Wee Bit Gigantic Painting

a rare photo

My first painting this big in a damn long time. This one is acrylic. Not so bad.

First blog entry in a while too.

Real sunglasses, this time.

Me and My Bassackwards Dark Sunglasses

Hey, lookie. It’s me. And one of my wee paintings. Far out.

“Joe the Plumber is Rich”

“Joe” (formerly known as Sam) was seized upon by the McCain campaign because he said he was thinking about buying a business that will make more than $250,000: the ‘magic number’ beyond which Obama would tax a business 3% more than they are currently. That is, a lot LESS than they were taxed previous to the big biz tax cuts enacted under the Bush Administration. McCain mentioned “Joe the Plumber” 21 times during the debate last night under the pretense that a guy who could purchase such a business represents the average working or middle class American or even the typical small business owner.

Plumbers, licensed plumbers I should say, are among the most well-paid trade workers but new construction has nearly come to a standstill in the past couple of years. Precious few of these folks are anywhere near able to purchase a successful business that will pull in over a quarter million per year in the best of times.

Somewhere between 95 to 98 percent of Americans have a lower income than Sam was openly dreaming about having, and mostly, like Sam, a lot lower.

Is McCain honestly so sheltered as to be ignorant of the fact that what looks like a manual laborer representing the lower classes to him while plausibly owning a business that put the guy in the top five percent of the population income bracket, would then hardly be a ‘fitting’ example of the vast majority of Americans who, like Sam, might LIKE to identify with someone in the position to buy a business that pulls in a quarter mill a year? Whether it’s genuine or feigned ignorance, the truth is we cannot afford ANOTHER President EITHER that stupid or that dishonest.

In the second debate Obama mentioned some plans that sounded like the Roosevelt’s WPA that helped a lot of average joe’s a great deal in a very constructive way for the U.S. and I’d like to hear a lot more about those ideas.

Also to the point: I liked what Obama said about making and renegotiating international trade agreements to make them “fair” as in closing the ‘loopholes’ that have helped cause the mass exodus of American jobs due to American business owners being able to circumvent unions, labor laws, and environmental laws that don’t exist in other countries, to the collective detriment and peril of Joe U.S.A along with every other sam and joe on planet earth; even the fools like Sarah Palin who don’t get the connection, eh.

In the context of energy (environmental/economic) issues Obama also spoke to the independent yankee-spirit of Joe Bootstraps U.S.A. during the second debate when he said that the government needs to WORK WITH innovators and budding small business owners by removing the big-business favoring barriers  McCain has long represented.

I think the corporate employees who have lost their jobs, the Joe Bootstraps and wannabees of America and the future of America that the younger voters represent, would all be very interested to hear more in detail about these plans of Obama’s to provide incentives and opportunities for those already or bristling to work in the trenches toward a more self-sustaining and self-supporting America, toward self-generated job creation, economic growth and development in the diverse ways that will collectively solve the environmental sustainability and energy problem rather than hear one more word about McCain’s lame and half-baked plans to continue to favor well-established corporations that have LONG TRACK RECORD of suppressing the “energy independence” he likes to harp about.

McCain in reality is another dinosaur with a long-established voting record of supporting well-established corporations representing unsustainable industry, of favoring legislation that discourages new bootstraps businesses, suppresses sustainable development, job creation and economic growth with out of control trickle down theory policies that not only do not work but leave the real average american joe feeling helpless, victimized and frustratingly unable to put their elbows into helping to improve the situation.

Sustainable Presidential Material?

Staunchly ignoring the campaigning up until this point, I’ve been putting off having the subject of my strongest doubts concerning Obama addressed. Yes, I have been cringing a bit, in the darkest most dearly guarded corner of my hopes when it comes to the next president. The Big Question: Exactly how comprehensively informed vs. clueless is Obama on the economic/environmental sustainability issue, and if aware: How purposefully, decisively, intelligently, and dynamically might he address this problem, as president?

I peeled my blinders off to sit down and listen to Obama for the first time tonight and hey. I almost hate to say it: There IS hope. On the subject of energy and the environment in tonight’s presidential debate, Obama came very close to saying something in particular that I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear something about the environment and the economy in terms of peeling back the suppression of grassroots tinkering, experimentation, invention and innovation that corporate bullying (particularly from the auto/oil industry sector) has laid down over the last how many years, under the guise of ‘regulation’ among other forms. Laws and other astroturfish, pseudo-scientific maneuvers, well-funded anti-intellectual Limbaugh-esque ‘tree-hugger’ epithets and characterizations and such kind smoke and mirrors designed to obscure and discredit rational thought on the environment for decades.

I wanted to hear something about bringing down these blockades that continue to make it very difficult for anyone with good ideas to get off the ground with, gain support for and cultivate interest in sustainability-oriented innovations without being choked off by legalistic and logistic obstacles designed and created by the overkilling “competetive spirit” of established and unsustainable industries which have for too long had an upper hand, a hand full of well-paid all-too-comfortable lobbyists writing legislation in D.C. and state legislatures.

I am happy to see that Obama is thinking in a dynamic and comprehensive way on these issues, right along the lines that I am dying for our next president to be thinking. He has a clue.

McCain on the other hand didn’t seem to ‘get’ the simplest of points, nevermind the complexities involved. For example even after Obama clarified that domestic sources of oil constitute about 3% of the world’s oil supply while we consume approximately a quarter (25%) of the world’s oil, McCain continued to drill himself right down the drain drilling for more drilling, as if he simply cannot grasp the meaning of the word “alternatives” (other than the holy grail of nuclear energy) nor the magnitude of need for sustainable alternatives implicit in Obama’s clarification.

McCain just does not comprehend vital concepts such as ’sustainability’ in it’s simplest sense nevermind in the presidentially requisite (at this point) sophisticated sense that Obama does; sustainability across the overlapping contexts of economics, energy, foreign policy, diplomacy, health and the environment. McCain does not seem to even “get” such basic economic concepts as the ’supply vs. demand’ behind Obama’s point about oil. No, McCain continued to stubbornly stump for the McSame domination of unsustainable industry giants, unto our death.

Here’s the part of what Obama said that didn’t specifically spell out exactly what I wanted to hear as mentioned above, but came so close, and on top of that, surprised me with a lot more than I had hoped to hear:

“We’re going to have to come up with alternatives, and that means that the United States government is working with the private sector to fund the kind of innovation that we can then export to countries like China that also need energy and are setting up one coal power plant a week . . . ”

I think Obama GETS IT. I like where Obama puts his focus, and I like his capacity for meticulous detail, particularly in comparison to McCain, who can’t seem to even focus on anything but the most superficial and sentimental rhetoric of stick-figure talking points. McCain and Palin talk to the American people of the U.S. and the world as if we were kindergartners barely capable of adding 2 + 2, as if we were ruled by infantile emotions and the need for much nap time. I’d like to see a new wave of post-partisan politics and politicians that recognize and expect a helluva lot more than that of their people.

Executive Warp

Slithey toves relentlessly gyrating backstage of the least competent and most destructive President in American history, swirling and burbling like backwash in the smokey quagmire of executive secrecy; oh-so myopic buck-passing profiteers, holy terrors lurking and foundering in the shadows of the gaping maw of Bush Administration ‘presidential war powers’, ‘executive privilege’ and ‘unitary executive branch’ theories, grubby human grotesqueries slithering through the slime coated misty innocence of poor memory, basking obfuscated in hopelessly threadbare executive mastery of the English language, sidling by in the sidelines of an astonishingly infantile and panoramic grandiosity, wiffling between the tulgey subterfuge and other nefarious and stunningly undemocratic tactics so well-represented by the Bush Administration, dwelling disappeared in the many million murky multi-billion trillion dollar dark corners of conveniently lost White House email exchanged and effervescent as canary feathers floating on a chortling wind, elusive like a shimmering fleet of school fish who in reality collectively represent the Bush Administration more truly than Bush himself ever will or will ever have the capacity to comprehend.

As easy as he is to mock and vilify, even more for the very reasons that he is, Bush is only a figurehead. Whether by design or accident, conspirators in this Administration’s crimes may have warped perception of the importance of figureheads within a functioning democracy yet in an honest accounting the strength of numbers is what we should see distorted in this carnival mirror. Not scapegoats to blame.

Writing for Not

Hard to disagree with a statement like “The Government Is Not Your Daddy,” but there are a few things worth mentioning in reference to “Land of Opportunity or Land of Entitlement?” by whoever that is currently blogging under that title, who I suppose I will refer to as ‘Not’. In that inciteful post ‘Not’ discusses ‘not’ letting no-account lay-about illegal aliens fill up our prisons and take a free ride. Well, it certainly inspired me. First of all, it’s worth noting that the particular four year period covered by the GAO report ‘Not’ references includes 9/11 and the days and years immediately following in which a massive round-up of aliens and foreign-born occurred, and that within those following years all sorts of “crime sweeps” were enacted, in keeping with the Bush Administration’s general advancement toward a deeply entrenched police state. In fact that GAO report was published in the middle of the very week during which the “largest criminal-sweep in the nation’s history,” Operation FALCON, occurred, in April 2005. A look at the lovely ‘Death and Taxes Map‘ provides a graphic education in the proportion of allocations devoted to both domestic and foreign aspects of what might possibly fit under that broad cloak of ‘Crime and Punishment‘ in terms of cost and the federal budget. But I’ll start with the bit about alien crime. As examples of the pernicious alien infiltrator problem, ‘Not’ chooses two figures; “27% of inmates in federal prisons were aliens”, and “the number of aliens incarcerated rose 15% over the four year period, the majority of them from Mexico” . . . and a subtext, out of the 2005 GAO report he references; “Information on Criminal Aliens Incarcerated in Federal and State Prisons and Local Jails“. That did not sit right with me. Those are rather misleading figures to pull out of the hat alone. They’re on p.19 of the GAO report, which displays a graph depicting the rising number of inmates incarcerated in federal prisons and correspondingly, the portion of those who are criminal aliens. To clarify; a criminal alien is defined as a non-citizen in the U.S. either legally or illegally, who is convicted of a crime. So, why does that ‘27% of inmates’ seem like an awfully high number? Well, these figures only take the Federal Prison System into account. Of the 4,722+ correctional facilities represented in the GAO report, about 122 of them are Federal Prisons. The type of crime and circumstance that land one in Federal Prison must be significant variables, because including figures for state and local corrections facilities makes a big difference. According to a 2006 Justice Department bulletin, 6.4% of all state and federal prisoners at midyear 2005 were non-U.S. citizens. A New York State DOC document about the impact of foreign-born inmates on the NYS Department of Corrections Services in 2006 reports that 36% of foreign-born inmates in New York State DOC were illegal alien and 54% of foreign-born inmates were from countries where Spanish is the dominant language.” So, roughly translating and estimating, it looks like approximately 1% of all U.S. prisoners, not all of whom are criminal or convicts, are undocumented latino aliens. That ‘15% rise’ in incarcerated aliens represents approximately 6,284 inmates in Federal Prisons over a four year time span. As indicated in the same chart, in the same time frame the number of U.S. citizens in Federal Prisons increased at a slightly higher percentage rate, represented by nearly 18,000 inmates. The estimated cost of perhaps $2 billion annually for dealing with criminal aliens is a drop in the $200 billion dollar bucket poured annually into law enforcement and corrections in the U.S; “a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century” as Glenn Loury put it in his article “Why Are So Many Americans In Prison?” in the Boston Review last August. The U.S., home to about 5% of the world’s population and jailing between a fifth and a fourth of the world’s prisoners, holds the highest incarceration rate in the world, coming in almost 40 percent higher than the country holding second place. Is that Necessary? Migod. The imposition of incarcerating a puny few criminal or illegal aliens is a marvelous diversion from the big picture here. Disregarding the relentlessly increasing U.S. population that ticks like a time bomb and the charming “Incarceration Clock” (on the very admirably comprehensive site ‘Prisonsucks’) that seems only to echo like the heart below the floorboards, there are a few more upbeat prospects to consider in terms of the towering cost of this prison system. All in keeping with the pernicious alien infiltrator theme. For example, according to the U.S. Census 2000, on ‘Immigration Border Patrol and Investigation Activities‘, the Border Patrol’s seizures in 1997 valued at $1,094,600,000 (this is not counting the $1,046,300,000 value of narcotics seized that year). In 1995 the value of Border Patrol seizures was about $2 billion (not counting narcotics). According to the figures available here, the value of seizures increased steadily between 1980 and 1997 and following the trajectory shown would put the annual value of ‘pernicious alien related’ seizures 11 years further down the road at as much as $4 billion. Not to nitpick, but that’s a lot of revenue. Add to this the implications of a special report by Texas State Comptroller Carol Keeton Strayhorn, “Undocumented Immigrants in Texas: A Financial Analysis of the Impact to the State Budget and Economy,” completed in December 2006 and the first of it’s kind; a comprehensive state-level financial analysis of “the impact of undocumented immigrants on a state’s budget and economy, looking at gross state product, revenues generated, taxes paid and the cost of state services.” By it’s assessment “undocumented immigrants produced $1.58 billion in state revenues, which exceeded the $1.16 billion in state services they received.” In terms of cutting costs, another study out of New York does a little financial analysis of the possibility of “Dropping the Rock” -that is, the potential savings of drug law repeal. In terms of criminal aliens, as the Correctional Association of New York puts it in a Women in Prison Project fact sheet on Immigration and the Criminal Justice System, “the increase in the overall number of non-U.S. citizens in the criminal justice system has been primarily driven by an increase in the number of non-U.S. citizens charged with drug offenses.” Among those who persist in examining the prison problem, the fact that there is a gross disproportion in imprisonment for latinos, like blacks, is common knowledge, yet for some, as reflected in the mission statement of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), the problem of institutionalized racism may pale in comparison to the broader reasons many advocate dismantling the draconian drug laws. New York, like Texas, is one of the five states that carry the brunt of the cost of incarcerating criminal aliens, the five states whose prison system data the GAO report heavily relied on in assessing the cost of incarcerating criminal aliens; the other three are Arizona, California, and Florida. According to the GAO report these 5 state prison systems incarcerated 80% of criminal aliens who were in the state prison system in 2003. In February 2007 The Correctional Association of New York made a ‘thoughtful attempt’ at realistic financial analysis of the Potential Annual Savings from Rockefeller Drug Law Repeal and came up with an amount over $210 million that could be saved in the 2007-08 New York State Budget. On a lighter note, the New York Times Lede blogger Mike Nizza informs us that the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency has taken the time to do another financial analysis that might give the pernicious alien infiltrator a good laugh: “Estimate for Deporting Illegal Immigrants: $94 Billion“.

War On Terror, War on Drugs, War?

Regardless of whether anyone really buys their theories of executive privilege and power, the masterminds behind the Bush Administration do seem to have managed a perpetual state of declared war under which presidential war powers might be operative. This has gone on so long now the definition of “war” seems to have become irrelevant.

Concern about the liberal use of privatized military or security contractors in the Bush Administration’s war-on-terror has recently become a subject of more widespread and publicized interest. Much has been made of troubling incidents in Iraq involving Blackwater employees contracted to protect State Department officials, but there has been little coverage of more interesting news on this issue, such as the curiosities and ironies involved in Blackwater’s questionable exportation of silencers to Iraq and current investigations into this being pursued by various federal agencies including the State Department, which happens to be responsible for regulation of firearm exports. Nevermind the question of what legitimate use a silencer would be to security personnel on diplomatic protection detail, or to the corporation contracted to provide that service.

Blackwater has mounted a public relations campaign in response to recent criticism which might get a lot more attention than that or another disturbing angle of the military contractor issue taking shape. The Defense Department has been and has further plans to use contractors of the Blackwater variety in it’s new “Counter-Narcoterrorism” Program. Blackwater is one of the corporations in the running for a piece of this $15 billion dollar pie. We seem to be moving seamlessly back in time, from the ‘War-on-Terror’ back to the ‘War-on-Drugs’. Remember the ‘War on Drugs’? With so much noise coming from the war-on-terror front, it’s easy to understand ignorance as to how well we’ve been doing in that little ‘war’. But for those who have been following it, it is well known that as a result we have succeeded in becoming the country with the world’s highest incarceration rate (pdf).

I’d be quite interested in some perspective on this issue from veteran members of LEAP. What exactly is LEAP? ‘Law Enforcement Against Prohibition’ is a non-profit organization of current and former members of the law enforcement and criminal justice communities who advocate change in U.S. drug policies as a result of their experience in the trenches of ‘the war on drugs’. Here’s the mission statement from their website:

The mission of LEAP is to reduce the multitude of unintended harmful consequences resulting from fighting the war on drugs and to lessen the incidence of death, disease, crime, and addiction by ultimately ending drug prohibition.

Where might, as one Narcosphere commenter put it in 2005, ‘the lines between anti-drug and anti-democracy efforts’ lay in all this? Hell if I know, but just the term “Counter-Narcoterrorism” seems to cross the line. It also reinforces my impression that forces within and behind the Bush Administration have been intent on circumventing oversights put in place following Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair by re-creating a veil of secrecy at new digs unfettered by those protections, like within the Defense Department.

Industrial Strength Nomadics

Naturally, being a traveler tooling by New England’s largest intermodal shipyard every day, thoughts of rail riders bubble to the surface amongst the homeless passed along the way. Hauling habitual consideration of infinite possibilities within finite resources, things like this do tend to cross the mind many a time but get no further. Meanwhile, what can be done with shipping containers other than packing them with cargo and stacking them on trucks or boats or trains has been percolating and moving down the line for a while, but this really gets the juices flowing. Nevermind that it’s the CIA’s venture capital firm investing in it, not FEMA’s, or Whatevah. The dream police have not arrived yet.

Being Superwoman

Ha! I figured out how to number pages. Only took five months . . .

Looking the Other Way

We are enamored of and accustomed to stories which involve corruption, corruption as a matter of fact, corruption as backstory, the lay of the land. The ‘real story’ is about good guys vs. bad guys in grey areas where the lines are crossed over and unclear, incorrigibles who redeem themselves somehow, good guys who made a mistake, good bad guys and bad good guys who inflame and ultimately warm our hearts. So much coverage of corruption investigations and sensationalist news revolves around who did what when and all the uproar over ‘holding them accountable’ is often a secondary pipe dream to the ‘effect’ of stirring the audience’s emotions; self-righteous indignation, pity, affection for bad guys who do good, forgiveness for good guys who do bad . . . through human emotion a cathartic effect is achieved, the ‘problem’ is solved daily this way . . . but not.

What if candidates were to honestly debate the pro’s and cons of corruption? What if professional journalists unjudgementally acknowledged corruption as blithely as rain, drought, and the latest presidential address? Do we want this? It’s not as if across the landscape, in the privacy of homes, in the semi-privacy of the workplace, among neighbors at the post office and citizens in the street, the refrain in any passing conversation about current events, the chorus, were not sentiments to the effect that corruption is to be expected, natural, often even assumed to be integral to how things get done. But never in the formal ‘public eye’ do you see this.

Is the illusion of our disillusionment actually a resigned sense that corruption is normal, rather than a naivete, a pollyanna-ish denial, or minimization of it’s effects? The thought of government representatives and employees treating corruption as ‘part of the job’ does not phase us in fiction, why would it in reality? Cockroaches are not so bad as long as they mind their manners and stay out of sight. The only mistake a cockroach ever makes is getting caught. But humans entrench themselves in mistakes by defending them. Do we want a Presidential Administration that attempts to legalize it’s crimes? We focus on mundane specifics and emotions stirred, on the crime, the criminal, rather than the effects. We focus on the players and personalities, media frenzies and circus-like court proceedings, and as we imperceptibly wander into the fictional woods of emotional appeal and suspension of disbelief we look the other way on the question of whether we accept, comply with, and encourage corruption. We do not see the effects. Is looking the other way on the question of our compliance ‘really’ how we make it go away?