Alan Caron to Kids: "Create Your Own Damn Jobs!"

Media Watch

Re: "New set of challenges on the horizon for teachers," Alan Caron, Portland Press Herald, 12.19.2013.

Alan Caron, President and founder of Envision Maine and PPH columnist.

Centrist political columnist, Alan Caron, has been with the Press Herald for about a year now. He typically represents the "moderate" (read: corporate status quo) viewpoint, frequently advocating fiscal conservatism with (moderately) liberal social stands. Caron is the founder and president of the business-oriented non-profit, Envision Maine, which lists Angus King, TD Bank, and Maine Chamber of Commerce president, Dana Connors as its partners on its website.

I would liken him to the New York Times's Joe Nocera.

Caron fancies himself a political "independent," which, in Maine, is very trendy right now. In reality, he is about as "independent" as his buddy Angus and would-be governor Eliot Cutler. For instance, in an August 8, 2013 column ("Old two-party election system fails us, so let's change it,"), Caron advocated stricter ballot access laws in the state as a sensible, "moderate" way to reform the two-party duopoly. The problem with this approach is that Maine already has some of the most ridged ballot access hurdles in the nation. For a self-described "independent," Caron demonstrates an astoundingly limited capacity to think outside of the box.

Yet Caron's most recent column struck me for reasons I doubt he intended it to. While most of the piece praising the work of teachers and the ever increasing responsibilities they face was blandly by-the-numbers, one short section caught my attention.

Among Caron's three-point "most prominent challenges" educators must address is the notion teachers must produce not only future employees, but future employers as well. He writes:

The next economy will have more small businesses created here in Maine and fewer large ones from away. Increasingly, today's children and their children will need to create their own jobs rather than find them. But schools aren't preparing them to do that. Making our own jobs is, by the way, exactly what our grandparents and great-grandparents regularly did.

While I would like to see some actual evidence for the lofty claim in the first sentence (especially given that it is undermined by everything else I have read), it is the second sentence, with its claim young graduates will essentially need to create their own jobs, that I find interesting.

Now, at face value this is actually sound advice. Maine traditionally has a long history of successful entrepreneurs, and given the current economic climate the idea of working for oneself is becoming increasingly more attractive to Americans.

But in coming right out and conceding members of the next generation may well need to create their own work opportunities, Caron perhaps inadvertently hints at a rarely acknowledged truth about capitalism. Namely, that the system does not allow for full-employment.

This is true regardless of the state of the economy. Even in a healthy, thriving economy, capitalism does not produce full-employment--i.e. a job for every individual who is willing and able to work. This is, furthermore, not a mere "glitch" or aberration of the system. Capitalism, as Marx observes in Das Kapital, is intentionally designed to prevent full-employment. It cannot survive without a constant supply of what Marx termed a "reserve army of labor." Without this supply of reserve labor employers would have less ability to suppress wages and labor strikes, and generally keep their work force under control.

If, as Caron argues, "making our own jobs" is what our grandparents and great-grandparents were forced to do, it is merely further proof of capitalism's effective negation of any kind of full-employment economy. Apparently the exalted "job creators" of their time were no busier "creating jobs" than they are today.    

   

The Two Americas

On the Rich and the Rest of Us.

John Edwards famously declared during the 2008 presidential campaign that there are "two Americas"--one for the rich and one for everybody else.

While the former U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate's words now ring quite hollow in light of his own hedonistic, duplicitous behavior, his observations into America's ever widening economic stratification nonetheless remain true.

There are two Americas. One, occupied by an extremely wealthy minority, and the other made up of the poor, the unemployed, underemployed and members of what was once referred to as the "middle class." Or, as PBS news-host, Tavis Smiley and Professor Cornel West put it in the title of their 2012 book, there are the rich and the rest of us.

The last 30 years have seen a staggering rise in income inequality not seen since the Great Depression. Currently, the upper one percent of American society owns more wealth than the bottom 99 percent combined. This is a level of inequality unmatched among industrialized nations. As economist Joseph Stiglitz makes clear in his book The Price of Inequality (Norton, 2012), the consequences for such a wealth gap are indeed grave.

He writes:

[A]s our economic system is seen to fail for most citizens, and as our political system seems to be captured by moneyed interests, confidence in our democracy and in our market economy will erode along with our global influence. As the reality sinks in that we are no longer a country of opportunity and that even our long-vaunted rule of law and system of justice have been compromised, even our sense of national identity may be put in jeopardy (p. xii).

Yet the dystopian future Stiglitz forecasts may already be here. These two Americas come with two highly distinct sets of laws that seem to apply only to the poor. The rich are exempt.

Case in point, Ethan Couch, a 16-year-old accused of killing four people in a drunk driving accident in Texas, successfully escaped jail time by pleading a case of "affluenza." The teen, the defendants ludicrously argued, was brought up in a privileged home where he was never held accountable for his actions and therefore gained a sense of entitlement. As a result, the defense argued and the judge agreed, he should not receive the typical 20-year prison sentence for his crime.

"Affluenza," it should be noted, is not even an actual psychological condition. Indeed, this story seems more like something out of The Onion than an actual news report.

American law, as it is currently practiced, only truly applies to the poor. The rich, the elite and the powerful can break the law at will and get away with it. This is exactly what happened when Wall Street trashed the global economy through reckless, illegal gambling, and was then promptly rescued with a taxpayer-funded government bailout. To date not a single banker has gone to prison.

"The rich are different from you and me," F. Scott Fitzgerald allegedly wrote in a letter to Ernest Hemingway. "Yes," Hemingway is said to have replied, "they have more money."

Fitzgerald's classic novel, The Great Gatsby, masterfully illustrates how the wealthy elite cruelly and callously manipulate others for their own personal aims. Gatsby, in his singular quest for fame, wealth, power and, ultimately, love, erases his very identity. Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes, "invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end."

As psychologist Dr. Suniya Luthar notes in the aforementioned Affluenza story, "We are setting a double-standard for the rich and poor. ...[F]amilies that have money, you can drink and drive."

Luthar continues:

What is the likelihood if this [Couch] was an African American, inner-city kid that grew up in a violent neighborhood to a single mother who is addicted to crack and he was caught two or three times... what is the likelihood that the judge would excuse his behavior and let him off because of how he was raised?

She raises an excellent point. Perhaps no other group in America has experienced, firsthand, the blatant hypocrisy and cruel double-standard in our laws than the African American community. Black Americans--particularly young black males--are disproportionately imprisoned at an unprecedented rate. According to statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Justice, black men make up 40.2 percent of all prison inmates. One in every three black men will spend time in prison in their lifetime, along with one in every six Latino males. The vast majority of those imprisoned are serving time for nonviolent offenses, such as drug possession.

Law professor Michelle Alexander attributes this discriminatory practice to the "War on Drugs." In her revealing book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010), Alexander argues the War on Drugs has far more to do with imprisoning and disenfranchising African Americans from mainstream society than with apprehending any actual drug-lords. Like the racist Jim Crow laws of the 19th century that prevented blacks from voting, she contends, the criminal justice system serves to create and maintain a "permanent under-caste."

Nationally, the unemployment rate for African Americans remains double that of whites. Yet, highly successful figures like Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama are consistently held up as proof that, today, blacks too can "make it if they try."

The left's inability (or is it unwillingness...?) to talk frankly and directly about class and class struggle has left it divided and impotent. This is why I long ago severed myself from the liberal class. I am not interested in dabbling in identity politics or tweaking the capitalist system so more people can join the ranks of the rich. I want a real democratic revolution.

Until such a revolution occurs, may I suggest a slight amendment to the Pledge of Allegiance? Given the vast discrepancies in the enforcement of the law with regard to rich and poor, it is no longer accurate to maintain America provides "....liberty and justice for all."

We should, therefore, change one word so it reads, "....with liberty and justice for some."

If you like this blog post, donate what you think it was worth via the "Donate" button on the right. Consider a daily issue of the New York Times costs $2.50. I think Guerrilla Press is worth that amount. Don't be a Scrooge around Christmas time.

Error: In the original posting of this piece, 16-year-old Ethan Couch was incorrectly identified as "Andrew Couch." The name has been corrected. Guerrilla Press is dedicated to accuracy and regrets the error.





  

Sixteen Tons

...And what do you get? Not much, it turns out.

One of the first jobs I had growing up in Kennebunk, Maine, was cashiering at the locally-owned grocery store, Garden Street Market. I started working in the Produce Department when I was about 15 and continued through college.

The job was hardly glamorous. It involved a lot of standing for long periods, muscle and back pain from the repetitive motions, and, at times, hostile, unruly customers.

But the store owner was a decent man who treated his workers with respect and dignity. My co-workers were genuinely warm, earnest people, many of whom became good friends. And the pay, as far as retail jobs go, wasn't all that bad. By the time I left, I was, as a full-time employee, making close to $9 an hour. I even received a modest health insurance package.

In 2010, Garden Street Market closed when a massive Hannaford moved in just down the street. The owner did not even attempt to compete with the chain store.

His only demand of Hannaford was they offer jobs to any of store's employees who wanted one. Those who now work at Hannaford, I am told, are not happy with the big store or the management. One former co-worker, who was always so chatty and social with the townspeople who came through her line, laments the cashiers are forbidden from talking to customers at length beyond the standard, "How are you today?" and "Did you find everything you were looking for?"

While Garden Street was never truly my "dream job," I still occasionally reminisce about my time working there. I was treated with dignity, respect and, generally, received an honest wage for honest work. What more, really, can any worker ask for?

Alas, many retail and service workers are not afforded the same basic treatment. Local, independently-owned mom & pop stores like Garden Street Market are rapidly going the way of the manufacturing industry. In fact, Hannaford Brothers (founded in Portland, Maine; now owned by the European, Delhaize Corporation) is currently the largest employer in the state. L.L. Bean, Walmart, TD Bank, Maine Medical Center, and tax-dodger Bath Iron Works, round out the top 10.

According to an in-depth jobs report in the Maine Sunday Telegram (June, 2013), the jobs with the most expected growth are almost exclusively in retail, fast-food, or customer service. (Health care also ranks high here in Maine due to the state's aging population, the oldest in the nation.) And, contrary to popular belief, these jobs are not primarily held by teenagers or college students. A recent report by the National Employment Law Project finds the average age of fast-food workers is 29. More than 26 percent of them, according to the report, have children and subsist on poverty wages.

The average retail worker earns around $8.25 an hour--a mere dollar above the federal minimum wage. Most must rely on public services such as foodstamps, WIC, or TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) checks to make ends meet. These retail giants' stinginess toward their workers costs taxpayers nearly $7 billion annually according to researchers at the University of California, Berkley. The fast-food industry alone, made more than $7.4 billion in profits last year.

Indeed, this is another blatant form of corporate welfare, which I wrote about earlier this year. We are essentially paying these companies' employees for them.

As far as jobs go, retail ranks only slightly higher than janitorial work. Employees at big-box stores like Target, Walmart and The Gap, in addition to their cashiering or shelf-stocking duties, must also empty the trash, sweep and mop the floors, clean the associate breakroom and even the bathrooms. They are also responsible for disposing of any trash customers indifferently leave behind in the shopping carts. Such items can include everything from empty fast-food containers, unfinished Starbucks lattes, discarded tissues and even soiled diapers.

In fact, it is quite common for customers to pawn their garbage off on cashiers while checking out, commanding--never asking--them to "Throw this out!" Whether they are oblivious to the large trash receptacles that line the entrance of most of these big-box stores, or simply too lazy to make use of them on their way out, has never been clear to me. I once had an old man slowly and deliberately crumple his receipt up in front of me and drop it right on the register in a manner that suggested I was wrong to have handed it to him in the first place.

Additionally, retail workers must endure erratic scheduling, including shifts on weekends and holidays. Increasingly, more and more retail workers are expected to work on Thanksgiving Day. Associates are often forced to work until the store's close, getting home around 10:30 or 11 p.m., only to return to the store at 7 or 8 a.m. the following day. This unrelenting scheduling particularly takes its toll on single mothers, especially if they work an additional job. And you can forget about having any sort of a social life when you work retail. The few days associates do get off are usually in the beginning or middle of the week--when everybody else is working.

All of this demeaning work for jobs that offer meager pay, no health insurance, no overtime pay, no union protection and little opportunity for advancement. Since most retail workers are considered "part-time,"--even if they actually work close to 40 hours a week--employers do not have to offer them any health care. This is unlikely to change with the official start of Obamacare next year.

But increasingly low-wage workers are fighting back.

On Nov. 29, "Black Friday," Walmart workers went on strike in over 1,500 stores nationwide to demand higher wages. Walmart employees, operating under the labor-advocacy group, Organization United for Respect at Walmart, or OUR Walmart, initiated the strikes on what is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. The strikes came on the heels of a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) lawsuit against the retail giant that alleges Walmart illegally fired or disciplined employees who took part in a similar strike earlier this summer.

Walmart is the nation's largest employer and ranks number one on the Fortune 500, with profits of $443.9 billion in 2012.

Doug Born, president of the Southern Maine Labor Council, attended a protest, along with 25 other labor activists and Walmart employees, at the Walmart in Scarborough. The retail giant, according to Born, has a "terrible habit of underpaying" its workers.

So much, it seems, for the idea these corporate big-box stores "create jobs" in their cities and neighborhoods.

"How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach," John Steinbeck asked in The Grapes of Wrath, "but in the wretched bellies of his own children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other."

Retail workers of the world, unite!


If you like this blog post and want to read more like it, more often, consider making a donation via the PayPal button on the right side of the screen. Any bit helps.

 

 

How Identity Politics Destroyed the Left

It is difficult not to view Maine U.S. Rep. and would-be governor Mike Michaud's recent disclosure that he is gay with a degree of cynicism.

His announcement, made via an Op-Ed in Maine's two major dailies, The Portland Press Herald and The Bangor Daily News as well as the Associated Press, smacks of a shallow, calculated attempt to win over the progressive LGBT vote in next year's gubernatorial election.

This is in no way meant to diminish the very act of Michaud's coming out. Certainly it is not the place of heterosexual observers to dictate the timing, method and manner in which gay public officials choose to disclose their sexual orientation--or, for that matter, whether one chooses to disclose such personal information at all. And one must be at least somewhat sympathetic to the tightrope balancing act public officials like Michaud--who presides over Maine's northern, more conservative Second District where voters are likely to be less accepting of gay rights--must engage in.

That being said, local political columnist Al Diamon (yes, that Al Diamon) is justified in his recent criticism of Michaud's repeated votes against gay rights legislation as both a state legislator and a member of the House of Representatives ("Where were you when I needed you?", The Portland Phoenix, 11/11/2013). Michaud, Diamon writes, "stepped up after the war was mostly won."

He continues:

If he's successful in becoming the first gay man to be elected governor of any state, it won't be because he was brave. It'll be because he sat silently on the sidelines for 30 years while real heroes fought to change public attitudes.

It is a valid point--one that recalls then-Senator Barack Obama's stated opposition to the Iraq war, while he continued voting for additional military-spending bills to fund that very war. Yet it is a point that Michaud's liberal supporters--many of whom have already adorned their vehicles with "Michaud 2014" bumper stickers--peevishly brush aside as inconsequential or "mean-spirited."

Former U.S. Congressman and recent Maine transplant Barney Frank (D-MA) in a follow-up letter to the editor published in The Phoenix ("Diamon misreads Michaud," 11/20/13), castigates Diamon's "tone." Frank's defensive, hyper-partisan letter is emblematic of "progressive" gay rights advocates who have absolutely no trouble overlooking the fact that the two most egregious anti-LGBT bills in the last two decades--The Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask, Don't Tell--were passed by President Bill Clinton. Or those gay rights "defenders" (like Equality Maine) who refuse to speak out against the unjust imprisonment of Pfc. Chelsea Manning.

The fact is Maine, overall, is pretty accepting of gay rights--and Rep. Michaud knows this. This move was little more than a calculated effort to win over the state's LGBT base. It is, furthermore, emblematic of the cult of "identity politics" which has all but destroyed the left.

Identity politics has become the raison d'etre of the liberal left in this country. Those on the left no longer stand up against poverty, militarism, or a broader sense of social justice. They took to the streets en mass to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but promptly halted such actions when Obama became president. They instead dabble in what Chris Hedges calls the "boutique activism" of multiculturalism, inclusivity and other forms of so-called "identity politics."

Don't get me wrong: I wholeheartedly support all of these efforts.

The problem is, in abandoning a broader sense of social justice for highly specific issue or identity-oriented activism (be it the plight of lesbians, gays, blacks, immigrants, women, etc.), the left has allowed itself to become splintered, isolated and largely ineffective. While the focus on these various "isms" has certainly called much needed attention to the oppression of minority groups, the effort fails to critique the actual system of corporate capitalism which causes such oppression in the first place.

As Hedges observes in his 2010 book, Death of the Liberal Class, "Making sure people of diverse races or sexual orientations appear on television shows or in advertisements merely widens the circle of new consumers. Multiculturalism is an appeal that pleads with the corporate power structure for inclusion" (p. 125).

Contemporary liberals have seemingly lost any sense of class struggle which Karl Marx correctly understood as the central root of all societal inequality and the great scourge of capitalism. The left has, in a sense, lost sight of the big picture. Identity politics has become an end in of itself.

Furthermore, by ignoring class entirely, identity politics erroneously lumps all members of a given minority group together, suggesting their political aims and goals are all the same. Contrary to the dictates of multiculturalism, one can be female, black or gay and still be part of the economic one percent. (Oprah Winfrey, Clarence Thomas, Barney Frank and "feminist" scholar Anne-Marie Slaughter come to mind. Come to think of it... add President Obama to that list as well.)

To wit: This past summer, Supreme Court Justice Thomas voted with the conservative majority to gut key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The notoriously taciturn Thomas has, likewise, compared modern day affirmative action practices to slavery.

Indeed, Thomas's callous indifference to the plight of the majority of black Americans recalls the traitorous, self-serving Dr. Bledsoe in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. When the college-aged, African American narrator inadvertently takes one of the university's wealthy white donors to the impoverished black ghettos on the outskirts of campus, Dr. Bledsoe, the college president, reacts furiously. Upon expelling the narrator, Bledsoe reveals his true sycophantic nature.

"I's big and black and I say 'Yes, suh' as loudly as any burrhead when it's convenient," Dr. Bledsoe tells the narrator in one of the novel's most frightening passages. "but I'm still the king down here."

The only ones I even pretend to please are big white folks, and even those I control more than they control me... That's my life, telling white folk how to think about the things I know about... It's a nasty deal and I don't always like it myself.... But I've made my place in it and I'll have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am.

Nationally, the Democratic Party stands for little more than the vague concepts of inclusivity and identity politics. Women, Latinos, African Americans and members of the LGBT community were vital to Obama's win in last year's presidential election.

The irony, of course, is Obama has overseen the deportation of more immigrants than any other president in history. In the year since the president's re-election, a number of states have arbitrarily passed some of the most restrictive abortion access laws in the country, despite liberals' insistence that such continued reproductive freedom hinged on Obama's re-election. (Currently, eight states have outlawed abortion at 20 weeks post-fertilization.)

If we are losing the fight against corporate capitalism, it is because the strict focus on identity politics has, counter to its aims, left us more divided. The left, if it is to ever be relevant again, needs to rediscover its radical roots. We also cannot afford to wait around for closeted or otherwise self-sabotaging politicians to determine when it is politically convenient for them to stand up and stop actively working to undermine their own brothers and sisters.

To that end, Congressman Michaud's sexual orientation should not be our--or, for that matter, his--primary focus. As Maine voters, we should be far more concerned with what he will, as governor, do to take the state forward and reclaim it from the corporate interests that threaten so much of it and the rest of the nation.   

    

   

 

Toxic Sludge is Good For You!

When it comes to capitalism vs. the environment, capitalism always wins.

The disheartening though unsurprising defeat of a South Portland ordinance earlier this month that would have prohibited the transportation of tar sands oil through neighboring Sebago Lake, provides another stark example of the environment's perpetual subordination to capitalism.

The citizen-led referendum, "The Waterfront Protection Ordinance," would have effectively prevented the loading and transportation of tar sands oil onto ships at South Portland's waterfront. Voters narrowly defeated the measure 51-49 percent, or by a margin of about 200 votes.

The Portland Pipe Line Corporation, a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil and operator of the Portland-Montreal Pipeline which would deliver dirty, highly corrosive oil sands (or "tar sands" oil) from Alberta, Canada, poured in close to $600,000 to defeat the referendum question.

Opponents received additional campaign funding from other oil giants including Citgo, Irving, and the American Petroleum Institute, as well as the South Portland Chamber of Commerce, according to The Bangor Daily News (11/05/2013). Former Maine Gov. John Baldacci, a Democrat whom the local chapter of the Sierra Club awarded an environmental record of "B+" in 2002, also publicly opposed the ordinance.

The oil industry used the traditional Business talking-points--"Job killer!", "Protect working families!", "Our way-of-life is in danger!"--to convince residents to vote against the measure. They even recruited the local firefighters union in their efforts, thus making the campaign out to be a labor issue. Editorials in the ("liberal") local press uniformly lambasted the ordinance as "overly broad," preferring to quibble over procedural details while ignoring the ordinance's overall aim. The Press Herald staff editorial against the WPO ("Our View: Waterfront vote affects more than tar sands," 10/17/13), for instance, cites all the economic concerns, yet says virtually nothing about the dangers of tar sands oil.

The fact is, if the Portland-Montreal Pipeline were to rupture and leak heavy tar sands oil into Sebago Lake, none of these purely economic concerns will matter. None of them. Jobs...? Sure, temporary clean-up jobs. Local economy...? Destroyed. Tourism...? Ha! Yes, I can see it now: "Welcome to Maine: The Way Life Used to Be." Or, how about this play on our new city motto: "Portland. Yes, water's poisoned here."

Sebago Lake, it is worth noting, provides the water supply for the Greater Portland area, and about 15 percent of the state. It is routinely ranked as some of the cleanest water in the Northeast.

Contrary to the claims of Exxon Mobil press secretaries, tar sands oil is nothing like the conventional oil you put in your car. It is exponentially worse.

Tar sands contain crude bitumen and release about three times as much CO2 as refined oil. The process of extracting the sludgy material alone is extremely energy intensive and poses a major risk to the Alberta boreal forest and wetlands from which it is derived. But a mass-scale production of the substance, as envisioned in the all-but-imminent Keystone XL Pipeline, would be an environmental nightmare--a "carbon bomb," in the words of esteemed climate scientist James Hansen. Tar sands oil's potential impact on climate change, Hansen warns, would spell "game over for the climate."

Earlier this year, global CO2 emissions surpassed 400 parts per million, an atmospheric concentration not seen since prehistoric eras. According to Hansen, any CO2 level greater than 350 ppm is not compatible with "a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and life on Earth is adapted."

As I write, Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest storm in recorded history, has left nearly 4,000 dead in the Philippines. (The precise death toll, according to NPR, may never be known.)

Contemporary political discourse perpetually (and myopically) pits The Economy against The Environment as if the two are separate and mutually exclusive concerns. And The Economy (i.e. Capitalism) wins every time. Environmental regulations and protections, politicians warn us, will mean job losses or potentially missed economic opportunities.

Not only is this mentality completely warped, on a practical level it is unsustainable. Unlimited, unhindered economic growth on a planet of finite resources is simply not possible. To put it another way, capitalism and environmental sustainability are incompatible. The fact that the oil industry has shifted focus in recent years to tar sands, mountain-top removal, deep-water oil drilling and "fracking" is testament to the reality that we have essentially used up all the planet's readily available resources. The easy stuff is gone. We burned it all into the atmosphere. Now the oil giants, like an obsessed Captain Ahab, are maniacally tearing the planet apart to find more.

As Ahab says in Herman Melville's classic, Moby Dick, "All my means are sane, my motive and object are mad." The doomed whale-hunting captain, like the self-serving billionaire CEOs that manage Exxon Mobil, "did long disassemble" from mankind. If they must destroy the planet in order to maintain their outrageous profit margins, so be it.

The good news is the environmental activists that crafted the WPO ordinance are not ready to give up the fight. Indeed, a vote this close signals no mandate for the winners. South Portland Mayor Tom Blake and most of the members of the City Council support a ban on tar sands transportation in the city. The day after the election, Mayor Blake convened a Council meeting to discuss the issue further.

While I hope my neighbors in South Portland are successful, it is important to keep the larger perspective in mind. As long as protecting the planet remains subordinate to capitalism and "economic growth," this battle remains one we are, in the long-run, doomed to lose.

Fawzi Ibrahim, author of the eco-socialist book, Capitalism Versus Planet Earth: An Irreconcilable Conflict, sums it up best:

"Today, humanity faces a stark choice: Save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet."

Local readers can join the effort to keep Maine tar-sands free by clicking here. And you can make a donation to Guerrilla Press by clicking the "Donate" button on the right. Any amount is greatly appreciated.

Portland Paves the Way on Pot



Photo appropriated from the Portland Press Herald website, 'cause dammit Jim, I'm a writer not a photographer.

Portland, Maine became the first city on the East Coast to legalize marijuana on November 5 with the passage of the city ordinance Question 1. The ordinance, which asks voters to legalize 2.5 ounces of marijuana for residents 21 and older, passed in a landslide with close to 70 percent of the vote. My colleagues and I in the Portland Green Independent Committee spearheaded the initiative back in January. We collected nearly 3,000 voter signatures to place the question on the ballot.

While the ordinance is specific only to Portland, our hope is its passage will set the precedent and model for the rest of the state. (Many politicos anticipate a statewide referendum in 2016.) We ultimately envision the state of Maine taxing and regulating marijuana as it does alcohol and other legal drugs.

Though local pundits and opinionators leveled a barrage of criticism and ridicule our way, there was no formal, organized opposition to the measure. The brief demonstrations of public protest proved inept, unprofessional and incomprehensible.

Portland Police Chief Michael Sauschuck has told numerous local media outlets he intends to ignore the new law and continue treating marijuana possession in the city as a federal crime. The police chief's blatant disregard for the will of the voters is indeed contemptuous. This is the same person, keep in mind, who used lies and hyperbole this summer to convince the City Council to pass an overly broad and counterproductive ban of panhandling on median strips.

Maine is once again leading the way forward.

Decriminalizing marijuana is a sensible step toward ending the racist, economically unsustainable war on drugs. The U.S. spends more than $51 billion annually on a policy even former  President Jimmy Carter believes is a failure. That is money that could be going to re-hire all those laid off teachers, repair our schools, roads and crumbling bridges, or even provide health care for every citizen.

Additionally, the drug war disproportionately targets minorities and people of color. According to statistics from the Drug Policy Alliance, African Americans constitute 37 percent of those arrested for marijuana possession nationwide, even though they use the drug at comparable rates to whites.

The U.S., it is worth noting, has the highest incarceration rate in the world. 

It is important to understand this effort did not come out of either of the two political parties. It was the Greens working with the libertarian Marijuana Policy Project that enacted it.

Maine's Democratic U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree claims she supports marijuana legalization, but has taken no action in the House of Representatives to that end. What's stopping her...? State representative Diane Russell (D-Portland), meanwhile, introduced a legalization bill in the Legislature this summer. But she failed to even get it out of the committee. That is how supportive the Democrats are on this issue. And State Rep. Mark Dion, a Democrat who helped craft Maine's medical marijuana law back in 1999, snidely dismissed the will of the voters on WGME 13 as a glorified "opinion poll."

Throughout this campaign opponents constantly argued marijuana legalization is a "state issue," that should not be decided by Portland alone. They are correct. It should be a state-wide issue. But, with the notable exception of Rep. Russell, no one else in the Legislature is acting on it. The residents of Portland are tired of waiting for our lawmakers in Augusta.

Tuesday's vote is further proof that meaningful, substantive progressive change rarely, if ever, comes from the top-down. It comes from the bottom. It comes from hard-working, ordinary Americans most people have never heard of. Their names are conveniently left out of history textbooks. It comes from activists, labor leaders, socialists, anarchists, and third-parties. From people like Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, Mary "Mother" Jones, Emma Goldman and Upton Sinclair.

Most of these figures never achieved formal positions of power. Many were scornfully dismissed and savagely attacked by the power elite just as Ralph Nader, Edward Snowden and Jill Stein are today. Yet they used their books, writings, speeches, and organizing abilities to threaten those in power and demand real change.

"Democracy is not what governments do," the radical historian Howard Zinn said. "It's what people do."

As Zinn's dissident treatise, A People's History of the United States illustrates, all major progressive gains throughout this nation's history have come from outside the political sphere. Even such cornerstone victories of liberalism like Social Security and Medicare were not immediately embraced by the Democratic Party that, to this day, claims credit for them. Celebrated liberal figures like FDR and LBJ enacted their signature social reforms, Zinn observes, only when pushed and prodded by labor unions, activists and other citizen-led protests.

Roosevelt is said to have told a group of activists to "Make me do it." So they did.

The late Peter Camejo, who ran as Nader's vice presidential running-mate in 2004, concurs. In the 2006 documentary film, An Unreasonable Man, Camejo compares Nader's plight to that of  Debs and Thomas. He says:

Every major progressive law in the United States--whether it's the right of women to vote, Social Security, the rights of the Labor Party--never [did] any of these proposals come out of the two major parties. They always came from the grassroots, from the people. And there were people who lead those struggles who were independent and not functioning as agents of those parties who were always called names and suffered personal abuse...

Tuesday's victory is, no doubt, quite limited. It puts Maine--along with Colorado and Washington--in direct conflict with federal law. And its limit to one municipality in the state seems to make a statewide vote not only inevitable, but mandatory.

But it is a start. The Greens have made a small yet decisive crack in the machinery of the drug war. We have demonstrated that Mainers are ready for a more sensible, humane policy toward marijuana. Ignore the Establishment media that claim the new law is "meaningless" or "purely symbolic." They are, as is so often the case, out of step with their own readers. 

As Maine goes...so goes the nation...

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Red Sox.

I often feel like the only person in New England who does not care one iota about The Boston Red Sox. Sports, which are inherently sexist and anti-intellectual, have never held any interest for me. Given that most of today's celebrated professional athletes seem to derive their physical prowess from performance enhancing drugs, I am uncertain what makes these games, won through cheating and deception, appealing to anybody, frankly.

Red Sox fans (which, for reasons I have never fully understood, include hundreds of Mainers, despite the fact the team is based in Boston) can recall, from memory, intricate details and minutia of past World Series games from ten, twenty, even fifty years ago, but most cannot tell you the name of their state's congressional representative. In a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released prior to last year's presidential election, only 39 percent of eligible voters could correctly identify Joe Biden as the vice president.

As for the 54 percent that agreed with the statement, "[Politics] is so corrupt," as their excuse for not paying much attention to politics, I refer you to my previous statement about steroids in professional sports.

If the Red Sox lose a game, the entire city of Boston practically erupts in riots. If Obama guns down an innocent teenage boy with a drone in Yemen, nobody blinks an eye. It is good to know we have our national priorities straight. What's that you say, Sen. Angus King...? Drones are a more "humane" way of killing people? Well, if it's good enough for our junior "independent" senator, it must be good enough for liberals.

"Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist attitudes," Noam Chomsky once said. "They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators."

Baseball fans gush evangelically about the sport's "cultural tradition," its embodiment of essential values of "competitiveness," and "teamwork," often with an almost spiritual reverence. Many sports reporters even cast the Red Sox's World Series win as a symbolic "healing" of the city in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing earlier this year.

Get real, people!

Baseball, like all major league spectator sports, is commercial entertainment, pure and simple. Don't believe me? Just consider the Red Sox's major sponsors this year:

Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Poland Spring (which is owned by Nestle), Verizon Wireless and Dunkin Donuts. (The New York Times sold its share of the Red Sox last year.) The very purpose of these games is not to create any sort of community bonding experience, or even provide pleasurable entertainment. It is to sell ad-time to viewers.

These corporations do not care at all about the citizens of Boston--or anywhere for that matter. They do not even care about baseball. They just want your money. Feel stupid yet?

Sports, Hollywood movies, television and pop music make up what Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno called "The Culture Industry." Their seminal 1944 essay, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, proved eerily prescient in its portrayal of the then burgeoning popular culture as a system designed to distract and control a passive citizenry to satisfy the aims of the corporate state. As German-Jewish emigres to the  U.S. during the rise of the Third Reich, Adorno and Horkheimer observed ominous parallels between the Nazis' repressive propaganda machine and America's own commercially driven systems of mass media.

"Culture today is infecting everything with sameness," the authors wrote. "Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together. Even the aesthetic manifestations of political opposites proclaim the same inflexible rhythm."

Not only does this system of commercial culture, the authors warned, come at the expense of more emotionally and intellectually gratifying art, but it also creates within citizens a set of false needs--or "manufactured consent," to use Chomsky and Edward Herman's term--that can only be satisfied through consumer capitalism.

Or, as George W. Bush urged Americans following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, "Go shopping."

"Freedom to choose an ideology," Adorno and Horkheimer wrote, "which always reflects economic coercion, everywhere proves to be freedom to be the same."

For further confirmation of this last point, simply turn on any given commercial radio station anywhere in the country. Nearly every new song and artist sound the same. Clear Channel Communications, the world's largest radio producer and concert promoter, owns over 850 Top-40 radio stations in 300 cities nationwide.

The music featured on their stations is hook-laden, upbeat, obnoxiously overproduced and about as slick and soulless sounding as you can get. Most of the songs sound as if they were literally assembled in a factory. And, try as one may to fight it, listen to any of these stations long enough, and about a dozen of these tracks are bound to get stuck in your head.

Pop stars of the moment like Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, and Katy Perry stand in stark contrast to the messy, dissonant proto-punk of Lou Reed, who passed away last week. With the Velvet Underground, one of the great unheralded bands in rock history, Reed created music that was angry, cerebral and sonically volatile. His noisy, experimental rock challenged and provoked listeners as all great art should.

Yet, Reed and his contemporaries--Patti Smith, The Ramones, Television, The Stooges, The Sex Pistols--were never deemed safe or suitable enough for the corporate-owned airwaves. Their music always existed on the margins outside of popular culture. Thus, the culture industry ensures audiences are not exposed to true artists whose work could rouse them to dissent, rebellion, or protest.

The great media scholar Neil Postman was correct: We are amusing ourselves to death.

Postman opens his 1985 anti-TV polemic of the same name with an oft-cited comparison of the equally bleak though starkly different totalitarian futures depicted in George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contending that "Huxley, not Orwell, was right," Postman observes:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.... In 1984... people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

But rather than "rage, rage at the dying of the light," as Dylan Thomas urged, Americans prefer to relax, relax at the throwing of the opening pitch at the next game at Fenway Park.

If you like what you read here on Guerrilla Press, please make a donation via the PayPal button on the right. Any amount, even just a few dollars helps keep this blog going and allows me to update it more frequently. Consider you pay $2.50 (plus a periodical tax in Maine) for a regular issue of The New York Times. So, I think that is a fair amount to ask readers to donate.