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If you have the means (Spotify), please play this track, then read on: Noah And The Whale – Instrumental I

There was a near full moon and it was dark when I set off to climb the hill this morning. Here are some photos of the view nearer the top. Imagine seeing this (next time I’ll take a better camera, sorry) and listening to that tune. It does something incredible to my chest .. such.. almost longing. Incredible.

Here’s a summary of the Occupy declaration, as drafted by Lawrence Lessig (the same guy behind Creative Commons).

1. Elimination of the Corporate State
2. Overturning the “Citizens United” Case
3. Elimination of All Private Benefits to Public Servants
4. Term Limits
5. A Fair Tax Code
6. Healthcare for All
7. Protection of the Planet
8. Debt Reduction
9. Jobs for All
10. Student Loan Debt Relief and Refinancing
11. Ending Perpetual War for Profit
12. Emergency Reform of Public Education
13. End Outsourcing and Currency Manipulation
14. Banking and Securities Reform
15. Foreclosure Moratorium
16. Ending the Fed
17. Ending the Electoral College and Enactment of Uniform Federal Election Rules
18. Ending the War in Afghanistan and Care of Veterans
19. No Censorship of the Internet
20. Reinstitution of Civil Rights

The declaration in full at: http://www.the-99-declaration.org/read-the-99-declaration/

And all the while on a sidewalk over the abyss. There are islands of time when things seem stable. Nothing much happens but the rounds of the week. Later the islands break apart. When enough time has passed, no one now alive will still be here; everyone will be different. Then it will be the stories that will link the generations, history and DNA, long chains of the simplest bits—guanine, adenine, cytosine, thymine—love, hope, fear, selfishness—all recombining again and again, until a miracle happens and the organism springs forth!

Meanwhile humanity is exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity for our species, badly damaging the biosphere. Neoclassical economics cannot cope with this situation, and indeed, with its falsely exteriorized costs, was designed in part to disguise it. If the Earth were to suffer a catastrophic anthropogenic extinction event over the next ten years, which it will, American business would continue to focus on its quarterly profit and loss. There is no economic mechanism for dealing with catastrophe. And yet government and the scientific community are not tackling this situation either, indeed both have consented to be run by neoclassical economics, an obvious pseudoscience. We might as well agree to be governed by astrologers. Everyone knows this is the situation, and yet no one does anything about it. They don’t try to instigate the saving of the biosphere, they don’t even call for certain kinds of mitigation projects. They just wait and see what comes in. It is a ridiculously passive position.

Why such passivity, you ask? Because NSF is chicken! It’s a chicken with its smart little head stuck in the sand like an ostrich! It’s a chicken ostrich (fix). It’s afraid to take on Congress, it’s afraid to take on business, it’s afraid to take on the American people. Free market fundamentalists are dragging us back to some dismal feudal eternity and destroying everything in the process, and yet we have the technological means to feed everyone, house everyone, clothe everyone, doctor everyone, educate everyone—the ability to end suffering and want as well as ecological collapse is right here at hand, and yet NSF continues to dole out its little grants, fiddling while Rome burns!!!

Well whatever nothing to be done about it, I’m sure you’re thinking poor Frank Vanderwal has spent a year in the swamp and has gone crazy as a result, and that is true but what I’m saying is still right, the world is in big trouble and NSF is one of the few organizations on Earth that could actually help get it out of trouble, and yet it’s not. It should be charting worldwide scientific policy and forcing certain kinds of climate mitigation and biosphere management, insisting on them as emergency necessities, it should be working Congress like the fucking NRA to get the budget it deserves, which is a much bigger budget, as big as the Pentagon’s, really those two budgets should be reversed to get them to their proper level of funding, but none of it is happening or will happen, and that is why I’m not coming back and no one in his right mind would come back either

Another great chunk from Forty Signs of Rain, by Kim Stanley Robinson.

“The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.”

Anna said, “I wonder how they define surplus value.”

“Profit,” Frank said.

Edgardo shook his head. “You can cook the books and get rid of profit, but the surplus value, the value created beyond the pay for the labor, is still there.”
Anna said, “There was a page in here that said the average American worker puts in 1,950 hours a year. I thought that was questionable too, that’s forty hours a week for about forty-nine weeks.”

“Three weeks of vacation a year,” Frank pointed out. “Pretty normal.”

“Yeah, but that’s the average? What about all the part-time workers?”

“There must be an equivalent number of people who work overtime.”

“Can that be true? I thought overtime was a thing of the past.”

“You work overtime.”

“Yeah but I don’t get paid for it.”

The men laughed at her.

“They should have used the median,” she said. “The average is a skewed measure of central tendency. Anyway, that’s…” Anna could do calculations in her head. “Sixty-four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars a year, generated by the average worker in surplus value. If you can believe these figures.”
“What’s the average income?” Edgardo asked. “Thirty thousand?”

“Maybe less,” Frank said.

“We don’t have any idea,” Anna objected.

“Call it thirty, and what’s the average taxes paid?”

“About ten? Or is it less?”

Edgardo said, “Call it ten. So let’s see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two thirds, and gives you one third, and you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it takes to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party.” He grinned at Frank and Anna. “How stupid is that?”
Anna shook her head. “People don’t see it that way.”

“But here are the statistics!”

“People don’t usually put them together like that. Besides, you made half of them up.”

“They’re close enough for people to get the idea! But they are not taught to think! In fact they’re taught not to think. And they are stupid to begin with.”
Even Frank was not willing to go this far. “It’s a matter of what you can see,” he suggested. “You see your boss, you see your paycheck, it’s given to you. You have it. Then you’re forced to give some of it to the government. You never know about the surplus value you’ve created, because it was disappeared in the first place. Cooked in the books.”

“But the rich are all over the news! Everyone can see they have more than they have earned, because no one earns that much.”

If the scientific community were to propose a platform of political goals based on scientific principles, how would it be formulated, and what would the platform say?

It would help to have a macro-goal. Two present themselves:

1) Some form of the “Greatest good for the greatest number” rubric.
Without implying in any way that this “greatest good” could include or justify any planned or accepted structural or permanent disadvantaging of any minority of any size. As should be clear in the wording of the rubric, the greatest number is of course one hundred percent, including also the generations to come.

2) Even in the context of any religious or humanistic anthropocentrism, the life of our species depends on the rest of Earth’s biosphere. Even the utilitarian view of nature as something distinct and subservient to humanity must grant the biosphere the status of a diffused expression and aspect of our bodies. Interdependence of all the components of biosphere (including humanity) is undeniable. An observable, confirmable fact (breathing).

This leads us to the detail of the “Contract with Our Children”

1. Protection of the biosphere: sustainable uses; clean technologies; carbon balance; climate homeostasis.

2. Protection of human welfare: universal housing, clothing, shelter, clean water, health care, education, reproductive rights.

3. Full employment: Current economy defines 5.4% unemployment as optimum for desired “wage-pressure balance,” treating labor (people) as a commodity and using a supply/demand pricing model. Five percent in U.S.A. = approx. fifteen million people. At the same time there is important work not being done.

If government-insured full employment reduced “wage pressure,” forcing a rise in minimum wages from the private sector, this would help pull millions out of poverty, decrease their government dependence and social service costs, and inject and cycle their larger incomes back into the economy.

4. Individual ownership of the majority of the surplus value of one’s labor. 

People create by their work an economic value beyond what it costs to pay them and provide their means of production. This averages $66,000 per year for American workers, a surplus now legally belonging to owners/stockholders.

American workers therefore receive between a fifth and a third of the actual value of their work. The rest goes to owners.

A minimum share of 51% of the surplus value of one’s work should be returned to one, this value to be measured by objective and transparent accounting as defined by law.

3. and 4. combined would tend to promote the greatest good for the greatest number, by distributing the wealth more equitably among those who have created it.

5. Reduction of military spending

Match U.S. military expenditures to the average of other nations; this would halve the military budget, freeing over two hundred billion dollars a year.

More generally, all national militaries should be integrated in an international agreement upholding nonviolent conflict resolution. (Using black helicopters of course.)

Disproportionate size of U.S. military and arms industry a waste of resources. Doubling since September 11, 2001 resembles panic response or attempt at global hegemony. Results undermine goals outlined in the foundational axioms.

6. Population stabilization

Human population stabilized at some level to be determined by carrying capacity studies and foundational axioms. Best results here so far have resulted from increase in women’s rights and education, also a goal in itself, thus a powerful positive feedback loop with chance for results within a single generation.

Context/ultimate goal: Permaculture

A scientifically informed government should lead the way in the invention of a culture which is sustainable perpetually.

If reproductive success is defined as life’s goal, as it is in evolutionary theory, then stealing from descendants is maladaptive.

Protection of the environment, therefore, along with restoration of landscapes and biodiversity, should become one of the principal goals of the economy. Government must lead the way in investigating potential climate-altering strategies to mitigate current problems and eventually establish a balance that can be maintained in perpetuity.