I cite

NY Civil Liberties Union calls out irregularities in Reading Town Court

On January 21, 2015 the New York Civil Liberties Union wrote Justice Berry, Town Supervisor Switzer, and Councilmembers to ask that the Town of Reading facilitate public access to court proceedings. The NYCLU addresses the chilling effect of denying observers and supporters access to the court during the hearings of We Are Seneca Lake defenders arrested for trespass. Here is a link to the letter.

Lake lessons

Since the end of October (and my first arrest on November 3), I've been involved in civil disobedience actions at the gates of Texas-based oil and gas company Crestwood-Midstream to stop the company from storing methane gas in the fragile salt caverns of Seneca Lake. The facility is at the south end of the lake; I live at the north end. The lake supplies the drinking water for about a hundred thousand people. Seneca Lake is fragile, higher in salinity than the other Finger Lakes, likely because of LPG storage in the sixties through the eighties. I've been on the line six times, arrested four of those times, and in a support role three additional times. 

The issue is complicated and layered, not one I would have chosen. It chose me. 

I wonder if politics works this way a lot of the time. I wonder if there is or will be something about climate politics that makes the way it will choose us to engage different from other political matters. What makes this seem likely is the largeness and seeming intractability of the problem: it is already happening. Binding global agreements seem unlikely and already like too little too late. We get trapped into the worst sorts of individualizing approaches that reduce action to one's consumer choices or ethical stance, feeling responsible. 

The expanded storage facility would be part of the fracking infrastructure. Allowing it to be built undermines efforts to ban fracking (or maintain the ban in NY), adding to the ability of the industry to say things like "well, X is already in place." Methane in particular has an even greater warming effect than carbon. So this isn't a NIMBY issue. The point is no fracking here, no fracking anywhere.

We have to insist on no fracking anywhere as a necessary component of climate politics: fossil fuels must stay in the ground (which would be helped by not calling them "fuel" anymore or even "fossils" since "fossils" seem to be things that are out of the ground and within human containers, generally, museums). 

One divides into two -- in this case, the struggle over protecting one lake divides into that plus another struggle against fracking. The struggle against fracking divides into itself plus the struggle to mitigate rather than compound climate change. And this struggle, to be the struggle it is, is a struggle against capitalism. If there is to be any mitigation of global climate change, a massive sector of the capitalist economy -- the oil and gas industry, which includes, then, petro-chemicals, shipping and transport, the financial markets associated with speculating on oil and gas as commodities as well as other stocks and investments, automobiles, roads, the component industries of all of these -- has to be shut down. This means lots of job loss: in a sense the dismantling of the carbon-combustion complex is akin to the de-industrialization of the seventies and eighties. Instead of jobs and processes being moved elsewhere, though, they would be eliminated. Yes, renewables, thought broadly in ways that connect with renewing the capacities and resources of workers who have had to make their livings in the industry threatening us all.

The array of pipeline, storage, and water struggles are salvos against the oil and gas sector of the capitalist economy, attacks on its base, the energy system that supports it. It makes me wonder about the fruitfulness of an analogy with the early days of organized working class struggle as Marx and Engels describe in the Communist Manifesto, the days when workers are beginning to form combinations (Trades' Unions) against the bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels write: "The real fruit of their battle lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers." 

In addition to learning a lot about propane, butane, and methane, the economics of the oil and gas industry, the dangers associated with the storage and transport of methane and LPGs, I've learned more about engaged collective action, maybe even the way in which an "ever-expanding union" may produce itself in practices of comradeship where one finds oneself acting in solidarity with a whole slew of people one barely knows and may not have much in common with outside the action (which itself grows to become the focus of life rather than what is added in when one 'has time' -- really, none of us have time, individually or collectively).

I say 'engaged collective action' because I am reluctant to say "activism," feeling uneasy about the term (although, interestingly, the local paper, covering a rally I helped organize last weekend, called the over 300 people who came out in 17 degree weather to march in Geneva, many for the first time, 'activists').  I am also reluctant to say "grassroots," in part because it starts to suggest to me a chain of associations that leads to unrooted cosmopolitan intellectuals, an environment that I also inhabit, but again not in those terms.

Since I am in this vein of saying what I am  not saying, I'll add that I don't think of the actions of the group We Are Seneca Lake via the binary of 'local' versus 'global,' a binary into which some of my friends and comrades want to assimilate it. Problems with the local/global binary include the rendering of sacrifice zones into localities while the global persists as a realm of functioning success, the production of some eyes, opinions, and attention at what needs to be "gotten" for something to matter (and here plays into the worse tendencies of communicative capitalism), and the utter failure to take seriously the material interconnections of infrastructure, capitalism, state, and climate that intellectuals in particular have claimed to be focusing on for over a decade.

A few lessons:

1.  Footwear matters.

2.  Wear sunscreen.

3.  Wear layers.

4.  There are divisions of labor that make people happy: people like making contributions that matter, such as providing care and sustenance by bringing food, providing technical, legal, and creative services, providing good humor, energy, calm, information. Many of us like being foot-soldiers, banner holders, reliable cadre. "Just tell me where to go and I will be there. You can count on me." Being one of many -- of the 40 arrested on the big day, of the 15 who stood in the cold and wind the whole fucking day, of the 12 from the first arrests, of the 6 who went to jail -- gives us a sense of purpose that we can't give ourselves by ourselves: "how do I help?"

5.  Leadership gives people the confidence to do more than they thought they could. Organizers channel and reinforce this confidence, letting it intensify and spread.

6.  It makes sense to look for allies. (Honestly, this is where the insane politics of outrage of the typing left leaves me cold, much colder than 12 degrees and wind on the west side of Seneca Lake. In the name of a rejection of norms, the politics of outrage incites the expression of rhetorical alliance within media networks, reinforcing the primacy of these networks and these expressions. That this is in the name of the rejection of norms makes sense: in replace of these norms is a super-ego injunction that we can never satisfy and that gets stronger with every attempt to satisfy it.) 

7. Comradeship is a general sensibility cultivated out of commitment to a common end. Arising out repeated practices, comradeship traverses and transcends specific motives for engagement. 

CLEAR MESSAGE: About 300 descend on Geneva for a rally, march in support of Seneca Lake - Finger Lakes Times: News

 

"Fourth Ward City Councilor Ken Camera was among those who spoke from city hall’s steps. He said Seneca Lake could face destruction if the protests fail.

The crowd, still waving signs, stretched from the sidewalk out to the middle of Castle Street. Occasional passersby asked why they were there, and some drivers honked as they went past.

“Without the lake, Geneva and the surrounding areas and towns will lose what makes them unique,” Camera told the crowd. “For us, the lake is not a business. It is a part of our home that we need to fight for. ... We’re going to be on the barricades until we win.”

Couchon called the protests a people’s movement.

“There was nothing to do but go home or fight, and we fight,” he said of activists’ reaction to Crestwood’s plans. “We fight for our right to determine what’s best for our people, as we do not accept that corporations are people or that corporations have the right to determine what’s best for our communities.”

Howie Hawkins, a longtime activist and the 2014 Green Party candidate for governor, was a late addition to the roster of speakers. He pledged to join the protesters, and he linked their efforts to earlier protests against nuclear power and to the larger energy debate. The Crestwood protests, he said, are part of the nation’s decision to either continue embracing 19th century energy sources that pollute or to turn toward green power.

“We’re not just fighting for ourselves,” Hawkins said. “We’re fighting for our whole future, our whole state, our whole nation, our whole world.”"

via www.fltimes.com

Gas storage on Seneca Lake: all burden, no benefit

In support of its plans to expand gas storage in the salt caverns adjacent to Seneca Lake, the deepest lake in New York state and the longest of the Finger Lakes, Texas-based oil and gas company Crestwood-Midstream is circulating the claim that the increase in storage capacity will benefit Finger Lakers by helping control propane costs. More storage of butane, propane, and methane is supposed to protect us from shortages and price hikes. It's time to debunk this myth because the bottom line is that Crestwood's plan to expand storage is about their drive to find markets for fracked gases, not keeping prices low for Finger Lakers. The propane is not for us. We are just supposed to hold it -- and bear all the environmental consequences -- until Crestwood finds buyers willing to pay a high enough price. A Texas company makes the money, and New York's efforts to develop renewable energy is shoved onto back burners, propane burners.

The spike in propane prices last winter is offered as evidence of the urgent need for more storage -- even though the Crestwood plan goes back nearly five years (having been brought forward by Inergy, a company with which Crestwood merged). For example, the chair of the NY State Senate committee on energy sent Cuomo a letter in July 2014 urging that the DEC approve the planned expansion:

A severe propane shortage in the Northeast caused prices to spike more than 50 percent and cost more than $100 million. The Finger Lakes storage facility would create a major new hub for propane storage in the Northeast. Maziarz said those most affected by the dramatic spikes were largely rural residents and businesses who could least afford it.

But what really caused prices to spike? Was the problem lack of storage? In other words, is the "major new hub" actually because people in the Finger Lakes need it? Or is Seneca lake being used as a dumping ground such that we bear the costs that accompany expansion of the fossil fuel industry at a time when more and more voices are telling us to keep fossil fuels in the ground?

If the price hike last year was related to a lack of storage, then one explanation for the current drop in propane prices this year could be because storage has increased. But it hasn't. Crestwood's development plans have been on hold pending more thorough inquiry into hazards associated with storing LPGs next to the drinking water of 100,000 people. The price drop in propane has nothing to do with storage. It's about markets. There is a glut of propane and butane, and the oil and gas companies are looking for customers to buy it. 

The drive for more storage is based on supply -- not demand. In the shale fracking boom, companies over-expanded:

“Things look pretty ugly overall,” said Francisco Blanch, commodities and derivatives strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “It really is an amazing amount of supply, and it’s very difficult to place fast. That’s created consistent selling pressure.”

According to a 2013 industry analysis,"the propane market has been grappling with an over supply situation since Spring 2012." Propane inventories were pushed into "the stratosphere" and increased even further the following year.

That the push for storage comes from over-supply and not demand is clear even in industry reports that emphasize storage. LPGs are being produced for export. According to the National Propane Gas Association, 5% of US propane was exported in 2008. By 2013, it was 20%. The excessive expansion in production, and need for storage, is happening because oil and gas companies want to sell their product overseas. According to "the propane industry's premier information source," LPGAS, 

This should be a golden era for propane considering the amount of gas available domestically from various shale plays, but inadequate storage in key U.S. regions – plus the economics that have propane leaving U.S. borders at record rates – has the industry on edge as preparations are being made for the winter of 2014-15.

Leaving US borders at record rate means exports. The so-called storage problem isn't simply about domestic need. And it's not about Finger Lakers' need at all. In a way, we are the product, our lake the storage facility that Texans are trying to sell to their multinational customers. Underlying the emphasis on storage is the dynamic of moving propane and butane in the market. Andy Ronald, a Crestwood VP, is quoted in the LPGas article cited above as lamenting the "travesty" of "this tremendous growth and supply" but no storage. Translation: supply is driving Crestwood's storage expansion, not demand in the Finger Lakes.

Ronald is explicit on this point in a presentation that highlights growing supply and limited infrastructure. Propane production is increasing, exceeding existing pipeline and storage capacity. In order to take advantage of "favorable global price differentials," Crestwood needs more storage.

The growth of propane exports is in fact one of the reasons for last year's "shortages" in the northeast and midwest. There was propane, but not for domestic use. Exports continued even after several states declared emergencies.

Even Maine, ostensibly one of the areas of the country that needs more propane, is awash in the stuff. There is a glut and dealers are doing their best to build more export facilities. The surge in supply is driving this expansion.

Finger Lakers have been led to believe that increased storage would impact propane prices for us in the winter months. Crestwood's own materials make it clear that this is not true. Ronald's presentation says that winter propane delivery would go out the Teppco pipeline to the Selkirk gateway to the New England market. The propane isn't for the Finger Lakes. We aren't the customers. We are the dumping ground, our water supply put at risk, the quality of our lake degraded, our communities threatened, so that Crestwood can push its over supply of LPGs and diminish incentives for the development of renewable energy.

Having more storage, like having more LPGs, is not a boon to local consumers. The expansion in storage is not planned to meet need in the Finger Lakes. Instead, it is planned to take advantage of price differentials in markets.

One reason companies proceeded with exports and pipeline changes that left propane consumers vulnerable this winter is that producers of many critical commodities—including oil, natural gas, propane, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and heating oil—are not obliged to distribute those fuels in a way that benefits U.S. consumers. If it's more profitable for companies to sell those products overseas or reconfigure pipelines, then whenever possible, they will do so.

Oil and gas companies can ship or pipe their products however they want. Their goal is to make money for their investors. When they can get a better price shipping their commodites abroad, they do it. In fact, when domestic prices are low, oil and gas companies have an incentive to ship their products abroad. 

Crestwood wants to expand storage in the Finger Lakes for its benefit, not ours. But we and our lake bear the real costs of the environmental harm that comes with LPG storage. Added to the damage is the build up of the infrastructure of the very industry that is destroying the planet. Energy should should be placed on renewables, not wasted on deadly fossil fuels. 

Living the Lake

The perspective from which you look impacts what you see.

Bill Connolly looks from the dinner table and sees zombies oppressed by a future they are constrained to build. 

These days, I look from the blockade line at the gates of Crestwood Midstream on the south of Seneca Lake outside Watkins Glen, New York. Next to me, I see organized activists and committed people from all over the Finger Lakes. They are teaching me a lot about what matters in the current political struggles at the intersection of climate and capitalism and about what doesn't.

Since We Are Seneca Lake began blockading the gates of Crestwood in October, there have been nearly 200 arrests.  At least half a dozen people have gone to jail. The arrested range in age from 19 to 90. They include students, retirees, former military, farmers, vintners, health care workers, scientists, musicians, teachers, moms, college professors and others. On the morning of my first arrest, right after we were processed at the local sheriff's office, a former elected county official (in her late seventies), said "okay, now let's get back on the line!" These people are dedicated, steadfast. Each time I hear the organizers describe the blockade in trainings for new recruits I am moved: "and then a large truck tries to pull into the gate and not a muscle twitches, not an eye blinks; nobody moves."

The Defenders of Seneca Lake didn't emerge out of nowhere. I don't think any of them got their start in a dinner table conversation about the term "anthropocene" (although the ideas associated with the concept--as well as the debates over it, which morph into the "capitalocene" and the manthropocene--are interesting). Because their concern is focused on political organizing and not deflected into debates over gatekeeper terms like the "anthropocene," when these activists are around the dinner table, they try to figure out how many signatures they need to get in order to pressure their local townships to ban fracking and how long they should take to get them. For them, people's active impact on the climate includes their capacity to change the political climate as well as the geologic one (which they discuss actively -- explaining the fragility of shale formations, the likelihood of salt caverns to collapse, the relation between the different lakes in the region as they formed during the ice age, etc). The We Are Seneca Lake activists (and other fractivists in New York) don't see the people around them as zombies. Instead, they see them as people willing and able to struggle against a corporation and a system that, in pursuit of profit and shareholder value, creates sacrifice zones and assigns some of us to them.

The Seneca Lake Defenders came out of the convergence of different groups and efforts in the battle against the gas and oil industry. In New York state, this convergence ultimately resulted in a state-wide ban on fracking. The struggle is ongoing, now targetting the infrastructure of storage and pipelines that supports fracking elsewhere (like in Pennsylvania) and thereby enables the oil and gas industry to continue pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The story of the victory over fracking in New York state is an exciting one. Some of the parts of it that I've learned as I've been looking from the blockade line include remarkable convergences:  of long-term local activists who had set up a film and lecture series that, over the course of a few years, built up a list of concerned and engaged people; a couple of lawyers working pro-bono to scour state law to come up with the municipal banning strategy; a few people going door-to-door for several months to get signatures on petitions that would pressure local officials to ban fracking within their townships; these same activists doing presentations in town after town to folks who wanted to get their communities to pass similar bans; scientists doing research on the effects of fracking; other activists working within the system to compile reports on liquid petroleum gas storage; and, journalists keeping the issue in the local papers.

The struggle against fracking in New York state has been going on for about six years. It's duration has been vital, enlivening, letting it grow and spread, not like a swarm but as an organized collectivity. The length of time has brought more people into the movement, often in unexpected ways. From marches, to meetings, to rallies, to support for civil disobedients, to arrests, to jail, to more organizing -- people come into the struggle and find themselves ever more engaged. The work, the struggle, feels more real than anything else.

In the battle for Seneca Lake, one begins to see the different fronts of the struggle--policy, media, courtoom, Crestwood gates--and appreciate how they fit together--local political knowledge plus scientific knowledge plus legal knowledge plus creativity. One becomes heartened by the skills and energies of others. 

In multiple sites of organized political struggle, the liveliness that Connolly doesn't see and thinks needs to be fomented is already a vibrant matter. And it's vibrant because people collectively are figuring out what to do and this collective engagement is inciting more action, more involvement. Down near Watkins Glen, people drive by the blockade at the Crestwood gates. Next time they bring hot chocolate. Next time they join the line. Then they organize another group, perhaps to get standing at an issues conference, perhaps to pressure state and federal officials, perhaps to begin another strategy.

It sometimes feels like the whole area is united against this Texas company: when people come up to us in the grocery store and shake our hands, when they send us email asking how to give money for legal support, when they say thank you. It's interesting when people begin conversations by saying "I'm not ready to get arrested yet" -- what an amazing jump! They aren't grappling with some abstraction of zombified complacency versus making a pronouncement here or there. They are already figuring out what they want to do next, how they want to be involved. They feel themselves already in the life of the collective engagement of the people around them. This becomes the crowd to be in--not a swarm or a shuffling zombie mass of individuals worried making a difference in themselves but a collective changing the world.

Those trying to fend off zombiness in the Baltimore area don't have to look very far for the kind of collective engagement that enlivens the Finger Lakes (as well as the multiple sites of organized struggle against pipelines, storage, and other parts of the fossil fuel infrastructure). An ally of We Are Seneca Lake is We Are Cove Point. They are organizing to stop the building of the first fracked gas export terminal on the east coast. It's important work: stopping the fracking infrastructure is crucial to make sure that this destructive form of extraction can itself be eliminated. A dozen Chesapeake Bay groups have converged to constitute We Are Cove Point and blockade the entrance to the Dominion Resources Cove Point construction site. At least twenty people have been arrested so far. 

Instead of zombified repetition constraining them to future oppression, the protectors of We Are Cove Point are collectively creating a future conducive to a habitable and even more just and equitable planet. From where they look, they see a world they are and can actively change.

DEC issues draft permits for LPG: This is your wake-up call

 

Dear friends of Seneca Lake, Last night, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation issued a draft permit for the storage of 88 billion gallons of propane and butane (liquefied petroleum gases, LPG) in Seneca Lake’s salt caverns. This is not a surprise, but it is a travesty. It means that Houston-based Crestwood Midstream is now one step closer to realizing its sinister plan to turn our lake into a gas station for the fracking industry. It means that Governor Cuomo is not protecting us. He’s protecting the things that threaten us. He could have told the DEC to deny the permit—and so stand up for the wine and tourism industries that he professes to champion and cherish. But he didn’t. If there is a silver lining in the black cloud of badness it is that the final approval of this draft permit is not automatic. It hinges on the results of an “issues conference,” which is scheduled for February 12. An issues conference is a prelude to a full adjudicatory hearing. At the conference, an administrative law judge will consider arguments by opponents of the project and determine if our concerns warrant a full hearing. The issues conference is the result of persistent, loud citizen opposition. And also good science. But science alone did not win us the issues conference. And science alone will not stop Crestwood. So far, the We Are Seneca Lake campaign has focused on methane storage, and we will continue to do so. However, with last night’s tragic but long-expected announcement, we now must resist gas storage of all kinds, including LPG, and recommit ourselves to our solemn responsibility to protect this lake—and our climate—for the sake of our children and future generations. And, of course, it’s all connected: while we are defending our own health, safety and access to clean drinking water, we are also defending the economic vitality of our region, which is based on the twin pillars of vineyards and tourists. Here in the Finger Lakes, we know that economic growth, good health, and an unspoiled environment all dance together. Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of Seneca Lake. There is nothing left to wait for. We need you to join us now, and we need you to invite your friends to join us. Sign the Pledge. Your signature triggers an invitation to attend a non-violent civil disobedience training. We will contact you with details. . (There are two this week.) You don’t have to go to jail. You don’t have to get arrested. But you do need to find the courage of your convictions, and, in return, you’ll have the chance to tell your grandkids, “See that lake? I once worked with many brave people, and we helped to save it.” because blue is the color of faithfulness, Sandra p.s. Here’s a photo from last week’s blockade. Martha Ferber is 90 years old. She was placed in handcuffs for defending water. I think she wants you to follow her.

Copyright © 2014 We Are Seneca Lake, All rights reserved.

 

Geneva anti-Monsanto demonstration at Congressman Tom Reed's HQ

Geneva, NY.   Demonstrators in Geneva, NY protested against Monsanto in front of the district office of Congressman Tom Reed on May 24. The protest was part of a global March Against Monsanto. The company's genetically modified organisms and harmful pesticides threaten health, biodiversity, and sustainable food production throughout the world. 

The Geneva demonstration was organized by Geneva resident, Kyle McGloon. McGloon said, "I feel like a lot of people are not aware of what is going on with our food and our government and wanted to spark some critical thinking."

Although Austria, Germany, France, and Switzerland are among the countries with partial bans on GMOs, the US lags far behind. Just this week, several counties in Oregon broke this impass, when they voted to ban the planting of genetically modifed crops in their borders. Monsanto currently spends upward of seven million dollars a year in lobbying efforts in the US. 

Hobart and William Smith Colleges' Professor of Political Science Paul A. Passavant explained, "GMOs threaten small farms. In addition to poisoning the environment with their toxins, Monsanto puts small farmers out of business when common seed stores get contaminated with their genetically modified frankenseeds. We live in a strange world when the law allows Monsanto to sue small farmers out of business, but doesn't protect the rest of us from invasion from these genetically modified organisms.

This year's Geneva protest doubled in size from last year. McGloon was optimistic: "If I reached one person, I would be satisfied."

Occupy Geneva (or what links Geneva with #occupywallstreet)

Yesterday was Geneva's annual "spookerie" parade. 

Geneva has a population of around 13,000. It's declined 2.6% since 2000. The median household income is about  $35,800.

The parade was at 5:00. Before dark. A couple of blocks were blocked off from traffic.

More people walk in the parade than watch it. Everyone lines up in front of the armory. Kids are arranged by schools--two public elementary schools, a few nursery schools. Whole families walk with their kids. Some are in costume, some are not. Parents run around with cameras. The order of the parade doesn't seem to be set; it depends on who shows up with the banners. The high school band plays. They wear costumes, not uniforms.  The whole parade takes about half an hour. 

Our zombie horde of 12 (including two Anonymous in Guy Fawkes masks), filled in behind a nursery school, pretty much lined up with the volunteer firemen (in dress blues) and a couple of people with signs for the Catholic schools.

After we started walking (lurching), the Catholic kids, firemen, and zombies flowed in and through each other.  A man holding the hand of a kid wearing a bleeding ghoul mask and black robe was like a human pseuodopodium, pulling us all along through the crowd. To keep up, the zombies couldn't really shuffle; we had to hop to it. Zombies walking like regular people aren't all that frightening.

The week before Occupy Halloween, the mayor denounced the zombie march as an attempt to hijack the event. Let the kids be kids, he said. This is supposed to be about and fun and costumes. The words abhorrent and repellant also entered the mix. 

Local radio announced the zombie march. 66 people told FB they were going to participate in Occupy Halloween--a humorous, festive, way to pull together conversations about debt, foreclosures, and the economy in Geneva. On FB, the mayor posted a You Tube video from Billy Dean, "Let them be little".

Would 66 zombies hijack the parade? How many zombies does it take to hijack a parade, anyway? 1000 would have definitely done it.

Phone lines were pretty tied up on Friday afternoon--people calling folks on city council, folks on city council calling people at the Colleges. This whole thing could put kids in danger. Some kids might be scared of the zombies. What about violence and counter demonstrations? This is too dangerous and could get way, way out of hand. Politics does not belong in the spookerie parade (religion is okay, though; several guys handed out Christian goodie bags). 

Some wanted the zombies to enter the costume contest in the "Group, Patriotic" category--after all, this was free speech, right?

Guarded by Anonymous, the intrepid zombies stumbled and moaned through the parade. An 8 year old Robin Hood and 7 year old cowgirl walked alongside, chatting and laughing, "you are not scary at all." BRAAAIIIINNNNNNNSSSSSSSSSS

The biggest applause came from the stalwarts in front of Democratic Party HQ. The local head judge was there, having been apprised of the potential for zombie blocking or anti-zombie violence. The cheering Dems were the long term bunch, the ones who think that the housing authority should focus on housing for senior citizens of limited means, not the young DLC type Dems who think in terms of what's attractive to tourists. 

There is talk about "really" occupying Geneva. Some folks have scouted out a small park in a pretty good location--the edge of "downtown" visible from a major road. No signs warn against loitering or announce closing hours. 

Some of the Dems were thrilled with this news--great, somebody should occupy Geneva, that would bring people downtown, provide the downtown businesses with customers. But why sleep in the park? It's getting cold. What would be really good would be if they would occupy some of the empty store fronts or abandoned houses. Shoot, what we really need is for lots of people to occupy Geneva. That would totally liven things up.

What does it mean to occupy a place where the problems are those of abandonment and displacement, where absence of opportunity manifests itself in steady attrition? It's almost as if occupation changes its valence, becoming opportunity or even hope.

But that's not quite right.  Up here hope seems unable to escape the confines of the possible, of the (no longer viable) expectation that an answer will come from within capitalism, that will entail capitalism's spread, as if more capitalism is all that is needed to flourish.

In the very small cities of the rust belt, to continue to think in terms of capitalism is to remain stuck, persising like the walking dead in search of something that can never bring you back to life. Tourism isn't a solution (nothing to see here, and whatever there is to see is demolished by tourism), info-tech isn't a solution (there's plenty of that elsewhere), wineries make some sense (but much of the work that goes into them is seasonal and low paid), and so people turn to service jobs with low capital requirement--massage, hair, nails, and the Wal-Mart, especially now that the local K-Mart (along with Burger King) has gone out of business. 

Maybe that's where the hijacking occurs--the derailing of hope from its capitalist track and into the muck and uncertainty of capitalism's failure. And maybe the plea to "let the kids be kids" is a call to let parents continue to hope through them, continue to believe what they already know and experience is false--that the economy we have can provide most of us with economic security, with the health care we will need when illness strikes, with enough to live on when we retire. That we will be able to get our kids through college with making them into debt slaves, that they will have lives of consequence.

"Let kids be kids" is another way of asking to be allowed to hold on to the fantasy that it's all going to be ok, even if we don't do anything. 

Maybe 12 zombies are enough to hijack a parade.

God loves Geneva

Economist Robert Samuelson has been going on about Americans not being in the mood to spend, about how such attitudes hurt the economy. Robert Reich makes the obvious point that many people can't spend. Apart from the top 1%--getting richer all the time--the majority have seen their income remain stagnant or decline over the last decade. My own view is that decreasing spending, and decreasing debt, can be steps out of consumerism. These steps should be furthered with large tax increases on the top 1% as well as a lifting of the cap on income taxed for social security. These large taxes will suppress/depress private spending by the wealthy and enable more public spending on collective goods--alternative fuel, alternative transportation, expansions in green and sustainable ways of living, dismantling of suburbs and exurbs and reinvigoration of cities, etc

Yesterday I spoke with a couple of women who had a different view. They were standing at a street corner in Geneva. It wasn't very busy. It was pretty hot, pretty humid. One of the women held a sign calling for us to repent and return from our backslidden ways to God.

After I drove past them, I turned back around to ask them a few questions.

My first question: why are you doing this?

The sign-holder said that God told her to.

Surprised, I pressed a bit: "God told you to make this sign and stand here on the street corner? Why do you think God finds this an effective way to get His message out?"

The other woman interjected--a stream of answers flowing from her mouth in ever more fluid associations: God talks to people, John delivered the Revelation on a street corner, God told Peter to go speak to the Italians, it's in the Old Testament but God speaks to people now. The sign holder added that she had had a vision of precisely this corner of Geneva burning in flames. She then begin to speak of the pain and suffering of the people, that many have no jobs, that they are hurting, and that God doesn't want them to suffer.

I again wondered why holding a sign calling for people to repent made sense as a response to the problems in the economy.

Our exchange continued to drift away from coherence (Paul was surprised that I found this noteworthy). I tried to talk about BP and corporations and they talked about God caring for each hair on our head and fornication. Some of the problems on the Gulf Coast have less to do with BP (the women acknowledged that there may well be evil people working there; they avoided considering whether bad choices by generally not evil people could be an element or whether the capitalism system overall is evil) and a lot more to do with the backslidden ways of the people. Fornication matters because God doesn't want us to get HIV or STDs. I wondered why those even existed if God didn't want us to have them but that was a pretty stupid question: our fallen condition, original sin, hello?!

The women shared by criticism of corporations, but they thought that the problems of corporations could be solved by repenting: those who have repented make much better workers. It's part of God's plan. Wouldn't I want my employees to be responsible? I confess that I was pretty confused at this point and having trouble responding.

By channels I couldn't quite follow, one of the women got to a joyful description of heaven--dancing with Jesus and eating all you want without getting fat. And this while basking in God's love. It was a message of abundance, one that she directly connected to an explanation for early death: God brings some of us home so that we don't have to remain in this fallen, awful condition any longer. Who wouldn't want to die?

Their message of love and care for each individual person may be more effective than my own tendencies to dismiss individuals as ideological fictions. Their solution--stop sinning and follow Jesus--also seems less complicated than overthrowing capitalism and restructuring the economy.  Overall, though, I couldn't shake the feeling that their message didn't address the difficulty and loss in people's lives at all. It invoked it, only to displace it by a gesture to God's love.

How McCain Could Win

Below is an excerpt from Greg Palast. Most of us have probably already come across is nightmarish stolen election scenario. The details are shocking. I find the experience of reading them jarring: I believe they are true (that he is a reliable reporter who checks his facts) yet I can't believe 'the ugly secret.' And I wonder, is this my fetishistic denial, a kind of residual faith in democracy? Or is something else involved, something that has more to do with the position of the story/report? Does the report function as a kind of political pornography, an extreme kind of leftist paranoia that replaces/displaces not just political optimism and possibility but steps toward responsible dismantling of conservative hegemony? Differently put, is the problem with Palast that he fantasizes a nearly omnipotent power behind the scenes? That he may even be too certain in the face of the always messy sausage-factory of US elections?

Link: t r u t h o u t | How McCain Could Win.

Swing state Colorado. Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!

    Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year's Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they're still "disappeared" from the lists this week.

    Swing state Indiana. In this year's primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state's new voter ID law. They had drivers' licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they'd let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn't cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don't have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.

    Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state's Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new "verification" process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).