999

999 is the brink, the moment before transformation, the anti-666, crisis and opportunity.

1000 is the millennium, the catastrophe, the fulfillment, the end and the beginning.

1001 is infinity, eternity, what comes after The End.

Who will dare push it over the edge? What will happen then?

Looking Up

About two weeks ago I got myself invited to participate in a public reading organized by a nearby bookstore. At first I planned to read an excerpt from something I’d already written, but while taking a walk I thought of a story that would fit the occasion. I get ten minutes just like everybody else, and timing myself I find that read aloud about 200 words a minute. That gives me 2,000 words to work with: long for a blog post, but short for a story, forcing me to get to the point quickly. My first draft came in at 3,000 words, so I had to do some severe pruning. Here’s what I’ve ended up with, as of this morning. The reading is tonight, Thursday, so if you think anything isn’t clear or could be eliminated I hope you’ll leave a comment to that effect. Also, is it just me, or does this story sound like it’s already been written by a thousand other writers? Tomorrow I’ll report on how the public reading went.

———————————————-

LOOKING UP

I glance over my shoulder at the big-screen image of my own slouching profile and I know it’s over. The faceless throng jamming the arena has remained silent and attentive during my first two hours, but I’m certain that by the end of this evening everything will be different. The arena might be reduced to rubble by air strikes, or maybe gravity will stop working and we’ll all wind up crushed together inside the concavity of the domed roof. Or I’ll turn the page and there will be nothing there.

* * *

I’ve always felt uncomfortable looking up from the page. Even on that first night – was it really only two months ago, or has the structure of time changed in some fundamental way? – even then I knew I ought to look up, make eye contact. Certainly I was familiar enough with my material to lift my eyes off the page now and then, try to coax my audience a little farther into the world I was showing them. I had assured myself that the novel isn’t me after all, isn’t even about me really: it’s just something I wrote, as separate from myself as any other book I might pull off the shelf. Still, there I was, making what amounted to a flagrant pass at two dozen strangers, and I was terribly afraid they weren’t looking back.

I enunciate clearly and with inflection. I rarely stumble over even the most convoluted syntax, probably because I’ve had plenty of experience reading bedtime stories to my daughter. Sometimes for fun I would look up theatrically from what I was reading to her, my face painted with ersatz emotion, my eyebrows arched, eyes and mouth opened wide. My daughter would laugh and tell me to stop it. That’s when I understood: I don’t need to master the arts of locutionary seduction in order to lure someone into another world; I just need to hold the door open and the world itself does the work.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d never heard about the public readings at the bookstore, never made inquiry. Even after I’d been given a slot on the roster for that Thursday night I almost didn’t make it. People were gathering their things and putting on their coats when Karl Schroeder spotted me standing just inside the doorway and beckoned me forward, asked everyone to please give their attention to the last scheduled reader of the night.

I glanced at my watch as I’d neared the end of my text that first time: right on schedule; no need to hurry getting through the last page before my ten minutes were up. But anxiety had begun to creep over me. I stumbled over a word, then I repeated a line, and still the end came rushing toward me. Two paragraphs, one. Imbued with a strange dread I forced my way through the last sentence of Chapter One.

My finger hovered over the text for a moment longer, then abruptly I raised my head and gazed into the void. I discerned the faces, dispassionate and expressionless. They did not move; they made no sound – as if they were waiting for something. I detected motion in the periphery: a neon light near the door was flickering on and off. I picked up the manuscript, tapped it a few times on the lectern, and replaced it in the accordion folder. I nodded unsmiling toward the silent motionless audience and left.

I was surprised to find a phone message waiting for me at home. “Mr. Molina, this is Karl Shroeder, from the library? I wanted you to know that we really enjoyed, really appreciated, your reading this evening. I wondered, we wondered, if you might come back tomorrow night. You can just keep going where you left off.”

Again the reading went smoothly. I managed to look up a few times and again found myself confronted by attentive but expresssionless faces. After I’d finished my ten minutes I took an empty seat in the second row. The audience members began chatting among one another, preparing to leave – apparently I was the only reader scheduled for that evening. Two young women approached. “We looked for your book on the shelves but we couldn’t find it,” the black-haired one informed me. I acknowledged that it wasn’t published. To me surprise they seemed thrilled. “Then we’re the first ones to hear it?” I nodded. “Well that makes sense then,” the taller one remarked. “See you tomorrow.”

Reading aloud is slow going, but you do get to the end of the book eventually, and since my nightly readings had been extended to half an hour things were moving right along. By the end of the second week I had begun to feel a little relieved knowing that soon I’d be finished. It saddened me too, of course. Anticipation often exceeds fulfillment, but the reality of reading my own work every night to what had grown into a roomful of people – it had changed my life. I actually started thinking again about quitting my job and devoting myself to writing – the craft of it, the art, the truth, the paradoxically diffuse intensity of it. That first night I’d felt like I was on trial; now it seemed as though everyone in the store, reader and listeners alike, were entering together into another world, a world conjured out of nothing but words and imagination.

Soon enough there came that inevitable night, raw and blustery, when I drove to the bookstore with only five unread pages left to go. I’d framed the narrative according the traditional third-person-singular, past-tense convention, but then in the last chapter, Chapter 42, the story shifted abruptly to first person – as if the teller of the tale had suddenly become the main character, stepping out from behind the veil of anonymity. At the same time the story itself took a sharp turn toward the surreal. The previous evening, as I’d begun reading this final chapter, I experienced a momentary visual distortion, or perhaps it was a lapse of attention: the letters arrayed before me wouldn’t congeal themselves into meaningful units. I blinked hard two or three times, and when I looked up every person in the room seemed to have moved a little closer to me, gotten incrementally larger. Their wide-open eyes were locked onto my own, as if by the power of their gaze they could make my eyes see the words as they’d always been meant to be seen…

As I had done for the past 26 nights I extracted the loose-leaf manuscript from the accordion file and set it in front of me on the lectern. With a singular gravity I transposed the written words into sound. I was speaking no louder than usual, but somehow my voice sounded larger to my own ears. Whenever I finish reading a page I place it face-up at the bottom of the stack, so that the top sheet is always the next one to be read. One after another I read those top five pages, delivering them flawlessly; carefully and deliberately I slipped them one by one to the bottom of the stack. I grasped the entire sheaf in both hands and tapped the bottom edge on the lectern, just as I always do at the end of a night’s reading. I was sliding the manuscript back into the accordion file when I noticed that the title page, which should have risen again to the top of the sheaf, seemed to be missing. I scrutinized the top sheet more closely: “Chapter 43,” the heading read. Silently I scanned the opening lines: familiar yet disconcerting. How could I have forgotten? I still had about 15 minutes left. Sweeping a glance across my expectant audience, I read on.

And on. The hallucinatory tone of the narrative intensified as past tense turned the corner into the present. The story, which for its first 42 claustrophobic chapters had taken place almost exclusively inside one room, was chapter by chapter exploding outward: the rest of the house, the neighborhood, the town, the nation, the world. The narrator, who in first revealing himself had born only a generic resemblance to the author, gradually emerged as a distinct character. Sex, age, stature, back story, day job, literary aspirations: more and more the narrator was becoming Edgar Molina, was becoming me. To this fictional Edgar remarkable things were happening. From benumbed obscurity he had risen rapidly to prominence; his voice, so long unheard, struck resonant chords in the people’s hearts; the worlds he conjured from imagination began taking on shape and substance. Obscure adventurers crisscrossed the globe; wars ended while others began; world leaders in every sphere of endeavor sought his counsel. If, reading from his magnificent book, the words this fictional Edgar intoned said let there be light, then light there was.

In the narrator’s book the crowds swelled to enormous proportions – and it was so. Soon I was reading 3, 4, 5 hours a day. My job faded away; reading is what I do now. And yet every night, every time I finish a page and slip it to the bottom of the stack, I have to master the same dread again: what happens now, after the end? Every time another new page awaits me, familiar, expected, predestined. The world into which I speak these words is changing dramatically, but the book seems to keep pace with the changes, even to anticipate them, as if I had known the future when I’d written these astounding pages. And just when had I written them? The book itself explained that Edgar had written it, was writing it, would continue to write it, until the time came when he would not.

And now that time has arrived. As the page draws my eyes to itself I read it to the people, and reading it to them I read it to myself: the time is at hand. Desperation has seized certain pockets of resistance to the grand trajectory laid out by my, Edgar’s, book. Even now forces are arraying themselves against him, me: not just the will of determined and dangerous men, but the very fabric of nature being rent asunder. As I glance over my shoulder to the gigantic image of my profile, my attention is drawn to a figure leaning toward that profile from one of the exit ramps.

* * *

Centering his target in the crosshairs, the sniper watched Edgar Molina return his attention to the large stack of paper in front of him. Edgar’s mouth stopped moving; half a second later his amplified voice cut off mid-sentence. The vast auditorium fell silent. Edgar’s shoulders shrugged; his features seemed to melt down his face. The sniper had been concentrating his full attention on that face, but now his mission was completed and Edgar’s face had fallen from view. The sniper shifted his left wrist ever so slightly so that the top sheet was framed by the telescopic lens. He couldn’t read the words from there; he would have to go down to the arena floor, stand at the lectern, pick up where Edgar had left off.

Gut and Run

Bear with me on this one.

In March 2008 a bipartisan group of 22 senators, including Democrats John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, Patrick Leahy, and Carl Levin, introduced bill S. 2666, the Affordable Housing Investment Act of 2008. The stated purpose of this bill is “To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to encourage investment in affordable housing, among other things.” Affordable housing is set aside by the government for low-income renters whose housing costs are reduced by government subsidies. To increase the availability of low-income housing stock, the government offers tax incentives to investors in affordable housing developments.

I direct the reader’s attention to TITLE III–FACILITATE PRIVATE INVESTMENT CAPITAL TO INCREASE THE EFFICIENCY OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING INVESTMENT. Section 303 – REPEAL OF RECAPTURE BOND RULE proposes to modify Paragraph (6)(A) of Section 42(j) of the existing law to read as follows:

IN GENERAL- In the case of a disposition of a building or an interest therein, the taxpayer shall be discharged from liability for any additional tax under this subsection by reason of such disposition if it is reasonably expected that such building will continue to be operated as a qualified low-income building for the remaining compliance period with respect to such building.

Related to this bit of obscure rewriting you will also observe the even more cryptically impenetrable TITLE IV–HELP PRESERVE EXISTING AFFORDABLE HOUSING, SEC. 401. REPEAL OF 10-YEAR RULE FOR ACQUISITION HOUSING CREDITS:

(a) In General- Subparagraph (B) of section 42(d)(2) (relating to existing buildings) is amended by striking clause (ii) and by redesignating clauses (iii) and (iv) as clauses (ii) and (iii), respectively.

(b) Conforming Amendment- Section 42(d) is amended by striking paragraph (6) and by redesignating paragraph (7) as paragraph (6).

I would never have known about this piece of proposed legislation, let alone deciphered the pertinent passages, had it not been for an white paper submitted to the Senate by the Surety and Fidelity Association of America , or SFAA. (I used to work in the surety industry and have been renewing my familiarity with the Association’s activities lately.) The document begins:

The Internal Revenue Code in 26 USC 42(j) permits investors in low-income housing to take tax credits for 10 years on the condition the property continues as low-income housing for 15 years. These tax credits are subject to recapture if the investor changes the nature of the property during the compliance period and… fails to maintain the property as low income housing for the remainder of the 15-year term…

Legislation has been introduced in the last two sessions of Congress to repeal the long-term guarantee of future compliance with both the tax laws and the federal housing program and to substitute a notification to be made after a compliance default and the tax credit recapture event have already occurred. This increases the profits of a few investor-sellers at the expense of U.S. taxpayers and low-income tenants who will bear the cost of future non-compliance.

The SFAA is an association representing surety bond industry, a relatively small line of insurance business. A surety bond guarantees the performance of a contract; if the contractor fails to perform, the surety steps in and pays to have the work completed. The surety company charges a fee for its guarantee, which is in effect  a risk premium not unlike that charged by a lender protecting itself against the borrower’s default. The underwriter invests considerable effort to make sure that the contractor is technically and financially capable of fulfilling its obligations before issuing the guaranty bond on the contractor’s behalf.

Under current Federal tax law, the developer of a low-income housing project qualifies for significant tax breaks, so long as the property remains dedicated to its original purpose. The developer is allowed to capture its tax benefits up front, with the understanding that the unearned portion must be paid back if the developer converts the property to, say, luxury condominiums within 15 years. The surety bond guarantees that the unearned tax benefit will be repaid if the developer flips the property to another use. If the developer can’t pay then the government draws on the bond guaranty and the surety company has to pony up. The SFAA briefing continues:

The tax recapture bond is required for the benefit of U.S. taxpayers not the investors. The bond requirement was enacted in 1986 to prevent investor abuse of the government housing programs. The tax recapture bond prevents aggressive investors from taking the tax credits in the early years of the compliance period and then disposing of the property in the later years. These were so-called “Gut and Run” schemes, in which investors gutted tax credits from the property and then sold the properties to shell corporations with little assets for the IRS to pursue to recapture unearned tax credits.

With the SFAA explanation in mind, we return to the proposed legislation. Instead of requiring that the new development continue to be operated as affordable housing for 15 years in order to qualify for the tax credit, the proposed revision permits any change of ownership or management “if it reasonably expected” that the property will continue as affordable housing. The surety bond, which guaranteed developers’ compliance with the requirement, would no longer be required. And instead of recapturing up to 10 years of unearned tax breaks from the developer or the surety bond guarantor, the proposed legislation strikes out the recapture clause altogether. With the restrictions lifted and the financial penalties removed, investors in affordable housing developments would be given carte blanche to rip off the taxpayers while at the same time pulling the rug out from low-income tenants by selling or renting the properties to higher-paying customers.

The proposed Senate legislation and a similar bill introduced into the House of Representatives are both currently in committee and have not yet come up for a vote.

Reruns: A Zombie Pastiche

In a comment awhile back I mentioned that I was thinking about doing some sort of collaborative moviemaking project with the local high school kids. Thus far the teachers at the school have been useless (won’t respond to my emails), but the handful of kids who’ve heard about it seem fairly enthusiastic, so I’m going to move forward and see what happens. I’m putting together an email description of the proposed RERUNS Project, as well as a blog which would have as its first post something like this:

* * *

RERUNS: A Collaborative Movie Project

If you go to school at Fairview High School, how would you like to:

  • make a short video about or starring zombies,
  • collaborate with your fellow Undead moviemakers,
  • have all or part of your video included in a larger feature movie, and
  • take a bow on stage when the movie is screened in the Fairview Auditorium?

If so, then the RERUNS Collaborative Movie Project might be for you.

The Proposal

Zombie sitcoms. Zombie drama. Zombie reality shows. Zombie commercials. Zombie shopping network, art films, sports, news, soaps, cartoons, music videos — anything you want to see, 24/7, on Zombie Cable TV. The premise: a couple of the Undead are sitting on the couch watching television. These zombies might be a little slow but they’ve got short attention spans, and one of them has an active remote control reflex. Click. Click. Click. First we see the two zombies watching, then we start watching what they’re watching — bits and pieces of all sorts of programs produced for this very special viewer demographic.

So the proposal is this: a bunch of people (probably all high school students) make short videos, each of which consists of something that might be showing on one of the zombie cable channels. The video doesn’t have to be a whole episode of some imagined program — a scene or two is enough; even a short clip or highlight will do. Then we edit them all together into a single feature, a pastiche, cutting in with occasional glimpses and reaction shots of our two undead friends clicking the remote and watching this explosion of weird entertainment. The working title for the whole compilation is RERUNS.

A film festival is a competition; RERUNS is a collaboration. As you work on your script, your acting, your sets, your filming, you can ask each other for feedback and suggestions. There might be mini-workshops on techniques, guest presentations from experienced filmmakers in the community, pre-screenings of early takes, and so on. Everybody’s video gets included — or at least part of it anyway — so everybody gets their name in the credits. At the World Premiere (at Fairview High School? in March?) the dozens of undead filmmakers take a collective bow before a stunned and speechless and horrific audience…

Zombiedom is a great genre to mess with in any number of ways. Even if you’ve never made a video before, how bad can it be? — heck, it’s just a freaking zombie movie! Besides, if your movie sucks the editors will find something good in it to include in the final cut. But zombie reality can also let you stretch your skills and your imagination. The zombie world has room for plenty of diversity, so you can imagine your zombiesrevenants any way you like, from bedraggled rotting flesh to people who look like you and me.

they-jouissance

Here’s a screengrab from the 2004 French film Les Revenants, or They Came Back. The guy with his back to us looking at the woman is a zombie. What does his face look like? As videomaker you get to decide. Since the composite film is sutured together Frankenstein-like from bits and pieces, each mini-film can have its own distinctive look and feel. Zombiedom can also be an intriguing and multipurpose metaphor for contemporary life, so you can make a Grand Statement if you like. Even if your reach exceeds your grasp there’s no pressure — heck, it’s just a freaking zombie movie!

About Me

My name is John Doyle. I am not a high school student; I’m just an old guy whose daughter goes to Fairview. I like movies, even though I’ve never made one. I also like when people channel their creative energies toward a common end, bringing out the best in each other. I can be useful behind the scenes, doing organizational stuff, helping make things easier for the moviemakers. But RERUNS fails unless it’s a student-run project from start to finish.

Next Steps

Does the RERUNS project grab your imagination at all? If you want to make a video, write a script, act, do makeup, build sets, just curious, whatever — please come to the preliminary planning meeting. It will be held after school in the Fairview library on ____. If it looks like there’s enough interest we’ll come up with a plan. No fees, no requirements, no course credit, no credentials necessary — just show up.

* * *

Too pushy? Not pushy enough? Do I sound like some sort of perv luring highschoolers into my lair? Any comments or suggestions from Ktismatics readers before I go out the door with this?

UPDATE: Per a friend’s excellent recommendation I added the brief summary with 4 bullet points to the very beginning of this write-up.

Election 2008: Presidency

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?” To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked. I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?

– David Sedaris, “Undecided”

A few months ago I decided to vote Socialist Party USA, even though I keep forgetting the name of the candidate. I had a chat with my father yesterday and he’s voting for Nader again, just like he did eight years ago in Florida and four years later after he moved to South Carolina. My dad thinks there’s not much substantive difference between McCain and Obama, that Obama will say anything at all just to get elected. Of course my father might be right. Like a lot of people, I tend to think that Obama is really more left than he’s letting on, that he is shifting rightward in order to grab up what passes in the US for moderate voters. But maybe he’s been this way all along, invoking semi-left rhetoric mostly to hold onto that wing of the Party. Maybe Obama is being held hostage by a Party apparatus that won’t let him be the change agent he wants to be. All this psychologizing isn’t going to get me anywhere: after all, I’ve never even met the man.

I’m not sure I understand the objections to deciding among political candidates based on ideology, but I presume this is part of it: talk is cheap; people will say just anything. So then along with ideology I have to add morality to the decision matrix: is he a man of his word? I have judged the Democratic majority in Congress to be corrupt for not shutting off the Iraq war funding after ascending to power on the 2006 wave of antiwar sentiment. Even Obama, whose earliest claim of distinction in the primaries was his vote against the War Powers Act, has made peace with the pro-war faction of the Democratic Party. In making a case for himself as Commander in Chief Obama emphasizes his personal credentials as cool-headed decision-maker and competent manager — like an applicant for a CEO position. I keep wanting him to take a firm ideological stance against the wars, but then I remember that according to the Constitution the President is supposed to be an administrator rather than a leader, that the Congress is supposed to decide these things, that as elected officials the members of Congress are supposed to act on behalf of the electorate. As a Senator Obama has consistently voted to continue funding the wars rather than pulling the plug. It would seem that, other than the original vote to authorize Bush to invade, Obama’s war voting record hasn’t been substantively different from Hillary’s or from Biden’s, or even from McCain’s. Does that make Obama a liar? No: he’s consistently stated that, while he disagreed with the launching of the wars, once war was underway he felt it important that the military intervention be managed and funded adequately and that the American troops be supported. I’ve been prepared to discount Obama’s rationale, believing that he’s being a good Party player, making tactical concessions in order to achieve a larger strategic antiwar victory. Why would I have believed that when I had no evidence to support it? Because I wanted to believe it. On the other hand, why do I believe that if Nader had been in the Congress he’d have voted against the wars and their continued funding? Because that’s what he says he would do, and I perceive him as a man of his word. Rhetoric, ideology, personal morality.

I suspect that Nader would make at least as good a President as either McCain or Obama. As best I can recall, on every political position where Nader differs from Obama I agree with Nader. I was of the same mind about Nader vis-a-vis Kerry, and I felt like I’d betrayed my conscience voting for Kerry, a feeling that was certainly exacerbated by Kerry’s defeat. At the same time, I’m kind of like the guy who, when asked if he’d rather have the chicken or the pile of shit, says he’ll have the fish. Though Nader is on the menu, I understand that I can’t have my own personal Nader for president. I can insist on ordering the fish just to remain true to my own convictions, as well as to erect a tiny spectacle of dissent for others possibly to observe out of the corners of their eyes as they’re eating what the majority selected from the menu, a little reminder that we could all be eating fish right now if enough of us said we wanted it. But I have to face it: at the end of tomorrow I’m going to be served chicken or shit.

Comparing Nader with Obama point by point I’d pick Nader. But in comparing Nader with my own personal political ideas I’d find points of disagreement. Comparing Obama with McCain point by point? While they’re similar to one another in so many ways, there are differences. On every difference that I know of I agree with Obama. Can I operate within the pragmatic binary, deciding which of the only two possible winners I prefer? Or by occupying the larger political-ideological field do I choose the one I like best but who surely will lose? If I flip the binary toggle while still floating in the vaster space of all conceivable presidential politics, then I have to pick the lesser of two evils. But if I consciously constrain my electoral horizon to just these two candidates, Obama and McCain, maybe I can persuade myself that I’m actually picking the one I like better, whom I agree with more, whom I think will be a better President for the country. Voting for President is just one among any number of political acts I can take from within the larger space, each of which is constrained by the real circumstances in which it plays out.

I’ll have the chicken, thank you.

Election 2008: Boulder County Issue 1A

Here’s an intriguing proposition being put to the vote here in Boulder Colorado:

Shall Boulder County debt be increased by up to $40 million… with no increase in any county tax or tax rate, for the purpose of financing the costs of constructing, acquiring, and installing solar and other renewable energy systems or energy-efficient improvements for property owners… by the issuance of special assessment bonds payable from special assessments imposed against benefited properties…?

Say you own a home or business property in Boulder County. You want to retrofit your building for solar heating — install panels, cables, transformers, etc. If Issue 1A passes, you can finance this installation by borrowing money directly from the County government. These loans would be priced below market rates of interest, and for income tax purposes they would be treated like mortgages: the interest paid by the owner is deductible. The loans are attached to the property itself, so that if the current owner sells the building the new owner acquires the responsibility continuing the loan repayments.

The supporting documentation, mailed by the County to every resident, says this:

WHEREAS, coal and natural gas are the principle sources of generation of commercial quantities of electrical energy for the power grid in the Western United States, and home and business consumption accounts for 73% of the overall usage of electric energy; and…

WHEREAS, if the United States is serious about moving away from fossil fuels in order to limit the greenhouse gas effect leading to global warming, the existing occupied building stock must be retrofitted…; and…

WHEREAS, existing homeowners, and to a certain extent business property owners, are highly leveraged on their properties currently…

NOW, THEREFORE, etc. etc.

In addition to the arguments in favor of this bill, the County summarizes arguments submitted in opposition. Here the language gets a little more colorful:

This is another example of Boulder County’s excessive obsession with green initiatives regardless of the negative financial impacts… One of the problems with the current financial meltdown on Wall Street is predatory lending, lending by mortgage companies to people who could not possibly afford the loans. Yet this is exactly what 1A does… To commissioners want to lend money to people that the market has determined cannot repay additional loans, and saddle the poor homeowner with even more easy debt using the good credit of the citizens of Boulder County…

This is similar to mortgage companies who attempted to be so creative in creating debt instruments that we had a housing market collapse… The county is acting like a crackdealer for people hooked on money… Vote NO on this insane proposal by the County Commissioners.

I admire the creativity of a local government that’s prepared to take on the role of lender as a tangible way to encourage use of renewable energy. According to the documentation it will take 20 years before the building owner’s energy cost savings offset the price of the solar equipment installation. In backing these loans the citizenry doesn’t participate in these savings, but they are on the hook in the event of default. Then there’s this crackdealer angle to consider: instead of providing relief for already-distressed mortgagees, 1A would encourage homeowners to take on even more debt.

I wouldn’t be sorry if this bill passed: an innovative and tangible local effort to clean up the commons. However, I can’t get past the crackdealer argument. I’m going to vote NO.

Election 2008: Colorado Amendments

[The morning after: Colorado election results are in the comments.]

With the election just a few days away I guess it’s time for me to decide how I’m going to fill in my ballot. In addition to the presidential and senate races there are several issues being put to the vote in Colorado. Although ordinarily this blog doesn’t have many local readers, I thought it might be informative to show what kinds of things the local citizenry is being asked to decide. Here’s how I plan to vote on each of them, but I might be dissuadable if you’ve got a good counter-argument to offer. Here are the proposed amendments to the Constitution of the State of Colorado being decided by popular vote during this election:

Amendment 46 — Prohibit governments from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, or public contracting.

The U.S. Constitution already prohibits this sort of discrimination; the key phrase is “granting preferential treatment.” If this amendment passes, equal opportunity and diversity hiring policies, which attempt to rectify institutionalized biases and injustices in academe and the workplace, would be prohibited. I vote NO.

Amendment 47 — Prohibit requiring an employee to join and pay any dues or fees to a labor union as a condition for employment.

This is basic union busting — NO.

Amendment 48 — Define the term “person” to include any human being from the moment of fertilization.

A proven strategy for getting out the conservative vote is to put pro-life and anti-gay marriage any amendments on the state ballot. If this proposal wasn’t on the ballot I think Obama would win Colorado for sure. NO.

Amendment 49 — Prohibit any public employee paycheck deduction except for deductions required by federal law, tax withholdings, judicial liens and garnishments, health benefit and other insurance deductions, deductions for pension or retirement plans or systems or other savings or investment programs, and charitable deductions.

There seems no need for this legislation, except for making it illegal to deduct union dues from government employee paychecks. NO.

Amendment 50 — Allow residents of Central City, Black Hawk, and Cripple Creek to vote to extend casino hours, approve additional games, and increase the maximum single bet limit; give most of the gaming tax revenue that results from new gaming limits to Colorado community colleges and to the gaming cities and counties; exempt the revenue raised from new gaming limits from state and local revenue and spending limits.

I don’t know. I think gambling can be fun, and if you want to play big-stakes games why should the State prevent you? It’s not like second-hand smoke, where hanging around in the same casino with a compulsive gambler is going to rub off on you. I have no idea how the local citizenry of these three towns feel about having gambling joints in their neighborhoods, but this amendment, but I’ve got to believe it’s the casino owners rather than the townies who are pushing for this amendment. On the other hand, the local jurisdictions will get significant increases in tax revenues, so they might like it. But the biggest chunk of increased taxes would go to the community colleges located throughout the state. This sort of earmarking of state revenues I’m generally against, but giving it to schools isn’t so bad. State-run lotteries are a regressive mechanism for raising tax revenues. Still, this amendment isn’t proposing a sin tax imposed on the gamblers, but rather an income tax to be paid by the casinos. The Voter Guide distributed by the Boulder County Democrats says “no,” but they don’t say why — I suspect it’s worries about compulsive gambling and the seedy environment that seems to crop up in casino towns. Much as I think casino gambling is a stupid way to spend your money, I could say the same thing about luxury cars and crappy $6 coffee-flavored beverages. The amendment doesn’t require these 3 towns to accede to statewide results; if it passes the legislation just just gives them the right to decide for themselves. I’m going to vote YES.

Amendment 51 — Increase state sales tax from 2.9% to 3.1% over two years; direct the new money be used to pay for services for people with developmental disabilities.

Again, the earmarking is problematic. Also, sales tax is regressive. So after originally thinking yes I’m changing to NO for this one.

Amendment 52 — Require the state legislature to spend a portion of state severance tax collections on highway projects.

Severance tax is levied against mining companies based on the amount of nonrenewable natural resources they extract from the earth. So, e.g., an oil driller’s severance tax would be used to pay for highway projects that would… encourage more driving and thus more oil consumption. NO.

Amendment 53 — Hold a business executive criminally responsible for the business’s failure to perform a duty required by law if the official knew of the duty and the business’s failure to perform it.

YES.

Amendment 54 — Prohibit certain government contractors from contributing to a political party or candidate for the contract’s duration and two years thereafter; prohibit contributors to ballot issue campaigns from entering into certain government contracts relating to the ballot issue.

I’m sure the government contractors claim discrimination and excessive bureaucracy to monitor compliance, but I say YES to this one.

Amendment 55 — Prohibit private-sector employees from firing or suspending full-time employees except for specific reasons.

I understand that employers are going to regard this legislation as restricting their flexibility to respond to volatility in the economic climate. However, one of the “specific reasons” that’s acceptable for letting a worker go is “documented adverse economic circumstances that directly affect the employer.” YES.

Amendment 56 — Require private employers with 20 or more employees to either provide health insurance for both employees and their dependents or pay for insurance through a new state authority; limit the amount the employee must pay to 20% for employee-only coverage and to 30% for dependent coverage.

I favor single-payer health insurance that would eliminate employers as purchasers of health plans. This legislation will make it relatively harder on the smaller employers, providing competitive advantages to bigger companies. However, this law is designed to protect workers regardless of who they work for. YES.

Amendment 57 — Allow an injured employee to seek damages in court, beyond workers’ compensation benefits, if the employee believes that the employer failed to provide a safe and healthy workplace.

Certainly a company should be subject to punitive damages for creating or tolerating conditions that make it more likely for workers to be injured. As an aside, I’d like to see current and former employees of subprime lending institutions start suing their employers for PTSD and punitive damages caused by putting their workers in the untenable position of pushing toxic mortgages on their friends and neighbors. YES.

Amendment 58 — Increase the amount of state severance taxes paid by oil and natural gas companies, primarily by eliminating an existing state tax credit; allocate the increased severance tax revenue to college scholarships for state residents, wildlife habitat, renewable energy projects, transportation projects in energy-impacted areas, and water treatment grants.

I described severance taxes in Amendment 52. YES.

Amendment 59 — Eliminate rebates that taxpayers receive when the state collects more money than it is allowed, and spend the money for preschool through 12th grade public education.

I believe that current law requires the state to refund tax revenues that exceed expenditures within any given year, which seems stupid to me. This amendment eliminates that requirement. YES.

Referendum L — Lower the age requirements for serving in the state legislature from 25 to 21.

YES.

There are three more referenda on the ballot, but they’re mostly technicalities. If you think I should change my vote on any of these items, or if you want to reinforce my potentially wobbly support for any of them, pleas let me know. Tomorrow I’ll post on the city and county issues if they prove interesting (I haven’t read them yet).

Three Things

During the Big Game Saturday night between Fairview and Boulder High Schools, some kid streaked across the field brandishing a fake sword and wearing nothing but a pair of running shoes and a red hat. He was tackled by police officers and taken into custody. Now the authorities are threatening to charge this kid, whose name is Tom, with a felony sex crime. This would mean that, for the rest of his life, everywhere he lives Tom would have to register with the local police and have his name posted on a public list of sexual predators. Why pick on this particular streaker when Friday night everyone walking through the downtown Boulder mall, including trick-or-treating kiddies, will witness the tenth annual Naked Pumpkin Run? I’m sure you can imagine what this event is like — some guy who participated last year told a local reporter he found it to be “super liberating.” Kids at Fairview (the Knights, hence Tom’s fake sword) are now wearing homemade “Free Tom” t-shirts to school. I like the ironic touch of announcing the pro-streaker cause on an item of clothing.

Tomorrow night at the University of Colorado’s Mackey Auditorium, popular memoirist David Sedaris will give a public reading from his latest book. He got famous by reading his short humorous pieces aloud on National Public Radio. Ticket prices range from $42 to $65.

And if you needed any more reassurance that capitalism is here to stay, consider this guy. He’s apparently the most successful of the untold thousands of people who write and film advertisements for real commercial products, post them on Youtube, then solicit as many people as they can to go watch their ad. These are free marketeers in a literal sense: they aren’t paid for their work; instead they compete with each other for best ad. The winner is selected by popular acclaim, meaning that the top-rated ad must already have proven itself a viral marketing success in the marketplace. The winner gets a prize from the company being touted in the ad: sometimes the prize is cash, usually it’s a free product sold by the company. The losers get nothing other than the knowledge that every day somebody out there is watching the internet commercials they wrote, filmed, and posted for free.

The Creativity of the Multitude

The possibility of democracy is emerging for the very first time.

Always a bit slow on the uptake, I just read Hardt & Negri’s Multitude, their 2004 follow-up to Empire, a book on which I previously engaged in a series of tumultuous post-and-parry sessions. H&N argue that in late capitalism the knowledge worker has replaced the factory worker as the hegemonic form of labor, not through numerical domination but by signaling a change in how all work can “work.” Manual labor produces material goods, characterized by limitation and hence by scarcity. Knowledge work, by contrast, produces immaterial goods that can be distributed to everyone without natural limit, its spread restrained only by artificially constructed barriers like intellectual property laws. Not only that, but through dissemination the products of knowledge work actually burgeon and multiply rather than being dissipated. This is the power of the “multitude” – the singular and collective ability of people, working individually and in collaboration with one another, to create an ever-expanding congeries of immaterial cultural products which collectively H&N call “the common.”

I skip to the last thirty pages of Multitude, where the authors present as close as they get to a proposal on how democracy is going to emerge as both a political and an economic force from within the existing world order. What restrains the expansion of the common, say H&N, is the sovereign power which capital exercises over the means of production. According to the tradition of sovereignty, as elaborated by fascist social theorist Carl Schmitt, only the One can rule, whether that One be the king, the aristocracy, or the people. Without the dominance of the One, society descends into chaos.

Schmitt insists that in all cases the sovereign stands above society, transcendent, and thus politics is always founded on theology: power is sacred. The sovereign is defined, in other words, positively as the one above whom there is no power and who is thus free to decide and, negatively, as the one potentially excepted from every social norm and rule. (pp. 330-1)

According to H&N, this theory of political sovereignty applies to economic management as well:

The capitalist is the one who brings the workers together in productive cooperation. The capitalist is a modern Lycurgus, sovereign over the private domain of the factory, but pressed always to go beyond the steady state and innovate… To sovereign exceptionalism corresponds economic innovation as the form of industrial government. A large number of workers are engaged in the material practices of production, but the capitalist is the one responsible for innovation. Just as only the one can decide in politics, we are told, only the one can innovate in economics. (p. 331)

For H&N, the unrestrained expansion of the common depends on the intrinsic creative force of the multitude being released from the ideology of sovereignty. It’s not that the knowledge workers must form themselves into a manifestation of the One, whereby they can then exert the sovereignty of Labor; rather, the multitude succeeds by remaining true to its multiplicity, its limitless burgeoning channeled only by mutual collaboration among its singular constituents. What’s needed to achieve this infinite expansion of the common isn’t a unitary executive chain of command driving down through the hierarchy but rather a flat organizational architecture fueled by “common resources, open access, and free interaction” (p. 337). H&N see in the growth of the internet and cybernetics industries exemplars of this sort of “open source” development of an electronic commons.

Perhaps we can understand the decision making of the multitude as a form of expression. Indeed the multitude is organized something like a language. All of the elements of a language are defined by their differences one from the other, and yet they all function together. A language is a flexible web of meanings that combine according to accepted rules in an infinite number of possible ways. A specific expression, then, is not only the combination of linguistic elements but the production of real meanings: expression gives a name to an event. Just as expression emerges from language, then, a decision emerges from the multitude in such a way as to give meaning to the whole and name an event. For linguistic expression, however, there must be a separate subject that employs the language in expression. This is the limit of our analogy because unlike language the multitude is itself an active subject – something like a language that can express itself. (p. 339)

It’s this ability of the multitude to arrive at emergent decisions that fuels both economic innovation and democracy. Sovereignty, based on the myth of the One Who Rules, has in fact always depended on the consent of the ruled. If the ruled withhold this consent they don’t descend into chaos; rather, they achieve the absolute democracy and self-rule of the multitude.

People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept, but a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude… We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions. Christianity and Judaism, for example, both conceive love as a political act that constructs the multitude. Love means precisely that our expansive encounters and continuous collaborations bring us joy. (p. 352)

I’m all for the multitude of knowledge workers being freed to control their own work and to generate their own innovations in love for one another and for the commons. But aren’t the limitations to H&N’s proposal fairly obvious? First, the workers suddenly becoming aware that the emperor has no clothes isn’t going to topple the reigning sovereign. Capital controls the work because capital pays the workers. It’s money, not ideology, that gives the owners their power over the workers.

Second, money isn’t just a controller of workers; it’s also a motivator. Knowledge workers may grind out the work through fear of losing their jobs, but most also attempt to excel in hopes of getting a raise in pay. The vaunted explosion of worker creativity in information systems and biotechnology was fueled by nerds who hope to get rich off of their cleverness, to invent their way into the plutocracy. There’s no question that the already-rich investors get more than their fair share from entrepreneurial ventures, but some knowledge workers really do make a lot of money from their ingenuity. The most visibly successful techie entrepreneurs are propelled less by the freedom to create something intrinsically excellent than by the possibility of accruing enormous financial rewards far exceeding what they could earn in decades working a regular job.

Third, the capitalists’ sovereignty over innovation doesn’t operate by executive fiat and exception. In the contemporary capitalist firm Innovation is a core corporate objective, part of the work at nearly every level of the organizational structure. For decades so-called intrapreneurship has been incorporated into business practice, providing even line-level ops workers with opportunities to collaborate and to put forward clever new ideas for consideration by management, ideas that might earn the innovative worker at least a small sliver of the pie if the idea goes into production and distribution. Certainly it’s capital that calls the shots: the financial projections attached to the proposed innovations, the expected reductions in costs or increases in revenues, the anticipated return on investment — these are the criteria by which management selects some ideas for development while rejecting others of equal or even superior intrinsic merit.

Fourth, I guess I’m just not persuaded about the incipient potential creativity of the multitude waiting to be unleashed. Certainly there are workers whose ingenuity is thwarted or diverted by the power of money. Productive and inventive workers often find themselves forced either to accede or to resist pressures from finance and marketing, pressures that would have them relax their standards in order to generate more revenue. Resistance to economic innovation often tends toward resistance to innovation generally and a guildlike protectionism among workers. Often the most innovative and energetic workers find themselves lured by jobs in management and marketing, jobs that offer both more control and more pay, jobs that drain creative passion away from innovations that benefit the common and toward those that benefit capital. However, management and marketing people aren’t particularly innovative either. If workers owned the means of production, if knowledge workers reaped the financial benefits of their innovations without having to pay off the investors, would passionate creativity begin to explode through the multitude? I doubt it, but I’d like to give it a try anyway.

It’s possible that H&N have gotten things backward, that instead of leeching away the creative energy of the multitude, capital is really the motivator, the engine, and the agent of innovation. That’s what neoliberalism asserts. Maybe without the propulsive force of capital, humanity would sink entirely into routine and repetitive contentment. The financial markets create money out of nothing through investment and lending; so too perhaps does the entrepreneur and the CEO create creativity out of nothing in order to make those investments and loans pay off for themselves and their companies as well as the capitalists. Only through a continually renewed stream of products does the economy keep growing, do share values go up among speculators, do existing loans get rewritten for ever bigger amounts. This sense that capital rather than biopower is the engine of innovation has been the subject of recent speculation among bloggers about accelerationism and capital unbound. Perhaps, instead of inhibiting the creativity of the multitude, capital is creating that very creativity, the current crisis actually hastening the move toward the singularity of a fully recursive, self-creative posthumanity.

In counterpoint, here’s an excerpt from an essay by Mario Tronti:

What’s missing? A political interpretation: serious, lucid, realistic, non-ideological, non-conventional, non-electoralist. The famous transformations of work are like the equally famous transformations of capitalism: when everything has been said, nothing has changed. The storytellers of the social come and describe the state of affairs: the liquid instead of the solid, what melts into air rather than what sediments on the ground, the whole that must become flexible, the production that becomes molecular, the power that is everywhere and nowhere like the holy spirit, because it is micro and no longer macro, and then the immaterial, the cognitive, the politics that is bios, made to measure for the asocial individual – forget about women and men of flesh and bone who organise themselves for the struggle. With limitless patience we read and listen, careful not to let what we don’t know slip through our fingers.