We are rational; we understand cause and effect; we understand consequences; we understand loosely-coupled distributed self-organizing systems with multiple redundant communication channels.

We are a community, not individuals entirely subject to our employers’ whims. Our personal contacts make up the backbone of the world-wide GeekWeb.

The [...]]]> We are geeks, and we are proud to be.

We are rational; we understand cause and effect; we understand consequences; we understand loosely-coupled distributed self-organizing systems with multiple redundant communication channels.

We are a community, not individuals entirely subject to our employers’ whims. Our personal contacts make up the backbone of the world-wide GeekWeb.

The world we live in could not function without us. It would not exist without our intellectual forebears. We have power, to do or to not do. Together, we have ultimate power. An individual can be corrupted; a community of peers cannot. Our work demands honesty. We demand it of each other. Without a central command structure there is no one to corrupt.

With power comes responsibility. We are smarter than the plutocrats. We know that their agenda will drive the world to hell, and their wealth will not insulate them from the consequences. The world has been there before. The time will come when action is necessary. We will decide how to decide. We will know what to do.

Spread the word.

Clergy members in the New York Metropolitan Area offered a new theory – maybe they’re possessed.  That’s why Thursday afternoon, ministers from churches throughout the area joined New York Communities for [...]]]> Is JP Morgan Chase ignoring homeowners’ pleas for help because they feel they’ve done enough already?  Or that they just don’t care?

Clergy members in the New York Metropolitan Area offered a new theory – maybe they’re possessed.  That’s why Thursday afternoon, ministers from churches throughout the area joined New York Communities for Change to perform an exorcism outside JP Morgan Chase’s headquarters on Park Avenue.

“JPMorgan Chase did you figure in your calculations that the hundreds of thousands of us who have lost our homes did not lose our souls? And did you figure in your calculations that we are rising up like a great storm that will trouble your executive sleep?” asked Reverend Billy, leader of the revivalist activist group The Church of Earthalujah.

Throughout the financial crisis, JP Morgan Chase has often been portrayed as “the good bank”, which is more than just generous….it’s flat-out wrong.  As reported by loan counseling operations in New York to the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, of the 1,027 homeowners with Chase mortgages who came to get help, only 6% now have a permanent modification.  A full 80% of these homeowners who asked for a modification have not received any offer of a modification whatsoever.

Members of New York Communities for Change have been working with Chase victims for several months now, pressuring the bank to put in place a mortgage modification process which produces permanent, affordable, transparent, timely modifications whenever these have a positive net present value.  Last month, the United Federation of Teachers and Transit Workers Union Local 100 stood with NYCC to announce that if Chase doesn’t change it’s ways, the unions will direct their pension systems to pull all investments from Chase (which are estimated to be over $300 million).  Two weeks ago, New York City Council Member Jumaane Williams marched to a Chase branch with dozens of NYCC members to shut down his Chase account (security at the branch tried to tell him the bank was closed.  It was 10 AM on a Thursday).  Thursday, it was the leaders of several prominent Churches that descended on a local Chase branch to shut down their accounts.

Over the next few months, New York Communities for Change Members will keep relentlessly applying the pressure on JP Morgan Chase through their Not The Way Forward campaign.  On March 18th, hundreds of NYCC members will be joined by United Auto Workers and many NYC elected officials to rally outside Chase headquarters. And let’s just say that employees at Chase branches throughout NYC should be prepared for some interesting events throughout the spring.

“The Good Guy Bank” gives its CEO a $17 million bonus and benefits from ridiculous tax breaks while teachers are being fired, homeowners are getting kicked to the curb, and working families foot the bill.  It really does sound demonic.  Or at the very least, criminal.

The arguments that the right and the pro-corporate/”free market” crowd make are in direct conflict with the entire rationale for privatization corporatization of public [...]]]> I put “privatization” in quotes because it is really corporatization, and quite frankly is a much better term for the further theft of taxpayer dollars for the well connected corporate class.

The arguments that the right and the pro-corporate/”free market” crowd make are in direct conflict with the entire rationale for privatization corporatization of public services – regardless of whether it is the school system, toll collecting, motor vehicle inspection (all of which have been done/proposed in New Jersey), or taking it a step further, the fire department. It goes something like this:

Corporations are supposed to maximize profits and their responsibilities lie with their shareholders and increasing shareholder value. So, cutting corners (BP, anyone), using cheaper materials (as we have seen in building houses as compared to decades ago, or even in household goods that break down after a few years) or reducing quality control in order to make more cheaper or do more with less. Even if this isn’t all willful and there are just fewer people doing the job, there is inherent quality control issues from less people doing more. All in the name of maximizing profit and being accountable to shareholder value.

Contrast this with the basic premise of public service – to serve the public. There is an underlying goal of making sure that the public receives the services that it needs as opposed to the services that a private company wants to deliver based on cost and interpretation of the contract, regardless of needs.

Now, let’s take the argument for corporatization of services – it goes something like this:

The public (schools, garbage removal, government) is full of waste and bloat and there are too many layers and too much money being spent to provide services. Therefore, it must be put out to bid, so private companies can compete for these services – usually based on the lowest cost bid (if there is a competitive bidding process – which of course, would at least ensure that an overbudget sweetheart no-bid contract wouldn’t be abused, but that is another issue altogether). So let’s just assume that there is a competitive bidding process for the purpose of this argument. In theory, public employees would be fired, department costs reduced and the cost of “government” would decrease – assuming that the cost of corporatization is even lower than the cost of keeping the services publicly run.

Remembering the old adage, “you can only have two of the following three things: (1) quality, (2) timeliness and (3) inexpensive”, the arguments of corporatization and the “corporate priority manifesto” will ultimately lead one of two things – neither of which is good:

• A lowball bid will get the job, and in the interest of maximizing corporate profits, a subpar effort would generally be undertaken, as “precious corporate resources” wouldn’t want to be wasted on an effort that doesn’t generate as much profit as other initiatives; or
• Bloat, waste, inefficiencies, mismanagement and overruns will increase the cost of the corporatization, or even worse, lead to a stalemate and potential disruption of services as a new agreement is negotiated.

The two ideals can’t mutually coexist. Either a corporation is interested in maximizing its’ profits and shareholder value, or the pro-corporatist argument is a fallacy. And if the interest is in maximizing profits, then doing the work that is in the public interest would only work if that also serves to (1) reduce the overall cost and (2) happens to also meet the goal of maximizing corporate profits and value, in which case it really isn’t serving the public good.

Corporate profits and public service are at odds with each other at the very core as the primary driving force behind these goals. And that’s where the argument for corporatization of public services falls on its face.

There is even the job you had, now paying less, with no benefits.

Much of the post-recession job growth is at low [...]]]> There are good jobs and there are crappy jobs. There are burger-flipping jobs and there are skilled trades and professions. There are jobs that pay well and have benefits and jobs that don’t.

There is even the job you had, now paying less, with no benefits.

Much of the post-recession job growth is at low end. Many “better” jobs not at the low end pay less and offer fewer benefits than they used to. So the middle class continues to fall. The “economic divide” — the gap between the top few percent and the rest of us — continues to accelerate, pushed by the recent continuation of tax cuts for the wealthy, stock bubble-pumping from the Fed, and ongoing attacks on labor. And now, in particular by “austerity” budgets in the states and the pullback of stimulus and other programs from the federal government.

If you are desperate you’ll take any job, and the “austerity” idea — cutting taxes for the rich and using the resulting deficits to force cuts in unemployment, services, things government does for We, the People — forces people to be desperate enough to do just that. At the same time, it is cutting the number of jobs and the possibility that the economy will ever create more.

Why Crappy Jobs? Plutocracy and Austerity

Why isn’t the economy rebounding and producing lots of good jobs? The answer has two parts: plutocracy and austerity. Plutocracy forces the money and power to the top, and that power forces austerity measures on us to remove even more money and power from the rest.

Plutocracy: Fundamental changes brought in by the Reagan Revolution have come home to roost, shifting almost all of our economy’s income growth to a few at the top, while pitting working people around the world against each other. The forced decline of labor unions has left people on their own against giant corporations.

This video shows what it is like to negotiate on your own, up against companies with billions in resources:

Austerity: The second part of the crappy-jobs, slow-growth equation is austerity. Tax cuts for the wealthy have resulted in huge budget deficits, defunding government’s power to protect regular people. The plutocracy uses these deficits as an excuse to force budget cuts, “spending down” our infrastructure by deferring maintenance and modernization, cutting back on education, cutting back on basic scientific research and cutting back in many other areas thereby reducing our economic competitiveness. But they’re doing fine today, so they don’t care about how this hurts the rest of us tomorrow.

Austerity cuts back economic growth. This week a Goldman Sachs report says that the proposed budget cuts passed by the House shave a couple percent off of economic growth. Goldman Sachs Says GOP Budget Plan Will Hurt Economy

A Goldman Sachs economist has warned that the $60 billion package of spending cuts proposed by the Republicans to counter President Obama’s proposal could slow economic growth.

The cutbacks will also hurt employment. Center for American Progress this week, in Cuts In House GOP’s Continuing Resolution Could Drive The Unemployment Rate Up One Full Point,

Earlier this month, the Economic Policy Institute released a report finding that the $100 billion in discretionary spending cuts that the House GOP passed last weekend would result in the loss of nearly one million jobs. “Cuts of this magnitude will undermine gross domestic product performance at a time when the economy is seeing anemic post-recession growth,” wrote EPI’s Rebecca Theiss.

Another report this week shows how state and local cuts are also shaving growth. And who can be surprised by that? When you lay off thousands of teachers and other government workers, this causes a ripple effect to grocery, clothing and other stores. It causes even more foreclosures. AP: State spending cuts slow US economic growth in Q4,

The government’s new estimate for the October-December quarter illustrates how growing state budget crises could hold back the economic recovery.

The Commerce Department reported Friday that economic growth increased at an annual rate of 2.8 percent in the final quarter of last year. That was down from the initial estimate of 3.2 percent.

. . . State and local governments, wrestling with budget shortfalls, cut spending at a 2.4 percent pace. That was much deeper than the 0.9 percent annualized cut first estimated and was the most since the start of 2010.

The Effect On People

This “austerity” craze — cutting taxes for the rich to force cuts in the things government does for We, the People — is threatening to destroy even the small amount of job creation we are getting. And what is the human effect?

A report from the Coalition on Human Needs titled, A Better Budget for All: Saving Our Economy and Helping Those in Need shows that millions of Americans would suffer from the proposed budget cuts:

At a time when 14 million people are out of work, the House approach to the federal budget fails those who are struggling most, according to a new report by the Coalition on Human Needs for the SAVE for All campaign.

The report draws a sharp contrast between the president’s budget for next fiscal year and the House plan for the remainder of this year, although it also notes serious concerns with elements of the president’s budget. It shows how the proposed budget cuts would both harm individuals and damage the country’s fragile economic recovery. The House plan includes the largest cuts, on an annualized basis, in domestic appropriations funding in history.

An Expanding Economy Fixes This

Cutbacks shrink the economy. And expanding economy provides good jobs with good pay and benefits and fixes budget deficits. We want an expanding economy for We, the People, not tax cuts for the rich and cutbacks on the things government does for We, the People. Tax cuts and austerity provide an opportunity for a few to cash out and take off, but does not provide for the rest of us.

March 10 Summit on Jobs and America’s Future

On March 10, 2011, the Summit on Jobs and America’s Future will bring together leaders and activists who understand that America faces a jobs crisis – and who are committed to building a political movement for sustainable economic growth, dynamic job creation, and a revival of the American economy.

Free. $15 with lunch. Register here.

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.

Sign up here for the CAF daily summary.

I asked Lynda Hiller if she felt generally optimistic or pessimistic. She was quiet for a moment, then said: “I don’t think things are going to get any better. I think we’re going to hit rock bottom. The big shots are in charge, and they just don’t give a darn about [...]]]> which ends like this

I asked Lynda Hiller if she felt generally optimistic or pessimistic. She was quiet for a moment, then said: “I don’t think things are going to get any better. I think we’re going to hit rock bottom. The big shots are in charge, and they just don’t give a darn about the little person.”

Bob Herbert has a column titled Absorbing the Pain. He attended a small gathering in North Philadelphia organized by Working America, an effort of the AFL-CIO. The people gathered were not union members, simply those coming together to share the pain.

Things are bad in America. Herbert’s column reminds us how bad:

after telling us the specifics of some of the people at that meeting, he offers four powerful paragraphs, too much to quote here without exceeding fair use, then concludes with the words with which I began.

In the first of these four Herbert reminds us that the people around that table in Philadelphia do not represent extraordinary cases, and that they sound as if they came from a nation in a deep depression.

He says one benefit of the turmoil in Wisconsin and elsewhere is that it puts a

spotlight that is being thrown on the contemptuous attitude of the corporate elite and their handmaidens in government toward ordinary working Americans: police officers and firefighters, teachers, truck drivers, janitors, health care aides, and so on. These are the people who do the daily grunt work of America. How dare we treat them with contempt.

Let me reflect on this point for a moment. In theory we believe in the dignity of work. That is part of the reasoning of some for their opposition to welfare. And yet, are not our tax breaks for the wealthy and for corporations and our refusal to impose appropriate fines for illegal and destructive corporate behavior a form of welfare for the corporations and the rich? If the actions we do not sanction are destructive of the possibility of work for the ordinary people do not we demean the dignity of the work they had been doing? Or is it our attitude going to be that only the work of some matters and to hell with the rest of us?

Herbert tells us that this not just about the right of public workers to be in unions:

As important as that issue is, it’s just one skirmish in what’s shaping up as a long, bitter campaign to keep ordinary workers, whether union members or not, from being completely overwhelmed by the forces of unrestrained greed in this society.

The predators at the top, billionaires and millionaires, are pitting ordinary workers against one another. So we’re left with the bizarre situation of unionized workers with a pension being resented by nonunion workers without one. The swells are in the background, having a good laugh.

That laugh sounds familiar to this student of history. It reminds me of the powerful who pitted poor whites against blacks in the South and elsewhere in order to maintain power over both, to depress the wages of both while maximizing their own profits. It is the cackle of those folks at the notion they should care about working conditions that maim and murder as if the broken lives and families should somehow matter more than their ability to consume conspicuously, to buy more expensive toys, to act as if their shit didn’t stink.

Too many who should know better have allied themselves with the wealthy and the powerful against the rest of us – they may not be part of the elite but they hope to benefit personally from the work they do that is destructive of hope to millions. We find such folks in Congress and state legislatures, in governor’s mansions and in positions supposed to regulate to protect all of us. We find far too many in the organs of media that should be exposing the corruption and greed and telling us truth rather than seeking to indoctrinate us on behalf of their puppetmasters.

Herbert writes about ordinary, hard-working people. The rhetoric that the wealthy and powerful like the Koch brothers have funded and promoted is about to hit the middle class. It is not only teachers like me, and government workers of all stripes in states with governors like that idiot in Wisconsin. By this time next week it may well be most of the federal civilian work force.

We live in the DC Metro area. At the time of the last shutdown, the Congress eventually provided the federal workforce with back pay for the time workers were locked out. That was a total of several weeks. This time? It is not clear that the Republicans in House would offer any back pay to federal workers.

Our household is not unique. As a teacher my pay this year has been cut more than 10%. My federal employee wife makes more than I do. Were we to go a month without her income, we might well be in danger of losing our home of 27 years: we have no reserves.

But we are better off than many: think of the ordinary folks working in coffee shops living on tips who will have no customers if the government shuts down. Even if the government workers get back pay after the shutdown ends, they have lost that income forever.

This country is at serious risk. Our GINI coefficient, indicating our economic inequality, is going up even as we sit here. The stock market may have recovered, but people still lack jobs, and many jobs that exist or are being created at a snail’s pace pay less with fewer benefits than those that were lost. Wealth continues to be shifted into the pockets of those who already have too much.

We cannot afford our military-industrial-congressional complex. That is how Eisenhower wanted to describe it.

Our endeavors in Afghanistan are not only killing and destroying lives, of Afghans far more than of Americans, it is using up scarce funds that are desperately needed to help the American people.

Our tax policies are destroying what is left of the ability of the government to intervene on behalf of those in or approaching desperation.

It is early morning on a Saturday. Today’s New York Times contains yet another must read from Bob Herbert. I read it. I wrote about it, and more.

And now? Today there are demonstrations all around the nation.

Today we have an opportunity to try to take back our nation.

Today we should remind ourselves that we need to be vigilant and active, to ensure that our government is of the people, by the people, and for the people, not – as I wrote in this piece for CNN a government of the corporations, by the already powerful, for the wealthy.

If it is not already too late.

So, here’s a frame. Over at AlterNet, I have a feature up arguing that labor markets only work when workers can bargain collectively. As it stands, [...]]]> Like all progressives, we obsess on the quest for good ‘framing’ quite a bit around here (when I lived in DC, even the cabbies and doormen were reading Lakoff).

So, here’s a frame. Over at AlterNet, I have a feature up arguing that labor markets only work when workers can bargain collectively. As it stands, with private-sector union density in the U.S. hovering at just 7 percent, the wages of many, many workers in this country represent a market failure of significant proportions.

By all means, read the whole thing for some lefty-bomb-throwing goodness, but for our purposes, here is the relevant passage (sorry for the long excerpt):

In economic terms, the wages of many Americans working in the private sector represent a “market failure” of massive proportions. Even the most devout of free-marketeers — economists like Alan Greenspan and the late Milton Friedman — agree that it’s appropriate and necessary for government to intervene in the case of those failures (they believe it’s the only time such “meddling” is appropriate). But the corporate Right, which claims to have an almost religious reverence for the power of “free” and functional markets, has gotten fat off of this particular market failure, and it’s dead-set on continuing to game the system for its own enrichment.

The market does work pretty well for Americans with advanced degrees or specialized skills that allow them to command an income that’s as high as the market for their scarce talents will bear. There are also people with more common skills who have the scratch (and/or connections) and fortitude to establish their own businesses — think George W. Bush or a really great mechanic who owns his or her own shop.

But that leaves a lot of people; about 80 percent of working America are hourly workers, “wage slaves” in the traditional sense. There’s no doubt that their salaries are heavily influenced by the laws of supply and demand. We saw that clearly in the latter half of the 1990s, when, under Bill Clinton, the Fed allowed the economy to grow at a fast clip, unemployment dropped below 4 percent, and for a brief period, a three-decade spiral in inequality was reversed as wages grew for people in every income bracket.

But a common fallacy is that wages are determined by market forces. They’re not, for a variety of reasons that require more explanation than space permits. I’ll focus on two: what economists call “information asymmetries” and coercion. Both are anathema to a functional free market, and both exist today, in abundance, in the American workplace.

To understand these failures of the free market, one has to go back, briefly, to basic economic theory. In order for a free market transaction to work, both the buyer and the seller need to have a good grasp of what the product being sold — in this case, people’s sweat — is worth elsewhere, who else is buying and selling, etc. In other words, they have to have more or less equal access to information. There can be no misrepresentation by either the buyer or the seller in a free market transaction. And both parties have to enter into the transaction freely, without being coerced; neither side can exercise power or undue influence over the other, whether implicitly or explicitly, through threats or other means.

Now let’s look at how that theoretical construct plays out in the real world of the American workplace. When an individual worker negotiates a price for his time, effort and dedication with any business bigger than a mom-and-pop operation, there’s quite a bit of explicit coercion (much of it in violation of our labor laws), which I’ll get to shortly. But there’s always an element of inherent coercion when an individual negotiates with a company alone, because of the power differential: a company that’s shorthanded by one person will continue to function, while a person without a job is up a creek with no paddle, unable to put a roof over her head or food on the table.

The “information asymmetries” in such a negotiation are immense — they’re actually more like process asymmetries. Companies spend millions of dollars on human resource experts, consultants, labor lawyers, etc., and they know both the conditions of the market and the ins and outs of the labor laws in intimate detail. While working people with rarified skills are often members of trade associations or guilds, read trade journals and have a pretty good sense of what the market will bear, many low- and semi-skilled workers don’t know their rights under the labor laws, don’t know how to assert them and (rightfully) fear reprisals when they do. They often have little knowledge of the financial health — or illness, as the case may be — of the company to which they’re applying for a job, how profitable it is, how much similar workers in other regions or firms earn, etc.

For the majority of Americans who lack scarce talents or a high level of education, negotiating a price for one’s time with a firm on an individual basis is anything but a free market transaction. That’s where collective bargaining comes in — when workers bargain as a group, they do so on a level playing field with employers, and the resulting wages (and benefits) are as high as the market can bear, but no higher.

Unions, like corporations, have a great deal of information about the market. They know how a firm is doing, how profitable it is and where it is relative to the larger industry in which it operates. They know what deals workers at other plants have negotiated. They have attorneys who are just as familiar with the American labor laws as their counterparts in management.

And while an individual has very little leverage in negotiations — again, most companies can do with one less worker — collectively, an entire work force has the ability to shut down or at least slow down a company’s operations if management chooses not to negotiate in good faith (as is often the case).

It’s not difficult to quantify the difference between what most hourly employees take home and what the free market would dictate. Economists Lawrence Mishel and Matthew Walters estimate the “union wage premium” — the amount of additional pay a unionized worker receives compared with a similar worker who isn’t a member of a union — at around 20 percent (that’s in keeping with other studies, using different methodologies, which put the premium in a range between 15 and 25 percent). If one includes benefits — health care, paid vacations, etc. — union members make almost 30 percent more than their nonunion counterparts.

Another way of looking at it is this: Millions of American families are scraping by on below-market wages, and if that weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be such a large group of American families among the “working poor.” In economic theory, it’s a given that a producer can’t sell his or her wares below the cost of production. The equivalent to the cost of producing a gizmo, when we’re talking about the sale of someone’s working hours, is the cost of providing basic necessities — nutritious food, safe housing and decent medical care. These are out of reach for the almost three million American families who work full-time and live beneath the poverty level. According to the Working Poor Families Project, half of the working poor have no health insurance.

So, I’m turning the free market argument around and using it against the union-busters. What do you think?

“Yeah, now she wants her f——g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a—— for f——g $250 a [...]]]> Remember the Enron recording where two traders were joking about how they crewed the people of California and then “Grandma Millie” was trying to get her money back?

“Yeah, now she wants her f——g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a—— for f——g $250 a megawatt hour.”

Every time I hear a quote from someone resenting what a great deal the public employees unions have I remember that quote. It reminds me of who we are not hearing from in this prearranged crisis in Wisconsin.  We are not hearing the voices of the people who set up the financial crisis in the state.

Today Ian Murphy, editor of the Buffalo Beast, called Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, pretending to be billionaire industrialist and secretive conservative political activist David Koch. Koch (pronounced “coke”) is one of the big money people behind Walker. Walker’s office admits the call is real and for a brief period of time the media will be forced to move the focus of the story from unions and their supporters fighting Walker and conservatives.

In the call we got to hear how Walker sounds when he talks to big money. Now I’d love to hear how rich people like Koch actual talk to each other about these protests.  Are they laughing at everyone? Do they chuckle when the media miss their role in this? Do they smirk watching tea partiers play their role? There will be a lot of press calling Walker’s office about the Fake Koch call, but how many will call the Real Kochs? Even if some do, Koch will be on guard.

I want to hear more unguarded conversations like this, to hear the real emotional tone behind the words. Radio is a powerful medium because while it might take listeners some time to process the meanings of the words, the tone and emotional context behind the words is deduced almost immediately. Video can also give us lots of information, as anyone who has watched Lie To Me can attest to; but it requires more focus than listening, which can slip into people’s mind almost everywhere they go.

Why do I want more people to hear how the rich say things? Because I’d like to activate certain groups of people on an emotional level. Emotions, like anger, need to be directed at the right entities. As Silivo said to Tony in the Sopranos, “Our true enemy has yet to reveal himself”.

If the Tea Party people are directing their anger and resentment at the public union employees that means they are not mad at the rich corporate persons who are actually behind making their life less rich. I suppose it is easier to be mad at someone who has a slightly better life than you than with someone who has a wildly better life than you. But if you heard these rich people laughing at you as they talk about their schemes to keep beating you down I would think that even many tea partiers would get upset.

It’s too bad that we won’t hear the conversations of people who were responsible for driving states into deficits via unproductive corporate tax breaks. Wouldn’t you love to hear the conversations of the people responsible for the financial meltdown?  Do they joke about our inability to prosecute them for their economic treason? Do they laugh as the media moves on to the crisis of the day without looking for the true cause of people’s pain? Do they breath a sigh of contented relief as we turn on each other?  What would it sound like?

If we heard them in all their cackling glory or insensitive obliviousness perhaps we all would want to take the fight to them. Not physically, of course, but financially.  The UK Uncut movement has been showing us the way. One of the funniest and most profound movies of the eighties has a quote that I think applies here. In Trading Places Eddie Murphy’s Bill Ray Valentine finds Dan Aykroyd’s Louis Winthorpe III character cleaning a gun and explains why that is a spectacularly bad idea.

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