Happy New Year

For a limited time, my first book, What's a Girl Gotta Do, which came out in January 1994, is available as an ebook, absolutely free, here.

Happy Diwali

(Satellite photo of India at night via NASA)

India celebrates Diwali, the festival of lights.

Josephine and Grace

A friend posted this on Facebook, The Five Most Bad Ass Teams of Famous People to Ever Join Forces....

...which made me think of one of my favorite famous teams, Princess Grace of Monaco and Josephine Baker, who fought racism together--not as dramatic as the other examples, but much more epic.

In 1951, back when racism was still wildly popular, Josephine was refused service at the Stork Club because she was black. Grace Kelly was so incensed by this, "she stormed out with her entire party and refused to go back. And never did." The two became lifelong friends and Grace was an ardent supporter of Josephine her entire life.

Wouldn't you love to have been a fly on the wall when these two got together at the palace, when the tiara and the glass slippers were off and they could just kick back, two girlfriends together?

Josephine:

The Way the World Works

A rich man in Europe owes me a small fortune.

I will never see this money. The European artists he exploited, and then completely screwed over, took him to court. It was an arduous, expensive and painful process. Even though they won the case, in the end the artists got very little because the lawyers took almost all of it. It made no sense for the foreign artists to then sue. Between translations, the paperwork nightmare and mandatory court appearances it would have cost us even more and we might have received less because he would have had time to hide all his assets.

I'd almost forgotten about him--I'd blocked it in the interests of letting go, moving on, and finding some peace--until a friend reminded me last night.

This is not an isolated case. "The side that has the most interest in pitting raw financial power against the opponent in the suit is probably going to win."

That last link comes from this piece in The Daily Kos, from the POV of someone who temped at a large, international bank. I temped a lot back in the day, between media jobs, while writing. Most of my employers were great. For months I worked for a consultant firm in Washington, a great and ethical company, that specialized in helping failing and otherwise wayward banks get back to the straight and narrow and make a fair profit. I had to type up a lot of documents detailing what had gone wrong. The word 'embezzlement' came up so often it began to appear in my dreams.

A Chelsea neighbor used to work for a very rich family with a popular department store among other holdings. She told me they routinely paid their big mainstream suppliers and not the artisans who made the store's reputation. Why? Because the big suppliers could afford to sue them. The artisans couldn't, not simply for financial reasons, but also because they'd be labeled troublemakers and find it harder to get their work into other big stores. And if they had pursued it in a class action? The owners would hide their assets and declare bankruptcy, and/or sell the company, which IIRC is what they did anyway.

That family is still filthy rich.

Bankruptcy is a pip if you're wealthy.

At the time, I thought my neighbor was just grinding an axe against her former employer but I later met artisans who had been bankrupted by the store.

Extrapolate, and you see that this is what has happened to the entire world economy.

This was not the only time I was screwed over by someone wealthier, but not all rich people are bad--and I was helped out at the time by a wealthy woman in New York who assists many artists, and helped too by family and friends (some of whom had little more than I had). The American Dream characterizes the rich as people profiting from their talents and creativity, like Steve Jobs or Steven Spielberg. But these deserving individuals seem to be the exception, not the rule.

When a CEO earns 100 or 1000 times more than the people doing the work for him or her and pays proportionally less in taxes, yet still has massively disproportionate influence over the government, things are FUBAR. With the stroke of a pen the corporate elite can lay off those workers, then pressure the congresspeople they own not to extend benefits to the unemployed. Most galling is the way their Ho's in government cut benefits to veterans and their beneficiaries, many of whom have actually risked their lives/lost loved ones fighting wars that shamefully profited corporations.

Read this: It's the Inequality, Stupid.

Then read this: 7 Core Demands from the Occupy Wall Street Movement. These are very clear demands, and seem very reasonable ways to take power from the moneyman and return it to the people. Whatever else people want, environmental laws, alternative energy programs, whatever, will be easier to fight for (or against, depending on your POV) once financial and electoral reform--a real democracy1--is achieved. That's what Occupy Wall Street is about, replacing plutocracy with democracy.

1 Yes, I know people have the vote, but what does that mean when they can redistrict, manipulate the number of voting booths, or just hack the electronic voting machines, which turns out to be surprisingly easy. (Thanks to Max Adams for leading me to that last bit and to the 7 Core Demands.)

K-FLEX The Congressional Pimp

Eye Candy: Pan American Airways Posters

I haven't seen the TV show yet. Is it any good? I'm a big Pan Am history fan, since I was a kid in landlocked Northern Alberta clutching my atlas to my heart. Their posters were the stuff of dreams.

Pan Am represented adventure in far-flung places, made less distant by jet travel.

The show is set in 1963 so (SPOILER ALERT), this flight, Pan Am 214, is likely to figure into the plot and involve at least one of the characters.

Trans World posters were pretty great too, but TWA never had the same cachet for me as Pan Am.

Radical Abundance by K. Eric Drexler

This is the book I'm most looking forward to reading, when it comes out next year. Drexler, who wrote Nanosystems and Engines of Creation, is controversial and maybe 50 years ahead of his time on some things (he's "active in space politics," and was involved with the Moon Treaty of 1980). But he's also extremely perceptive about the ways the world economy and political landscape are changing radically because of the power of personal technology. (Also, he writes for people like me who appreciate the concepts but don't understand the mathematics at all.)

The Cynic of Sinope

This Smithsonian Magazine piece, the Top Ten Books Lost to Time, made me think of Diogenes, whose writings were lost (many in the fire that destroyed the Library of Alexandria IIRC). We know of him only through a handful of other writers whose works survived.

Fascinating guy. Would have been right at home in the Hotel Chelsea.

"Diogenes was knee deep in a stream washing vegetables. Coming up to him, Plato said, 'My good Diogenes, if you knew how to pay court to kings, you wouldn't have to wash vegetables.'

"'And,' replied Diogenes, 'If you knew how to wash vegetables, you wouldn't have to pay court to kings.'"

The Teachings of Diogenes.

Fasting to Stop Gratuitous Fasts

After the success of Anna Hazare anti-corruption fast, all sorts of people are jumping on the bandwagon.

Some have done it for a long time, and for good reasons.

Some are.. dubious.

In which category does this guy fall, you think? My, he does look saintly in those photos.

In other news:

A Chennai girl writes an open letter to a "Delhi Boy" and unleashes a brouhaha.

That long-dreamed for "pie-fax" may soon be a reality.

And you may now pre-order Last Girl Standing.

Reflection

via Azmat Zahra

Return to Iron Mountain

While researching conspiracies that turned out to be true, I kept stumbling across Iron Mountain. Apparently, 40-plus years after the Iron Mountain report was published, it remains controversial, and many people still believe Iron Mountain happened.

In a journalism class in college, we were assigned to read this and write a report about it. The book is written in such a detailed, realistic and deadpan fashion, that it was easy to believe it was nonfiction, that a group of powerful people and thinkers had gathered to ponder the consequences of peace and ultimately decided it would be detrimental to the American economy--until I read more about it at the library and learned that it was a hoax. Many years later, I met one of the co-authors, and heard the whole story over Grey Goose vodkas in various Manhattan bars.

"The year was 1966 and one morning the New York Times featured a short news item about how the stock market had tumbled because of what the headline called a 'Peace Scare.'

"The news item had no byline, but it seemed to those of us around the editors’ table in the Monocle office worthy of Jonathan Swift, H. L. Mencken, Mark Twain. Around the table, in addition to myself were Marvin Kitman and Richard Lingeman. Kitman, our news managing editor, had been Monocle’s candidate for president in 1964. He ran in the Republican primary against Barry Goldwater as what he called 'a Lincoln Republican.' Unlike Goldwater, whose platform only went back to McKinley, Kitman claimed to be the only real conservative because his platform went back one hundred years and called for unconditional surrender of the South, freeing the slaves and the reinforcement of the garrison at Fort Sumter."

(Read the entire article.)

While the meeting and the book are part of a hoax, the idea that certain corporate and political concerns prefer war to peace has been borne out over and over, so the Report from Iron Mountain contains much truth.

Wherever warfare is useful to more than one person, there are conspiracies to keep peace at bay, though the majority would fall under the Oliver Stone definition of conspiracy (I'm paraphrasing,) that most conspiracies are not a bunch of white guys sitting on a hill plotting, but are conspiracies of people whose interests-material, ideological, social--align so they consciously or unconsciously act in concert.