When I read third tier right wing blogs I have a lot of trouble figuring out what they are talking about. I was reading this guy’s feeling that the US Navy should have sunk a few speed boats in the straight of Hormuz so we don’t look like pussies when I stumbled across this graphic, which outlines the evil plan of the left to revive socialism:

So, Clinton wins (barely) in NH, splitting the early primaries. The good news is that super tuesday will be wide open and a lot of Americans will actually get some input on who will be the next president. California in particular will be a critical state to win on February 5th.

I like Obama a lot more than Clinton, she has too many of the Terry McAuliffe election losing triangulators around her. I am sick of that team that has been rushing the party towards the mythical center for years while the republicans tore the country apart. I would love to see their influence gone.

The other story is that Ron Paul is doing about as well as Rudy Guilliani. I personally think Ron Paul is a crackpot, but if he runs as an independent in the general election he will pull away enough republican votes to give us the really close swing states.

Obama and Huckabee take an early lead. I like Obama the most of any viable candidate and it is very good that all of the Democrats in the field roughly agree on a platform way to the left of the “centrist” platforms we had to deal with before. Not as left as I would like of course, but good.

The big nightmare for the republicans is that the rubes they were pandering to actually found a true believer in Huckabee. But at this point it looks like the only candidate that has any chance in the general election–Mccain–seems to be way behind. Also Ron Paul’s relatively strong showing makes me think he might make an independent run, if he can fund it. So at the risk of being horribly, horribly wrong I am going call this election for the democrat, who I suspect will be Barack Obama or John Edwards.

Circuit City: made up of assholes.

This is one of the things disturbing me about capitalism as it operates today: a small number of very wealthy people who seem hell bent on making sure their friends stay rich, regardless of the consequences for the rest of us.

As California faces another fiscal crisis, The state needs to take a hard look at Proposition 13. By hard look I mean destroy.

For those too lazy to look at the wikipedia article, proposition 13 was a brilliant plan by some anti-tax crusaders in orange county to completely thrash state finances. Prop 13 caps property taxes to a certain percentage point increase each year. Those taxes are also not reassessed each year. This has gutted the major revenue stream of California cities, forcing them to rely on state block grants, which in turn make it very hard for the state to make ends meet as so much state funding must go to finance local municipalities. Worse still cities like San Francisco must beg the state assembly (and the voters) for money to buy things like infrastructure. Not to mention the damage this system has done to the real estate market.

Repealing prop 13 will cause upheaval in the state real estate market, as massive increases in homeowner property taxes are certain to cause even more houses to go on the market. This would really cause a housing crash. But there is no choice, surely policy makers can figure out a way to get rid of this crippling problem for the state without too seriously damaging the state economy.

I can’t believe this libertarian nonsense. According to the libertarians that wrote this article college kids are yearning for libertarianism. If that is the case it is because these students don’t know what libertarianism is and what Ron Paul actually stands for.

I loathe the fact the democrats don’t seem to want to do anything about illegal wiretaps, torture and the war. But just because Ron Paul says he wants these things does not make him your friend. For the last thirty years we have as a country relentlessly been shrinking the role of government in everything except law enforcement and defense, reversing a fifty year trend in the opposite direction. Before you go and vote for Ron Paul because he wants to legalize it and get out of Iraq you should consider why government was expanded in the first half of the twentieth century, and consider the wisdom of Paul’s reactionary ideas.

Some restraunteurs seem to have managed to have a long gripe session printed in the chronicle.

Evidently it is very hard to hire cooks in SF due to a lot of demand for a small pool of workers, and the fact that cooks have the audacity to demand to make more than $12 an hour. Then they complain that the fact that they have to pay waiters minimum wage is taking to much money from their payroll. Simple solution, pay waiters more money, don’t accept tips. Raise your prices to cover the difference and pay out the difference. If you have to raise prices at your restaurant, raise them and pay you workers are real wage. Everyone benefits. Eating at expensive restaurants is supposed to be expensive. If you can’t hire good workers you need to pay more. Simple as that.

This NYT article, “Too much information? Ignore it,” is about the recent fad in Silicon Valley of a new self-help guru named Timothy Ferriss, whose book, “The 4-Hour Workweek,” offers advice for how to shorten one’s workweek by cutting out “useless information,” e.g., by reading email much less, not reading the news, and outsourcing routine tasks to low-paid workers abroad. The NYT article does a good job of highlighting Ferriss’s hypocrisy for claiming to work less while seeming to work a lot on his own self-promotion (e.g., book tours and hyping himself to the media). Yet, I find this guy to be so annoying that I think the critique needs to be taken much further. Particularly, what this guy neglects is the class privilege that enables him to live such a “light work” lifestyle. He seems ignorant of his position as a capitalist who is able to work less only because he is exploiting the labor power of other people who lack his privileges (he’s white, went to Princeton, etc.). The question left unaddressed is: who are you working for? If you’re just working for your own selfish purposes and you’ve already attained a lot of cultural and financial capital, then sure, you don’t need to work much at all, and you can outsource your capitalist administrative tasks to exploited workers (and then go enjoy yourself in a hedonistic lifestyle, as this guy seems to do: scuba diving and horseback riding, etc.). Yet, if you are working on projects for someone other than yourself, e.g., if you care about the problems that other people have in the world (and that your own capitalist lifestyle has created and is reinforcing), then it would be obscene to think that you could reduce your workweek and just enjoy yourself in hedonistic pursuits. The underlying assumption in this guy’s argument is that you are a capitalist. But why accept that definition of your subjectivity? Capitalists are selfish jerks, and this “4-hour workweek” is just another ideology to mask their exploitative behavior and make them feel better about themselves.

Here’s an example from today’s NYT of biopower in action: “Facebook to Turn Users Into Endorsers”

Facebook was just bought by Microsoft. Now they are turning their website into a tool for users to internalize corporation’s brands into their personal identities. This is a good example of why Hardt & Negri see “the primary site of struggle on the terrain of the production and regulation of subjectivity” (Empire 321). Facebook users now have the option of choosing to join an “i love Escalades” group or a “protest the RNC” group. Which group gets more members may be determined by which group owner has more capital to buy advertizing space. Thanks to Microsoft for decreasing the democratic character of facebook. A good critical article on how consumers are becoming biopolitical producers of brands is:
Adam Arvidsson’s “Brands: A critical perspective” (2005) -

Abstract. This article proposes a critical perspectives on brands based on recent developments within Marxist thought. It argues that brands build on the immaterial labour of consumers: their ability to create an ethical surplus (a social bond, a shared experience, a common identity) through productive communication. This labour is generally free in the sense that it is both un-paid and more or less autonomous. Contemporary brand management consists in a series of techniques by means of which such free labor is managed so that it comes to produce desirable and valuable outcomes. By thus making productive communication unfold on the plateau of brands, the enhanced ability of the contemporary multitude to produce a common social world is exploited as a source of surplus value.

(also, see his book - _Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture_ (2006))

In Gaza, the Israeli governmentl is violating this human right (among many others).  See this NYT story.

Why is sewage treatment a human right? B/c it is intimately connected with the Human Right to Water, which has been recognized by the UN and many international policies and conferences.  One of the most important policy statements is General Comment No. 15 of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.