NaBloPoMo

TGF is a bit of a data geek and she’s turning me into a bit of a data geek. This is not a bad thing necessarily.

So, that job I hate? Yeah…according to figures from the Census Bureau for 2010, and according to this handy calculator based on those figures, it puts me in the top 6% of earners in the United States.

How is that even possible? Given the imbalance in weath distribution in this country and given the fact that my skills are of no real, practical value (seriously, in a survival economy knowing how plumbing works rates a lot higher than understanding website Information Architecture), what does that say in my little microcosm about how things are for most people in the U.S. ?

These figures stun and scare me and I don’t know what do to about them. Impoverishing myself won’t help the masses, and it’s become abudantly clear after nearly 7 months in the Fed that change from the inside is not possible.

Something’s got to give, though. I just don’t know what.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I did a random act of kindness for a stranger this evening.   I found someone’s Federal ID badge, her contracting company ID badge, and authorization card to move equipment around her agency, and an RSA key, the kind that auto generates a really long random number so you can securely login to a protected network.

After going around a couple of times with the guy on the other end of the “Please call if found” number about how I didn’t think the Post Office would be willing to deliver all of this stuff, he finally agreed to meet me on the corner outside the building the ID granted access to.  It was a nice fall day and I needed the walk.  Plus, with the time change this weekend it’s probably the last time I’ll walk out of my office in the daylight for a while.

All this is by way of saying, I realize this is a crappy entry but sometimes life intervenes.

Fascinated as I was with the 1960s when I was younger I spent the better part of my college years studying social change movements. From the Civil Rights movement to the anti-Vietnam War movement, these schools of thought and marches and gatherings caused significant upheaval. While they weren’t as born of impulse or altruism and while they didn’t leave as big a mark on American culture as their proponents would have us believe, these movements did for better or worse make change. They also made it seem in retrospect as if there wasn’t much left for future generations to change. This is part of what makes looking at the Occupy movements happening in the U.S. and around the globe so hard for me to get my head around.

First, let’s talk about Occupy as a banner heading. I get it. The protestors are using the oldest confrontation tactic in the book: show up and don’t go away. But I have a real philosophical problem with the concept of “occupation” as a viable populist movement. Occupation implies that those being occupied are the rightful owners or dwellers or possessors of what is being occupied. Indeed, one commentator I heard on MSNBC several weeks ago remarked that Wall Street is from a Native American perspective already occupied. While I think this complaint stretches too far back too specifically into history to be legitimate as stated it does make a valid point about how the widening wealth gap in America disproportionately affects Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities. It also sharpens the focus on part of the problem I have with the Occupy movement.

Occupation as the name for what the philosophy, rather than the execution, of this movement legitimizes the idea that the bankers, hedge fund traders, and other denizens of the financial world who are largely the movement’s targets, have a right to act the way they’re acting. In fact, this movement should be stressing the opposite idea: that these bankers, traders, and financial manipulators actually owe the American people a public service debt. Propublica has a handy list of firms who took and returned bail out money. Sort it by the “Revenue to Gov’t” column to find out which firms gave money back.

Of the 926 firms that took bail out money from the U.S. Treasury 623 of them have paid zero dollars back. Admittedly, not all of the firms listed are in the financial sector (19 are classified as “State Housing Orgs” and 4 are classified in the “auto company” category), and some firms, like Bank of America, are listed twice: once as a bank and once as a mortgage servicer. When you eliminate the car companies and the state housing funds, which were set up to provide innovation to states hardest hit by the housing value crash you’re left with a staggering figure: 74%

Seventy-four percent of the companies that took U.S. taxpayers’ money to prop up their businesses or help inject life into the U.S. economy have paid back not one red cent. And since the U.S. economy is really no better off than it was when the bail out money was paid out to those firms it’s clear that the implied mandate of those loans wasn’t fulfilled, unless, of course, you count paying out millions of dollars in bonuses to investment bank staff.

Based on the interest free use of taxpayer money doesn’t logic dictate that those occupying Wall Street aren’t really usurpers but are instead the rightful owners of those firms’ outputs and profits?

It seems like a simplistic take but it’s also an approach that in all the coverage I’ve read of the Occupy movement, both progressive and conservative, no one has seemed to bring up.

The other thing that makes it so hard for me to get my head around the Occupy movement is not the fact that they don’t have a coherent set of goals and demands. I kind of like the fact that the movement is inchoate even a month later. No, what makes it so hard for me to get my head around Occupy is that it’s happening in my adult life.

I look at the movement, one I don’t have the leeway to participate in because for better or worse I am employed full time (and yes, I realize even as much as I hate my job how brilliantly lucky this makes me at this point), and I have to wonder if this is how my grandmother felt looking at the anti-Vietnam War protests on TV and in the streets. She was 58 in 1968, still working full-time, with the last one just about to leave the nest. I know she didn’t support the war; we talked about it years later when I was in college. And I know she wasn’t stupid so she understood both the deeper political reasons why U.S. involvement in Vietnam was a bad idea as much as she understood the often more intimately personal reasonsfor opposing the war. But did she feel this same sense of treading water, of anticipation for something she could do or some way she could get involved that I do with Occupy? Likely not. My grandmother was of her time in much the same way I’m of mine.

Since I’m not in a position to go camp in McPherson Square, and since I don’t agree with everything the Occupy seems to want, the only thing I can do is promote some of the events and activities I think make sense.

Bank Transfer Day or the Move Your Money Project aren’t an “official” Occupy events. There are no official Occupy events per se. At least, I don’t think there are, but as a grassroots activity this one I like.

The folks promoting Bank Transfer Day and Move Your Money urge people to take their money out of large financial institutions like Bank of America, Chase, and Citibank and deposit it in local or regional banks or in credit unions. To me this is the ultimate power of capitalism at its best: the consumer doesn’t like the way these large banks are doing business so the consumer is going to take her business elsewhere.

To me Bank Transfer Day and Move Your Money are little bit like Buy Nothing Day. They force me to think about the companies with which I am doing business.

Human communication has many modes. Some communication is perfunctory and dictated by custom. A perfect example is saying thank you if someone holds a door for you. Some communication is transactional; after all, you can’t get your order at McDonald’s if you don’t tell the cashier what food you want. Not all communication is 100% honest and it’s two of those less than 100% honest modes of communication I want to look at today: threats and lies.

Threats are more common in certain times in our lives, like childhood, than they are in other times. Threats are more common for people in certain professions, like prison guard or police officer or bartender, to be subjected or witness to than they are for people who work in other professions. They’re also more common for people who live certain lifestyles or associate with people who engage in illicit activities. Generally, if you’re drunk a lot or you spend a lot of time around criminals, you’ve probably witnessed them being made or had quite a few threats directed your way.

Lies, in contrast, are more common throughout our lives. Most of us are told as we grow up that we should not tell lies. This prohibition is often couched in moral terms; we’re told it’s wrong to lie. We’re told it’s also not smart to lie; dishonesty in one area of your life impugns your reputation in all areas of your life. Yet, adult life would not function without small lies (“Why yes, I had a lovely time!” “No, really, the meat loaf wasn’t too dry.”) and sometimes, unfortunately, it’s necessary to tell bigger lies in situations where telling the truth would cause trouble.

What threats and lies have in common is that in order to be effective they each need to be delivered in a particlar manner that makes the best use of human psychology and perception.

Non-specific threats like “I’m gonna mess you up!” are the type usually made by middle-school bullies or really drunk bar patrons. They are totally ineffective unless acted upon virtually immediately in a Nordic berserker fashion.

n order for threats to be effective they need to be direct and specific and they need to be delivered in a way that convinces the person you’re threatening that you will back them up.

An ineffective threat sounds something like this: Man, I’m gonna fuck you up!

An effective one sounds more like this: Step back from the bars or I’ll mace you in the face.

By giving the person being threatened something specific on which to focus you as the person making the threat play upon human psychology and our stunning aptitude at keying in on details and imagining the worst.

Specific lies packed with detail, on the other hand, are the kind told either by amateurs or by people lie one-on-one professionally. That one-on-one distinction is important as it draws a fine line between con artists, who create whole story lines and scenarios designed usually to swindle an individual out of a sum of money or a valuable item, and politicians, who lie to large groups of people routinely and in public. Politicians, in fact, demonstrate the most effective kinds of lies virtually every time they speak.

The best lies are those that contain just enough detail and are told with just enough sincerity to be believable.

An ineffective lie goes something like this: Employee X is having an emergency root canal. This is the lie that my boss told his boss when asked why I was being allowed telework off schedule for one day last week. This lie is too specific in that it creates too high a need for supporting behavior: is my jaw swollen when I show up the next day? am I only chewing on one side of my mouth? when am I going back for the follow-up work?

This lie sits in direct contrast with the lie I told my boss in order to get him to let me telework off schedule last week: I’m having some pain in one of my back teeth and they’re squeezing me in at the dentist. I’m not sure how long it’s going to take, maybe an hour, maybe a little bit more since they’re squeezing me in. I’ll keep you posted.

The lie I told is one of those that needed telling because telling my boss that my tooth hurt and I needed to go back to my orthodontist two weeks after getting my braces removed caused me less trouble than telling him I had a job interview scheduled for the middle of the morning. My lie had just enough detail – they were squeezing me in at the dentist’s office – backed by circumstance – I did just get my braces off two weeks ago – to let my boss fill in the blanks. He wanted to believe me because the details around my lie made the lie itself plausible enough to be true.

Communication is more art than science and a lot more can be said with silence than we are normally lead to believe. But that’s a whole different essay.

This experiment comes to you courtesy Cat Cora and the Hilary for President website circa March 2008. Since I’ve got this box of Egg Replacer, which only comes in 16oz which is a lot of eggs replaced when it’s 1 1/2 tsps powder for every 1 egg, I thought I’d try a vegan adaptation of this simple cookie.

Snickerdoodles are a soft, cinnamon and sugar cookie of uncertain original. Some claim the word itself is a corruption of the German schneckennudeln (meaning “snail noodles”) while others suggest a corruption of the Dutch snekrad (meaning “snail”). Why snails would be involved with these cookies I’ll never know as they are neither snail shaped nor slow to bake.

Another site lists the first appearance of this same basic recipe as 1902. Still another puts it at 1908 with no more certainty about the cookie’s origins. Regardless of when this cookie entered the American baking landscape, it’s simple to make and a delight for most to eat.

The Photos

The Verdict

While still tasty, the vegan version of these cookies isn’t even vaguely as soft as the version with butter and egg. Perhaps with the addition of some additional liquid, water or possibly a teaspoon of vegetable oil, they could be.

The Recipe

Cat Cora’s Snickerdoodle Cookies

Makes 2 dozen cookies
The Dough
1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1 1/4 cup flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

The Topping
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon

Directions

1. Pre-heat oven to 400 degF.
2. Cream butter.
3. Add sugar and egg. Mix thoroughly.
4. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt.  Stir into butter, sugar and egg mixture.
5. Form dough into balls the size of walnuts.  Roll in sugar and cinnamon mixture.
6. Place on ungreased cookie sheet two inches apart.
7. Bake 8-10 minutes.