What’s in a (Bad) Word

In my new novel, The Woman in White Marble, the main protagonist and one incidental character use the word fuck. The book is novella length and in 50,000 words the word fuck or fucking is used 37 times (five of the 37 are used by the incidental character in one small scene in the first chapter). The word is not used violently or sexually. It’s used for emphasis, as has become rather common in western culture, which, depending upon who you are, is either bad news, good news, or of no real importance.

In my previous short novel, Alien Love or Thank you Alpha Centauri, I didn’t use fuck or any derivative of the word. Instead I substituted it with the word “bush.” Early in the book I wrote:

Interestingly, etymologists agree it was also at this time that the proper name “Bush” began being used as an obscenity in the English language. In an unprecedented and amazingly short fifteen years the word “bush” found itself alongside the word “fuck” as one of the most offensive and often used obscenities in the world. Many etymologists believe that the intimate association of the two words is due to the fact that most people in the West, and apparently everyone throughout the rest of the world, thought the 43^rd President of the United States had, to put it bluntly, fucked the planet and everyone on it, and not just those he had tortured. In effect, he “bushed” the world.

The obscenity “bush” is used as a verb, both transitive (George bushed  the World) and intransitive (George and the World bushed). It can be an active verb (George bushed the World) or a passive verb (the World was bushed by George). Or an adverb (George is a bushing bastard) and a noun (George is a terrific bush). It can be used as an adjective (George is bushing horrible). The following obscenities are now in common usage: bush, bush you, bush me, I’ve been bushed, bushing hell, for bush sake, holy bush, like bush, what the bush, get bushed, mind bushed, go bush yourself, bush you, bush-all, bushass, bushed, bushed off, bushed over, bushed up, busher, bushing, bushing-A, bush job and bushwit.

There are numerous substitutions and derivatives for the word fuck. To name just a very few:

ef, eff, effing, fark, f-bomb, feck, fecker, fecking, ferk, fizuk, flip, fook, foose, fork, frak, frap, freaking, fricka fracka, frell, frick, fricking, figging, frig fug, and futz.

The television series Battlestar Galactica, used the word frack and fracking so often even the most pure among us couldn’t miss the reference. Even Howard Wolowitz in The Big Bang Theory says “What the frack” from time to time. My use of the substitute “bush” in Alien Love was not semantic or phonological but obviously political.

Interestingly, given the context we all know what “frack” means, what “What the frack” is saying. The word frack points directly and unambiguously to the word fuck and embraces the full meaning of that word. And yet, we will never here Howard Wolowitz say “What the fuck” on The Big Bang Theory. The writers use frack to say fuck without offending anyone. It’s almost as if it is the actually hearing of the word fuck spoken or seeing the word on paper or screen that is offensive. Of course, by using frack, even though everyone knows what is really being said, the impact of the word fuck is eliminated, as is also true in my use of the substitute “bush” for fuck in Alien Love. Even though I explicitly say “bush” is “fuck” the use of the word bush offends no one (well, perhaps some Republicans but I suspect no one else). So why did I use fuck instead of frack in The Woman in White Marble? For the impact, of course.

Jesse Sheidlower edited a book entitled The F-Word: The Complete History of the Word in All Its Robust and Various Uses. The book runs to 228 pages, plus a 35 page introduction.[1] It seems to me less a history and more a dictionary of the derivations and usages of fuck – and there are a lot of them! The short introduction is a history of the usage of the word and not an exploration of the cultural meanings and impact. Sheidlower does point out that a word's “badness” changes through time. For example he writes:

In more recent times, words for body parts and explicitly sexual vocabulary have been the most shocking: in nineteenth-century America even the word leg was considered indecent; the proper substitute was limb.[2]

The history of fuck is unclear though it seems to be of Germanic origin. It is also unclear whether or not the word was always consider vulgar “and if not, when it first came to be used to describe (often in an extremely angry, hostile or belligerent manner) unpleasant circumstances or people in an intentionally offensive way...” However, given the easy and numerous usage of the word fuck today, in everything from James Joyce’s Ulysses to the Star Report, in newspapers, television and film, it’s interesting to note that the first openly printed use of fuck occurred in the U.S. in 1926 “when it appeared once, and seemingly without generating any controversy...in Howard Vincent O’Brien’s anonymously published Wine, Women and War, his diary of the years 1917-19.”[3]

It’s obvious that the word fuck has lost much of its shock value, though it is still considered a “bad” word and deemed inappropriate, if not offensive, by many (thus you can see the word fuck used in an editorial in a leading newspaper but not used on a television show like The Big Bang Theory). At times I am one of those people: when it is used in anger; when it is used in hatred; when it is used sexually. So why use it at all.

The first and perhaps obvious reason is, that while it may no longer shock, it is still a “bad” word. People curse for a reason. There are always other words we can use. If fuck weren’t a “bad” word it wouldn’t have the impact the speaker/write is going for. If a fiction writer puts the word fuck in the mouth of his/her characters he/she is doing so to communicate something about the character’ personality. It isn’t happening by accident. The usage could indicate the character is crude, violent or insensitive. Or it could indicate something very different.

The British comedian (I guess I should say the Scottish comedian given recent events!) Billy Connolly is known for the use of fuck in his live performances, and the question arise: would he be as funny without using it? (At the end of one of his shows he warned the audience that when they left the auditorium they might find themselves telling the taxi drive to fuck-off, for example, but not to worry about it because it was his fault.) I suspect even those who find the word offensive can’t stop laughing.

I had my main character in The Woman in White Marble use fuck and fucking primarily for comic value, though I’m no where as funny as Billy Connolly! One reader wrote of the main character, who also narrates the story: “The narrator is the main selling point. He swaggers and swears, hiding the sensitive soul within.” While I’m not sure I would use the words “sensitive soul within,” his use of the word fuck is bluster and an attempt to indicate his “street-wiseness.” While sometimes humours, the use of the vulgarity also points to some level of insecurity in the character that, I hope, is likeable.

So for me, in this book, the use of the word fuck and its derivatives is a comic device and an indicator of the characters personality. I offer these thoughts not as an apology or an excuse, but as an explanation. However, a heads-up: if you don’t like my book because of 37 fucks you definitely do not want to watch Billy Connolly, you better skip Ulysses, and for heaven's sake do not watch the film The Big Lebowski, in which the word fuck is spoken 271 times or once every 26 seconds.

Copyright © 2014 Dale Rominger

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[1] Sheidlower, Jesse, editor. The F-Word: The Complete History of the Word in All Its Robust and Various Uses. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.
[2] Ibid., p. xi.
[3] Ibid., p. xii-xiii.

The Woman in White Marble

I’m excited to say that my new book, The Woman in White Marble, is now available. As always it is available in hardcover, paperback and eBook for Kindle (also Kindle for Android and iPad), the Nook, Sony Reader, etc. I had a bit of fun with the mystery story, a bit of fun with the ghost story, and a bit of fun with the American “gumshoe” genre. The key word there is fun, so I hope you enjoy the book. Here is the publisher’s book blurb:

Drake Ramsey is a Californian news reporter who wants to write the great American science fiction novel. Dumped by his girlfriend, Drake finds himself with nothing to lose, and he searches online for a secluded place to work. Alone in a dreary English coastal town, consumed by boredom and loneliness, he is lured up the road to the Skinburness Hotel, where he finds inspiration in the beer and the atmosphere. Drake senses this is the place to harness his creative genius, without any idea of what awaits him in the future.

After a few visits, Drake is befriended by the hotel manager—just as a member of staff is found mysteriously dead. Drake, ever the streetwise reporter, senses a story and begins to investigate. The last person to have seen the dead man alive is Zuri Manyika, a stunningly beautiful hotel guest. Now Drake must determine whether Zuri was involved, all the while wrestling with his undeniable attraction to her. Unfortunately, this is not the first death in the hotel—nor will it be the last—unless Drake finds a way to stop a killer on a quest for revenge.

In this eerie tale, an American news reporter suddenly immersed in a suspicious death investigation in a remote corner of England is about to discover that every mystery comes with an unexpected twist.

Now I know you are extremely eager to get your hands on a copy so if you click here you wlll find a bit more information about the book and links to Amazon and Barns & Noble.

My publisher keeps telling me that  reviews are really important on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. So if you do like the book and have a few minutes, a good review would be most welcome (and don’t forget to post it on both amazon.com and amazon.co.uk). On the other hand, if you don’t like the book and are moved to write a really bad review, I would ask you to pause for just a moment and remember what a nice guy I am.

Copyright © 2014 Dale Rominger

Holidaying in Tesco with My Zen Master

I’m the main cook in our small family and thus I am also the one who does the food shopping. I go to a big Tesco not far from home, not for any misplaced loyalty to a huge faceless corporation, but because it is the closest supermarket to where we live.

When I’m preparing a meal I always have the radio on and at 5:00 p.m. Radio 4’s PM programme comes on. It’s a frustrating programme for me, but it’s my own fault. I can’t shake the idea that it is an hour news programme when in fact it is a news and light entertainment programme. For example, there is often what I call the Oprah segment. Under the guise of a news interview someone does an on-the-cough conversation with the guest where the expression of feelings is more important than the news that got them to the studio in the first place. PM can also be like a dog with bone. Once the programme asked listeners to send in audio clips of how best to present the weather. We all know the weather report is trance inducing so PM got the brilliant idea of asking it’s listeners how to do it. Every clip I heard was ridiculous. The latest bone the programme couldn’t let go of was asking people to send in their favourite sound. This went on forever! And if all that weren’t bad enough, PM introduced iPM, “the news programme that begins with its listeners.” You get the likes of: “Hi, I’m Mildred and I had a wonderful lunch with my daughter yesterday.” Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m happy for Mildred, but it’s not news. It’s not even light entertainment. I doubt Mildred’s husband cares all that much. I certainly don’t care and I don’t need to know.

Anyway, a while back when I was dicing an onion, a news item about Tesco came on. A few years back, Tesco was so successful all you ever heard was that it was taking over the UK like some unquenchable monster. But today Tesco is doing so horribly badly we are told the world as we know it is coming to an end. In this regard, Tesco is not unlike the English cricket team. For weeks the media proclaims that the English team is the best in the world, reminiscent of the old, but gratefully deceased, empire and that the team captain is second only to Churchill and Jesus, in that order. Weeks later, however, the English cricket team is worse than a joke and a disgrace to the nation, and while no one actually suggests the captain should be crucified, hundreds of column inches are used demanding he resign immediately and never pick up a cricket bat again. However, I digress.

PM had three “experts” on to tell us, and presumably Tesco, how the supermarket could be saved. The one that interested me the most was a very intelligent woman saying that Tesco desperately needed to improve my “shopping experience.” They way she talked about it, it seemed my shopping experience should be similar to my holiday experience. As I began sautéing the onion, I imagined myself walking into Tesco with sunglasses, a colourful short sleeve shirt, shorts pants, and sandals, filled with anticipation about the experience I was about to have. I saw myself emailing and texting friends at home: “In Tesco food shopping. Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.”

If truth be told, I have never thought food shopping in Tesco should be a holiday experience. Obviously, I do have an experience when I shop. Even sitting in a chair doing nothing is still an experience. But the most I ever hope for is at Tesco is getting in and out with my sanity in tack and without having insulted other shoppers. I experience food shopping as a Zen-like challenge. The aisles are wide and spacious but two people with their shopping carts can block the whole damn thing. Politely requesting passage is a waste of time. One is more than likely on their mobile phone and thus not actually engaged with the shopping experience at all, while the other one simply ignores you. I am never sure if that person actually is unaware of my presence, blocking all other human forms from their consciousness as a survival mechanism, or if they are just selfish and mean. No matter what the next thing is on my shopping list I can be assured that someone will be standing right in front of my desire item reading the shelves or talking on their phone or arguing with their obnoxious child. I’m convinced that a Buddhist monk, who has after decades of dedication achieved nirvana, would lose it after fifteen minutes of the food shopping experience, in much the same way Jesus would never had instructed us to turn the other check if he had to drive an automobile in any major city in the world. If Tesco wants to improve my shopping experience, it can get the other shoppers out of my way. And oh, it can stop rearranging the shelves every other week making it difficult if not impossible to find the things on my list. Om. Om. Om. Ommmmm.

The doors of my Tesco are located at the right end of the store. That obviously is where everyone enters and as a result there is always a bottleneck in the vegetable section, the aisle in a direct line with the doors. I, nonetheless, run this gantlet and slowly make my way across the store always moving to my left until I reach the last aisle. In that aisle is located the wine and spirits. It’s always my last stop, perhaps because at the end of the shopping experience I feels as though I need a drink. More than not there are only a few people there and as I approach the last check-out in the store, the one furthest from the doors, I see a middle aged woman from Uganda minding the till. Big smile and big, what in the old days we would have called, Afro. We smile and talk and make jokes, and not just about the weather. She is always pleasant, even though I’ve seen shoppers treat her with less politeness and dignity than she deserves. She told me about the new American section, which I visited with excitement only to find a box of Cheerios cost the equivalent of $10.00. One Friday I asked her if she had the weekend off and she said she was heading home soon, though it would take her two hours to get there. I laughed lightly and suggested she should have moved from Kampala if she wanted to work at Tesco. She almost fell of her chair laughing in response. If there is no one in line behind me I linger a few minutes. It always ends with the shared request that each of us have a nice day. The shopping experience is a strange place to find a stranger-friend, but as a result I usually leave the store feeling pretty good.

The woman on PM concluded that Tesco should make the interiors of its stores look and feel like an outside market. I knew what she was getting at. My wife and I used to live up north in Newcastle and we went to the Metro Centre frequently. There was a section with a Spanish and Creek restaurant. There were fake tress and twinkling lights fixed to the ceiling painted black encouraging you to imagine you sitting outside on warm Spanish or Greek evening sipping wine on holiday. It didn’t work. Shoppers kept walking by loaded down with bags and heavy coats. Across from the restaurant was a evangelical Christian bookshop where, I supposed, people were being saved. I’m not sure about Tesco indoor markets. Tesco’s isn’t a market and I doubt a pretend market would make the shoppers more courteous towards each other. My shopping experience is determined by the people more than the space. If Tesco wants to improve my shopping experience it can hire more people like my Ugandan friend. And it can clear the store upon my arrival.

Copyright © 2014 Dale Rominger

Why I Left the Church ~ A Big Fat Correction

Last week I wrote in my blog about why I left the church. I began with these words:

Recently my wife and I had dinner out with friends, both of whom are ministers (which meant all of us were minsters!). A family walking by our table – mom, dad, son and daughter – paused and said hello. When they were gone my friend said they were leaving the church because her church welcomed LGBT people. Mom and dad didn’t want son daughter to be exposed to that kind of environment. In response I said I had left the church for the opposite reason. Here’s a bit of why I left.

After my friend, mentioned in that opening paragraph, read the blog, she emailed me saying I had got it all wrong. The family in question were not leaving the church because the church was welcoming of LGBT people, but instead because the denomination had failed to agree a policy that would have allowed local churches to conduct same sex marriages! Besides being embarrassed, I feel like a real ass. How did I get that so wrong? A couple of things jump out at me.

First, I am reminded that memory is a combination of recall and construct. I remember we had been talking about the denomination’s failure to agree on same sex marriage at its general assembly, and my friend was saying that she had gay couples in the church wanting to marry. The family walked by, paused, said hello and my friend said, “They’re leaving the church over this” or something like that. I assumed the parents were more evangelical than liberal and were thus leaving over the “gay issue.” I couldn’t have been more wrong! Thinking back, now I see that my friends comments about the failure of policy, the inclusiveness of her local church and the family leaving all fit. So why did I assume the opposite? Well, that leads me to the second thing that jumps out at me.

I think this was the first time in all my years in the church and ministry that I heard of liberally or progressive Christians leaving because the church was failing LGBT people. Through the years the, sometimes loud background, noise has always been evangelicals and fundamentalists saying they would leave, or actually leaving, if the church accepted LGBT people as fully human. It has been a rather constant threat. I have never heard a liberal person say they were leaving because of perceived injustices. Oh, I’ve had many a conversation through the years about being tempted to leave, but I personally have not known a progressive to actually leave. We usually stay around, even when things are difficult. I have wondered from time to time, if we liberals threatened to leave, and to take as many people with us as we could, whether or not we would have made more progress and, for example, would have won the day on same sex marriage. We’ll never know. It’s not in our DNA. It won’t, and shouldn’t, happen. We leave, I am sure, but rather more quietly and alone.

Well, a big apology to the family and to my friend for getting this so wrong.

Copyright © 2014 Dale Rominger

Why I Left the Church

Recently my wife and I had dinner out with friends, both of whom are ministers (which meant we all were ministers!). A family walking by our table – mom, dad, son and daughter – paused and said hello. When they were gone my friend said they were leaving the church because her church welcomes LGBT people. Mom and dad didn’t want daughter and son to be exposed to that kind of environment. In response I said I had left the church for the opposite reason. Here’s what I meant.

First, my UK denomination, under the delusion that it is protecting its “peace and unity” and the nonsense that it is “living within its diversity,” is unable to welcome and include LGBT people fully and openly because a minority in the community believe LGBT people are sinful and pathological. In choosing whom to offend and who not to offend, my denomination chooses not to offend the bigots. As a result, it lends credibility and gives a platform to faith-based gay bigots – and by implication asked me to collude in this behaviour. I could no longer do it.

Second, while I know of no case of any member of my denomination being physically violence towards a LGBT person, many do, directly or indirectly, encourage and/or commit spiritual, psychological, and institutional violence against LGBT people. Injustice is violent. I could no longer be a part of it.

(While I have never witnessed physical violence against LGBT people in my church, I have metaphorical violence. At one of our general assembly gatherings a man expressing his hatred of LGBT people at the microphone stabbed a knife into a block of wood. He was not asked to leave the auditorium nor was he rebuked in any way, though his action, words, and demeanour were disturbing. It does beg the question, what would have happened if someone had done the same while expressing hatred for people of colour? While the question is almost unavoidable, it is, nonetheless, of no value because the church institution does not recognize violence against LGBT people in the same way it does violence against people of colour. Further, while individual liberal and progressive Christians may abhor such behaviour, they find it difficult to challenge and change their institutions. By not speaking out and acting against faith-based gay bigotry, they provide a safe place for bigots within the institution and thus in the public square. By refusing to publicly take sides, they choose sides. By not declaring loudly and publicly that faith-based bigots do not speak for all, they hand the bigots a metaphorical megaphone.)

(If you are unaware of the many expressions of violence, some reading might help. A place to start might be with Religion and Violence by Roberta McAfee Brown; Spiral of Violence by Helder Camara; and The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism by Regina M. Schwartz .)

Third, in general LGBT people in my denomination are either happy with the status quo or are able to quietly tolerate it. Many are fully included in local churches and perhaps understandably do not want to rock the boat. Some have ministries and careers they want to protect. Still others tell me that change will come eventually and that I should cease and desist. If the LGBT community does not want to make a fuss, then what’s up with a straight guy doing it? It all started feeling a bit pretentious if not foolish, and perhaps even unhelpful. I didn’t want to be any of that. So I stopped.

It's a personal not a political thing. Many of my evangelical and fundamentalist brothers and sisters are not shy to say they will leave if the church recognizes LGBT people as fully human and are thus included in the life of the church and society with full rights and dignity (they wouldn’t say it quite like that, but given my perspective, you understand). Also, they would not hesitant to ask others to leave with them. But like a good liberal/progressive I disappeared quietly, so quietly in fact I doubt anyone noticed! And I certainly didn’t ask anyone to follow me, though I seriously doubt I’m the only one to have pulled up stakes and left. I suspect many of my liberal friends will say I gave up the fight and ran. Perhaps. Perhaps they are right. But the decades rolled by and I found it harder and harder to live with myself. And with fewer days left on good old planet Earth than I have had, I decided there might be better uses of my time. As I said, it's a personal thing.

So, for these reasons and a few more, I have to declare myself out.

Copyright © 2014 Dale Rominger

Who Wants to be a Human Mascot? I Mean Really, Think About It!

The other night I was watching baseball and for some reason got to thinking about team names. I grabbed my handy tablet and had a look. In Major League Baseball (MLB) there are thirty teams. I broke the names down into four categories:

• Teams named after Animals – e.g. the Baltimore Orioles, Arizona Diamond Backs, and the Tampa Bay Rays;
• Team names associated with Location, in some way reflecting the city or area where the team is based – e.g. Texas Rangers, Milwaukee Brewers, Washington Nationals;
• Team names I classify as Other, meaning there is no direct association with a mascot or location – e.g. Los Angeles Dodgers, Houston Astros and the San Francisco Giants;
• Teams named after Native Americans – e.g. Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves.

Here’s how it breaks down in the MBL:

• Animals                     =  8
• Location                    = 10
• Other                         = 10
• Native Americans    =  2

I turned to the National Football League (NFL) which has 32 teams:

• Animals                     =  15
• Location                    =   6
• Other                         =   9
• Native Americans    =   2

This isn’t an exact science and I’m sure there have been books written about why we name our sports teams what we do. But it was really late at night and I had had more than a little wine with dinner. The Animals category is plain enough. Animals make good mascots for teams and imply that the team possess some of the animal’s virtues – speed, strength, fearsomeness. My Location category is also pretty obvious. Name your team after something unique or identifiable about the city or area in which the team is located and you quickly establish identify and loyalty. I admit my Other category is pretty much of a big net, but how do you classify names like Dodgers, Twins, and Red Socks (and who thought of naming a team after a pair of socks anyway?). If truth be told, I as too tired to break it down further. But the strange one is naming your team after Native Americans, or more accurately characteristics and qualities the dominant culture stereotypically associates with Native Americans.  Here are the MBL and NFL team names linked to Native Americans:

• MBL: Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians
• NFL: Kansas City Chiefs and the Washington Red Skins. (And of course the award for the most racial offensive names goes to...the Washington Red Skins).

And we can add to the number of teams associated with Native Americans in the professional ranks:

• National Hockey League – The Edmonton Eskimos and the Chicago Blackhawks (the team was actually named after the teams founder’s military unity the Blackhawk Division, but the mascot character on the team jerseys is a Native American, so you decide);
• National Basketball Association – the Golden State Warriors.

I got to wondering why we don’t have teams named the Boston Italians, or the Missouri Negros, or the Cleveland Polocks (or Polacks if you prefer). The notion is totally absurd, ludicrous! But the Chiefs, Red Skins, Braves, Indians, Warriors, Blackhawks, and Eskimos are apparently acceptable. One does wonder why.

Of course, there is a huge controversy surrounding naming teams after Native American tribes or their racial and cultural characteristics. In favour is the argument that making Native Americans team mascots is an honour. Perhaps, but then why not the Missouri Negros or the Cleveland Polocks? Wouldn’t African Americans feel honoured to be called the Missouri Negros? I guess the question is this: Would you want to be a human mascot for a sports team? Would being compared to a bird or fish honour your history, traditions, your existence as an individual and a people? Would it make you feel respected and dignified. It’s great to say your mascot is a fish or a tiger or a bird, but a human being? Perhaps we could have the Tennessee White Trash mascot with the appropriate cultural signifier on the team uniform.  

I did wonder if we turn Native Americans peoples and all that they are into mascots for our sports teams because somewhere did down in our collective memory and attitudes Native American fits best in my first category: Animals. My mascot is a tiger. Well, mine is a Brave. My mascot is a snake. So, mine is a Chief. My mascot has a red breast. Well big deal, mine has red skin. My mascot is a buffalo. Yeh, well, mine is an actual Indian. After all, when we invaded their continent we did find them in the forests and plains apparently just wondering around, not a fence anywhere and absolutely no sign of Jesus (let’s not mention the cities and continental trading routes and the social, cultural, political religious realities). And we did hunt them down, like we did the buffalo.   

Crazy I know. I stayed up too late and the game wasn’t even that good. My apologies.

Tonight it’s the Missouri Negros versus the Tennessee White Trash.

Go White Trash!

Give me a “W”! Give me an “H”! Give mean “I”!...

Copyright © 2014 Dale Rominger

The Woman in White Marble Gets a Makeover

My next indie book will be released soon. I prefer to call myself an Indie Author, indicating that I’m not under the shackles of The Man, but rather that I’m free and making my own waves (See I’m an Indie Author). Of course, other people call it self-publishing, but hey, each to their own. Anyway, the new book is called The Woman in White Marble. In the past several weeks I’ve been through two editorial evaluations, line-by-line editing, proof-reading, cover and interior design, and marketing strategies. The editorial evaluations assessed: Title; Opening; Basic Premise and Tone; Point of View; Structure; Plot and Pace; Setting; Characterization; Dialogue; Punctuation and Grammar; and General Comments. Basically no place to hide. Before receiving the thirty page report the publisher sent me an email telling me not to be hurt and angry. I wasn’t. The evaluator (who was not named but I think was a man) found a major whole in my plot. He also made smaller suggestions for improvement. I worked for two weeks to make the fixes and the revised manuscript was sent back to the same editor for a second evaluation. He liked what I did, but repeated two needed improvements that I had ignored, simply because I didn’t agree with him. One was trivial and the other important. Eventually I caved on both, because he was right.

After that came the line-by-line editing. There are something like four punctuation and grammar bibles out there and each publishing house embraces one of them. If you want to impress your publisher you need to know which one it worships. The publisher I’m working with uses The Chicago Manual of Style, 16^th Edition. The damn thing is 1026 pages long. No way I was going to master that. I thus decided to go in-house on the line-by-line and proof-reading to make sure it was done right. Everything you read about self-publishing says you need to put the money into editing. Everyone says it because it is true.

I had thought after two thorough editorial evaluations the proof-reading would be redundant, but I was wrong. The proof-reader highlighted inconsistencies in characterizations and plot that I hadn’t seen. For example, in the story a ten year old girl brings dessert to my main character. The girl’s father and mother own a big hotel and the main character often goes to the hotel for a meal. In England desserts are often called puddings or puds for short. I had written: “Libbie would saunter on over with my “pud”, as she put it.”

My proof-reader made the following comment:

“Pud” is a slang term for “pudendum,” or genitals, in the US. The way you have this phrased can be read as a joke about the sexual organs (and availability) of an underage girl, which I think is not what you intend. Please consider revising.

I revised.

My in-house editorial consultant encouraged me to pay for the line-by-line and proof-reading if I wanted my book to be professional. Her suggestion highlights an important aspect of self-publish. Self-publishing companies exist to make money helping people publish their books. They’re not in it to be nice, though the people you work with are more than not quite nice. However, if you can’t accept that you have to spend money and that some of the people you encounter during the publishing process are there to both help you and to sell you services, then don’t get into self-publishing. More than not people that help you with editorial issues and marketing will also try to sell you services. People in production are just there to create a cover and interior design that you’re happy with.

At bottom line, trust is important. If you can’t accept that this is a business and people will try and sell you services along the way, then it will be very difficult for you trust them. If you think you are being taken advantage of at every turn and manipulated into spending money you would rather not spend, it will be hard to trust. An example will help.

I dropped my last publisher, for Notes from 39,000 Feet and Alien Love. Why? Because I don’t trust them. On three or four occasions the marketing people contacted me with the most ludicrous claim: a producer in Hollywood wanted to make a movie out of Alien Love and I needed to respond urgently! When I asked the name of the producer a cone of silence fell over the marketing person. The telephone calls and emails stopped. False urgency, absurd claims and outright lying to entice me to spend money. I dropped the publisher. In contrast to that experience, my current publisher for The Woman in White Marble are not preposterous, melodramatic and deceitful. When people have suggested I purchase services they have been clear and straightforward about why. There has been no real pressure to buy, just reasons and encouragement. If I say no, the matter is dropped. Yes, they’re good at their job, and that’s one of the reasons I trust them.

I enjoy self-publishing and being an Indie Author. I’m willing to put time and money into the process so the book is as good and professional as it can be. When my in-house editorial consultant suggested I purchase editorial services, she asked if the book was just for my family and friends or if I wanted it to be sold more widely. Her advice: if it is just for family and friends then you might not want to spend the money, but if it is for the general public, then editing is a must (it really is!). I said this to her: “I have no illusions about selling hundreds of thousands of copies, but I also don’t want my book to be crap.”

Copyright © 2014 Dale Rominger

One Crazy Idea: Power to the People (Not the Candidate)

Here’s a crazy idea:

It seems to me this is how we elect people to public office, hopefully at least to some degree, to serve our interests. An individual announces he or she (let’s use she today) is running for public office. She develops policy positions and makes them known though the media, social media, speeches etc. She shows up on TV a lot so we can sit and listen to her. She announces that she will be at a particular location either to give a speech or to answer questions and, essentially, hopes some of us will show up. In her speech we hear what her positions are, and no doubt hear a lot about her family, faith, etc. If we ask her questions, she answers them from within the frame of her positions and beliefs. Her answers also reflect who is asking the question and where it is being asked. Thus the same question can get different answers depending on the race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, economic status and so on of the questioner and the community in which she lives. At a predetermined date she will stop speechifying and sound-biting and ask us to vote and, of course, to vote for her. Some of us will and some of us won’t.

Once in office she may or may not do what she said she would. We expect this because once in office things change, and we know there is very little, or anything at all, we can do about it until the next election. We also know she has been taking money from individuals (who might include us), businesses, corporations and interest groups all of whom have an agenda and expect payback. Again, we know this. It costs a lot of money to run for public office. But we also know that in a conflict between what she said at the town hall on that cold Wednesday night and the desires of that multinational corporation, we are more than likely going to lose out. Though it’s not popular to say, we are paying for a service and those billionaires and corporations can pay a hell of a lot more than we can. Again, we know that sometimes we will lose. That is life. But it is difficult to swallow when we lose most of the time.

Here’s the crazy idea. Let’s say instead, we get together in our communities and decide what we need and want – everything  from the condition of our schools to the bombing the hell out of people we’ve never met on the other side of the world. Through discussion we come up with the policies and actions we want and then we invite the candidate running for the public office in question to meet us, to come to us at a time and place we designate. When she arrives will present our desired policies and positions. After a discussion, that will no doubt include compromising and some changing on our part, we ask her how she will implement the agreed policies. If we have come to a common mind with her, if she answers our questions satisfactorily, and she seems trustworthy (yes, so much of this is about trust), we will contribute to her campaign and vote for her at the election. If later we hear that in the next town over or the next state over or in the next country over, she answered our questions differently, made different kinds of promises, and/or made policy statements contrary to our agreed programme, we will tell her that our donations have stopped and that we will not be voting for her.

If, one the other hand, all goes well and we elect her, but we learn that her actions in office run contrary to our policies and positions, and if she fails in her promise to server our interests, we will recall her and look for another person to represent us (which of course means we need recall legislation that can remove a public servant not because she had sex with the wrong person, but because she is not serving our interests, for whatever reason). However, if she does serve our interests than she will get our full support, financial and political.

I know. It’s a Disney fantasy cartoon. It’s ridiculous to give the power to the people. It’s outlandish to suggest that the candidate is not the dominant player in the democratic drama. It is absurd to expect a public servant to actually serve the people who elected her. And it is beyond comprehension that any politician could be removed from office before the next election for failing the people.  

Sorry! What was I thinking?

Copyright © 2014 Dale Rominger

Welcome to the World of Executive Garden Leave

In the UK the Co-operative Group has been going through very hard times. Euan Sutherland was brought in to save the day. As chief executives like to do, he brought in some fiends to help the cause. His yearly pay package was £3.6million. He was given a retention bonus equalling 100% of his first year’s salary regardless of performance. His staff were give retention bonuses adding up to at least £8milliom. (See Co-op chaos: chief executive quits 'ungovernable' group after pay furore).

According to Investopedia a retention bonus is:

A payment or reward outside of an employee's regular salary that is offered as an incentive to keep a key employee on the job during a particularly crucial business cycle, like a merger or acquisition, or during a crucial production period. In recent years, retention bonuses have become increasingly popular as corporate poaching has increased.

Unfortunately, retention payments aren’t worth much – well, they’re worth millions, but not worth much in actually retaining people. Sutherland quit after ten months, kept his retention bonus, and was paid off to the tune of £1million, which is the equivalent of twelve month’s base salary. Others of the senior staff brought in by Sutherland, paid £1million with equal retention bonuses, also skipped town. For example, the HR director quit after twelve months and got a £2.5million payoff (see Storm over £1m payoff for Co-operative group boss who quit job). Since the Co-op is still in dire straits, I’m thinking that ten to twelve months was not sufficient time to get through a “crucial business cycle”.

Apparently some Co-op members are upset about all these multi-million payoffs to executives, who didn’t stay in town long enough to find their favourite cafe, while at the same time the organisation is planning to make around 6,000 people redundant (I bet none of them got retention bonuses). All you can say to disgruntled Co-op members is: Oh, you silly people, get real!

The Co-op is trying to defuse the fury by reminding people that nothing is untoward. The retention bonus worth millions that don’t retain, the huge pay packages, the obscene payoffs, are all normal for chief executives. The Co-op board helpfully said:

Euan Sutherland was on a 12-month notice period as group chief executive. When he resigned in March, the board did not feel it appropriate to ask him to work his notice period and exercised its right to put him on gardening leave, which is normal practice for a senior executive.

Well, that settles it. All this is “normal”! Sutherland was on “gardening leave”. No, you are not looking at a surreal Salvador Dali painting. No, you are not listening to Stephen Hawking trying to explain the anti-intuitive nature of quantum physics. No, you are not reading a dystopia sci fi novel were a tiny elite live in a parallel existence sucking up vast amounts of wealth and recourses while the masses...Oh, wait. Maybe you are!

Just to avoid confusion, here's what a garden leave or gardening leave means:

The practice where an employee leaving a job – having resigned or otherwise had their employment terminated – is instructed to stay away from work during the notice period, while still remaining on the payroll. This practice is often used to prevent employees from taking with them up-to-date (and perhaps sensitive) information when they leave their current employer, especially when they are leaving to join a competitor.

The term originated in the British Civil Service where employees had the right to request special leave for exceptional purposes. "Gardening leave" became a euphemism for "suspended" as an employee who was formally suspended pending an investigation into their conduct would often request to be out of the office on special leave instead...

The term can also refer to the case of an employee sent home pending disciplinary proceedings, when they are between projects, or when, as a result of publicity, their presence at work is considered counter-productive.

We can talk nonstop about the abuses of the 2008 crash, the greed and criminality of the banks, and the almost complete failure of our elected officials to regulate the financial industry. We can share stories and anger about 6000 people being laid off while senior staff who quit just after they had started are paid off to the tune of millions. But the point is this: In the world in which the 1% live, this is all absolutely normal and, of course, legal (thanks to our elected officials). As the Co-op board said, all is OK because all is normal. Private jets and private elevators, all normal. Golden hellos, retention bonuses, and golden goodbyes, all perfectly normal. Several homes around the world, very normal. Government bailouts and friendly legislation so all this remains normal, again absolutely normal. So unless we are willing to change what is normal for the 1%, it doesn’t do much good complaining and getting angry.

The international financial industry and its executive class have created, though government legislative assistance and our own passivity, a parallel surreal reality which is very normal to them. They have worked hard and spent a lot of money to convince us that their normal is, well, normal, but it is not. None of us are given millions to not quit our job and given more millions to go “gardening”. And in case we forget, the millions and billions have to come from somewhere. The Co-op, for example, doesn’t have a magic pot of money that keeps refilling itself.

One thing is clear, however. Somewhere along the way I took a wrong turn on my career development path, which for me was pretty normal.  

Copyright © 2014 Dale Rominger

A Charter for Democracy

As many of you know I struggle with the current trends in our democracies, everything from the personhood of companies to the tax avoidance of individual and multinational corporations. In a recent blog, Democracy, Oligarchy and a Manifesto for Resistance, I wrestled with the question of why we are so passive and looked at ways we could resist the changes taking place before our eyes.

Popular Resistance: Daily Movements News and Resources has published The Spanish Social Movement release of A Charter for Democracy. Popular Resistance says:

Unsurprisingly, the Movement is hard to define. It clearly targets the political arena without desiring to become a political party itself. Their “Charter for Democracy” is an inspiring, thorough text on what politics should be. It proposes a politics for the people: squarely grounded in environmental realities and social justice, based on the Commons, defended from corporate interests and neo-liberal dictates. The Charter was written collectively through nearly 30 different workshops throughout Spain held over the span of a year, with the collaboration of some 200 individuals.

Popular Resistance also says:

The Charter can only make sense when shared widely, so it can stir extensive debate. If you find it interesting, we ask you to share it on Social Media, send it by email or get it into people’s hands in a thousand different ways. We ask you to comment on it, debate it, refute and if you like it, make it yours.”

So in that spirit, I have copied the charter in my blog. Feel free to share it if you find it interesting. It is a long document but worth reading. And while you certainly may not agree with everything it says, it may, nonetheless, stir thoughts.

(To go directly to the charter click on the link: Popular Resistance.)

Dale Rominger

A Charter for Democracy

This Charter was born of a deep malaise: lack of prospects, mass unemployment, cuts in social rights and benefits, evictions, political and financial corruption, dismantling of public services. It was drafted in reaction to the social majority’s growing lack of confidence in the promises of a political system devoid of legitimacy and the ability to listen.

The two-party system, widespread corruption, the financial dictatorship imposed by austerity policies and the destruction of public goods have dealt the final blow to a democracy long suffering from its own limits. These limits were already present in the 1978 Constitution. They can be summarized as a political framework that neither protects society from the concentration of power in the hands of the financial groups, nor from the consolidation of a non-representative political class. This political framework has established a system which is hardly open to citizen participation, and unable to construct a new system of collective rights for our protection and common development. This is evident in the fact that, despite some very significant public demonstrations, the demands of the vast majority of the population have repeatedly been ignored.

Faced with this institutional stonewalling and the growing separation between the rulers and the ruled, it seems there’s only one way out: a deep expansion of democracy based on citizen control over political and economic power. Surely, since what’s left of democracy is constantly shrinking and attempts at internal reform would only mean repeating the same mistakes, we must take a chance on changing the rules of the game – a democratic change, geared toward returning to society the effective decision-making ability over all which concerns it.

Chaos and dictatorship are not the only alternatives to the current democracy. A democracy created among all people is possible – a democracy not reduced to merely voting, but founded on participation, citizen control and equal rights.

This Charter emerged from the desire to contribute to this process of democratization. In this sense, it contributes from a place of joy, from the energy of citizen mobilizations, from politics happening outside political parties, speaking in first person plural and trying to build a life worth living for everyone. No doubt the impetus is democracy itself. People have the ability to invent other forms of governing themselves and living together. This text was created with the assurance that today’s struggles are the basis of the coming democracy.

As this is a proposal of democratization, this Charter is presented as an unfinished, long-term construction project, openly inviting anyone to participate. This charter isn’t meant to be a political program or an exhaustive catalogue of rights, nor does it pretend to be a static State model. Given our investment in democratization, it simply points towards the basic, necessary elements needed to reconstruct a new institutional model that is open to the collective needs, proposals and capacity for self-governance that has recently found its voice throughout streets, squares and networks. Seen this way, the participative, deliberative process we yearn for matters as much as its content, which should always be a faithful reflection of the proposals and aspirations of the citizenry.

In essence, this Charter calls for opening a new process of debate, leading to a political and economic restructuring to guarantee life, dignity and democracy. It’s presented here as a contribution towards establishing a new social contract, a process of democratic reform in which the people — the “anyones”— are the true protagonists.

It’s time for the citizens to appropriate public institutions and resources, in order to ensure their defense, control and fair distribution. In the public squares and networks, we’ve learned something simple and conclusive which will forever change our way of being in the world. We’ve learned that yes, we can.

Rights and Guarantees

A democracy worthy of the name requires universal recognition of a wide constellation of rights related to all areas of public life and social reproduction. The decline in access to benefits and social services, the plundering by the financial dictatorship, and the dismantling of public welfare systems by austerity policies in recent decades have all significantly undermined the means of effectively exercising these rights. Similarly, access to many of these rights is conditional upon nationality and employment status, which has ended up producing major exclusion. Moreover, the subordinate nature of social rights in the current Constitution has not allowed sufficient development of certain fundamental issues such as housing, employment and income.

In short, both the inherent limits of the current system and the impotence of the Spanish political regime in protecting the most basic of rights are strong enough reasons for the creation of a new institutional system of rights and guarantees that enable caring, the development of our lives, and access to political life.

This Charter puts forward a common starting point for defining a new system of rights. Today, these rights have arisen from the demands and struggles of society itself, and expressed through its multiple forms of organization and participation; as such they are the highest expression of the act of democracy.

These rights redefine social relations, the production and distribution of wealth, and relations between nation-states according to a concept of the human being as a subject with the right to autonomy, but still in deep interdependence with the common space s/he inhabits. To this extent, these rights oppose being characterized as merely individual attributions. These rights must be recognized from both a universal as well as a singular dimension.

In order to guarantee these rights, we require an institutional framework that recognizes and promotes access to an active and democratic political life, and the recognition of the right to collective and direct participation as a real opportunity for the expression of the citizens’ desire to decide on everything which significantly affects the community. This framework should also be fully inclusive; one that accepts that we live in a global world, and acknowledges people’s right to migrate and/or settle where they see fit, in order to live life fully. A framework that could safeguard a life – our own – which, being interdependent, requires protection. This would comprise institutions specifically designed to ensure social reproduction, while neither delegating care labor to particular social groups nor permitting the privatization of that labor. A framework which also guarantees and extends all the rights already recognized in existing frameworks, constitutions and declarations of human rights, and which also recognizes the environment wherein life takes place as a rights-holder that should be carefully defended. This framework must, in the end, recognize society as a source of rights, therefore it must be considered open and under constant construction.

The basic principles which inspire a new, robust Bill of Rights with a guarantee of institutional means are:

Universality. All residents will have the same consideration and access to resources that guarantee the effective exercise of their rights.

Singularity: Recognizing that there are realities, forms of organization and a diversity of needs, different types of rights must be taken into account, including specific forms of recognition as well as human resources and economic requirements, to the extent that we must preserve such diversity.

No regression. Public authorities are not entitled, once these rights are recognized, to interpret them restrictively or to reduce them.

Equality. Given that all rights — civil, political and social — are fundamental to the development of people’s lives, the relationship among them must be protected and cared for with the same constitutional and legal guarantees.

Multi-institutional and democratic guarantee. Rights should not only be guaranteed by jurisdictional means but also through citizen participation and extra‑institutional organisms created by the persons entitled to the rights themselves. The social participation in the recognition, extension and guarantee of rights through the institutions of direct election and citizen intervention procedures must be explicitly admitted.

Financial sufficiency. The development of these rights must be ensured with the necessary economic means. These means will be provided by fiscal reform measures established in the following paragraphs of this Charter.

Finally, it is understood that a subject of rights is also a subject of responsibilities, insofar as she or he is part of a community built around a common project. These responsibilities extend to the environment we inhabit, and include accepting the responsibility to care for it, protect it and enable its reproduction, and in doing so, our own. Such responsibility involves all citizens, but is distributed according to the differences of wealth and ability.

Political Democracy

The crisis has shown that the decisions of the political class are increasingly controlled by financial interests, and therefore, that democratic Government is conditioned by private enterprise. This situation has lasting repercussions, having provoked a major crisis of legitimacy and representation, aggravated by a state of continued corruption and underscoring the serious lack of existing democratic control.

In any case, the limits of the political system are not recent; rather, they’re structural. These problems can be summed up as: bipartisanship; one-party government in most autonomous communities; difficulty creating new political options; media monopolies; and, especially, the enormous legal difficulties in reforming a Constitution which, moreover, has never been approved by most of the current population.

This is compounded by the fact that political parties – the major players in political life – have turned into a self-serving class, primarily geared towards its own propagation. Without a doubt, institutional obstacles to direct participation hamper the imagination and formation of a political framework founded upon the direct involvement of ordinary people in public affairs.

The decline of the current democracy manifests itself in neglecting the demands of different sectors of society, thus magnifying the distance between legislated policies and what the people say they need. This growing gap between the rulers and the ruled results in the democratic deficit of a system that has prioritized governability over representation and respect for minorities.The limits of the current democratic system cannot be resolved from the same position from which they arose. Therefore, in order to establish a true democracy, an overhaul is needed.

This Charter advocates a form of democracy capable of returning decision-making power concerning the fundamental aspects of life back to the population. A democracy based on participation in social and political life, one which enables joint decisions on how we want to live. It is, therefore, a wager on a new political agreement built in an open way and with the active participation of citizens. A new agreement based on the recognition of society’s capacity to organize, create institutions, and self-govern.

The construction of this democracy requires a series of agile, effective, and transparent mechanisms articulated on different levels and geared towards both deepening direct participation and the control of delegation, via representation, as deemed appropriate.

Some actions that could give shape to a new democratic political system are as follows:

1. Democratization of public authorities

• Control of representation. Revocable mandates by a social majority and absolute transparency both in public accounts and the actions of the various organs of Government. Tightening of controls and penalties related to corruption, and the development of independent supervisory authorities with competence over different public institutions. Economic and temporal limits on political appointments: salary caps; an incompatibility regime before, during and after the appointment; and effective limits on the duration of the mandate.
• Democratization of the internal functioning of the parties. Transparency in party financing, clearly democratic internal statutes, and autonomy of the vote of representatives to ensure the internal plurality of organizations.
• Reform of the electoral representation system. Removing privileges accorded to parties in the assignation of representatives; modification of lists system; eliminating minimum quota of proportionality; mechanisms of recognition and respect of minorities, as well as balance between the different territories.
• These mechanisms for democratization, openness and citizen control will be extended to other areas of collective representation, such as social and labor organizations, as well as the media, given their relevance in public life.

2. Recognition and extension of the ways of participation and direct democracy

• Recognition and expansion of direct democracy tools, such as popular legislative initiatives, referendums and virtual tools of participation.
• Recognition of citizen control instruments on all areas of the main branches of government, as well as on public accounts. The recognition of such instruments requires transparency laws and the development of flexible mechanisms for public hearing. Recognition of other social organizations acting as control mechanisms or political representatives.
• Developing mechanisms for collective deliberation: Favoring the development of methodologies for democratic deliberation, both virtual and analog, that promote shared decision making. These mechanisms will be essential in the development of new legislations and their budgets.
• Extension of the mechanisms enabling direct participation at all administrative levels, and management of public goods and common assets such as school boards, health councils, labor councils as well as local, regional and inter-regional councils.

3. Recognition of popular constituent power as the ultimate source of the constitution and the powers of the State

• Promotion of a model of open constitutionalism which allows reformation of constitutional standards from below, prevents foreseeable constitutional stonewalling, enables citizen reform initiatives and promotes permanent deliberation.
• The autonomous, independent forging of institutions for the self-regulation and development of rights generated by the social structure itself will be recognized and favored.      

A mature political democracy will not only allow for the real and effective separation of the different powers of the state, but also for direct citizen control of the latter. According to this charter, the judiciary, state police, and security forces will also be subject to the same requisites of transparency, democratization and citizen control. Its ranking heads shall not be chosen by political representatives but directly by the citizenry itself.

Economic Democracy

A democratic society cannot be conceived without the guarantee of the necessary material support for the development of a dignified and politically active life. A democratic society without a fairer distribution of wealth cannot be conceived.

The high unemployment figures, the widespread insecurity, the spiral of evictions, the debt slavery condemning a large part of the population, the privatization of public services, the enormous concentration of wealth and the subordination of public economies to banking interests, all point in the opposite direction: inequality and economic subordination of the many (99%) to a few (1%).

The current democracy as well as the constitutional guarantees on which it is based have been completely ineffective in avoiding this situation. None of the mechanisms set out in the Constitution of 1978 – social rights, labor rights, public initiatives in the economic sphere and the subordination of the wealth to the social interest, among others – have been able to protect society from economic and financial interests. Neo-liberal policies have prevailed above any other criteria, including the common good. This despoilment is most evident now, in the midst of the crisis.

This Charter intends to recover the social resources which have been privatized and concentrated into a few hands, in order to make them available for a real democratic process. Thus, the framework proposed by austerity politics will not be accepted. Never before has there been so much wealth, but rarely has this been distributed so poorly and under such undemocratic and unfair criteria. Therefore, a full review of the functions of economic policies is required, in order to prioritize of the welfare of the population over private, financial and corporate profit. A real, and not just formal, recognition that the laws of the market must always be subsumed to the social functions of the economy is essential.

With the aim of promoting economic democracy, this charter considers five basic pillars:

1. Financial democracy

Financial wealth will be considered as a common resource, upon which the citizenship must have the capacity and ability to influence. “Who regulates are the people, not the market” is the maxim that inspired this point. To do so, procedures will be established for democratic decision making on the debt contracted during recent years, as well as on financial and real estate assets in public hands derived from the restructuring of financial markets and the banking sector. To this end, the following measures are proposed:

• Citizen Debt Audit. This proposal allows distinction between those debts which are legitimate and those which are not. This audit will be articulated as a social process of democratic and financial education, whereby citizens may acquire greater capacity for decision making and control over the financial economy.      
• Creation of public utility institutions, with financial and real estate assets resulting from successive restructuring. These institutions, under strict democratic control, will serve the promotion of economic equality and social development.    

 2. Tax reform

The object of the reform entails the promotion of a broad redistribution of expenditures and benefits, so that a formal equality is also a guaranteed real material equitability with access to common and public goods.

• Major proposals: the restoration of the principles of proportionality and escalation for both labor income and corporate profits; the implementation of new taxes on financial transactions and higher taxes on capital income; the decrease of 220 indirect and consumption taxes, and prosecution of tax fraud. Tax reform will be based on a criteria of equality and equal tax treatment, as well as territorial solidarity.       

 3. Common and public goods

Privatization processes have shown that public administrations have not protected public resources against attempts at appropriation by private interests. The social recovery of these goods, as well as the democratization of their management, must guarantee their accessibility by the population as a whole.

• All goods and basic infrastructure needed for the reproduction of life, political participation and the normal function of the economy will have the status of public-common goods. These public-common goods shall include: education, health, housing, security, transportation, information, and justice; important natural resources including water, atmosphere, soil, oceans, coasts, rivers and riverbanks, forests and natural areas of ecological and aesthetic importance; and major roads, highways, interchanges, railway infrastructure, ports, and the like.       
• Strategic resources and sectors of the economy, such as communications, energy, or mineral resources, will be reverted to a condition of public–common resources. The administration of those resources will be subject to a strict public and democratic control. This will effectively reverse the tendency towards privatization that has been promoted in the last decades.       
• Public-common assets shall neither be alienated nor sold by public administrations. Being public-common property, they are considered the property of all persons residing in the Spanish State.       
• Public-common assets shall be managed in a democratic way, regulated and governed both by mechanisms of citizen participation and expert communities required for each case.       

4. Promotion of the Social Economy and Democracy in Economic Relations

This Charter promotes citizen participation in business-related decision-making processes, especially in matters which could be crucial to the common interest. In addition, economic activity will be subordinated to criteria of integral profitability, i.e. social, environmental and economic.

• It encourages the development of a new business model based on the principles of the social economy, cooperativism, and respect for the environment.       
• All companies should progressively organize around the following principles: equity, respect for the environment, transparency, and sustainable development. Equally, controls over wage distribution in companies will be observed, forestalling the present model of speculative accumulation and extravagant salaries, while rigorously vetoing the increase of precarious labor.       
• The fundamental principles of labor rights will be observed: the right to work freely or in exchange for just compensation; the protection of workers in situations of dependence; the right to rest and to retire; the right to autonomy and to dignified lives independent of wage labor, along with the right to strike, to form unions and to freely associate and assemble.       

 5. The expansion of social protection, the recognition of common resources, and the right to a dignified life

Our current system of Social Security is principally funded by income tax contributions and is only inclusive according to criteria of national legal identity. In a globalised context, where employment is scarce and non-remunerated work is seen as essential to the production of wealth, migration has become an elemental necessity for an impoverished population. As such, the prior bases of our system of social protection have proven to be increasingly inefficient and less inclusive.

An expansion of the pension system to comply with just and sufficient standards is required. Another requirement is an expansion of the support mechanisms and infrastructures for collective caretaking, which presently falls almost exclusively on families (particularly, women). Child-rearing duties are a collective responsibility with the following two requirements: the necessary budgetary development and allocation, and the creation of common infrastructures.

The production of non-GDP quantified wealth (in areas such as research, study, cultural, informational or communicative production) shall also be acknowledged through mechanisms for the recognition of all such non-remunerated wealth (such as a Basic Income), along with the creation of all the necessary infrastructures for the development of such mechanisms.

This new system of guarantees will be financed by the proposed measures for fiscal reform, especially through the taxation of financial profit and its circulation, while also reducing the proportion of income tax.

Territorial Democracy

The current financial and economic crisis has shown the weakening of democracy at every level, as well as the fragility of territorial wealth-sharing mechanisms. The dictates of financial governance through austerity policies have established an extraordinary geography of inequality, plunging some countries and regions into the economic and social abyss.

The result is an important territorial split opening up both at the European level and in the Spanish state. In Europe, the absence of democratic intervention mechanisms and the crisis of sovereign debt has created a growing rift between a protected center and an increasingly impoverished periphery. In the Spanish state, the heavy indebtedness of municipalities and regions is leading to the dismantling of social protection systems and the sale of many public goods.

Both cases show a growing loss of territorial solidarity and the legitimacy of government institutions. This threatens a collapse that can only be addressed through a complete institutional reorganization based on democracy and territorial stewardship.

This charter invites discussion for a new territorial agreement at all levels, based on a radically democratic model. It is based on the assumption that decisions about the management of resources and services should be developed at the minimum level of territorial unit, and forms of distribution of wealth must be organized within the larger Commons to ensure equity between the territories.

In this way, it is intended to minimize the inequalities between them, compensating for the inequalities generated by models of territorial jurisdiction.

The new territorial agreement model shall be the result of democratic consultation and cooperation among the various territorial units. It should acknowledge the widest possible plurality, and build itself up from its residents’ right to democratically decide on their belonging or not to the different territorial units.

Territorial Democracy will be based on the following principles.

• Joint responsibility and equality. Membership in the political association involves the acceptance of certain rules and communal constitutions, as well as the acceptance of a taxation system and a communal budget sufficient to correct social and territorial inequality. The new tax system shall be based on progressiveness and fiscal equity.       
• Subsidiarity. The management of resources and services as well as decisions on matters of public interest must be reduced to the minimum territorial unit in which it is most accessible to those residents responsible for such management or decisions. All services that can be better managed at smaller territorial scales will be managed at this level.
• Financial autonomy and sufficiency. Each territorial unit must have an appropriate budget for the provision of those services for which it is responsible. This budget will be autonomously administered by the democratically managed citizen organisms established for this purpose. Moreover, this budget will not only be guaranteed by its binding resources, but additionally by territorial compensation mechanisms established at different territorial scales. Autonomy in the management of said budget does not exempt those territorial units from the provision of certain services and fiscal obligations to the supra-territorial treasury.

The institutional development of the different territorial scales will be carried out starting from the following principles:

1. Deepening of political democracy: self-government

To reclaim and develop all areas of participation and decision at every scale, building on the aforementioned formulas: the democratization of public powers and the extension of citizen participation and direct democracy mechanisms.

In accordance with the subsidiarity principle there shall be an inclination, whenever the scale of the processes and resources involved allow, toward developing local and direct democracy at a scale closest to the people, i.e., local governments and towns.

The democratic re-founding process is proposed not only at the Spanish State level, but also for the rest of the territorial scales.

2. Acknowledgement of the different scales and territorial realities and solidarity among them

The forms of political union which may result from these democratization processes shall take as their aim the rejection of the current forms of territorial competition, as well as wealth redistribution at all levels; from the supra state levels, to those which are immediate to people, such as townships.

European Union. The establishment of real fiscal, budgetary and banking cohesion directed at the practical elimination of the growing economic and social inequalities between countries, as well as of the controlling interests of the financial sector.

The Spanish State, the current autonomous communities and whichever territorial entities that shall arise from the territorial constitution processes. The principle of fiscal equity shall be accepted, the existence of a joint budget, and the wealth redistribution according to the equitable methods of the territorial distribution.

Municipalities. Financing and budgets, besides being subject to strict citizen control, will be guaranteed by distributive mechanisms accorded at the highest scales (regional, state-level and European Union) so as not to be dependent on property and land speculation.

3. The European scale of the process

In the European sphere, a new constitution shall guarantee all the fundamental rights for every part of the Union, the political participation possibilities, the share-out conditions and the distribution of wealth, and a thoroughly democratic political structure.

In the case that these minimums would not be guaranteed by the European Union, the various comprising territories could develop new territorial alliances from their own constituent political processes, in order to guarantee the previously mentioned principles and therefore their own collective survival.

“A Charter for Democracy” was translated by Jaron Rowan, Jaime Palomera, Lucía Lara, Lotta, Diego and Stacco Troncoso, and edited by Jane Loes Lipton of Guerrilla Translation! The original text was published at MovimientoDemocracia.net.

Cigar Guy and Cigar Gal Come to Stay

Last week I wrote about finding my old draft card in an cigar box. How I got the cigar box in the first place – I don’t smoke – is either a funny or disturbing story.

When I first moved to Britain I lived in a small town on the northwest coast of England called Silloth. Trust me when I tell you there is not much to see or do there, though the Lake District is a couple hours drive south. During the first couple of years of living in Silloth I got numerous visitors from the U.S., most my friends, but some sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, and friends of friends. One day I got a call from a guy in my last church in California saying his son and daughter-in-law were coming to stay with me. What could I say? He was a nice guy. I’m a nice guy.

Skinburness Hotel © Copyright Alexander P Kapp and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons LicenceWhen visitors came to stay I would take them to the Skinburness Hotel for drinks and a meal. The Skinburness Hotel was an oasis in a cultural desert. I went up there for a bar meal at least once a week and knew the manager and his family and the staff quite well. So, of course, I took son and daughter-in-law to the hotel for a meal.

We settled into a nice table in the front window and the son reached into his pocket and pulled out two huge fat cigars. He handed one to his wife and they both lit up, tilting their heads upward, as cigar smokers do, and blowing impressive amounts of smoke into the room. This was a long time ago, way before legislation that made it an offence to smoke in public places. Actually, I should clarify. Before it was a legal offence to smoke in public. What they were doing was pretty damn offensive to me having to breathe in and smell their cigar smoke. I just looked at them and figured he had to have a very small penis and she a bad case of penis envy.

The waiter that served us was Paul. Very nice kid. Lived in Silloth all his life and was hoping to get out one day. I knew him pretty well. When I did get out he bought my car. Paul came to our table, gave us menus, and as he turned to leave Cigar Man called him back, reached into his pocket, retrieved three pound coins, and said something like this:

“What’s your name?”

(Paul tells him his name.)

“Paul. OK. Paul, do you see what I’m doing?”

(Cigar Man hands Paul the three pounds. Paul looks at me and then Cigar Guy confused and a little embarrassed.)

“Paul, I’m giving you your tip before the meal. I do this with all my international waiters, whether in Berlin or Paris or wherever. You are now one of my international waiters. And I am giving you your tip before the meal because I know you will now give me good service.”

(Cigar Guy turns away from Paul in a manner which clearly was meant to communicate dismissal. Paul looks at me at first bewildered, but then a little annoyed, his facial expression saying “What the hell?”)

There are a few things you must know about that short and absurd encounter. First, a three pound tip, even back then, was outrageously mean. Second, I knew for a fact that this was Cigar Guy’s and Cigar Gal’s first trip outside of California. When Cigar Guy’s father called me he said that his son and daughter-in-law had never travelled internationally and could I keep an eye on them. And third, as soon as it was time to go to the bar and get us more drinks I apologised to Paul, the woman behind the bar and anyone else I thought might run into Cigar Guy and Cigar Gal.

A week later when they left Silloth, having first filled my house with cigar smoke, they gave me a box of those obscenely huge cigars. I tossed the cigars but kept the box, which now holds my draft card and a whole lot of photos.

I thought for a while the whole thing was a joke and when they left they had a good laugh at my expense. That would have been OK with me, but I think Cigar Guy and Cigar Gal were for real. I never saw them again.

Copyright © 2014 Dale Rominger

Draft Card in an Old Cigar Box and Memories of a War Lottery

The law requires you to have this certificate on your personal possession at all times and to surrender it upon entering active duty in the Armed Forces.

The law requires you to notify your local board in writing within 10 days after it occurs, (1) of every change in your address, physical condition and occupational (including student), marital, family, dependency and military status, and (2) of any other fact which might change your classification.

Any person who alters, forges, knowingly destroys, knowingly mutilates or in any manner changes this certificate or who, for the purpose of false identification or representation, has in his possession a certificate to another [??], who delivers his certificate to another to be [??ed] for such purpose, may be fined not to succeed $10,000 or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both.

Your Selective Service Number, shown on the reverse side, should appear on all communication with your local board. Sign this [??m] immediately upon receipt.

Local Board No. 30
Selective Service System
39 Federal Office Bldg
240 East 9^th Street
Cleveland, Ohio 44199

The above is information printed on my Selective Service System Registration Certification. I was registered for the Selective Service System on September 6, 1966. My Registration Certificate was signed by Diane M. Beck. At the time I had blue eyes, brown hair, was 5ft 11in tall and weighed 150 pounds. My Selective Service Number was 33 30 48 360. My Selective Service System Notice of Classification was signed by Sallie Ferguson. On April 13 1972 my Classification was 1-H.

Classification 1-H meant: Registrant Not Subject to Processing for Induction. Registrant is not subject to processing for induction until a draft is enacted. All current registrants are classified 1-H until they reach the age of exemption, when they then receive the classification of 5-A.

I had had a college deferment, a 1-S(C) classification which meant: Student deferred by statute (College). Induction can be deferred either to the end of the student's current semester if an undergraduate or until the end of the academic year if a Senior. President Nixon’s Vietnam War Draft Lottery encouraged me to request my classification be changed from 1-S(C) to 1-H. (See Wikipedia)

I know all this because the other day I found my Registration Certificate and my Notice of Classification card in an old cigar box in the closet in my study. We called our Registration Certificate our Draft Card. Those were the days when the government “called up” young men to serve in the military for two years. From Wikipedia: 

The Selective Service System created by the 1940 Act was terminated by the Act of March 31, 1947, and the Selective Service Act of 1948 created a new and separate system, and is the basis for the modern system. All males 18 years and older had to register for Selective Service. All males between the ages of 19 to 26 were eligible to be drafted for a service requirement of 21 months. This was followed by a commitment for either 12 consecutive months of active service or 36 consecutive months of service in the reserves, with a statutory term of military service set at a minimum of five years total.

The Vietnam War changed all that too. On January 27, 1973, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announced the creation of an all-volunteer armed forces, thus ending 33 years of selective service, or what we all called The Draft.

Representative Alexander Pirnie (R-NY) The Nixon draft lottery took place when I was a junior in college on December 1, 1969. At that point I had my 1-S(C) college deferment. My cousin did not go to college and was “called up.” The evening the draft lottery took place he was fighting in Vietnam. Here’s how it worked: they put the date of each day of the year on a piece of paper and then placed them in plastic capsules. The capsules were but in a large class jar. Leading people in the nation then reached into the glass jar and pulled out a capsule, opened it up, and read the date inside. Each date was assigned a lottery number. (In future years the glass jar would become a large Plexiglas drum that could be turned with a handle just like on a TV game show.) The first date to be taken from the jar by Representative Alexander Pirnie (R-NY) was September 14^th, which meant “all registrants with that birthday were assigned lottery number 1.”  That pretty much meant that young men born on September 14^th were first in line to be drafted.

I was so offended by the whole game show lottery event that would determine the lives of thousands of men, me included, I refused to listen to it on the radio and instead went to the library to study. It was, of course, a foolish and futile protest. I couldn’t study. I was worried sick. I went back to the dorm and started listening with everyone else. When I got back to the dorm some man too old to be drafted was pulling the tenth date from the glass jar. This went on for what seemed like hours, all of us sitting around a radio waiting to hear our date of birth being announced along with its lottery number. I sat and listened. When the hundredth date was announced I started worrying, thinking maybe my birth date had been one of the first nine. I started asking guys what the first nine dates were, but, of course, no one knew. We were all just waiting for our birth dates to be announce. By the time we got to lottery number 250, I was really worried. At 300 I was panicking. As it turned out, my number was 352. No chance in hell, short of war with the Soviet Union, that I would be drafted. My roommate was 333. We put a sign on our door that read: I’m 333 and I’m 352. The next morning we found the sign with numerous burned holes in it. Two guys on our floor with numbers in the top ten actually left college. I have no idea where they went. Me? My girlfriend baked me a cake with the number 352 big and bold.

Sometime later, my cousin came home on leave. In a fit of guilt and burdened by the injustice of our situations, I told him I was going to volunteer for Vietnam. I looked at me like I was crazy. He described the war to me and ordered me to stay home and finish college. And so I did.

Copyright © 2014 Dale Rominger

How I Can Fix Football! ~ Well, a Part of Football (There’s No Fixing FIFA)

Since the whole world loves football (soccer) I thought I’d try and watch as many World Cup matches as possible this time around. If truth be told, I hate football. It’s utterly boring. I mean, how can a game that ends 0-0 after 90 minutes (!!!) be exciting? You can’t make the game shorter because then most matches would end 0-0. There’s fraudulent behaviour on and off the field. Players diving trying to defraud their opponents. FIFA officials making big bucks. Racism and gay bigotry on the pitch and in the stands.

I wrote on Facebook:

As some of you know, I'm no great fan of football, though I am trying given most everyone else is. Anyway, some observations thus far. First, and obviously, I wouldn't last 30 seconds in a match. Second, occasionally footballers are injured. Third, footballers have absolutely no shame. Watching them falling to the ground and rolling around in feigned pain is both humorous and embarrassing. Don't they know we're watching in super slow-mo? If they're not faking, then fourth, the average footballer wouldn't last 30 seconds on a rugby field.

Off the field, FIFA is so dishonorable it is a wonder national teams don’t all get up and go. I guess money does indeed talks, and plays football too. (Brazil spent over $300 million on a stadium, built in an area with no major football club, which will host only four World Cup matches.)

Anyway, I can fix football, or at least the fraudulent behavior of the players. Here’s how.

When a player falls to the ground he will have fifteen seconds to get up and continue playing (it should be ten seconds but I’m feeling generous). If he does not get up in fifteen seconds he will be removed from the field for fifteen minutes for medical treatment. During this fifteen minutes he cannot be substituted by another player. If the same player goes down again and cannot get up in fifteen seconds, he will be taken off the field to receive medical care for twenty-five minutes. Again no substitution. If the same player goes down a third time and cannot get up in fifteen seconds, he will be removed from the match for his own protection. At this point a substitution will be allowed.

I figure this would solve the diving problem and the rolling around on the ground as if a career ending injury has just occurred. How to stop most everyone in FIFA from immoral and fraudulent behavior, well that’s another matter.

While football is bad, English football is terrible. You have to feel for old England. They are simply not competitive, though in each and every international tournament everyone has to claim they can actually win. Everyone knows they can’t, but football was invented (do we invent sports?) in England so they have to keep saying they are the best. It’s sad really, that burden. I mean the national teams for, say, Ghana and the United States are not shackled with that burden. They would never claim they had a chance of winning. No need to. I wonder how many years need to pass before this burden of false expectations can be lifted. 50 years? 100 years?

Each time they lose, and boy did they lose this year – England was out of the World Cup before some other teams had played their second match. Anyway, each time they lose the media, and I suspect most people in pubs and offices, try to explain it away. I would guess they lose because the England players and manager are not good enough. This year the England team took 72 back-up staff to Brazil, including a turf expert and a psychologist. It was planned like a military operation. No expense denied. And they lost their first two matches.

Here’s a thought: The English Premier League does not exist to provide England with a national team. Last I read, 66% of Premier League players are from foreign parts. That leaves only 34% of positions for English footballers. Of the twenty Premier League clubs, thirteen managers were born outside of England. And thirteen Premier League owners are foreigners. None of these people, the foreign players, managers and owners, have any interest in nurturing top notch English players. Why should they?

It has been argued that it is good for English boys to play with the best in the world. Well, the proof is in the pudding. If that were true the national team would be doing a lot better. No, the English Premier League is a great international league. People in England can watch many of the best players from around the world. They just need to stop thinking that the England national team is going to win anything.

Copyright © 2014 Dale Rominger  

Democracy, Oligarchy and a Manifesto for Resistance

When Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens by Martin Gilens from Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page from Northwestern University was released in April 2014 the press declare the United States was not a democracy. TPM’s headline was: Princeton Study: U.S No Longer an Actual Democracy. TPM, like others, described U.S. as an oligarchy. It’s important to say that the word “oligarchy” does not appear in Testing Theories. In an interview Gilens said:

I'm sure you've noticed, this notion of America being an oligarchy seems to be a dominant meme in the discussion of our work. It's not a term that we used in the paper.

And then:

People mean different things by the term oligarchy. One reason why I shy away from it is it brings to mind this image of a very small number of very wealthy people who are pulling strings behind the scenes to determine what government does. And I think it's more complicated than that. 

Oxford Dictionaries defines oligarchy as a “small group of people having control of a country or organization.”   Reading Testing Theories and the Gilens’ interview, the issues seems to be the meaning of “small group of people.” If a small group means a handful of named people, then no, the U.S. is not an oligarchy. If, on the other hand, it means a very small percentage of the population, say the 0.01%, controlling the government, then the U.S. might indeed be considered an oligarchy. As the old saying goes: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...We can argue about when a duck is a duck, however, if Testing Theories is an accurate description of what is going on in the U.S. then the country is not a democracy in the American common sense notion of the word. What is a system of government where the citizens vote but have little or no influence on what their elected officials actually do?

Below I have included numerous quotes from Testing Theories,[1] but if you wish to read the study in its entirety then click here. However, two immediate quotes will give you a good idea of what the authors found in their study:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

The estimated impact of average citizens’ preferences drops precipitously, to a non-significant, near-zero level....By contrast, economic elites are estimated to have a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy.

I’m not sure if arguing whether the U.S. is a democracy or an oligarchy is very useful. Suffice it to say that there is evidence to suggest that the average citizen is being cut out of the political process. You can be pretty sure that if the majority of Americans want the too big to fail banks to be regulated and broken up so they are small enough to fail, it won’t just happen. If the majority of Americans want higher taxes on the wealthy, it won’t just happen. If the majority of Americans want gun control, it won’t just happen. And if the majority of Americans want to maintain Net Neutrality, it won’t just happen[2]. If the majority of Americans want Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to be overturned and for Corporate Personhood to be abolished, it won’t just happen. For any of that to happen it will take a major resistance movement by citizens. (Testing Theories did not claim that average citizen’s preferences are never met. They are when those preferences, coincidentally, match the desire of the elite.)

We must keep repeating the obvious: The concentration of wealth equals the concentration of political power. Those with political power make the decisions.

So what to do? Is it too late to claim back the political process? How do a person and a society whose values and identity are defined by consumerism resist consumer capitalism which is controlled by a small and powerful elite? Are we willing to, or even capable of, resisting (at least for a limited time) the thousands of easily obtained products on Amazon, the latest technological wonders of Apple, the information on Google? How do we resist the banks if we think resistance will threaten our accounts, savings, investments and pensions?

When people lines up and sleep on hard pavements for a single night, or even several nights, so they can be among the first to buy a new phone or tablet, it speaks volumes about who they are and where their values reside. After 9/11 President Bush told us to go shopping. There were too good reasons for this. First, shopping (consuming) is good for a consumer based economy. Second, we are consumers. It is in consuming we find our value and joy. To resist consumerism as an act of reclaiming power is to resist ourselves.

Unregulated consumer capitalism destroys our capacity to resist. It seduces and drugs us. It makes us passive. And when our elected officials and the courts continually create and nurture an environment that encourages the concentration of wealth and power, it is discouraging. When the politicians that we elected do not support and protect us, it is discouraging. It is easy to become passive. So we don’t move our money out of the big banks and into smaller ethical banks. We could do that, but we don’t. We could stop buying from Amazon until they pay a fair share of taxes. We could do that, but we don’t. We could stop buying from Apple until they get their environmental act together. We could do that, but we don’t. Is it possible for us first to overcome ourselves and our financial fears and second to believe in the possibility of success to actualize a resistance movement?

Some simple suggestions for a manifesto for resistance. Most of this comes from years of reading, but I have recently read On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance by Howard Caygill which is an excellent book bring together numerous resistance philosophies and movements (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Where an idea corresponds directly with a particular movement or movements that I am familiar with I have identified it or them in parenthesis.

Elements of Resistance

• The forces being resisted are formidable; therefore, any resistance movement will take a very long time to succeed.
• The resistance movement cannot rely on governments. Elected officials are either members of the 1% or in the pay of the 1%.Resistance is all embracing, including the cultural, sociological, religious, economic and political. (Occupy)
• Resistance must address and change attitudes and beliefs. (Occupy)
• Resistance actualise by appealing to its necessity.
• Act for others as well as yourself. (Occupy)
• Believe in the possibility of success while living in failure. (Zapatistas)
• Accept repression is part of resistance. (Greenham CommonYellow Gate)
• Accept that court cases are part of the resistance. ( Greenham Common Yellow Gate)
• Accept that resistance includes suffering and repression. (Greenham Common Yellow Gate)
• Resistance demands solidarity, selflessness, support. (Greenham Common Yellow Gate, Zapatistas, Pussy Riots,  Ghandi - Satyagraha)
• Resistance will create counter resistance, so any resistance movement must adapt and adopt new strategies.
• Resistance responds to the demands of justice.
• Resistance challenges accepted legitimacies. (Occupy , Ghandi - Satyagraha)

Demands of Resistance

• Courage over a long period of time. (Ghandi - Satyagraha)
• Commitment without the certainty of success (Ghandi – Satyagraha, Greenham Common Yellow Gate, Zapatistas)
• Fortitude (Ghandi – Satyagraha)
• Prudence in choices of action. (Ghandi - Satyagraha)
• Sustained work and presence. (Greenham Common Yellow Gate, Occupy)
• Political Engagement.

Tactics for Resistance

• Action on the economic and political levels.
• Interaction with people from the grassroots to the elite.
• Occupation. (Greenham Common Yellow Gate, Occupy)
• Networking. (Occupy, Greenham Common Yellow Gate, Zapatistas, Pussy Riots)
• Boycotting.
• Sabotage. (Sun Tzu, Mao)
• Diversion. (Sun Tzu, Mao)
• Civil Disobedience. (Thoreau, Ghandi - Satyagraha)
• Evasion. (Sun Tzu, Mao)
• Exasperating the opponent. (Sun Tzu, Mao)
• Aesthetic Resistance. (Pussy Riots, Occupy, Zapatistas)
  
  • Provides a way of imagining resistance.
  • Hiding our face: becoming no one in order to become everyone.
  • Manifestoes, stories, jokes, masks, tricks, defiance. (Zapatistas)
  • Performance and masks. (Pussy Riots)

It is interesting to note that the first use of the word “resistance came from the African-American experience of slavery. From On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance:

In one of the first articles of The Atlantic magazine following the US Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision that slaves could not become citizens and amid growing civil and political conflict surrounding the extension of slavery, Edmund Quincy asked: ‘Is our spirit effectually broken? Is the brand of meanness and compromise burnt in ineffaceably upon our souls? And are we never to be roused, by any indignities, to fervent resentment and effectual resistance?'[4]

Copyright © 2014 Dale Rominger

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[1] From Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (To read the study click here.) 

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.

But net interest group stands are not substantially correlated with the preferences of average citizens. Taking all interest groups together, the index of net interest group alignment correlates only a non-significant .04 with average citizens’ preferences! This casts grave doubt on David Truman’s and others’ argument that organized interest groups tend to do a good job of representing the population as a whole.

When both interest groups and affluent Americans oppose a policy it has an even lower likelihood of being adopted (these proposed policies consist primarily of tax increases.) At the other extreme, high levels of support among both interest groups and affluent Americans increases the probability of adopting a policy change, but a strong status quo bias remains evident.

As noted, our evidence does not indicate that in U.S. policy making the average citizen always loses out. Since the preferences of ordinary citizens tend to be positively correlated with the preferences of economic elites, ordinary citizens often win the policies they want, even if they are more or less coincidental beneficiaries rather than causes of the victory.

Moreover, we must remember that in our analyses the preferences of the affluent are serving as proxies for those of truly wealthy Americans, who may well have more political clout than the affluent, and who tend to have policy preferences that differ more markedly from those of the average citizens. Thus even rather slight measured differences between preferences of the affluent and the median citizen may signal situations in which economic elites want something quite different from most Americans and generally get their way.

Because of the impediments to majority rule that were deliberately built into the U.S. political system – federalism, separation of powers, bicameralism – together with further impediments due to anti-majoritarian congressional rules and procedures, the system has a substantial status quo bias. Thus when popular majorities favor the status quo, opposing a given policy change, they are likely to get their way; but when a majority – even a very large majority – of the public favors change, it is not likely to get what it wants.

When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.

Over-all, net interest group alignments are not significantly related to the preferences of average citizens. The net alignments of the most influential, business oriented groups are negatively related to the average citizen’s wishes. So existing interest groups do not serve effectively as transmission belts for the wishes of the populace as a whole.

the preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of “affluent” citizens) have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do. To be sure, this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose out; they fairly often get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically elite citizens who wield the actual influence.

What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule -- at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated  by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

[2] President Obama nominated Tom Wheeler to lead the Federal Communications Commission. Wheeler is a former cable and wireless company lobbyist who has argued in behalf of the cable companies for a two tier net system. See Obama to appoint cable industry lobbyist Tom Wheeler as FCC head. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/01/obama-tom-wheeler-fcc

[3] Caygill, Howard. On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, Kindle Edition Location 3509-3514.

The Plutocrats versus the Precariats: Or the 1% versus the 99%

In February 1987 I visited El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica with a group from the United Church of Christ Northern California Nevada Conference. In the late 1980’s people from Central America were seeking sanctuary in U.S. churches and our group was sent to the area on a fact finding mission. As part of that visit a few of us met with a leading figure in ARENA, Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (National Republican Alliance). ARENA was founded in 1981 by Roberta D’Aubuisson and Mercedes Gloria Salguero Gross and it controlled the National Assembly until 1985. Alfredo Cristiani, a ARENA leader, was elected to the presidency in 1989. The party  controlled the presidency from 1989 to 2009. 

At the time of my visit ARENA was very pro U.S. Our host told us that ARENA’s struggle was to honour the principles of the American revolution, build a secure state in order to protect foreign investment and to give free reign to the market. At one point he suggested that El Salvador would be better off as a U.S. state.  If you were looking for conservatives who backed the military and were backed by the military, ARENA was the place to go.

The gentleman we met was a member of one of the estimated thirteen families who controlled 80% of El Salvador’s wealth. We met him at a furniture factory owned by his family. We were told to park next to his car in the parking lot. On the back window of his car was one of those small yellow signs, only instead of it saying “Baby on Board” it said “Angry Man on Board.” In our far ranging conversation I distinctly remember him saying at one point: “I keep my labour force healthy enough to work but not healthy enough to rebel.” You can bet there was no workers’ union in his factory.

He made this comment pleasantly enough, assuming that we would both see the wisdom of his strategy and applaud him. It was a striking statement of purpose and reality, and it has stayed with me for all these years. You might say that 1987 was a long time ago and that this particular conversation took place in a “third world” country, so no need to get overly excited. Perhaps.

On February 26, 1997 Alan Greenspan testified before the, U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. In his testimony, Greenspan said that “benign inflation outcomes” were beneficial for the economy. He also said that benign inflation was a result of “the rate of pay increase [being] markedly less than historical relationships with labour market conditions would have predicted...”And further that the “atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity.”

In his Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture[1] Noam Chomsky said of Greenspan’s testimony:

He said a lot of success of this economy was based substantially on what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If working people are insecure, if they’re part of what we now call the “precariat,”[2] living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get wages, they won’t get benefits. We can kick ‘em out if we don’t need ‘em. And that’s what’s called a “healthy” economy, technically. And he was very highly praised for this, greatly admired.[3] 

Perhaps not as dramatic as “not healthy enough to rebel,” but similar in tone and intention, if indeed Chomsky’s interpretation of Greenspan’s testimony before Congress is accurate.[4]

In Britain, under the rubric of having a “flexible labour market,” it is hard to deny that worker insecurity is becoming more the norm. By a flexible labour market Britain means a lightly regulated economy, as opposed to the more heavily regulated economies throughout Europe. What it has meant for workers can be characterised by the following:

• Decline in union membership and power;
• Zero-hour contracts (workers are on-call with no fixed hours, are paid only for hours worked, lack full benefits or receive no benefits at all, and often cannot take other jobs);
• Stagnating wages (the majority of people on state benefits actually have a job, or jobs, but still can’t make ends meet);
• A drop in the share of national income taken in wages;
• An increase in household debt; and
• Weak demand.[5]

I have often wondered why management so disrespects workers, and in our now metaphorical language of protest, why the 1% so disrespects the 99%. After all, someone has to make the bricks and someone has to pile bricks on top of each other so the 1% can have their summer homes, not to mention their yachts and private jets. However, the truth is, a poorly paid and insecure workforce is less likely to protest and rebel. Obviously, this is not about respect. It’s about money and politics. As Mark Hanna, Ohio Senator from 1897 to 1901 said: “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember the second.” 

A few months ago the Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies[6] was published, a controversial essay on mathematical models for understanding and predicting the collapse of civilizations. HANDY is a model that calculates the affects of population and resource use on human societies. For my purposes, the following quotes are pertinent:

...humans can accumulate large surpluses (i.e. wealth) and then draw down those resources when production can no longer meet the needs of consumption... Empirically, however, this accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels.

It allows for the two features that seem to appear across societies that have collapsed: the stretching of resources due to strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity, and the division of society into Elites (rich) and Commoners (poor).

 ...over exploitation of natural recourses and strong economic stratification – can independently lead to a complete and irreversible collapse of a society.

HANDY studied past civilizations that collapsed, some of which completely disappeared and others that muddled along for some time. The authors, however, go one further and use HANDY to imply possible outcomes for today’s civilization. If HANDY is accurate, things don’t look good. We are both over exploiting natural resources and are witnessing the stratification of our economy, the link between the two not being accidental. Indeed, a study from Princeton University entitled Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens actually claims that the United States is no longer a democracy but is instead an oligarchy. 

So what can be done? Does our economic insecurity, which also means our lack of political power, make it impossible for us to protest or even rebel if necessary? Does the fact that in character and action we are consumers in a consumer dominated capitalistic society make it impossible for us to, for example, boycott for change?

More next week.

Copyright © 2014 Dale Rominger

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[1] You can find the lecture in Chomsky, Noam. Occupy. New York: Penguin Books, 2012, p. 23. Or on AlterNet.
[2] Chomsky distinguishes between the plutocrats, a small minority of the very wealthy who control the economy and government, and the precariat, “people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. It’s not the periphery anymore. It’s becoming a very substantial part of the society in the United States, and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing (Chomsky, Noam. Occupy. New York: Penguin Books, 2012, p. 33).
[3] Chomsky, Noam. Occupy. New York: Penguin Books, 2012, pp. 33-34.
[4] In his testimony Greenspan went on to say: “If heightened job insecurity is the most significant explanation of the break with the past in recent years, then it is important to recognize that, as I indicated in last February's Humphrey-Hawkins testimony, suppressed wage cost growth as a consequence of job insecurity can be carried only so far. At some point, the trade-off of subdued wage growth for job security has to come to an end. In other words, the relatively modest wage gains we have experienced are a temporary rather than a lasting phenomenon because there is a limit to the value of additional job security people are willing to acquire in exchange for lesser increases in living standards. Even if real wages were to remain permanently on a lower upward track than otherwise as a result of the greater sense of insecurity, the rate of change of wages would revert at some point to a normal relationship with inflation. The unknown is when this transition period will end.”
To read the complete testimony click here.
[5] See, for example, Workers have become the prey: now a natural balance needs to be restored.
[6] Safa Motesharrei, Jorge Rivas and Eugenia Kalnay. March 19, 2014. To read the essay click here.