CONTROL-FREAKING AMERICA

The computer and internet have transformed governance into something more like an international corporation than it has ever been.  But we don’t LIKE that.  Not even when the corporations do it.  Here’s a short list:

1.  Counting people and sorting them according to secret algorithms determined by the government so that no one is ever an individual and no voice is heard without enough people agreeing to affect major votes.

2.  No matter how carefully people’s incomes are monitored for taxes, there are always loopholes and secret exemptions that can be controlled by the simple change of codes and algorithms, but only certain people (rich) know what they are.

3.  People can no longer “move away.”  No travel by mass transit goes unmonitored, not just with passports and tickets, but also with no-fly lists so coarse they can’t really pick up the “bad” people who are the justification.  Constant video monitoring only works with densely populated places and always has blind spots.

4.  People are no longer anonymous.  Fingerprints, genome (not just one’s own but those of the whole family as well as your pets), dental records, serial numbers on implants from boobs to hips, face-matches, on-line public records of relationships, birth dates, and social security numbers (which were NEVER supposed to be used for identification), are only a few ways of tracking individuals.  It’s a constant preoccupation of CSI shows.

Every boundary from the 49th parallel to highway checkpoints and enrollment in kindergarten is recorded in giant databases that can be “cracked” by hackers, not necessarily for admirable purposes.  

Every order for books or cat food is noted.  I looked for new house slippers and was deluged with ads for slippers — along with porn (the traditional sex kind) of people doing the nasty while wearing slippers.  People note strange lit sky-fliers in Montana:  the drones are here.  Not the gun-ships but the snoops, too small to shoot.  The defense?  Trained eagles that knock them out of the sky.  Of course, you need government permission to train or even own an eagle.  (There are a few wild eagles that simply don’t like drones.)

No one tracks virtues.  As far as I know, no church turns in lists of their members, even the denominations that have boundaries.  (UU’s and Mormons claim everyone they think reflects well on them, even if they’re dead, and dissenters may not share the opinions.)  Most churches are semi-public so anyone can attend.  Fuzzy edges are dangerous.  This paragraph assumes there IS such a thing as virtue.  I find it even more difficult to define than Sin or Evil.

Neoliberals are self-defined as people who want to get rid of laws and regulations.  It cramps their style and reveals their marketing secret strategies.  They feel that the money for all those ports of entry, inspectors, monitors, enforcers, paper pushers is just wasted.  Of course, anyone who offers to reduce taxes is going to be popular.  At least among those who haven’t found a way to escape paying them in the first place.  (I escape by being too poor.)

The effective collaborator and enabler of all the control freaks is print:  the writing and interpreting of written laws, regulations, standards, and contracts.  I used to have the task of maintaining the Standard Code for the City of Portland for one department of the Bureau of Buildings.  Weekly I took a handful of pre-punched thin paper with fine print on it, looked for the code it was replacing, and inserted the new pages, usually more of them going in than coming out.  There were four BIG binders of this stuff, all numbered and so on.  No one had time to sit around reading the whole thing, much less keep up with the new inserts even if they knew which ones they were.

One of the crucial elements of this stuff was definitions:  what IS a citizen?  What IS a juvenile?  What IS grievous harm?  What IS insanity?  Isn’t it code so intricate and variable that no one knows it?

No matter how carefully written and interpreted, there were always clusters of lawyers challenging laws on behalf of their clients who couldn’t seem to get their ability to go underground to work.  Or had to pay an even higher tax to extortionists who guarded that strategy.

One of the smart insights into writing a law is to never write a law that can’t be enforced.  That means write it so you can tell what’s in and what’s out of the intention of the law.  (Big problem when it comes to militia and the right to bear arms.  Or even when defining religion.)  

You can’t enforce a law that interferes with with a lot of people’s desires:  That includes alcohol, hard drugs, smoking, and trafficking, whether children and women for sexual use or anyone for labor, whether in a mine, a field or a carpet factory.  They’ll find a way — probably bribery or secrecy.

BUT you can outlaw behavior by culture pressure.  When my family used to drive cross-country, the highways were white with trash.  My mother’s rule-of thumb was that anything organic could be thrown out the window, but nothing that could set a fire or puncture a tire.  Later she concluded that NOTHING could go out the window.  The change came from public notices and opinions.

For a while you were more likely to be chided for littering than for sleeping on the sidewalk.  Not anymore.  The culture shifted to resist scary signs of a failed economy, failed families, failed support for children, because the culture shifted to value greed.  In the Fifties a family was thriving if they owned a TV set.  Now it takes a huge surround-sound screen and a computer in every bedroom.  (Which presents a new monitoring and enforcing problem.)

We have not gone deep enough or wisely enough into the values that can guide us through our widening and multiple world.  Even people who have valuable things to say rarely think about any circle except their own, and that ignoring non-human living beings and even landscapes.  

One of the nastiest schisms is between the governing classes in cities and on the coasts, creating laws and practices that do not at all fit the rest of us.  The biggest trouble with their assumptions is that they don’t know they ARE assumptions.  When I write about Blackfeet, the automatic tags I get are travel and history, even though I’m writing about a real and dynamic population, my neighbors, whose history I have shared for half a century.

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY

First I tied my head into knots trying to balance my checkbook.  You’d think that with a life so simple, a balance so small, it would be a snap.  But I accidentally skipped some checks and the government demanded a blank check to give them access to my bank account for automatic “deposits” and “adjustments.”  Consecutive numbers will be lost until I use those empty checks.  I had a printout of the bank’s online statement, which is always a week behind; my own register with mysterious jotted notes that made sense at the time; the paper form that I invented for balancing; and the actual bills and receipts which I always accumulate in a monthly envelope, though some of them are electronically debited at the cashier’s counter and others are mailed or go into the store’s paper bookkeeping.  It’s the variousness that drives me nuts.  I hate being forced onto electronic records which are written on water and subject to strange policy changes, even in foreign countries since some of my pension comes from Canada and the exchange rate floats.

Some people call him a renegade economist.

Then I tried to read an article sent to me by a reader who had an unwarranted belief that I would understand it.  It’s an interview in the October 5, 2015, magazine called  “Counterpunch” which I didn’t know.  The interview is “Parasites in the Body Economic: the Disasters of Neoliberalism,” which is about a book by that name written by Michael Hudson, who is my age (b. 1939) and was educated at the U of Chicago but in quite a different discipline -- I did “theology’ and he did “economics”.  Both have their fantasy dimension and require learning a lot of invented terms which prove to be very useful if you can find anyone else who uses the same terms.  This particular set of terms and definitions turns out (or maybe will when I finally decode it all) to be very helpful in answering some questions that are local and specific.

Valier grain bins

It stays with me that a big piece of real estate in the town of Valier is owned by someone (I don’t know whether they are local) who only owns the land.  It is occupied by grain bins owned by industrial-grade farmers based on irrigation.  The bins became available when the US government changed its system of handling the huge grain purchases that are meant to stabilize economics and politics between nations.  So many bins with such large capacity meant that the system that was once simply logical has now become an economic system based on renting.  Like trailer courts or boat docks -- not the object itself but the land (or shoreline) under it.  This interview explains where the term “rentier” came from and its relationship to feudalism. 

The author sees what he calls “neoliberalism” as a return to feudalism.  Sort of share-cropping.  Ranchers I overhear talking remark bitterly that they are only running their ranch for the bank.  Not only does acquiring a large acreage cost a major first investment so that most ranches that have at least a little independence came by it through inheritance, but the megamachines that operate the fields also are immensely expensive.  Of course, one doesn’t have to pay wages or health insurance to a giant combine.  The old homestead houses, now considered pretty substandard (only one bathroom), are demolished, or -- like the grain bins -- moved to lots in town.

New topic:  When I was working for the City of Portland in the Bureau of Buildings, a bold legal concept was just arriving: “taking.”  It seems to have derived from the condemnation of private property for the public good and puts into play a lot of shady doin’s, like secret knowledge of governmental plans to construct something like sport stadiums, which somehow have become the public good.  We ran into a case where a big box store wanted to expand on marshy land behind it.  That marshy land was part of the system for handling floods, not only absorbing the extra water but also because of the marsh plants filtering storm water.  The store could buy the marshy land but -- due to environmental regulations -- could not drain it to put their extension on it.  So they sued for what they claimed was profit they lost by not being able to "grow" the business.  And they won.  I tried to tell a sophisticated lawyer in Montana about this (I knew he was sophisticated because he was from California and his daddy was a lawyer) and he said it was ridiculous and I must be making it up.  Many cases since then have changed his mind.  

New but related topic:  states are mandating certain standards for water and sewage, which involve both the collection piping and the treatment lagoons.  The state is always pushing the standards upwards, which means expansion and lucrative contracts for construction companies who actively participate in decisions of the towns about what to do.  Partly there are problems because of the concertina-like population which swells and shrinks in mysterious economic patterns.  The sweetest plea is always for the young people of the community since the service area for education is much bigger than the town.  Schools are big water users, not just for food and sanitation but for fire, which is only a potential.  But it was the argument that forced the second water tower in town so there would be enough water to put out a major school fire.   No one wants it to be an actuality.  In several ways the service area demands more and more (a percentage of the local farms have no on-site water source so need to truck water -- the trucks begin hauling before dawn.  (They pass by the head of my bed, twenty feet from the street, indoors, of course.) These are big heavy hauling systems that shake the house.  The town has added a fourth well.  The ranches buy the water.

Another topic:  Here’s a key idea from this article, the concept of the rentiere who uses a paybooth theory, so that he charges a toll for crossing a bottleneck of land or even stringing a wire across it.  This is a French idea that took hold in Europe.  It came to America, of course, but was not a concept in the minds of the indigenous people.  This is part of the reason they have not been able to exploit their rez land in the way that adjacent Euro-origin people have.  They have simply not seen the potential without the hypnotism of the idea.

Although -- in the Sixties there was a free-lance tribal toll-taker who had a cop hat and now and then collected toll for driving on the rez from clueless tourists.  He only asked a dollar.  There was a plan to charge the same category of tourists for taking photos of Chief Mountain, but it fell through.  Still, you see how a good idea catches on.

Of course, the government and businesses, local or national, were not about to explain the cost of crossing the rez -- because those same big entities were the ones who wanted to run railroads, pipelines, shipping routes, wires and all the other major infrastructure services that could charge “rent” for crossing the land.  This is how Malcolm Clarke was prospering on his ranch where there is a narrow passage on the way to Helena.  The railroad made a mint when Marias Pass was discovered and developed -- but not the tribe though it was on their land.  The same is true of Swift Dam.  It’s a little strange that when the dam collapsed in 1965, there were no law-suits for the “takings” of life.

Photo by Todd Klassy

This ability to make a profit simply from legal ownership without any participation in terms of labor or supplies or even physical danger is what has created a “coupon-clipping” class of people.  This is capitalism.  We call it “interest” and “investment” and the stock market.  I still don’t really understand it properly, but here’s an interesting opinion of renegade economist Hudson's: that religion (or at least religious institutions, the notorious “organized religion”) was originally developed as a way of keeping money exchanges honest and to constantly preach against hoarding, usury.  This is the core of the success of the fantasy of “money,” which isn’t really anything.  Just an idea.  In fact, Hudson says money was once physically made by religious institutions.  So maybe the University of Chicago Div School and the infamous Chicago school of economics have something in common after all.  Maybe both are outdated and need to renew their moral goals.

Michael Hudson

This is also a guy named Michael Hudson.  Native American.  Just so you don't think I'm a stuffy old woman.  But maybe we should think about his ancestors.  This IS Indigenous day.