Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
Don’t be afraid of hiking alone, or snakes, or icy patches, or any of the other vague terrors conjured and then dismissed in this hilarious, horrible, brilliantly insultingly dumb, soul-crushingly smug sucker-punch to the cojones. DO be afraid that this gooey ordure is from the once-flagship journal of the once-intellectual metropolis of America’s West Coast.
The Singularity must have tracked my interests (hiking, Yosemite, men?) and come up with this, in fact, pushed it at me all over the Internets, dangled it several times before my lazy-swimming eyes. SFGate? That’s the old Chronicle, right…? Patient Reader, I clicked!
This is journalism? This is even…advertising? Is this written by a bot? What is this? Democracy requires an alert, inquiring Fourth Estate. I share this for the laugh, but…seriously, folks, ….what do we do now?
The View offers no screed, only the notice that even NakedCapitalism. com, perhaps the LAST of the grass-roots, clean-talk, expert-hosted, independent, non-profit blog/hubs educating the public, has closed its comment section. I understand why they did. I watched and learned, but never contributed to the scrum. It still hurts, though. With sites like Naked Capitalism not able to keep the barbarians out, how are we then to make a nation?
The future won’t be — can’t be! — found on Facebook, or Google, or iCloud. It can never, ever, again, be on or mediated by any kind of a moneyed, for-profit corporation selling private information and ads. It can never come streaming into your home at the cost of a separate cable fee of 200 dollars/mo. either. It can’t. be. It must be what they used to call, an entitlement. Everybody gets it just for showing up a citizen.
There must be a citizens web, with all of us connected, just as we are now, each with our own little mailboxes and such, but where the encryption is secure from meddling and hacking, because it is not configured for and will not support advertisements, financial transactions, and guarded from mass spamming. We can build web sites and host our pictures — we can host our own pictures, imagine that! — and send e-mail and maybe even vote and participate in civic forums on Zoom-type sites — but it is free of Russian meddling, or barrages of ads and pop ups and financial appeals. In fact, financial appeals would get you kicked off for a time. Rude behavior might get you kicked off for a time. If you say “that’ll never work” I’ll say, rude behavior on the streets is very well enforced indeedcosting trillions of dollars a year why can’t a tiny fraction of the money going into keeping bums from peeing on the streets, be used to support robust and secure public internet service?
Another analogy would be the early days of PBS, which really did provide THE BEST CONTENT ON TV for generations, before Newt Gingrich’s Congress killed it by making them all for-profit competitors.
As for your e-commerce and your Amazon and your porn-on-demand and your Bitcoin ponzi schemes and your privacy-flushing clickbait scams and your corporate news videos of jerks who stayed in their hurricane houses ending up on the roof in the lashing storm, with helicopters roaring overhead and wet skirts flying in the downdraft, keep it right where it is for them as wants to click on it. Nothing need change there at all. But if you don’t want any of that, you simply can scroll through your public web connections, looking at photos of your family’s vacation, or reading somebody’s observations of Saturn, or giving attention to and learning from our all the fascinating things our late, lamented, polite/egalitarian/good-behavior when in public, citizenry are thinking and doing.
We have the technology and the thousands of eager-beaver codewriters, and Ol’ Man Tubes’s Barn right here, to build a public, free, Federally secured citizens web in maybe a couple of weeks.
And Mr Zuckerberg can “pivot to Hell” and the disaster-capitalist billionaire-run news media can put its content out on its numerous space-junk satellites and beam it to the Moon, which they’re all so suddenly intent on mining and colonizing anyway…
Well, I guess that was a screed. Forgive me, it’s Monday of maybe the worst week modern America is likely to have had.
I’ve culled some excerpts from an article by Paulgibbons1 at www.retakedemocracy.org. This article excerpts from another article, by Kurt Anderson, in The Atlantic. The result is a bunch of clunky cutting and pasting, which is time-consuming for me and confusing for Patient Reader. I regret I can’t just link to the articles directly, but Google has recently (unilaterally and without any comment by anybody) made it impossible for one blogger to link to another blog, on WordPress. At a single keystroke, they have effected a corporatist coup that fragments the people, by fragmenting the Web. This is exacerbated by the Atlantic’s recent decision to put its content behind a paywall, like all the other media corporations cloaking themselves in the gravy-stained dignity of the robes of the old 4th Estate.
Sadly, the open, free, peer-to-peer, lightning-fast, penny-cheap, trade it and save it value of the Internet is almost destroyed. They’ve tried to turn infinite Cyberspace into Boardwalk/Park Place real estatein the name of “private intellectual property,” which, let’s remember, is a legal fiction and a thing that doesn’t exist. And if private intellectual property did exist, it would doom the bottom 9 billion of us in the human race to total annihilation in a single generation. If ideas aren’t free, if they compete in cost with food, if it takes going into debt to be an educated voter, can you doubt that society will remain ignorant? It’s too late to hope we will ever get to vote on access to the Web. But next time you get a chance to express any kind of a preference about anything, please speak up FOR net neurtality and AGAINST the bigoted, fascistic destruction of the Alexandrian Library — er, the enclosure of the Internet.
And for Uplift!: some cartoons taking the View that rolling around giddy and cackling in a huge pile of gold coins in a private underground vault, soundproofed against the cries of the homeless outside the moat, is not social; nor is it respectable; nor is it holy; nor is it healthy; nor is it American.
From The Slide Into Neoliberalism, by Paul Gibbons: “This line of thinking [when Democrats turned against the New Deal] was only a small step from the neoliberalist ideology forming in the 70s and 80s, where “liberal” Democrats were more than willing to entertain corporate and conservative ideas (corporate tax cuts, deregulation, welfare “reform”). But while liberals were willing to compromise, the newly energized right had but one objective: make the rich richer and corporations unfettered by regulation.
Starting in the 1970s, the Milton Friedman Doctrine, the righteous pursuit of maximum profit to the exclusion of absolutely everything else, freed and encouraged businesspeople and the rich to be rapacious and amoral without shame. Indeed, the new economic right even encouraged them to wage a class war—explicitly against (traitorous white) liberal professionals and the (black) “underclass,” more discreetly against the (white) working class they were enlisting as political allies.”
From The Atlantic: “College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots: How I got co-opted into helping the rich prevail at the expense of everybody else”
And so, four decades of unrelenting assault on unions, working families and the poor unfolded.The liberal response was not to take to the streets with the working class, but to try to negotiate the best deal possible with conservatives who were far more principled and less willing to yield. And so “the Rust Belt” became a common term, indicating the demise of manufacturing and along with it the jobs that had supported the working class. But “rust” does not just surface from nowhere, it is a sign of neglect and poor stewardship. The Democrat “response” to the erosion of working class was Bill Clinton and NAFTA, followed by Obama’s totally caving to Wall St and the banking industry. The Party had exchanged practicality for principle and while it was able to make deals with the right, in doing so, it moved further and further from its principles and in so doing lost the support of many blue collar working people.
The faction that was now dominant in the Democratic Party had been pushing for a more centrist economic and social-welfare policy since the 1970s, but the Republican Party after 1980 had no comparable moderating faction—which in a two-party system meant that Democrats kept moving toward a center that kept moving to the right.”
From The Atlantic: “College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots: How I got co-opted into helping the rich prevail at the expense of everybody else”
This is when Arthur Laffler, the founder of supply side economics was embraced not just by Reagan and the Koch brothers, but by the likes of Democratic presidential candidates Jerry Brown (1992) and Gary Hart (1988). Neoliberalism and market-based solutions were at the heart of the Democratic Leadership Council, founded by Bill Clinton in 1985. Anderson reports that Laffler himself claimed to have voted for Bill Clinton.
The slope from FDR to Bill Clinton was indeed slippery, steep and insidious. Indeed, since JFK it would be hard to find any serious leftist candidate until the rise of Bernie Sanders. What’s more, until Sanders no viable economic justice platform was ever developed to counter the New Democrat socially liberally, fiscally conservative mantra. With the Dow booming, any critic of rapacious capitalism was deemed fringe, if not lunacy.”
The Valley Village View 