Redefining Freedom

¡Hola! Everybody...
Looking forward to doing nothing this coming weekend. Do you realize how hard that is?

* * *

-=[ The Freedom to Rape]=-

Greed is good.

Check this out... I came across a similar post a few years ago. I've changed it to suit my purposes, but I think it works:

Rape is a basic and necessary expression of human nature. Sexual assaults have been present in every society since the dawn of time. It is the natural drive of man to reproduce, to compete successfully for advantage in the marketplace of life and evolution. In fact, it is this innate compulsion to reproduce that motivates man to do anything productive and worthwhile in the first place.

It is this competitive drive that motivates man to aspire to greatness. Can you imagine men striving for greatness were they not motivated by their drive to reproduce by any means? Of course not, because the drive to reproduce is at the very core of mankind’s fundamental nature. As long as we disregard childish “God” superstitions and recognize that a man is ultimately responsible only to and for himself, we therefore recognize that any measures that attempt to suppress this natural and intrinsic drive to reproduce by any means are inherently wrong.

To suppress sexual assaults is the perverse anti-human dream of the superstitious rabble. In fact, no human society has successfully eliminated rape, despite innumerable measures designed to curb sexual assaults. If man were only truly free to pursue this integral part of his nature we would walk as the masters of the Earth that we are.

Anyone with a relatively functioning forebrain will immediately see that this is a excruciatingly faulty and dangerous chain of reasoning. Just because the drive to reproduce is inherent in humans, it doesn’t follow that sexual assault and rape stem from that drive and are a part of human nature. Furthermore, the assumption that every society has had sexual assault and none has successfully eliminated rape, doesn’t necessarily mean that sexual assault and rape are good things that should be encouraged; or that there wouldn’t be disastrous and apocalyptic consequences were people given carte blanche to rape.

Now, reread the paragraph but this time replace every occurrence of the words “sexual assault” with the words “free markets,” and replace every occurrence of the word “rape” with “capitalism,” and every occurrence of the word “reproduce” with “acquire wealth.” It is now word-for-word the position of economic neoconservative types. You will find this same line of thought in the teabagger diatribes against universal healthcare, for example.

Well, boys and girls: what have we learned? First, my aim here is not to equate capitalism with rape (which upon reflection is not a stretch). Rather, my aim is to point out fallacious reasoning. Certain things might (or might not) be inherently part of human nature or cannot be completely eliminated, but that isn’t a sufficient condition for a logically cohesive argument that they should be encouraged. If you want to argue that they should be encouraged, you must give other reasons.

The only other reason I seem to get is the unthinking and reactionary response of “Communism doesn’t work,” which displays an ignorance of the enormous and diverse body of economic and ethical thought that is not neoconservative.

Love,

Eddie

Economic Enslavement

¡Hola Everybody...
Yesterday, I was on my way to the fireworks display and when I hit the City, I decided against it. I wanted to take some photos to upload, but I was tired from a full day running around at the beach.

I was reading this and I have to admit: sometimes I surprise even myself...

* * *

There are currently at least 30 wars and armed conflicts raging in the world… over 80% of the casualties of war are civilians… disproportionately women and children.

-=[ The Ties that Bind Us ]=-

... And whoever controls the debt, controls everything. This is the essence of the banking industry to make us all slaves to the debt.
-- The International

As we lurch toward the end of the first decade of the new millennium, I can’t help but reflect in amazement how we’ve been at it for all these thousands of years and we’re still here in spite of ourselves. Through the cruel elements, the countless plagues and wars, the madmen, and perhaps human nature itself, we are still here, defiant, striving, still trying to make sense of it all.

We’re still alive...

But we’re still suffering and killing and hating each other. Diplomacy has risen to an art form because we have become masters of the art of war. I wake up today with the realization that we have defeated the democratic process and in its place we have put an economic system that depraves our efforts in order to create riches based on a subculture of poverty and crime, a system any other creature would rightfully see as barbaric.

We believe ourselves to be the most advanced species but we demonstrate very little understanding or respect for our bodies or the world we inhabit.

For over a hundred years, the practice of slavery has been outlawed here in the Land of the Snow, but people still slave. Technology has taken us to outer space, but not before we managed to eradicate millions in search of genetic purity; not before one of our greatest technological projects, harnessing the power of the atom, incinerated tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children to shadows.

We wear the restraints of capitalism, the corruption of ideals, and our hatred, prejudice, and ignorance like shackles.

Our capacity for moral reasoning hasn’t caught up with our technological advances. On the richest nation on the planet, we have the power to end starvation, but children still go hungry. We celebrate our medical advances, but the medicines that slow the progress of AIDS are nowhere to e found as that very plague decimates the entire African continent. Our thinking gets the better of our actions. But before you begin to lay blame, please know that our actions are not truly ours to command. At least not any longer...

Today decisions are made by governments and the corporations that own them and are designed to increase profit, not to advance humanitarian ends. Children are starving because it has nothing to do with the bottom line. People are dying everywhere, but how can you try an international cartel for murder?

I awaken and I am appalled at the lack of moral responsibility and leadership. We all know something’s wrong, but we can’t seem to change because we’ve been hoodwinked -- we’ve all been chained and made into property.

Reality TV is our pacifier and money is our drug of choice -- the one habit we can’t kick without dying in the process. Money also forms the links that create our shackles. Our labor binds us to systems that see us only as units of value or expense.

And in this way we careen toward a future like a runaway train whose conductor and engineer have slain one another, its passengers blissfully unaware. Our lives are designed to maintain the values of our economy. A pound of coffee, an ounce of lead, a human life -- all these things express value in our world. Not human values but the values of the system that rules us. We drag along these values accepting their consequences: wars, the laws that maintain order (and their prisons), the weapons of mass destruction, and the perceived need for world dominance.

Through all this, we are told that there awaits a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But we know deep down inside that we’ll have to pay in sweat, blood, and sacrifice -- our sacrifice alone -- for such a future. Yes, boys and girls, the future may be bright, but we will be the beasts of burden hauling around the necessities to maintain that brilliance.

I wake up today and I am overcome by an overwhelming sense that nothing will save the masses from this tragic fate.

Unless we free ourselves from those old chains of ignorance of the past two-hundred years or more. In order to free ourselves we must stop fooling ourselves into continuing to believe that our chains are jewelry. We must begin to consider the nature of our chains. Understanding something about how we became enslaved (again) might allow us the ability break free of those chains. Once freed, we might bring on a new consciousness that will help us realize that the dreams we had for a bright future pale in comparison to the reality that lies quiescent within each and every one of us.

I can’t help but think that as the latest economic devastation forces white working-class Americans to stop heeding the demagoguery of right-wing talk show hosts, they will come to realize that they too are part of the insanity of mass oppression for mass production. This current economic mess, brought upon by decades of conservative ideology, will not just go away. This is not an economic hiccup.

Maybe this time it will make it harder to separate people of color from whites, as we all endure the hardships. Even if people do not want to see -- or admit -- the fact that we’re all in the same boat, reality has come knocking. Maybe, finally, as we all suffer from the economic shit storm, people will be less prone to heed the propaganda of racial superiority.

Poor or nonexistent medical care, job security, lack of education -- these issues affect every cultural group, creed, and race to differing degrees.

While the runaway juggernaut of capitalism may not extract its pound of flesh in an equal opportunity manner, it does extract it from all of us. It is the nature of capitalism to apply its value system to everything. Within this system, all values are interchangeable. Not only are these values interchangeable, but they also rise and fall according to market forces. Your whole sense of identity and belonging can come tumbling down the moment the cost of a barrel of crude oil, for example, skyrockets. Price competition could well affect the cost of production and one of the major production costs is labor -- your labor. In this way, the value of life itself rises and falls according to the cost of production.

Contrary to what the well-fed and groomed media lap dogs tell you, the economic system that rules so much of our lives cannot value human labor above any other commodity or resource. Under the crushing weight of this system, your humanity is no more valuable than its equivalent cost of a sack of potatoes. Capitalism has no humanity, something even the talking heads admit even while they tell you it’s the ultimate solution to all our social ills. All that exists in the capitalist bible is the margin of profit, the market share. We are all part of the machine, and those elements -- those idiosyncrasies of individualism -- must be dealt with in the same way any mechanic deals with a “faulty” part: removal or replacement.

We are all part of an economic machine. Some of us are cogs, others ghosts, but it is a machine, not our differences, that drive us.

Whites will experience what people of color have been experiencing for centuries and my hope is that, as they experience alienation and isolation from the full participation of the democratic process, they will begin to learn what it feels to be marginalized and in that way, we can all somehow create a coalition founded on our common experiences. As whites, you might feel identification with groups or power, but what does that identification mean on the unemployment line or when an HMO refuses you the luxury of life-saving technology?

In our current reality, we are all a unit of labor. Sure, each individual may use his or her labor as he or she wishes, but in most cases, this power is extremely limited. Make no mistake: the advantage of supply and demand is in the favor of the corporations, not ours. While this is indeed depressing, I take heart in knowing that the experience that can marshal a new era -- a new consciousness -- in our shared history.

The history of African Americans and other people of color is an integral and important part of the history of the United States. Rebellion, it is said, is the essential movement of understanding. Violence and oppression rob us of the ability to understand. Without understanding, there can be no growth, no appreciation of truth, and no tomorrow -- only a never-ending repetition of the daily act of humiliation that has become definition of our existence.

You may deem my words depressing, but I say that there can be no healing until recognition of the disease has evolved. With that, we are well on our way. I also realize that some of you despair that there aren’t enough of us, that the machine will chew us like so much grist for the mill. My first response is almost theoretical: allow me to point you to the power of karma as we discussed the other day. Your actions, no matter how seemingly insignificant, fan out, creating psychic ripples of consequences and actions. My second response is pragmatic. For those who would despair, I leave you with the following knowledge passed down to us by the great anthropologist Margaret Meade:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Love,

Eddie

Sunday Sermon [Marginalization]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Later tonight (8PM EST), I will be joining my friends Rippa and Max and others on the Radio show "Freedom Through Speech" as we talk about what I feel is the civil rights issue of the 21st Century -- mass incarceration. (click here for more info and to listen)

For a look at how I view this issue, click here for a post I wrote on incarceration.

To learn how racial profiling both immoral and ineffective, click here.

I wrote the following a while back as a response to a question I posed to myself: Who said it has to be that way?

* * *

-=[ The Psychological Plantation ]=-

It is said that when the slaves in America and the serfs in Russia were “freed,” the chains were laid out before them and the doors to the plantation were opened wide. Most slaves and serfs, however, chose to stay on plantation, not because they liked it but because they had been conditioned to believe that their very survival depended on their servitude. It is the same with individuals who have experienced long periods of incarceration: they have become conditioned (institutionalized) to being told what to do and when. Even eating, shitting, sleeping, showering becomes difficult when you have been forced to accept servitude.

Today the average working stiff accepts more hours at a lower wage, or fewer hours, which usually means the loss of health care and other benefits (how do you think Wal-Mart makes all that money?). All this in the name of profit. You can be assured that when a slave is freed it is because he or she will make Boss Hawg more money as a free agent. When a worker is praised, you can be sure he is more than likely sweating gold.

Today we measure progress by increments in the margin of profit: how much you make off the sweat of others (whether the labor of your employee or the slave labor of some child in some far off country). Your success is measured how much you make off your money in the bank, off the exchange of international currency -- and how much you stand to lose.

We are all governed by this margin. It is like a river we have come to depend for our subsistence; a life-giving river that brings us sustenance and news from upstream. It has been the major artery of human interaction for centuries, and most of us believe it is the only way a nation can achieve greatness. If we fail at education and our children cannot add or read, we can always import mathematicians from Russia or China, or engineers from India.

We can buy almost anything we want because almost everyone seems to want to live where he or she can be a millionaire from hard work or pure luck. Not even real profit, but just the illusion or dream of a profit holds millions of Americans and American wanna-bes, in thrall. It’s like an obsessive/ compulsive disorder -- or like gambling or addiction. But this over-preoccupation with profit is far more harmful than any drug. This obsession with the margin of profit grinds everything that is good and human about us into the unnameable glob of meat by-product squeezed into synthetic cases that are sold by the pound and then forgotten.

Our values are turd-like products pounded out with assembly line-like efficiency and sealed in plastic -- this is our identity. Truth here has no value. The cure for cancer is far less important than the commodified ideal of profit over people.

For profit we will overlook the needless deaths of tens of thousands of our fellow compatriots, we will ignore rape and genocide. In the name of profit, we will accept and rationalize apartheid, slavery, and even lawlessness in isolated cases. For the margin of profit, we will enslave our own people. For even the hope of a profit, a worker will mangle mind, soul, and body doing the work of two or three.

And here we are -- all of us. Profit is made on a grand scale in America, but not all of us share in it. Most of us work for currencies that fluctuate in value, workplaces that dehumanize and destroy our hearts. We -- all of us -- we live in the margin of profit. The money taken from labor is used to buy political power that does not represent us. Our taxes pay for federally licensed airwaves that we no longer control, for economic bailouts that are thinly disguised welfare handouts for the rich, for the millions it took to look explore Clinton’s cock, and for a criminal justice system that cannot keep heroin out our children’s hands but incarcerates them in numbers unprecedented in the history of humankind.

Broken roads and schools, children who can’t read, and prisons that are traded on the Dow Jones -- these are also the margins of profit. The verb, then, is to marginalize. We are all marginalized by the dogma of Capitalism. We are mere entries in the ledgers of Citibank, Halliburton, AIG, and the rest. We are the skin that defines the monster that tells us He is the only way. God, this monster tells us, can only be defined by the margin of profit. We pray to it and even sacrifice our children to it.

Let us be clear: the world of profit is a world of plunder. Progress is defined by this margin but it says nothing of the quality of life and of goodness. Fair, as defined by this margin, is what you can get away with.

If profit is the only way, then we have truly never left the inner plantation of our collective psychological enslavement. Like the poor souls whose minds have been broken, we can no longer envision a world without a master...

Eddie

Modern Enslavement

¡Hola! Everybody...
I went to see Michael Moore’s latest, Capitalism: A Love Story, and I have to say that whatever your political affiliation (or lack thereof); regardless of whether you “like” Mr. Moore (or not), you have to see this film. You may not agree with his political ideas -- you might even find them offensive (or not), but free societies will always need people like Moore. People who ask the questions not being asked; people who offer the challenge, “Who said it has to be that way?”

* * *

-=[ The Psychological Plantation ]=-

It is said that when the slaves in America and the serfs in Russia were “freed,” the chains were laid out before them and the doors to the plantation were opened wide. Most slaves and serfs, however, chose to stay on plantation, not because they liked it but because they had been conditioned to believe that their very survival depended on their servitude. It is the same with individuals who have experienced long periods of incarceration: they have become conditioned to being told what to do and when. Even eating, shitting, sleeping, showering becomes difficult when you have been forced to accept servitude.

Today the average working stiff accepts more hours at a lower wage, or fewer hours, which usually means the loss of health care and other benefits (how do you think Wal-Mart makes all that money?). All this in the name of profit. You can be assured that when a slave is freed it is because he or she will make more money for Boss Hawg as a free agent. When a worker is praised, you can be sure he is more than likely sweating gold.

Today we measure progress by increments in the margin of profit: how much you make off the sweat of others (whether the labor of your employee or the slave labor of some child in some far off country). Your success is measured how much you make off your money in the bank, off the exchange of international currency -- and how much you stand to lose.

We are all governed by this margin. It is like a river we have come to depend on for our subsistence; a river that gives us life-giving water and news from upstream. It has been the major artery of human interaction for centuries, and most of us believe it is the only way that a nation can be great. If we fail at education, when our children cannot add or read, we can always import mathematicians from Russia or China, or engineers from India.

We can buy almost anything we want because almost everyone seems to want to live where he or she can be a millionaire from hard work or pure luck. Not even real profit, but just the illusion or dream of a profit holds millions of Americans and American wanna-bes, in thrall. It’s like an obsessive/ compulsive disorder -- like gambling or drugs. But this over preoccupation with profit is far more harmful than any drug. This obsession with the margin of profit grinds everything that is good and human about us into the unnamable glob of meat by-products squeezed into synthetic cases that are sold by the pound and then forgotten.

Our values are turd-like products pounded out with assembly line-like efficiency and sealed in plastic -- this is our identity. Truth here has no value. The cure for cancer is far less important than the commodified ideal of profit over people.

For profit we will overlook the needless deaths of tens of thousands of our fellow compatriots, we will ignore rape and genocide. For profit, we will accept and rationalize apartheid, slavery, and even lawlessness in isolated cases. For the margin of profit, we will enslave our own people. For even the hope of a profit, a worker will mangle mind, soul, and body doing the work of two women or three.

And here we are -- all of us. Profit is made on a grand scale in America, but not all of us share in it. Most of us work for currencies that fluctuate in value, workplaces that dehumanize us, where our hearts are destroyed. We -- all of us -- we live in the margin of profit. The money taken from labor is used to buy political power that does not represent us. Our taxes pay for federally licensed airwaves that we no longer control, for economic bailouts that are thinly disguised welfare handouts for the rich, for the millions it took to look at Clinton’s cock, and for a criminal justice system that cannot keep heroin out our children’s hands but incarcerates them in numbers unprecedented in the history of humankind.

Broken roads and schools, children who can’t read, and prisons that are traded on the Dow Jones -- these are also the margins of profit. The verb, then, is to marginalize. We are all marginalized by the dogma of Capitalism. We are mere entries in the ledgers of Citibank, Halliburton, AIG, and the rest. We are the skin that defines the monster that ells us He is the only way. God, this monster tells us, can only be defined by the margin of profit. We pray to him and even sacrifice our children to him.

Let us be clear: the world of profit is a world of plunder. Progress is defined by this margin but it says nothing of the quality of life and of goodness. Fair, defined by the margin, is what you can get away with.

If profit is the only way, then we have truly never left the inner plantation of our collective psychological enslavement. Like the poor souls whose minds have been broken, we can no longer envision a world without a master...

Eddie

Escape from Freedom

¡Hola! Everybody...
OK, so DANG! It’s back to being busy again! Sheesh! Why are people so driven in this country?!!

* * *

-=[ The Freedom to Rape]=-

Greed is good.

-- Gordon Gekko

[Note: I haven’t finished the follow-up to yesterday’s post on freedom. I will post that part tomorrow. A blind adherence to the virtues of “free markets” is symptomatic to neoconservative thought. Below, in an essay I adapted from an internet page I came across several years ago, I try to uncover the faulty reasoning behind the dogma]

Rape is a basic and necessary expression of human nature. Sexual assaults have been present in every society since the dawn of time. It is the natural drive of man to reproduce, to compete successfully for advantage in the marketplace of life and evolution. In fact, it is this innate compulsion to reproduce that motivates man to do anything productive and worthwhile in the first place.

It is this competitive drive that motivates man to aspire to greatness. Can you imagine men striving for greatness were they not motivated by their drive to reproduce by any means? Of course not, because the drive to reproduce is at the very core of mankind’s fundamental nature. As long as we disregard childish “God” superstitions and recognize that a man is ultimately responsible only to and for himself, we therefore recognize that any measures that attempt to suppress this natural and intrinsic drive to reproduce by any means are inherently wrong.

To suppress sexual assaults is the perverse anti-human dream of the superstitious rabble. In fact, no human society has successfully eliminated rape, despite innumerable measures designed to curb sexual assaults. If man were only truly free to pursue this integral part of his nature we would walk as the masters of the Earth that we are.

Anyone with a relatively functioning forebrain will see that this is a painfully faulty and dangerous chain of reasoning. Just because the drive to reproduce is inherent in humans, it doesn’t follow that sexual assault and rape stem from that drive and are a part of human nature. Furthermore, that every society has had sexual assault and none has successfully eliminated rape, doesn’t necessarily mean that sexual assault and rape are good things that should be encouraged, or that there wouldn’t be disastrous and apocalyptic consequences were people given carte blanche to rape.

Now, reread the paragraph but this time replace every occurrence of the words “sexual assault” with the words “free markets,” and replace every occurrence of the word “rape” with “capitalism,” and every occurrence of the word “reproduce” with “acquire wealth.” It is now word-for-word the position of economic neoconservative types. You will find this same line of thought in rationales against universal healthcare, for example.

Well, boys and girls: what have we learned? First, my aim here is not to equate capitalism with rape (which would make for great fodder for future blogs). Rather, my thrust is to point out fallacious reasoning. Certain things might be inherently part of human nature or cannot be completely eliminated, but that isn’t a sufficient condition for a logically cohesive argument that they should be encouraged. If you want to argue that they should be encouraged, you must give other reasons.

The only other reason I seem to get is the unthinking and reactionary response of “Communism doesn’t work,” which displays an ignorance of the enormous and diverse body of economic and ethical thought that is not neoconservative.

Love,

Eddie

Relationship Thursdays (The Girlfriend Experience)

¡Hola! Everybody...
Well, well, well... I already like Judge Sonia Sotomayor! Apparently she’s a bigot/ racist just like yours truly! Yaaaay! In today’s political climate any mention of racism or privilege, or even having the fortitude to point out that the post-racial Emperor has no clothes, makes one a racist. Well, if that’s the case, then I am a flaming racist and proud of it!

* * *

-=[ The Girlfriend Experience ]=-

The Commodification of Intimacy in the Post-Capitalist Era

As reported by the Village Voice, for $60 an hour, a NYC agency arranges for a smart young woman to accompany you, laugh at your jokes, and make you feel interesting and special. It may sound like just another escort service -- complete with a negotiable “happy ending” sex service -- but it’s not. In fact, the young women who set up the agency spell it out on their website: “If there are any attempts at sexual activity, the girl has the right to end the date immediately.”

A colleague of mine has employed the same nanny for the past seven years. When he speaks of her, it’s almost as if he’s speaking a dear aunt or close family friend. His two sons adore her and have known her all their lives. They too see her as more than a nanny.

A few years ago, I joined a gym and, realizing that I needed more than a little motivation and guidance, I opted for a few sessions with a personal trainer. The trainer was very attractive in an athletic sense -- streamlined slinkiness expressed with cat-like grace in a body hinting at barely contained sex. At first, our relationship was purely business, but eventually I was able to convince her to go out on a date with me -- against her hard and fast rule about “dating customers.” Sometimes I can be persuasive. LOL

What all the above scenarios share is that they are paid situations that can easily lead to the blurring of professional relationships in ways that leach out into relationships that simulate or give the illusion of intimacy. We see this all the time in all areas of our hectic lives. For example, with an increased workload accompanied by decreasing wages, many people are using their places of employment as dating pools. It seems that one consequence of neoliberal uber-capitalism is that everything has become a commodity -- including intimacy or its simulation.

In the new Steven Soderbergh film, The Girlfriend Experience, the main character (more psychological study than lead actress) Chelsea (played by porn star Sasha Grey), is not only a consumer of top-of-the line merchandise, she is also a commodity: a prostitute whose specialty is implied in the title of the movie. She offers her wealthy clients more than sex with a pretty young woman. In fact, sometimes there is no sex at all. What she sells instead is a simulation of intimacy.

The first scenes are of Chelsea in the company of a handsome, well-mannered man. For all we know, these two attractive people leisurely chatting over dinner, then kissing on the couch before making their way to bed, are intimate lovers. Only when cash changes hands the following morning is the audience made aware of transactional nature of the affair.

Working out of a stylish Manhattan loft she shares with her boyfriend Chris, Chelsea charges $2,000 an hour. For something like $25,000, a “date” with this slim, pretty, perfectly-carnately fashioned 20-year-old can really be like a date. Chris (real life trainer Chris Santos), works as a personal trainer, tending to the bodies of some of the same kinds of guys who hire Chelsea for her services. The similarities between them are thought provoking. Both Chris and Chelsea belong to a segment of the economy that depends on the blurring of certain distinctions, between service and friendship, profit and warmth. As I noted previously, exercise instructors, nannies, life coaches, bartenders -- when you think about it, they are all paid for something that can easily be mistaken for love.

Up to now, Ms. Grey’s screen performances have been almost entirely in hard-core pornography (she calls it performance art) and along with her character’s profession, this adds another dimension to the movie. Is Soderbergh also commodifying Ms. Grey?

However, the film’s main interest is in money rather than sex, which is shown to be a far more powerful and dangerous cause of obsession and confusion. The movie takes place during the first glimpses of our current economic collapse, October 2008, lending the piece an anxiety riding just underneath the surface of a film that is all about surfaces. Occasionally, this palpable anxiety bubbles to the top.

The movie follows Chelsea from one encounter to the next, and with some clients, Chelsea plays the shrink, low-key and attentive; with others, she’s simply a source of physical pleasure. With most, however, she’s the ideal girlfriend which is more or less the role that Sasha Grey, music composer and winner of the 2008 AVN Award for Best Oral Sex Scene, plays in real life.

Grey is the only professional actor in the movie, playing a character who is always acting. Some of the most interesting insights come during the scenes where Chelsea is being pursued by a journalist (played by real-life journalist Mark Jacobson), who wants to write a profile and seems genuinely eager to discuss her “inner you.” At one point, repeatedly frustrated by his attempts to delve into her psyche, he mentions that by necessity, Chelsea has had to create an impenetrable psychological armor. Soderbergh’s camera lingers on Chelsea’s facial reaction to this insight and her spare approach to acting lends this scene power.

The Girlfriend Experience is a mosaic of short, largely a-chronological scenes. Flashbacks are impossible to differentiate from flash-forwards; the emphasis is on Chelsea’s behavior is in the here and now. Soderbergh’s camera placement reinforces the feeling of intimacy that is the escort’s product. This economic imperative rules nearly every interaction: Chelsea’s capital is her body and her persona.

Soderbergh also explores the two-way street/ nature of selling intimacy when he locks into Chelsea’s falling for a client. This could have been a weak point in the movie, but the minimalist approach to acting utilized by Ms. Grey combined with Soderbergh's almost clinical, apathetic distance, stops this from becoming too melodramatic. Grey's hard-won defenses keep the camera (and the audience) at arm’s length -- even when prying underneath the beautiful yet hard exterior of her character. Perhaps part of the price Chelsea and all of us pay is to be forever locked inside the character armor we erect to protect ourvelves from the very thing we desire -- intimacy?

I fear many people will not enjoy The Girlfriend Experience. Its subject hits too close to home and it’s not a movie in the traditional sense. It’s more character study and it poses more questions than it answers. In fact, I don’t know if the film answers any questions at all. However, it is exactly the questions that intrigued me the most.

Love,

Eddie

The Ties That Bind Us

¡Hola! Everybody...
Welcome to social networking sites where a woman who considers it moral to screw married men, another who pays for sex, and a man who talks publicly about his ex-wife’s foul-smelling genitalia have the audacity to pass moral judgment on others.

There’s some funny country-assed muthafuckas up in here. LOL!

Imma get all pedantic on yo asses today ...

* * *

-=[ The Ties that Bind Us ]=-

“... And whoever controls the debt, controls everything. This is the essence of the banking industry to make us all slaves to debt.”

-- from the film, The International

As we lurch toward the end of the first decade of the new millennium, I can’t help but reflect in amazement how we’ve been at it for all these thousands of years and we’re still here in spite of ourselves. Through the cruel elements, the countless plagues and wars, the madmen, and perhaps human nature itself, we are still here, defiant, striving, still trying to make sense of it all.

We’re still alive...

But we’re still suffering and killing and hating each other. Diplomacy has risen to an art form because we have become masters of the art of war. I wake up today with the realization that we have defeated the democratic process and in its place we have put an economic system that depraves our efforts in order to create riches based on a subculture of poverty and crime, a system any other creature would rightfully see as barbaric.

We believe ourselves to be the most advanced species but we demonstrate very little understanding or respect for our bodies or the world we inhabit.

For over a hundred years, the practice of slavery has been outlawed here in the Land of the Snow, but people still slave. Technology has taken us to outer space, but not before we managed to eradicate millions in search of genetic purity; not before one of our greatest technological projects, harnessing the power of the atom, incinerated tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children to shadows.

We wear the restraints of capitalism, the corruption of ideals, and our hatred, prejudice, and ignorance like shackles.

Our capacity for moral reasoning hasn’t caught up with our technological advances. On the richest nation on the planet, we have the power to end starvation, but children still go hungry. We celebrate our medical advances, but the medicines that slow the progress of AIDS are nowhere to e found as that very plague decimates the entire African continent. Our thinking gets the better of our actions. But before you begin to lay blame, please know that our actions are not truly ours to command. At least not any longer...

Today decisions are made by governments and the corporations that own them and are designed to increase profit, not to advance humanitarian ends. Children are starving because it has nothing to do with the bottom line. People are dying everywhere, but how can you try an international cartel for murder?

I awaken and I am appalled at the lack of moral responsibility and leadership. We all know something’s wrong, but we can’t seem to change because we’ve been hoodwinked -- we’ve all been chained and made into property.

Reality TV is our pacifier and money is our drug of choice -- the one habit we can’t kick without dying in the process. Money also forms the links that create our shackles. Our labor binds us to systems that see us only as units of value or expense.

And in this way we careen toward a future like a runaway train whose conductor and engineer have slain one another, its passengers blissfully unaware. Our lives are designed to maintain the values of our economy. A pound of coffee, an ounce of lead, a human life -- all these things express value in our world. Not human values but the values of the system that rules us. We drag along these values accepting their consequences: wars, the laws that maintain order (and their prisons), the weapons of mass destruction, and the perceived need for world dominance.

Through all this, we are told that there awaits a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But we know deep down inside that we’ll have to pay in sweat, blood, and sacrifice -- our sacrifice alone -- for such a future. Yes, boys and girls, the future may be bright, but we will be the beasts of burden hauling around the necessities to maintain that brilliance.

I wake up today and I am overcome by an overwhelming sense that nothing will save the masses from this tragic fate.

Unless we free ourselves from those old chains of ignorance of the past two-hundred years or more. In order to free ourselves we must stop fooling ourselves into continuing to believe that our chains are jewelry. We must begin to consider the nature of our chains. Understanding something about how we became enslaved (again) might allow us the ability break free of those chains. Once freed, we might bring on a new consciousness that will help us realize that the dreams we had for a bright future pale in comparison to the reality that lies quiescent within each and every one of us.

I can’t help but think that as the latest economic devastation forces white working-class Americans to stop heeding the demagoguery of right-wing talk show hosts, they will come to realize that they too are part of the insanity of mass oppression for mass production. This current economic mess, brought upon by decades of conservative ideology, will not just go away. This is not an economic hiccup.

Maybe this time it will make it harder to separate people of color from whites, as we all endure the hardships. Even if people do not want to see -- or admit -- the fact that we’re all in the same boat, reality has come knocking. Maybe, finally, as we all suffer from the economic shit storm, people will be less prone to heed the propaganda of racial superiority.

Poor or nonexistent medical care, job security, lack of education -- these issues affect every cultural group, creed, and race to differing degrees.

While the runaway juggernaut of capitalism may not extract its pound of flesh in an equal opportunity manner, it does extract it from all of us. It is the nature of capitalism to apply its value system to everything. Within this system, all values are interchangeable. Not only are these values interchangeable, but they also rise and fall according to market forces. Your whole sense of identity and belonging can come tumbling down the moment the cost of a barrel of crude oil, for example, skyrockets. Price competition could well affect the cost of production and one of the major production costs is labor -- your labor. In this way, the value of life itself rises and falls according to the cost of production.

Contrary to what the well-fed and groomed media lap dogs tell you, the economic system that rules so much of our lives cannot value human labor above any other commodity or resource. Under the crushing weight of this system, your humanity is no more valuable than its equivalent cost of a sack of potatoes. Capitalism has no humanity, something even the talking heads admit even while they tell you it’s the ultimate solution to all our social ills. All that exists in the capitalist bible is the margin of profit, the market share. We are all part of the machine, and those elements -- those idiosyncrasies of individualism -- must be dealt with in the same way any mechanic deals with a “faulty” part: removal or replacement.

We are all part of an economic machine. Some of us are cogs, others ghosts, but it is a machine, not our differences, that drive us.

Whites will experience what people of color have been experiencing for centuries and my hope is that, as they experience alienation and isolation from the full participation of the democratic process, they will begin to learn what it feels to be marginalized and in that way, we can all somehow create a coalition founded on our common experiences. As whites, you might feel identification with groups or power, but what does that identification mean on the unemployment line or when an HMO refuses you the luxury of life-saving technology?

In our current reality, we are all a unit of labor. Sure, each individual may use his or her labor as he or she wishes, but in most cases, this power is extremely limited. Make no mistake: the advantage of supply and demand is in the favor of the corporations, not ours. While this is indeed depressing, I take heart in knowing that the experience that can marshal a new era -- a new consciousness -- in our shared history.

The history of African Americans and other people of color is an integral and important part of the history of the United States. Rebellion, it is said, is the essential movement of understanding. Violence and oppression rob us of the ability to understand. Without understanding, there can be no growth, no appreciation of truth, and no tomorrow -- only a never-ending repetition of the daily act of humiliation that has become definition of our existence.

You may deem my words depressing, but I say that there can be no healing until recognition of the disease has evolved. With that, we are well on our way. I also realize that some of you despair that there aren’t enough of us, that the machine will chew us like so much grist for the mill. My first response is almost theoretical: allow me to point you to the power of karma as we discussed the other day. Your actions, no matter how seemingly insignificant, fan out, creating psychic ripples of consequences and actions. My second response is pragmatic. For those who would despair, I leave you with the following knowledge passed down to us by the great anthropologist Margaret Meade:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Love,

Eddie

Dumb Twats and the Wall

¡Hola! Everybody... Let’s do this once again... once more:

Tax cuts do not stimulate the economy. We’ve gone down this road before: mink coats, to pataphrase an economist, don’t trickle down.

Stimulus is spending! Now, I’m a dumb spic, but even I know this. Why doesn’t the “Dumb Twat” of the week, Mika Brzezinski, know this?

Here’s a handy chart -- a “bang for the buck” guideline:

Notice what creates the most economic activity? That’s right: food stamps! Give a down and out individual $100 in food stamps and they will spend it all. That creates economic activity -- stimulus! Give a rich person the same $100 and they will not spend it! In fact, give the financial sector hundreds of billions of dollars and they will not spend it!

Oh! We tried that already?!

Wait! That’s not entirely true, some fat cats will spend, like, $35,000 on a commode, but for the most part give rich people money and they will not spend. That means there’s no stimulus.

Easy right?

Well, will someone please tell this dumb cunt:

:: blank stare::

* * *

-=[ Wall Street ]=-

Fact: Some beds at juvenile detention centers cost as much as $100,000-150,000 annually.

Fact: Public officials resist increases in education spending. A fraction of what it costs to lock a child up.

Fact: Overwhelmingly, incarcerated children are people of color.

As a young man, one summer I managed to get a messenger job at a small brokerage house on Wall St. One of my best friends, a darker-skinned Nuyorican, had been working there before me and he put in the good word. By the end of the summer, I had moved up (again, with the help of my friend) and was now balancing the sheets. That was a promotion and a raise.

I wasn’t very responsible: I would miss days and I wasn’t all that motivated. Yet, when another promotion came up later that year, my friend was passed up and the promotion was offered to me. This was bullshit, and everybody knew it. My friend had been there longer than I had, had more experience, and was there at work every day. We both know it was because I was light-skinned and he wasn’t. I was going to quit because I couldn’t bear it, but my friend insisted that I take the job. He said they would only give it to someone else.

It pays to be/ look white! LOL!

I mention this because I spent most of my young adulthood working at various places on Wall St. Let me tell you: Wall St. in the 1980s?!! DAMN! It was crazy out there! LOL! The culture of Wall St. and my love for the hard life took me down hard. By the end of the 80s, I was blackballed from working on the Street, spiraling deep into my addiction. I worked hard ad I played harder. It wasn’t unusual to go on a business lunch and instead of it being a two-martini lunch, it was acceptable -- even expected -- to have a three-line lunch. Cocaine was king on the Street. I can’t say it was all regret. I fact, I had a lot of fun! LOL! I fucked a lot, used a lot, spent a lot -- well, you get the idea.

I had two very close friends, Jeffrey and Freddie -- crib brothers. Where you saw one, the others weren’t too far behind. We grew up together became men together and we worked on the Street. Jeffrey was the friend who got me my first job on the Street.

Anyway, we would sometimes meet at this park -- Jeannette Park -- at lunch on Fridays to drink rum and coke and smoke weed, plan our weekends. One day, there was this older black dude who always seemed to check us out. I mean, we were pretty much out there, always surrounded by women, and dressed to the nines -- young-dumb-and full of- cum, cocksure muthafuckas. Anyway, this dude came up to us and shared some of this fierce weed he as smoking and he told us a story I never forgot. He asked if we knew the history of where we were standing and acting all cocksure and shit, and I told him, me always being the smartass, yeah! Fuckin' Wall St.! LOL He smiled...

He said, Wall Street became the financial capitalist center because it was the first big slave trade center in the colonies, and, later, the new nation’s principal slave trading port, where the business of slavery was transacted (until 1862!).

He continued, And as the business of slavery went, so did all other businesses. For about 125 years, there was a wall that separated the financiers, speculators and bankers from the stench, humiliation, and daily grime of young New York’s vibrant slave trade business and African and white working-class residential areas.

Hence the name, Wall St.

Love,

Eddie

Monday Madness [Profits Before People]

¡Hola! Everybody…
A recent PEW study came out showing that news coverage for McCain during the last six weeks was more negative than coverage for Obama. Conservative pundits immediately pounced on this study as proof that the media “is in the tank for Obama” as Neo Nazi commentator Pat Buchanan put it on the preposterous McLaughlin Group.

Of course, Pat and the rest conveniently forget to note that the study’s authors acknowledged some observers would use the findings to argue that the major media have a pro-Obama bias, they also said their data did not support such allegations.

What I find glaringly obvious is that the same PEW recently noted that during the same period almost 100% of McCain’s campaign ads were negative. Now, wouldn’t it follow that if you’re putting out an avalanche of scurrilous charges and a blitz of negative campaign ads that the result would be to report that negativity? That gets my ::blank stare:: of the day…

For my conservative readers who claim to value intelligence and foresight, please watch the following video and tell me again why you would vote for this individual?

* * *

-=[ Profits Before People ]=-

“I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.”

-- Thomas Paine (1737–1809) American revolutionary, writer The Age of Reason

My uncle by his own admission wasn’t an intellectual. He dropped out of school before he reached high school, though he read a lot and possessed a natural ability with gadgets. My father’s side of the family was left orphaned in the midst of a depression, so my uncle went to work.

Eventually, my father’s family moved to New York City where my uncle married. Shortly thereafter, he would fight in the Korean War.

Upon his return he sometimes worked three jobs at a time, barely able to keep his family afloat. Eventually, he gained entry as a printer’s apprentice, worked his way through the ranks, and became of printer. He worked with much enthusiasm because the printing industry was unionized and he found he was able to support his family -- all three children -- on one paycheck. He had fully funded health insurance, an annual paid vacation, and a good pension waiting for him when he retired. My uncle, with some savings and veterans benefits would eventually buy a home across the river in New Jersey and become part of the middle class.

This was the America my uncle fought for and believed in. He passed away a few years ago, but towards the end of his life he expressed sadness because he felt that America -- an America that looked after the middle class and working poor -- was a thing of the past.

My uncle would say that today most Americans don’t have that reassurance any more. More than 45 million Americans don’t have health insurance to cover expenses for serious illness; more than 5 million have lost their health insurance in the past 5 years alone. Even those lucky enough to have health insurance sometimes find that their insurers won’t cover certain treatments. And it’s not just illness that worries most Americans today. Today Americans work more for less pay in less stable jobs.

It’s getting harder and harder to get by and for a long time conservatives have used the anxiety felt by the middle class to scapegoat the working poor and poor. In that way they have convinced an angry, fearful, and sometimes gullible public to vote against their interests. Today, it’s profits before people -- let the “invisible hand” of the free market cure all our ills, the conservatives have always argued. Just wait: prosperity will trickle down on all of us before long.

I can tell you that I see a lot of shite trickling down, but that’s about it.

There’s a reason why America is suffering. The America my uncle grew up in put peopleAmerica we live in now idolizes the market, putting market concerns over the concerns of the people. before profits. The

In my uncle’s America 35% of working people were union members who got a living wage, health insurance, and pensions. These union benefits lifted all boats because they set the standard for employment; for every union job, there was a nonunion job with similar pay and benefits (meaning that about 70% of the American workforce back then could raise a family on a single paycheck).

That America has disappeared. The minimum wage is not a living wage. Workers are now expected to pay for their own health insurance and their own retirement. Pension plans are disappearing -- 30,000 General Motor employees lost theirs in 2005 -- and despite the hard evidence showing its dangers, there’s continuing talk of privatizing Social Security. The “less government” ideologues have ripped apart the safety nets, and the results are that the middle class is shrinking. The rich are once again getting richer, and the poor and working poor and middle class are getting poorer:

The adjusted average annual pay of a CEO went from $7,773,000 to $9,600,000 from 2002 to 2004. At the same time, the adjusted median annual household income went down from $46,058 to $44,389. In other words, ordinary people’s (the “Joe six-packs”) incomes went down by &1,669 while CEO pay went up by $1,827,000.

Over the period of 2001 to 2005, America has lost 2,818,000 manufacturing jobs. If you don’t count jobs produced by the military/ industrial complex (aka welfare for the rich), the number of private sector jobs during that time decreased by 1,160,000.

While it is true that large employers offer a traditional pension, that number is down from 91% two decades ago, and it’s dropping fast as more companies freeze pensions and turn instead to 401(k)s. Before the current financial meltdown, only 6% of Americans working in the private sector could rely on a defined pension, and 76% of Baby Boomers said they don’t think they are prepared to meet their retirement expenses.

Today only 60% of employers provide health care to their employees. As of 2004, more than 45 million Americans were without health insurance.

But I don’t think you need the numbers because you probably already know someone who has been forced out of the middle class. Maybe you know someone who was displaced after the dot com crash and never got her job back. After intermittent employment, she’s thinking of becoming a housecleaner at a fraction of her former salary.

Or maybe you know a recent college graduate holding down three part-time jobs, but doesn’t make enough to pay for his own apartment and has no health insurance.

How can this be?

Why do people go hungry in America? Why is that people like you and me work long, hard hours and still cannot afford to become sick, cannot buy houses and cannot send our kids to college?

What happened to the middle class?

These are economic questions but the answers are about who we are as a country.

Love,

Eddie

Monday Madness [Free Market Myths]

¡Hola! Everybody…
There’s been a lot of gnashing of teeth, tearing of clothes and hand-wringing over the fat cats cluster fuck resulting in a global financial meltdown.

I have yet to hear one talking head question the validity of bailing out the Wall St. Welfare Queens! Everyone agrees that this must be done for the good of everybody. Mention even thinking about bailing those who will lose their homes and people will get a razor sharp hair up their collective arses.

If it were a middle class couple, or [gasp!] a black single mother being helped, there would be hell to pay (complete with bonfire) and cries of Socialism! and Government Interference! by the likes of McCain and the rest of the corporate bootlickers. The very same talking heads would be waxing poetic over the “free market” and how we shouldn’t interfere with the “sound principles” of our market.

SMDH

How is this not socialism for the corporate elite? A SEVEN-HUNDRED BILLION DOLLAR CHECK WITH NO OVERSIGHT?!!

* * *

-=[ The Free Market Isn’t Free ]=-

“Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

-- John McCain, 2008

McCain, like his conservative peers, idolize the so-called “free market.” You hear it all the time from them: “Leave it to the market.” Health care: Leave it to the market. Social Security: Leave it to the market Minimum wage: Leave it to the market!

There is no “free market.” It doesn’t exist. As McCain’s own reversal recently, conservatives know it’s myth and they understand that government regulation of and participation in the market can be beneficial. The current financial collapse, brought upon by deregulation and lax oversight is a case in point. However, this isn’t new; conservatives send a large percentage of the federal budget year after year to private defense companies, shifting public wealth to private owners, for example.

We have spent about a trillion dollars in the Mess in Mesopotamia and now we’re going to spend close to that bailing out the Welfare Queens in three-piece suits. I have a better idea on how we could such money. In fact, I’m pretty sure we all could come up with better ideas on how to spend our money (health care, education, etc.).

What if we took a trillion dollars and help small businesses instead?!!

Let’s look at some facts:

Small businesses (defined as businesses with fewer than five hundred employees) accounts for about half of our GPD (gross domestic product).

Small businesses have generated 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually for the last decade. Looking at the most recent data small firms accounted for all of the net new jobs. Yup, all of them. Some large businesses grew, of course, but that growth was undermined by large businesses that laid off workers.

Nearly half of all small businesses, 49 percent, as of August 2007 had experienced no employee turnover during the twelve previous months. None.

Thousands of new businesses are founded in the United States each year, and over the last decade, the rate of new venture formation has increased.

Due in part to downsizing at large firms and rapid technological advancement, the trend toward more new business start-ups is likely to continue.

There’s a flip side, however:

Between 20 and 30 percent of new start-ups close during the first year of existence.

So what do we have so far? Well, here’s a sector of the economy that accounts for half the wealth and most of our job growth. Due to the increasing challenges and opportunities in our modern, “global” world, our economy will need this sector to expand, despite the fact that it is subject to a high rate of failure.

With a trillion dollars, we could have the largest pool of venture capital in the world -- perhaps in the history of humankind.

The average solo start-up in America these days needs only $6,000 to get off the ground. Even in businesses started by a group of people, the average required is just $20,000.

In theory, we could fund more than 50 million new businesses. Unlike the current financial bailout, we would have to put some restrictions in place. We can’t have crackpots like my brother-in-law walking off the job to follow a hair-brained scheme. So, sure, you would have to put in some of your own money into it. You’ve got to have a sound business plan written down. But if we’re going to bail out fat cats that have bungled billions of dollars, why isn’t just as valid to consider supporting the American entrepreneurial spirit for those with a good plan and sound head on their shoulders?

Love,

Eddie

PS: Much of above was shamelessly stolen from the book, What We Could Have Done with the Money, by Rob Simpson. Check it out for more ideas on how to spend a trillion dollars (click here)