First- go read this. It’s short, I promise.

Let’s take this part as true:

And here’s the bottom line; despite what is said about Roosevelt, no government has tried to spend its way out of a recession the way Obama is intending to do, and the way Keynes recommended. We are watching a very grand experiment.

If we are getting Keynesian spending on a scale grander than the New Deal, then why do quite a few of us feel less than excited about this “very grand experiment”?

And I got an answer for that.

Because at it’s heart, the stimulus plan and even the mortgage plan all work to maintain the systems that got us into this mess to begin with. And they don’t address any of the fundamental causes of the economic collapse, just the symptoms.

The real issue is that free market capitalism is fundamentally flawed. It will ALWAYS lead to corruption and eventually collapse. The only way for a capitalist economy to remain healthy is with a good dose of regulation provided by a strong government. It is the government’s job to make sure that wages are neither too low nor too high. It is the government’s job to make sure that business is kept honest (and not allowed to sell you poisoned peanut butter). It is the government’s job to provide the services that should not depend on profit, like education and health care, so that no one is denied a basic right because they are they low person on the totem pole. It is the government’s job to regulate the economy so that it neither grows too fast or too slow. But for years (30 at least) the government has been doing none of that.

The crisis will end eventually. Sooner rather than later if Obama can help it. But if we don’t do something right now to change the way this country works at it’s core and instead patchwork another few years of life out of this broken system, then the problems will continue to worsen. And no amount of money printing will fix it. Instead we will have the inevitably high tax bill from the stimulus and tarp plans without any permanent fix.

Spending money is fine and dandy, but spend the political capital that comes with it. We need to make the changes to the system now, when it is weak.

So a dude cuts off his estranged wife’s head. (Sorry, this may be triggering for some folks).

And the dude is brown, and Muslim. That must be the reason he did it, right. It’s not the patriarchy. It’s not the entire world view that women are inferior property to be owned by men and discarded as they see fit. Nope. He must have done it because of religion.

So of course the newsbunnies have run to claim this as some sort of terrible Islamic “honor” killing. Cause shit like that doesn’t happen when good Christians are involved. Nope.

I mean, could a guy who loves Jesus soooo that he would get a tattoo like this ever treat a woman like a piece of property?

Surely he must have taken Jesus’ message of turning the other cheek to heart. Right?

Except that tattoo is on the arm of another man famous for (among other things) beating the crap out of his girlfriend. Chris brown most certainly didn’t assault his girlfriend because Jesus told him to. That would be silly.

But wait, he’s also a brown dude. Good, white Christian men would never act that way. Right? I mean they found Matthew Denni in a church camp for Christ’s sake. He not have really meant to blow her brains out.

Actually, the only constant I’m seeing here is religion. Maybe patriarchy based hierarchical religions that treat women as empty vessels to be owned by their husbands are part of the general problem, but hurting the woman you love own most certainly isn’t an Islamic value.

and no one is talking about the origin of the housing crisis. Ok, not no one, but the people in charge are ignoring the biggest problem in hopes of things continuing on as they have in the past once the crisis is over. In the mean time the Rethuglikans and newsbunnies are blaming greedy homeowners, but that’s wrong.

For the last 30 years or so, wages have been stagnant while inflation continues to rise like a hot air balloon on a cold morning. So if people, average everyday people, can’t save for retirement or their children’s education because the money the earn from work isn’t keeping up with the cost of living they turn to other sources of revenue. And because they aren’t wealthy people with stock portfolios, they invest in something much more useful and tangible to them, their homes.

And we as a society and as a country have been promoting this kind of investment for a very long time. It is almost a moral imperative that people buy a home. It is the crux of the American dream.

So people buy homes, even poor people. It’s the only way they can get ahead. And when more people buy homes, home prices go up. And with more competition, people sink more money into their homes to get more value out of them.

So the Kid is moving into my closet next weekend (the closet is the size of a NYC bedroom folks, so it’s not too terrible) and I am rearranging my room so I can hang closet rods on one wall (sorry lathe and plaster, but it’s cheaper than buying a wardrobe). I went thrifting yesterday and found an old 1940’s vanity which has replaced the card table i was using for a desk ($14.99- and I’ve been coveting one of these forever).

To help make the labor go faster, I’ve been playing Gang of Four. Best described as disco punk and an obvious influence on bands like Franz Ferdinand, I love love love the Gang of Four. They had a wee resurgence a few years ago when they played the Live 8 concert. The lyrics are political, the beats are dancey, and it hits all the happy revolutionary buttons in my brain.

I love a man in uniform

Natural’s not in it

Ruth and I watched Bizarre Worlds last night. And they were talking Turkey. And now I am obsessed. Not just because of the history and the archeology and the culture, but because of this. Manly men, covered in olive oil, wrestling in the grass.

So fucking hot

I’ve been thinking about parity lately. It’s hard not to when bankers are crying over salary caps of $500k a year while minimum wage (even with increases) is still far behind the actual cost of living.

If you or I were to rob a bank (no guns, no violence, just a scary note and the threat of violence) we’d be facing some serious jail time. But if you are a banker and you rob the treasury department with threats of violently collapsing the entire world economy, you don’t get jail time. You get TARP money. And you still get to hand out annual bonuses and bitch about salary caps.

Now if you or I had to apply for government assistance, there would be some serious investigation into our finances. If you own a car worth more than a couple thousand bucks ($5000 I think), you have to sell it and use up that money first. If you have stocks or bonds or a 401k even a prepaid funeral plan, you have to use that up first. Then maybe you can get some kind of government help. Maybe.

But if you’re a banker, and you’ve run your company into the ground, your own assets are safe. The government will not require you to sell off your vacation house and pump the proceeds back into the bank before writing a check. They won’t even require salary cuts or end bonuses (who the fuck gives out annual bonuses at failing companies anyways?)

Now the bankers are screaming that if you put restrictions on salary, you’ll run off all the top brains who will take their wads of cash and go elsewhere. Good riddance I say. But isn’t it both morally and fiscally responsible to subject failing businesses that receive government money to the same kinds of pressure and investigation that we subject poor people to?

But one of these things is not like the others. The mere act of having money makes you insulated from the requirements we place on every other person in the country. And that is not ok.

Every now and then (and by now and then I mean once every couple of years) my city does something right.

Seattle City Council shows support for universal healthcare.

I talked to an old high school friend today. Once a year or so she and I IM or chat on the phone till one of us is called away by the daily grind of kids or work. She has 3 kids (two who are toddlers) and hubby got laid off recently. There are no job options for him in my old town, and she’s thinking it’s time to pack up the kiddies and see if there’s a better place for them. She wants to know if Washington’s social services treat people better than Nevada’s does. I told her only slightly. The problem is that in Nevada, they think women should just go out to a brothel to feed their kids instead of relying on social services.

Another dear friend came over the other night for tortilla soup and box o’ ritas (margaritas in a box- $6 on sale at Safeway). She’s been out of a job for a year now. She spends hours and hours everyday sending out resumes and is on file with every temp agency in the city. She’s stressed out cause her boyfriend has to play sugar daddy every time they go out, and he pretty broke too.

And me, well I’m stressed to the max. Ruth got into grad school (YAY Ruth!) but that means that come August 1 I’ll have to move again. I don’t know if there is anything out there I can afford. And my job may be non-existent come summer, forever, when the school sells off my program to another school. And I am turning my bedroom closet into a room for the Kid so we can shave a little bit of money off our rent and get another roommate. And the Kid is being his typical, awesome self about it. And his shoes need to be replaced. They are held together by teenage boy foot funk alone at this point.

And there are emails and comments from people I don’t know who are losing their homes. And I don’t know how to help them. And dear internet friends whose young relatives need $ for cancer treatments not covered by insurance. And I feel like a tool for being too stressed out to remember to post a link.

So I have to wonder, with all the stimulus talk and all the bank bailouts, what about us? We are not the margins. We are the real, living, breathing people who make up this country. We are not pork, though Republicans seem to think that any money that might go to help us a pork program and Dems are so eager to be bipartisan that they agree to it.

People first needs to be the motto of the day. Not banks, not bipartisanship, but people first. It is the people of this country, average everyday people like you and me, who do 70% of the spending. We buy the milk and the eggs and the shoes that keep the economy running. And when we have to choose between milk or medicine, shelter or shoes, then the economy dies. It doesn’t matter how much you prop up banks. It doesn’t matter how much you cut taxes. These are not the things that makes us able to buy bread and shampoo or to pay for electricity or cover the costs when the plumbing explodes (as ours has, repeatedly).

So when the news bunnies talk about the economy and talk about what the government is doing, remember that it won’t help unless they put people first. We need housing and food and health care. We need education for ourselves and our children. And we need jobs that pay a living wage so that when things pick up again we won’t have to live in debt to keep the economy going.

People first. If you help us out, things get better for everyone. If you ignore that, then it’s gonna get worse.

Every year there is a new student who drives me bat shit crazy. And after 5 years, the students have been, without exception, dudes.

I have had a student who would come in, have me explain the same things to him over and over and over again until I sat down and basically did the work for him. This is the only student I have ever yelled at, because it was painfully obvious he was trying to get me to do his homework for him.

This quarter my “problem student” is just sooooo obtuse I feel a bit like slicing my wrists every time he comes in the lab. Last week I had to explain to him that objects on the screen are not life size, just like on TV. Today it was 20 minutes explaining to him that he can’t get rid of a blank document because there is nothing to get rid off. He just kept staring at the screen saying “but I don’t want it” and trying to select the page to delete it. He wasn’t trying to exit the program. He still wanted to use it, he just didn’t want there to be a page there. (The program is a CAD program, but imagine someone who wants to type up a document in word and then gets pissy because he has to open a new document to do it).

That is all. I am now off to find any reasonably sharp implement with which to gouge my eyes and eardrums out.

And damn it’s about time.

I was reading this piece by Robert Reich in Salon and let me just say that reading lines like “But structuralists like myself don’t believe that the economy can fully recover unless these underlying problems are addressed.” makes me giddy. Hang on with me peeps. It’s time for another round of Red Queen gets all deep and philosophical on ya.

I am a structuralist. Structuralism is a not currently popular philosophy that posits that everything has a structure including human relationships, language, politics, etc. and that by changing the basic structure, you change society. It’s pretty basic really. Politically it went out of favor with the rise of the neocons and the neolibs (though that fact that those two belief systems exist is proof that we need changes to the structure now just as much as we needed them during the 60s and 70s). We don’t get to be the post modern society (post racist, post feminist) until we deal with the fundamental flaws of how we distribute power and resources. And that means changing the structure. (Dear favorite anthropology proff who looked at me in horror when I told you I was a structuralist- I”m STILL RIGHT!)

In the early 70s, with the Cold War raging and two super powers holding proxy wars on nearly every continent, Immanuel Wallerstein developed World Systems Theory as a way of explaining power and dominance on a global scale. It was a way to explain and prove the flawed structure we use for distributing power (political) and resources (economics). But Wallerstein’s theory of core, periphery and semi-periphery actors doesn’t just apply to nations on a world stage. It also applies to domestic systems. Look at domestic economics and you have the core (the rich) the periphery (the poor) and the semi-periphery (the middle class). Look at the nuclear family structure and you have the core (the father) the periphery (the children) and the semi-periphery (the mother). Same thing is true of corporate structures, you have the core (the board, the CEO, etc) the periphery (average workers) and the semi-periphery (management). What this kind of system does is insulates the core by making the semi-periphery responsible for keeping the periphery in line. The semi-periphery does so in the hopes of one day making it to the core (see Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony which explains that people do things in the best interest of the power class because they believe it is “common sense”. This explains all the blue collar workers who vote Republican because they think taxes are a bad thing, when higher taxes will give them greater benefits).

But back to Robert Reich and the structure that is our current economic system.

As late as 1976, the richest 1 percent of the country took home about 9 percent of the total national income. By 2006, they were pocketing more than 20 percent. But the rich don’t spend as much of their income as the middle class and the poor do — after all, being rich means that you already have most of what you need. (Emphasis mine)

I call this the gallon of milk theory. Say you 10 families with $10 in their budget for milk and one family with $100 in their budget for milk and everybody buys exactly as much milk as they are going to need. The family with $100 to spend is still only going to spend $10 on milk, otherwise they’d have a fridge full of yogurt in no time flat. The middle class and the poor spend more money on more goods than the rich ever can or will. So making sure that the middle class and the poor have enough money to spend on those things is better for the economy overall and in the end better for the wealthy too, as they make more money off more sales and are less likely to have their heads chopped off in French Revolution style uprising.

But that is not how we’ve been running the economy for the last 35ish years. We’ve been running on the trickle down theory, that if you give to the rich it will eventually trickle down to the poor. But a better structure would be to give to the poor and middle class, through higher wages and universal benefits for healthcare and education so that money can bubble up to the rich. The more people that can afford a safe and comfortable life, the more stable our entire economic system is and the less cyclical it becomes (that’s also basic Keyenesian economics- the it’s government’s job to temper economic cycles by taxing during booms and spending during busts).

So how’s Obama doing on changing the structure? So far, I am not impressed. The bank bailout was money to the rich without a single dime going to help homeowners facing foreclosure. Healthcare has been backburnered (and was never really health care but a more convoluted version of the private system we have now), and half the workforce was basically overlooked in the stimulus bill. For every 10 to 20 construction jobs created there may be one or two new secretarial positions.

The structure is broken. We will never recover economically if we don’t attend to that first. It is the individual American workers and families who must come first, not business or banks. When American families can afford both cereal and milk for their kids, and don’t have to worry about an emergency room visit being cause for bankruptcy, then things will be on their way to improving. But anything that doesn’t take care of people first will do no more good than the Bush tax rebate checks did.

The new structure must be built on people first, business second.