American Debt Project HomepageAmerican Debt Project

Pay off debt and live your life. Don't compare, contrast.

Check Out My Guest Post at Envisionaries!

by

The fine people at the Envisionary Movement are young, passionate and incredibly brilliant.  We all know that politics as usual is inane and corrupt, but the Envisionaries are working on changing that and making politics more about what it should be: the people, local government providing great services, and policies that pave the way for a prosperous future.  I admire the way this group is committed to being non-partisan and educating the people.  We ARE a people, and 300 million people in this country means we need more important ideals to get behind other than those of two outdated political parties.  I just checked out the issues that the GOP and Democratic parties present on their national websites.  What a joke!  The GOP has a fifth-grader-sized paragraph devoted to issues like Education and Healthcare, and the Democrats might fill up a whole page, but believe me, there was nothing in there that’s going to make the pages of history.

So without further ado, please check out my guest post at Envisionaries entitled “I Will Never Vote for a Two-Party Candidate Again”, and be sure to support their site with a comment or like on Facebook!

From The Economist: Doing Business in California is Maybe Not So Good

by

I’m reposting this article from the Economist (the website isn’t working), which shows the red tape that’s typical for small food businesses in California.  I’d still love to have a food truck, but this article made me think twice about it:

Beware of the yogurt

The authorities save Californians from a phantom menace

The White Moustache, photo credit: The Economist

Homa Dashtaki and her family came to America from Iran in 1984 and settled in a neighbourhood of Orange County, California favoured by fellow Zoroastrians. The Dashtakis are the kind of immigrants who give California its vibrancy. Ms Dashtaki’s father brought with him a tradition from the old country: the secret of making fantastically good yogurt, the sort that has foodies fighting one another as they throng California’s farmers’ markets. So Ms Dashtaki, spotting a marketing opportunity in her father’s magnificent facial hair, called their little venture “The White Moustache” and prepared to become that all-Americanimmigrant archetype: the entrepreneur.

Alas, after three months of operating (for about $300 in revenues a week, and no profit at all), she encountered that other American tradition, red tape (after the red bands that used to hold bundles of bureaucratic papers together in the old days). For although she had spent a year getting the required permits from Orange County, she had, it turned out, yet to make the acquaintance of the “milk and dairy food safety branch” of the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA). On a Saturday morning in March, Ms Dashtaki got a call and was told to shut down or risk prosecution.

If the Dashtakis were readers of such publications as Chief Executive, they might have had an inkling that this would happen. This month, that magazine published its latest ranking of America’s states by their business climate, and California once again came in 50th. (Texas, which likes to see itself as California’s nimbler rival, again topped the list.) But Ms Dashtaki does not read Chief Executive, nor indeed is she one, so she had no idea.

Her business, while it lasted, consisted of herself, making yogurt on the instructions of her father. Ms Dashtaki was renting space in the kitchen of an Egyptian restaurant where she and her father, “like elves before and after their working hours”, lovingly cultured their yogurt under a blanket, then drained it through a certain kind of cheese cloth, then stirred it for hours, and so forth. For the taste to be divine, everything has to be just so. And, being artisans, they kept the volume tiny, about 20 gallons (76 litres) a week, for sale only at local farmers’ markets.

Ms Dashtaki and her father say their yogurt is safe. It always has been, both in Iran and in America. Nonetheless, she was eager to demonstrate the safety of her process and to comply with all regulations. Hence her surprise when she researched just what those regulations said.

For a start, they date back to 1947. When she pointed out to Stephen Beam, the head of the CDFA’s Milk and Dairy Food Safety Branch, that the rules might be somewhat out of date, Mr Beam replied that the rules have been “amended many times in multiple areas during the past 60-plus years”. But when Ms Dashtaki researched those modifications, they turned out to concern only frozen or “soft-serve” yogurt, not the regular sort, and they still made no allowance at all for yogurt made from pasteurised milk.

The core assumption behind the CDFA’s rules, however, is that all dairy products are made from raw milk, thus requiring elaborate processes that involve proper pasteurisation. The White Moustache, however, was making yogurt from milk that was already pasteurised—Ms Dashtaki bought her inputs from a fancy (and regulated) grocery store in half-gallon glass jugs. Ms Dashtaki thus hoped for a waiver. Absolutely not, replied the CDFA in a communication full of legalese that Ms Dashtaki calls “Kafkaesque”.

The regulator demanded instead that Ms Dashtaki set up a “Grade A” dairy plant, just as a large factory processing raw milk would be required to do. She was told to install, among other things, a “pasteuriser with a recorder”, a “culture tank”, and a “filler”, which apparently also required a “mechanical capper” to screw lids on jars. When Ms Dashtaki pointed out to the CDFA inspector that all this would alter—meaning ruin—the taste of her father’s artisanal yogurt, the inspector agreed. But that does not fall within the remit of the state of California’s dairy regulations.

Ms Dashtaki soldiered on. Then a licensing officer told her that the code does not permit milk to be pasteurised a second time. So “in order to comply with the order to re-pasteurise my already pasteurised milk, I would need to get exemption from the head of the CDFA,” she explains. The tale thus went from Kafka to Catch-22.

Ms Dashtaki would have been happy to label her yogurt—“This product does not meet CDFA codes”, or perhaps “The Moustache kills”, as she suggests. Not allowed. The argument that her target audience consists of sophisticated gourmets at farmers’ markets fell flat, too.

So The White Moustache remains just a wispy little thing. Ms Dashtaki is pondering whether to move to another state, one whose rules allow for artisanal products. She would not be the first entrepreneur to flee the Golden State. Or she might just give up. After all, one has to make a living. It looks like California’s regulators have triumphantly saved their population from the threat of mass poisoning once again.

-The Economist, May 19th, 2011

Advice from Noam Chomsky

by

Noam Chomsky

“Don’t take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can’t. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. There is plenty of information. You have got to learn how to judge, evaluate, and compare it with other things. You have to take some things on trust or you can’t survive. But if there is something significant and important, don’t take it on trust.”

(Excerpt from Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges)

 

 

Book Review: Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges

by

Hedges has got the Good, the Bad and the Dirty.

Have you heard of Chris Hedges? The dude’s a rebel! A former New York Times reporter with a Master of Divinity designation from Harvard rebel.  On a radio interview in July 2011, he talked about how he was “never a careerist” because those reporters who were closest to the most powerful figures in the government, military or whatever would also generally acquiesce to those figures of power.  This was never his interest, as he says, and it shows in his work.  His stories in the New York Times were never the “big” policy pieces, but more concerned with talking to the soldiers on the ground and their stories from the field rather than decision-makers at CENTCOM.  Overall, I found Empire of Illusion to be a dark, probing look into what is taking hold of America and its citizens.

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle is Hedges’ second-most recent book, published in 2009.   I found much of Hedges’ assessment of American society and culture (or its lack thereof) to be fascinating and disturbing.  The book warns in the most dire tone of the imminent end of the American Empire, which can sometimes feel downright uncomfortable for those of us raised on the snarky and cheeky view of politics a la Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.  Hedges touches on the state of affairs in literacy, love, education, happiness and the country in general, and his overall assessment is that we have been cast down the wrong path by those in power, and that power continues to become more and more concentrated at the detriment of the majority of the people.  More simply, Hedges says we’re all getting stupider, the institutions that once served the people are a joke, and pornography is some twisted, freaky business.  Below are a few great quotes from each section of the book, which was divided by the different illusions (and delusions) we suffer under.

 The Illusion of Literacy: We’ve rewarded reality television, fake wrestling, and the ostentatiously rich.

The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape. This cult has within it the classical traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.  This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism.

The Illusion of Love: I want to believe the best of Hedges, but I am not sure why he “had” to attend the Adult Video News (AVN) Awards in Las Vegas to write this section, which is the biggest event of the pornography industry, complete with convention, after-parties and every big name in porn in attendance.  His intention is to expose the violence and cruelty that women are exposed to within these films and this section is more graphic than a Bret Easton Ellis novel.  You might skip these detailed descriptions of violent, commercialized and soulless sex, but even creepier is the tale of the man who lives with eight silicone dolls:

Dr. Z hides his hobby from most of his friends. He keeps the dolls locked in his bedroom closet. He positions them around the house, including in his bed, when he is alone. He shops for their clothing. He poses them for photo shoots. He carefully applies their makeup. And he talks to them. He began using blow-up dolls when he was married…He kept his habit secret from his wife. He is now divorced. “Hey,” he says, “I wasn’t cheating.”

The Illusion of Wisdom: This section focused on the shift in higher education away from true intellectual inquiry and the fact that even the our elite, private universities are focused on creating systems managers and not people who are going to think critically and challenge the systems in place.  Having attended an elite, private university myself, I had to assess my own education in a different light than the warm-and-fuzzy views I’ve given my school since graduation.  Business has become the most popular major (also my major) and careers on Wall Street are some of the most sought after positions for new graduates (also true on my campus where the big Wall Street firms came to recruit, wine, and dine the business, economics and accounting majors).  Hedges sums up the future imagined by these kinds of graduates as dim:

They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of how to replace a failed system with a new one. They are petty, timid, and uncreative bureaucrats superbly trained to carry out systems management.  They see only piecemeal solutions that will satisfy the corporate structure. Their entire focus is numbers, profits, and personal advancement…The human consequences never figure into their balance sheets. The democratic system, they believe, is a secondary product of the free market-which they slavishly serve.”

 The Illusion of Happiness: Hedges cites corporate culture and positive psychology as tools that are used to promote social conformity within society, the workplace, and every other institution.  I think anyone who has worked for any company with over 50 employees can relate to this section, where an example of a meeting held at FedEx Kinko’s reminded me of Office Space.  A “woman from corporate” brings toys, candy and markers to get the employees involved and keeps an upbeat attitude even though the employees are initally reluctant to get involved.  In the end, this scene feels uncomfortable because the employees are being “spun” to think they are happy to work for the company.

Positive psychology, like celebrity culture, the relentless drive to consume, and the diversionary appeals of mass entertainment, feeds off the unhappiness that come from isolation and the loss of community.

The Illusion of America: Hedges looks back at America with nostalgia, because, he says, what is still here is not really America anymore.  The quote I want to cite here actually comes from economist Jared Diamond, who lists five factors that lead to social decay:

1) a failure to understand and to prevent causes of environmental damage; 2) climate change, 3) depredations by hostile neighbors; 4) the inability of friendly neighbors to continue trade; and 5) finally, how the society itself deals with the problems raised by the first four factors.

In case you were wondering like I was, depredation means an act of attacking or plundering.  Although I think that the depredation going on in the United States is mostly carried on by internal forces.

Recommendation

Overall, I thought Empire of Illusion was a great read.  I learned about some disturbing trends in each section that Hedges focused on, and the overall message that the people are being distracted and entertained with spectacle and noise while the country and the environment is plundered is definitely a thesis I can agree with.  But I’m always weary of books that prophesy apocalypse and offer nothing in return to a reader.  Although Hedges ends on a note of hope (“The power of love is greater than the power of death”),  he doesn’t offer a path to readers which I think would include education that encourages critical thinking, less apathy overall within the United States, and an inclusive society that offers a larger percentage of people a path to a middle class lifestyle.  I guess in the end, I have an unbounded (and maybe unreasonable) optimism that’s hard to dampen, even though I respect Hedges’ way of presenting the story.

Have you read any works by Chris Hedges? What do you guys think?

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: What Does It Mean For You? (Not Much)

by

Hmm, nice little graphic. There goes $50K of the CFPB budget.

OK, so having overhyped Carmageddon last week, it’s time to talk about a serious and relevant topic, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  I don’t need to say a whole lot on this topic, since this article explores some of the possible potential of the Bureau and this article reminds us that it will all probably end up being nothing but a lot of talk and watered-down “initiatives” and reform.  The main point I want to make is that by the time some event/trend/whatever has reached the point where it needs a federal bureau to look into it, that means there are definitely big problems with it and that the new bureau is not going to be able to do much to stop a tidal wave of activity (Example: FBI.  Catches lots of criminals every year but do you think that means they’ve stopped the flow of counterfeit cigarettes or whatever else into the country? NOT ONE BIT).

So when we talk about a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the government is basically telling you there is no consumer financial protection in the United States, they had an “Oh, sh*t” moment and are frantically trying to put a friendly face on a HUGE issue with no easy answers.   As the second New York Times article points out:

Republicans have unsuccessfully tried to chip away at the authority and structure of the agency by proposing a commission instead of a single director to oversee it, among other ideas. They signaled Thursday that they want to reduce the agency’s powers by challenging the salaries of some staff members, the justification for its budget decisions, its authority to look into certain types of financial institutions and practices, and a number of other organizational issues.

Which sounds like there isn’t even any promise that the CFPB is going to be able to do anything.  It’s counter-intuitive to say that a so-called protection bureau should be limited in its “authority to look into certain types of financial institutions and practices” because that is supposed to be the whole POINT of this stupid agency in the first place.  But when something has “Consumer” in its name instead of “Citizen” that already says to me that the agency is sort of BS (We should be protecting the citizens and residents of America.  Calling us consumers is demeaning and makes me envision mindless drones at the mall sipping Orange Julius and buying cell phone accessories from overpriced kiosks).  Which is not to say that Elizabeth Warren isn’t doing some great work, but one person cannot stand in the way of an industry that has been very effective at making billions in fees and interests, whether it is from a mortgage or a credit card or other type of loan.  Now all of a sudden this brand-new agency is going to try to stand in the way of those healthy, growing revenues?  I’m interested to see where this whole thing leads (Prediction: Nowhere).