(no subject)

Thinking about the mismanagement of the disaster is now something I have to leave to other people. Not that I don't think about it, but that I shouldn't, because it gets personal when I think about my son going into that and what could happen to him because of it. So -- since I'm trying not to think about it, I'm trying to replace all New Orleans thoughts with rebuild thoughts. I just started doing this but I'm going to make a discipline of it.

So.

On the radio they had an extensive interview with a member of a very large family from the Ninth Ward -- almost thirty people, who owned, by her reckoning, nine houses among them. One of the things she wanted to say was that to portray her neighborhood as poor was inaccurate: her family members were all professionals, mostly in public service. She said that was the character of her neighborhood, almost all black professionals. That is, they were in law enforcement, they were project managers in state agencies, things like that.

It's time to get honest about class.

First of all, I want to expunge the word "underclass." It's demeaning, dishonest, and disingenuous. It's obfuscatory. I don't even want to go backto the old word "lumpenproletariat," which is about the same (although I retain the riught to call myself, at least jokingly, "lumpenintellectual"). The very poor -- the usually unemployed (let's drop "habitually unemployed" too -- it sounds like they're snorting poverty through an unemployment check, which of course they don't get one of, having been unemployed for more than six months) -- are members of the working class. They are the reserve army of the working clas (I'm sure I didn't make that up. Where did I get that from?). Their status is an essential part of the capitalist long-term strategy: their existence keep the working class fragmented, and provides a lever for ratcheting down wages, benefits, and protections. In times when an expanded workforce is needed, they provide new workers to be discovered and trained in magnanimous gestures that just happen to cost very little (notice how similarly the very poor at home serve to the way that new workers in undeveloped countries do). So get that: the very poor are a part of the working class.

Now. Categories, and category names, are invented by people to understand things, to express things, to prevent alternate understandings or expressions . . . and "middle class" is a category which has been defined in such a way as to confuse the relationships between the working class and the owning class. Because we use that term in the US to mean plumbers, teachers, low-level county clerks, Burger King managers, and also -- owners of large car distributorships, board members of corporations, directors of companies, and middle-to-large scale investors. It's not meaningful the way we use it. People used to call Angela Davis' parents "middle class" and use the label to question her credentials as a social critic (really). Other times some clearly rich, powerful, influential person gets called "middle class" in order for that person to seem all folksy and "just like us" and not like they have so much power and connections that their world is not ours.

I don't know how "middle class" can be resurrected as a meaningful term of any use in discussing real world problems. It probably can be made to mean something somehow, but the world in which we live right now doesn't seem to have a middle class in it that I can understand. I am reminded of an old longshoreman nicknamed Seagull (because all he did was "eat, shit, and squawk," according to his colleagues), who my mother met while working at a fishpacking plant and incidentally participating in the organizing drive there: he used to, according to my parents, punctuate conversations with a tendentious repetition of "THere's just two kinds of people, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie." I don't mean to be tendentious, I just honestly can't see how the term can be of any use in political, social, cultural, economic, ecologial, or any other discussion I can imagine taking part in at the moment.

So. Now I'm ready to talk about what I want to talk about today, and I'm just about out of time. I guess I'll continue this late tonight, but here's what the theme will be:

The health of a community depends on the state of its working class. Planning for a healthy working class should be the organizing focus of community planning. A no-brainer, right? No.

(no subject)

I wrote the first draft of this standing on the shoulder of Highway One just north of Buena Vista Road waiting for the Triple A to come and put on my spare. Not because I’m incapable of putting on my own spare. But for some reason my car didn’t have its tire irons in the trunk. I think I had bett.rer check out both cars for tools and evacuation supplies.

So here goes. This morning I was talking about class. That was the p[reamble, really, to what I want to talk about, which is the implications of the principle that the health of a community depends on the health of its working class. Having defined the working class this morning – or no, I didn’t, did I? I just undefined “underclass” and “middle class” and folded all of the first and most of the second into the working class where they belong – I’m ready, now, to think about what the health of the working class entails.

What makes a healthy working class? Decent work, with decent working conditions: affordable, decent housing: safety (and how we define safety has a lot to do with what we do to secure it and what we get in return): comfort: culture: and a sense of community.

What decent work entails is: a reasonable wage that allows the workers and their families to do more than survive: protection against physical hazards, injustice in the workplace, and harassment (which entails clear, enforceable, and enforced rules): a say in the policy and operations of the workplace and the business of which it is a part: and work that is itself not harmful to the community or to the world, including the natural world (which we should please be a little relaxed about when it comes to tiny venal things like liquor stores and smut shops, okay? Let’s save harmful for toxic or exploitative or criminal, okay?).

So cities can encourage decent workplaces with a little encouragement and can discourage indecent workplaces with the clever use of land use permits and fees and taxes and ordinances. Let me return to “encouragement.” Some communities in the past have gotten themselves declared “enterprise zones” which means the employer coming in pays less taxes and lower wages and lower benefits on the promise that somehow their being there is going to revitalize stressed towns. Excuse me, how? If you lock a town in to a bad deal, where it is paying for infrastructure and getting no return for it, where its population is getting screwed and not making enough to buy those extra things that feed the local economy – how does that revitalize anything but the pockets of whatever corrupt politician designed this foul deal in the first place?

But communities can offer other kinds of encouragement. Infrastructure guarantees, locked in with clear obligations. “We’ll build and maintain public transportation with routes timed to be convenient for your workplace, if you make promises about hiring, promotion and training. If you guarantee a distribution system, we’ll even make reduced fares available to your workforce! We’ll build the water mains in your part of town, state of the art, if you make commitments to water conservation and pollution controls above the Federal guidelines. We’ll make sure to include training programs relevant to your industry in our adult education programs if you commit to a fair promotion policy. We’ll zone for housing convenient for your workforce if you make commitments to stay in the area for at least fifty years.”

Sorry, tax breaks are stupid. Communities need money to provide infrastructure and protection, and large workplaces make large demands on communities. It’s no good letting them off the hook, because you will end up paying your public safety officers less than they could get washing cars and that will result in personnel shortages and corruption. Employers need communities to provide these things. Privatizing those services results, as we have seen, in waste, chaos, and abuse.

(as I write this, Gloria has the television going, and I swear the reporters sound drunk. All they seem to know anything about is that some of the people in New Orleans refuse to leave. They don’t seem to know anything else. Is there a connection?)

Employment is only one way that good planning for the working class is good planning for the whole community, but this is already quite long and I will have to get to housing, open space, and the rest, some other time.

On other fronts, I’ve seen “Broken Flowers” with Gloria, and you don’t have to. It has some very good things about i, but it is not a must-see, especially if you’re burned out on long slow scenes and ambiguity, or if it is possible for you to have enough of long loving shots of Bill Murray’s depressed face. The ambiguity is interesting, and the characters are portrayed sympathetically, even the monsters. It’s downright sweet. But not a must-see.

Late tonight, or tomorrow, I'll share my amazing insights about housing.

Comic relief, by way of Teresa and both Annas

I found Omniglot a while back, but I didn't find the useful phrases part until tonight. By way of Teresa Nielsen Hayden, http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=annafdd, and http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=aynathie. For some reason I can neither recall nor find the proper way to get a personhead, so those linky things will have to do. I know it's ugly, but if I can't find the instructions and I can't remember them, I'm left with kludgery as my only option.

Here are ones I chose especially for http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=diminishedsheep, and her friends, picked and arranged to tell a story they will all relate to:

German
Ich bin kein Mitglied dieser Konferenz, dennoch möchte ich einen Pinguin.
I am not a conference delegate, nevertheless I would like a penguin.


Wir wollen Ihre Kühe und Schafe sehen.
We want to see your cows and sheep.

Welsh
Mae'r defaid wedi bwyta fy mrechdanau!
A sheep has eaten my sandwiches!

Gaelic (but this is too obvious)
Cò an caora sin còmhla riut a chunnaic mi an-raoir?
Who was that sheep I saw you with last night?
Cha b'e sin caora, 'se sin mo chèile a bha innte!
That was no sheep, that was my spouse!

Cebuano
Gusto kung mosakay sa kabaw.
I want to ride on a water buffalo.

Esperanto
Mi volas brakumi tiun sciuron.
I want to hug that squirrel.

French
Il y a un singe qui vole dans l'arbre.
There's a flying monkey in the tree.

Tibetan
Nga saymong chig gö!
I need a squirrel!

Russian
V našem lesu mnogo medvedej
There are many bears in our forest.

Hindi
Āpke mez ke nīce billī hai.
There is a cat under your table.

Esperanto
Kiom kostas tiu hundeto en la fenestro?
How much is that doggie in the window?

Indonesian
Maaf, Nona. Ada bebek di atas kepala anda.
Excuse me miss, there's a duck on your head.

Breton
Sot oc'h gant ar binîoù?
Are you fond of bagpipes?

Swedish
Mitt huvud trillar av och det är fullt av godis.
My head falls off and it is full of candy.