It's Saturday Night, Get Your Dance On!

Bullseye!

'Aside from reality, things in America are really recovering quite nicely'

Cheerful Evening Song

Once upon a time there was a boy, a large Scandinavian hipster artist boy who wore cowboy shirts and rectangular framed glasses. He kept trying to get me to like this band, and I kept trying to get him to like another band and neither of us was very nice to the other when we didn't get our way. It's a petty thing, but sometimes people are petty.

Anyways, now that boy is a thing of the long ago past I actually do like this band.

An inefficient system needs an ever expanding underclass to sustain itself

That's a helluva long title, isn't it.

Long ago my favorite proff explained that in order to work, capitalism needs a certain portion of the populace to be perpetually unemployed as a way to hold down the expense known as wages (or that tiny amount of money we are allowed after working our asses off in order to feed and house ourselves and families). I understood that in a vague kind of way. Cultural hegemony was still pretty strongly entrenched in my psyche though, and it took several years of peeling away before I got it in a solid way. Who is to be the underclass doesn't matter. The qualifications have little to do with the individual. In a parallel universe there's probably an underclass of Trump offspring who are all trying to prove their citizenship but their long form birth certificates aren't cutting it with the powers that be. It's arbitrary. There is no reason, logically, that POC or women or single mothers or PWD etc, etc, etc  are more likely to occupy the underclass. It's just the easiest way our society found of creating that underclass. 


And I've been thinking about this that I read at Corrente awhile back. 

This raises the obvious question: Why are corporations so fleeting? After buying data on more than 23,000 publicly traded companies, Bettencourt and West discovered that corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, was entirely sublinear. As the number of employees grows, the amount of profit per employee shrinks. West gets giddy when he shows me the linear regression charts. “Look at this bloody plot,” he says. “It’s ridiculous how well the points line up.” The graph reflects the bleak reality of corporate growth, in which efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy. 

(bolds mine)

So if our entire economic system is dependent on large, inefficient corporations then our economic system is going to have to find more ways to increase the underclass in order to offset losses of profit that correspond with growth in corporate size. Enter the prison industrial complex.

Think about this, in the last 30 years crime rates have dropped significantly while incarceration rates have exploded. Just about nobody claims that the decrease in crime rates has anything to do with increased threat of jail time. There are theories that crime rates started declining because legalized abortion meant fewer unwanted and unprovided for children were being born, or that the elimination of lead paint (lead poisoning causes aggression) meant a mellower population. But just like privatizing aspects of the military means more wars because those with the power and money now have more incentive to lobby for wars because it directly increases their profit margin, the prison industrial complex benefits the masters of the universe both through private prisons and by enlarging the number of people who serve as the threat class at the very bottom. (Oh threat class, I like that, consider it coined!) The threat class is the class of bottom dwellers that serve to remind the people directly above them what their fate is if they question authority.  That's why a woman is going on trial for enrolling her kids in the wrong school district with the threat of a 20 year sentence.

As the system breaks down expect more things to become threat class markers. Things like obesity (OMG can't hire fat people because of insurance costs and the the idea that fat is contagious!), party pictures on social networking sites (fire that teacher for drinking a beer with friends after work at a non-school function, or for having a profile on a causal sex dating site, or or or). The good news is that these are signs that the system is in it's death throes. The bad news is that more and more of you will be joining me in the threat class while it dies.

History of unemployment

Unemployment:
This graphic was designed by Lorena O'Neal, you can check out more of
her work here.
Source:http://www.onlinecourses.net
click to embiggen

Happy Evening Music Will Continue Until Further Notice

Because damn there is just too much shit in the world. I think it's good to end the day with a happy. And I haven't been able to post vids in a long ass fucking time.

Don't forget, if you'd like to participate in the Great Old Fashioned Music Exchange by sending me a burned cd or dvd full of stuff you like, drop me an email.

Signal Boost for a Friend in Need and Deed

You all have seen the darling Aeryl hereabouts. If someone is rambling on about hot boys and why they're aren't more stoner chick movies, that would be me and Aeryl. What you all don't know is that she played comment moderator for the last month or so pre- internets, that she's shipping me a big ol' box of tees and books and stuff for the Kid cause he's outgrown all his.

While trying to do the right thing, i/e not risk death because of OSHA violations, Aeryl's sig nif got fired. And of course they are fucking him out of his unemployment. So things are more than a bit tight for the Aeryl family. If you can, throw her some ducketts.
More info and paypal link here: Bootstrap Production Halted

If you didn't catch this at Corrente

Watch it here!


Corporations are to Society at large what MRA's are to exes and offspring. They spend a hole fuck of a lot of time whining endlessly about how unfair the system is to them because they have to pay all this money, wah wah wah. But the reality is they aren't paying taxes, just like MRA's aren't paying child support.

The patriarchy (of which capitalism is abso-fucking-lutely a part of) has NO NEW TRICKS. Every argument is the same tired lie its spouted somewhere else. It keeps beating us not because it is clever and wily, but because it is boring and tedious.

Despite Jailing Other Poor Moms, I Refuse To Give Up My Cheerful Mood

Besides, I'm getting a pink tool bag and the tools to fill it. (Thank you, you know who you are).

We can't send the Banksters to jail but we can give a homeless mom 20 years

It's becoming more obvious to the have-a- littles that it is illegal to be a have-Not. Homelessness and school enrollment are one of the most glaring ways in which poverty is a criminal act. I have the constant fear that my poverty status means that at any moment Kid's home schooling could be grounds for extra social services scrutiny.

But at least I'm not looking at 20 years in jail for trying to get my Kid an education. A FUcking education! She didn't causes a global financial melt-down. She didn't commit an act of violence. She didn't even Commit the Standard 'let's lock up the poor and brown for Self-medicating.' She just enrolled her kid in the school closest to the homeless shelter they stay at. That's our lovely justice system for you.

Cause I'm In B Damn fine Mood

History of Recessions

History of Recessions:
This graphic was designed by Lorena O'Neal, you can check out more of
her work here.
Source:http://www.onlineschooling.net
click to embiggen

It's Internet time!

Yes, I an writing this from my own sweet, sweet home internet connection to No more weirdly formatted phone posts! To the lovely reader who made this possible, you get my undying gratitude and a kidney should you ever need it.

Also, shortly you will be seeing a few sponsored blog posts. You'll Know they are sponsored by the fancy graphics and distinctive lack of cuss words. Please enjoy!

The Great Music Exchange

The loverly Aeryl is burning me some cds and wanted to know what I
like. The Great Ruthzilla has drunkenly proclaimed me the Indy Pop
Queen. It's true. I love the Decemberists, Death Cab, the Pernice
Brothers, Magnetic Fields, etc. Also bitchy girl's, pop and otherwise
like Lilly Allen, Kate Nash, M.I.A., Princess Superstar, etc. 70's
funk and it's bastard children from curtis Mayfield to Janelle Monet.
Thinky or non-gangstar rap like Blue Scholars and Lyrics Born. And
disco punk (punk you can shake your ass to) like The Clash, The Fall,
Gang of 4, Franz Ferdinand,Gogol Bordello, the Gossip. Oh and I like
some latin stuff like Julietta Venegas and Maria Rita.
I also love hearing shit I haven't heard before. Surprise me!
If you want to participate in the great music exchange, email me for a
mailing address.

Fuck Yeah! Pillows!

We haz them. So fluffy. So awesome. If everyone had enough pillows we
could maybe end war.

Eat The Rich!

So i get this text message from a dear friend:
DF: Husband just got a new job. It's on Wall Street, but don't worry.
He's not a banker.
Me: That's col. He's in a prime spot for when the end times come. Tell
him to keep an eye out for the foodiest banksters. They'll make the
best steaks.

That's a tricky little intersection

You all may have heard about the horrible beating of a white
transwoman at a McDonalds by 2 African American women. Let me start by
saying it's an atrocious act to inflict violence on someone because of
their gender, or your percieved notions of their gender.
But I have to wonder if this is getting so much attention because the
attackers are black and the victim is white. Does the racial make up
make it easier for us good white folk to sit back and tssk tssk the
actions of these violent black women? Does it feed into established
stereotypes and make it okay to talk about?
Would it be getting this much attention if it were 2 white women
beating a black trans woman (and I hate having to include the trans
part in that description, the victim is a woman. And if I were writing
about her for any other reason, trans wouldn't be needed. But she was
attacked because of her trans-ness, so it's part of the story) or 2
white men doing the beating to a black body, would anyone even care?
Sadly, probably not.

It's almost as if we're never on the right side

While I was working on my Chiapas painting I was thinking about how
the current carnage in northern Mexico due to narcotrafficing is
because we trained those criminals and murderers in warfare to fight
the zapatistas, a bunch of farmers who were protesting NAFTA and
wanted land reform. And I was thinking about how Aristide really was a
decent guy until Clinton (Bill) got into the act and Aristide was all
love for le Infants Terrible. And so I was thinking about the armies
we're training in Iraq and the Pols we're backing in Afghanistan and
the bombing we're providing in Libya. What kind of horror stories will
we hear in 10 years because once again we've backed the wrong person
or corrupted the governmet of some other country or trained an army of
sadists in the fine arts of Torture and oppression.