Report From The Front Lines - Involuntary Part-Time

There is a recent article on Canadian unemployment in the Canadian paper Globe and Mail, titled, “Why The Real Picture May Be Worse.” (Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall.) One of the article's major points is that those who keep government statistics on unemployment in Canada are defining their terms so narrowly that they skip counting significant numbers of people who have been impacted by the loss of jobs arising from the current depression – er, I mean, “recession.”

The Canadian government applies more than one definition of “employment” when measuring the labor market. The narrowest definition of unemployment, known as R1, is used to generate the official unemployment rate, which now stands at 8 percent. But there is a broader measure, known as R8, which takes into account many groups of people not counted according to R1. R8 includes those who are underemployed, those who have given up on looking for work, those who have been placed on involuntary furlough by their employers and who are waiting to be called back, and those whose hours have been reduced without their consent, and who are thus “involuntary part-timers.” While the R1 rate has been pegged at 8 percent, the R8 measure now stands at 12.4 percent. According to Benjamin Tal, economist at CIBC World Markets, “Real unemployment is rising much faster than the official rate.” Involuntary part-time employment is one of the fast-growing sectors of the underemployment measured by the Canadian R8 statistic, and those placed on involuntary part-time schedules may find that they have trouble collecting unemployment benefits if they lose their jobs altogether.

There was one very interesting quote from the article. Mr. Philip Cross, chief economist at Statscan, stated that the growth of involuntary part-time work in Canada pales in comparison to the United States. According to Mr. Cross, “Full-time work is disappearing extremely fast in the United States.”

That statement matches what I've been seeing with my own eyes lately. Whereas the MAX line and the buses were full of commuters several months ago, there are days now when they are quite sparsely populated. Some familiar commuter faces are showing up very infrequently now. On the way home, the bus has been almost empty a couple of times this week. At my office, there are several people who are just taking one day at a time – as long as they have work and a billable charge number, they show up. When the work runs out, they go home, not wanting to be caught without work by the “grim reaper.”

Several coworkers have been placed on involuntary leave, including my coworker friend with whom I hosted our first brown bag lunch discussion on neighborhood resilience. He let me know on Monday that he was asked to stay home until work in his department picked up. As he told me about it, he talked of taking some time off to re-connect with life. I should have been a better listener; instead, I was full of talk of economic collapse and suggestions for what to do.

On the MAX a few weeks ago I ran into another co-worker who had been farmed out from our office to provide site support engineering services at a client facility. He informed me that the client firm is closing that particular facility fairly soon, due to the economic situation. On a morning bus ride that same week, a lady acquaintance announced to several of us that that week would be her last on the bus. She worked at a bookstore, and they had cut her back to only ten hours per week, so she could no longer afford to work for them.

The wryest workplace moment came for me during that same week, when another co-worker went to the supply room to get some “white-out.” When she couldn't find any, she was told to look in the desks of the people who have been furloughed. (We're trying hard to cut costs.) Four of us sit next to each other, including this lady, and sometimes we joke about being Bolsheviks.

All these things have taken place against a backdrop of a steadily rising stock market and talk of the beginnings of a “recovery” by the media's talking heads. Yet they haven't noticed that as the economy seemingly begins its exertions again, the price of oil is also rising – like a fever in a sick man as he rises from bed and begins to exert himself, before he has fully recovered. I wonder how long it will be before resource scarcities and price spikes knock our economy back onto its sickbed? I'm thinking it may be only a matter of months. The media talks of recovery. Is that because in April, we “only” lost around 491,000 jobs, as opposed to seven or eight hundred thousand? Anyway, gas is now over $2.61 a gallon for premium at some area stations.

As for me, I still have work – at least for the next month or two. In my backyard, the snow peas and fava beans are doing quite well. The corn is starting to come up, the oats seem established, and even the carrots and potatoes are starting to sprout. I can also see the beginnings of sunflower plants. It's good to enjoy good things while they last.

The Real Reasons For Frugality

Frugality has often been in the news over the last several months. Sometimes it is described in faintly negative tones by the mainstream media, who portray savers as a hindrance to the recovery of our economy. Then there are blogs whose authors try to make money from the frugality trend by offering financial advice and financial planning services. There are also people who define frugality as scoring the best deals on all the stuff being offered by our consumer economy. One peculiar article, titled, “America's New Frugality,” was published by Forbes Magazine in February of this year. It describes strategies “investors” can use to get at the savings of ordinary people who are now turning frugal. Some of their recommendations include investing in saving-and-loan institutions or bargain retailers like Amazon.com, since that's where the supposedly “frugal” people are now putting their money. (Source: http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/16/retailers-bank-stocks-intelligent-investing_0217_retailers.html.)

These attempts to “monetize” frugality would be really funny if the stakes weren't so high and the consequences weren't so tragic. Frugality should actually be viewed as a righteous response to scarcity, a choice to live gracefully with less. In fact, frugality is defined as “economy in the use of resources,” according to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition. As we see how scarce those resources have actually become, we begin to see the real reasons for frugality.

That scarcity is what I want to address in this post. But I must warn you that for many readers, what I am about to say will seem like very bad news. So you may want to sit down (if you're not already). Put on some appropriate mood music, if you think you need it. If you can't think of any, let me suggest Turn To Stone by Joe Walsh. The version he has on his album, You Can't Argue With A Sick Mind, seems appropriately doomful.

Let's start by talking about the last four years. During this time the world saw crude oil prices shoot up from slightly over $30 a barrel to nearly $150 a barrel. The once-hot and ever-climbing real estate market crashed under an avalanche of foreclosures. Prices for food and motor fuel skyrocketed to unsustainable levels and people found themselves unable to pay for these things. The prices of raw manufacturing materials such as metals rose to such levels that thieves were stealing not only residential wiring and plumbing fixtures, but even manhole covers in some cities.

Many who reported on these things treated them as isolated events that seemed to happen without any good reason. But the proper way to view these events is as symptoms of a deeper underlying problem, signs of Something Terribly Wrong underneath. Something's terribly wrong with our present society, our present economy, our present economic arrangements.

Our modern global economy is based on debt and requires continuous growth to function properly. It is based on debt in the sense that the banks who control our money supply loan money into existence. Their expectation is that this money will be paid back with interest, which means that they expect that borrowers will grow ever more prosperous as time passes, and will thus be able to pay off their interest-bearing loans. But for borrowers to grow more prosperous, their individual “net worth” must continually increase. This means either that their wages must continually rise or that some other asset (like a house or a 401K) held by borrowers must continually increase in value.

The other side of a debt-based economy is that many of the things needed by individuals and businesses are so expensive that they can usually be bought only on credit, that is, by taking out a loan. This is true of large businesses like airlines, who borrow money to buy new jetliners, and for ordinary people, most of whom don't have the resources to pay cash for a house or car or expensive medical treatments. As long as the economy is expanding, these borrowers can reasonably expect to be able to repay their loans with interest.

An expanding economy depends on an expanding base of resources. When a resource vital to an industry becomes scarce, its price shoots up and the products made by that industry become more expensive – or scarce. Then it becomes impossible to grow that particular industry unless a substitute resource is found to replace the resource that is now scarce. Our problem is that a large number of resources have now become scarce. Peak Oil is the name for one such resource constraint we are now facing. But there are other resources that are running out – everything from inorganic phosphate fertilizers to industrial metal ores to coal, and much more. There are no substitutes for these resources. And we are using up renewable resources like fish, trees and arable land at a rate far faster than they can be renewed. A shrinking resource base means the end of the growth economy.

Not only have we hit resource constraints, but the earth can no longer safely absorb all of the wastes generated by our global industrial economy. It is now all but certain that manmade air pollutants are causing potentially terminal climate change, that it is being felt now in many parts of the world, and that within a few years we may all be feeling it. The ozone layer of our atmosphere is still being destroyed by manmade chemicals. There are now huge islands of plastic trash floating in our oceans. The pollution of our oceans is endangering the phytoplankton from which half of our oxygen is derived, as well as destroying fisheries. The destruction of our world by our industrial economy means the end of the growth economy.

All of these symptoms are behind the present economic collapse. For instance, the skyrocketing prices of basic necessities from 2005 to 2008 made it impossible for many debtors to pay off their loans, and made it impossible for markets to attract large numbers of new consumers. The crop failures caused by climate change-induced drought are a big reason why some food grains got expensive. These resource constraints and destructive consequences of our industrial system are not going away, no matter how many governments offer “stimulus packages.” The long-term direction of our economy is therefore downward.

Most of us must therefore give up dreaming of getting rich. It has been a popular dream, especially in America, but the truth is that there is no longer enough of the “official” economy left for any significant number of us to achieve that dream. Those who pursue the dream of getting ever-more stuff will hit the wall of resource constraints or of environmental damage. The pie is shrinking. The well has run dry.

Some may ask then about the present time in which many things have started to get cheaper again, like gasoline. This is not due to our finding new resource supplies, but due to the removal of buyers from the market due to economic collapse. The number of people who can qualify for a loan is shrinking; therefore, house prices are falling. The number of people out of work is increasing; therefore, fewer people are driving and gas prices are down. But oil production, to name one resource, is still falling because old oil reservoirs are still being depleted, and oil scarcity is about to make a reappearance. Any attempt to “revive” the economy will run up against the same resource scarcities that caused the present collapse. I would not view this as a good time to go into debt or run out and buy a new big truck or SUV. I have seen a few drivers of these new vehicles lately, some of whom still have the dealer tags on their vehicles, and I can only say that their actions seem dumber than a bag full of rocks.

Frugality is thus the wise, righteous and realistic response to our present times, a learning to live gracefully on less and a learning to live for something other than money and material advancement. It is not a way of getting rich! If anyone is thinking of frugality as a means of socking money away for later investment in some get-rich scheme, I've got one bit of advice: Fahgetaboudit. Those days are over, probably for good. I suggest, instead, that we view frugality as one strategy in a portfolio of strategies for preserving that good which can be salvaged out of this present difficult time, to hand it down to future generations. These are strategies well worth exploring, and there are some very excellent writers tackling these topics. Some of these writers are listed under my heading, “Other Wells,” on this blog.

For Further Reading:

• “Ocean Pollution: Destroying What We Need Most,” http://oceanpollution.blog.ca/2009/04/22/phytoplankton-and-oxygen-5985274/

• “Ocean Pollution Worsens And Spreads,” http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5474

• “Our Finite World,” http://gailtheactuary.wordpress.com/

• “Crude Oil – The Supply Outlook,” Energy Watch Group, www.energywatchgroup.org/fileadmin/global/pdf/EWG_Oilreport_10-2007.pdf

• “Climate Chaos Predicted by CO2 Study,” The Independent, 30 April 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-chaos-predicted-by-co2-study-1676411.html

The Bars Of Our Intended Cage

I have often stated our dependence on the breaking system known as the “official” economy, and have pointed out that the masters of this system are waging a war against anyone who tries to create a safety net of alternative systems. Recent posts discussed how this war is being waged against ordinary people who want to become self-reliant in regard to food. However, there are many other fronts to this war.

One such front is the war over the Internet. The Internet has emerged as a powerful example of citizen media and a powerful expression of free speech. Therefore it has become a powerful threat to the established media of our modern industrial society. Anyone who is the least bit savvy knows that the established media have largely become mere propaganda outlets – mouthpieces of the elites who run our society. Often they don't report the very important news which has a significant bearing on the course of our society, and the news they do report is usually slanted to promote the aims of rich corporate masters.

A case in point is the media coverage of the protests which took place just before and during the G20 economic summit in London at the beginning of April. When the protests were covered at all, they were usually covered at the “10,000 foot” level, that is, in a very generic manner almost devoid of detail. On the few occasions when the mainstream media focused on individuals and specific places, they painted the protesters as vandals and lawbreakers, while portraying the British police as dedicated men just trying to do their job. (Examples: “Spirit of 'the Mob' lives on in London,” CNN, 2 April 2009, http://inthefield.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/02/spirit-of-the-mob-lives-on-in-london/; “Police Attacked As They Try To Save Dying Protester,” Fox News, 2 April 2009, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,512171,00.html)

The “official” line was roundly discredited, however, by the appearance of citizen-shot video posted on Youtube which showed police initiating violent and unprovoked attacks on protesters and innocent bystanders (See “Earl Street Raid During G20 Protests,” http://tr.youtube.com/watch?v=PYNrf2GIRO4&feature=PlayList&p=C1659084B50463CD&index=20; “G20 Armed Police Raid On Seated Protesters With Their Hands In The Air,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmqdE0lXcxk&NR=1; and many, many others). And it turns out that the “dying protester” whom the police had been “trying to save” according to the Fox News report had actually been shoved to the ground by the police. Moreover, he had not been a protester at all, but simply a man trying to get home from work (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrpdrn5kb0s). I can guarantee you that CNN, Fox and the Associated Press didn't break these stories. The Oregonian didn't break these stories. They were not discussed on KPOJ, “Portland's only progressive talk station.” (Ha! That's a laugh. When it comes to chasing money and hawking stuff to buy, KPOJ is no more progressive than any of its Clear Channel sister stations – including right-wing KFI in Los Angeles.)

The result of the appearance of citizen media which so roundly discredits the “official” news line regarding such key events has led to a swift and sharp drop in the credibility of the official media. It has been wryly amusing to follow some of the editorial pieces written by major newspapers decrying the death of the modern newspaper in America, and the supposed inferiority of blogs and other citizen-generated means of publishing news. Often these editorial writers talk of mysterious psycho-social forces and new technologies as being the cause of the demise of the traditional newspaper. I think the truth is far less comfortable to these people. That truth is that more and more people are seeing that the traditional mainstream media predominantly tell either fluff (“Did you hear that Britney Spears' psychotherapist is dating Joaquin Phoenix??!”) or outright lies.

Citizen media, captured by inexpensive consumer electronics and broadcast cheaply over the Internet, is a huge threat to the official propaganda machine of the corporatists who control our society. It is therefore no surprise that members of the United States Congress are now very “concerned” about Internet security and Internet vulnerability, and are introducing legislation to provide for increased “cybersecurity.”

Senate Bill S.773, “The Cybersecurity Act of 2009,” is sponsored by Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME). In a videorecorded speech, Senator Rockefeller justified the need for this bill by speaking of the increased threat to the American economy resulting from vastly increased attacks on America's information technology infrastructure, and he cited “secret” briefings he had received describing these attacks. During that speech, he asked rhetorically whether it would have been better for us if we had not invented the Internet at all. (A most interesting question, which provokes another question: why is he asking this?)

The proposed Cybersecurity Act establishes the usual huge new Federal bureaucracy customary for such bills, but it also establishes a new cybersecurity certification for IT professionals. Any IT professional who cannot obtain this certification is to be barred from IT security work in the U.S. Perhaps the most chilling part of this proposed new law is the granting of power to the President to “declare a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic to and from any compromised Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network...”

One would hope that if such a law was passed, a “critical infrastructure information system or network” would not be defined to include the general Web structure, including such things as Google, YouTube, blogs and other means of disseminating citizen media! Otherwise, during a time of domestic tension and deployment of armed Government agents, the President could shut down citizen media sites by declaring a “cybersecurity emergency.”

We don't need such a law to provide an IT infrastructure that is more secure from attack. We could instead take such simple measures as breaking up Microsoft, switching critical IT hubs to Linux or Unix-based operating systems, and insuring a diverse supply of software vendors instead of the monoculture we have now. And there is already a loud and increasing protest and backlash against this proposed law. But I have a prediction: that as protest against this proposed legislation increases and its chances of passage diminish, other members of Congress will be induced to quietly introduce legislation that seeks to set up the same regulatory power proposed in this “Cybersecurity Act.” After all, this is the same strategy that is being employed in corporate attempts to establish Federal control over “food security.”

Volunteer Groups And Community Food Security

As has been stated repeatedly on this blog, the globalized, industrialized culture of modern advanced civilization is under great and increasing stress, due to resource constraints, climate change and economic collapse. This stress is severe enough to threaten the small units that make up our modern society – the homes, families, streets and neighborhoods in which most of us live. I seek to do my part to investigate strategies for making neighborhoods and communities resilient in the face of our present stresses. In this I am hardly alone, as there are many individuals and groups striving to achieve the same goal.

In America the challenge of achieving resilience is particularly acute, as most Americans acquire necessities by going into debt, thus forcing them to rely on the breaking systems of the “official” economy. Getting out of debt is very hard in many cases, due to rising prices or diminished earning power (i.e., low wages). Those who lose their jobs usually wind up losing almost everything they “own,” since their ownership is based on making monthly payments on an interest-bearing debt. A key, therefore, to getting out of debt and becoming more resilient is finding strategies which allow people to meet a portion of their basic needs for free or at very low cost.

One such strategy is urban food gardening. Yet urban gardening is a challenge in itself, since most Americans don't live on a farm and don't know how to garden for food, having never grown a food crop. I know how much of a challenge this was for me when I started in 2007 in Southern California. Later that year, when I moved to Oregon, I started a garden in my new backyard. I was trying to grow plants I had never seen before, and was anxious that I wouldn't be able to tell a fava bean plant from a weed.

I was greatly helped in my gardening efforts by the discovery of local, non-profit, volunteer groups of people who have made it their business to host classes on gardening, food preparation and food preservation, and who provide help to residents looking to start gardening for food. Growing Gardens, of Portland, Oregon is one such group. I have had the pleasure of attending several classes hosted by them, on subjects such as urban chicken-keeping, winterizing the garden, food preservation and canning, urban chicken-coop building, and seed saving. Their connection to community resilience seemed to be a natural and obvious topic to explore, so I arranged to interview one of their staff to discuss this in more detail.

Thus it was that I got to spend a bit of time with Growing Gardens staffer Rodney Bender last week. We met at their headquarters, a simple rented house which has been turned into offices and storage space to support their activities. Rodney's time was somewhat constrained, as they are very busy with this being the growing season, but he was gracious enough to give me about a half-hour. Here are some questions I asked, along with his answers:

How did Growing Gardens start? During the early 1990's, a gentleman noticed the poverty of some local residents, and began building raised-bed gardens for them, using his own materials and money. As word got out about what he was doing, demand for his services rose quickly, and he soon found himself unable to meet all the needs that were popping up. In 1996, he met a network of volunteers who offered to turn his effort into a non-profit organization to carry on his work. (According to the GG website, this first non-profit was called the Portland Home Garden Project. Later, the name was changed to Growing Gardens.)

What is the mission of Growing Gardens? Their mission is to provide food security to people whose income would normally be insufficient for such security. They do this by transferring skill-sets to people without prior gardening experience, as well as building actual gardens in the yards of low-income residents. Over the years they have installed a large number of gardens, both at single-family homes and in apartment complexes. (Rodney provided an interesting quote: “Give a man a carrot and he will eat for a day; teach a man to grow carrots and he will eat for a lifetime.” I laughed and told him that that was a vegetarian version of a similar slogan I had once heard.)

Rodney spoke of how GG's approach to gardening had evolved over the years. A specific example concerns raised bed gardening. When the project first started, volunteers would build wooden box raised beds in people's yards. However, over time the wood would rot and the soil would be compacted or lost, necessitating an expensive rebuild of the raised bed. This was clearly not sustainable for low-income gardeners, so GG changed its approach to building raised mounds directly on ground level, on top of a layer of newspaper. With this “raised mound”/sheet-mulching approach, installing and maintaining a garden bed is much cheaper.

You said that Growing Gardens has installed apartment gardens. How did that work out? Evidently, they have been able to install gardens in 45 apartment complexes. However, there are unique challenges to starting an apartment garden. First, one must find tenants who are willing and enthusiastic, and obtain permission from the management. This is usually the easy part. The harder part is organizing the daily labor and care needed for a successful garden. Sometimes the original enthusiastic tenants lose interest; sometimes they just move away. In any case, these gardens often wind up as weed patches after a few years. Skillful community outreach and organizing is key to a successful apartment garden.

Is Growing Gardens reaching out city-wide, or are your efforts focused mainly on a certain region? Growing Gardens is focused mainly on the east side for the present. However, they hope to expand to the west as they are able to add staff and resources.

How easy is it to find all of the volunteer helpers and teachers on whom you rely? That part is actually very easy, as GG maintains a listserv where those who want to volunteer can sign up. To date, over 1,000 people have signed up in one capacity or another. (For those Portlanders who are interested, you can sign up here: http://www.growing-gardens.org/volunteer.php)

How do you see urban gardening contributing to the establishment of a strong local economy? Urban gardening is a growing contributor to the local Portland economy, with many local merchants taking an interest. One obvious example is the many local restaurants and farmers' market stands that are now buying and selling garden-raised produce. (That prompted me to ask, “There are broad food-safety laws being proposed in the United States Congress, laws that would impose stringent regulations on food grown for commercial use, no matter where it is grown. How do you see these proposed laws affecting the contribution of urban gardening to our local economy?” Rodney was unaware of bills such as H.R. 875 and its cousins, but my question definitely aroused his interest.)

What advice do you have for people who want to start something similar to Growing Gardens in other cities? First, start small, so that you don't get overwhelmed. If the group's main focus is helping poorer families install home gardens, start with five to ten families at first. Second, keep it simple (especially at first). Begin by teaching simple gardening methods. And where supplies are needed, use free or recycled resources wherever possible.

That concluded our interview. One day I'd like to be a helper (and a witness) at one of their garden installation “parties”; if I can do that, I'll write a post describing it. Growing Gardens is an example for others in other locales to imitate. Another such example is the Portland Fruit Tree Project (http://portlandfruit.org/), a group that collects gleanings from backyard fruit trees in order to donate them to charity. They got their inspiration from a similar fruit tree project in Canada, which now has at least two such projects including the Vancouver Fruit Tree Project (http://www.vcn.bc.ca/fruit/), located in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the Victoria Frut Tree Project (http://www.lifecyclesproject.ca/initiatives/fruit_tree/), located in Victoria, British Columbia. The Victoria Project was featured on a 2006 broadcast of Deconstructing Dinner, a Canadian food security radio program (http://deconstructingdinner.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=130221).

I have a few closing thoughts on the subject of volunteer groups and food security. First, volunteer groups will play a vital role in establishing resilient neighborhoods, especially those groups that teach self-sufficiency skills. A whole body of knowledge has largely been lost to our generation, which has only known reliance on far-flung global systems for the most part. Second, the Internet is a great resource for connecting with like-minded people. If you have a skill or a benefit that you would like to impart to your local community and you're wondering where to start, you'll probably be able to find someone in another locality who is already doing (or trying to do) what you want to do. Feel free to write others in other localities who are interested in doing the same things. You might even want to arrange visits where you can observe and learn from what others are doing.

Lastly, consider petitioning your local governments for changes in the way they specify greenery for public places. I think particularly of the city easements that exist in front of houses on many residential streets, and how these are usually planted with ornamental, non-fruiting trees. You might suggest that your city use its funds to plant trees that bear useful things like various fruits, nuts and olives. Such plantings would provide the beginnings of a very public safety net of food security.

A Neighborhood Resilience Lunch Discussion

In my first “Report From The Front Lines” post, I mentioned that a co-worker and I were planning to host a brown-bag lunch discussion on community and neighborhood resilience at our office. Last week we finally sent out an e-mail announcement, and today we actually did the discussion.

Eight people showed up, including me and my co-worker partner. We had a good time and discovered a rather deep well of interest among the other attendees. I began the discussion by stating that in this time of economic uncertainty it was necessary for each of us to begin building alternatives and safety nets to help cope with sudden adversity. I got a laugh out of everyone when I said, “Most of you who have had to endure my 'soapboxes' over the last year or so probably know where I think our economy is headed, and the reasons why. There are three possible responses to such a point of view: first, to plug one's ears while singing 'La, la, let's not think about that!'; second, to head for the hills with a stash of five tons of baked beans and five thousand rounds of ammo; or third, to reach out to one's neighbors to form a network of people who take care of each other.”

I talked also about the systems of a neighborhood, and how they break down under economic stress. Lastly, I defined resilience as the ability of a neighborhood to bounce back after a shock or stress. One of the other employees spoke up at this and mentioned the difference between the response of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the small communities in Iowa after the most recent flooding in that region, and how the Iowans had learned to be self-reliant and to help each other instead of waiting for the government to rescue them.

At this point my co-worker partner took over. He described how he himself had experienced adversity a few years ago due to a death in his family and a prolonged stretch of unemployment. He spoke of how he chose to make his needs known immediately to his neighbors, and how he was able to trade skills and manual labor for basic necessities. He also spoke of the need to spend the necessary time and effort to get to know neighbors and their needs, including volunteering to meet those needs as he is able. He lives in a neighborhood in which many of the homes are occupied by widows and the elderly.

This prompted me to mention a post by Sharon Astyk on her blog Casaubon's Book, titled, “The Party's Not Over – It's Just Getting Started!” (http://sharonastyk.com/2009/03/19/the-partys-not-over-it-is-just-getting-started/) That post talks about taking steps to forge community connections in one's own neighborhood. Since we had a laptop and a projector in our conference room, we all took a bit of time to peruse her post. We also discussed the optimum size of community circles.

We finished with a query of each of us as to how well we knew our neighbors. One other co-worker told the story of the neighbors of his cul-de-sac, who all know each other and who went out of their way to welcome him when he moved in. They went so far as to bring baked goods as a housewarming present, and to loan him a few air mattresses (without his asking first) when he had relatives over. They also have neighborhood showings of movies and have even volunteered to help each other with large house/yard projects, where during a particular year all the neighbors will go to one house and do something like removing a tree or a project of similar scope.

We had an extensive agenda of topics to cover, but our lunch hour was over before we could even finish discussing this first topic of establishing community connections. However, we plan to get together again in a few weeks to discuss other things, like building lending libraries of tools, community gardening, and swapping skills. I'm excited to think of where this discussion might go, and am itching to try a few things in my own neighborhood.

Catching Up And Falling Behind

I'm running a bit behind on posting this week. But I have some good excuses: first, I started building a chicken coop in my backyard this weekend. I also installed a new hub dynamo-equipped front wheel on my bicycle, along with some new dynamo lights. (For those who are curious, the hub is a Shimano DH-3D71, 36 spoke, mated to a new Sun Rhyno Lite heavy-duty rim. The front light is a Busch & Muller Lumotec IQ Cyo, and the rear light is a Lumotec Seculite.) The chicken coop is nowhere near finished, and installing the lights took far too long.

My next few posts will hopefully consist of conversations I've had with local people about subjects related to community resilience and our present economic situation. Stay tuned!

Homeboy Culture And The Solari Index

When I first moved to Portland, Oregon in the fall of 2007, I immediately noticed one difference between Portland and Southern California from whence I had come: the almost complete absence of “gangsta” graffiti. The rare graffiti I did see was almost entirely political – much of it quirky and quaintly humorous.

Over the last year and a half, that has changed. There has been an explosion of graffiti in our city during that time, and most of the new stuff is not political. Instead, it's a tired repeat of the same things I saw in So. Cal. – homeboys and “wanna-be” homeboys marking out their turf in destructive ways, much like cats marking their territory with their own urine. The City of Portland has a webpage with a link to a document titled, “How to Read Graffiti And What To Do,” describing the various types of graffiti now showing up everywhere in the city (http://www.portlandonline.com/index.cfm?mode=search&search_action=SearchResults). According to that document, gang-related graffiti now accounts for 15 percent of all graffiti in Portland, although that percentage is growing. (“Tagger” graffiti comprises almost all of the rest.) The document also states that most of this gang graffiti is now done by Hispanic/Latino/Latina gangs and gang “wanna-be's.” Curiously, the document does not mention the obvious link between gang graffiti and tagger graffiti.

This graffiti can be found on the usual public structures such as signs and freeway barriers, but it is also being applied to private buildings such as company offices and storefronts. Here's the kicker: some taggers are now putting their mark on private residential property, such as front yard fences, houses and vehicles. I'm sure these taggers are not asking the permission of the owners of said property beforehand.

This says something about the mindset and culture of these people, namely, that they can't feel comfortable living in a place unless they have had a chance to make it ugly and dangerous. Graffiti is the first step toward turning a place into a ground of armed battle – battle over things that are really stupid and insignificant, desperate attempts by gangbangers to provide themselves with an identity. That identity is not built around a worthwhile personhood devoted to making one's place a better place or becoming a productive member of one's society, but rather toward doing one's best to tear things apart – toward becoming known as the biggest, baddest nihilist (though most gangbanger wanna-be's can't even spell “nihilist,” let alone tell what it means). Gangstas and wanna-be's don't care if the things they deface are not their own things – in fact, it's more fun to destroy someone else's things, whether those things are publicly (i.e., taxpayer) owned infrastructure or privately owned buildings, houses and neighborhoods, or human lives.

Who is responsible for creating this culture? There are two answers to that question, I suppose. On the one hand, one can say that gangbangers are fully responsible for their actions, having knowingly chosen things that are wrong and evil, and that one day they will have to answer fully for their actions. There is a level on which that is certainly true. This should be a cause of great fear for gang members, if they are thinking with clear heads – namely, that one day, they will stand in ultimate judgment for every piece of defaced property; every stupid, senseless fight; every neighborhood ruined by senseless violence; everyone killed over gang signs, gang colors, ethnicity or other stupid reasons; every wounded or killed innocent bystander; every attacked outsider; everyone who was ever pressured by a gang peer group to do something criminal.

Yet gang members are not thinking with clear heads; if they were, they wouldn't be gang members. Gangs are dysfunctional groups that attract dysfunctional people. They are symptoms of a larger dysfunctional society. In my post, “Our Least Resilient Neighborhoods,” I described the “Solari Index” as a measure of how safe and healthy a neighborhood is for its residents, and I described how certain wealthy interests outside the American minority community were doing things that lowered the Solari index of minority neighborhoods in order to make money. The problems caused by this, and the culture that results, have become the emblems of minority culture in America. But a further problem is now becoming apparent – that the dysfunctional culture of the American 'hood has now burst out of the 'hood to infect the rest of America and the world.

It can be seen in places as far-flung as Sudan (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6915187.stm), and Britain, for instance, where over the last few years there have been incidents of gang-related gun violence and where in 2004, a well-known black personality on British TV criticized gangsta street culture as a “deadly virus” destroying a generation of African-Caribbean boys. According to a Guardian news article, the TV sportscaster, Garth Crooks, said “...there was a direct link between films and rap music glorifying violence and the drift of black boys away from education and into crime and violence.” (Source: “Gangsta Culture A Deadly Virus, Says Top TV Presenter,” UK Guardian, 12 September 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/sep/12/schools.society)

As drug use in American minority communities was partly boosted by CIA and Federal involvement during the 1980's and 1990's, I'd like to suggest that gang culture in America is being driven by forces outside that culture, in order to enrich certain powerful growth capitalists. The drivers of that culture include all the usual suspects, namely poverty, exploitation and gross material inequality. But I want to focus on two huge drivers of that culture: the prison-industrial complex and the entertainment (or “content”) industry.

It's fairly easy to trace the role of the prison-industrial complex in the growth of American gangsta culture. As the prison “industry” has lobbied for ever-tougher laws and punishments for ever more trivial offenses, the result has been an explosion of the American prison population. This has meant more jobs for prison administrators, staff, guards, and so forth, as well as more contracts for architectural and engineering firms who design these prisons. But it also means that one out of every 31 Americans is now in jail. One out of every 31 Americans is now being exposed to and shaped by a corrosive institutional culture in which gangs are prominent. One out of every 31 Americans will one day come home to a family that has been disrupted by that one individual's incarceration. Many of those families will have kids on whom the culture of the lockup will rub off.

The corrections “industry” has influenced the American judicial system to prey on minority communities first of all. But the corrections “industry” is a growth industry, like all industries in our global economy. Its success is measured in capturing market share and growing the bottom line as measured each quarter. Therefore, it can't remain static. It grows exponentially, as expressed thus:

Corrections Industry Growth = Ae^x

Those who want to grow it want really high growth rates, rates that are usually higher than the rate of population growth, so that they can get rich really quick. This can be expressed thus:

Corrections Industry Growth Ae^x > General Population Growth Be^y

This means that this industry is branching out beyond the minority community in its search for people to throw in prison. They're probably already looking for poor non-minority candidates for lock-up. Who knows? Maybe soon they'll be looking for formerly well-off people who can't pay their bills. They'll encounter ever more surprised fish as they move up the food chain. We may get to see what sort of culture emerges when a large percentage of America is thrown in the slammer.

Then there's the entertainment industry. I don't have nearly the time to trace all of the “urban-themed” entertainment now being marketed to impressionable American youth, but I suspect that it's quite a lot – from the rap, gangsta, hip-hop and other “urban” music, radio and music videos to the gang-themed movies. As I write this, Slumdog Millionaire comes to mind – not only because it shows how pervasively American hood culture has infected the rest of the world, but because the producer, Celador (now wholly owned by Sony Pictures) couldn't even make a movie about a non-Anglo country and culture without injecting American trash culture into it. Now Summit Entertainment is releasing yet another “urban” film, Next Day Air, with black people in all the settings customary to such a film – raunchy comedy, drugs, guns, and sex. There are even gang-themed video games for Microsoft's Xbox and Sony Playstation!

The trouble with all of this is that it's being marketed to an ever-younger audience. The self-imposed industry rating systems are a joke, as they are meant much more to protect the movie industry from strong regulation than to actually protect young kids from trash. The content industry says that consumers of its content are assumed to be responsible consumers who can properly process the unwholesome parts of the content they consume. But this is not the case with young kids whose powers of discernment are not only not yet developed, but are actively being short-circuited by ads for harmful movies and other content. The content industry says that its movies, TV and other offerings are not contributing to a general breakdown of society. But anyone who watches young kids acting out the “entertainment” they now see and hear knows that this is a lie.

The continued creation and strengthening of gang culture in the U.S. will be an impediment to the efforts of citizens to create local, resilient communities that can weather the effects of economic collapse, resource constraints and climate change. All of these threats will be difficult enough to handle without having to worry about dysfunctional people trying to tear down whatever anyone tries to build up, all for the sake of “keepin' it real.”

For Further Reading

• http://www.maverickentertainment.cc/films.php?CategoryID=1

• http://www.buzzle.com/articles/urban-movies-continue-to-rise.html

• http://www.streetgangs.com/movies/

• http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,302010,00.html

• http://houston.broowaha.com/article.php?id=2009

• http://www.latinheat.com/columna_det.php?col_id=3&column_id=3

• http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08158/887702-254.stm

• http://www.nancycarlssonpaige.org/articles9.html

• http://www.tothegame.com/ps2-1634-crime-life-gang-wars-for-sony-playstation-2.html

• http://www.us.playstation.com/Search?search&s=gangsta

• http://games.teamxbox.com/xbox/1091/Crime-Life-Gang-Wars/

• http://www.truthout.org/040309J

• http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2136

• http://galewarnings.blogspot.com/2008_02_13_archive.html

• http://galewarnings.blogspot.com/2008_02_17_archive.html

• http://current.com/items/87069981/visit_america_before_america_visits_you.htm