next 6 weeks on a combine." But the piece reeks of lobbyist-talking points and slicker than subsidized-corn oil.

Responding to Thinking About Creativity

Thanks for reading, Matt.

If we're attached to the idea that everyone in a society should be able to voice their opinion, then it matters if they feel their voice is their own.

You ask, "if we want people to buy us...what's wrong with that; what does that really mean?" Now working with refugees I can assure you that millions of people are trafficked across the U.S. and the globe, as sex workers, as migrant workers. They are slaves by another name.

While you might be able to afford the idea that some people would want to be considered as simply a commodity to be purchased, no different from a sack of flour, I can assure you millions of people don't enjoy that luxury. Here I will quote the International Rescue Committee (where I am currently doing an internship):

Anywhere from 700,000 to 4 million persons worldwide are trafficked across or within national borders every year. Virtually every country is affected by trafficking, whether capitalized by traffickers as a source, transit or destination location. Generating roughly $7 billion to $10 billion annually, human trafficking is the fastest growing global criminal industry, with high profits, low risks, minimal capital investment, and a "commodity" that can be used over and over again.

If we're reduced to "just commodities sold in a market" then we are faced with conditions that would undermine the validity of democratic or republican representation.

And, let's face it, some sort of Libertarian utopia à la Ayn Rand would have to condone this burgeoning commodities market above described, and the existence of this market eats away at a notion of a commonwealth like an acid.

While it's true we might reduce all of life to quantiles of energy exchange, this would ignore and abnegate the other 98% of life that is qualified by how these exchanges occur. To reduce living to a quantifiable exchange is to literally live without meaning.

Why eat anything other than high-fructose corn syrup if the purpose of eating is simply to facilitate the exchange of electrons? By the way, what's been among the most subsidized industries in the U.S. for going into 40 years now? Corn. Guess how the Federal Poverty level is determined - by how much it costs to acquire calories. Guess what the poorest people eat in the U.S. That's right, food slathered in high-fructose corn syrup, because it's cheap.

This is what Marx stated; in Capital, vol. 1:
"As use-values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange-values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use-value. If we leave out of consideration the use-value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labor."

Why would a capitalist ever want to eradicate protections if it were possible to ensure that some portion of the population was always willing to be sold on the marketplace so as to escape the wretchedness of life unprotected by the commonwealth?