FALSE EQUIVILENCIES

One of the tricks the right has mastered and even educated people unfortunately too often fall for is the false equivalency.

The obvious ones are easy to spot. Like evolution vs. creationism. That we should accept these as just two conflicting ideas is illogical. One is based on reality (scientific facts), the other on faith.

There's a similar thing going on with the right's war on unions. They have actually convinced some folks that a corporation spending money on political campaigns is the same as a union doing it, only, and this is their big winning point that some are actually falling for, because unions automatically deduct dues payments that then contribute to union activity in political campaigns, that somehow gives unions an unfair advantage!

As always, the right is much better than the center (and that's the main political positions these days, since the right has successfully moved the political dialogue in their direction, the center is now framed by the right as "the liberal" and "socialist left" when it is nothing of the kind, but that's another post) at framing the argument and then distracting from any deep analyses of their positions by targeting false inequalities.

As most of us who read the news know, unions are the only big donors to political campaigns left for the Democrats in the top five. And since Reagan began the diminishment of the power of unions to organize and collectively bargain—rights that led in large part to the rise and sustainment of a working class that could afford homes and college educations for their children and a retirement that did not lead to impoverishment, which was no longer the case after Reagan—that has left mostly the public sector unions, as they're called—like state and municipal employees, teachers, firefighters, etc.—to defend the rights and pay and working conditions of workers.

If the right wins this battle and these public unions are decimated and forced to accept whatever terms they are given, not only will that add to the disappearance of a working class that has any leverage in the battle for decent living wages and working conditions, it'll also lead to Republicans dominating all campaign financing and thus advertising and organizing (something that was true in many races in the last election, after the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were people and could spend all the money they wanted on political campaigns without disclosing where that money was coming from).

One of the misdirections the right uses to avoid the facts that support the reality that strong unions made our country more prosperous and more equal is that union members have no say in how their dues will be spent politically (something they never complained about when Nixon and the right used Teamster pension funds to finance their political campaigns).

The reality is that you and I contribute to corporations' political activities every time we buy something those corporations sell. And are we to believe that every stockholder in every major corporation that supports Republicans is a Republican?
Of course not.

You know I've often said that "poetry saved my life" and meant it, and more than once. But when I had a cancer removed from my body I didn't do it with poetry. Poetry probably made me more at ease and accepting of whatever the outcome might be, as did the prayers that were sent my way and which I said myself. But I wouldn't rely on prayers and poetry alone to heal, let alone remove, the cancer.

Unions look out for the best interest of the workers in those unions. Management looks out for the best interests of management and those higher up who determine corporate policies. As we saw in the banking debacle, management these days often does not consider what's best for customers or even stockholders, but for the managers themselves. Without a unified entity to counteract that, we see what can happen: the collapse of an entire economy, and the only ones to pay the price were the unorganized stockholders and customers, and ultimately all the rest of us taxpayers when we had to bail the financial institutions out and no one was held accountable.

Unions hold management and owners accountable. That's why there was much more economic equality in this country in the 1950s and '60s when unions were at their strongest, and why economic inequality has reached what used to be called "third world" levels ever since Reagan and the right began systematically attacking and dismantling unions and their right to collective bargaining.

I know some of you who read this blog believe in your hearts that some public sector unions are paid too much or have pension and healthcare benefits that are too good, compared to what private sector people are dealing with now.

But as has been written in many of the pieces I've linked to lately, those in the private sector are being tricked by the right—and their usual divide and conquer strategy that helps them win despite their being in a minority in this country—tricked into believing that public sector unions are getting away with something, when in fact they aren't even getting the kind of benefits and pay private sector unions were getting in the '50s and '60s and most of the country believed was their right to get for the work they did and the thriving economy that work contributed to.

If everyone is working more for less, the solution isn't to take even more power away from those who can bargain for better pay and benefits, but to get back to a system in which everyone belongs to a collective bargaining group that can match the power of the corporate elite and win concessions that anywhere else in the developed world are not only accepted as a right but as a necessity to a successfully functioning society and economy.

(And before the rightwing commenters start spewing the usual lies and misrepresentations of what I just wrote, let me make clear that unions didn't always, nor do they always, deserve to win every concession they bargain for. But neither do the elites they're bargaining with. An example right here in Jersey is the Republican governor who turned down funding from the federal government, and New York state, and other entities that were making it possible to build a tunnel that would allow more trains to pass under the Hudson River and thereby relieve bottlenecks and delays and allow more people to use mass transit etc. The funds were there and hundreds of millions had already been spent, but Christie, without bargaining with any of us voters or commuters or etc. decided by fiat to give those funds back because he calculated that in the long run it would end up costing the state more than was projected. He ignored the projected long term benefits of the project—financial, ecological, etc.—and instead chose to use whatever money the state may have contributed to the project to widen highways! (creating more pollution, traffic problems—it's been proven that making more roads or existing roads bigger only increases traffic and doesn't stop bottlenecks and traffic jams etc.). It's interesting that who that immediately hurt the most (in the long run it hurts almost all New Jersey residents) were the unions that had already begun building the tunnel, and whose workers are now unemployed and unable to contribute to the state's economy, in fact are a drain on it. But his decision weakens their union and thereby any contributions it might make to a Democratic opponent of Christie's! It's also interesting to note that, as I've written here before, Christie ended an agreement with movie and TV show makers for tax incentives to make their films and shows in Jersey, another blow to one of the few private sector industries with strong unions—the entertainment industry. [Full disclosure, I live mostly on a pension I get from an entertainment industry union, which I believe I deserve, since the entertainment business has been, and remains, not only one of the most successful industries in our country, it's also one of the few we still export to other countries, number one in fact for years, so without my contribution and others like me in my unions, that industry may not have been as successful and one of the few reliable domestic and export industries in this country would suffer.])

PS TO LAST POST

And another writer, and a longer but excellent piece on the hypocrisy of the right when it comes to the Koch brothers' financing of rightwing causes that protect their industries and profits here.

ANOTHER GREAT KRUGMAN COLUMN

Here's a succinct and accurate summary of the right's usual misdirection, misrepresentation and outright lying about something, in this case polls and election results.

GRAND HOTEL

Watched this Hollywood classic last night on TCM's current series showing all the Oscar Best Picture winners. I'd seen it only once before, decades ago.

I don't know about you, but it's always enlightening to revisit a work of art I dug when I was younger, now that I'm older, to see if it still has an impact on me.

I remember reading Theodore Dreiser's SISTER CARRIE when I was a young man and digging the depth of this novel's insights into what it was like to be young and ambitous. I identified, of course, with the younger characters in the book, including Carrie.

Then I read it decades later and noticed for the first time the "old man" (to me as a young man the first time) was the sympathetic and deepest character in the book. Both times I got a lot out of it. But it's not a book I'm interested in reading again.

I've also had experiences of reading something as a young man that had an enormous impact on me and later on rereading the same thing discovering it now falls flat (that would make an interesting list, if i ever can get myself into making lists again with any regularity or focus).

But to get to GRAND HOTEL. I watched it the first time out of obligation, because I was interested in Greta Garbo and film history. I was struck that first time by the breadth of the casting and the character subplots. I enjoyed it, but also found the old style actors like theater icon John Barrymore, well, old style.

But last night it had a poignant realism I think I missed as a young man. The desperation caused by financial fear that drives so many of the characters, especially the one played by John Barrymore, moved me in ways I'm sure I wasn't the first time.

Yes it's melodramatic and old fashioned in many ways, but it's also incredibly realistic and contemporary in other ways. It was pre-code so the Hollywood cliches of only the virtuous can win etc. was not the case (ala Joan Crawford's very modern character).

It's a classic for good reason, because you can rewatch it and end up digging it even more, which is my definition of a classic.

Check out this scene with Barrymore and Crawford first meeting (Youtube wouldn't let me embed it).

SUZE ROTOLO R.I.P.

I never met her that I know of. Sorry I didn't. I liked her memoir, A FREEWHEELIN' TIME, a lot, and the woman revealed in it. (I posted a review of it here.) And I liked her art, what I've seen of it.

Here's a link to a good obituary that was in Rolling Stone (thanks to Ron Silliman's blog for hipping me to it).

PAINTERS & POETS (TIBOR DE NAGY GALLERY)

I haven't been getting into the city much since the brain operation. I'm still sometimes a little overwhelmed by too much stimulus (stimuli?) and get a little anxious in some crowded situations.

But I have done it and have been meaning to go see this show—PAINTERS & POETS— at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery on Fifth Avenue near 57Th Street. I just realized it closes this Saturday, march 5th, so if I'm going I've got to get going soon.

The show is in celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the gallery, begun back in 1951, obviously, and from the start a place where New York painters and poets were celebrated. The gallery published what people call "chapbooks" (i.e. less pages than a normal book, usually saddle-stitched—meaning the pages just fold in the middle so the "book" has no spine—and soft paper covers, etc.) of many of what became known as (and one of the gallery owners supposedly coined) "The New York School Poets"—Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, et. al.

I missed some of the many events the gallery has had in honor of the anniversary since the show opened in January, including a reading with John Ashbery, Bill Berkson and Ron Padgett. Wish I had made it to that one. But between my post-brain-op reluctance to go to events in the city as much and my caring for my thirteen-year-old, I wasn't able to make them.

But the gallery was kind enough to send me the catalogue for the show, and it has become one of my favorite books. The page size is art book big, with a hardcover (no dust jacket) detail from a Larry Rivers painting of O'Hara (as seen above) and inside are many reproductions of paintings and poems and photographs of the artists and poets and supporters of the gallery and its press.

There are also two essays, the first and longest by poet Douglas Crase (who I don't see much but consider an old friend anyway) is one of the main reasons I love this book and recommend you get it if you have any interest in any of "The New York School Poets" or the painters the gallery showed, like Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, et. al.

Here's an excerpted paragraph from Crase's very witty, very insightful and very informative (and sometimes contrary in brilliantly original ways) essay "A Hidden History of the Avant-Garde" from the catalogue:

"Friends of the gallery are familiar with the explicit collaborations of its artists. Of equal if perhaps more lasting interest were the implicit collaborations that produced work that remains valuable without reference to its extraneous sociability. The aesthetic affinity that arose between Porter and Schuyler [poet James Schuyler], for example, made theirs the greatest instance of a painter-poet friendship in the history of American art. Their near competition for the title, as it turns out, has been the steadier, more elusive rapport that links the works of another painter-poet pair associated with the gallery: Frielicher and Ashbery. It's true that the shared concerns of this latter pair are not so apparent. We are always entitled, however, to look for clues; and a logical place to begin is with Ashbery's mirror-like essay "Jane Frielicher." In the casually delivered credo of that essay he praised her work as "tentative," and went on to state his belief that most good things are tentative "or should be if they aren't." The observable paradox may be that the works of both are steadily tentative. But the paradox only reveals that Ashbery's idea of the "tentative" must be another way to identify that combination of disinterest and concentration which delivers us in Freilicher's paintings, as it does in his poems, from the erosive claims of faction and time."

[PS: in the phrase "steadily tentative" above the "steadily" is italicized but I've yet to figure out how to italicize on this blog, and yes I have the device that's supposed to achieve that but it never seems to work!]

[PPS: Thanks to Tom Raworth for emailing me how to do the italics: it worked!]

[PPPS: I'm remiss for not mentioning the other essay in this book, equally engaging, by Jenni Quilter, called "The Love of Looking: Collaborations between Artists and Writers."]

BIG BANKS GET PERSONAL

I just got back from depositing some checks at my local bank. I know all the tellers and the managers and have been banking at this place since I moved here in 1999.

It was a Wachovia bank up until recently, and like all banks it had its problems, but I was used to them and usually my transactions go pretty smoothly.

Then Wells Fargo took them over. They sent out notices to all their customers, including me, that nothing would change, I would go right on banking the way I always had, and just the name would be different.

Then they sent out notices listing some "minor" changes that were mostly in fine print and complicated financial and legal language so it was pretty difficult to figure out what they meant, but it seemed to have something to do with the fees charged and interest rates and the usual areas where financial institutions do the dirty work that ends up costing small customers like me more money.

But then there's the actual experience of banking at this newly renamed Wells Fargo bank. It's a disaster. It took the tellers a few weeks to adjust to the new "system" and computer programs, so that for a while just cashing a check might take twenty minutes or a half hour. And it wasn't their fault, which was obvious when you saw all the extra steps Wells Fargo had instituted to replace the more simple and direct system Wachovia had used.

One of those steps is the requirement that you show them your driver's license so they can put it in their system. This morning a woman that the tellers all knew, one of them even knew her kids, went to school with them, a woman who'd been banking there longer than me, but they wouldn't carry out her transaction until she showed them some i.d. because that was one of the new rules. She left without showing it to them, I assume to start banking elsewhere.

Another man was trying to withdraw money from his account. Under Wachovia there were always a pile of deposit and withdrawal slips on the table where you could fill them in, but under Well Fargo there are only deposit slips. Withdrawal slips can only be given out by the tellers, one at a time and must be used in the bank when received so that no one can leave with any or take any home.

When the man got frustrated by this and asked why, the tellers said "for your own protection" and the man got angry and muttered mini-rants as he walked out. The teller I was depositing my checks with looked upset, very upset. I couldn't blame him. He and the other tellers are taking the brunt of their customers anger over a new giant bank that seems to have no feel for the personal touch and seems determined to make every customer feel like they are prisoners of a giant corporation that doesn't care about them but only about its own internal workings and profit making.

Which seems obviously true. Decades ago, when I lived in Southern California and had just moved there, I got an account with a Wells Fargo bank branch in Santa Monica. Wells Fargo was then a regional bank for mostly Western states. But even then, my experience with them was so bad I pulled my money out and took it to another more local bank and kept it there until I moved back East.

I like the convenience of my bank being right around the corner (actually the way I go to it, right through the alley beside the house my apartment's in) and the tellers I've known for years and get along well with. And the only other bank is another giant multinational corporate financial monster. So, I suppose I'll grin and bear it.

But it is the story of contemporary "America"—giant corporations that the Supreme Court says have the same rights as us individual citizens, except when they have even more rights, like getting to bet our money on whatever crazy scheme they come up with and if they lose, they then get to get bailed out by more of our money and take home bonuses for that same year that are more than most of us make in a lifetime.

While the small businesses the right pretends to care about (while doing everything in its political power to make corporations more powerful and wealthy and dominant over the rest of us) get crushed and many of the brightest college students opt for careers in finance over medicine or science or education or public service.

You know Mussollini's definition of fascism? He called "corporatism." Yep.